History on the Ground

Maurice Beresford

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138187702
• eBook ISBN: 9781317284581
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Taking the evidence of maps and documents, this book, originally published in 1957, describes 6 journeys inthe field: to parish boundaries, Elizabethan villages, the planted medieval towns and to parks of all periods.

Chapter One
Introduction

THE journeys described in this book began in libraries and ended in the open air. The traveller, armed with maps, was sometimes seeking what a document suggested he might find, and sometimes coming back to books and documents in order to explain or confirm what he noticed in the landscape. One fellow-traveller in the history of landscapes has publicly declared that by exploring the English countryside on foot he makes at least one major historical discovery a week. The journeys described in these pages cannot claim to have extended the frontiers of knowledge at this revolutionary rate, but every English historian with an interest in fieldwork is dealing with an inexhaustible source of evidence, more than enough for one man's lifetime.

Field studies such as those in this book have always a mixed character. There is exploration which confirms what documents and books have already suggested; and there is exploration which examines maps and landscapes when documents themselves are lacking, seeking always to call in one technique to supplement the other. With documents, books and travel the historian is thrice armed in his perpetual war against oblivion, and the intellectual journey is always triangular: from field to archives, from archives to libraries and from libraries to the field.

The "field" and the "landscapes" of out-of-doors investigation are not only those of the countryside. The landscape of towns needs the observant and inquiring eye as much as the landscape of earthworks and hedges. A topographical interest is as relevant to urban history as to rural history. Nor are the fields and landscapes which are worthy of historical attention exhausted by the six studies in this book. The present selection of topics omits whole periods of English history. The prehistoric and the Roman enter only as accidental and incidental influences on succeeding landscapes. The industrialization of England in the last two centuries has modified even those rural landscapes which are far from chimneys, but none of the six field studies in this book has for its central theme an historical subject as recent as the industrial revolution.

The theme which unifies the six studies is the bringing of documentary evidence to bear on particular villages, particular fields and particular towns. Among the documents which are used it will be seen that manuscript maps and plans play a large part. By examining the work of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cartographers we are admitted not only to the landscape of the Tudors and Stuarts portrayed on the parchment but to the far older landscape which had not then been completely effaced. From the limited number of such plans surviving we can recognize the historical structure of certain landscapes and then apply our knowledge to the much greater number of towns and villages for which no such early plans survive, and where the landscape itself—in default of other manuscript evidence—will have to be scanned as a document.

The journeys among the open fields and the deserted villages in Chapters 3 and 4 proceed in this way, beginning with Elizabethan maps and ending in the countryside itself. The journey to Elizabethan market-places in Chapter 6 also begins with manuscript plans which are among the earliest ever made of English towns. The second chapter deals with boundaries which were settled many centuries before the first English maps, and here the modern landscape as recorded in the Ordnance Survey plans must afford the principal evidence, although at the end of the chapter we are able to follow the Elizabethan cartographer, Christopher Saxton, along the bounds of a Yorkshire parish for which his manuscript plan has survived. The medieval town-planning which prompted the journeys of Chapter 5 has also left its mark in modern topographical features which can be studied on the ground and in the Ordnance Survey plans; while in Chapter 7 evidence assembled from documents, manuscript maps and printed books is linked with the parks from all periods which are to be found in the English landscape.

Illustrations are a poor substitute for taking the reader and showing him first the old maps and then the modern landscape, but they must suffice. Several of the plans are relevant to more than one chapter: Higham Ferrers, for example, has something to tell us about fields, boundaries, market-towns and parks. Cross references are given in such cases, for the narrative in the text is often closely geared to a particular illustration or figure.

All but one of the seventeen manuscript plans are, it is believed, published here for the first time, and acknowledgment to their owners or custodians is made on page 15.

The photographs are a selection of those taken for record purposes by Clifford Farrar. The choice has inevitably been limited by the weathers and seasons in which the journeys were made. The conditions which they record may also have changed since our visits, for the English landscape of town and country is not a museum. Men will not scruple to grub up a hedge, bulldoze earthworks, lay out aerodromes, build reservoirs and put the landscape to a dozen other uses which alter its shape and remove old landmarks. But it has been always so: landscapes have come and gone in accordance with the ebb or flow of changing economies and fashion. The tide will not halt for the convenience of antiquaries; and economic historians, who earn their bread and butter by chronicling the ebb and flow of seas, are not in a strong position to cast themselves for the role of Canute. If change moves fast across the English countryside its historians must keep pace, and the journeys which follow represent only a few of the rewards which offer themselves to those who take to their feet.

