Life in Medieval Landscapes

People and Places in the Middle Ages

Sam Turner, Bob Silvester, Bob Silvester

• Publisher: Windgather Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781905119684
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

Life in Medieval Landscapes presents new studies on key themes in the economic and social history of the medieval landscape. The book draws together papers by medieval historians and archaeologists, with contributions by leading scholars in each field. The first part explores the nature of landscape regions in Britain and Ireland. Chapters explore the use and experience of different types of landscapes including marshlands, uplands, woodland and woodpasture. The papers analyse a wide variety of sources from detailed archival work on medieval records to place-names, archaeological survey and the study of veteran trees. A particular theme in several papers is the exploration of social, economic and spatial marginality. The second part presents new studies of labour and lordship. The contributions focus on medieval England, including aspects of the land market before the Black Death, the organisation of village communities, and how changing settlements related to demography and occupations. There is a particular focus on understanding the lives of peasants and labourers. The main themes of the book reflect the interests of Professor Harold Fox, whose death in 2007 was marked by a number of conferences in different parts of the UK. The papers in this volume have been offered by Harold's colleagues, friends and former research students as a tribute to his work. They showcase some of the best research in the fields of medieval landscape and social history. Contributors include Chris Dyer, Bruce Campbell, Andrew Fleming, Della Hooke, Jem Harrison, Ros Faith, Peter Herring, Mark Gardiner, Angus Winchester, Andrew Jackson, Alan Fox, Mark Page, Mike Thompson, Mike Thornton, Matt Tompkins, Penelope Upton and Richard Jones.

CHAPTER ONE

Harold Fox as Historical Geographer: a Personal Appreciation

Bruce M. S. Campbell

Harold Fox (HSAF) was a scholarly and deeply private man. One evening in 1973, after dining with me at Darwin College, he rose and excused himself early, saying ‘I am sorry, I have to go now, I have a footnote to write’. The remark reveals both his omnipresent desire to retreat into the security of his own solitariness and the importance that he attached to footnoting (which he had elevated to an art-form). His now largely forgotten 1979 essay ‘Local farmers’ associations and the circulation of agricultural information in nineteenth-century England’ comprises fourteen pages of closely argued text supported by seven pages of notes. After allowance for abbreviations and differences in font size, this is the equivalent of three-quarters of a page of notes to every page of text. And the notes, of course, are a goldmine of erudite information and perceptive asides. Characteristically, he adds an acknowledgement in which he thanks Miss Sue Blake (from 1970 to 1973 a postgraduate in the Department of Geography at Cambridge) ‘for giving initial encouragement when he was beginning the work’ and Hugh Prince (his former Geography tutor at University College London) for commenting upon an earlier draft. Such courtesy and scholarly generosity, untarnished by personal ambition, were characteristic of the man and meant that Harold was easy to like. Nevertheless, he was hard to know and cloaked almost everything he did with an air of mystery.

How many of those whom he impressed with his deep historical knowledge across a whole range of periods and subjects, awed with his command of palaeography and expertise at extracting meaning from often intractable historical sources, and inspired with his passion for the past, realised that Harold was trained not as an historian but as a geographer? In fact, he obtained a first-class honours degree in Geography from University College London (UCL), and studied for his doctorate at the Department of Geography at Cambridge. He then spent the first seven years of his academic career as a lecturer in geography, from 1969 to 1974 at Cambridge (where, as a postgraduate, I first encountered him), and then from 1975 to 1976 – following a year between posts working freelance as a college tutor – at The Queen’s University of Belfast (where I worked alongside him) (Appendix 1). HSAF never denied his geographical pedigree but nor did he parade it; as his reputation and standing as a landscape and agrarian historian grew, people simply ceased to think of him as a geographer. Indeed, what defines his work is that it is intrinsically inter-disciplinary.

Even Harold’s publications provide few clues to his geographical origins. Apart from various notes and comments of a mostly ephemeral nature in the geographical house journal Area, his only three publications in explicitly geographical journals are his 1970 essay ‘Going to town in thirteenth-century England’ in the Geographical Magazine; in the same journal, a 1973 anniversary essay co-authored with fellow Cambridge geographer David Stoddart, ‘The original Geographical Magazines, 1790 and 1874’; and, last and by no means least, his 1988 essay in Geografiska Annaler, series B, ‘Social relations and ecological relationships in agrarian change’. Although secretary of the Historical Geography Research Group of the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) from 1972 to 1976, his sole IBG publication was his contribution (the afore-mentioned essay on local farmers’ associations) to Special Publication, 10: Change in the Countryside: Essays on Rural England, 1500–1900 (1979), which he co-edited with fellow historical geographer, Robin Butlin. He had already made the move from a department of geography to one of local history and this, in fact, proved to be his valedictory publication as a geographer. Perversely, notwithstanding that he was the founding book-review editor of the Journal of Historical Geography and for over 20 years (1975–97) a member of the editorial board, with the exception of book reviews, he never published an article in that journal (unlike historian Chris Dyer, his sometime head of department at Leicester). Harold, in fact, has practically no publication profile within geography. Almost all his finest and most enduring publications were written following his move to the Department of English Local History at Leicester and were intended for a predominantly historical readership.

