The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (43 page)

For all this, it is easy to forget that the sixteenth century was a time of significant continuity as well as of change. Despite the reversal of the downward trend of the post-Black Death era, the national population level remained well below that of the early fourteenth century. This meant that those rural settlements which survived, and many of the smaller urban centres too, would easily have been recognizable in terms of their street pattern and the size of the built-up area to a resident of 1300 revisiting as a time traveller three, or even four, centuries later. Despite the ink spilt about depopulating enclosure, large-scale open field arable farming persisted into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries over much of the midlands, and to a lesser extent in the north east and south, so that some 21% of the land surface of England, and over 50% of that of Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire,
Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire, still had to undergo expensive parliamentary enclosure to enable owners to get rid of what in origin was an early medieval land-sharing arrangement.
¹⁰
The almost complete absence of church building in the century after 1540 meant that towns and villages retained their medieval parish churches, which despite some rearrangement internally were scarcely altered in terms of the external appearance they presented as part of the landscape. Medieval parishes survived and were given a new lease of life as units of local secular administration, medieval roads and bridges persisted even though new arrangements had to be made for their upkeep. How far a youthful traveller through England in 1540, retracing his steps in old age in 1600, would have perceived there to be have been far-reaching changes in the English landscape during his lifetime would have depended on the route which he took: sooner or later he would have encountered ruined monasteries, decaying castles, newly built country houses, and the changing face of towns, but it would have been quite possible to journey through one village after another which retained their accustomed layouts, their old field systems and their old parish churches, features which must have appeared immutable.

Yet there was one traveller through England in the 1530s and 1540s whom we have often had occasion to quote and who was in no doubt that he was living through dramatically changing times. When John Leland composed his ‘New Year’s Gift’ to Henry VIII towards the end of 1545, commenting on his efforts to rescue collections from monastic libraries and promising a series of books based on all he had learned on his travels around the country, he clearly saw himself as contributing to the dawn of a new age. A store of knowledge, long buried in the monasteries, would be ‘brought owte of deadely darkenes to lyvely lighte’, partly through Leland’s own endeavours and partly through the new medium of ‘enprinting’. This would refute ‘the usurpid autorite of the Bishop of Rome and his complices’, rid the country of ‘al maner of superstition and craftely coloured doctrine of a rowte of the Romaine bishopes’ and demonstrate that nowhere ‘may justely be more extollid … for trewe nobilite and vertues’ than the Tudor kingdom. And such had been his travels that ‘there is almoste nother cape, nor bay … river or confluence of rivers … forestes, wooddes, cities, burges, castelles, principale manor placis, monasteries, and colleges but I have seene them’. He hoped to provide some historical background to the places he had visited: ‘I truste so to open this wyndow, that the lighte shall be seen … and the olde glory of your renowmid Britaine to reflorisch thorough the worlde’. Time and again, as he endeavoured to explain the growth and decline of towns and the condition of castles, churches and bridges, he succeeded in his mission of enlightenment. Following his mental breakdown in 1547, he never did write up the notes he
took on his journeys in the manner intended, but his observations survive and we have had occasion to be grateful for them many times in this book. With his eye for detail, coupled with a concern to explain what he saw in historical terms, John Leland was justly proud of the ‘description … of your reaulme yn writing’ he had worked so hard to prepare. It gives him a fair claim to be called ‘the father of English landscape history’, in whose footsteps the rest of us follow.
¹¹

1
For a succinct discussion of theories surrounding this frontier, see Rowley (2001), 77–9.

2
Carpenter (2004), 13–14.

3
Hoskins (1978), 115.

4
Knowles (1950), 702–3; Knowles and Hadcock (1971), 52–82, 253–69.

5
E.g. Britnell (1997), 1, 254; but cf. Walsham (2011b), esp. 99–105, for contemporary appreciation of the Reformation era as a time of dramatic change.

6
Darby (1977), 303; Nightingale (1996), 105; Smith (2002), 181.

7
Carpenter (2004), 3–11.

8
Stringer (1993), 36–7.

9
Plucknett (1949), 5–86; Elton (1960), 2–12, 331–4, 355–6.

10
On all this, see, for example, Walton (1991), 331–2; Roe and Marx (1994); Hatcher and Bailey (2001); Langdon and Maaschaele (2006), 35–81.

11
Harke (2002), 167–68; Maddicott (1997), 7–54.

12
Darby (1977), 89, 303–9, 336–45, 364–8; all the shepherds were in Sussex, all men with gardens in Oxfordshire, all mill keepers in Derbyshire and Herefordshire.

13
EHD
, II, 884–92; Darby (1977), 85–6; Harke (2002), 162–3.

14
Smith (2002), 177–81.

15
Postan and Titow (1958–59).

16
EHD
, III, 265–6; Kershaw (1973); Bolton (1980), 58.

17
Bailey (1991); Mate (1991); Smith (1991).

18
Schofield and Vince (2003), 27.

19
Ormrod and Lindley (1996), 4, 22–4; Horrox (1994), 5–11.

20
Bridbury (1973); Hatcher (1994); Fox (2001), 145–67; Wrigley and Schofield (1989), 528; Smith (2002), 181–201; Schofield and Vince (2003), 232; Dodds (2008), 136–41.

21
VCH: Leicestershire
, II, 15; Bolton (1980), 221–4; Platt (1981), 90–1.

22
Chronicle of Battle Abbey
(1980), 8, 50–3.

23
Knowles (1950), 702; Mellows (1947), xviii–xx, xxxv.

24
See especially Creighton (2009).

25
Records of the Templars in England in the Twelfth Century
(1935), 131, 135; Langdon, (1994), 9, fn. 23; Derry and Williams (1960), 95–6, 174–5.

