The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (3 page)

Thereafter, estate surveys, rentals and the government enquiry which produced the Hundred Rolls of 1279 all demonstrate a burgeoning population. Cautious estimates of population totals for villages in Cambridgeshire, Essex, Leicestershire and west Yorkshire suggest a population density in 1300 very close to – sometimes greater than – that which pertained in the rural areas of these shires at the time of the 1801 census. If towns over 5,000 population
are subtracted from the 1801 census total, we are left with an English rural population at that time of 6.3 million: a figure which may not be far from the mark for 1300 as well.
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The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed the intensification of farming and settlement, the expansion of cultivated areas, and the proliferation of new commercial centres – all tending to increase the incomes of lords able to spend on impressive domestic, fortified or ecclesiastical buildings. But this was achieved in circumstances of high birth and death rates; over the medieval period as a whole, only about half those born reached the age of 18 and only 10% passed 60. And it was not to last. On the Bishop of Winchester’s extensive estates in southern England an appreciable rise in mortality is apparent from the number of heriots (inheritance fines) paid by peasants, which experienced notable peaks in 1272, 1289 and 1297.
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This – together with a reduction in the amount of the bishop’s land dedicated to producing food for the market – suggests that the population may have stopped growing in parts of this region before the thirteenth century was over. Thereafter, most of the country seems to have suffered from a series of catastrophes, including harvests ranging from poor to disastrous in seven of the 14 years between 1308 and 1321 and outbreaks of animal disease severely hitting stocks of sheep in 1313–17 and of cattle in 1319–21. Suffering was exacerbated by the very heavy tax burden imposed on the peasantry, particularly to pay for war against the Scots, and by the effects of that war on the northern shires in the shape of border raiding: factors which have contributed to debate over how far this was more than just a ‘subsistence’ crisis based on population outstripping resources. What is less controversial is its immediate impact: a dramatic increase in mortality – with heriots on the Winchester estates rocketing to over twice their normal level at times – and a fall in the total population of the country in the decade following 1314 of the order of 10%.
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The trend of population in the second quarter of the fourteenth century is by no means certain. There is evidence of abandoned land especially in the more arable south and east, to set against a continuing search for new farmland in the more pastoral north and west.
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As magnets for those prepared to travel in search of new opportunities, urban centres appear to have been less affected than rural ones: by 1340 London had become one of the largest towns in Europe and was attracting immigrants from far and wide.
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But nowhere escaped the Black Death, an epidemic of bubonic combined with pneumonic plague which reached England in the summer of 1348 via the port of Melcombe Regis near Weymouth and then spread rapidly to the whole of the country, before running its course early in 1350. Estimates of mortality vary, but the best modern opinion suggests somewhere between 40% and 50% over the two years from summer 1348.
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Following such a catastrophic fall in population, one might expect substantial wage increases in response to
a shortage of labour, a significant decline in rents and prices to reflect a slump in market-demand for land and goods, and easement of the terms of unfree peasant tenure because of difficulties in attracting tenants. All this came to pass, but not consistently so until there had been further serious visitations of the Black Death, especially in 1361 and 1375. Thereafter, the population remained in slump throughout the fifteenth century and by 1524–25, on the evidence of taxation data, stood at less than 2.5 million; an authoritative study, based on parish registers (which began in 1538) and back-projection from the 1871 census puts the population of England in 1541 slightly higher at 2.8 million. In a few places (such as Devon where tin working, cloth making and a long coastline offered a variety of employment opportunities) population may have begun to rise again from about 1480, but recent opinion is that on a national scale there was no sustained recovery before the 1530s. The reasons for this prolonged trough in the population graph remain controversial – probably a combination of high mortality (through endemic, and occasionally epidemic, disease) and low fertility (partly because more women entered the labour market) – but there is little doubt over its effects on the living standards of the majority, as real wages reached levels in the fifteenth century not seen again till late-Victorian times. Commentators bemoaned the fact that humble families were dressing as well as their social superiors and the consumption of meat, fuel and better-quality bread and ale all increased.
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This is not of course the same as an improvement in the ‘quality of life’: bereavement remained a frequent experience and in many places it became a struggle to keep communal farming going, with too few people to till the land. But there can be no doubt that, in social and economic terms, the Black Death and its immediate aftermath must still be seen as one of the great ‘turning points’ in English history.