Nevertheless, HSAF undoubtedly owed his profile and impact as an historian to the grounding he received in the geography and historical geography practised and taught in the 1960s and early 1970s. That era’s ‘quantitative revolution’ may have passed him by, but not the emphasis then placed upon gathering, measuring and playing with data. Other intrinsically geographical qualities exemplified by his work include an appreciation and understanding of maps; a concern with spatial patterns and geographical differentiation; an understanding of how humans interacted with, and impacted upon, their environment; an appreciation of how processes of change operate both over space and through time and often in the very long term; an awareness of the importance of scale, both temporal and spatial; and a sensitivity to the essence of ‘place’. Like many another geographer, he was also an expert and dedicated fieldworker and would not have considered writing about anywhere that he did not know intimately on the ground. It is this geographical skill of marrying field and documentary evidence that sets so much of his work in a class of its own. Moreover, as those he taught will testify, he was invariably more effective and at ease teaching al fresco in the field than delivering a lecture in the formal setting of a class-room.

Historical geographers, when Harold became one, took an interest in the longue durée and their undergraduate courses typically spanned centuries and sometimes millennia. True to this tradition, Harold’s teaching and research ranged from the Anglo-Saxons to the nineteenth century and embraced fishing, farming, landlessness, rural settlements and towns. His respect for and sensitivity to historical sources marks him out as belonging to the H. C. Darby ‘school’ of historical geography and Darby’s great enterprise to reconstruct the Domesday geography of England was already at an advanced stage when Harold became Darby’s student. At University College London it was, however, Hugh Prince, then working on the nineteenth-century tithe surveys, who probably exercised the greater influence, forming and nurturing Harold’s interests in agricultural improvement, field systems and enclosure, and the rural landscape.

Significantly, Harold was interested in enclosure acts for the documentation they generated and their impact upon field systems, the landscape, and the productivity of agriculture rather than as the outcome of an often-contested political process. Had Harold been trained in history he would have displayed at least some concern with power, politics, pedigree, and persons per se, whereas he was conspicuously indifferent to such matters. Instead, what fascinated him were places, localities, and regions, and how people collectively, through their daily interaction with their immediate environments, shaped both the landscapes in which they lived, worked, and played and their individual social and economic destinies. Unlike his UCL mentors, Darby and Prince, he never championed a single source nor pitched his studies at a national scale, for the relationships that he sought to illuminate were better explored at a more local scale using a multiplicity of sources, including direct field observation. As an undergraduate he had learnt about the French Annales school, which so sympathetically blended history with geography, and it is this approach that he espoused and made his own. His 1989 essay, ‘Peasant farmers, patterns of settlement and pays: transformations in the landscapes of Devon and Cornwall during the later Middle Ages’, with its explicit reference to the French concept of pays, is a conscious tribute to, and one of the finest English exemplars of, that tradition.

Examination of Harold’s modest list of publications before 1980 (he was personally unambitious, slow in building up a portfolio of publications, and was not remotely strategic about placing his papers in the most influential journals) reveals that the research themes and modes of publication with which he became so closely associated in his academic maturity derived, in fact, from the formative geographical first phase of his career (Appendix 2). Already as a historical geographer he displayed a predilection for publishing in journals that were historical rather than geographical, and local as much as national. From very early on he was a committed medievalist but never to the exclusion of an interest in earlier and later periods. His first publications display the close and fastidious engagement with archives that became his hallmark. The deep and enduring interest in the south-west, particularly his native county of Devon, was there from the outset, along with a concern with the micro-geography of individual places. From the research undertaken for his 1971 doctoral thesis sprang his abiding interest in field systems and early enclosure and their effects upon agricultural improvement and the adoption and spread of innovations. From this period, too, stemmed his curiosity about the nature of small towns and chartered boroughs – of which the south-west possessed a remarkably high density – and their role in a coastal society that lived by both fishing and farming. In short, the lines of historical inquiry for which Harold became renowned while at Leicester were essentially an extension of the agenda he had begun all those years before as first a postgraduate and then an assistant lecturer in the Department of Geography headed by Professor H. C. Darby at Cambridge. Even so, for all its geographical provenance, it is an agenda today more likely to excite historians than geographers, so far have these once close sibling disciplines now moved apart.

