12 The Planned Countryside

 

At the end of the last post, I described the reasons from the slow demise of Champion landscapes and the failing agriculture and dramatic fall in population in the 1300s. Recovery took a long time but it wasn't all bad news. 

Over time it all led to two major and more positive changes in rural society. Firstly, the reduced workforce was in a position to demand better wages. There is a visible impact of that. If you look at those lovely timber framed houses, the oldest usually date back to the 1400s -1500s. There are very few ordinary houses earlier than that. (See my post on Cottages. Link: The Olde Country Cottage).

Secondly, many landlords found that they could no longer profit from using the peasantry to farm their land for them. Instead, they found it less troublesome and more profitable to rent out the land to others (often their former serfs)  who were thus incentivised to improve their own lot. In fact the word 'farmer' is derived from the medieval Latin 'firmarius' which is someone who rents, not farms. 

'Working for the Man'. 

Another response to changing circumstances in the rural economy was a radical increase in sheep farming. Initially this could be bad news for the rural poor. Not only did the landowners need fewer shepherds than labourers in the fields, but it necessitated the creation of enclosed fields, commons and waste lands. You might well ask, how could those gormless woolly beasts be an agent of profound change? 

What? Me?

In fact it is hard to over-emphasise the pivotal role of sheep in all of this, but although they had always been reared, from medieval to Georgian times they were as central to the economy as iron and coal extraction was to the Industrial Revolution. One legacy is the drove roads, minor roads, byways or rough tracks used to take sheep to the markets in London and the South.  When you come across a 'Welsh Road' or 'Welsh Lane', that is testament to how far the animals had to walk!    

They were primarily kept for wool rather than meat, and fuelled both the domestic and export  economies for centuries, involving not just the collection but (especially in the eastern counties) all the ancillary industries like fulling, napping, dyeing and weaving. It radically changed the landscape. If you ever wonder why small villages sometimes sport grand churches, the answer is usually that someone was investing in improving their chance of enjoying life in the hereafter. If you want a bit more detail on the story of sheep farming in England, check this link: Sheep farming in England. Or better still, try my two bike routes in Suffolk.

  

By now, changes in the country landscape would have been profound. Before the enclosures, little of the old lowland landscape with its communally farmed, wide open ‘strip farming’ fields, would have been obstructed by woodland, let alone a clutter of easily visible boundaries. All that changed as the old large fields were parcelled up into smaller ones, more reliant on private endeavour and using hedges and fences. In contemporary jargon, the countryside was being privatised. 

In places this was driven by shared interest and agreement or by individuals enclosing land that they had been using anyway. Fields with animals needed fencing and changes in the wider agricultural economy begged a response, but powerful landowners inevitably played a leading role. Why let a good plague go to waste when profits could be turbo-charged by evicting the tenants and focusing instead on profitable wool production? This link to a record of events in 1488 tells of the fate of Burston near Aylesbury, whose traces can still be seen and are pictured below.  Link: The Enclosure of Burston

Deserted Burston

But again, the pace and extent of change varied across the region. The 'Ancient'  countryside which I will describe in the next post seems to have been less affected. In 1540 John Leland, the 'father of English local history' remarked on the extent of sheep pasture in the Clay Vales and noted that the Chilterns were still mostly wooded. Large parts of Berks, Herts and the West Suffolk valleys probably were too. But I doubt that he would have seen as much of a change in the Wessex Downs, which had been popular with sheep and relatively clear of trees since the Late Stone Age, or in the pastoral countryside that still survives on higher ground in Mid Bucks. 

In the early 1700s, Daniel Defoe (the author of Robinson Crusoe) also referred to the woolly wealth in the both the Clay Vales and the Cotswolds, when there was a much greater interest in improving the profits to be made from more general husbandry and arable farming. But then he also admired the religiosity of the population of Great Yarmouth! It makes you wonder......! 

The picture below is the Enclosures Plan for Wingrave, just east of Burston. If you want the countryman's view of it all, try this: Link: Agricultural Change

 

  

Enclosures Plan, Wingrave

The the changes usually required a measure of persuasion, by fair means or foul, so things could move slowly. After the Civil War in the late 1600's, you could get an Act of Parliament to speed things up and could sometimes permit the enclosure of whole parishes. These came with conditions aimed at ensuring a degree of equity but were generally more responsive to landowner interests. 

