This incidental evidence of 'Piers the Plowman' is fully borne out by a manuscript _terrier_ of one of the open fields near Cambridge, belonging to the later years of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century.[16] It gives the names of the owners and occupiers of all the seliones or strips. They are [p020] divided by balks of turf. They lie in furlongs or _quarentenæ_. They have frequently headlands or _foreræ_. Some of the strips are gored, and called _gored acres_. Many of them are described as _butts_. Indeed, were it not that the country round Cambridge being flat there are no _lynches_, almost every one of the features of the system is distinctly visible in this terrier. «The system already decaying.» But this terrier also contains evidence that the system was even then in a state of decay and disintegration. The balks were disappearing, and the strips, though still remembered as strips, were becoming merged in larger portions, so that they lie thrown together _sine balca_. The mention is frequent of iii. seliones which used to be v., ii. which used to be iv., iii. which used to be viii., and so on. Evidently the meaning and use of the half-acre strips are already gone. It will be well, therefore, to take another leap, and at once to pass behind the Black Death--that great watershed in economic history--so as to examine the details of the system _before_ rather than after it had sustained the tremendous shock which the death in one year of half the population may well have given to it. «Winslow Manor rolls of Ed. III.» A remarkably excellent opportunity for inquiry is presented by a complete set of manor rolls during the reign of Edward III. for the Manor of Winslow in Buckinghamshire, preserved in the Cambridge University Library.[17] [p021] No evidence could possibly be more to the purpose. Belonging to the Abbey of St. Albans, the rolls were kept with scrupulous accuracy and care. Every change of ownership during the long reign of Edward III. is recorded in regular form; and the year 1348–9--the year of the Black Death--occurring in the course of this reign, and occasioning more changes of ownership than usual, the MS. presents, if one may appropriate a geological expression, something like an economic section of the manor, revealing with unusual clearness the various economic strata in which its holdings were arranged. «The open field.» Before examining these holdings it is needful only to state that here, as in the later examples, the fields of the manor are open fields, divided into furlongs, which in their turn are made up with apparently almost absolute regularity of half-acre strips. Whenever (with very rare exceptions) a change of ownership takes place, and the contents of the holding are described, they turn out to be made up of half-acre pieces, or seliones, scattered all over the fields. «Half-acre strips.»