Open Fields 1

---

The holdings of a manor also included woodland and pasture areas for common usage and fields belonging to the lord of the manor and the church.

The farmers customarily lived in individual houses in a nucleated village with a much larger manor house and church nearby. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among the inhabitants of the manor. The Lord of the Manor , his officials, and a Manorial court administered the manor and exercised jurisdiction over the peasantry.

The Lord levied rents and required the peasantry to work on his personal lands, called a demesne. In medieval times, little land was owned outright. Instead, the lord had rights given to him by the king and the tenant rented land from the lord.

Navigation menu

Lords demanded rents, often ruinous, and labour from the tenants, but the tenants had firm user rights to cropland and common land and those rights were passed down from generation to generation. A medieval lord could not evict a tenant nor hire labour to replace him without legal cause. Most tenants likewise were not free without penalty to depart the manor for other locations or occupations.

The rise of capitalism and the concept of land as a commodity to be bought and sold led to the demise of the open-field system.

Open-field system

France, Germany, and other northern European countries had systems similar to England, although open fields generally endured longer on the continent. Some elements of the open-field system were practised by early settlers in the New England region of the United States.

The most visible characteristic of the open-field system was that the arable land belonging to a manor was divided into many long narrow furlongs for cultivation. The fields of cultivated land were unfenced, hence the name open -field system. Each tenant of the manor cultivated several strips of land scattered around the manor. The village of Elton, Cambridgeshire is representative of a medieval open-field manor in England. The manor, whose Lord was an abbot from a nearby monastery, had 13 " hides " of arable land of six virgates each. The abbot's demesne land consisted of three hides plus 16 acres 6.

The remainder of the land was cultivated by tenants who lived in a village on the manor.

Open Field Farm

Counting spouses, children, and other dependents, plus landless people, the total population resident in the manor village was probably to The abbot also owned two water mills for grinding grain, a fulling mill for finishing cloth, and a millpond on the manor. The village contained a church, a manor house, a village green, and the sub-manor of John of Elton, a rich farmer who cultivated one hide of land and had tenants of his own. The tenants' houses lined a road rather than being grouped in a cluster. All were insubstantial and required frequent reconstruction.

Most of the tenants' houses had outbuildings and an animal pen with a larger area, called a croft , of about one-half acre 0. The tenants on the manor did not have equal holdings of land. About one-half of adults living on a manor had no land at all and had to work for larger landholders for their livelihood.

To survive, they also had to work for larger landowners.

Our Vision

The land of a typical manor in England and other countries was subdivided into two or three large fields. Non-arable land was allocated to common pasture land or waste , where the villagers would graze their livestock throughout the year, woodland for pigs and timber, and also some private fenced land paddocks, orchards and gardens , called closes.

The ploughed fields and the meadows were used for livestock grazing when fallowed or after the grain was harvested. One of the two or three fields was fallowed each year to recover soil fertility. The fields were divided into parcels called furlongs. The furlong was further subdivided into long, thin strips of land called selions or ridges.

Selions were distributed among the farmers of the village, the manor, and the church. The scattered nature of family holdings ensured that families each received a ration of both good and poor land and minimised risk. If some selions were unproductive, others might be productive. Ploughing techniques created a landscape of ridge and furrow, with furrows between ridges dividing individual holdings and aiding drainage.

While selions were cultivated by individuals or families, the right of pasture on fallowed fields, land unsuitable for cultivation, and harvested fields was held in common with rules to prevent overgrazing enforced by the community.

The typical planting scheme in a three-field system was that barley , oats , or legumes would be planted in one field in spring, wheat or rye in the second field in the fall and the third field would be left fallow. The following year, the planting in the fields would be rotated. Start your free trial today and get unlimited access to America's largest dictionary, with:. What made you want to look up open - field?

Please tell us where you read or heard it including the quote, if possible. Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Do you feel lucky? Our Word of the Year justice , plus 10 more.

How we chose 'justice'. And is one way more correct than the others? How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. United States , [7] the Supreme Court held that a privacy expectation regarding an open field is unreasonable:. There is no societal interest in protecting the privacy of those activities, such as the cultivation of crops, that occur in open fields. Courts have continuously held that entry into an open field—whether trespass or not—is not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. No matter what steps a person takes, he or she cannot create a reasonable privacy expectation in an open field, because it is an area incapable of supporting an expectation of privacy as a matter of constitutional law.

In situations where the police allege that what was searched was an open field, this has the practical effect of shifting the argument from whether any given expectation of privacy is reasonable, to whether the given place is actually an open field or some other type of area like curtilage. This is because a person can have a reasonable expectation of privacy in areas classed as such. While open fields are not protected by the Fourth Amendment, the curtilage , or outdoor area immediately surrounding the home, may be protected.

Courts have treated this area as an extension of the house and as such subject to all the privacy protections afforded a person's home unlike a person's open fields under the Fourth Amendment. An area is curtilage if it "harbors the intimate activity associated with the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life. The courts have gone so far as to treat a tent as a home for Fourth Amendment purposes in the past.

• Umfangreiches Wörterbuch Deutsch-Russisch 40.000 Einträge (Pommel`s Sprachschule 11) (German Edition)
• Non-Combatant
• Food Drying vol. 2: How to Dry Vegetables
• The Suburban Monsters
• Lasino sogno di Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (Italian Edition)