The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (2 page)

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n the year 1000, England had been a united kingdom for less than a century. In 927, Athelstan king of Wessex and Mercia, the grandson of Alfred the Great, had conquered Northumbria, so extinguishing the last segment of independent Scandinavian rule. There had been periods after this when more than one king ruled in England, but they had not lasted long. By the turn of the millennium, the latest king of the Wessex line, Ethelred ‘the Unready’, was engaged in endless campaigning and diplomacy to preserve the frontiers of that kingdom and extend his influence over his neighbours. To the west lay the politically fragmented country of Wales, the border with which had been defined by the eighth-century linear earthwork Offa’s Dyke from Basingwerk on the Dee to a point just east of the Wye estuary.
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The northern end of this frontier would, however, be pushed eastwards by the close of the twelfth century, eventually to be fixed roughly as we know it today by Henry VIII’s Act of Union with Wales in 1536. To the north, Scotland was also divided in 1000, both politically and in terms of the identity of its constituent peoples, although it was all to come under the control of Malcolm II – conventionally regarded as the first king of the whole of Scotland – within the following two decades. Here, an eastern frontier along the Tweed and a western one at the Solway Firth were not to be established – by force on both sides – until 1016
and 1092 respectively, and even then there could be no guarantee of their future stability.
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As that pioneer of landscape history, W. G. Hoskins, put it, ‘this border country belies its peaceful appearance today. Beneath its clouds are the scars of centuries of warfare and skirmishing.’
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England in 1000 was a country whose population had been growing steadily for several centuries but may still have been some way short of the level reached in Roman times. Only one person in ten lived in towns and there was a heavy preponderance towards the east and south of the country. Among the iconic structures associated with the medieval English landscape, castles had not yet arrived and monasteries were relatively few in number – although those which existed were exceptionally well-endowed, some with incomes which Domesday Book would later show to be comparable to the riches enjoyed by leading favourites of William the Conqueror.
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Parish churches were, as yet, mostly small and timber-built but they were certainly proliferating, and those serving rural settlements were often witness to an important process of transition, as nucleated villages and open arable fields farmed in common were coming to replace dispersed hamlets with individually farmed enclosed fields: but this was a phenomenon which had neither run its full course by 1000, nor would ever characterize large parts of England.

If the year 1000 can be taken for convenience as a starting point for the period covered by this book, 1540 may fairly be treated as its end. All periodization is of course open to challenge,
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but – collectively – the cultural changes associated with the Renaissance, seen for example in the development of new architectural styles, the religious changes initiated by the Reformation, the secularization of landownership following the dissolution of the monasteries, and the governmental changes occasioned by shifts in the balance of power between crown, council and House of Commons, all mark the years after 1540 as part of a new ‘post-medieval’ era which lies beyond our scope. In the momentous decade which had gone before, parliament had enacted Henry VIII’s royal supremacy over the Church in England, had legislated for the suppression of the monasteries – by then numbering over 700 in England – and had formally united England and Wales. Open field farming – though still widespread – was in retreat, as arable fields were being enclosed and converted to permanent pasture, a process sometimes accompanied by the abandonment of their parent settlements. Castles had come and gone as major defensible structures, though several remained as gaols, hunting lodges and administrative centres, alongside the unfortified country houses which were coming to be built. Parish churches had become ubiquitous and in almost every case had grown grander in size and style as the middle ages had advanced: nearly all of them in stone and most towering above their local communities physically and psychologically. There were more bridges and better roads than at any time since the Roman occupation. Yet the total
population was not dissimilar to that of 1000: having escalated until the early fourteenth century, it had then experienced a prolonged slump following the Black Death and seems once again to have been somewhere between 2 and 3 million – although 15% or more now lived in towns and London had witnessed extraordinary growth to at least 60,000, five or six times the number estimated for the period of the Norman Conquest.
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The political history of the intervening five centuries had revolved around two principal issues: first, the relationship between England and her neighbours, to north, west and south east, and second the extent to which power over the kingdom as a whole should be shared between the monarch and some form of ‘representative assembly’. One potential issue which never became the force it might have done was the identity of England and ‘the English’. The divisive legacy of 1066 – that of a Norman/French élite ruling over the subjugated English masses – eventually disappeared in the thirteenth century, following the loss of Normandy to France in 1204 and the triumph of the English language as the mother tongue even of the aristocracy.
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As for a ‘united kingdom of England’, there were to be moments when it looked as if it might split into separate political units: in 1069, for example, when rebellion in the north prompted William the Conqueror’s terrible ‘Harrying’ in reprisal, and again in 1149, when a country already divided by civil war faced invasion from the Scots.
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As late as 1405, three rebels against Henry IV optimistically partitioned England and Wales between them in a ‘Tripartite Indenture’. But these turned out to be fleeting affairs. Essentially, England retained its political cohesion throughout the period – troops and taxes could be raised in the south to assist in the defence of the north – despite there being some local adjustments to the frontiers from time to time and notwithstanding the existence of a few regions, notably Cheshire and Durham for much of the period, where the normal processes of royal government were modified so as to respect the privileges of a local potentate. Although the landscape of England was infinitely varied, politically the country was unified, in a way that medieval France, Germany, Spain and Italy were not. Local and regional affinities were certainly strong in medieval England, but there was general acceptance that these belonged within the context of one overarching kingdom. For the development of the English landscape, all this mattered. The king’s journeys, the intermarriages between noble families, the selection of clergy for senior posts: all were conducted on a country-wide basis, contributing to a network of shared information about farming practices, building styles and skilled personnel across the country as a whole. Regional variations abounded, as anyone who crosses the country today through different terrain and geology can readily perceive, but so did connections between landscapes created in different parts of the kingdom.

