SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY condition, and is described as a ' back-going district,' much of the land being unlet and scarcely cultivated at all. Only the worst kind of labourers were found there as employment was so precarious, and the farmer had no work to offer in the winter time. The reason given for this decay was that about four years previously attempts had been made by Lord Exeter's agent to throw certain lands together, which resulted in a slight increase of rent ; in consequence one farm had been utterly uncultivated for two years, and three farmers had recently given notice of removal. The accounts given by the commissioners of the agricultural customs in the two Luifenhams and Barrowden are exceedingly interesting, showing as they do how very little change had occurred since the 14th and 15th centuries. The owners held their land in strips in ' known acres ' : that is, each owner (or occupier) used the same strips every year as his own private property, subject to the rights of grazing. When the crops had been gathered in, all the land became common pasture until wanted for the cultivation of the next crop. In South Luffenham the tenants of the arable land alone had rights of common over the arable fields, but in Barrowden not only the owners of the strips in the fields had this right, but also the owners of certain cottages and tofts. The ancient custom had been that the fields were to be used for a fixed or ' stinted ' number of beasts, but of late years this had been entirely disregarded, and owners of common rights had turned on what cattle they chose, irrespective of stints. In earlier centuries such breaches of custom would have been brought before the manorial court, and the trans- gressors fined or otherwise punished. We must note some interesting points which came out in the evidence concerning the ownership of the soil of a piece of land called the ' Cow Pasture,' at North Luffenham. The pasture was claimed by certain individuals, not necessarily inhabitants of the parish, who exercised the right of pasturage, and whose shares in the land were represented by so many stints. It was maintained that the ground had originally been owned in a fixed number of acres by each owner, and that so many stints represented one acre, that the precise acres had been lost as to situation, and that the rights were then known by the number of stints. In 1871, when application for inclosure was first made, two pieces of evidence had been brought forward to prove the above ownership. One of these was a copy of an old survey of 1660, showing the ' Cow Pasture ' to have been owned by several persons in several acres in a similar manner to the open fields, and the other piece of evidence was provided by the Rev. Mr. Dennis, who said he had taken extracts from the terriers in the registry of Peterborough, showing glebe land of so many acres in the ' Cow Pasture.' It was not usual to hold pasture in fixed acres, so it seems reasonable to suppose that at some period prior to 1660 the ground might have been either meadow or arable land, and that when it had been converted to pasture, and no longer cultivated, the number of cattle allowed for each owner became the important point, not the number of acres owned. If the ' Cow Pasture ' was originally part of the common fields, then the other owners of land in these must have been for over two hundred years previously deprived of a certain amount of common right. Two new features appear in arrangements for inclosures after the Act of 1845, viz. the provision of land for the labouring poor, and that for public 227