26
Walter of Henley and other Treatises on Estate Management and Accounting
(1971), 319; Langdon (1982); Langdon (1984); Harrison (1992); Cooper (2006), 22–4.

27
Campbell (1983); Thirsk (1997), 17.

28
Muir (2000), xv; Muir (2007), xi.

29
Cantor (1982), 219.

1
Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum
(1996), 10–11.

2
Higham (2004), 68.

3
Carpenter (2004), 410–11; cf. Phythian-Adams (1992), which traces the evolution of W. G. Hoskins’s thinking on the significance of the ‘yeoman’ class of substantial free peasants.

4
Aelfric’s Colloquy
(1978), 20–1; the translation of this late tenth- or early eleventh-century representation of a ‘ploughman’s voice’ is by A. E. Watkins.

5
Gray (1915), 64; Campbell (1981), 112. Convenient summaries of the main features of the ‘midland system’ are to be found in e.g. Fox (1981), Rowley (1982), Astill (1988) and Hall (1995), 8–35.

6
Roberts and Wrathmell (2002), 123–4, where it is also argued that three-field systems were a later development, in evidence only from the late twelfth century onwards. This is consistent with the findings of Hall (1995), 53–63, where no examples of three-field arrangements are cited earlier than the thirteenth century.

7
Roberts and Wrathmell (2003); Rippon (2008), 3.

8
Description of England by William Harrison
(1968), 199, 217. For John Leland’s use of the term ‘champion’ to point up the contrast with enclosed land, see e.g.
Itinerary of Leland
, I, 151, 156 (on Somerset), IV, 17–19 (on Nottinghamshire). However, Homans (1942), 13, 419, traces the term ‘champion’ in this sense to a Derbyshire court-roll of 1310.

9
Oosthuizen (2011); cf. Rippon (2008), 23–6, 147, 194 on Somerset and Norfolk.

10
Baker and Butlin (1973), 328, 332, 362, 404, 423–4; Rippon (2008), 153–64.

11
Baker and Butlin (1973), 393–419; Roberts and Wrathmell, (2002), 158–9. Roberts and Wrathmell (2003)
passim
emphasize that some form of farming in open strips – often in association with farming in enclosed fields – was to be found in virtually all the local regions into which the country can be subdivided.

12
EHD
, I, 403, 405, 436.

13
Roberts and Wrathmell (2002), 95–6, 103–4, 111.

14
Rippon (2002); Oosthuizen (2005).

15
Astill (1988), 77–8; Taylor and Fowler (1978), 159–62; Harrison (2002); Oosthuizen (2003); Gerrard and Aston (2007), 44–55, 973–4.

16
Rippon (2008), 153–67.

17
Hall (1982), 42–55; Hall (1995), 131–6; Harvey (1983); Roberts and Wrathmell, (2003), 53; Roberts (2008), 99–101. For a warning against concluding that shorter strips were invariably preceded by longer ones, see Jones and Page (2006), 94.

18
For the geographical distribution of partible inheritance customs, see Roberts and Wrathmell (2002), 178, Fig. 7.1.

19
Roberts and Wrathmell, (2002), 143; Campbell (1981), 113–17.

20
Rippon, Fyfe and Brown (2006).

21
Fox (1981), esp. 98–102; Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer (1997), 90–5; Bassett (1997); Rippon (2008), 15, 138–200.

22
Fox (1991), 303–23; Fyfe (2004); Herring (2006), 62, 69, 96–7; Rippon (2008), 130–5.

23
Rippon (2008), 136–7, 198–200, 255–60.

24
Rippon (2008), 64–95; Higham (2004), 66; Gerrard and Aston (2007), 979.

25
Maitland (1889), 161–4, 172; Wake (1922); Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer (1997), 177–9; Harvey (1989); Carpenter (2004), 413–14.

26
Hilton (1975), 66–7.

27
Roberts and Wrathmell (2002), 128–33, 139; Roberts (1987), 84, 172–5, 212–13; Stewart-Brown (1916); Higham, (2004), 63–4; Booth (1981), 127–8.

28
Evans (1956), based on oral evidence from Blaxhall, Suffolk.

29
Fox (1981), 89; Gerrard and Aston (2007), 74–101, 972–4; Oosthuizen (2010).

30
Bishop (1954), esp. 30–2; Baker and Butlin (1973), 41–92, 337; Hall (1982); Muir and Muir (1989), 41–2; Sylvester (1958).

31
Campbell (1983); Baker and Butlin (1973), 261; Beckett (1989), 22; quotation from Oosthuizen (2011), 22.

32
Page (1934), 162; Fox (1981), 94–8; Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer (1997), 148, 178.

33
VCH Oxfordshire
, II, 171; Gray (1915), 80; Hall (1995), 55–62.

34
Baker and Butlin (1973), 260.

35
Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln
, IV (1937), 266. On regular distributions of strips, see e.g. Roberts (2008), 81–7, 248–50.

36
Ault (1972), 83, 88; Dale (1950), 46–7.

37
Kosminsky (1956), 197–255.

38
Cambridge University Library: EDR/G/3/27, f. 60.

39
Dyer (1988), 19; Lennard (1959), 393; Reeves and Williamson (2000); Taylor (2000a); Hey (2000); Everitt (2000).

40
Dyer (2006); White (2012).

41
Hall (2005), 12, 22–3.

42
Ault (1972), 106–7, 131, 136; Cheshire Record Office: DLE 47.

43
Baum (1963), 28.

44
Beresford (1948); Taylor (1975), 78–88; Hooke (1991); Hall (1995), 36–9; Williamson, (2003), 148–55. For a variant reverse-J course to ridges in Cornwall, and the implications of this for the design of the plough, see Herring (2006), 69.