The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (4 page)

W
hen the twelfth-century writer Henry of Huntingdon, in conscious imitation of the Venerable Bede, produced a monumental
History of the English People
, he began by rejoicing in the diversity of the landscape: ‘Britain … is the most blessed of islands, rich in crops and trees, with plentiful streams and woodland, delightful for its hunting-grounds of wildfowl and game, and teeming with many different kinds of land, sea and river birds’. Some of this was copied straight from Bede but it is still an interesting commentary upon the perceived productivity of the countryside, with pastoral farming and fishing singled out for special praise: ‘like Ireland it is wonderful for feeding draught animals and cattle … so rich in grazing … remarkable too for its numerous springs and rivers that abound in fish’.
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Convenient though it is to treat different forms of land use separately in the pages which follow, we do well to remember their interdependence and the fact that they were not always regarded as distinct: arable, pasture and meadow were managed together within communal farming regimes, fishing and fowling supplemented the diet of many a peasant farmer, and the privileged minority who spent their time hunting game – sometimes over farmland – relied for most of their incomes on the produce of their rural estates. An early-fourteenth century survey of Heaton Norris (Lancashire) hints at the dynamism of an agricultural economy which was prepared to put land to different uses at different times: ‘certain acres of land and plats are of arable land, some of meadow land and some of pasture, and so meadow, arable and pasture cannot be separated because some are meadow and pasture and some arable land’.
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And all who worked the land in the medieval period were aware of the risks inherent in allowing one resource to expand too far at the expense of others.

For the vast majority of the population, the success of the grain harvest was crucial. Within the ranks of the so-called peasantry of rural England there were many gradations, from substantial freemen with 40 acres or more of arable holdings who did not labour in person, made up local juries and are better described as ‘freeholders’
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to those whose unfree status tied them to their manors and to lives dominated by agricultural work for their own families’ sustenance, and (if obligations were enforced) for their lords. Outright landless slavery – the condition of just over 10% of the recorded rural population in Domesday Book – disappeared in the wake of the Norman Conquest but many in the humbler ranks of society would have shared the sentiments of the late-tenth or early-eleventh century ploughman who was obliged to ‘work so very hard’ going out ‘at dawn to drive the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plough’ assisted by a ‘boy who drives the oxen with a goad … hoarse from shouting and the cold’.
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Study of the land which they ploughed has long been dominated by a focus on great open arable fields, each typically extending to 50 hectares or more, divided into blocks called furlongs which were themselves composed of long narrow unenclosed strips. Two, three – occasionally four – of these fields were arranged around a nucleated settlement, the strips within them being dispersed among the farmers living in that settlement. There was communal regulation to control the rotation of crops between the fields, including provision for one field to be left fallow each year; livestock would also be released from the pastures at specific times to graze and manure the arable strips and meadows when their crops were not growing. In 1915 H. L. Gray coined the term ‘midland system’ to describe these arrangements, which he saw prevailing over ‘at least half the soil of England’ from County Durham through the midlands to the central southern counties, albeit with some exceptions inside this zone. An alternative estimate is that, at its maximum extent in the fourteenth century, between one-third and one-half of England’s rural population lived in places where this system broadly operated.
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In the sixteenth century this was described as ‘champion’ country, from the Latin
campus
used in medieval documents to refer to an open field. This is a preferable description of a type of landscape which prevailed far beyond the ‘midlands’ and witnessed some variation in the detailed working of the ‘system’: for example, ‘wolds’ regions with good pasture available (such as the Cotswolds themselves and the uplands of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire) typically favoured two-field open arable systems, while fertile lowland vales (characteristic of much of the south and midlands, especially the east midlands) sometimes developed three.
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However, the
overall picture painted a century ago has stood the test of time, this broad diagonal band featuring, for example, as the ‘Central Province’ in the influential
Atlas of Rural Settlement
published at the turn of the millennium and being reinforced by recent analysis of the references to ‘champion’ fields in John Leland’s
Itinerary
, compiled either side of 1540.
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To west and east of this great ‘champion’ zone lay what the
Atlas
has defined as the ‘Northern and Western’ and ‘South-Eastern Provinces’. Settlement here was more dispersed and field systems can broadly be described as embracing smaller pockets of unenclosed strips, with individuals’ holdings distributed unevenly between them; ‘closes’ (enclosed fields) were encountered more often and these were mostly held ‘in severalty’ (that is separately, or individually). This led to a more hedged, wooded landscape as well as to considerable flexibility and variability in the communal regulation of cropping and pasturage. One of the Elizabethan commentators on all this, William Harrison rector of Radwinter and vicar of Wimbish in north-west Essex, lived on what has been identified as part of the frontier separating the ‘Central’ and ‘South-Eastern’ Provinces, and was therefore ideally placed to describe ‘our soile’ as ‘being divided into champaign ground and woodland’.
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Drawing lines on maps does of course imply sharp definition when realities on the ground are blurred. There were many places inside the ‘champion’ zone which did not have great open fields and others outside it which did. In south Cambridgeshire, where the River Cam has been taken as the boundary between the ‘Central’ and ‘South-Eastern’ Provinces, medieval fields apparently conforming to the ’midland system’ have been found on both sides of the river, as have more irregular field patterns: but the ‘midland’ system does seem to have predominated to the west of the river rather than to the east, so the distinction holds good in general terms.
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What is remarkable is not that settlements in several parts of the country chose not to conform to the highly regulated communal farming regime of the ‘champion’ zone, but that – in however limited a form, and with however many enclosed fields in amongst them – long narrow open arable strips, laid out so that adjacent strips belonged to different people, were to be found across the length and breadth of England, as they were over much of continental Europe, at some point during the middle ages.

