11 .The Medieval Countryside

    

This is the first in a series of posts aimed at providing some general background on the development of the rural landscape to accompany the local detail the posts on my bike tours in the countryside north of London.

Landscape of Northern Home Counties 

A useful but very crude simplification is that you will find two 'typical' types of rural landscape in the region. Both had their roots in the practices of medieval agriculture. 

The predominant pattern today, in the northern part in particular, is a 'planned' countryside landscape of large rectangular arable. Good examples include the clay lowlands and rolling, open hills to the north of London, lightly shaded in the map above. 

The other is the 'Ancient' countryside which has defied planning and where the layout owes more to serendipity. Examples include the wooded hills which are darker on the map, but also meadows, woodlands and the old estates. 

It would be handy if this was a neat distinction but on the ground everything is blurred. In the pic below, the use of the downland is planned, while around the village it is down to happenstance. Overall, there is far less 'Ancient' than 'Planned' countryside. Different places developed and changed  in different ways at different times. There is no single magic thread which can traced through the centuries so my aim here is to describe each of them separately and leave it to you to decide how much each explains, whatever or wherever you happen to be looking at.

Lambourn 

First though, I want to give you a quick idea of what came before, what has vanished and what can still be seen if you are interested enough to look carefully. 

My earlier posts deal with prehistory generally. Link: The Landscape . Although there are plenty of relics of Roman and Pre-Roman Britain, ranging from hillforts and monuments to roads, the everyday traces of even older farming are well hidden in South East England. In fact they are there, for instance on and around the Wiltshire Downs, but it takes an expert (i.e. not me) to confidently distinguish between a stone age enclosure and a random pile of stones. 

Here, I will start with the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Angle Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries. That isn't actually that long ago. If you could line up all of your forebears since then, they should just fit along one side of a tennis court.   

Life under the Romans had generally been peaceful and comparatively prosperous but around 400 AD they left, taking their odd Gods, pizza ovens and wine with them and leaving only a skeletal and disintegrating administration. in the next two hundred years things took a major turn for the worse. 

Firstly, the sun went on sabbatical after massive volcanic eruptions, causing catastrophic crop failures. Then the first of recurring plagues took a scythe to the population. This had repercussions across Europe and a lot of people were on the move. Problems with migrants in small boats are nothing new. 

The scant documentary evidence we have for these events is mainly thanks to a monk called Gildas whose partial point of view was that God was fed up with the Britons, so he let Saxons and other northern Europeans muscle them out of power and off the better land. But in truth no one could chillax amid the chaos and decline in a country A few centuries later, legends based on the flimsiest of evidence credited King Arthur with resisting, but apparently he didn't survive it either. 

Gildas

By 600 A.D. someone the rural vista would have been a threadbare population riven by poverty and violence. The climate had deteriorated, subsistence farming was again the norm and the hefty ploughs favoured by the Romans had been superseded by light 'scratch' ploughs which were relatively ineffective on the heavy clay soils that are frequently found hereabouts. Trade was limited. 

An ard or 'scratch' plough

The people of the time left few traces. They don't seem to have been keen to live in the vacated but still visible Roman stone-built towns and farms, or even bothered to loot them for building materials. Instead they built timber houses which rotted away leaving us to guess exactly how they lived. Thoughtless lot; for want of clues we drown in ignorance. (Recycling the Roman stonework only became common centuries later. Take a look at the cathedral in St Albans or the buildings around Silchester, all of which reused Roman bricks). 

North Leigh Roman Villa, Oxon

Scroll forward another century or more and two powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Wessex and Mercia, emerged from the fractured mess of southern Britain. Later they were joined by Danes who arrived as raiders but settled in places. Their respective fortunes and territories waxed and waned. If you are interested, you can see the progress in this neat little video.  Link: Engelond

Saxon Subbuteo Team

As things settled down a bit, people took advantage of the empty spaces. As the population started to expand again it became a landscape of dispersed farms and hamlets. More fertile land was occupied, woodland clearance restarted and even more difficult land on the higher ground and in the clay vales was brought into use. These people knew what they were doing, rotating the use of their fields and applying natural fertilisers, mostly dung and sometimes chalk or limestone where the soils were acidic.   

