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Ridge and furrow and the open field system. Ridge and furrow is a corrugated surface left on land that was ploughed for a long time in fixed strips. From a low hill, or from the air after snow, the ground looks like a washboard of parallel swells and hollows. Each swell is a ridge, each hollow is a furrow. The pattern is not decoration, it is the fossil of an open field system, in which a village's arable was divided into many long, narrow holdings, instead of into compact hedge-bound farms. The open field, in the form that became standard over much of lowland England, and in related shapes across parts of Europe, was a large tract without permanent internal fences. It was divided into furlongs, blocks whose strips all ran the same way, usually with the slope or with the lie of the ground so that water could run. A furlong's strips were the units of tenure. A household did not hold one block. It held a bundle of strips scattered through several furlongs, and often through two or three great fields. The scatter mixed good land and poor, wet and dry, so that no one family sat only on the clay or only on the sand. A strip was commonly a land or a cellion, a ridge, or a pair of ridges, long enough for a plow team to run before turning. The old word furlong means a furrow's length. A full ploughing length was often about 220 yards, though surviving ridges vary with the field. Width varied too. A strip might be a few yards across, or wider where custom and later consolidation allowed. The plough did not work the strip as a flat table. It threw the sod inward toward the center, year after year. The middle rose, the edges became furrows that served as drains. In a wet climate, that camber was a tool. Water left the crown and stood, if it stood, in the furrow, where it did less harm to the seed. The plough that made the ridge was a heavy, wheeled or footed implement drawn by oxen, later by horses. The mold board turned the slice. At the end of the ridge, the team was turned on the headland, a margin left for that purpose, and brought back on the other side. A skilled ploughman could keep the crown true and the furrow clean, a careless one left a ridge that ponded or a furrow that wandered. Once the pattern was set, later plowings followed it. To flatten a ridge was extra work, and while the strip remained the unit of holding, not worth doing, so the earth remembered the holding. Two or three great fields made the usual rotation. One field was winter corn, often wheat or rye, one was spring corn, barley or oats, with or without pulses. One lay fallow and was plowed in the year of rest, to kill weeds and to take what dung the village could spare. The fallow was not empty of law. Beasts were turned on it at stated times. The same beasts walked the stubble after harvest under rules about when the field was broken. And became common again. Meadow, separate from the arable, was shut up for hay until the crop was taken, then opened. Pasture and waste lay beyond or among the fields. The whole was a calendar as much as a map. Rights were attached to the strips and to the common. A man who held so many acres in the fields held a matching share in the meadow, a right to so many beasts on the common, and a duty to maintain hedges at the outer bounds, or gates, or a portion of the parish road, according to local custom. Custom was the working law that said when ploughing might start, when the meadow was shut, how many sheep followed a cow, and who folded the flock on the fallow. The manor court, or the village meeting that did the same work under another name, recorded the orders and the fines. The open field did not run on goodwill alone, it ran on dates and on the memory of dates. Surveyors of a later age, walking with chain and compass, found that the strips were not perfect rectangles, they bent with the contour, they widened and narrowed. A furlong might be a fan of lands meeting a boundary at an angle. Where two furlongs met, the ridges changed direction, and a joint or a short headland took the turn. Those changes of direction are still readable in pasture that has not been leveled. They are a plan of dead plow teams. Enclosure ended most of the system in England by degrees, faster in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when parliamentary acts allotted compact farms in place of scattered strips. Hedges went up on the new allotment lines, some ridges were plowed down. Many were not, especially where the new use was grass. Pasture conserves ridge and furrow better than arable. A field under permanent grass in the Midlands may still show the old lands as clearly as a rubbed inscription. The hedges ignore them, the ground does not. Elsewhere the timetable differed. In parts of Europe the open fields lasted longer, or took other geometries, the gowan floor of German-speaking lands, with its bundles of strips, the long Breton or open northern French pieces, versions in Sweden and in eastern regions, where later reforms drew new lines. The English case is only the one whose ridges have been most often photographed and named. The common fact is the strip, the shared field, and the plough that piled the middle. Soil sits differently on the ridge than in the furrow. The crown is drier and after centuries, sometimes a little more mixed by the turning of the sod. The furrow is wetter, darker, and more liable to hold the stones that work downhill. A spade put on the crest and a spade put in the hollow will not always agree. Crop marks in a dry summer can show the same contrast from above, the ridge paler, the furrow greener, or the reverse, according to the plant