There were exceptions, such as parts of the Weald in Kent, Sussex and Surrey, in southern Essex and in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, where none of the arable seems ever to have been farmed other than in closes.
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But given the widespread distribution of some form of open field farming in strips, from Cumberland to Cornwall to Kent, as well as within the ‘champion’ zone where it came to dominate the rural landscape, there were clearly powerful incentives to adopt this methodology for arable cultivation, at least in part.
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There also seems to have been a widely held cultural expectation – rooted in
that sense of ‘community’ touched upon in the previous chapter, with notions of fairness over the distribution of land of similar quality and a guarantee of a minimum stake therein – that some portion of the arable should be worked in open strips, alongside communal grazing rights in the accompanying pasture. All this would involve an element of land-sharing, even where a fully regulated ‘system’ was never adopted.

The earliest documentary reference to open field farming is usually taken to be a statement in the late-seventh-century
Laws of Ine
, King of Wessex, which required those who had ‘common meadow or other land divided in shares’ to compensate their neighbours if their failure to maintain fences led to cattle entering to ‘eat up their common crops or grass’.
¹²
This says nothing about the circumstances in which such fields were created, but it is generally assumed that they developed as the population recovered from its post-Roman downturn and that various different processes were involved. Where there was a collective effort to clear woodland or drain marshland in order to win it for cultivation, this would tend towards a sharing out of the new resource, with the potential for expansion thereafter from the original nucleus of small open fields. From present-day field patterns, oval-shaped areas, probably the bounds of intakes from wood or marsh, are being identified in many parts of the country, often with evidence of open arable strips having been developed within them: examples range from Tunley (Lancashire) to Rashleigh (Devon) to Haslingfield (Cambridgeshire) and many more surely remain to be found.
¹³
Elsewhere, the original division of strips seems to have been in the context of an ‘infield/outfield system’, where the best arable land (the ‘infield’) was distributed among the farmers in strips and cropped every year, while the less fertile ‘outfield’ served as common pasture with portions being ploughed in rotation; all this might develop into more extensive and organized open field systems if rising population meant that the ‘outfield’ had to be brought into more frequent cultivation and – as pasture receded – the livestock had to be grazed over the fields as a whole. This is thought to have happened at some stage during the Anglo-Saxon period within – for example – the marshlands of the Severn estuary and also in settlements such as Comberton and Barton in the Bourn valley west of Cambridge.
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Alongside this, there would have been many instances where open arable fields were created through the reorganization of an already-cleared and previously cultivated landscape. Cases where open field strips appear to have respected ditches of Iron Age or Roman date – a phenomenon which has been found, for example, in parts of Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, where such ditches underlie the headlands defining the furlongs – may well illustrate this. So does the general alignment of fields to this day at Shapwick (Somerset), which can be traced back through eighteenth-century maps to the furlongs of medieval open fields and beyond them to boundaries
of Roman or even earlier origin; this certainly suggests some continuity of previous territorial divisions when blocks of strips came to be laid out, continuity broadly maintained ever since.
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It is of course possible that those plotting the new open fields merely re-used long abandoned field boundaries, but given the speed with which these can be obliterated by the regrowth of trees and shrubs this is improbable: the more likely hypothesis is that these ancient markers influenced the new arrangements because they were still functioning features in the landscape.
¹⁶

Other than the cultural factors to which reference has already been made, one reason for ploughing in long narrow strips must have been the convenience of having plough teams tracking back and forth along roughly parallel lines. There is evidence from parts of Northamptonshire, Yorkshire and the silt fens of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire that early open strips were up to – sometimes in excess of – a kilometre in length, a circumstance which suggests replanning of the landscape on a grand scale.
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But this was not the case everywhere and, in any event, these very long strips were normally subdivided later, so that a length of about 200 metres (or about 220 yards, our modern furlong) came to be widely adopted as a reasonable stretch for the teams to undertake before resting and turning around. Strips might be delineated one from another by stones or stakes at the ends or by nothing more than furrows or narrow balks of grass; the absence of more prominent barriers along and between them economised on land use and minimised the risk of obstruction and damage to the plough and its team. The practice of co-aration (whereby a number of peasant farmers each contributed one or more beasts to the plough team) encouraged the notion that working a field was an enterprise shared by all who had a stake in it, whether or not the livestock also pastured together in the arable fields when crops were not growing. Narrow strips also tended to result from the subdivision of holdings – whether through sales, leases, partible inheritance (where there was more than one heir, as was the widespread custom in East Anglia and the south east)
¹⁸
or the already-mentioned commitment to sharing out what had been cleared for cultivation by collective effort. None of this made the creation of open fields inevitable, but a combination of circumstances made them a reasonable answer to the question of how to arrange at least some of a community’s stock of arable land: an answer which seems to have been reached over a remarkably large area of the country, notwithstanding differences of climate, soils and terrain, and whatever the local balance was between arable and other forms of land use, on the one hand, and between communal and individual farming on the other.

From these origins, open field farming developed in different ways in different places. Within the ‘Central Province’, the highly regulated communal farming regime we know as the ‘midland system’ became widespread
– fanning outwards, it has been argued, from an original heartland of ‘the ‘Cotswold Scarps and Vales, the Inner Midlands, the east Midlands and the Trent Valley’ during the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. Elsewhere, arable strips continued to be worked alongside enclosed fields, their farmers being only partially dependent upon a communal regime. Indeed, four main types of open field operation apart from the ‘midland system’ have been identified, with subtle sub-classes within them, ranging from those where strips were cropped and grazed separately – rather like a modern block of allotments – but with shared access to pasture beyond the designated arable area, as happened in the Lincolnshire Fens, to those in which there was communal regulation of cropping and grazing but in a context of many small open fields intermixed with closes.
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