In these laws there occurs a section which so clearly refers to open common fields divided into acres, and to common meadows also divided into strips or doles, that it would have been perfectly intelligible and reasonable if it had been included word for word in the record of the customs of the Hitchin manor as regards the three common fields and the green commons and Lammas land:-- [p110] _Be Ceorles Gærs-tune._[133] (xlii.) Gif ceorlas gærs-tun hæbben gemænne. oþþe oðer gedál-land to tynanne. ⁊ hæbben sume getyned hiora dæl. sume næbban. ⁊ . . . etten hiora gemænan æceras oþþe gærs, gán þa þonne þe ꝥ geat agan. ⁊ gebete[n] þam oðrum þe hiora dæl getynedne. . . . _Of a Ceorle's grass-tun (meadow)._ (42) If ceorls have common meadow or other _land divided into strips_[134] to fence, and some have fenced their strip, some have not, and . . . [stray cattle (?)] eat their common acres or grass, let those go who own the gap, and compensate the others who have fenced their strip. . . . There is here in the smallest possible compass the most complete evidence that in the seventh century the fields of Wessex were common open fields, the arable being divided into _acres_ and the meadows into _doles_[134]; and as the system is incidentally mentioned as a thing existing as a matter of course, it is not likely to have been suddenly or recently introduced. The evidence throws it back, therefore, at least to the earliest period of Saxon rule. II. THE HOLDINGS WERE COMPOSED OF SCATTERED STRIPS. «The holdings were _hides_ and _yard-lands_.» Let us next ask whether there are traces of the _scattered ownership_--the scattering all over the open fields of the strips included in the holdings--which was so essential a characteristic of the system; and, further, whether in tracing it back into early Saxon [p111] times any clue to its original meaning and intention can be found. First, it may be stated generally that, when the nature and incidents of the holdings are examined hereafter, it will be found that throughout the period of Saxon rule, from the time of Edward the Confessor backward to the date of the laws of King Ine, 300 years earlier, the holdings were mainly the same as those with which we have become familiar, viz. _hides_, _half-hides_, and _yard-lands_, and that, generally speaking, there were no other kinds of holdings the names of which are mentioned. «Holdings composed of scattered strips.» That these Saxon hides and yard-lands were composed of scattered strips in the open fields, as they were afterwards, might well be inferred from the mere fact that they bore the same names as those used after the Conquest. It would be strange indeed if the same names at the two dates meant entirely different things--if the virgate or yard-land before the Conquest was a thing wholly different from what it was after it. But there is other evidence than the mere names of the holdings.