The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (8 page)

Where meadows were held in common, stakeholders were assigned ‘doles’ or shares from which to take their hay, but had to complete their mowing before the date designated for the animals to be allowed in to graze in common; apart from the Shocklach example cited above, the North Meadow at Cricklade (Wiltshire) is a good surviving illustration of such a meadow divided into doles. From elsewhere in Oxfordshire, at Shifford, comes evidence of the distribution of such doles: about 1360, a meadow called Twelve Acres was divided into 12 shares, the lord having in one year the first, third, fifth, seventh, ninth and eleventh shares while two tenants held the remainder, with the distribution alternating from one year to the next. Communal access to meadow was certainly found even in areas where arable farming was not practised in common; at Rivenhall (Essex), where the norm was for small enclosed fields to be worked independently, there is map evidence from 1716 of meadows along the River Blackwater divided into strips.
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With the growth in population in the centuries following the Norman Conquest, more land was needed to feed both people and livestock, and meadow was no exception: it has been calculated that some 4% of the surface of England was managed as meadow by the mid-thirteenth century, compared to about 1.2% according to the figures in Domesday Book.
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As early as William the Conqueror’s reign, his own religious foundation, Battle Abbey, was having to purchase some 12 hectares of meadow 8 kilometres away at Bodiam (Sussex) because, as its chronicle put it, ‘the area around the church was wholly dry and well-watered meadows were scarce’.
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This sort of arrangement, for both meadow and pasture, became ever more frequent. Within the heavily arable county of Northamptonshire, for example, a survey of 1290 informs us that Hemington (west of Peterborough) was having to supplement its limited supply of meadow by accessing that in four other places nearer the River Nene, at Barnwell, Southwick, Warmington and Yarwell. Peterborough Abbey’s Borough Fen, to the north of the town, supplied extensive common pasture each summer to the people of the entire hundred and to the abbey’s tenants elsewhere; in 1310, for instance, there were 32 cows from Kettering grazing there.
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An appreciation of the value of pasture and meadow as scarce resources often led to dispute if attempts were made to privatize what was held in common. Henry II’s Assize of
Novel Disseisin
of the 1160s, which gave freemen deprived of their holdings redress in the royal courts even against their lords, was interpreted from the outset
as protecting rights of access to common pasture, and it was accepted that hedges or banks enclosing old-established commons could lawfully be demolished without resort to the law courts provided that this was done without delay. Thirteenth-century legislation, in the form of the Provisions of Merton (1235) and second Statute of Westminster (1285), removed any absolute prohibition on lords enclosing pastures, but permitted it only if free tenants and neighbours were left with sufficient to meet their common entitlements.
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It was the abundance of rough pasture to be found in the moorlands that enabled them to make a significant contribution to the country’s agricultural economy, despite their reputation in popular culture as marginal ‘wastes’ fraught with danger for those who ventured into them.
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For much of the middle ages moorlands were largely controlled by the crown or other great landholders as reserved hunting areas (the royal ‘forests’ or private ‘chases’ to which we shall turn later) but provision was also made for a limited amount of settlement and livestock grazing, especially for the benefit of lower-lying villages or hamlets elsewhere on their estates. For example, the forest administration of Dartmoor, which passed from the crown to the Earls (later Dukes) of Cornwall in the thirteenth century, was less concerned with hunting (there was better sport elsewhere) than with regulating and levying charges for communal grazing; in 1403–4 the Duchy derived an income of £66 from the 6,400 cattle, 95 horses and indeterminate number of sheep, mostly from parishes away from the moor, formally permitted to graze there. In the Vale of Pickering, a distinctive pattern of long narrow parishes stretching up to the pastures in the North York Moors from the villages below strongly suggests activity deliberately planned from the time the settlements were established.
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Meanwhile in Cumberland, great estates were arranged so as to combine upland portions which the lords kept for themselves (‘in demesne’) and lowland portions where manors were sub-let to free tenants. Furness Abbey’s estate, for example, was divided into lower-lying ‘Plain Furness’ leased to local manorial lords and the upland ‘Furness Fells’, managed for the monks largely as a sheep ranch; the abbey had a licence for the export of wool by 1230. Other Cumberland baronies within Copeland, where there was a similar contrast between upland and lowland tenurial arrangements, have yielded evidence of summer pasturages (shielings) in the lords’ moorland fells, many established in the thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries. The footings of rectangular stone huts, and place names derived from the Scandinavian word
skali
for such a temporary hut – itself the origin of the word ‘shieling’ – are legacies of this activity, the two coming together in the present-day landscape at places such as Scale Close, Borrowdale and Scales, Gosforth.
