11. The Planned Countryside

 

At the end of the last post, I described the failing agriculture and the dramatic fall in population in the 1300s. Recovery took a long time but led to the demise of the open fields of the 'Champion' countryside and both positive and negative 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 the oldest timber-framed houses in the villages, they usually only date back to the 1400s -1600. 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. Instead, it was more profitable to rent the land out to others,  often their former serfs. The word 'farmer' is derived from the medieval Latin 'firmarius', 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. Sheep rearing requires enclosed fields but less labour.

Overall, many people found themselves better off from all this. A new landowning class grew as the effective control swathes of land passed from the aristocracy to the new landowners. Many profited further when Henry VIII sold off the monasteries' estates. However the poorer class, who could not afford to rent land, were marginalised. Fewer people were needed to till the remaining arable land. Communities that had been based on co-operation, fractured. 

What? Me?

How could those gormless woolly beasts become the catalyst for such radical change? Sheep had always been an important part of the English economy but from the late Middle Ages to the Industrial Revolution, they were as central to it as iron and coal became later. The sheep were raised for wool rather than meat, and this together with ancillary industries like fulling, napping, dyeing and weaving, fuelled the economy in general and trade in particular. 

It radically changed the landscape in a process known as 'Enclosure'. Until then, 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 smallholdings were incorporated into larger farms while the old large fields were 'enclosed' into smaller ones, fenced and hedged for livestock. All this was driven by private endeavour. In contemporary jargon, the countryside was being privatised. 

In places, this was driven by shared interest and agreement or by individuals enclosing land  they had been using anyway. 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? 

Where did those profits go? As mentioned earlier, the houses in the villages usually date back to then. Increasing wealth resulted in better and more substantial buildings with survived better. 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. 

The counterpoint is that you almost never see the survival of the hovels of the poor. But they were not entirely cast aside. The new 'Poor Laws' offered a meagre subsistence to the dispossessed and impoverished as part of a social system that endured for several centuries. 

Medieval Sheep Farming

Of course there was a political angle to all of this. English monarchs did not enjoy unfettered authority and were often caught between the hereditary 'Lords' and the 'Commons'. After some debate, even the latter increasingly represented the interests of land and property owners rather than the population as a whole. These conflicting interests were one of the causes of 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. From Henry VIII onwards, many of them issued frequent but usually ineffective rules and proclamations to reign in the more egregious land seizures and Enclosures. But when it came to protecting the rights of larger property owners, including Oliver Cromwell himself, 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, monied interests could secure 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. 

Initially the'Enclosures were haphazard. The open countryside had always been riven by 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 'Drove Road', that is a testament to how far the animals had to walk!  Apparently geese were sometimes given socks to protect their feet as they trudged miles to the market and their doom.

As larger scale farming began to predominate, more organisation was required. While there was no clear and universal pattern to the early Enclosures, the 'Planned' landscape that finally 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. I suspect many of the straight roads fancifully attributed to the Romans, actually date back to the Enclosures. 

If you want more detail on the story of sheep farming in England, check this link: Sheep farming in England. Or, better still, try my two Suffolk tours. Link: Bike Routes

Here are some illustrations of the changes. 

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, a deserted hamlet mentioned in my previous post. Note the regular layout proposed for the fields. If you want the countryman's view of it all, try this: Link: Agricultural Change

 

  

Enclosures Plan, Wingrave

The pace and extent of change varied a lot in different areas. In the early 1700s, Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, who was also a journalist, highlighted the woolly wealth in both the Clay Vales and the Cotswolds. (He also admiringly noted the religiosity of people in Great Yarmouth!). 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. However in many other areas most of the land wasn't enclosed until the early 1800's.

An Enclosure Act

By Defoe's time, basic agricultural techniques had improved, contributing rising incomes and, for some, profits. England was more agriculturally productive than much of Europe. It now increasingly looked to adopt new ideas on animal husbandry, improving crop yields, drainage and transport, from the even more productive Dutch, . Some of those field drains you can still see have been there for a long time!

'Dutch' Drains

A good example is the impact of Enclosure and these 'improvements' on the communities around Otmoor, near Bicester in Oxfordshire, where the local population had adjusted to life in the common land of the marshes, so when plans were made to drain them in the early 1800s, they rioted. 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

Otmoor and the adjacent villages provide a good example of the changes in the landscape. 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, typical of the 'Ancient' countryside described in the next post 12. 

Otmoor

Beckley

To the east a similar geometric layout of fields can be seen in the aerial view of Little Cornard near Sudbury in Suffolk.

Suffolk

The switch from collective to individual endeavour and land ownership had other surviving impacts on the layout of the countryside. As farming became less of a collective endeavour, it made it more convenient for people to live on their own parcel of land instead of in a hamlet or village. In broad terms this is the pattern you see in the planned countryside today, with many long-standing isolated farmhouses. Villages increasingly ceased to house the active farming population and became the local service centres they are today. 

Aylesbury Vale: Enclosed & Planned Fields

A particular and insidious form of Enclosure was practised 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, and even more if you wander on foot, especially in areas within a day's ride from London.

Many literally rose and fell with the fortunes of their owner. Most were substantially rebuilt over time, while others were later flattened to provide land to house the expanding population. Stonor Park near Henley, shown below, is a good example of a truly ancient survivor. It dates back to the 1200s and is the ancestral home of Baron Comoys, whose family's Catholic fate led to fluctuating fortunes and thus fewer '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 but less ancient houses. 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. 

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, set in a park created by moving the entire village, leaving only the church behind. The Manor has been massively extended and remodelled several times since. It 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 our region and middle England. 

In 1540, John Leland, the 'father of English local history', remarked on the extent of sheep pasture in the Clay Vales. Much of the South Midlands might have looked similar. He also 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 (12) and which was less affected by Enclosures and other changes. Classic examples include the irregular fields and patchy woodland of the Chilterns and the land flanking the Thames near Newbury, while Hertfordshire is a mixture of both the planned and ancient. What a perfect segue!