The powerful kings of Wessex proved good at organising things and Alfred the Great in particular matched real achievements with good PR. From then on, we have progressively more archaeological, genetic, place name and documentary evidence to go on. Sadly it is often conflicting, so with that caveat the story goes that laws were drafted and larger towns appeared. 

I am conscious that this post is about the countryside and not the towns, but their fates are entwined, so I will digress. Towns like Buckingham, Oxford and Wallingford (and 28 others!) were fortified against Danish incursions. You can still see the Saxon ramparts at the latter. Yet more were permitted to hold markets, which facilitated trade, services and crafts. . 

Saxon Ramparts at Wallingford

As time passed, some of these places grew and some shrank, but many have survived to this day. It is noticeable that most of them have names derived from Old English although a few seem to be Brittonic. This has fuelled an inconclusive debate about the power relationship between the two peoples. Notions of an wholesale replacement of the Britons seem to be contradicted by genetic evidence. It makes me wonder whether they were relegated to invisible serfdom or just were not as keen on living in villages as the Saxons.  

Early Medieval Village

In the early Saxon period, land ownership was often divided into smallholdings known as hides, with the legal or effective ownership resting with a community, family, individual or a landlord with hereditary rights. In short, it was messy. The detailed arrangements varied across regions but a common factor was an obligation pay a tithe or render  service to a ruler if called upon. This might be produce, goods or service, such as military or for some collective endeavour such as building those ramparts. 

All this time the landscape itself was changing. This was most pronounced in cleared, lowland areas where arable faming predominated. As the population increased, the haphazard pattern of self-sufficient Saxon agriculture slowly evolved into a more collective arrangement underpinned by law and customary practice and aimed at making the best use of land and water resources. It was based on hamlets and villages surrounded by large, open fields.

Three Field System

Around each settlement there might typically be two or later three of these fields together with some communally enjoyed grazing and woodland. Every year two of the fields would be used for a crop of spring or winter wheat or Barley. You might also see oats and in  a few places the beautiful blue flowers of Linseed which was used to make Linen. Each household in the village would be allocated several of the strips on a rotational basis which gave every household a fair share of the better land. Presumably this would be agreed over a warm pint in Ye Olde Saucy Sow.

This is known as 'Champion' countryside and the system required cooperation. The expense of a team of oxen to draw the ploughs would be shared and everyone was involved in the sowing and harvesting. Each household would keep the produce from their own strips and also some livestock on the common and fallow land. Water, which was a problem in some areas, could be used more efficiently. Odds on, most of them would have had a vegetable garden as well. Baldrick needed his turnips. 

Early Medieval Open Fields

For smallholders, co-operation always made sense. It still does. My grandfather had a small Irish hill farm and shared an old tractor and the job of harvesting with neighbours. His crop would mostly be used to feed his few cows. He wasn't exactly an agreeable bloke, so it is a tribute to the early communities that, despite the scope for disagreements among neighbours, they made it work. Some now look back on this as a collectivist nirvana, fine tuned to nature. This requires the rosiest of rosy spectacles. Life on Grandad's smallholding was socially claustrophobic, hard and unforgiving. 

The system was practical rather than compulsory and it isn't clear how it emerged, not least because it pre-dates written records. I can see how it would give most people a fair share of the best land but wonder how they ensured an equally fair share of the work! Now, the only place where it is still (proudly!) practised, is Laxton in Nottinghamshire. Google it or visit; they have a tiny museum next to the pub.  And if you want to see how they manage it, check this link: Laxton Manorial System

Laxton in 1635

Laxton Open Fields Today

King Alfred died around 899 A.D. The subsequent years were tumultuous but I suspect that even though political control in this region changed hands frequently, the pattern of farming didn't change very much and the land become moderately prosperous. The population of England might well have reached 2m to 3m people, double the number when your predecessor looked down from that hill and as many as at the height of the relatively peaceful Roman period. At its simplest the better drained land was used for crops, the valley meadows were enjoyed by the cows, pigs sniffled in the woods, sheep grazed the downland and woodland was tended to provide fuel and building materials.

