Chap. VI.
ANCIENTLY PLOUGHED FIELDS.
293
wards discovered to have been ploughed only 50 or 60 years before. During the early part of the present century, when the price of corn was very high, land of all kinds seems to have been ploughed in Britain. There is, however, no reason to doubt that in many cases the old crowns and furrows have been preserved from a very ancient period.[1] That they should have been preserved for very unequal lengths of time would naturally follow from the crowns, when first thrown up, having differed much in height in different districts, as is now the case with recently ploughed land.
In old pasture fields, the mould, wherever measurements were made, was found to be from ½ to 2 inches thicker in the furrows than
- ↑ Mr. E. Tylor in his Presidential address ('Journal of the Anthropological Institute,' May 1880, p. 451) remarks: "It appears from several papers of the Berlin Society as to the German 'high-fields' or 'heathen-fields' (Hochäcker, and Heidenäcker) that they correspond much in their situation on hills and wastes with the 'elf-furrows' of Scotland, which popular mythology accounts for by the story of the fields having been put under a Papal interdict, so that people took to cultivating the hills. There seems reason to suppose that, like the tilled plots in the Swedish forests which tradition ascribes to the old 'hackers,' the German heathen-fields represent tillage by an ancient and barbaric population."