Cambridge historical geographer, Gerry Kearns, recently expressed his regret that HSAF had not been appointed to a permanent position in Cambridge following expiry of a 5-year assistant lectureship in 1974. Yet had Harold remained at Cambridge and within a mainstream department of geography very likely he would have found himself increasingly ill at ease with the direction taken by the subject in which he had been trained. He was essentially an empiricist and positivist, an intellectual position rendered unfashionable by a growing subject preference for theory – much of it cultural and post-modern – over empirical substance. Insofar as he wrote with clarity and verve but never with pretentiousness, he was decidedly old-fashioned. Historical geography, too, has changed since he succumbed to its appeal, abandoning its concern with the longue durée, privileging the recent almost to the exclusion of the remoter past, and substituting an eclectic and often formless internationalism for a close and rigorous engagement with the historical geographies of individual countries and regions and the spatial and temporal processes that shaped them (for HSAF was above all schooled and interested in the historical geography of England, although not in any narrow or jingoistic way). He would also have found himself at variance with the mounting obsession with a research-grants culture and the concomitant disdain for publishing in the non-prestigious, non-peer refereed, non-international journals of which he himself was such a champion. In fact, for Harold the real misfortune would surely have been to have remained entrapped at Cambridge, for that mainstream department could never have provided him with as natural a spiritual home or students as sympathetic to his own talents as a teacher as he eventually found at Leicester. English Local History was his natural niche and it is fortunate for all that he found it.

Harold and geography effectively parted company in 1979, with the result that among geographers he is remembered with fondness by a small and dwindling cohort of contemporaries, all of them either retired or approaching retirement. Today, the historical-geography research group of which he was secretary and the journal on whose editorial board he served for so long have changed beyond recognition. What he once taught has disappeared from the curriculum of most geography departments and few geographers now need to read his work. In contrast, his most substantive publications remain indispensable to medieval economic historians and all with a serious historical interest in the south-west. It will be a long time before his classic 1996 study of the garciones on the estates of Glastonbury Abbey – ‘Exploitation of the landless by lords and tenants in early medieval England’ – is superseded. His twin essays on Devon and Cornwall in the Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume III, 1348–1500 (1991) – ‘The occupation of the land’ and ‘Farming practice and techniques’ – remain definitive. His 2001 monograph, The Evolution of the Fishing Village: Landscape and Society along the South Devon coast, 1086–1550, cuts entirely new ground.

Geography has changed profoundly since 1963 when, fired by his schooling at Churston Ferrers Grammar School near Brixham in Devon, Harold enrolled to study it at UCL. At that time, given his talents and academic inclinations, it was obviously natural for him to prefer geography over history, although as events turned out it proved to be in history rather than geography that he built his career and established his reputation. It was, however, historical geography that first inspired Harold, shaped the paradigm within which he operated, formed his personal research agenda and equipped him with the skills that he used so expertly to make his very individual mark as a historian. Harold Fox was not alone in making the crossover from geography to history; Tony Wrigley, Richard Smith, Michael Turner, Mark Overton, and myself (among others) have made the same journey. But we belong to much the same academic generation and, with the exception of Michael Turner, like Harold, spent time in the same Cambridge stable. In terms of the pre-industrial past, geography and history then shared more in common than, sadly, they do today. Nevertheless, Harold Fox’s many publications – all but the last, left incomplete at his death, enriched with wonderfully erudite footnotes containing many a scholarly aside for others to follow – demonstrate what rich insights can be obtained from a true fusion of the skills of the geographer with those of the historian.

Appendix 1. Harold Fox’s career as a Geographer/Historical Geographer, 1963–79

1963	left Churston Ferrers Grammar School near Brixham.
1963–6	read Geography at University College London, where he studied historical geography with H. C. Darby and Hugh Prince (Richard Smith recalls that HSAF’s undergraduate dissertation dealt with some aspect of hedgerows and hedgehogs).
1966	graduated with 1st class honours.
1966–69	postgraduate, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, and member of St Catherine’s College: PhD supervisor, Professor H. C. Darby (who had recently taken up the chair of Geography at Cambridge).
1969–74	Assistant Lecturer in Geography, University of Cambridge (historically minded colleagues in the Cambridge department included Alan Baker, Clifford Darby, Robin Donkin, Jack Langton, Brian Robson, David Stoddart, Tony Wrigley; quantitatively minded colleagues included Richard Chorley and Andrew Cliff; postgraduates included Peter Atkins, Bruce Campbell, Richard Denis, Mark Overton, Susan Shaw nee Blake, Richard Smith, Charlie Withers).
1971	awarded PhD for his thesis, ‘A geographical study of the field systems of Devon and Corn...