This is a detail of Thomas Pride’s Map of ‘Ensham’ from 1782. It shows the individual strips in the Open Field system and the enclosure of some land in the parish.
The open field system was the shape of the agricultural landscape in England in the 1700s. Every manor or village had two or three often very large fields. These were divided into narrow strips of land, which were cultivated by individual yeomen (people who owned their own strips of land) or tenant farmers (people who rented them).
It was called the open field system because there were no fences between the sections of land. Even today, you can still sometimes see the imprint of this ancient system in the form of ridges and furrows in the landscape, which indicate the lines of ploughed strips of land.
Over the 18th and 19th centuries, the open field system gave way to a system called ‘enclosure’. Fences and hedges now closed off whole fields, making it possible to cultivate more land. This explains why the ‘Ensham’ map has elements of both systems.