Pootler

  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. ...

     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.  The predominant landscape 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 a '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....

  Route GPX File    Woolly Money Intro This is a ride through the centres of the medieval wool trade, which was then the flywheel of England’s economy. It starts at Manningtree Station and crosses the undemanding, rolling landscape of South Suffolk, through visibly ancient and once-wealthy market towns and villages, timber framed houses and towering churches. It finishes at Sudbury where a train can take you back to the main line at Marks Tey. Heading for Lavenham, it mostly follows t he valley of the River Brett, a tributary of the Stour, along quiet country roads and although you might think of Suffolk as being very flat, remember you are cycling up a river valley and rivers don't flow uphill. The first two waypoints are shared with my Dedham Vale Route. Zooming In History porn / Medieval wool towns and ancient villages Timber framed houses and supersized churches. Flatford Mill / Constable Country Hadleigh, the old capital of the Viking Guthrum and the Saxon Ealdor...