The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (13 page)

So what was the chronology of any rearrangement of rural settlements, and how did this relate to changes in the layout of fields? In particular instances there is always the possibility that villages and their fields were planned together, but this does not appear to be typical. On the one hand, where nucleation occurred it often seems to have been a phased process: the initial development of a village lacked any obvious plan, but in due course there was replanning according to a more regular form. On the other, while it is tempting to see the fields as having been rearranged at the same time
as their parent settlements, only occasionally is there good evidence of this having happened. If we take the analogy of the well-documented process of parliamentary enclosure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – in many respects the reverse of what we are discussing here, but comparable in its overall impact as a ‘landscape revolution’ – the great replanning of a community’s fields on geometrical lines was normally preceded by small-scale piecemeal enclosures of irregular form which served to illustrate what could be achieved. And the rebuilding of farmsteads away from the old village centres in among their new consolidated holdings, while clearly linked to the enclosure process, was often not a coincident development but – as Hoskins pointed out in
The Making of the English Landscape
– one which followed a generation or two later.
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In a medieval context, there is much to be said for a model which sees settlement forms, like field systems, undergoing a series of changes which influenced one another but were only contemporaneous in the most general terms.

One influential excavation of a deserted settlement site was that of Goltho (Lincolnshire) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here, a planned medieval village – with streets at right angles to one another and regularly laid out enclosures for peasant housing – was interpreted as having originated in the tenth or eleventh century, but to have been preceded by a short-lived ninth-century settlement whose arrangement bore no resemblance to it and over which successive manor houses were later built; the fact that the dating of these developments has subsequently been challenged (as too early) does not undermine their essential sequence. Detailed investigations in central Northamptonshire, at places such as Braunston, Daventry and Higham Ferrers, have also led to the conclusion that the original nucleations probably date to before 850 and subsequent replanning to the tenth century. At Cottenham (Cambridgeshire), an apparently eighth-century nucleation (still the site of the church) was subsequently abandoned in favour of a new ninth- or tenth-century centre to the south, laid out according to a radial plan; further planned extensions followed in the twelfth century. Wharram Percy (Yorkshire), Brandon (Suffolk), Chalton Down and Bishops’ Waltham (both Hampshire) are other early nucleated settlements which appear to have undergone ‘second-phase’ replanning, though in the latter case not until the eleventh century.
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These later reorganizations may well have occurred in the context of intensified manorial control – a drive to apportion house-plots systematically in relation to government tax assessments and the demands of the local lord – but there must have been other reasons for the initial clustering of houses together, albeit in an irregular, unplanned pattern. It is tempting to suggest that peasants were motivated by a heightened sense of interdependence, whether for mutual protection, the sharing of equipment or ready access to specialist skills and services, including in some places those provided by a newly built church.

As for any connection between these processes and the rearrangement of the fields, clear evidence of a link between the two is remarkably elusive. At Shapwick (Somerset), the existence of a planned settlement whose arrangement changed little from the eleventh century to the eighteenth, set conveniently between two great open fields, lends itself to the suggestion that these were all laid out at the same time, but the investigators acknowledge the possibility of alternative explanations, one of which is that the village and its fields both developed in stages.
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Where we have documentary evidence of a replanning of the fields, there is no sign that this extended to the accompanying settlement: for example, the twelfth-century accounts of the deliberate rearrangement of the open fields at Dry Drayton and Segenhoe – encountered in the previous chapter – make no reference to the layout of the housing. Conversely, we read in the
Battle Abbey Chronicle
a detailed description of a post-Conquest planning initiative which created a new town but did not change the fields outside. Many of these fields were already being worked as part of neighbouring manors before being granted to the abbey and – as was usual in the Weald – they were arranged in closes held by individuals rather than in common. Successive abbots were certainly prepared to promote further woodland clearance and to rearrange tenancies to their own advantage, but no attempt was made to reorder these closes into open, communally worked, fields; instead, we are told in the
Chronicle
that ‘in Petley there is one wist … which a man called Oter formerly held; it is forty-eight acres in size’, and that ‘next to Strellewelle are four acres which Gilbert the stranger held and his heirs after him’. We have here a nucleated settlement laid out without significant alteration to the pattern of its accompanying fields: and since the prevailing custom of the area was to farm in closes, that pattern remained.
