Open field strip farming has almost entirely disappeared from Britain in the past 1,000 years — though there is one great exception: Laxton.
In 1635, a surveyor called Mark Pierce was employed to map the farmland around Laxton, which he did in four sheets, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Each shows one of the enormous open fields around the village, between them divided in 2,280 strips of land.
Open-field farming, with land divided into small parcels between…
