The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (9 page)

Although the focus here has been on the extensive and relatively well-studied fens north of Cambridge, a similar story could be told about fenlands in other parts of the country, such as Axholme in north Lincolnshire, the Lancashire and Cumberland mosses, the Norfolk Broadland and the Somerset Levels. Reclamation through drainage schemes proceeded apace: for example, Southlake moor in the Somerset levels was reclaimed by Glastonbury Abbey in the thirteenth century, as were parts of Pilling Moss (Lancashire) by Cockersand Abbey. Peat-digging was a major activity in the Broadland – much to the profit of the major landholder St Benet’s Abbey, Holme – and this has left us the ‘Norfolk broads’, with their ragged edges along the sides of the former trenches, as the flooded legacy; almost 20 million cubic metres of peat are estimated to have been dug from the Broads by the early fourteenth century, after which the activity declined.
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Axholme was another area noted for this, with Thornton Abbey (Lincolnshire) prominent in the enterprise; the droveways which extend into the fen within long narrow parishes such as Ousefleet and Swinefleet were in origin the access-ways to these former peat-diggings. As in the Cambridgeshire fens, so in Axholme, many farmers had very small holdings but with access to other resources, including fish and fowl, they were (according to a later account) ‘very happy respecting their mode of existence’.
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Marshlands and fenlands did change in the later middle ages. Despite their protecting banks, marshes were affected by rising sea-levels, first apparent from a ‘super-surge’ in December 1287 which had a catastrophic effect on the Netherlands (where the Zuider Zee developed its present form as a result) but which also hit east Norfolk and Romney in particular. Overall, there was the same trend towards greater emphasis on pastoral farming as in much of the country: the accounts for the marshland manor of Wisbech Barton (Cambridgeshire), for example, show the Bishop of Ely increasingly reliant on income from sheep rather than grain production as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries wore on.
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Reduced population also affected the availability of labour to keep banks and ditches in good repair and this, allied to widespread confusion over who was responsible – lords, peasants, neigh-bouring settlements – contributed to an apparent increase in disputes and complaints on this score. The competing interests of fishers and fowlers who wanted to let water in and farmers who hoped to keep it at bay only made things worse. A remedy was sought through the periodic authorization by the crown of Commissions of Sewers, normally local landowners who were to order the construction, repair and maintenance of drainage works, if necessary by levying a tax, although these seem to have had only a limited impact. The General Sewers Act of 1531 acknowledged that existing provisions were
‘none of them … sufficient remedy’, and empowered commissioners to enact local legislation ‘after the laws and customs of Rumney marsh in the county of Kent or otherwise by any ways and means’.
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The basic problem was that long-term drainage improvements required concerted effort and major capital investment. The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s did not help matters, since it removed from the scene some major landowners who could offer a co-ordinated approach. However, it would be unfair to suggest that grand enterprises had never been undertaken. The remains of sea banks, for example, can readily be found in the marshland landscapes as indicators of large-scale land reclamation schemes from late-Saxon times onwards: there are good surviving examples of such banks representing medieval intakes from the Wash in Lincolnshire, at Wrangle, Lutton and near Gedney Drove End, and also in Norfolk, where in the villages of West Walton and Walsoken the communal obligation to repair the sea bank, at a rate of several feet per annum for every acre held, is recorded in 1348. Elsewhere, in the Cambridgeshire fens, Morton’s Leam, apparently built about 1490 on the initiative of the local divine John Morton, still runs today as an artificial channel alongside the River Nene from a point east of Peterborough to Guyhirn: an early attempt to hasten the flow of river-water to the sea to prevent it flooding surrounding farmland (
Figure 5
). This was the principle taken up again in the great drainage schemes of the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, in Axholme and in Cambridgeshire, during the seventeenth century. Yet these fenland drainage schemes have deprived us of a bountiful and distinctive landscape which now survives, imperfectly, only in pockets such as Wicken Fen (Cambridgeshire), Redgrave and Lopham Fen (on the Norfolk-Suffolk border), and Thorne Waste (Yorkshire). The loss of the fenland meres, such as Whittlesey Mere near Peterborough, described in Domesday Book as hosting fishing boats belonging to the Abbots of Ramsey, Peterborough and Thorney, and still over 600 hectares in extent in 1786 when it was home to summer regattas and winter skating, is particularly regrettable. This was drained between 1851 and 1853, an enterprise which caused the surrounding peat to dry out and sink, with the result that nearby Holme Post is, at nearly 3 metres below sea level, claimed to be the lowest land point in England: a dubious distinction which hardly compensates for what has disappeared.
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Figure 5: Morton’s Leam near Whittlesey (Cambridgeshire)
. This 20-kilometre channel, diverting water from the River Nene east of Peterborough, was initiated by John Morton, successively Bishop of Ely and Archbishop of Canterbury in the late fifteenth century. The first major project to drain the fens since Roman times, it still contributes to the overall drainage network.

