by Tom Fort
However, the chain or chains of cause and effect are very often obscure, allowing the spilling of rivers of scholarly ink and a ferment of respectful disagreement. In some places the adoption of open-field farming preceded the establishment of nucleated settlements. In others it accompanied it, and in others it came later. Sometimes it proceeded swiftly, sometimes much more slowly, sometimes only partially. Variations in local conditions – such as the lightness or heaviness of the soil, or the presence or absence of extensive woodland – seem to have dictated developments. For instance, the successful cultivation of clay soil required a heavy plough, which in turn required a team of oxen to pull it, which in turn required a pooling of resources by families who did not possess enough animals on their own.
In the south-west the persistence with the old methods seems to be easily explained. The population was too small, the land too hilly and the soil too stony and thin for open-field farming to be viable. But in south-east England – Essex, for example – conditions were favourable, yet the dispersed settlement pattern persisted, and no one really knows why.
A further thorny complication is that the handy distinction between a ‘nucleated’ and ‘non-nucleated’ settlement all too often breaks down in practice, since a very large number of settlements display aspects of both categories. Some appear to have been planned around a rough grid of streets, others to have grown up randomly and organically. Furthermore, even when nucleated villages associated with open-field farming do survive, they are sometimes not in the same place as they were when the fields were laid out.
Much of this confusion arises from the long-established assumption that Domesday – that medieval marvel of central planning – listed villages. In fact it described and recorded land holdings (which is where the value for tax purposes lay). These may have been gathered into manors or estates, but were certainly not the same as a settlement and its holdings. Some estates included several villages, others – just as meticulously recorded – none at all.
Altogether the picture of ‘Village England’ in the immediate post-1066 period is one of almost infinite variety, which is very pleasing to the archaeologists and those whose pleasure it is to pore over tithe and manorial rolls. The great difficulty in establishing where those villages were and what they looked like arises from the limited choice of available building materials. Hovels of clay, wattle and thatch were not built to last, indeed were built not to last. That sense of the impermanence of things must have been a dominant feature of the medieval mind, colouring every aspect of life.
Where a building does survive, it is usually the church, the only one built of stone. But the positioning of the church was determined by a number of factors. St Augustine had instructed that the place should, where possible, be the same as that previously used for pagan worship. The land had to be given by the local lord, or by the community. It may have been close to, or in the heart of, the settlement; or some distance away, according to what site was available. Often a later, permanent settlement – the village – did coalesce around the church; but that does not necessarily mean it started there.
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We may have no more than a hazy idea of where exactly the medieval village was or what it would have looked like had we stumbled upon it down some muddy, stony track. But thanks to the efforts of inquisitive and open-minded historians to make sense of the earliest written records – the manorial and court rolls – as well as more elusive sources, we now have a reasonable grasp of how it was organised.
For a start the people would not have called it a village, the word being unknown at the time. It is derived from the Middle English vill meaning ‘town’, a unit established to organise the working of the fields. Vills were grouped into tens, confusingly known as hundreds, for taxation and other administrative purposes. The vill could act as a collective of tenants, or indeed as the collective lessee of an estate.
The medieval village has left no written record. The documentation available from that period is in the form of church, manor and state records. It is extensive but inevitably lopsided. It presents its account of the workings of society through the eyes of the clergy, the landlords and their literate employees, and royal officials. It is one version, and for a long time was the only version. But the village and its people had another version, only there was no one to write it down. It has had to be deduced by clever detective work.
The official version has a society that is pyramidal in structure, with the king at the apex, owning everything. Below him were the lords, forming the aristocracy, and the Church, both given charge of lands not reserved for direct royal control. These lands were divided into estates or manors. At the top of the village section of the pyramid were the free tenants, who paid rent to the manor (indirectly to the lord or bishop or abbot or abbess) for their land, and owed service and obligations. Next – able to look up and down – was the villein: not a free man yet not a slave either; technically not allowed to own anything, but with certain time-honoured rights; the backbone of agriculture, empowered by custom and practice to take decisions on how the fields should be cultivated and to compose a jury to sit in judgment on his fellows. At the bottom, able only to look upwards, were the cottars, with the smallest dwellings – the cottages – the smallest holdings of land, the greatest burden of obligation to those above them.
The village also required its specialists, who stood slightly outside the pyramid. The two most important were the miller and the blacksmith, who were likely to have the status of free tenant or villein. There were also the officials, chief among them the reeve, who was generally drawn from the villein class and was chosen by the village to serve as the lord’s general foreman. There would also be a priest, who as often as not combined the duty of conducting worship with that of farming his glebe land.
