The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (20 page)

Contemporary commentators deserve credit for raising the subject but they were attacking the symptoms not the cause. The population downturn had profound effects upon labour supply and the demand for land and goods
– all impacting upon the course of wages, rents, prices and the remnants of unfree status – and it inevitably affected settlements as well, with a tendency for peasants to leave less-favoured locations in search of easier terms and conditions elsewhere. This seems to be the principal reason why smaller settlements were most vulnerable to late-medieval desertion: they had less of a cushion against loss of population to begin with. It would not take much death and departure to wipe out a hamlet of (say) four families in total and even larger communities could soon reach a point where there was no longer a ‘critical mass’ to sustain farming and other collective activities. In response, some peasant families moved elsewhere, others stayed on and turned to alternative, more individualistic, less labour-intensive types of farming, such as sheep and cattle grazing: an option which might also be available to their lords. It was the latter who were vilified by the commentators, but enterprising freeholders and peasants were also keen to accumulate land, enclose it and convert it to pasture. For example, Compton Verney, listed by Rous among the formerly populous villages from which the inhabitants had been driven out, is known in 1407 to have had several smallholdings of pasture of varying sizes, in the hands of about 20 households, at least some of which was probably composed of abandoned open field strips.
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In some places, lords did their best to keep the settlements on their estates alive: it was peasant behaviour which killed them off. A good case in point was Chapel Ascote (Warwickshire), where the ladies of the manor, the nuns of Nuneaton Priory, far from seeking to destroy the settlement, kept ordering their tenants to keep their buildings in good repair and fining them if they did not; but despite this effort, evidenced in manorial court rolls for much of the fifteenth century, they were fighting a losing battle. The disappearance (for whatever reason) of the last ale-selling brewer in 1451 may have been both a factor in, and a consequence of, the terminal decline of the Chapel Ascote community, and it illustrates the critical breakdown in services which might lead to the demise of a settlement. No smith, no wheelwright, no miller: why stay when there was a larger settlement with vacant holdings a few kilometres away, which had access to them all? In similar vein, attention has recently been drawn to the effects of low morale and anti-social behaviour among peasant communities when settlements were in decay and there were not enough people left to sustain normal life: at Barcheston (Warwickshire), for example, another place to lose its last brewer in the middle of the fifteenth century, the handful of peasant households still in residence through the 1470s and 1480s were suffering encroachment onto their pastures from the neighbouring town of Shipston-on-Stour, seem to have themselves ignored customary regulations on grazing, and were having to endure the presence among them of one violently aggressive family who quarrelled not only with their neighbours but also allegedly assaulted the sons and daughter of the lord. For all Thomas More’s lamentations, this was the old order overturned before the settlement was deserted, not as a result of it, and it is small wonder that the lords of Barcheston decided to lease the manor to a grazier in the 1490s and sell it outright in the 1500s. The result was that the new owner, a wool merchant, had the five remaining houses removed and all remaining arable land converted to pasture.
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It is clear that, while virtually every settlement suffered some decline in population during the fourteenth century, the long-term effects were more serious for some than for others. Those with some inherent vulnerability – unfavourable location, small size, limited access to communal services – tended to witness slow out-migration of the remaining population, though the removal of the last few inhabitants might be the result of lordly decision and involve some coercion, in the interests of making the place more viable from an economic point of view. Wretchwick, where we have seen that the Prior of Bicester was officially blamed for the desertion, had already shrunk from 12 households in the 1430s to the five cited as being evicted in 1489 and similar steady decline is apparent in many other deserted settlements: at Woolashill (Worcestershire) where 20 households in the thirteenth century had fallen to 13 by 1426, nine by 1442 and two by the middle of the sixteenth
century; at Upton (Gloucestershire), over 200 metres above sea level, where the bishopric of Worcester recorded 11 households in 1170, 16 in 1299, eight in 1327, four in 1334 and none at all in 1383; and at Barton Blount (Derbyshire) where the distribution of pottery shows the last occupation of houses to have spanned the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth century.