Nasty Normans

As any skoolboy kno, in 1066 A.D. Duke Bill & His Nasty Normans turned up at Hastings. In the two centuries that followed it seems that God loved the Normans even if the English didn't. This is known as the 'Medieval Warm Period'. Climate change is not new, although the pace of change is. Then, the sun was more inclined to shine, the country continued to prosper for a while and the population grew further, perhaps to 5m. 

To an even greater extent the good land was intensively exploited and marginal and waste land brought into use, even though swathes still survived as Commons and Greens.  Overall, based on the Domesday Book which was compiled in 1086, it has been estimated  that around a third of the land at the time was arable, a third pasture and the remainder was woodland or 'waste'. This doesn't mean that it was entirely useless, but rather that it was scrub, open hillside or marsh.

Domesday Data Collection

As I understand it, the arrival of the Normans didn’t itself change the layout of the countryside or the day-to day management of farming, so much as who profited from it. The old system of ‘free’ farmers holding land in their own right but with obligations to the King or his vassals, was replaced by the feudal system of holding land under a Lord of the Manor or other landowner, to whom there was a more structured and specific obligation of service. 

Under the Norman yoke

This efficient way of gouging the peasantry had actually started earlier. In effect, rather than owning your plot and being periodically press-ganged into nipping off to fight a war, you held your land at the Lord’s pleasure and with the obligation to do to spend some time doing his farming for him, thus freeing up a bit more time for him to go on crusade or invade France. This Feudalism and its relationship with the Normans was a bit like the relationship between the British and slavery. We certainly didn’t invent it, but organised it more thoroughly. 

Revolting Peasants

This wasn't by any means a universal pattern. If you looked at any particular area with the magnifying glass it is likely that the actual arrangement would be much more complex. There would be lots of small parcels of land held privately and splattered with discreet arrangements for institutions such as the monasteries and abbies, the King's own land and the Lord's demesne. (pronounced like 'domain').

All good things come to an end. During the 1300's the climate became colder and wetter as England slowly headed towards  the 'Little Ice Age'. You might have seen pictures of the frozen Thames. The icing on the cake was the Black Death, which arrived in 1348 and did what bubonic plagues usually do, returning intermittently until it culminated in the Great Plague of 1665. 

Where was the King while all this was going on? Apart from a tea break in the worst of the plague years, he was wasting treasure and able bodies fighting the Hundred Years War with the French. Agincourt might have fuelled Shakespeare's ripping yarn but it provided no benefit to the poor, hungry sods turning sods in the rain-lashed fields.

Poor farming practices compounded the problem.  As the population grew, the more fertile land was overused to the point of exhaustion and more was devoted to crops than livestock which reduced natural fertilisation. As failing harvests led to the deadliest famine in European history, the population was 'rightsized'.

Making the best of it

Overall the weather gods, the rats and their passengers, starvation and greedy monarchs possibly halved the population. This had three lasting effects on the countryside. First, it led to the slow demise of the Open Fields System. Second, there was a massive increase in sheep farming. Third, many of those early farms and settlements moved or were deserted. 

This all led to the slow demise of the open 'champion' fields. I will cover what followed and which provides the basis for what we see today, in my next post 12, but firstly want to summarise what can still be seen of this early countryside. Call me a geek, but looking for these floating scraps from the distant past is one of the things I most enjoy doing when I am out and about. 

