and a share in the meadow and waste land. The strips of arable were
unfenced and ploughed by common teams, to which each family would
contribute.

Apparently, as the land was cleared and broken up it was dealt out
acre by acre to each cultivator; and supposing each group consisted of
ten families, the typical holding of 120 acres was assigned to each
family in acre strips, and these strips were not all contiguous but
mixed up with those of other families. The reason for this mixture of
strips is obvious to any one who knows how land even in the same field
varies in quality; it was to give each family its share of both good
and bad land, for the householders were all equal and the principle on
which the original distribution of the land depended was that of
equalizing the shares of the different members of the community.[2]

In attributing ownership of lands to communities we must be careful
not to confound communities with corporations. Maitland thinks the
early land-owning communities blended the character of corporations
and of co-owners, and co-ownership is ownership by individuals.[3] The
vills or villages founded on their arrival in Britain by our English
forefathers resembled those they left at home, and even there the
strips into which the arable fields were divided were owned in
severalty by the householders of the village. There was co-operation
in working the fields but no communistic division of the crops, and
the individual's hold upon his strips developed rapidly into an
inheritable and partible ownership. 'At the opening of Anglo-Saxon
history absolute ownership of land in severalty was established and
becoming the rule.'[4]

In the management of the meadow land communal features were much more