A Social History of the English Countryside

G. E. Mingay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415034081
• eBook ISBN: 9781134967018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

Traces the rise and fall of rural England from the Middle Ages to the Second World War and the nature of the changes which have occurred.

1 Lord and Peasant

DOI: 10.4324/9780203199831-2

Twentieth-century English people have lived through an age of rapid change when ancient country towns have sprouted industrial estates and ‘enterprise zones’, their high streets have become cluttered with cars and vans, traffic lights, ‘street furniture’ and pedestrian crossings, and their old-established road patterns disrupted by motorways and by-passes. The villages, similarly, have been strangely altered by an alien rash of commuters’ villas and unimaginative rows of drab council houses, while mellowed Tudor and Georgian cottages have been disfigured by the intrusion of modern shop-fronts and ice-cream signs. Such changes make one more prone to believe in a past which was unchanging, or at least more reassuringly stable. But, as Christopher Taylor has remarked, ‘all we have today is the latest phase of change, more violent perhaps than before, certainly faster than that in previous centuries, but a direct descendant of it, and merely part of the same ebb and flow of the tide of human occupation’.¹

Indeed, the pattern of rural settlement in the past was much more fluid than may be commonly supposed. Some hamlets grew into large villages, while others declined to a solitary house or two; some villages grew only to fall away again, and many settlements, usually the smaller ones, disappeared completely, their existence known only by some chance mention in the records or by telltale signs of former foundations and enclosures which may best be seen from a low-flying aircraft in the evening light. Strangely enough, numbers of settlements did not disappear completely but changed their site for another, often one nearby, perhaps a mile or two away, leaving stranded in the fields a lonely church with perhaps the traces of a former manor house or castle.

The factors in this ‘settlement drift’, and in village growth and decline, were various, and at this distance in time it is often impossible to do more than guess at what they may have been. We know from modern instances that the decisions, sometimes eccentric, of an individual or of government, may bring about changes which would otherwise be inexplicable, and no doubt there were many examples in the past which, if we knew the facts, could be put down to the same irrational sources. Lacking such knowledge of individual motives, historians have singled out certain physical influences, such as intractable or infertile soils, situations too exposed to the elements, or even gradual changes in climate, which reinforced other reasons for change. Forces of undoubted long-term significance were the movements in population: the considerable growth in numbers in the early middle ages, when the population of Domesday, probably between 1.75 and 2.25 million, grew to reach perhaps as many as 4.5, 5 or even 6 million in the middle fourteenth century – a level not to be exceeded until the seventeenth or eighteenth century. This period of expansion was followed by a subsequent decline to a figure of only some 2.5–3 million in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

With changes in population went changes in the availability of land and labour and in the demand for food, with consequent effects on land use. When the population was growing, arable or mixed farming concerned primarily with the production of bread grains expanded, with cultivation spreading into former forest and waste lands, encroachments on village greens and extensions of village housing, sometimes in an organized or planned manner. The increased demand for land meant that some new settlements grew up in formerly unattractive upland areas, on bleak heaths and moors, even 1,200 feet up on the eastern edge of Dartmoor. When the population fell, however, and economic conditions were reversed, there was a retreat of cultivation. Farms in marginal areas, where soils, altitude and climate were not well suited to grain production, went out of arable and might be converted to pasture for sheep or cattle, or perhaps abandoned altogether. The shifts in village locations and the advance and retreat of the limits of settlement, associated with the surge and subsequent decline in population, indicate that the country people of medieval England were a good deal more mobile than was once thought. In law the unfree cultivators (as distinct from the freeholders) were strictly bound to their manors, but in practice many obtained the lord’s permission to move away (which might be readily granted when the population was rising and labour was plentiful). Others simply thumbed their noses at the law and ran away to seek a better life in sparsely populated districts where land was available, or to find other kinds of work in the expanding towns. There was, furthermore, a measure of seasonal migration of workers round the countryside in the busy seasons.

