fenceless

MEDIEVAL RURAL LIFE AND ORGANIZATION. The manorial village. Let us refresh our memory at first with a glance at country life in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. All rural life in England at this time was village life. Farmhouses were gathered into clusters sheltering a population ranging from fifty to a thousand persons. Radiating from and circling around each village were the plowlands, pastures, meadows, and woodlands, spreading open; for the most part houseless, barnless, shedless, mill-less, even fenceless, clear to the similar lands, commons, and open fields belonging to the inhabitants of each adjoining village. The landscape picture presented, then, is a village cluster, surrounded at the extremities of irregular radii by a ring of similar clusters, all varying in size but separated from one another by open, unfenced, agricultural land. But the memory of each villager sticks to his own parcels of land, whether held individually or in common, so definitely, that, even without ditch, wall, or survey stakes, a clean-cut, psychological boundary, very irregular in shape it may be surmised, divides the lands of one village from the lands of every adjoining village, and sets apart a certain group of villagers as a distinctive agricultural community.

1922 [1918], Charles Josiah Galpin, “Chapter IV: Structure of rural society”, in Rural Life, New York: Century Company, page 67