Chapter 13
The Land
The first possible evidence for open fields comes in the Laws of King Ine in Clause 42 which tells of a corporate obligation to protect growing crops in fields which may be divided into many parts. If this is accepted as evidence of the presence of embryo open fields in the landscape of 694 then it makes our understanding of eighth and ninth century charters easier. These charters record grants of land to the Church, to the royal family and to important royal servants. They describe the handing over of so many hides (120 acres in Cambridgeshire but probably not more than 40 acres in Wiltshire) and threaten anybody who dares to infringe the grant. But it is not clear what this handing-over implied. Does it mean that they were outright gifts of land, of immunity from taxes or loans of the use of the lands for a period of time?
Land in these gifts was predominantly arable, the most important and profitable land in peoples’ eyes, but there were often rights in meadow, pasture, common, marsh and wood associated with it. Some charters give voice to these subsidiary rights as in Thanet where the Abbot of Reculver received land with ‘everything belonging to it, fields, pastures, marshes, small woods, fens, fisheries with everything, as has been said, belonging to that land’. No description of the boundaries of the estate (if estate it was) were given as though everybody knew and had always known the area of countryside referred to which perhaps helps to strengthen the idea that this estate had been an entity from time immemorial, even as far back as Romano-British times.
Perhaps the question we ought to ask is whether the Romano-British estates were natural agrarian units containing a community that tended the land. If this was so, then the metamorphosis into a post-Roman estate would make sense and would seem to be almost inevitable. If, however, they were devoted to a single enterprise, like wool production or horse-raising, for example, or were larger than an agrarian unit that could fit into the shrunken post-Roman agrarian economy, then the process would involve, presumably, some division during the fifth century that ensured that each new estate was a workable entity with a suitable work-force and adequate areas of arable land, woodland, grazing and so on. If smaller, then two or more adjoining pieces of land could be combined or even, in some circumstances, abandoned as waste.
In some areas during Romano-British times, villas were not the centres of agricultural estates but seem to have been the headquarters of industrial and mining concerns, to use modern terms. They had no need of agricultural land and the areas they controlled could not be turned into agricultural estates. Presumably in post-Roman times, the small parcels of land attached to them would become waste. There are several villas of this sort in north-western Wiltshire, too close together to have been centres of agricultural production, but perhaps exploiting the iron deposits in the area.
This process of metamorphosis to a post-Roman system is made easier, of course, when we are relieved of the notion of invading hordes of barbarians tearing apart the Romano-British estates and swallowing as many fragments as they could get their hands on while driving the British into the fastnesses of the West. In contrast to this, we have a situation in which land was the source of wealth both in Roman and post-Roman times and great care would naturally be taken to keep it in viable units with sufficient labour to work it profitably. This would mean a re-organisation of the villa estates to suit the new times and new agricultural objective but not necessarily the destruction of the estates themselves.
We need more details of agricultural activity during the Romano-British period to fully understand it for our present knowledge rests mainly on the few finds of agricultural artefacts, some grain and many animals bones but the post-Roman charters give us a fuller picture of the situation of that time. The law codes provide some indications of marketing so we know that farming for sustenance was not always the rule but in the main the farmers worked to provide their own bread and meat. This does not mean that each farmer in a hamlet produced his own few loaves from scratch. Much more efficient was corporate activity within a settlement, carrying out the clearing, ploughing and harvesting as required in the yearly cycle.
But there were probably a range of different farming methods in use. In the Norfolk Fens, for example, there were a number of sites all containing Ipswich ware that are thought to be evidence of part-time settlement. Folk were probably rearing and fattening stock during the summer months and preparing and salting meat for the market. Theirs was the practice of transhumance, taking advantage of the lush grass growth in this lowland area and driving their cattle down in the summer but evacuating when the ground became waterlogged during the winter.
One great problem was that of manure. Means of keeping fertility up to the mark were few. It was the usual method to turn all the beasts in the place onto the land after harvest. Lime was probably also used and so was peat but the use of all of these methods was not sufficient to keep the arable in good heart so a fallow year was employed which allowed the ground to recover. The process of recovery was helped by the poor yields that were generally produced at the time. Overcoming the problem would have been made easier by co-operative effort and by being in a position to set aside some land each year. This would have been impossible in most cases for a small individual farmer.