This was feudalism, a system built on obligations and rights which were partly imposed from above and partly drawn from an existing, pre-Norman pattern of land control. Its structure was mightily complex, its operation even more so. The distinctions it sought to define and preserve were very much less precise than the written records would have us believe. Some villagers were clearly freemen, villeins or cottars, but some straddled two or even all three of those divisions. Obligations varied hugely from manor to manor, region to region, village to village, as did the success the top tier enjoyed in enforcing them. Like all systems of government it developed multiple lives of its own, making it inadvisable for historians to offer sweeping generalisations about how people fared under it.
Nevertheless some important common features are worth mentioning. The ruling class did not exercise absolute power, however much it might have wished to, or asserted that it did. Broadly speaking the noble lords preferred to concentrate on important matters such as hunting, fighting, religious observances and attendance on the King, and left the mundane tasks of collecting rents and organising court judgments on land disputes and petty crime to their officials. These men over time acquired extensive knowledge of administration and law, which gave them their own authority. Drawn from the community themselves, their upward mobility enabled them to form a power base that restrained – and could even challenge – aristocratic tyranny. And the village itself jealously guarded the rights that came umbilically attached to the obligations, and learned to stand up for itself against the capricious exercise of power from elsewhere.
The application of the rigid rules of feudal status and service was haphazard. Families belonging to the lowest order quietly moved away to better themselves when they were not supposed to. Wage earners broke contracts. Villeins evaded duties to the lord or paid someone else to discharge them. Marriages were made and land transfers effected without anyone bothering to secure the necessary permission.
Settlements were formed by people acting on their own initiative in order to organise the cultivation of the land. Oligarchal tendencies inevitably prevailed: the more resourceful, enterprising, ruthless and ambitious members of the village community rose
to the top and directed the others. The law was enforced in the name of the manorial court, but the rules and regulations that actually mattered in daily life were not framed by the lord but by the villagers. The class system that emerged was one in which everyone knew their place and that of their neighbours. But it was not imposed from above, nor was it identical in its particulars to the one in the next village. People had the freedom, within the feudal web, to make choices.
Every village was acutely status conscious. The class divisions were complicated and nuanced; disputes were frequent, bitter and often violent. But in the interests of survival – the only interests that mattered – the village had to be able to function cooperatively. It had to be able to accommodate human nature or it would fail.
Many medieval villages did fail. It used to be believed that there were two main factors in forcing the abandonment of established settlements. One was plague. The other was forcible eviction so that the fields could be converted into grazing for sheep, enabling rapacious and tyrannical overlords to profit from the booming market for wool. In fact detailed research has uncovered very few examples of villages being wiped out by plague, or being seized by bailiffs and torched. Much more often a village fell into slow decay, as in the case of Goltho. There might be various reasons for this: an outbreak of plague might be one, causing a fall in population to a point at which the land could no longer be efficiently cultivated. Sometimes the village was just too small to be viable, or too close to a stronger competitor.
The medieval peasant could not afford to be sentimental about his place of birth and upbringing, or anything else. On the other hand, an investment in the village in terms of land acquired and home built would give rise to a natural practical impulse to stay put. At Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, a celebrated and thoroughly excavated deserted village site, the villagers constructed longhouses ranging from 50 to 75 feet in length, with timber-framed walls and thatched roofs. Early in the thirteenth century they began to build walls from chalk blocks bonded by clay; then reverted to timber, but with stone footings. Elsewhere stone walls to shoulder height or a little above became the norm over the course of the thirteenth century, although the roofs – of poles and thatch – meant the lifespan of the dwellings was still limited.
Little by little the notion of permanence took a hold, the desire to belong and to put down roots. It was a slow process, requiring as it did a total revolution in attitude. But it made the English village as we like to think of it possible.
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COUNTRYSIDE ENCLOSED
East Hendred, Oxfordshire
East Hendred is a particularly lovely village of mainly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses and cottages below the Berkshire Downs. For most of its history it was in Berkshire, but since the county boundary changed in 1974 it has been in Oxfordshire. In 1800 its resident squire, Basil Eyston, got together with two other local bigwigs, Sir John Pollen and Richard Hopkins, three more landowners designated as ‘gentlemen’, ten yeomen, a blacksmith, a cordwainer and a mason to petition parliament for an Act of Enclosure. It was passed the next year and three commissioners were appointed to ‘divide and allot and lay in severalty the open and common fields, common meadows, common pastures, Downs and other commonable and waste lands’.
Notices to this effect were placed in newspapers and pinned to the door of the church. There is no record of any opposition, and by the end of the year the award had been made. A total of 1250 acres was divided between thirty-six people, including the Rector of East Hendred. A few years later the remainder of the common land was similarly parcelled out.