The pace of change varied a lot. By that time enclosure was well underway in some places.  In Oxon, by the time Parliament had got their hands on the process, one third of the county was already enclosed. But in many other areas the majority of the land wasn't enclosed until the early 1800's.

An Enclosure Act

At the same time an increasing interest in Dutch agricultural techniques and a drop in the price of wool relative to corn stimulated an interest in further improvements, mainly in the form of better transport and drainage schemes (some of those field drains you can still see have been there for a long time!), but also new approaches to animal husbandry and improving crop yields. 

'Dutch' Drains

A good example is Otmoor, near Bicester in Oxfordshire, where the local population had adjusted to life in the common land of the marshes, and in the early 1800's rioted to hold up plans to drain them.  This gave rise to the famous rhyme: The law locks up the man or woman /  Who steals the goose off the common  / But leaves the greater villain loose / Who steals the common from the goose.

The Otmoor Riots

While there was no clear and universal pattern to the early enclosures, the 'Planned' landscape that emerged later was much more geometrical where possible, with bounded fields in single ownership, fewer footpaths and more wider and straighter roads, sometimes in a loose grid. 

Most of the planned countryside in the region lies beyond the chalk hills but as ever there is no single pattern. For instance, the farms in the open Berkshire Downs tended to be long strips from the high ground into the valleys. The logic of the arrangement was persistent but the organisation of the farms would have changed not least because much of the land once used for rough grazing is now cropped. 

The reduced emphasis on collective endeavour meant that it was more convenient for people to build their farmhouse on their own parcel of land than to remain in a hamlet or village. In broad terms this is the pattern you see today, with many long-standing isolated farmhouses and still more built on the site of earlier dwellings. Villages increasingly become local service centres. 

Aylesbury Vale: Enclosed & Planned Fields

A particular form of enclosure was often the most insidious, namely the growing number of large estates owned by the aristocracy, the 'landed gentry' or the newly wealthy. Initially these often comprised a large manor house and farm with some parkland. You will see lots of them from the road in areas  in areas within a horse ride from London and even more if you wander on foot. 

Many literally rose and fell with the fortunes of their owner. Most were substantially rebuilt over time, while others were flattened to provide land for the towns. Stonor Park near Henley, shown below, is a good example of a survivor, where the fluctuating fortunes of its owners reduced the number of 'improvements'. Unusually, it is sometimes open to visitors. 

Stonor Park : A late Medieval Manor

In London's outer orbit you can find even more palatial houses, many of which originated rather later. Places like Blenheim, Wotton, Woburn and Stowe sit in vast tracts of parkland, often fashioned as romanticised versions of the natural landscape in the style made famous by Capability Brown. Some were 'recreationally' farmed, as they are now. They were not founded on virgin land. 

Blenheim 

In 1786 two future Presidents of the United States, Adams and Jefferson, visited some of these great houses. They pronounced them beautiful but were disgusted by how they were financed!  As usual, the peasants often paid the price. Dispossession by greedy landowners was common. Villages were destroyed and peoples livelihoods ruined to make room for them. 

A good example is Glympton on my 'Highs and Lows of Cherwell' cycle route. It's  predecessor was a 1500's Manor House, with the park created by moving the entire village while leaving the church behind. It has been massively extended and remodelled several times since. It was recently bought by the King of Bahrain from Prince Bandar, the former head of the Saudi Intelligence Agency. Hmm.  

Glympton House & Park 

The enclosures and the planned countryside they engendered form the basis of what you see today in much of middle England and in our region. To keep each post to a length just about digestible on a phone, I will cover some of the other changes that followed in post 14 of this series

Elsewhere Ancient countryside predominates in many places. Classic examples might be the irregular fields and patchy woodland of the Chilterns and the land flanking the Thames near Newbury. Much of Hertfordshire has extensive examples of both.  

The area around Otmoor and the adjacent villages provide a good example. In the map extracts below you can see how the enclosures on Otmoor were followed by a drainage scheme. The footpaths are recent, created when the area became a nature reserve. In contrast in neighbouring Beckley, situated on a ridge a mile to the south, there is the jumble of small fields, copses and commons that are typical of the 'Ancient' countryside that will be described in the next post 13. 

Otmoor

Beckley

To the east a similar geometric layout of fields can be seen in the pic below, firstly in the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire and then of Little Cornard near Sudbury in Suffolk.

Oxfordshire 

Suffolk

What a perfect segue! I can move on to the next post Ancient Countryside.