The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (5 page)

The factors which led to this divergence remain a matter for debate, since none of the pressures which might be thought to have encouraged rigorous communal regulation were peculiar to the ‘Central Province’. It has been argued that rising population led to an extension of arable and consequent shortage of pasture, forcing communities to agree a tightly co-ordinated approach to the use of available land. Yet East Anglia, where a variety of less rigid ‘systems’ prevailed, had an appreciably higher density of population either side of the Norman Conquest than anywhere in the midlands. At a local level, the Domesday population density in mid-Devon around Exeter, an area of small enclosed fields, was appreciably higher than it was in ‘champion’ central and south-east Somerset.
²⁰
Arguments can also be advanced that systematic, controlled use of great open fields and their associated pastures made for more efficient and productive farming, particularly as what have variously been called ‘great’, ‘multiple’ or ‘federative’ estates broke up into smaller units through portions being granted to religious institutions and members of the nobility: instead of individual settlements each contributing one specialist resource to a large and varied estate (which may sometimes be the origin of place names such as Haverhill (oats hill), or Barton (barley farm) the available land had to be put to multiple uses in order to make an all-round contribution to a smaller estate unit. But estate fragmentation was a widespread phenomenon not only in the midlands but also in East Anglia and the south east, and here it could lead to a landscape largely of enclosed rather than of open fields, as at the Rodings (Essex), where a large coherent estate later fragmented into 16 separate manors and eight ecclesiastical parishes.
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Nor were great open fields onto which animals were admitted to graze after harvest the only way of making land work as both arable and pasture. There was an alternative, which had built-in flexibility to meet changes in circumstance, in the form of rotational ‘convertible husbandry’ in small enclosed fields. This involved grain being harvested for two to three years and closes being put to grass for the next six to eight (durations varying
to allow for fluctuations in demand for grain), an approach to the mixed use of farmland in Devon which is known from documents by the mid-fourteenth century but seems apparent from pollen analysis by the end of the eighth. A similar system, on a cycle of about ten years, applied in parts of Cornwall, though here the rotation operated over blocks of open strips, like those which can still be seen at Forrabury, above Boscastle (
Figure 1
).
²²
The contrasts in field patterns either side of the Quantock and Blackdown Hills in Somerset – great open fields to the east, more irregular patterns to the west – and a broadly similar divergence between north-west and south-east Suffolk, have been attributed not to soil or terrain but to distinct political and cultural experiences: in effect, to people in one region ‘thinking differently’ from those in the other.
²³
Nothing in this paragraph invalidates an argument that in a particular place, population pressure, shortage of pasture, a perception that land could be managed more efficiently in communally regulated great open fields, might all have been factors in prompting the adoption of arrangements characteristic of ‘champion’ country, at any time between the late-Saxon period and the twelfth century. But none of these factors applied deterministically: there was always an alternative option.

Figure 1: Forrabury Common (Cornwall)
. Over 40 strips survive above Boscastle, separated by low stone and earth balks. This is a remnant of open field farming but not of the ‘midland system’: under the rotation practised here, strips grew crops for two to three years and were then put down to grass to recover.

