The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (15 page)

Figure 10: Barnack Quarries (Cambridgeshire)
. Now a nature reserve, the ‘hills and holes’ are the product of the Jurassic limestone quarries adjacent to the village, worked from Roman times until the early sixteenth century. The durable stone was prized for high-status buildings, including Barnack’s own parish church with its late-Saxon tower.

As for mining, the landscapes of Cornwall, Devon, the Peak District, the north Pennines and elsewhere are enriched through the pits, trenches and spoil heaps generated by extraction, and through the slag heaps produced by subsequent smelting.
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However – notwithstanding the 3,000 men employed in the Penwith-Kerrier area of west Cornwall for much of the fifteenth century – the mining industry mostly involved low numbers at any one location, and once the raw material could no longer readily be extracted from the surface it made sense to try somewhere else in the vicinity. This meant that miners did not put down permanent roots next to anything as ephemeral as a mine: they generally walked between their home settlements and their movable places of work, a daily commute by foot of perhaps a few kilometres each way. The earliest record of a coalminer (‘carbonarius’) in England, in the
Boldon Book
(a survey of the Bishop of Durham’s estates) of 1183, places him at Escomb (County Durham), which to judge by its fine Saxon church had been a settlement since the seventh century; he had his own house-plot with four acres (1.6 hectares) of land and was expected to find coal as fuel for ironworking. As this form of mining spread, first through the north east during the thirteenth century and over most of England’s known coalfields thereafter, the raw material proved to be so readily accessible that there was no need to abandon familiar dwellings and fields. There might, however, be temporary shelters at the mines. ‘At dinner tyme … they syt downe together beside theire tynwork in a little lodge made up with turves covered with straw’ wrote Thomas Beare, a commentator on the south-west tin industry, in 1586; ‘many little howses … shrowd them in neere the worckes’ recorded the topographer and surveyor for the Duchy of Cornwall, John Norden, in 1610. Traces of these shelters, roughly 5 metres by 3 metres with drystone or turf walls and often some evidence of a fireplace, have been found in the south west on Dartmoor and Foweymore and while not necessarily medieval can be taken as representative of a longstanding tradition.
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A variation on this theme – temporary dwellings though in this case providing sleeping accommodation – were the
shiels
, or summer lodgings, of lead miners on Alston moor, which suggest that mining was being combined with the tending of livestock in their summer pastures. Small complexes of buildings also accompanied forges and furnaces for the working of iron, where constant supervision was required. Thus, in 1240 William of Lancaster gave to the Augustinian priory of Conishead ‘one acre of land next to the stream … for a forge with a yard and for building other houses there, necessary to it’; in 1377 William son of Elias of Bramley was granted rights to take loppings from trees in the wood at Calverley (Yorkshire) ‘for baking and brewing for his servants at the forge and for his supervisors there’. Out of all this, very little seems to have emerged as new permanent settlement, although the present-day hamlet of Pounsley near Framfield (in the Sussex Weald), where there was a ‘bloomery’ furnace for the smelting of iron ore by the 1540s, may have originated in this way.
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These references to temporary settlements, and even to one which may have developed from temporary to permanent, are ample demonstration that medieval England was not lacking in ‘industrial settlements’. The cloth industry certainly had them. What at the beginning of our period was largely a female domestic craft developed into a complex series of processes, from
the initial grading, washing and beating of wool, through carding or combing, spinning into yarn and weaving, and then on to the fulling of cloth (to scour and thicken it), tentering (drying and stretching), teasing (raising the nap), shearing (to remove raised fibres) and finally – if required – dyeing. Much of this became specialist skilled work, carried out by full-time urban or part-time rural wage-earners under the co-ordination of entrepreneurs, who employed the workers, supplied them both with raw material and with equipment and invested in new technology; those responsible for the later stages, such as fullers and dyers, tended to emerge in this role.
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For spinning, hand-driven spinning wheels, because they produced an inferior yarn and demanded full-time attention, only slowly replaced the traditional distaff and spindle – the
Luttrell Psalter
of the 1340s illustrates both methods – but for weaving there was a clear advance with the introduction of the horizontal treadle loom by the thirteenth century, producing a tighter weave in one-third of the time taken by the previous upright loom.
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Mechanization was introduced to fulling in the twelfth century and to teasing in the fifteenth, with waterwheels providing the power in both cases. While the significance of these developments in stimulating rural industrial activity has been exaggerated, it remains true that they were especially to be found in the countryside, with several towns continuing to favour conventional ‘walking’ (treading the cloth by foot) as a method of fulling: Norwich did not acquire its first mill for the purpose until 1429.
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A dedicated fulling mill in use in the fifteenth century has been identified from excavation at Beaulieu Abbey (Hampshire), with arched drains serving deep stone-built processing tanks, but these technological advances have usually left little obvious trace today, not least because fulling mills and gig mills (for teasing) cannot readily be distinguished from corn mills on the basis of surviving remains and many performed different functions in different periods.
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It is the settlements which hosted the cloth industry which are its principal legacy in the landscape.