Local studies have revealed that deserted village sites are very numerous, and some 3,000 of them have been pinpointed. As just noted, some of these disappearances were due to population decline and the reduced profitability of grain production in the later middle ages, but many villages were abandoned for quite other reasons and in earlier times, even well before the medieval period. Farming on marginal lands was made more hazardous by climatic change from the late thirteenth century, when the weather became colder and wetter and crop failures became more numerous. Conversion to grazing for sheep or cattle was then perhaps the only way of giving many families a livelihood and, since less labour was required, met the conditions of reduced availability of workers in the later middle ages. The fortunes of some villages, undoubtedly, were adversely affected by the famines and epidemics of the fourteenth century. Disastrous seasons, as in 1315, when torrential rains ruined crops and flooded pastures from May until the autumn, led to starvation among the human population and heavy losses of livestock. The decline of flocks and herds was intensified by a murrain which followed among the cattle, leaving pastures empty and ploughs bereft of their teams of oxen.²

The Black Death, though commonly blamed for the decline of villages and the phenomenon of isolated or ruined churches, was not generally a major factor: for example, of eighty deserted sites in Northamptonshire only two can definitely be ascribed to the great pestilence. Some villages were indeed devastated by plague, but subsequently recovered, or were re-established nearby. Usually the Black Death helped further to weaken settlements that were already in decline, or began a process of destruction that other forces completed.³ This is not to say that the plague was not gravely damaging. Even in a sparsely populated district like medieval Swaledale it is thought possible that colonies of rats in outlying farmsteads served to transmit the disease from one settlement to another, and certainly eight of the eleven Yorkshire churchyards specially dedicated for the burial of plague victims were in the very north of the county.⁴ In Nidderdale about half of the land held on customary forest tenure was vacated through deaths in the year 1349–50, and the work of clearing new land for cultivation was brought to a halt. In this same terrible year 45 per cent of the beneficed clergy in the Archdeaconry of the West Riding, the rectors and vicars, met their end.⁵

Throughout the medieval period, and indeed earlier, a number of other factors operated to create new settlements or to cause the decline or migration of old ones. Ancient fortresses were abandoned, leading to the migration of the farmers and craftsmen who had formerly found shelter and profit close to their walls, while newly built castles encouraged a movement of people to their sites. Changes in road patterns and the building of bridges attracted people who came to cater for the needs of travellers. Some small settlements, especially in northern upland areas, were displaced to make way for religious houses, as in the wastes of Yorkshire, where the Cistercians brought sheep and cultivation to their abbeys of Rievaulx, Byland, Fountains and Jervaulx. Some other villages were lost through the inroads of the sea – such as Dunwich on the Suffolk coast (which, however, long continued to return members to Parliament). French raiders, crossing the Channel, periodically ravaged Sussex ports such as Rye and Winchelsea, the Welsh made incursions into neighbouring parts of England, and in the northern border counties the marauding Scots spread destruction over a large area already laid waste by William the Conqueror. Even the North Riding of Yorkshire was not spared the attention of the Scots when the English defeat at Bannockburn in 1314 left the roads south open to the invaders. Homes were burned, their inhabitants taken prisoner, cattle driven off, and those who resisted put to the sword. In 1318 the Scots penetrated so far south as to plunder and burn such towns as Northallerton, Boroughbridge, Ripon, Knaresborough and Skipton. The wealthier inhabitants of these places were able to save themselves by paying tribute, or by flying to some place of safety, such as Richmond Castle, but so general was the destruction that 128 villages in the North Riding were relieved of having to pay a subsidy to help fight the marauders, ‘because of Scots damage’.⁶