The traditions in which the author has been reared frown on the first person singular: what matters is what the author has to say and not what he is wearing at the time or how his liver feels. By and large, I assent to the tradition, and cheerfully write "the author" and "we" to subdue the interfering ego. Occasionally, however, the following pages will slip into autobiography. After all, the choice of places to visit on these journeys was highly personal, and what was observed on them was also bound to depend on who did the observing. It has been necessary from time to time in the description of the journeys to explain in what season, in what mood and in what company a particular inquiry was carried out. Other seasons, other moods and other company might well produce a different report even from the same observer.

The choice of six subjects has been guided by the wish to make my own journeys the starting point for other people's. I have more than once been placed in the position of being curious about the history of a place or district of England without any previous knowledge of the terrain. I was faced by this mixture of curiosity and ignorance when I moved from the Midlands to Yorkshire in April, 1948, and anyone who first begins to acquire an interest in the history of his own locality will be in the same position. These chapters describe some topics which I have personally found worth investigation.

Some of my field-work over the last ten years has already been incorporated in my Lost Villages of England and in the work which Dr. J. K. St. Joseph and I have done for the second volume of the Cambridge Air Surveys. I have tried in this book to repeat myself as little as possible, and to apply a technique learned in one investigation to the study of fresh material. My professional colleagues will inevitably recognize among these essays some themes from specialised researches, but academic research has its own channels by which results are reported, and this book is not intended to be one.

In one sense, it is an ordinary travel book designed to those who like reading about other people's journeys, and it will take them by proxy into parts of an England which I suspect they do not know, but which I hope they will like to know better. The book is also designed to lead other readers out from the armchair to think about repeating some of my journeys for themselves. In different seasons of different years there is no danger that my journeys will be exactly matched and duplicated.

There was a final category of readers in mind when the book was planned. These readers would be more interested in why and how my journeys were made than in the particular places and findings, for they are men and women who are curious about their own neighbourhood and want to learn more of what documents, maps and field-work can tell them. They may also extend their curiosity to other parts of England where business or pleasure may take them. They may wish to carry out similar investigations to mine, and for them the final pages of the book are designed. The six main chapters describe journeys very much as they were taken—on foot, by bus or by car. The description of the journeys is interwoven with historical comment and quotations from documents, but the narrative is not interrupted by long accounts of the source-material which prompted each journey and suggested that it might be worth while looking over a particular hedge or down a particular street. Yet this source-material may be what some readers will want to assist them in their own local inquiries, and the distinct character of the final pages will, it is hoped, meet their needs while clearing the ground in the other chapters, which are self-contained, each telling a story in its own right.

2
A Journey Along Boundaries

BRAUNSTON (NORTHAMPTONSHIRE)
HIGHAM FERRERS (NORTHAMPTONSHIRE)
OLD BYLAND (YORKSHIRE, N.R.)

The Lords Records and the Tennants informations, are the pillars of a survey.

JOHN NORDEN, Surveiors Dialogue (1607)

Chapter Two
A JOURNEY ALONG BOUNDARIES

I

A THOUSAND years stand between the first settlement of English villages and the first successful attempts to portray them in accurate plans. In the interval, the appearance of the countryside could only be recorded in words, sometimes written on parchment, sometimes committed to memory and handed down orally from generation to generation. It is on sources of this kind that we must depend if we wish to confirm the antiquity of some medieval feature noticed in the course of a country journey, but documents have had many enemies, of which mice, damp and salvage campaigns have been the most successful, and survival is always a matter of chance. Where documents do survive and contain topographical matter it is important that any opportunities which they offer for comparison with the modern landscape should be seized, for only by becoming familiar with the earthworks, crop-marks and buildings which documentary evidences prove to be medieval can an explorer pass on with confidence to the much larger number of physical remains for which there is no documentary elucidation. This is the justification for the seemingly minute antiquarianism of a beginner in field-work; only then is it possible to proceed from the small area of the known to the larger area of the unknown, and to the visible remains of the past with which the English countryside is so well endowed.¹

