The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (6 page)

By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it had become normal for all transfers of freely held land to be recorded in charters, and accordingly references to strips and closes are found as a matter of course. About 1250, for example, William son of Hugh of Thorpe gave the canons of Lincoln Cathedral half a bovate of arable land in Laceby (Lincolnshire), comprising 9 selions (strips) to the south of the village and a further 21 selions to the north of the village, an arrangement which strongly suggests that there were two open fields either side of the settlement. Since a bovate was typically about 15 acres (around 6 hectares), and the total holding here was 30 selions, it is fair to conclude that each strip was probably around a quarter-acre in size. The selions were identified by the furlongs within which they lay, and also by the names of adjoining landholders (‘two selions … over Dicfurlanges’; ‘two selions over Littelbechill between the land of Hugh son of Ely and the land of Everard’; ‘one selion over Doflandes next to the land of Ralf of St Paul’), and there is a good deal to be gleaned from such information. On the one hand, the St Paul family – Ralf or William – occur as neighbours in the references to exactly half the strips in the charter, a circumstance which strongly suggests, when allowance is made for some exchange and transfer down the generations, that there had been a regular sequence to the distribution of the strips when they had originally been laid out. Furthermore, one of the selions (‘on the north side of Littelbechill between the land of Henry son of Berengar and the land of Hugh son of Ely’) was also identified as ‘abutting over the furlong of Ralf of Bradley’: a description which implies that one of the furlongs was no longer in the possession of a number of different holders but had come into the hands of one, presumably through the consolidation and exchange of
strips.
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It was initiatives of this sort which could readily lead to the enclosure of the entire furlong, in a reversal of the processes we have already explored.

By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we begin to have an understanding of how open fields were actually worked, particularly from local court rolls with their detailed regulations and records of punishments, covering matters such as the dates which governed the annual round of activity and the safeguarding of crops from thieves and straying animals. At Newton Longville (Buckinghamshire) the court met on 1 July 1290 and ordered that ‘no-one shall allow his calves to be in the fields in the growing grain … there shall be no carting at night … everyone shall see that his stiles and lanes, those nearest his neighbours, are so kept that [no one] incur damage because of lack of such maintenance’. At Chalgrave (Bedfordshire) on 25 July 1303, it was decreed that ‘no-one shall carry during the whole of autumn except by day … no-one shall carry corn except by cart … all shall close their curtilages and … no-one may have exit by the curtilage’: the last two orders seeking to ensure that the crofts around each house were kept properly hedged or fenced, without allowing direct access to or from the open fields beyond. And on 8 August 1315, the court at Cuxham (Oxfordshire) imposed a penalty of 40 pence (16.7p) if any ‘sheep shall come into the field sown with Lenten grain until the Feast of St Michael [29 September]’.
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Behind all this lies the story of an English countryside which until the early fourteenth century was under increasing strain as the population continued to grow – though the strain was felt most where there was the greatest dependence on arable farming, without the diversification which abundant pasture or other resources allowed. Analysis of data on the peasantry in the 1279 Hundred Rolls, a governmental survey which in its present form covers much of midland and eastern England, suggests that almost half those with a stake in the fields possessed holdings so small that their families were at or below subsistence level unless income was supplemented from elsewhere.
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A case in point would be Adam Unwyne on the Bishop of Ely’s manor of Willingham (Cambridgeshire). He appears in a survey of the bishop’s estate in 1251 owing labour service to his lord each Monday, Friday and occasionally more often – hoeing, mowing, reaping, threshing, sheep-shearing and hurdle-making according to the season of the year – with an obligation to render a hen at Christmas and six eggs at Easter and liability to make additional payments demanded by his lord, all for a cottar’s holding of two acres (0.8 hectares) of arable land.
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New land was of course brought into cultivation: it has been estimated that by the close of the thirteenth century, over 4 million hectares in England were being farmed as arable land, compared to about 2.4 million hectares in 1086 and 3.1 million hectares in 1914.
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But this must have caused a dangerous imbalance in some parts of the country, given the necessity for plentiful woodland – for fuel, toolmaking and building materials
– and for sufficient meadow and pasture to feed the livestock which pulled the ploughs.

