<<However, I would like to know if there is evidence of the meadows being enclosed in some way to stop cattle from getting on to the part of land that was growing winter fodder, i.e. hay. <snip> One Little Boy Blue alone would have been useless. Perhaps the horn was his early warning system to call out the whole village.>> You're quite right, Audrey, keeping livestock out of meadows (and fields of growing crops) was a constant problem, as is attested to by the repeated by-laws trying to deal with the problem, and prosecutions for breach of the by-laws, found in countless manor and parish records. The open field system lasted something like a thousand years, and operated across many parts of England, so I expect several different ways of keeping livestock out of meadows were used at different times and in different places. Some that I know were in use in the Midlands at the end of the middle ages were: 1. putting up a temporary fence of hurdles. This might be to keep livestock out of places where they were not supposed to be (like a meadow) or to confine them within a certain area (for example, sheep were often folded each night on a different fenced-in area of the fallow field to ensure that their valuable dung fertilised the land). 2. tethering them - obviously this only applied to small numbers of beasts - entire flocks or herds couldn't all be tethered 3. having herdsmen to keep them where they were supposed to be. Some manors/parishes had full-time adult herdsmen employed by the whole manor collectively, and all the livestock pastured on the common pastures, meadows and fields had to be placed under his control. At other times each individual was responsible for controlling his own animals, and one can well imagine that the task would often have been given to children. And yes, I do think that is exactly what the nursery rhyme Little Boy Blue is describing. Matt Tompkins Blaston, Leics