This applies to the landscape as well. The late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a period of retreat from less favourable areas alongside depopulation and desertion of settlements even in long-cultivated lowlands. There was a widespread switch from arable to less labour-intensive pastoral farming – with sheep-rearing particularly significant – and the progressive enclosure of many open arable fields, as holdings became consolidated and landlords and tenants alike sought the opportunity to farm independently. In turn, some lords clearly suffered from the reduced incomes yielded by their estates, with predictable consequences for both secular and ecclesiastical building schemes. Yet through good luck, good management, enterprise or opportunism, there were always some individuals and corporate bodies capable of ‘bucking the trend’. An episcopal visitation of Leicester Abbey in 1440, for example, noted that the monastic buildings had been extensively rebuilt, at a time when it is known that yearly income from sale of corn was falling from £573 (in 1341) to £240 (in 1477). One has only to look
at the large number of parish churches in England which, in whole or in part, display the features of the late-medieval Perpendicular style to appreciate that there was still plenty of work to be had in the building trade.
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So the rise and fall in population, and the impact of these trends upon resources, is only part of the story. Much depended upon the response to changing circumstances by those with power over the landscape. Almost invariably, the answer to the question ‘why is this here?’ or ‘why does it look like this?’ is that ‘someone decided it should be’. Why is the Sussex town of Battle on an awkward site on a ridge three kilometres off the main London to Hastings road? The answer lies in the power-politics of mid-eleventh century England and Normandy, in the decision of Harold Godwinson to pitch camp at Senlac and of William the Conqueror to attack him there, in William’s determination to found an abbey on the site of his victory, and in the abbey’s enterprise in laying out a planned town at its gates. As the Battle Abbey chronicler, displaying a good eye for landscape history, put it in the late twelfth century, ‘the brethren who were in charge of the building began to apportion to individuals house-sites of definite dimensions [which] can be seen to have remained to this day, just as they were arranged’.
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Why is there a magnificent cathedral at Peterborough but only a ruined gateway and a sixteenth-century house as the obvious reminders of the equally important medieval religious house at Ramsey, 16 kilometres to the south east? Both were the products of the Benedictine monastic revival under King Edgar, founded in the 960s and richly endowed with extensive tracts of fenland, to rank tenth and eleventh among all foundations in Domesday Book. But following the dissolution, Ramsey was granted to the Cromwell family, dismantled and rebuilt as a country mansion, while Peterborough was preserved through conversion to a cathedral serving an area carved out of the massive diocese of Lincoln: the fact that Peterborough had been chosen as the burial-place for Henry VIII’s first wife Katherine of Aragon in 1536 was probably a major factor in the decision.
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Ironically – but significantly because of what they tell us of their patrons’ priorities – two of the greatest ecclesiastical buildings in the country, Westminster Abbey and King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, owe their present grandeur largely to two kings conventionally regarded as ‘failures’, Henry III (remodelling the work of another ‘failure’ Edward the Confessor) and Henry VI respectively. ‘Heroic’ figures such as Richard I and Henry V, kings whose reputation rests mainly on their martial prowess, have no comparable legacy.