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Analysis of admissions from the residents of surrounding villages and hamlets to the Holy Cross Guild of Stratford-upon-Avon, through the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, allows the process of desertion to be tracked by the decline of certain settlement names: the broad picture is one of gradual decay for much of the fifteenth century, especially before 1450, as entrants became ever less frequent, but sudden disappearance in three or four cases around 1500, when admissions from these places cease abruptly and it is likely that an enclosing lord had indeed taken the decision to evict the remaining inhabitants and switch to commercial pastoral farming.
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There were certainly some financial incentives for a lord to get rid of the last few peasant families. Ingarsby was valued at £50 per annum as a working community on the eve of enclosure by Leicester Abbey in 1469 but at £81 as depopulated sheep pastures in the
Valor Ecclesiasticus
, the government’s survey of church property, in 1535. According to the
Domesday of Inclosures
, Wormleighton’s value to William Coope as lord increased from £40 to £60 per annum as a result of the depopulation he carried out in 1498.
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Recent distribution maps of deserted settlements suggest that nowhere was immune from the impact of shrinkage of population and local decision-making and that villages and hamlets could disappear on all sorts of soils and terrain. Within the confines of one small county, Rutland, settlement desertion has been shown to be fairly evenly spread across soils favouring arable, pasture and a mixture of the two.
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It is however a truism in business that when times are hard product diversification is the best recipe for success, and there is good reason to think that those places which enjoyed a mixed economy suffered less overall. The late-medieval increases in population in Cotswold cloth-making and Devon fishing communities have already been noted. Elsewhere, the wooded Arden district of north-west Warwickshire, an area characterized by dispersed settlement and reliance on cattle grazing, coalmining, metalworking and charcoal burning as well as on arable cultivation, fared much better than the Feldon district to the south east, an area of ‘champion country’ and nucleated villages heavily dependent on cereal growing: with the result that by 1524–25 the Arden district had increased its percentage contribution to the county’s taxation compared to 200 years previously, while the Feldon had declined.
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To return to Wormleighton, there is, in fact, a twist in the tale, since in 1507 following its enclosure and depopulation William Coope sold the lordship to the cattle-grazier John Spencer (ancestor of Diana, Princess of
Wales) who petitioned the crown against any punishment which might be imposed as a result of the
Domesday of Inclosures
enquiry. This was not an isolated example of the Spencers acting in this way: it was clearly policy to acquire already-deserted or at least partly depopulated sites for use as cattle pastures, but they were not necessarily responsible for causing or hastening the depopulation. The outcome of Spencer’s petition is unknown, but he claimed energetically to be restoring the settlement, rebuilding the church, replanting woodland and erecting five new houses, one of which was for himself. As a result, 20 people now lived there. This is a warning against over-simplification of the ‘deserted settlement’ story but it does not undermine it. Wormleighton did suffer depopulation as a mixed-economy settlement at the end of the fifteenth century, Spencer bought it for cattle grazing and the landscape which resulted was that of a country house with park plus some cottages for retainers. What is to be found there today is the modified Spencer house and a nineteenth-century ‘estate village’ (successor to the cottages he built) on a hill less than a kilometre from the settlement Coope had destroyed.
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But in its own way Wormleighton has survived: like every medieval rural settlement still on the map as an inhabited place today, it has had to adapt to do so.

I
n the two and a half centuries which followed the compilation of Domesday Book, the proportion of England’s population living in towns rose from 10% to between 15 and 20%. Despite the decline in absolute numbers and improvements in rural living standards thereafter, somewhere between one in five and one in seven were still dwelling in towns under Henry VIII.
¹
This is a clear sign of the continuing attraction of urban living. Toponymic surnames recorded in some east midlands towns in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries show them acting as magnets for settlers from within a radius of some 25–30 kilometres, with larger centres such as Nottingham and Lincoln drawing them from over 100 kilometres away; there was also significant immigration from Wales to towns in the western half of England by the fifteenth century.