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Commercial vaccaries – specialized cattle farms – also appeared on the moors and were widespread by the early fourteenth century. Fountains,
Furness and Calder Abbeys all had them in Cumberland by this time, as did the Countess of Aumale, whose vaccary at Gatesgarth, supporting 40 milk cows and managed for her as a demesne farm from 1267 (at latest) till her death in 1293, is probably associated with the huge enclosure of Gatesgarth Side east of Buttermere, twice the size of the lake below and now marked by a drystone wall. Vaccaries of similar date have been identified – to name but a few examples – in Wyresdale and Blackburnshire forests (Lancashire), around Barnard Castle (County Durham) and in upper Calderdale (Yorkshire).
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Beyond these, we have the example of Edward the Black Prince, who established a cattle enterprise intended mainly for the commercial production of plough beasts on his demesne manor of Macclesfield (Cheshire) in 1354. Nine years later the herd was at its maximum size (707 head of cattle) before declining to the eventual termination of the project in 1376, the year of the prince’s death. The probable locations of his three vaccaries have been identified in the landscape today, at Macclesfield park to the west of the town, at Harrop in Rainow township to its north-east and at Midgley in Wildboarclough on the Cheshire-Staffordshire border. Alongside the surviving series of annual accounts, these stand as evidence that on the edge of the Peak District in what at first sight might appear to be an inhospitable tract of countryside, a profit could be made even in the decades immediately following the Black Death.
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In the expansionist era of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, there was certainly a good deal of colonization of moorlands to create new settlements, necessarily with some arable land as well as pasture. On Dartmoor, for example, a new hamlet for five peasants ‘in the waste of the king’ at Dunnabridge can be dated by its appearance in a manorial account of 1306 when there had been no reference to it two years earlier.
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More remarkable is the fact that such colonization continued into the late middle ages, deliberately encouraged by lords keen to find an alternative use for the land. Former monastic granges in Yorkshire, bases for substantial sheep and cattle grazing concerns in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, were being leased to peasant settlers by the fourteenth, under the combined pressures caused by indiscipline among the lay brothers who staffed them, difficulties in recruiting these lay brothers as population fell, and the insecurity of the northern border. Thus, the abbey history of Fountains records the permission given by the Cistercian Order in 1363 to ‘found new vills in place of the ruined granges at Aldburgh, Sleningford, Sutton, Cowton, Cayton, Bramley, Bradley, Kilnsey and Thorpe’ so that ‘demesne lands previously maintained by the abbey at these places should henceforth be let out to laymen’ for annual rents.
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Lay lords followed suit. In the forest of Sowerbyshire (Wakefield, Yorkshire), the Duke of York abandoned his deer park at Erringden and leased it to eight tenants as farms between 1449 and 1451. In Cumberland, what had at the beginning
of the fourteenth century been four demesne vaccaries at Wasdalehead in Copeland forest had become 19 tenant farms by 1547.
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There were certainly compensations for those prepared to take up these leases, beyond whatever advantageous terms they were offered, since the moors offered distinctive plant material which could be put to good use: peat (as an alternative fuel to woodland which was normally in short supply), bracken (for thatch, bedding for cattle and – if burnt to ash – for the making of soap) and heather (for brooms, thatch, fuel and baskets).

An abundance of pasture, meadow and various other resources was also a feature of marshlands and fenlands – though here with plenty of arable as well. In marshlands, located beside the sea from which they were protected by man-made embankments, peasants engaged in salt-panning, fowling and fishing, but provided that farmland was properly drained they also enjoyed the benefit of rich clay and silt soils. Accordingly, in Lincolnshire in 1332, the tax assessments for the marshland wapentakes (districts) of Holland far exceeded those in other parts of the shire, while the highest rural assessments in Norfolk two years later were in the western marshland portion of Freebridge Hundred, in places such as Terrington, Tilney and Walsoken.