and the year. Archaeology uses that contrast. So did the farmer who knew which land needed an extra furrow to carry water away. The team that cut the ridge was itself an institution. Eight oxen are a common figure in older accounts, yoked in pairs, with a plowman at the stilts and a driver or a child with a goad. Horses later took the same path in fewer numbers. The length of the land suited the animals. A turn at every few yards would have wasted strength. A land that ran for half a mile would have tired them before the headland. The furlong is therefore a measure of beasts as well as of earth. When the ridge is seen as a wave on a hillside, it is also a day's repeated walk. Holdings were described in acres, yardlands, vergates, and ox gangs, words that pointed back to the work of a team and to a share in the whole, not always to a surveyed rectangle. A yardland might be thirty acres scattered in the fields, more or less, with meadow and common to match. Two yardlands made a substantial tenement. A few scattered acres made a small one. Because the acres were not adjacent. A man spent part of his year walking from strip to strip with the plough and the harrow and the seed. The path along the headland and the bock, where a balk remained between lands, was as necessary as the furrow. Balks were unplowed narrows, grass or rough used as bounds and as access. Not every system kept them. Where they existed they were a temptation to the plough and a subject of court orders. Encroachment by a single furrow year after year could swallow a balk. The court told the offender to set the land back. The ridge remembers the offense only as a slight change of width. Harvest was a common moment even when the crop was several men's. Neighboring strips ripened together, gleaning rules followed the binding of the sheaves. The field opened by nature had to be closed by agreement at sowing and opened by agreement after the last load. A man who put beasts in early spoiled his neighbor's corn. The fine was listed because the offense was ordinary. The open field made neighbors of everyone who held a land in the furlong. Wood and stone bounds marked the outer edge, a parish hedge, a stream, a road, a bank. Inside, the only permanent lines were the slight ones of custom. That is why a map of strips, where one survives from the century of enclosure, looks like a sheaf of lines drawn by many hands. Each line is a tenement, each bundle is a family's living. The later compact farm with its ring fence is easier to color on a plan. It is not the same organism. Ridge and furrow is sometimes confused with drainage grips of a later date, or with wartime ploughing. The older pattern is broader in the wave, longer in the run, and organized by furlongs whose changes of direction make sense as headlands. 19th century steam plowing and tile drainage produced other marks, often straighter and unrelated to village strips. Reading the surface is a matter of scale, and of knowing where the open fields were. On limestone and chalk, the ridges may be low, on clay they can be high enough to hide a sheep in the furrow. Height is a function of soil, of how long the inward throw continued, and of whether later flattening occurred. A high ridge and old pasture is not a monument raised on purpose, it is the sum of ordinary seasons. The plowman's year on such land can be told without leaving the field. After harvest, the stubble is common. Then the fallow field is broken. Winter corn goes in on last year's fallow or on the field whose turn it is. Spring ploughing takes the next, harrows follow, weeds on the fallow are turned again in summer, hay from the meadow is stacked, harvest returns, the strips do not move, the crops do. A man can stand on his own land and see to left and right another man's barley and a third man's peas, each on a ridge like his own. The view is the system made visible. When enclosure commissioners drew new roads and allotted new closes, they often used the edges of furlongs as convenient lines, and often ignored them. A straight parliamentary road cutting across the old lands leaves ridges that run under the hedge and out the other side. That discontinuity is a date. Everything under the hedge that still heaves and waves is older than the hedge. The vocabulary is small and worth keeping in use, field for the great division, furlong for the block of parallel strips, land, cellion, or ridge for the unit, furrow for the drain between, headland for the turning ground, bulk for the unplowed narrow, yardland or vergate for the bundle of strips that made a holding, soak, manor or township for the authority that kept the calendar. None of these words requires a theory. They are names for pieces of ground and for the rules that fitted them together. In districts that never had open fields in this form, highland pasture, woodland with assarts, regions of early enclosed farms, the washboard is absent or rare. The map of surviving ridge and furrow is therefore also a map of where the big communal arable once lay. River terraces, midland clays, and broad vales take the pattern well, steep wet uplands do not. The earth only keeps what the plough repeated. A last look at a single furlong will do for the whole. Twenty or thirty ridges run downhill to a stream. Each is a holding or part of one. The furrows are darker after rain, a hedge of enclosure age crosses them at a slight bias. Beyond the hedge, the same ridges continue, lower under grass, no board explains them. They are the place where a team walked, turned on the headland, and walked back, throwing the sod always inward, until the field itself became a set of long low roofs for the corn.