We can get a good picture of the pre-Conquest estate from the charters, especially those of the tenth and eleventh centuries, with its three open fields, the furrows that run in various down-slope directions to encourage drainage, its headlands at the end of the furrows which allowed the ploughman to turn his ox-team round and the ‘gore-acres’, pieces of land, usually triangular, that are left in the field after the furrows are inscribed in the ground. In some cases, it is possiblel to recognise some tenth-century boundaries existing today that are still very much in use.
Charters are one of the best ways of seeing the countryside of the period for, in essence, much it is still there to be seen. One of these relate to Ardington in Berkshire where it describes land on which stood five settlements. ‘These nine hides lie among other lands held in share; the open pasture is common, the meadow is common and the ploughland is common’ thus succinctly summing up the rights of the farmers.
Others, more detailed, present a picture of the countryside that we can recognise more precisely. The following is from a charter describing the extent of Hardwell Farm which still exists and was then the centre of an agricultural estate whose boundaries are perhaps now those of the parish of Compton Beauchamp in Oxfordshire.
‘First along the Swinbrook up to Rush Hollow, and then from the bend in Rush Hollow on to Hardwell Way; along the Way until it comes to Icknield Way, then from the Way up on the ‘old Wood Way’ along the eastern side of Tell’s Burh (an Iron Age fort in the wood, south of the present B4507), then to a gore and from there to a gore-shaped acre and then along the furrow to the top of the headland, and on to a fore-earth (headlands are where the ploughman turns his plough-team; fore-earths are where the headland is then ploughed at right-angles to the rest of the field) and this fore-earth sticks into the estate; then right along the furrow to the headland, then from the down at ‘Ferny Hill Valley’, to a furrow an acre (strip?) nearer the linchet , then to the linchet, and then from the linchet at ‘Ferny Hill Valley’ to the other linchet on the south side of ‘Ferny Hill Valley’; forward then along a furrow to a row of stones (markers) then right onto the ridgeway again (the bounds are now heading north); them from there to a gore-acre; then to a headland, then to a gore-acre going into the land (i.e. the estate), then along a furrow until it reaches a corner, and then from there forward along a furrow until it reaches a corner, and then from there forward along a furrow until it reaches a fore-earth, and this fore-earth goes into the land; then on to the Icknield Way along the west side of Tell’s Camp, then northwards over the Icknield Way to ‘Sica’s Spring’; then from there crossways over a furlong right on to an alder bed at the corner of ‘Hedged Hill Brook’ and along this brook until it comes to two gore-acres , these two gore-acres going into the land, then on to a fore-earth, to a headland, then right on to a ‘redcliff’ (riverbank) on Swinbrook and so along the brook back to the Rush Hollow’.
Michael Wood’s construe of this passage in his book Domesday (p.38) informs us that ‘The Hardwell Charter takes us back to the Berkshire countryside around 903 at the shoulder of the surveyor who rode the bounds with Tata, the new owner. Nearly all the features names in this grant can still be found on the ground. The farm itself stood inside a D-shaped moat which still exists in part though, sadly, the medieval longhouse ‘hall’ which can be seen on old photographs and maps was demolished thirty years ago; probably on the site of the Saxon hall that succeeded the nearby Romano-British villa, though perhaps ‘Hordwyll’ – the well or spring of votive offerings – had been used since the Iron Age. Hordwell Way, now a deep, broad lane overgrown with trees, still leads past the farm up onto the Icknield Way and the ‘old Wood Way’ is still there inside a double hedge going uphill east of ‘Tell’s Burh’ , the earthwork known today as Hardwell Camp. Fern Hill Valley is still there, although now called Pingoose Covert and even also the alder bed at Hedged Hill Corner leading on to Swinbrook. The numerous cultivation marks are now gone but what is really remarkable about this document is that here we have all the indications of specialised agriculture, all the language of arable farming from those times to the present day: headlands, furrows, furlongs, gore-acres and fore-earths. With the adoption of the heavy-wheeled plough in the later pre-Conquest period and the growing demands of expanding population, agriculture was at an advanced stage of estate management and specialised ploughing techniques. The 903 charters shows how the layout of the estate and its exploitation was geared to the soil – a strip of land two and a half miles long and never more than 500 yards wide, running from the top of the chalk downs to the rich soil of the vale . The estate of Hardwell Farm today has the same shape as in 903 and perhaps for over a thousand years before that.’
