Agricultural History Review, Volume 38 Part 1 (1990), pp. 40–57

This study charts the evolution of field-systems in north-west Suffolk during the later Middle Ages, a period often overlooked by historians of the subject. The whole area comprised extensive open felds in the thirteenth century, but thereafter two distinct and divergent field systems emerged from this common ancestor. On the light soils of Breckland, KJ Allison's classic foldcourse system had evolved by 1600 from a more fragmented and flexible medieval predecessor. On the loamier soils, an informal medieval foldcourse system disappeared with the gradual spread of piecemeal enclosures. Such differences are explained in terms of the changing structure of landholding, the influence of lordship, and environmental factors. The evidence suggests that commonfield systems could undergo important - but hitherto unsuspected - institutional changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: changes which were germane to the seventeenth-century improvements in agrarian productivity recently advocated by some historians. 

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