In the west midlands, where deserted villages were numerous in both low-lying river valleys and clayland plains, and also on the Cotswold hills, the abandonment of settlements had a long history, going back – as throughout England – to the Anglo Saxon period. Later desertions were especially numerous in the hundred years after the Black Death, though again the plague seems mainly to have had the contrasting effects of both weakening settlements and creating opportunities for survivors to take up vacant holdings elsewhere. The process of decline was protracted, most villages that were destined eventually to disappear not succumbing immediately after the plague: many still held some inhabitants a generation later, as we know from the poll taxes levied in 1377–81. The key factor in decline was not so much the direct effects of the plague and the fall in population as the indirect influences on migration as holdings on better land were left vacant and landlords relaxed their attempts to restrain mobility. Even relatively stable villages, we are told, experienced a turnover of families as high as 75 per cent over a space of some fifty years, while declining villages saw a much higher level of movement. The reduced demand for grain in this period made more attractive the areas where grazing, or some more flexible form of mixed farming, could be carried on, in contrast to the greater rigidity of farming committed to common-field arable. Although generalizations are difficult, common characteristics of deserted villages included the inherent weaknesses that they were seldom large and were often secondary settlements, not the chief villages of a parish. They were also generally very close to neighbouring settlements, so that as many as four-fifths of deserted villages in Worcestershire lay within a mile of another village. Indeed, desertion may be seen ‘as the thinning, out of a countryside over-stocked with villages’. Finally, they were predominantly agricultural settlements: villages that were much engaged in industry, such as in cloth-making districts in Gloucestershire or metal-working ones in south Staffordshire, did not feature in the list of deserted settlements.⁷

* * *

Settlements took many forms, and the nucleated type of village which is often thought of as typical of England, was in fact rare in the south-west of the country and over large parts of East Anglia and the south-east. The nucleated village appeared around the beginning of the eleventh century, and came to dominate about a half or a little more of the countryside: it was closely associated with the development of the common-field system of arable farming, particularly on the midland plain, though even there many hamlets and isolated farmsteads were to be found. Elsewhere, in the highland zone, in the extensive forested areas and on heaths and moorlands, scattered hamlets and solitary farms were the common elements of a very old dispersed pattern of settlement, the sites of numbers of them being under continuous occupation since Anglo-Saxon times. As the population expanded in the early middle ages lowland areas became more densely peopled, while further dispersed settlements were established by the ‘assarting’, or clearing, of waste land and forest carried out by individual farmers and small groups of settlers. The new placenames – Southwaite (‘damp, sour clearing’) and Roundthwaite (‘clearing of the mountain ash’) in the fells of Westmorland, for example – commemorated the work of the pioneers. The use of moors and heaths to graze sheep, as undertaken by the Cistercian abbeys, saw isolated homes built to house the shepherds, just as extensive rabbit warrens required dwellings for the warreners. The concept of the parish as an ecclesiastical and administrative entity preceded the middle ages, going back to the estate of Roman times, and long pre-dated the building of Christian churches. The coming of Christianity, late in the sixth century, led however to the imposition of tithes to maintain the village priest, and, since the value of the tithes depended on the yield of the parish, this created the need carefully to establish and maintain the boundaries of the village lands, though it might be many years before all the land in the parish was in constant use for some form of production.⁸ Generally, as the numbers of villages and hamlets grew, the very large original parishes were divided up, the new boundaries often becoming identical with those of the village.

Detailed investigation has shown that a surprisingly large number of medieval villages were laid out on some kind of plan, set out systematically along a road for example, or round a village green. The planning of a site was often associated with new settlements, especially in the northern counties when they were re-established after the harrying of the north by the Conqueror. Planning was also involved in new sites elsewhere, and there is evidence from earthworks, building debris and unearthed fragments of pottery of some degree of planning in old villages, perhaps when for some reason the centre of the village or alignment of the houses was changed, or an extension made to accommodate a larger population.⁹

Some planning, or at least a large degree of communal agreement, was involved in the creation of the common-field system of farming. The gradual clearance of land for cultivation would normally proceed outwards from the original nucleus of settlement, with each successive new intake of cleared land forming a private enclosure if the work of one family, or added to the common fields if cleared communally, and then called a ‘furlong’, though this term did not connote a precisely measured area of ground. Furlongs were frequently of between 5 and 15 acres, but could be smaller or, indeed, very much bigger. The villagers would expand their fields as needed, but not without some measure of organization. Natural obstacles, as well as soils and aspect, determined the location and limited the freedom of choice of new intakes, and the best-watered fertile land, as that by a stream, was reserved as a communal meadow for making the invaluable hay. Surplus land was kept as a common pasture for the village livestock to graze in summer, heavily timbered areas were reserved for the benefit of the building timber, firewood, the making of poles and hurdles and the beechmast for the pigs, while the poorest land was left as ‘waste’ to be used for cutting turf, quarrying sand or stone, snaring rabbits, and as additional rough grazing as needed. Some of this waste land might never be reclaimed for cultivation if the population remained small or if the land was so poor as to be not worth the effort of clearing. Indeed, some waste lands were not exploited until the near-famine conditions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars at the end of the eighteenth century made enclosure highly profitable and drove the plough on to bleak moorlands and up steep hillsides.