The villages first. The shadows of the deserted or shrunken settlements can be seen in many places.  They are often misleadingly referred to as 'Plague Villages' but in most cases their demise was not the direct result of the infected, buboe-covered yokels applying boot to bucket; but rather the cacophony of horrors of the period as a whole and the changes seen in the rural economy as it slowly recovered from the horrible 1300's.  Quite simply, there were fewer people to work the land and less need for fields to grow the crops to feed them. 

And you thought Covid was bad!

Also, we shouldn't underestimate the extent to which the medieval settlements adjusted to changing circumstances. Neither the individual dwellings nor the settlement as a whole was seen as permanent and immutable in the way they are now. Necessity or advantage often drove relocation and rebuilding. 

Take a look at the story of Quarrendon, an abandoned village just outside Aylesbury. Link: Quarrendon. Movement & Desertion 

Quarrendon from the air 

In the lower and more fertile areas, what is left of all this early medieval landscape now is just a palimpsest. Modern ploughing is a merciless destroyer of the evidence of the past. But more traces remain on undisturbed pastures and higher ground where many old tracks and boundary markings still exist together with the marks of old building plots. Often a stone built church or manor has survived the decay of the settlement it served, although often in ruins for want of a congregation. Many are marked on the 1:25000 series OS Maps. 

Widford Church, Nr Burford, Oxon

I have waymarked some of these on the cycle routes, but the sites of lost villages are unspectacular and often only discernible as earth-marks, best seen in half-light and/or from a raised vantage point. A hot-air balloon would be perfect if you happen to have one. 

 A great example can be found in the hill behind Quainton in Bucks. To get the picture you really need to leave the bike outside the café / pub and walk over the hill to to the north, where you can see old holloways and boundary ditches. They survive because much of the land is used as pasture and much of it is unsuited to ploughing. The OS map also shows a 'Roman Road' immediately to the east. The pic below shows the traces of the old village together with a moat which presumably surrounded a manor. It is visible from the road past Fullbrook Farm, north of the hill.

Lost Village at FullBrook Farm

There are other odd legacies of old farming. In places you can still see terraces on the hillsides, created to wring every last usable acre out of the countryside. 

In the northern part of the home counties and the south Midlands you sometimes see a pattern of wide stripes in the fields known as 'ridge and furrow’ markings and they often terminate in banks of earth known as 'headlands'. They result from the repeated passage of the heavy medieval ploughs, sometimes drawn by up to eight oxen and survive on land that has not suffered more recent ploughing. The ridges were planted and the furrows provided drainage. 

Heavy 'Carruca' Plough

These can be seen in the pic of the deserted village at Fulbrook Farm above and there is another example in the pic below taken, from memory, on the high ground north of Haddenham. .

Those ploughs had the turning circle of a lorry and tended to veer off a straight line, with the result that the strips and boundaries in those huge fields were often slightly curved. Those curves were fossilised as sinuous boundaries in later fields. I am intentionally pulling a lot of examples from Mid Bucks in case you want to make your own tour, so here is another from Berryfields, just north of Aylesbury. 

North of Berryfields, Aylesbury

 In the changing landscape one layer blankets another, like snow. Often, the relics of the past are now only clear in fields that have remained as pasture or meadow; perhaps an old headland running down the middle of a new and enlarged field, or the stripes of ridge & furrow running under a more recent boundary. Take a look at the pic below. The lynchets have survived because the higher field is now used for pasture. In the field below it, if you zoom in, you can see the old ridge and furrow marks running under the hedge which must have been  created later. 

In the next post 12 of this series, I will cover how a lot of these open 'Champion' fields of the were enclosed to create what we now call 'planned' countryside and shaped the landscape we see in many places today. 

Equally, there were many places that hadn't lent themselves to either the champion or the later Planned system and didn't prove as amenable to enclosure either, for instance the the hills or meadows which had always been best suited to rearing livestock or the small farms or 'assarts' carved out of surviving woodlands. The Chilterns and parts of the Cotswolds are good examples. This is the 'Ancient' countryside, 'ancient' being a relative term in this context as you will see when I describe it in my post 13