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It is no coincidence, therefore, that both here around the Wash and also in the Romney marshes of Kent there was intensive settlement and extensive arable cultivation. Around the Wash this was largely in the form of open fields, with long strips of up to 1.5 kilometres extending into reclaimed land, bounded by drainage dykes. In Romney, the reclaimed arable fields took the form of small irregular closes indicative of individual rather than communal enterprise: oats (especially), wheat, barley, peas, beans and vetch are all known to have been grown here by the early fourteenth century. By contrast, areas such as Halvergate (Norfolk) and marshlands along the coasts of Suffolk, Essex and Sussex were characterized by extensive pastures, especially for sheep. Much of this was commercial demesne farming for the profit of lords such as the Earl of Norfolk and the Abbot of St Benet’s, Holme, both of whom had flocks of over 1,000 sheep grazing on Halvergate in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, although it sometimes represented common pasture detached from the inland parishes which desperately needed this additional resource. After the Black Death, even those marshlands noted for arable farming became increasingly important as sheep pastures, so taking on the character they continue to have except where arable has returned in recent decades.
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Fenlands could also offer a good living to their inhabitants. Fens were and are distinguished from marshes by being inland, waterlogged, low-lying areas of peat soils; in medieval times settlement was confined to drier ‘islands’ within them. However, since the peat lacked the acidity found in a ‘peat-bog’, there was again the potential for drainage to yield fertile soil suitable for
both arable land and pasture, and there is plenty of evidence of reclamation to create additional holdings: the Bishop of Ely, for example, had 60 ‘new’ tenants on his manor of Littleport, 13 ‘new’ tenants at Downham and a further 111 ‘new’ tenants at Doddington (all in Cambridgeshire) recorded in 1251.
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Seasonal flooding, so that a distinction was drawn between ‘winter ground’ which could be farmed all year and ‘summer ground’ which could not, was accepted by lords and peasants alike in their management of the fens: such flooding, though potentially disastrous for the corn harvest, was of some benefit to pasture and especially to meadow, and this made pastoral farming in fenlands particularly important. Crowland Abbey, for example, had considerable demesne sheep flocks in and around Cottenham (Cambridgeshire) until the early fourteenth century and one of the settlements involved, Landbeach, appears to have been originally developed as a sheep ranch where cultivation could also be undertaken if neighbouring parishes’ fields were flooded. Cattle were also abundant in the fens, some being brought in from neighbouring areas to be fattened for the market.
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Like their marshland cousins, medieval fenland families could supplement an income from agriculture with fishing and fowling; they also had access to peat as a fuel, to wood, reeds and sedge both as building materials and as fuel, to hemp and flax as fibres, to woad as a dye, and to the opium poppy to relieve the notorious ‘fen ague’, although it was doubtless put to other use as well. The twelfth-century
Liber Eliensis
, a history of his community by a monk of Ely, records the netting at sluices of eels, water wolves (
lupi aquatici
), pickerels (pike), perch, roach, burbots, lampreys and – as hearsay – sturgeon, along with the taking of geese, coots, dabchicks, watercrows, herons and ducks using nets and snares. Other sources add bustards, swans, cranes and bitterns. There was considerable profit for manorial lords from all this – the Cambridgeshire folios of Domesday Book, for example, record 27,150 eels per annum rendered from the manor of Doddington, 24,000 from Stuntney and 17,000 from Littleport – but it seems clear that the peasantry also enjoyed common rights to these creatures. On Crowland’s manor of Cottenham in 1391 seven men, including one from neighbouring Histon, were accused at the manorial court of fishing when they did not have common right to do so: the implication being that others did enjoy these rights.
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Similarly, trouble in manorial courts over fowling seems to have concerned abuse of the common right, not the right itself, as in a case at Waterbeach in 1522, where an order was made that wild fowl should not be sold outside the manor without first being offered to the lord. It was access to such resources – along with the inherent fertility of the soil – that enabled some peasant populations to survive on very small arable holdings, notwithstanding the systematic expansion of the arable area through reclamation which characterized the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the 1279 Hundred Rolls show 91% of the peasantry
in Waterbeach with less than two hectares of arable, well below what would have been regarded as subsistence level in the midlands.
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