In order to try and establish what was the situation with regard to three-field layout, especially in relation to peasant lands, we will take all explicit references to three fields to be found in the fifteenth-and early-sixteenth-century documents available to us and see what picture emerges.

1. In April 1454 a monastery in Zvenigorod uezd was granted a privilege on the basis of which at some later date the monastery's title to the wastes of Karinskoe village, Negodnevo and Somovo, was confirmed; the peasant claimants lost their case ‘because those wastes from of old, for sixty years, have been subject to Karinskoe village, a third field …’ Vasko, who spoke ‘on behalf of all the Andreevskoe peasants’, regarded the wastes as Andreevskoe land; Karinskoe and Andreevskoe were more than five miles apart.

The view of ‘all the Andreevskoe peasants’ (a commune of some sort) was that the disputed lands were wastes. The judicial view was that the wastes were a third field of a village about five miles distant, and that it had been subject to that village for sixty years, perhaps as a third field.

2. On 27 August 1474 an exchange of lands was concluded between Prince Ivan Vasil'evich and the Trinity monastery of St Sergius, evidently in order to achieve a more compact disposition of land.