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Of course, circumstances might sometimes arise where it made sense to arrange a settlement and its fields at the same time, such as the colonizing schemes in northern England noted in the last chapter. It is possible that in some other cases of late nucleation, where concentrated settlement cannot be demonstrated before the twelfth century – Faxton and Lyveden (Northamptonshire), Wawne (Yorkshire), Gomeldon (Wiltshire) – the open fields were planned together with the village, along lines by then well-established in their respective areas. Much the same has been suggested for the settlements around Whittlewood on the Northamptonshire-Buckinghamshire border, where evidence for nucleation is lacking before the late-ninth and tenth centuries; here, the investigators suggested that these communities may – in effect – have skipped the earliest phase of inchoate nucleation and partial establishment of open arable strips and arranged their settlements and field systems together within a coherent plan. As at Shapwick, these are attractive theories, but they cannot be proved. The reality is that no model
of how settlement nucleation linked to field patterns applies everywhere: ‘a connection between the two is likely … but we still do not know what that relationship was’.
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Another reality is that, however convenient it is to distinguish nucleated and dispersed settlements one from the other, much of England displayed characteristics of both. Even the
Atlas of Rural Settlement
, which relies on that distinction for its methodology, accepts that, of ‘the eight varied ways in which a single township may be settled’, four of them embraced ‘mixed settlement patterns’ between the two extremes.
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Within the ‘Whittlewood’ area, though part of the ‘Central Province’ with its emphasis on nucleation, the parish of Leckhamstead (Buckinghamshire) had six small but identifiable settlements prior to the mid-ninth century, most of them sufficiently distant from each other to categorize this as an example of dispersion. The changes of the late ninth and tenth centuries led to fewer and larger foci than before, one apparently with a planned row of tofts, but Leckhamstead is regarded by its investigators as a ‘dispersed village’, described in Domesday Book as three separate manors, each with its own ploughlands, meadow and woodland.
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In Norfolk – within the ‘South-Eastern Province’ – a tendency has been observed for villages apparently created as nucleated settlements in or around the eighth century subsequently to become more dispersed, as farmsteads, attracted by the availability of a scarce resource, migrated to the edges of commons and greens. Longham (near East Dereham) and Stanfield (near Wymondham) are examples of places where such migration meant that the earlier nuclei had already been abandoned by the eleventh century, leaving their churches standing in isolation. Alternatively, as at Weasenham St Peter (near Fakenham), the settlement around the church remained but subsidiary foci developed around the common. The medieval field systems associated with these settlements were largely open arable farmed in common – though lacking some of the rigorous consistency associated with the ‘midland system’ – but they were not attached to single nucleations: ‘for much of northern East Anglia, the era of villages was short-lived’.
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Meanwhile in Cheshire, part of the ‘Northern and Western Province’, we have the example of Tilston, where the evidence in the landscape is of a row of house-plots (tofts) adjacent to the medieval parish church, a second small nucleation around Tilston Green the best part of a kilometre to the north, and dispersed settlement in the form of farmsteads and other dwellings at various intersections of routeways elsewhere within the township. This pattern of small nucleations surrounded by scattered hamlets and farmsteads was widespread in medieval Cheshire, as demonstrated by archaeological work at the deserted settlement of Tatton, a ‘straggling … interrupted row … with scattered halls and hamlets elsewhere in the township’.