Any decision to rearrange the farming landscape, including the replacement of a patchwork of intermingled strips and closes with carefully regulated great open fields, would have been disruptive in the short-term and not taken lightly. There is reason to believe that the initiative often rested not with the lords of great estates but with the peasants, or alternatively with minor lords whose income derived from only one or two manors and who were therefore intimately involved with the fortunes of the settlements to which they were attached. Analysis of field systems in Somerset has suggested that Glastonbury Abbey may have deliberately imposed this arrangement within much of its estate – possibly in the time of the reforming abbot Dunstan in the mid-tenth century – but this was exceptional, since no equivalent consistency can be discerned in the layouts of other settlements and their fields on the estates of the king, the Bishop of Wells or other major landholders in the shire. Elsewhere, and on a broader canvas, the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, with an estate which stretched from the ‘Central Province’ in the Midlands to the ‘Northern and Western Province’ in Lancashire and Cheshire, can be seen to have drawn his income from settlements and field systems arranged according to local practice, rather than on the basis of any centrally imposed template.
²⁴
By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the authority to order local affairs vested in the ‘community of the vill’ had become well-established and within this the management of farming bulked large. In 1294, for example, the villeins (unfree peasants) of Brightwalton (Berkshire) collectively reached agreement with their lord the Abbot of Battle over common rights in and around two woods, surrendering their claims to one in exchange for unambiguous entitlement to the other. Similarly in 1410 the lords of Harlestone (Northamptonshire) agreed a revision of land allocations between fields with a committee of village representatives.
²⁵
Although the last case comes from the late-medieval period when the bargaining power of the peasantry was unusually strong – when even ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’ chose not to reverse a rent reduction achieved on holdings in his manor of Lighthorne close to the heart of his estate
²⁶
– there is no reason to think that their tenth-to-twelfth-century forebears would have been lacking in prowess. By and large, we should look to the local peasant community as the driving force in the organization and reorganization of its own field system.

Exceptions can be found, but they often relate to specific cases where we know that lords had particular incentives to impose a ‘fresh start’. The colonizing efforts of incoming Norman landholders in Yorkshire and County Durham in the late eleventh and early twelfth century, which led to the creation of a series of villages on their estates arranged in regular rows, may well have been the context in which new open fields were also laid out in these places, even if the details were left to stewards or the settlers themselves. When Liverpool was founded as a new port by King John, alongside a creek in the Mersey, there was almost certainly a major rearrangement of any open fields already serving the small pre-existing farming and fishing community, if only to cope with the enlarged population; something of the pattern is still discernible to the north and north-east of the planned town, in the spaces between streets such as Vauxhall Road and Scotland Road. A regime of three open fields, with a three-course rotation, was deliberately imposed on
Drakelow (Cheshire), a manor on the Black Prince’s estate newly created after 1346 out of two sanctuaries at Rudheath (near Northwich) and Overmarsh (now King’s Marsh, near Farndon); these were no longer needed for the recruitment of soldiers to fight the Welsh from among the fugitives who had resorted there.
²⁷
But such circumstances were unusual. If we are seeking reasons why some places continued to farm a mixture of open strips and closes, with various degrees of communal regulation, while others adopted a highly regulated system of working great open fields in common, we should normally focus on the local peasant communities, and on various cultural and psychological influences bearing upon them. Among these may have been a simple wish to keep in step with what seemed to be working well in neigh-bouring settlements. If only – to quote the great oral historian of the Suffolk countryside, George Ewart Evans – we could ‘ask the fellows who cut the hay’.
²⁸

