The reason why the medieval three-field system was retained in Laxton, but was altered in Castor to an improved three-field system, is to be found in the nature of the soil. That of Laxton is a heavy clay, growing wheat of noted quality; that of the Northamptonshire parish is lighter, in parts very shallow and stony. Another result of the difference of soil was a different system of ploughing. The Castor method was that technically known as “Gathering and Splitting,” viz., alternately to plough each strip from the margin inwards, turning the sod inwards, and the reverse way, turning the sod outwards, so that the general level of the field was not broken into a series of ridges. In Castor, as in Laxton, no grassy “balk” divided one man’s “land” from his neighbour’s, the furrow only had to serve as boundary, and sometimes the boundary was bitterly disputed. Before the enclosure there was one spot in the common fields where two neighbours kept a plough each continually, and as fast as one ploughed certain furrows into his land, the other ploughed them back into his. Another difficulty occasionally arose when high winds prevailed at harvest time. The great extent of the open fields, and the slightness of any opposition to the sweep of the wind, at such times allowed the corn to be blown from one man’s land, and scattered over his neighbours’. Indeed it recently happened that one year when peas had been chosen as the fallow crop, that a storm carried the whole crop to the hedge bordering the field, and so mixed together in inextricable confusion the produce belonging to thirty or forty different farmers. Another source of dispute was one that has been a prolific cause of trouble in common fields for centuries. Where the extremities of a series of adjoining “lands” abut on a land belonging to another series at a right angle, the land so abutted on is termed a “head-land,” and the occupiers of the lands that abut on it have the right of turning their ploughs on the headland, and taking the plough from one strip to another along it. The occupier of the headland therefore has to defer ploughing it till all his neighbours have finished, and often chafes at the delay. Recently a farmer in the unenclosed parish of Elmstone Hardwick, near Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, attempted to find a remedy for this inconvenience. He ploughed his headland at the time that suited his convenience, and then sued his neighbours for trespass when they turned their ploughs in his land. Needless to say he lost more by his action than by the trespass.