The ‘classical’ three-field system – two crops and a fallow – was neither uniform nor ubiquitous. There might be two, three or more fields, and the number of fields might be increased when circumstances made this desirable. In any event, the crop rotation was not necessarily connected closely with the number of fields, but rather with the furlong. Groups of furlongs formed the basis for the pattern of cropping and fallowing. In some parts of the country, in northern England, East Anglia and the south-east especially, the field ‘system’ was in fact highly irregular, and further, where the cultivated lands consisted of assarts from woodland, as in the Kent and Sussex Weald and the midland forests of Sherwood, Charnwood and Rockingham, the holdings were made up of enclosures, and common fields were absent. And again, in those forested and upland areas where the soils were thin and infertile any common arable fields were small and served only to supplement a livelihood which came mainly from the grazing of stock, the manufacture of wooden articles such as barrels, tubs, staves and poles, or some branch of the textile industry or of iron-making. In such areas, too, an ‘infield—outfield’ type of farming was pursued, where only the best land, usually that near the homestead – the infield – was cultivated regularly, supplemented as required by temporary intakes further off – the outfield – which were cropped for a few years and then allowed to revert to waste.

Climate and relief, of course, largely determined the division between the more pastoral north and west and the more arable south and east. But this division, though fundamental, was never hard and fast, as considerable arable districts were established in the predominantly pastoral west (such as the Vale of Glamorgan and the Vale of Taunton Dean), while in the predominantly arable east there were also large pastoral areas (such as the meadows along the Trent Valley, a large part of Suffolk, the Weald of Kent, and the sheep grazings on chalk and limestone hills and wolds). A sheep-corn form of husbandry flourished on the upland wolds of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and on the downs of the Chilterns and Cotswolds, where the shallow soils were made to bear good crops by the night-time dunging of the large flocks of sheep kept during the day on the hill pastures. The arable heart of England, the broad midland plain, came to be covered by large common fields supported by their accompanying meadows, commons and wastes, by which the cattle and sheep were maintained during the summer months. On the western borders of the midlands, however, common-field arable gave way to pastoral vales where livestock predominated over the plough, and indeed over much of the midlands the farmers had some degree of choice between leaning more towards arable or more towards fattening and dairying.

Specialized fattening and dairying came to be established on the rich grass of marshland areas, such as the Romney Marsh in Kent and Sussex, and the Thames-side marshes of Essex. Extensive heathlands, with their thin sands and gravels, as in East Anglia, carried great flocks of sheep to fertilize and consolidate with their treading the arable fields; while elsewhere small patches of heathland supported smaller flocks used to support the farmers’ main activities of fattening or dairying on the better soils nearby. In the forest districts, such as Nottinghamshire’s Sherwood, Leicestershire’s Charnwood and Hampshire’s New Forest, the sheep, together with small intakes of cropland, were used to supplement woodland and industrial occupations, or the keeping of pigs and ponies. The fells and moors of the Pennines and northern border country, the North York moors and the south-western wastes of Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin, were necessarily pastoral, with cattle on the lower slopes and sheep on the exposed hills, though sheltered valleys could be made to produce hay and some crops of oats, barley or rye, perhaps on an infield-outfield system or in small common fields. Lastly, the inhabitants of the extensive fenlands around the Wash, the estuary of the Humber and the Somerset Levels, employed their rich river-borne silts to fatten cattle and produce dairy products, with some limited ploughlands us...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Lord and Peasant
• 2 The Progress of the Plough
• 3 In Sickness and in Health: Disease and Famine
• 4 Plenty and Want
• 5 Landed Society and Rural Culture
• 6 The Two Faces of the Countryside
• 7 The Countryside in Decline, 1870–1914
• 8 The Countryside in War and Peace
• Notes
• Index