East Hendred in the 1960s
The enclosure at East Hendred was no different in its essentials from the thousands of such awards made across the country (the first recorded was at Radipole in Dorset in 1604, the last at Elmstone Hardwicke in Gloucestershire in 1914). There were two main waves, between 1760 and 1780, and between 1790 and 1815. Altogether more than five thousand enclosure awards were made, affecting three thousand parishes and seven million acres, a quarter of the open countryside. The west of the country, from Cumberland and Westmorland (now Cumbria) down to Devon and Cornwall, was little touched by the drive to enclose, and its pursuit was patchy in Kent, Essex and East Sussex. But across much of England’s most productive agricultural land it amounted to a revolution which would have immense social consequences.
The bonds that bound feudal England began to slacken in the fourteenth century. The calamity of the Black Death, which wiped out a third of the population, caused a radical rebalancing of the agricultural labour market. The landowning class, faced with the painful realisation that many – sometimes most – of their tenants had perished, and their labour and rents with them, were forced to offer inducements to get their land tilled at all. Those that refused to substitute tenancies for feudal services found their remaining able-bodied workers quite prepared to move elsewhere rather than bend the knee. Most gave way sooner or later, and the class of bondsmen was converted to one of rent-paying tenants. At the same time it suited some landowners to rent extensive holdings to one prospering, ambitious farmer and leave him to organise sub-tenancies and the actual farming as he saw fit.
The village had a single function, which was to enable the land to be worked. But as it settled in its position, it developed its own dynamic. Some of its spaces – the church, the churchyard, the roads, the green if there was one, the environs of the pond if there was one – were public. Villagers also met socially at the mill, at the bakehouse and the house where ale was sold. But privacy and independence were important. Each dwelling was separate, however closely they were clustered together. Most had a surrounding ditch and bank enclosing the outbuildings as well as the home, with a fence or hedge or wall. A gate led from the street to the front door. Visitors were received in the hall; the chamber beyond was for the family. Doors were secured with locks, as were chests where valuables were stored.
Disputes between neighbours were extremely common, and almost everyone was summoned to the manorial court at some time or other to answer for themselves. Much of the trouble stemmed from the division of the land into multitudes of narrow, unmarked strips separately owned or rented. The pages of the court rolls are filled with records of the fines imposed for encroachment. Quarrels that started in the fields easily spilled over into the village, often leading to violence. Fights and assaults were another staple of court proceedings.
But although people may not have liked each other, they had to live and work together to survive. By degrees communities took shape, and those forming them began to show a cautious confidence in the future. They put down stone foundations for their houses, raised stone walls, installed windows and even roofs of slate. Once a family had established its presence on a particular plot, it was natural for it to aspire to a bigger, better home when circumstances were favourable, either by extension or rebuilding altogether. In Foxton in Cambridgeshire, for example, the entire village of fifty houses was rebuilt between 1550 and 1620 of stone with oak-braced walls, so robustly that twenty of them are still standing today.
The great historian of the English landscape, W. G. Hoskins, dubbed this period The Great Rebuilding and ascribed to it a general impulse for home improvement across much of the country. Sadly, as so often with the identification of pleasing overarching historical themes, it turns out that there was no such movement. Rebuilding occurred haphazardly at different times in different places, dictated more than anything else by the availability of building materials. Certainly by 1500 two-storey village houses with stone walls and thatched roofs were comparatively common.
The village began to assume its familiar form. Some were built or rebuilt according to a plan, a favourite being two rows facing each other across a green with the road running by it. Much more often, though, the growth was piecemeal and organic, the dwellings put on plots as and when circumstances permitted, facing each other, side by side, at irregular angles and different heights, squeezed along windi
ng lanes and down dark alleys, everything thrown together on to the available spaces without thought given to the shape or form or the look of it.
Such villages were the expressions of fierce individualism: each family seeking the best for itself and whatever advantage it could obtain over its neighbour. Each village was unique and often almost every building in it was unique. But because the villagers were seeking the same goals, because the building techniques and models were restricted, and above all because they had to use the same materials – the same timber from the same woods, the same stone from the same quarries, the one kind of thatch – the product of this individual striving acquired the harmony of design, texture and colour that creates the magic of the classic village scene. Weatherboarding in Kent, tile-hanging in Sussex and Surrey, brick-and-flint in the Chilterns and in Norfolk, cob and thatch in Devon and Dorset, slate in Cornwall, stone in the Cotswolds and the North – each bestows its own shared distinctiveness.
But it is easy to be deceived by the appearance of these villages. They have been there a long time, at one with their landscapes, apparently almost sprung from the soil. They are a visible connection with a life which in virtually all other respects has long since vanished. Those weathered walls and crooked roofs and gable ends are so solid and permanent. The temptation is to invest the lives of those who left them with the same qualities.
You wander around the churchyard and note the recurrence of the same names, generation after generation of them; and if there is a good history of the village, it is sometimes possible to connect those names with individual houses. And you may reasonably conclude that this indeed was village life: a triumph of continuity stretching over centuries, people finding their places, putting down roots, establishing strong and lasting bonds with the place of their birth.