In. the later chapters of this book it will be possible to compare Elizabethan town- and village-plans with the modern appearance of the same places and to learn the alphabet of topographical history in the normal way. But there are features on the English landscape which are older than any map, and in some cases older than any document. Among these are the boundaries of parishes and townships. It was only in the sixteenth century that the art of the surveyor encompassed large-scale plans with the parish boundaries accurately measured,² but earlier generations had been forced to adopt more crude methods of recording. In the Psalter of Kirkstead Abbey there is a primitive plan of the boundaries between cow-pastures in the Lincolnshire Fens. The plan was entered in the Psalter about 1300 but may have been first drawn about 1150. The bounds of Sherwood Forest were shown on a crude plan drawn about 1376. In the cartulary of the Northamptonshire Priory of Fineshead, written c. 1300, the scribe attempted to show the ownership of meadowland by a sketch which is half diagram, half plan. A monk of Chertsey Abbey made a plan of its demesnes (c. 1432). The bounds of the Isle of Thanet are shown on a plan made about 1414. The technique of these plans is of the roughest, and the plan of Elford made in 1508 (fig. 21), is very little better. The contrast with the plans made by the Elizabethan surveyors (e.g. Plates 2, 3, 5, 6) is striking.³

Yet, long before the description of lens, forests and villages in crude pictures, men had puzzled out how best to record the position of boundaries and give them certainty. Written record begins with the Anglo-Saxon boundary charters of the seventh century. These documents recorded the outer bounds of estates when they changed hands by gift, sale or lease. In many cases, an estate included all the territory of a village and had the bounds of the modern parish or township; when it was less than a whole village its perimeter will coincide with only part of the present circuit.

I he use Of an old boundary charter to settle a dispute is referred to in a document itself as early as 896. The mention in it of a procession headed by a priest also suggests that something akin to the Rogationtide perambulation of the bounds (p. 28, below) was already in progress. This charter refers to some woodland at Woodchester, a village in the western Cotswolds near Stroud. In 741 a king of the South Angles had given the monks of Worcester a block of woodland here, and in 896 the bishop complained that the land had been

filched from them. The supreme council of the kingdom, the witan, met at Gloucester and settled the problem by taking out the old charter of 741 and comparing it with the ground.⁴ The claimant was ordered

to ride with the priest of the people of [Wood] Chester ... along all the boundaries as he read them from the old books [i.e. charters].

Only a small number of places have documents as early as this, yet firm boundaries were successfully established and their position handed down orally from generation to generation. This word-of-mouth tradition was reinforced by frequent perambulations of the bounds and (later in the Middle Ages) by enrolment in the records of the manor courts. In the course of this chapter we shall move from the unknown Anglo-Saxon villagers who first determined the bounds of the Northamptonshire village of Braunston to the surveyor, Christopher Saxton, making his way around the windy bounds of a North Riding parish in 1598. The journey includes a short visit to Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire (the subject of Chapter 6) to consider its manorial survey of 1591 which stands midway between the verbal traditions and the surveyors' maps.

The boundaries of parishes and townships are among the oldest features marked on any modern Ordnance map. Only the Roman and prehistoric antiquities are older. No medieval building is as old. In English towns, the last two hundred years have seen many transformations of old boundaries when new churches have been built for growing industrial populations, but the rural parish boundaries have suffered very little change. Where there have been any minor administrative changes, they usually date from the last century, when anomalies of local government boundaries were tidied up, but over that period the successive ten-yearly Census volumes have always recorded such changes. In cases of doubt, the plans of the first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey and the numerous Tithe and Enclosure Awards of the period between 1730 and 1850 can be consulted. The dots which signify a parish boundary on the first edition of the O.S. map often mark a line unaltered for a thousand years, perambulated at Rogationtide by generation after generation of parishioners.

The Ordnance Survey plan occupies a curious place in the history of parish boundaries. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Author's Preface 1957
• Author's Preface 1971
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations and Short Titles
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. A JOURNEY ALONG BOUNDARIES
• 3. A JOURNEY TO ELIZABETHAN VILLAGES
• 4. A JOURNEY AMONG DESERTED VILLAGES
• 5. A JOURNEY TO NEW TOWNS
• 6. A JOURNEY TO ELIZABETHAN MARKET-PLACES
• 7. A JOURNEY THROUGH PARKS
• APPENDIX: THE MATERIAL FOR THE SIX JOURNEYS
• INDEX