But if England was formally united, it was hardly ever politically isolated. For most of the reign of Cnut (1016–35), the kingdom was part of a Scandinavian
empire embracing Denmark and Norway. Had Cnut’s dynasty become established long-term, these Scandinavian links might have significantly shaped England’s political and cultural development, with manifestations in architecture, for example, which had more in common with Norway than with France. In the event, his line died out in 1042 and the next conqueror, William duke of Normandy, ruled kingdom and duchy together and went on to establish overlordship of Scotland and Wales. Through many vicissitudes, a political attachment to territory in France was to persist until Calais was eventually lost in 1558. Within the British Isles, Lordship of Ireland was added by Henry II in the 1170s, and although most of the country beyond what came to be known as the Pale (the area around the east coast ports) was subsequently left to its own devices, Wales and Scotland demanded more sustained attention; their bequests to the landscape include the fine series of castles built to secure Edward I’s conquest of North Wales and the fortified pele towers which arose in the vulnerable northern shires after the Scots success at Bannockburn in 1314. Eventually, Wales would provide the base from which Henry VII launched his successful bid for the throne in 1485, the prelude to his son’s Act of Union. In turn, a decisive English victory over the Scots at Flodden in 1513 would bring some peace for a generation, and a series of dynastic manoeuvres would unite the crowns of Scotland and England in the person of James VI and I in 1603.