For much of the medieval period, Flanders – though heavily reliant on the import of wool from England – led the way in European cloth production, despite the efforts of English manufacturers during the thirteenth century to cut costs by turning increasingly to a rural workforce so as to bypass the collective power of urban gilds. However, after 1300 the Flanders cloth industry went into decline, hit by war, civil unrest and high export duties imposed on English wool. Cloth manufacture within England prospered in response, stimulated in part by the improved living standards following the Black Death which – in the eyes of scandalized contemporary observers – saw peasants dressing far better and more fashionably than was right and proper.
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Economic fortunes fluctuated thereafter, but by the 1430s the value of cloth exports had outstripped that of wool and England had become indisputably the major European cloth producer. Both urban and rural communities
benefited from this revival, though with greater geographical concentration than hitherto: in the countryside it was regions such as the West Riding of Yorkshire, Suffolk, Kent and the Cotswolds, favoured either by abundant local wool supplies or by easy access to the London market, which became especially important. And it is in some of the villages associated with cloth-making in this late-medieval period that we find the industry’s lasting impact. Analysis of relative wealth in different parts of the country on the basis of tax assessments has shown cloth-producing shires such as Suffolk, Somerset and Wiltshire, middle-ranking at the beginning of the fourteenth century as the last two were in the late twelfth century as well, to have been in the ‘top ten’ by the early Tudor period.
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Economic growth on this scale did not necessarily lead to a significant increase in population in these places, but it was certainly reflected in the quality of building.

Minchinhampton (Gloucestershire), for example, was already by 1200 developing as a cloth-making centre based in new dispersed settlement along the Stroud valley, below and apart from the original village nucleus where the church and manor house remained. There were at that time four fulling mills beside the river and during the following century several manorial tenants are recorded as engaged in fulling and in digging fuller’s earth; in addition, any weaver living by his craft and in need of a home was allowed to enclose part of the common. By the late fifteenth century the many fulling mills and dye works located down in the valley were responsible for the finishing of internationally renowned ‘Stroudwater’ cloths, the growth of their associated hamlets fully compensating for the desertion of some 50 houses in the old village centre above. Similarly, Castle Combe (Wiltshire) had 31 messuages (houses for those with a stake in the open fields) and 20 cottages (for wage-earners, especially those engaged in cloth-making), along with three corn mills and a fulling mill, according to a manorial survey of 1340: the crafts-men’s cottages were in ‘Nether Combe’ close to the stream which drove these mills, while the peasant farmers’ messuages were in ‘Over Combe’ adjacent to the open fields on a nearby hill, a clear sign that the cloth industry was having a significant impact on the shape of the settlement. By 1447, despite the dramatic fall in population on a national scale over the preceding hundred years, there were still 28 messuages, 19 cottages, one gig mill and three fulling mills; by 1507, 50 houses and two fulling mills; by 1547, 51 with four mills. In the 1450s we learn that the lord Sir John Fastolf had made substantial purchases of cloth annually from the village craftsmen, mainly as livery for his retinue of soldiers in France, and so had facilitated ‘the common wealth of the said town and of the new buildings raised in it’, among them a new church tower and ‘50 houses newly rebuilt’, forerunners of the Cotswold stone houses which still dominate the village today. Far from suffering decline and depopulation, this was a village which was attracting incomers and
sufficiently thriving for the lord to engage in major improvement to its housing stock. A comparable story could be told of Kersey (Suffolk), a village laid out on opposite sides of a valley between the parish church at the southern end and the Augustinian priory at the northern, with a stream crossing the street which links them. Here the cloth industry does not seem to have made any obvious impression on the overall layout, although it certainly enhanced the importance of the watercourse, which can be seen to this day as clear and shallow, ideal for the cleansing of the wool and cloth at various stages of production. The making of a distinctive light and narrow cloth which took its name from the village undoubtedly sustained Kersey in the late middle ages, helping to preserve the plan and contributing to the wealth reflected in the rebuilding of many of the half-timbered houses which survive (
Figure 11
).
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Figure 11: Kersey (Suffolk)
. Essentially a single-street settlement laid out across a valley, with a church at one end and a stream as a focus for industrial activity, Kersey had a market from 1252 and by the fifteenth century was prospering from the production of the distinctive hard-wearing cloths which bore its name.

These three places all had a farming element within their local economy, but they all depended for their late-medieval prosperity not on agriculture but on cloth manufacture. They remind us that, even if they did not owe their original existence to industry, they ought really to be regarded by the late middle ages as ‘industrial villages’. It was cloth for which they were known far afield and cloth which seems to have provided employment, including what we must presume to have been plenty of full-time employment, to a
substantial portion of the population. At Minchinhampton with its hamlets away from the parent village, and at Castle Combe with its separate cloth-making quarter, the industry gave a new shape to the pattern of settlement and at all three there was a superior quality to much of the late-medieval house building. If we turn to other industries, we can see a number of communities which seem to have had a similar specialist focus. In Furness, a place called Orgrave (ore-diggings) appears in Domesday Book as an outlier of Earl Tostig’s estate based on ‘Hougun’ (probably to be identified as Haume near Dalton-in-Furness); this subsequently passed to the monks of Furness Abbey, whose Coucher Book refers to the surface working of iron by ditch and trench. On a larger scale, the villages of Danby (Yorkshire), Horsham (Sussex) and St Briavels (Gloucestershire), while not owing their origins to the iron industry, appear on both documentary and archaeological evidence to have been major centres of production in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, to the point where their viability, and the livelihood of their inhabitants, depended far more on industry than on agriculture. At Danby, medieval slag heaps (dated by pottery sherds) survive as indicators of the extensive ironworking enterprises in upper Eskdale undertaken both by the canons of Guisborough and by lay lords such as the de Brus and Latimer families. Both Horsham and St Briavels were major suppliers of arrows to the king’s armies and in each case the centre of activity has been identified: at Horsham a dedicated area just to the east of the settlement, at St Briavels just over a kilometre south-south-west of the castle on a sloping site with a source of running water.
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