These are obvious examples, but it is important to stress that power over the landscape did not rest with the crown, the nobility and the ecclesiastical corporations alone, however adept they were at designing their own living spaces
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as well as impacting upon everyone else’s. In the broad curving ridge and furrow of former open field arable strips, now preserved in permanent pasture, in irregularly shaped fields near township boundaries,
carved out of woodland or moorland to extend the bounds of cultivation, in green lanes or minor roads depressed below the surrounding land surface as ‘hollow ways’, we encounter the impact of generations of anonymous peasant-farmers, collectively shaping their environment in the everyday quest for survival. Similarly, in the provision and maintenance of churches and guild-halls, causeways and bridges, we can often discern communities rather than individuals acting in concert for the general good. This was collective, rather than individual, power, an expression of ‘communal authority’ embedded in the consciousness of townspeople and country dwellers and as potent, at its own level, as that which motivated those who combined to resist the crown during the political crises of the thirteenth century. But, to reinforce the earlier point about interconnecting factors, such initiatives arose in response to changing economic circumstances which affected the course of supply and demand and behind which, ultimately, lay shifts in the trend of population. They might also be encouraged by developments in technology, which improved agricultural productivity and offered new opportunities in building design.

Some advances are more obvious than others. Windmills, for example, first recorded in England in 1185, spread mainly in the midlands and east of England thereafter and their deliberately exposed locations (often in the midst of the arable fields) made them prominent features of their communities. In a military context, the evolution of weapons and artillery can be traced in the changing designs of castles, which though profoundly influenced by considerations of comfort and ostentatious display could not afford to neglect their role as defensible fortifications: from the restricted dimensions of most early motte-and-bailey castles within the 160-metre range of the shortbow depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry to the sophistication of the Edwardian castles of North Wales, designed not only to withstand the threat of fearsome new devices such as the trebuchet, but actively to combat them. Most famously, the design of churches and cathedrals benefited from the introduction early in the twelfth century of the pointed arch, allowing for a roof-span no longer constrained by the length of available timbers and for the thrust of the roof itself to be carried to ground level. This in turn allowed the walls to accommodate a greater expanse of windows, showing off the coloured glass increasingly seen in England thereafter.
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Other technological developments were more subtle. The introduction of a modern style of harness and of a stiff padded collar during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries paved the way for the progressive replacement of oxen by horses, first for haulage then for ploughing. The greater speed of horse-haulage (about twice that of oxen) contributed to a broadening of the area which could be served by individual market-centres, and hence to the quickening trade which helped to sustain the growth in population and the
economy prior to 1300. It must also have been a factor in the building of new stone bridges, and the rebuilding in stone of earlier timber versions – wide enough to take horse-drawn carts – which characterized the twelfth, thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and increasingly utilized the technology of pointed arches previously developed in an ecclesiastical context.
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Beyond this, if ‘technological improvement’ is extended in meaning to embrace all innovation in agricultural practice, there is no doubt that there was plenty of dynamism in the face of changing pressures, whether in communally farmed or individually worked fields: witness, for example, the thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century practice in eastern Norfolk of planting legumes (especially black peas) and manually spreading various forms of fertilizer in order to maintain the fertility of the soil, and the experimentation with cash-crops such as saffron in eastern England during the fifteenth century.
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This was active engagement with the rural landscape rather than a passive response to force of circumstance.

Anyone who approaches the study of the medieval landscape has to accept that the limitations of evidence can be frustrating. There may sometimes be ‘no more than a few smeared earthworks and an ambiguous mention in an old document’, to quote one book which – despite these pessimistic comments – is in fact a very helpful guide to the interpretation of the historic landscape.
It is right to be cautious in assessing the evidence: as the same author has written elsewhere, ‘do not jump to conclusions; stalk them slowly’.
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But in the early 1980s, a book with a similar title to this one warned of the threat to ‘our medieval landscape heritage’ from modern developments
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and few would argue that such a threat is any less potent today: so let us study, celebrate and do all we can to conserve this historic landscape as a precious resource for understanding the lives of previous generations. Our landscape links our present and our past and – now as in the medieval period – the relationship between population and resources, the individual and collective power to maintain continuity or to impose change, and the impact of progress in technology are dominant and enduring themes in the story. We shall encounter them repeatedly in the pages which follow.