Problems of land shortage for the majority would only be exacerbated if individuals enclosed consolidated blocks for themselves. There is good evidence – as implied by the Lincolnshire charter above but especially outside the ‘champion ’ regions – that this was already happening by the middle of the thirteenth century.
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Once the reversal of the population trend in the fourteenth century brought an easing of pressure on resources, many of the brakes on the process were released: marginal land need no longer be ploughed, enterprising peasants could break with community bonds and seek easier terms (if necessary by moving elsewhere), lords tended to lease their lands rather than farm them direct (so loosening their hold on their peasant tenants) and opportunities arose to group strips together into larger holdings. The break-up of open field farming was a natural consequence of all this: having taken some seven centuries to evolve, the open fields were by now embarked upon seven centuries of enclosure. One stage along the way was to leave arable strips, and sometimes whole furlongs, temporarily uncultivated as ‘leys’, pasture on which beasts could graze – although it was often necessary to keep them tethered so as not to intrude on neighbouring strips. These were frequently the subject of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century village bye-laws, such as those of Dodford (Northamptonshire) in 1463–64 which ordered the restoration to tillage so as ‘to increase the amount of corn’ of all leys put down to grass in the previous twenty years.
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From here it was but a short step to withdrawing the strips from the open field regime altogether: a farmer who had acquired several neighbouring strips might well want to hedge them about and work them in a way that did not conform to the communal arrangements. This led to the type of gradual, piece-by-piece enclosure which became widespread in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, evidenced by the more frequent references to ‘closes’ which occur in charters, rentals and court rolls, sometimes in a context which orders the removal of the newly created boundaries. At Great Horwood (Buckinghamshire), for example, there are references to ‘uncultivated lands’ or ‘uncultivated grounds’ in court-rolls of 26 April 1374, 15 May 1385 and 31 May 1467, and to peasant farmers’ ‘closes’ by 1 August 1503. In Tilston (Cheshire) on 20 December 1491, Jankyn Williamson of Stretton leased to Jankyn Leche of Carden ‘certain parcels of ground … as heretofore been open field’ in terms which show that strips (here described as ‘butts’) had been consolidated together prior to enclosure: ‘all the Overtywarts flatt shooting afore the gatehouse of the parsonage of Tilston … one butt cloven in two shooting on the said flatt … and two other butts shooting on the said flatt next to the hedge of a croft of Randall Carden’.
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Manorial lords themselves faced both challenges and opportunities in these circumstances, as falling population led to a decline in income from
rents. While there was limited experimentation with cash-crops, a far less labour-intensive alternative was to convert what they could of the open arable fields to enclosed sheep or cattle pastures, an option also attractive to some of the more substantial freeholders within the local community. Because of its impact on settlements, this process has been left for more detailed discussion in the chapter which follows.

A corrugated pattern on the surface of permanent pasture – broad ridge and furrow, at least 5 metres across from one furrow to the next, with a shallow curve to its course along the length of the ridges – can usually be identified with some confidence as evidence of medieval open arable strips, even though (strictly speaking) what we see in the pastures today are the fossilized remains of these strips from the last time they were ploughed. The sinuous course, normally a gentle reverse-S, represents the line taken by the plough team, which approached the headland terminating each strip at an angle in order to save space when turning around. The ridges themselves were created quite deliberately by ploughing a consistent line back and forth so as to repeatedly turn soil to the right, usually working clockwise out from the centre. This was achieved by the heavy wheeled ploughs with a mouldboard for turning the sod, introduced in mid-Saxon times, which are apparently being described in a riddle preserved in the tenth-century anthology known as the
Exeter Book
: ‘I go sniffing along … borne on a wagon … I leave green on one side and black on the other’.
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All this had the effect over successive seasons of shifting soil towards the centre of each ridge, accentuating the furrows on either side of it, although a point would have been reached where measures would have had to be taken to prevent the ridges becoming too steep. On some lighter soils, such the Breckland and indeed across much of East Anglia, this conscious ridging up of the arable land seems not to have been employed, but on heavier soils it certainly assisted with surface drainage, the ridge and furrow normally being ploughed across rather than along the contours so as to facilitate run-off. Comparison with village plans of open fields, which survive from the sixteenth century onwards, strongly suggests that in origin a single ridge was equivalent to an individually held strip (or ‘land’), although this correspondence was liable to be obscured over time by farmers’ acquisition of neighbouring ridges to create wider strips. The furrows between the ridges would serve not only as drainage channels but also as dividers between one strip and the next, this being reinforced as the critical time of harvest approached if the corn stood high on the ridges but grew relatively poorly in the wetter furrows: a typical midlands open field, with strips in blocks of furlongs running in different directions, would certainly have displayed a much more ‘striped’ and ‘patchwork quilt’ effect in early summer than an extensive modern cornfield today.
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There are, however, dangers in leaping to conclusions on all this without supporting documentary evidence. Ridge and furrow which is narrower and
straighter than that described in the previous paragraph is likely to have been created after the middle ages, and as already said even that of medieval origin is left to us in the form it took when it was last ploughed. This might be any time up to the early nineteenth century before the open fields were enclosed prior to conversion to pasture. It might be the later nineteenth century if farmers were concerned to maintain the ridges to aid surface drainage of these pastures. It might even be the twentieth century if there was some short-term ploughing insufficient to eradicate the ridges altogether. Cheshire’s pastoral farmers in the 1840s are known to have created small extra ridges down the middle of the furrows, so as to improve the run-off of water, or to ‘split the ridge’ with an extra furrow down the centre, techniques which can still be observed in the surface of the county’s pastures today, as in the old Town Field area of Tilston, where arable strips survived till the late eighteenth century.
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Nevertheless, whatever alterations may subsequently have been made to the ridges and furrows, their underlying medieval pattern remains and serves as important evidence both of the lengths of strips and of the extent and distribution of former open arable farming (
Figure 2
). Even where ridge and furrow has now disappeared – a victim of deep ploughing or of deliberate flattening to ease the harvesting of a grass crop – traces of headlands sometimes survive; vertical aerial photographs, notably a survey by the RAF in 1947, are also available as excellent evidence of the former extent of ridge and furrow. But – to reinforce the point – caution is needed when interpreting all this. On the one hand, we cannot assume that all the ridge and furrow in a particular locality was in use as ploughed strips at the same time. On the other, without documentary evidence we cannot know how far the strips were worked in common.
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Figure 2: Ridge and Furrow near Wigston Parva (Leicestershire)
. Melting snow accentuates the broad, reverse-S ridge and furrow characteristic of medieval open fields, near where Watling Street (now the A5) crossed the Fosse Way. In the foreground, a headland serves to terminate the ridges and furrows, which take advantage of natural gradients to facilitate surface drainage.