The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (17 page)

The broad chronology of moat construction suggests that, after a slow start around the middle of the twelfth century, the ‘peak period’ ran from 1200 to 1325, when manorial incomes were at their most buoyant and many new settlements were being established. Despite their proliferation in areas of dispersed settlement, environmental factors should not be omitted from any analysis of their distribution: whatever the national picture, at a local level they are scarcely found wherever the subsoil is freely draining, or where there are outcrops of chalk, limestone, sand or gravel. Rather, they are associated with sites, especially on clay land, where the water table could readily be reached by digging and the soil would compact into a firm broad and deep ditch; while not every moat was ‘wet’, within a given locality the wetter spots seem deliberately to have been sought out. Moats facilitated drainage of the house platform within, offered some protection against casual violence and theft, and were a source of water both for keeping fish and for extinguishing fires. Their ultimate purpose, however, was almost certainly that of status symbol: an expression at the level of manorial lord or substantial freeholder of the same desire to impress which motivated the designers of castles (
Figure 12
).
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Figure 12: Weeting Church and Manor House (Norfolk)
. The moat in the foreground was added in the mid-thirteenth century to a fortified manor house of about 1180. The round west tower of the adjacent parish church is characteristic of early Norfolk churches, although this example was rebuilt in the 1860s.

As for the configuration of the tofts and crofts associated with the mass of the rural population, we can take as our starting-point a regional analysis first published in 1988, on the basis of excavations conducted up to that time. This provides a framework which is still useful, even though it bears little resemblance to the zones of dispersion and nucleation represented by the Provinces of the
Atlas of Rural Settlement
. ‘Region 1’, embracing the south-west peninsula, is wholly within the ‘Northern and Western Province’ of mainly dispersed settlement and its eastern boundary exactly follows that with the ‘Central Province’ as shown in the
Atlas
, but the other three regions cut across the Provincial boundaries. The clear evidence of regional characteristics makes it likely that ideas on the arrangement of these plots spread by emulation, by copying from other examples in the neighbourhood, much as seems to have happened with the overall layouts of settlements and field systems: but if so, a different sequence was followed, except possibly in the distinctive context of the south west.

Accordingly, we find in ‘Region 1’ that the norm was for the settlement area as a whole to be walled off, partly to prevent uncontrolled access by animals, and that within this enclosure there was no obvious plan to the positioning of individual houses. Sometimes they lacked any property
boundaries of their own (as at Okehampton, Devon), sometimes they had their own irregularly shaped walled plots (as at Hound Tor), though without the dual arrangement of both toft and croft. ‘Region 2’, however, straddling the ‘Central’ and ‘South Eastern’ Provinces of southern England and the south midlands, was characterized by generally well-defined rectilinear tofts and crofts associated with each house, though with occasional exceptions such as Bullock Down, a short-lived hamlet on the Sussex Downs where (as in parts of the south west) there was no separation of the two. In the north and north west of England, ‘Region 3’, distinct rectilinear tofts and crofts for each house were again encountered (though merged as one at a Northumberland site, West Hartburn), while in ‘Region 4’, the east midlands and northern part of East Anglia grouped around the Wash, it was usual for houses to occupy ‘squarish’ plots which seem to have been regarded as toft and croft combined. When this model was first suggested, the four ‘Regions’ did not cover the whole of England, but there have been refinements since: recent work on dispersed farmsteads on Denge Marsh (part of Romney Marshes), for example, has shown them to lie within small tofts without accompanying crofts, a conclusion which suggests that this should be regarded as a southern extension of ‘Region 4’.
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Where there were crofts as well as tofts, they seem to have served either as paddocks, gardens or (occasionally) as additional ploughed areas, as was apparently the case at Holworth (Devon), where there was a ramp in one corner of each croft seemingly giving access to the open fields. Whatever their precise role, they gave the peasant householder some independence from the communal farming regime, to grow what he chose or to enclose livestock which, for whatever reason, were best kept away from the common pastures. Where there were no boundaries delineating a separate croft, there might still be some cultivation or the grazing of penned or tethered livestock within the undivided enclosure, but the toft’s principal function was always as a base for the house and ancillary buildings of an individual family. There is good archaeological evidence that tofts were associated with fierce independence and a desire for privacy: an antidote to the communal farming arrangements which, especially in ‘champion’ country, affected so much of peasant life. Repeatedly, the boundaries between tofts, and those which separated them from their street, were prominent statements: deep ditches (at Grenstein, Norfolk, and Riplingham, Yorkshire), banks topped by hedges (Grenstein again), stone walls (at Thrislington, County Durham), timber palisades (at Hangleton, Sussex). Within them, evidence has been found of cobbled pavements which served as hard standing work surfaces (as at Anstey, Leicestershire), of outdoor ovens or kilns for drying crops or malting barley (as at Hound Tor on Dartmoor, West Hartburn in County Durham, Gomeldon in Wiltshire and Faxton in Northamptonshire), of digging for building
materials (as at Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, Caldecote in Hertfordshire, and the aforementioned Grenstein and Bullock Down), of private water supplies from pits (for example at Goltho and Riseholme in Lincolnshire, Barton Blount in Derbyshire and Wroughton Copse in Wiltshire) and of the burial of infants (as at Thrislington, Gomeldon and Upton, Gloucestershire).
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The widespread occurrence of these features, across all regions and within hamlets as well as villages, is striking.