Whatever the context in which open fields were first laid out, they clearly did not remain static. Typically, not only in the great open fields of the ‘Central Province’ but also in smaller versions found in other parts of the country, the subdivisions of such fields were very important units within their management. These were often called furlongs (though in places they went under other names, such as flatt, shoot or – confusingly –
feld
) and normally all the strips within a furlong ran parallel to one another, being bounded at either end by a headland which allowed access to them and also served as the turning-area for the plough team. In the northern counties, there is some evidence (for example in names based on words associated with clearings, such as
ridding
) that furlongs originated as the units by which land was reclaimed and brought into cultivation. Conversely, they may have been formed from the subdivision of larger blocks of land, such as the exceptionally long groups of strips found in parts of Northamptonshire, Yorkshire and elsewhere. Some furlongs were given names derived from earlier small settlements – such as those ending in
worth
and
cote
– implying that these had been abandoned as part of the reorganization of the fields, although the relationship between settlement change and the laying out of open fields is a controversial one, to be addressed in the chapter which follows.
²⁹
A key point is that wherever a communally agreed rotation of crops was in operation, this did not require there to be a given number of fields: the furlongs, whether grouped together into great open fields or dispersed in smaller blocks separated by closes of arable or pasture, would be allocated to whatever course of rotation had been determined. At Tarvin and Wybunbury (Cheshire), for example, three-course rotations had been established by the end of the thirteenth century but they covered a multiplicity of small separately named units, 14 in the first case, 12 in the second. Similar arrangements have been found all over the country, including within the ‘Central Province’ in parts
of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.
³⁰
Even where the classic ‘midland system’ of two-to-four great open fields is clearly in evidence, these extensive units of land seem to have been formed from the amalgamation for cropping purposes of contiguous furlongs: one field or group of furlongs lying fallow in any one year, while one or more other fields were sown and harvested at communally agreed times. Hardwick (Cambridgeshire) ‘which had an impeccable three-field system in 1639, boasted at least seven “fields” in 1251’ so presumably there was some significant reordering of the community’s arable in the meantime. At Laxton (Nottinghamshire), where a three-course rotation can still be observed in the surviving open fields, it is believed that the strips were organized into furlongs for crop rotation purposes sometime before the fields themselves were designated by grouping the furlongs together; the earliest reference to a field here is to Mill Field not later than 1189, while South Field, first mentioned in 1232, was possibly the last to be created. And notwithstanding the communal rotation scheme, individual furlongs within the great open fields might still grow different crops, typically wheat or rye where winter sowing (before Christmas) had been agreed, barley, oats or legumes – peas, beans and vetch – where there was ‘Lenten sowing’ in the spring.
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Two twelfth-century descriptions of what appear to be the rearrangement of furlongs into fields survive. Both are couched in terms which imply the close involvement of manorial lords, but this does not invalidate what was said earlier about the initiatives likely to have been taken by peasants; these documents may merely be recording the formal confirmatory stage. At Dry Drayton (Cambridgeshire) in the 1150s, the Abbot of Crowland and four other lords agreed on a ‘new partition’ of the land ‘in field and in meadow’ because it had been ‘dispersed in minute parts and long uncultivated’; it was all rearranged ‘by complete fields and by certain boundaries’. In the following decade at Segenhoe (Bedfordshire), where holdings had become highly fragmented and intermixed, ‘knights, free men and others’ came to one of the two manorial courts in the settlement and ‘surrendered their lands under the supervision of the old men and by the measure of the perch, to be divided as if they were newly won land, assigning to each a reasonable share’.
³²
Similar references in the following century appear to involve a redistribution of furlongs from two fields to three, probably as part of a switch from a two-course to a three-course rotation which would leave less land lying fallow each year. About 1241, the Abbot of Eynsham was accused of depriving a tenant of his common pasture at South Stoke and Woodcote (Oxfordshire) by dividing into three parts lands which had always formerly been divided into two. At Puddletown (Dorset) in 1292 ‘a division of the land of the convent [of Christchurch Priory] … was made … in three fields, namely the first near the king’s highway 248 acres, another to the east 177 acres,
another to the west 205 acres’. Several switches from two fields to three have also been identified in Northamptonshire; for example, Broughton had two fields in 1317 but an extra one, Middle Field, by 1336, while at Kislingbury the East and West Fields of the thirteenth century had been joined by South Field not later than 1340.
³³
All this testifies to the dynamism of open field systems during centuries which witnessed climate change and considerable growth and decline in population: it has been well said that ‘the boundaries of common fields and the extent of common rights fluctuated like the sea shore’.
³⁴
It also reinforces the impression that the emergence over most of the ‘Central Province’ of a highly regulated approach to farming would have been a phased process, the product of decisions taken in each community over several generations: an initial sharing of a portion of the available arable and pasture; the introduction of communally agreed practices for farming this shared land, including in time a decision to rotate the crops and the area left fallow; the rearrangement of the arable subject to this rotation into great open fields. Even this model doubtless varied from place to place, just as the pressures which prompted these decisions also differed in points of detail.