The conduct of war and the question of how it should be paid for were issues which obliged medieval kings regularly to consult their subjects. The emergence of representative assemblies of ‘the community of England’ can be traced to a period well before
Magna Carta
in 1215, and by the late thirteenth century meetings of parliament – increasingly with members of the ‘commons’ (local communities) alongside individually summoned lords – had come to be accepted as a necessary part of the fabric of government. Edward I had the sense to use parliament constructively, encouraging the receipt of petitions from the Commons and the passing of legislation which dealt with social and economic issues. Some of this had direct relevance to the development of the landscape, such as the second Statute of Westminster in 1285, which allowed lords to erect a windmill and buildings for sheep and cattle on the common pasture, and provided for redress against those from neighbouring settlements who broke down enclosures made on the common. Parliament was to figure from hereon as an essential element in the government of England, to the point where, at the very end of our period, Henry VIII was careful to involve it in the establishment of his royal supremacy over the Church in England and in changes to the lawful succession to the throne.
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An unfolding political narrative, dominated by England’s relations with her neighbours and by successive kings’ dealings with lords and commons,
forms the background to our story. But beyond these great events, what were the underlying forces which shaped the development of the English landscape in these five and a half centuries? Three themes stand out, and we shall encounter them repeatedly in the pages which follow. One is the impact of the rise and fall in population, which imposed pressures on resources differing in intensity from one century to another. In recent decades, some historians have argued that there has been too much emphasis on population trends as drivers of change, and have seen the commercialization of society, especially from the late twelfth century, as of at least comparable importance. But the proliferation of markets, the growth of towns, the increased activity in mining and manufacturing all took place in a context in which rising population provided a crucial stimulus to supply and demand. It is true that during the late-medieval slump in population commercial activity did not collapse; in some respects, it was energized by the better living standards many people now enjoyed. This is a warning against over-emphasizing the significance of population trends to the exclusion of other factors. But the fundamental relationship between size of population and the landscape which supported it remains very important. Alongside this theme is that of the imposition of power over the landscape, power exercised by different groups of people at different times but power to determine change – or lack of change – according to the interests of those in control. This is a story which involves not only the obviously powerful – kings, bishops, barons, abbots – but also the mass of the population acting both collectively to manage their surroundings and individually in the hope of improving their families’ or their communities’ fortunes. The third theme is the importance of technological progress. Our medieval forebears often displayed a healthy scepticism towards technological advances, which for all their ingenuity could take decades, even centuries, to supplant traditional methods: spinning wheels, fulling mills, gunpowder all had their detractors, largely because their end-products were less consistently reliable than those generated by conventional means. But when and where they were eventually adopted, new technologies brought significant changes to the environment – in building, farming and industrial activity. It would of course be wrong to adopt a deterministic approach to any of these forces; essentially, they interplayed with each other to produce results which, at a local level, were unpredictable.
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But they recur time and again, and it is appropriate here to give brief consideration to each of them in turn.

There is broad – though not complete – agreement among scholars over the trends in medieval population, but considerable disagreement over what the size of that population might have been. Archaeological evidence suggests that by the seventh century the population had begun to recover from a prolonged decline in the late-Roman and immediate post-Roman
periods which had seen it fall to between 1 and 2 million by A.D. 500. Although England then suffered a visitation of bubonic plague in the 660s and again in the 680s, its impact seems to have been temporary, and freedom from plague for several centuries thereafter allowed a sustained period of population growth.
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If growth continued from hereon until the Norman Conquest – as seems apparent from the evidence of more intensive farming and settlement, without any obvious catastrophic break – there is a problem in reconciling this with the figures suggested by the first useful document, Domesday Book of 1086: for here, too, the data has been taken to point to a population total somewhere around 2 million. Either the archaeologists’ figure for 500 is too high or the historians’ figure for 1086 is too low, but it is worth pausing to reflect upon the way in which the Domesday total is achieved. The total number of recorded individuals is 268,984 in the countryside, made up of 109,230 villeins, 81,849 bordars, 13,553 freemen, and so on, to which a figure which can only be estimated for boroughs has to be added. There are a host of problems with these figures: for a start, it is impossible to define what each category meant with any precision, and we can be sure that the Domesday investigators lacked consistency in their application of terms. On a literal reading of Domesday Book, there were only two mill-keepers, ten shepherds and 23 ‘men with gardens’ in the whole of England, when in reality these people must normally have been counted in with one of the general groupings (usually as villeins).
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A more serious issue, however, is the extent of under-recording in Domesday: not only the households of those who were entered (which probably demands a multiplier of five) but members of religious houses and those who lived in certain towns (notably London) and shires (in the north) which were omitted from the survey. Above all, it seems clear that, at least in some places, only a portion of the peasantry was actually counted. This is apparent, for example, from estate surveys of Burton Abbey about 1114 and 1126, covering various manors in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, which include numerous
censarii
(rent-paying peasants) omitted altogether from the equivalent Domesday entries. All this makes Domesday Book a very shaky foundation on which to rest statements of total population, but a figure somewhat in excess of the conventional 2 million seems plausible. If the real total was at least 2.5 million, possibly nearer 3 million, it would be easier to match this up with the archaeological evidence of a steady recovery in population from the sixth century onwards.
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