²
But all these figures are dependent on an answer to the question: ‘what was a town?’ Most historians today are sceptical of definitions based on the legal-constitutional privileges of a ‘borough’, essentially because some very small places enjoyed this status during the middle ages when other, more economically vibrant, centres did not.
³
And in seeking alternative means of distinguishing urban from rural settlements, scholars have to accept that just as every village had some people who made a living from craftsmanship – even if only part-time – so every town had people who worked the land, whether gardens and orchards within their plots or the fields outside. The small Staffordshire town of Rugeley in 1380–81 had a total of 81 taxpayers, 16% of whom were cultivators with the remaining 84% engaged in some manufacturing activity or working as labourers and servants. At the close of the middle ages, 35% of those who left wills in the Kentish towns of Ashford, Hythe, Milton and Sittingbourne included some agricultural land among their bequests.
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However, the balance between farming and other activities was different in a town from a village and medieval society did recognize a distinction between the two. For Susan Reynolds in the 1970s, a medieval town was ‘a permanent settlement’ in which ‘a significant proportion’ of the population lived off ‘trade, industry, administration and other non-agricultural occupations’ and where there was a ‘social distinctiveness’ based on ‘common interests’ which set the inhabitants apart from the countryside, in their own perception and that of their rural neighbours. That distinctiveness was expressed through associations of traders and craftsmen, and through various forms of self-determination, ostensibly for the benefit of the members of the urban community. At the turn of the millennium, the
Cambridge Urban History
adopted a broadly similar definition of a town as ‘a permanent and concentrated settlement [which] normally lives, at least in part, off food produced by people who live outside it’, while acknowledging that to some extent recognition as a town was a matter of perception: ‘the inhabitants … regard themselves, and are regarded by the inhabitants of predominantly rural settlements, as a different sort of people’. More recently, in grappling with the phenomenon of the ‘small town’, Christopher Dyer has looked not only to ‘occupational diversity’ but also to ‘high densities of buildings, rows of houses closely packed along street frontages … peculiar street patterns including the accommodation of market places’ and the frequency of two-storey buildings as features which, collectively, mark them out from villages.
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Notwithstanding the inevitable borderline cases, and the fact that some settlements effectively changed their status in one direction or the other over the course of time, these working definitions provide a basis for the exploration which follows.

Domesday Book has been reckoned to provide evidence of 112 boroughs in 1086, but the figure should be treated with scepticism. It is derived not only from places specified as a
civitas
or
burgus
, but also those for which there are passing references to burgesses or which have a claim to be regarded as boroughs for other reasons. Bury St Edmunds, for example, is counted among the ‘boroughs’ because of Domesday’s reference to ‘bakers, ale-brewers, tailors, washerwomen, shoemakers, robe-makers, cooks, porters, agents’, all indicative of a thriving commercial centre, even though the words ‘borough’ or ‘burgess’ are absent. It would in any case be pointless to speculate on what precisely constituted a ‘borough’ at this time. More profitably, we should note that some 60 places appear from Domesday Book to have had markets and a good proportion of these – places
such as Abingdon (Berkshire, now Oxfordshire), Faversham (Kent), Bampton (Oxfordshire) and Ilminster (Somerset), none of which are reckoned among the 112 ‘boroughs’ – almost certainly functioned economically as towns, albeit on a smaller scale than Bury St Edmunds. When one realizes that the list of markets must be woefully incomplete – Domesday mentions no markets at all for some counties, such as Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Surrey and Essex – this only increases the sense of inadequate recording of towns. To inadequacy may be added inconsistency, for in contrast to their handling of rural estates the Domesday commissioners obviously had no template of standard questions to guide them when it came to surveying the towns. We learn about governing
judices
or lawmen at Chester, York and Cambridge, about local laws and customs at Chester, Hereford, Lincoln and Oxford and occasionally about trading activity, such as the import of marten pelts to Chester and the 42 men associated with the market in Tutbury (Staffordshire). However, all this is done in such a way that comparisons can scarcely be made between one town and another. London, Coventry (Warwickshire) and Peterborough (Cambridgeshire) seem to have been omitted from the Survey, and Winchester appears only in passing.
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