There is also a broad consistency across the country, or at least some common themes, in the design of the housing which occupied these plots. For some three centuries beginning about 1200, a plan based on four elements was remarkably widespread among families all over England, from the ranks of the middling peasantry to those of gentry lords of the manor. This plan was based upon a house being wholly or partly one-storey and one room deep. It embraced, first, a central space open to the roof with hearth in the middle; second, a separate private area at one end of the building; third, a cross passage accessed from at least one but usually two opposing doorways located at the far end of the central space from the private area; and, fourth, another separate area (often with a ‘service’ function such as food preparation or storage) at the end of the building beyond this cross passage. Such matters as the size of the structure (including elaboration at one or both ends, to accommodate extra rooms vertically or horizontally), the quality of materials and construction, and the nature of any decoration, served to differentiate the status of those who dwelt in such houses, and as we have seen manorial lords and those who aspired to copy them had a liking for putting moats around their houses by the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. But the basic plan itself can be found time and again, to the point where it is sometimes difficult to assign a status to excavated examples. Thus, at Wintringham (Huntingdonshire), a small house dated to around 1200, aligned north-south, had a central space with hearth in the middle, opposed doorways creating a passage between them, and a screened-off area beyond this passage at the southern end. By the mid-thirteenth century the central space (again with hearth in the middle) had been realigned west-east, this time with what can clearly be interpreted as separate service rooms to the west but with the passage between two doorways at the other end of the building. By about 1300 another, larger, house had been built, this time north-south, with the service rooms to the north, cross passage between two doorways adjacent to them, a screened-off central space with hearth in the middle, and then a separate private area at the southern end. This last version had a moat around it and was probably a manor house, but it would be unsafe to assume that the earlier structures had been. While, for convenience, it is helpful to discuss manor houses separately from the dwellings of the masses in the paragraphs which follow, this essential conformity of plan – not ubiquitous
among peasant houses but frequently encountered – should always be borne in mind.
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For over 800 years until the close of the middle ages, a lord (or his steward or other representative) exercised authority and social control by using the central space within his house – the
aula
or hall – as a public area for eating, entertaining, doing business and sitting in judgement. For the Venerable Bede in the early eighth century, the hall was where the lord would sit at dinner with his counsellors, while a ‘comforting fire’ blazed in the midst. In the thirteenth century, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, advised in his
Rules for Household and Estate Management
that the lord (or in this case the lady) should ‘make your own household to sit in the hall as much as you may … and sit you ever in the middle of the high board that your visage and cheer be showed to all men … eat you in the hall afore your many, for that shall be to your profit and worship’. By the second half of the fourteenth century, William Langland was deploring a tendency for some lords to ‘abandon the main hall which was made for men to eat their meals in’, but his comment was balanced by another which suggested that communal eating with large households remained popular.
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Even where the lord was an absentee, there was an obligation on his tenants or retainers to guard the hall – as recorded on the estates of Gloucester Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral either side of the year 1200 – since it still served as an administrative centre.
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It is therefore quite wrong to envisage medieval manor houses as isolated features divorced from their surroundings, even if this is sometimes how they appear today: whether as a permanent residence or as the base for the lord’s local administration, they were intimately associated with the neigh-bouring settlement from which the lord drew an income. At Wharram Percy, for example, a stone manor house dated on both documentary and archaeo-logical grounds to the 1180s was built at the north end of the row of peasant house-plots laid out at that time on a plateau above the parish church, in a planned extension to the village west of its earlier focus around the church, stream and mill. But in the thirteenth century there was further expansion of the village northwards, over a furlong taken out of the open fields, and a new, larger manor house was erected, again at the northern end of this new row of peasant dwellings; the previous manor house was replaced by a succession of peasant houses.
⁶⁶
The ‘Whittlewood project’ located the sites of several medieval manor houses in the vicinity of churches, for example at Wick Dive at the northern end of the settlement and at neighbouring Wick Damon at the southern end, while also suggesting that in some cases earlier peasant houses had been demolished to make way for them.
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There is evidence both from excavation and from standing remains that eleventh- and twelfth-century manor houses were not arranged according to the standard plan outlined above, the hall being treated instead as a discrete,
freestanding building within a complex of domestic and service structures: the manor house was a series of rooms, but they were not under the same roof. At Goltho (Lincolnshire), successive tenth- and eleventh-century halls within the manorial complex were detached from other buildings such as the bower, kitchen and sheds. Surviving stone halls of late-eleventh or twelfth-century date, like Westminster Hall and Minster Court (Kent) – although hardly typical as royal building and monastic grange respectively – support the conclusion that these early halls were usually separated from other domestic structures, and examples of such freestanding structures can be found as late as the beginning of the fourteenth century, the manor house at Wasperton (Warwickshire) being a case in point.
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By then, however, the standardized plan for manorial halls and their ancillary rooms had emerged. The central hall was open to the roof with hearth in the middle, between separately defined ‘solar’ and ‘service’ ends. The solar end was positioned behind the lord’s high table and served as private chambers for his family and privileged guests. The service end typically comprised separate rooms for buttery and pantry, supplied from a kitchen beyond; this was often detached because of the risk of fire. Between the service end and the hall was a cross passage (also known as a screens passage) running between two opposing doorways which gave access to the hall; this passage was separated from the hall by a partition, which might be a permanent structure but could be no more than a movable screen.