As with other resources, discussion of the coverage of woodland in Domesday Book is bedevilled by different measurement systems. However, despite some woodland being described in acres, some by linear measures and some in terms of feeding swine, an authoritative estimate by Oliver Rackham suggests that about 15% of England’s surface was wooded in 1086: coverage ranging from less than 4% in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and Cornwall to over 30% in Staffordshire and Worcestershire and possibly 70% in the Weald. The national figure should be compared with estimates of 33% woodland cover in the late sixth century and perhaps only 10% by the mid-fourteenth.
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These figures are a reminder of growing pressure on a precious resource. ‘Assarting’ – bringing land into cultivation, usually through the clearing of woodland or scrub – was the stuff of everyday life for over 700 years prior to the Black Death and an activity the crown was content to profit from, rather than prohibit, when it took place within the confines of a royal forest. But cutting down trees and then failing to proceed to cultivate the land – probably because removing the stumps was far harder than the initial felling – was frowned upon as ‘waste’. Henry II’s treasurer, Richard fitz Nigel, wrote that:

if woods are so severely cut that a man, standing on the half-buried stump of an oak or other tree, can see five other trees cut down round about him, that is regarded as ‘waste’, which is short for ‘wasted … an offence, even
in a man’s own woods … considered so serious that he … must all the more suffer a money penalty proportionate to his means.
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It is this which seems to lie behind occasional references to ‘wasted wood’ (
silva vastata
) in the Essex folios of Domesday Book and to the sums levied from those who had caused ‘waste forest’ – damage to woods within the king’s forest – by Henry II’s exchequer.
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All these entries do, however, cover different types of woodland reflecting diverse management practices, and in places these distinctions are still recognizable today.

There was little or no ‘natural’ woodland (wildwood) left in England by the Norman Conquest: ‘natural’ in the sense that, having regenerated after the Ice Age (mostly as small-leaved lime, oak, hazel, ash and elm, plus alder in wet low-lying areas) it had not been influenced by human activity. The last such wildwood to survive may have been in the Forest of Dean, and even this did not outlast the thirteenth century.
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Virtually all the woodland of Domesday Book – and all woodland anywhere in England by 1300 – was there because of a conscious decision to retain and manage it as a resource. On the other hand, somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the woodland recorded in 1086 is thought to have been ‘primary’, that is the direct descendant of the post-Ice Age prehistoric woodland, rather than ‘secondary’, the result of planting or regeneration on ground previously cleared and put to alternative use. Where those who felled such ‘primary’ woodland to bring land into cultivation left narrow belts as field-boundaries, they were effectively preserving portions of it and for this reason hedgerows composed of ‘primary’ woodland survive to this day, especially among the irregularly shaped fields of formerly wooded areas such as the Arden district of Warwickshire and the Kent and Sussex Weald.
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‘Secondary’ woodland may sometimes be recognized by consulting early maps, which allows the first record of its appearance to be dated, or by the presence of ridge and furrow within the wood showing its former cultivation. It may also be necessary to use pollen analysis to establish the matter: it is this technique which has led to the conclusion that there are very few woods in chalk or limestone districts of southern England which were not preceded by a phase when the countryside was largely open. The concept of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ needs to be distinguished in turn from that of ‘ancient’ woodland, a term applied to woods in continuous existence since 1600. But whatever its origins, the presence today of a wood which existed in the sixteenth century or earlier is of obvious interest, not least because of the distinctive flora associated with this habitat. Studies under different soil conditions of ‘ancient woodland indicator’ plants, such as small-leaved lime and wild service among the trees, and dog’s mercury, wood anemone, oxlip,
herb paris and lily of the valley among other flora, have established that they are not uniformly reliable across the whole of England (not all grow in every region in any case), but a cluster of such plants is at least a starting point for enquiry into the longevity of a wood. At Swithland (Leicestershire) there is a good, well-studied, example of an ancient wood which contains many of these indicators, even though part of it is clearly ‘secondary’ in origin, as shown by the ridge and furrow in its northern and south-eastern portions.
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The Domesday commissioners were not, of course, concerned with the niceties of how woodland came about, but when they recorded it they normally had one of two types in mind. One was coppiced woodland, managed to ensure a constant supply of rapidly regenerating, easily collected wood – termed ‘underwood’ and used mostly for fuel alongside fencing, toolmaking and the wattle of timber-framed buildings. A tract of woodland was divided into sections, with the trees in each section being cut back to their stumps (‘stools’) in rotation; from each stool there would be a vigorous regrowth of sprouts (‘poles’) which would then be harvested after an interval which in medieval times was usually of four to eight years, in places much more. At Bradfield Woods (Suffolk), where coppicing has been recorded since 1252, the poles are now cut every eight to ten years (
Figure 6
). Coppicing was normally managed, in practice, as coppice-with-standards, whereby certain trees were allowed to grow for many decades towards their full height without being coppiced, eventually being felled for use mostly in buildings, as rafters and timber frames. Another practice was pollarding, the trees being periodically cut some 1.8 metres or more above ground and allowed to sprout in the same way as those which were coppiced; this had the disadvantage that the harvesting of the regrowth was more laborious but the advantage that the sprouts were out of reach of grazing animals. For this reason, pollarded trees were often found in deer parks and on the edges of woods adjacent to an area of pasture. All this can still be seen not only at Bradfield but also at Hayley Wood near Longstowe (Cambridgeshire), where there are interpretative panels to explain the processes involved.
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