10 .The Medieval Countryside

    

In the last post, I described the settlement of the region after the Romans left. I will now turn back to my main focus which is the creation of our rural landscape. This is very general; there is more local detail on the posts on my bike tours in the regional countryside. Bike Tours 

Landscape of Northern Home Counties 

A useful but very crude simplification is that there are two 'typical' types of landscape hereabouts. 

Today's predominant today, particularly in the clay lowlands and rolling countryside to the north of London, shown in the lighter shade in the map above, is a 'Planned Countryside' of large and often rectangular arable fields served by a loose grid of roads. In many places, this supplanted a medieval layout known as 'Champion' landscape, which was based on open, collectively farmed fields. 

The other is the 'Ancient Countryside', or 'Engliscan Gesithas' if you fancy a bit of linguistic cosplay. Examples include the wooded hills, darker on the map above, meadows, woodlands and the old estates. While few places are untouched, there are more relics and echoes of its past and the layout owes more to serendipity. 

It would be handy if this was a neat distinction, but on the ground everything is blurred. In the pic of Lambourn below, the use of the downland is planned, while the layout of the village and the land around it reflects history and happenstance. Different places developed and changed in different ways at different times. No single magic thread can be traced through the centuries, so you are left with some guesswork. 

In this case the village would have grown up in the sheltered valley around the only reliable water source. The small fields immediately around it are probably memories of the villager's vegetable patches, with the serious arable farming in the larger fields beyond and livestock on nearby Commons and fallow land. Odds on they valued the nearby woodland for fuel. The name suggests that sheep farming might have been important once. As you can see, it isn't now. The main focus is on the crops and in this case, gallops for racehorses. 

Lambourn 

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

My earlier posts deal with prehistory generally. Although there are many 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 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 the foundations of a medieval hovel, a Stone Age enclosure and a random pile of stones. 

I covered the settlement story in the last post with the arrival of the Anglo 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 fit along one side of a tennis court.   

To quickly recap, things didn't start well. 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 a continuing theme!  

In the previous post, I described the scant documentary evidence we have for these events. No one could chillax amid the chaos and decline. 

Gildas

In the years that followed, the rural vista would have been a threadbare population of subsistence farmers. The climate had deteriorated, trade was limited, and the hefty ploughs favoured by the Romans had been superseded by light 'scratch' ploughs, which were relatively ineffective on the heavy clay soils frequently found hereabouts. 

An ard or 'scratch' plough

These people left few traces. They don't seem to have been keen to live in the vacated 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. 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 to around 600 AD and things had improved. Two powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Wessex and Mercia, had 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 expanded again, it became a landscape of dispersed farms and hamlets. More fertile land was occupied, woodland clearance restarted and 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 his great PR with real achievements. From then on, we have progressively more archaeological, genetic, place name and documentary evidence. 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

Some of these places grew and some shrank, but many have survived to this day. 

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 landlord with hereditary rights. In short, it was messy. The detailed arrangements varied across regions, but a common factor was an obligation to pay a tithe or render service to a ruler if called upon. That might be produce, goods, military, or some other service, such as building those ramparts. 

Early Medieval Village

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 three fields would typically 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, giving 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 the 'Champion' countryside i referred to earlier, and it required cooperation. The expense of a team of oxen to draw the ploughs would need to 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, 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 small herd of 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 but because it pre-dates written records, it isn't clear how and when it emerged. I 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 explanatory 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 became moderately prosperous. That was one attraction for the Vikings - there was plenty to loot. 

The population of England may have reached 2m to 3m people, matching the height of the relatively peaceful Roman period and double the number after they left. 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 might have accelerated recently, but is nothing new. 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, 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 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 to pay a rent in kind or a 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 some of his farming for him, thus freeing up a bit more time for him to go on crusade, invade France or party. This Feudalism and its relationship with the Normans was 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 the actual arrangement would likely be much more complex. Many small parcels of land held would be privately and splattered with discreet arrangements for institutions such as the monasteries and Abbeys, 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 a 'Little Ice Age'. There were others later and 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. 

A deterioration in 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, reducing natural fertilisation. As failing harvests led to the deadliest famine in European history, the population was 'rightsized'.

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 inspired Shakespeare's ripping yarn about Henry V, but it provided no benefit to the poor, hungry sods turning sods in the rain-lashed fields.

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. 

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 1300s.  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 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, so 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 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 the north, where you can see old holloways and boundary ditches. They survive because much of the land has always been used as pasture and 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

You can easily detect others at Burston Farm, just south of Aston Abbots and immediately north of Aylesbury. Both are visible on Google Maps aerial photography. 

There are other odd legacies of old farming. In places, you can still see terraces or 'lynchets' on the hillsides, created to wring every last usable acre out of the countryside. More on this in 'Ancient Countryside, two posts hence. 

In the northern part of the home counties and the south Midlands, on land that has not suffered heavy ploughing, you will also sometimes see a pattern of shallow, striped undulations in the fields. They result from the repeated passage of the heavy medieval ploughs, sometimes drawn by up to eight oxen.  These 'ridge and furrow’ markings often terminate in banks of earth known as 'headlands'. 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 high ground north of Haddenham. 

Those ploughs had the turning circle of a lorry and tended to veer off a straight line, resulting in curves in the strips and boundaries in those huge fields were sometimes 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 and related to the deserted village referred to earlier.  

North of Berryfields, Aylesbury

In the changing landscape one layer blankets another, like snow. Often, the relics of the past are now only evident 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. 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 (11) of this series, I will cover how a lot of the open 'Champion' fields were enclosed to create what we now call 'planned' countryside and shaped the landscape we see in many places today. 

Equally, many places didn't lend themselves to either the Champion or the later Planned system, for instance 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 the subsequent post 12.