The Development of Open Fields in the Central Vale of York: A Reconsideration

Abstract

Despite the structural complexity of open field layouts in the central Vale of York in the sixteenth century, there is evidence to suggest that tenurial units were laid out in a very ordered fashion. In this respect, they closely resembled arrange- ments found further east, on the Yorkshire Wolds. A relation- ship is observed between the number of holdings in the fields in the sixteenth century, and the Domesday fiscal assessment. The implications of this relationship for the origin of the open fields is discussed. three possible explanations are examined, and the paper argues in favour of a pre-Conquest origin for the open fields of the Vale. For a number of years, the Vale of York had had a particular significance for students of the English open field system. In many other parts of the country, open fields were already present in some form by the time the earliest detailed docu- ments become available in the late Anglo-Saxon period, so that questions concerning their origin can usually only be a matter for conjecture. Be- cause of circumstances peculiar to the Vale, how- ever, open fields there are believed to have emerg- ed largely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the process can be examined using charter and other documentary evidence. By the time they were fully developed, these fields closely resembled arrangements in other parts of midland England, so it would seem quite possible that the factors causing their development could also have been responsible for the creation of open fields elsewhere, at an earlier date.