Editing Open-field system (section)

==Controversies and inefficiencies==

The open-field system is considered by many economists to have been inefficient for agricultural production and resistant to technological innovation. "Everyone was forced to conform to village norms of cropping, harvesting, and building."<ref>Hopcroft, p. 48</ref> The communal institutions, the manorial court, and the tenants regulated agricultural practices and economic behaviour. The manorial lord exercised control over the tenants by extracting rent for land or labour to cultivate his demesne lands. The scattered holdings of each farmer increased the time needed to travel to and from fields.

The open-field system, especially its characteristic of common grazing lands, has often been used as an example by economists to illustrate "[[the tragedy of the commons]]" and assert that private ownership is a better steward of resources than common or public ownership. "Tragedy of the commons" refers to the alleged destruction of common pastures in England as a result of overgrazing, each tenant maximizing his gain by grazing as many animals as possible and ignoring the long-term impact of overgrazing. The author of the term "tragedy of the commons", [[Garrett Hardin]], pointed out that the pastures of England were "protected from ruin by limiting each tenant to a fixed number of animals". Thus, Hardin says the commons were "managed...which may be good or bad depending on the quality of the management".<ref>{{cite journal |last=Hardin |first=Garrett |author-link=Garrett Hardin |date=13 December 1968 |title=The Tragedy of the Commons |journal=[[Science (journal)|Science]] |volume=162 |issue=3859 |pages= 1243–8|doi=10.1126/science.162.3859.1243 |pmid=5699198|bibcode=1968Sci...162.1243H |doi-access= }}</ref><ref>Hardin, Garret, [https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/TragedyoftheCommons.html "The Tragedy of the Commons"], accessed 22 August 2019</ref> 

Some scholars state that the pastures of England were highly managed; they were considered to be privately owned by the village as a whole, which led to a communal sense of responsibility to maintaining the land. Managerial practices such as stinting, or limiting the amount of cattle permitted, required weed removal, removal of straw, cutting thistles, ringing swine, and knobbing cow's horns to prevent grubbing were common. The commons were regularly inspected by the villagers and sometimes by a delegation from the manorial court. It is even argued that the commons that Hardin was referring to in "The Tragedy of the Commons" were actually pre-enclosure commons, which were not true commons, but rather left over lands that were misused by the poor, displaced, and criminals.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Levine |first=Bruce |date=January 1986 |title=The Tragedy of the Commons and the Comedy of Community: The Commons in History |url=https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6629(198601)14:1<81::AID-JCOP2290140108>3.0.CO;2-G |journal=Journal of Community Psychology |volume=14 |pages=81–99 |doi=10.1002/1520-6629(198601)14:1<81::AID-JCOP2290140108>3.0.CO;2-G |via=Wiley Online Library|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

The fact that the open-field system endured for roughly a thousand years over a large part of Europe and provided a livelihood to a growing population indicates that there might not have been a better way of organizing agriculture during that time period.<ref>Dahlman, Carl J. (1980), ''The Open Field System and Beyond,'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 95</ref><ref>Cox, S., (1985). "No tragedy on the commons". ''[[Environmental Ethics (journal)|Environmental Ethics]]'' 7:49–61.</ref> The replacement of the open-field system by privately owned property was fiercely resisted by many elements of society. Karl Marx was opposed to the [[enclosure]] of the open field system, calling it a "robbery of the common lands".<ref>{{Cite web |title=Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - Chapter Twenty-Seven |url=https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm#n19 |access-date=2022-10-15 |website=www.marxists.org}}</ref> The "brave new world" of a harsher, more competitive and capitalistic society from the 16th century onward destroyed the securities and certainties of land tenure in the open-field system.<ref>Campbell, Bruce M. S. "The Land" in ''A Social History of England, 1200–1500'', ed. by Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 237</ref> The open field system died only slowly. More than half the agricultural land of England was still not enclosed in 1700, after which the government discouraged the continuation of the open-field system. It was finally laid to rest in England about 1850 after more than 5,000 Acts of Parliament and just as many voluntary agreements<ref>{{Cite journal |last=McCloskey |first=Donald N. |date=March 1972 |title=The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050700075379/type/journal_article |journal=The Journal of Economic History |language=en |volume=32 |issue=1 |pages=15–35 |doi=10.1017/S0022050700075379 |issn=0022-0507|url-access=subscription }}</ref> over several centuries had transformed the "scattered plots in the open fields" into unambiguous private and enclosed properties free of village and communal control and use.<ref>{{cite book |last=McCloskey |first=Donald N. |author-link=Deirdre McCloskey |editor1-last=Parker |editor1-first=William N. |editor2-last=Jones |editor2-first=Eric L |year=1975 |title=European Peasants and Their Markets: Essays in Agrarian Economic History |chapter=2: The Persistence of English Common Fields |place=Princeton, New Jersey |publisher=[[Princeton University Press]] |chapter-url= http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/graham/common_fields.pdf |access-date=16 June 2013|page=73}}</ref> Over half of all agricultural land in England was enclosed during the 18th and 19th centuries.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=McCloskey |first=Donald N. |date=March 1972 |title=The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0022050700075379/type/journal_article |journal=The Journal of Economic History |language=en |volume=32 |issue=1 |pages=15–35 |doi=10.1017/S0022050700075379 |issn=0022-0507|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Other European countries also began to pass legislation to eliminate the scattering of farm land, the [[Netherlands]] and France passing laws making land consolidation compulsory in the 1930s and 1950s respectively.<ref>McCloskey, p. 11</ref> In Russia, the open-field system, called "cherespolositsa" ("alternating ribbons (of land)") and administered by the ''[[Mir (commune)|obshchina / mir]]'' (the general village community), remained as the main system of peasant land ownership in Russia until the [[Stolypin reform]] process that started in 1905, but generally continued for many years, finally ending only with the Soviet policy of [[collectivisation]] in the 1930s.