The W G Hoskins Lecture 2005

‘Midland Peasants: how farming made the medieval landscape’ presented by Dr. Tom Williamson.

The Sixteenth Hoskins Lecture.

Academics do not usually refer to the views of other historians as “tosh’, or call their theories ‘bizarre’, but Dr Tom Williamson was making a case and was prepared to trash the opposition in doing so. He was interested in the contrast between woodland and champion landscapes (he preferred this nomenclature to Oliver Rackham’s ‘ancient’ and ‘planned’ countryside), the later with its open fields surviving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until swept away by Parliamentary enclosure, and the former with a more ancient feel, a different and more irregular settlement pattern with fewer nucleations, more interesting hedges and more woodland. Many historians had tried to explain these differences in the past. In the early twentieth century, some had attributed them to cultural or ethnic factors (this is where “tosh’ came in); later historians had looked at social, economic or cultural factors, and Tom Williamson picked out Joan Thirsk’s seminal article on the open fields in the 1960s as being particularly significant.

He made a general point about the chronology being different in different areas, but began with the now proved fact that nucleated villages and open fields did not arrive in England with the Anglo-Saxon invaders. In Northamptonshire Glenn Foard and David Hall had shown that the process of nucleation and the laying out of the open fields could be dated to the middle-Saxon, but elsewhere others thought this had happened in the late-Saxon period. Joan Thirsk’s article had put forward a date in the early medieval period for the development of regular open fields. She had seen this as the result of population growth leading to the subdivision of holdings, and also the sharing out of newly assarted land. All this would reduce the area of grazing available, necessitating a more efficient use of marginal grazing; therefore intermingled strips would inevitably lead to the communal organization of the fields. In the 1980s Campbell had criticized this model because it did not allow for the ‘Grundy factor’ (only ‘Archers’ aficionados will understand this reference). He saw the influence of strong lordship as being vital to the process.

Tom Williamson’s area was south-East East Anglia, Essex, Hertfordshire and Leicestershire. He entered several strong caveats that the boundaries between the two landscapes were blurred, and the types intermixed in places. Where nucleated settlements existed, they were not always ‘new’ – sometimes they were what Christopher Taylor had called ‘polyfocal’, the result of several small vills coalescing. Also he warned that ‘champion’, in the seventeenth as in the twenty-first century, could mean many different things: it could mean ‘wall-to-wall arable’, with ridge and furrow to the boundaries of the township, or it could mean the landscape of south Buckinghamshire, where the arable was concentrated round nucleated settlements, but there was extensive rough grazing as well, giving rise to typical ‘sheep-corn husbandry’.

Similarly, ‘woodland landscapes’ could refer to several different types of agrarian organisation, though they would all have a dispersed settlement pattern. The first, occurring in northern East Anglia, had much settlement on the edges of commons; the churches tended to be isolated, and there had been open fields, though they seem to have disappeared early through piecemeal enclosure. The strips in these town-ships tended to be clustered rather than scattered over the whole, making it easier for individuals to enclose. The second, occurring in southern East Anglia, had scattered settlements, some ‘greens’, usually quite small, and some nucleations. These differences appear to have been developing in middle-to-late Saxon times. Archaeology confirms that, in the late Saxon period, there was a drift of settlement to the greens and commons.

Tom Williamson queried whether the creation of the open fields was really driven by demography and a crisis of resources. Domesday Book shows that East Anglia had the highest population in England, and the strength of lordship (as shown inversely in Darby’s map of the frequency of free tenures) does not seem to match the division between the two landscapes. He graphically described how a disastrous attempt to cultivate heavy clay soil in wet weather on his own small-holding had renewed an interest in the mechanics of farming and in the relationship between soils and landscapes. He showed how changes in landscape do correspond to changes in soil-type, but stressed that though this is true locally and regionally it is not true nationally.

Both Thirsk and Kerridge had noted that light land was always champion: here, intermingled strips appear to have developed early. Possibly the effect of sharing resources of water restricted settlement sites, leading to the need to allocate land in bits. Certainly the need to fold sheep on the arable at night would lead to the communal organisation of agriculture – it would be impossibly time-consuming to do this individually, as Kerridge had pointed out; in the Kerridge model soils became the determining factor. In rather the same way the Orwins’ study had seen the creation of nucleated vills and their open fields as an inevitable result of co-aration, with farmers coming together to create a full ox- team for the plough. It would be easier to co-operate in this way if farmers lived in the same settlement and followed the same time-scale.

Tom Williamson’s sticky clay soil experience caused him to think about the particular problems inherent in cultivating such soils. They are susceptible to water-logging and puddling if worked when too wet, and ni fact in most years the windows of opportunity for ploughing in the winter are very small, possibly only a week. Therefore, he saw this as the crucial factor in the development of nucleated settlements and open fields: if there was only a week to get the plough team together and out into the fields, it made sense ot live in close proximity. He pointed out that ridge and furrow which survived into the twentieth century was al on clay soils; it survived where it had been under permanent pasture, and it had been so because it was more suitable for pasture than for ploughing.

The other bottleneck of the farming year was the hay harvest, when it was vital to respond to good weather with all available labour. In the Midlands, meadowland was in fairly large blocks so living in villages made sense. Tom Williamson referred to Bruce Campbell’s book, which had taken information from Inquisitiones post Mortem to show that champion landscapes had more meadow; in woodland, hay meadows were less common and more scattered. Of course not all river valleys necessarily produced good hay: in north Norfolk it was difficult to create hay meadows, but instead there were extensive woods to use for leafy hay, and as wood-pasture. This explains the drift of the farmers to settle by the common-edge in order to have access to these resources for their animals.

Tom Williamson stressed that most historians generally are not interested in the practical problems of growing and getting food, unlike himself, with muck on his hands and mud on his boots. His own experience, leading him to focus on soil structure and behaviour as determinants of human action, made him focus on the key bottlenecks of the farming year, the winter or spring ploughing, and the hay harvest, as being the key factors which forced midland farmers into communally organised open fields. This was a lively lecture, with lots to look at and think about, and a strong case forcefully made.

From an original report by Deborah Hayter.