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So any survey of rural settlement across medieval England between the years 1000 and 1540 will embrace a variety of patterns of nucleation
and dispersion: a complexity sufficient to challenge even the hardiest exponent of categorization. However, as has already been alluded to, one recurrent characteristic of medieval settlements is the impact of at least a degree of deliberate planning in their layout. This is most obvious where the present-day settlements retain a recognizable pattern of straight streets and geometrically shaped village greens, lined by tofts of consistent dimensions with continuous ‘back lanes’ forming predetermined rear boundaries. Such a pattern is often encountered in north Yorkshire and the north east, where it has been attributed to deliberate resettlement following William the Conqueror’s ‘Harrying of the North’ in 1069–70, and also in Cumberland, where the context may be William Rufus’s annexation of the area from the Scots in 1092, after which he sent ‘very many peasants thither with their wives and livestock to settle there and till the soil’; no one who visits Milburn, just off the A66 some 14 kilometres east of Penrith, can fail to be impressed by the regularity of a layout in which housing still surrounds on all sides a large rectangular green, a place of safety for the animals once penned within it.
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But similar evidence of planning can be found embedded in many villages all over England which have since expanded far beyond their original form. In the Fylde area of Lancashire, for example, what are today quite diversely arranged settlements such as Clifton, Elswick and Longton were originally laid out in rows, each with territorial boundaries embracing a share of open field arable, marshland and mossland, possibly as part of another post-Conquest colonization initiative following violent incursion by the Scots in 1061. At the opposite end of the country, Chobham, Egham and Great Bookham are all in the Surrey commuter belt today, but all contain within them in the vicinity of their parish churches ‘excellent illustrations of regular two-row plans’, with peasant tofts aligned either side of a main street and back lanes behind. The fact that they were all within Chertsey Abbey’s estate suggests that here at least it was the lord rather than his tenants taking the lead in imposing a plan.
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Yet there was much more to planning than setting out geometrical patterns of streets and house-plots. Rashleigh (Devon), duly entered as a manor in Domesday Book with a recorded population of 15, consisted in the mid-eighteenth century of a small hamlet and several farmsteads mostly grouped around and within an identifiable oval enclosure, roughly 700 metres by 450 metres, by then held in separate portions. This may well be a settlement in which the oval enclosure – possibly representing the original intake for cultivation – previously housed the communally farmed open arable, with the peasant houses being systematically grouped around it so as to allow easy access to other resources beyond. Stanfield (Norfolk) is another settlement where the open arable fields seem to have been deliberately developed within a large oval, in this case just to the north west of the
church and manor house, with peasant settlement being located 200 metres and more west of the church at the periphery of the oval, at its interface with the common pasture beyond.
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These are not obviously ‘planned’ but there was certainly some forethought, and communal decision-making, behind the placing of the peasants’ houses. As Christopher Taylor has written, we need to be alive to the possibility that ‘many thousands of villages whose layouts do not show any elements of planning could nevertheless be the result of deliberate development’. At first sight, Raunds (Northamptonshire), which had several nuclei in the medieval period, does not look to have been planned systematically. Yet detailed analysis of former tofts in different parts of this settlement has shown them to have been very carefully laid out according to a 16 ½ feet (5.03 metres) rod, both in length and in breadth, seemingly as part of a deliberate reorganization in the tenth century.
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We also find evidence of planning in settlements so small that they would normally be described as examples of dispersion: Halton Shields near Corbridge (Northumberland), a former shieling settlement for upland summer grazing, was reorganized – probably in the early sixteenth century – as a row of seven uniform tofts along the line of Hadrian’s Wall,
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while in Cheshire the neighbouring settlements of Clotton and Burton near Tarvin, each with only a few adjacent house-plots, still exhibit all the characteristics of a deliberate arrangement (
Figures 2
,
9
). And planning certainly played a large part in the extension of settlements to cope with increased population, as at Cottenham (Cambridgeshire), where the boundaries of additional tofts are derived from the sinuous course of the former strips, at Burwell (also Cambridgeshire) where North Street (first recorded in 1351 as a northwards extension of the village) appears to follow the line of a headland between furlongs of the open field, and at Cestersover (Warwickshire) and Walgrave (Northamptonshire) – the former a deserted settlement – where house-plots alongside streets leading away from the core of the village incorporated traces of the ridge and furrow of the former open fields.
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Given their impact on communal farming arrangements, it is hard to believe that these extensions could have gone ahead without ‘planning consent’ granted by the ‘community of the vill’, whether or not the lord or his representative was also involved.