12 The Planned Countryside

 

At the end of the last post, I described the slow demise of Champion landscapes, the failing agriculture and the dramatic fall in population in the 1300s. Recovery took a long time but led to 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. You see very few ordinary houses older 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, it was more profitable to simply rent the land out to others,  often their former serfs. The word 'farmer' is derived from the medieval Latin 'firmarius' which is someone who rents, not farms, and the new farmers had more incentive to work to improve their lot.  

'Working for the Man'.

Thirdly, there was a radical increase in sheep farming. Raising sheep involves less effort than growing crops, but it requires the creation of enclosed fields, commons and waste lands. 

Overall, many people found themselves better off as a result of all this. A new landowning class grew as the effective control of a lot of land passed from the aristocracy to the new landowners. Many profited further when Henry 8th sold off the monasteries estates. But the poorer class whose labour was no longer needed to rear sheep, whose supportive communities were fractured and who could not afford to rent land, were marginalised. 

What? Me?

You might well ask, how could those gormless woolly beasts catalysed such radical change. In fact, they had always been an important part of the English economy but from the late Middle Ages to Georgian times they were as central to it as iron and coal extraction were to the Industrial Revolution.  It was the wool rather than meat which fuelled both the economy and trade, 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. 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, and later on smallholdings grabbed for incorporation into larger farms, all 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? 

One result of all this was the Poor Laws, which offered a meagre existence to the dispossesed. 

Others included 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!  And 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 in much the same ways as the billionaires today try to safeguard their future by planning to move into space. 

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.

Of course there was a political angle to all of this. English monarchs did not enjoy unfettered authority and often found themselves caught between the hereditary 'Lords' and the 'Commons' which increasingly represented the interests of land and property owners rather than the population as a whole. Their conflicting interests fuelled the Civil War and the fracturing of the victorious Parliamentary side in the republic that followed it. 

Cromwell the Landowner and Charles 1st

In terms of attempts to protect the interests of the ordinary folk, the monarchs come out of all this quite well. Many of them, from Henry 8th onwards, issued frequent and usually ineffective rules and proclamations to reign in land seizures and enclosures. But when it came to property rights, the House of Commons held sway. 

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

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

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

But again, the pace and extent of change varied across the region. 

In the early 1700s, Daniel Defoe (the author of Robinson Crusoe) also referred to the woolly wealth in both the Clay Vales and the Cotswolds, while 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 pace and extent of change varied a lot in different areas. 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

In 1540 John Leland, the 'father of English local history' remarked on the extent of sheep pasture in the Clay Vales and much of the South Midlands might have looked similar. Elsewhere, the open grassland on the Downs had been relatively clear of trees and grazed by sheep since the Late Stone Age. But he observed that the Chilterns were still mostly wooded and older landscapes survived. He probably would have said the same about large parts of Berks, Herts and the West Suffolk valleys. This is the 'Ancient'  countryside which I will describe in the next post.

Agricultural techniques had improved over time and contributed to rising incomes. England had progressively become more agriculturally productive than much of Europe and now increasingly looked towards the even more efficient Dutch for new ideas on animal husbandry and improving crop yields but also transport and drainage. Some of those field drains you can still see have been there for a long time!

'Dutch' Drains

A good example is of the impact of enclosure and these other changes can be found in Otmoor near Bicester in Oxfordshire, where the local population had adjusted to life in the common land of the marshes, and in the early 1800s 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 from enclosures and agricultural modernisation was much more geometrical, with bounded fields in single ownership, fewer footpaths and more, wider and straighter roads, sometimes in a loose grid. 

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, you can see 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.

Suffolk

The switch from collective to individual endeavour and land ownership had other impacts on the layout of the countryside which are visible today. It made it 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. Villages increasingly ceased to house the active farming population and became the local service centres that they are today. 

Aylesbury Vale: Enclosed & Planned Fields

A particular and insidious form of enclosure was practiced by the growing number of large estates owned by 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 people's livelihoods ruined to make room for them. 

A good example is Glympton on my 'Highs and Lows of Cherwell' cycle route. Its  predecessor was a 1500s 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 and was most recently bought by the King of Bahrain from a Saudi royal who was a former head of their 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 posts 13 & 14 of this series. The former looks at the 'Ancient' countryside that was less affected by enclosures and other changes and which still 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. Hertfordshire is a real mixture of planned and ancient countryside! What a perfect segue!