Open field system

Controversies and inefficiencies

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. 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". 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. 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 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. Over half of all agricultural land in England was enclosed during the 18th and 19th centuries. 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. In Russia, the open-field system, called "cherespolositsa" ("alternating ribbons (of land)") and administered by the 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.