Ridge-and furrow and strip cultivation seems to be indicated by this charter and long, ploughed strips have been discovered underneath post-Conquest earthen castles like Hen Domen in Montgomeryshire and Sandal in Yorkshire and demonstrate clearly that this type of cultivation was already established in some areas before 1066.
A key stage in the process of village formation has been highlighted at Furnells and Raunds in Northamptonshire, a sequence that the excavators suggest could apply to the development of other Midland villages. The archaeological record indicates that a manorial system had coalesced by the end of the tenth century which was accompanied by a planned settlement at North Raunds. The central building in this layout was a long building of a type that is seen elsewhere at the same time. This was an aisled hall similar to the nave of a later church, perhaps a barn or a building of general use. Surrounding the settlement was an extensive system of boundaries. In this case the spur to village formation was the development of a manorial estate.
Settlement drift is not restricted to early times. It might be thought that the building of a masonry church would have been a major factor in rooting a community firmly in one spot. But, in East Anglia, fieldwalking has shown that earlier pottery can be found around some of these churches but not the later pottery which has to be searched for at some distance to where the community has drifted, perhaps around a green or to a mill-site or to a spot more accessible to the local road network. This move may suggest that the village activities or the premises on which the activities are carried on had changed and the folk are no longer merely farmworkers who need to be based where the work is but have been able to widen the scope of their activities, perhaps into some sort of minor manufacture like wool processing that would be more conveniently carried on in another location.
As in Norfolk where fieldwalking has shown that this process was still going on in the eleventh-century so at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire where the earlier villages around the church on a ridge of high ground expanded into new areas leaving the church and what may have been the small manor-house behind. The new centre, still in use today, the result of village ‘creep’ has a village green as in Norfolk. It must have taken its name with it for Tetsworth - the place belonging to someone with a name like Tets – is an early name. However, these movements do not always end up in the same way; in Suffolk, for example, similar ‘creeps’ can result in dispersed, un-nucleated settlements scattered around large village greens
Shapwick, a Somerset village near Glastonbury, has been the subject of a long process of examination (Aston). During the eighth century it is thought to have been part of a large estate called ‘Pouholt’. One theory is that Sheepwick could have originated as a specialist area for raising sheep which provided wool for the lord’s disposal and for other settlements within a multiple estate. During the tenth century the present village was established by the Abbot of Glastonbury who forcibly moved the inhabitants into a new, nucleated settlement which kept the name ‘Shapwick’.
At Cheddar in the same county, the site of a pre-and post-Conquest excavated royal palace where meetings of the Witan were held during the tenth century, a ninth-century settlement has been found around the church and not around the king’s site which might suggest a certain royal distaste for the proximity of the smelly and noisy hoi polloi. Excavations (Rahtz) on the palace site demonstrated that it was indeed surrounded by a boundary ditch, palisade and timber gate. Buildings inside included what was identified as fowl-house, as in Frankish monasteries, a privy and a twenty-five-metre–long hall with bowed sides. Post-built, it was divided internally by two(?) partitions with a hearth more or less midway between the ends. There was no sign of a private ‘bower’ as described in an account of another royal site at Meretun in Hampshire which has not yet located. At Old Windsor, a royal site was located and excavated in the 1950s but is unlikely to be published.
In Somerset itself, documentary and fieldwork carried out by Stephen Costen has found that the county was dominated by large estates owned by the king and his important subjects from which periodic donations of land was given to monasteries. Each estate was made up of a number of smaller agricultural units and this provides the current archaeological name of ‘multiple estates’, each with a dominate unit referred to as a ‘caput’ (head).
Place-names can be indicative of early ownership of a place like Kingston (king’s farmstead) or Tottenham (Totta’s homestead) using the personal name together with suffixes like ton (farmstead), ham (homestead), stoke (place), wic (dwelling, farm), worth (homestead) and ley (oak wood or glade) Others feature some natural item in the countryside like Woodford, wood by the ford), Greenhill (green hill), Blackburn (dark stream) Wyresdale (dale or valley of the River Wyre), Alresford (ford by the alder(tree)), or even a man-made structures like Beaconsfield (open country of the beacon) or Taplow (Tęppa’s burial-mound, ‘low’ meaning mound).
What we find in Britain is that although Roman towns bequeathed their names to posterity, the same does not hold true for villa estates as happens frequently in Gaul. This seems to correlate with the archaeology since, as already said, we can rarely find a subsequent settlement on a villa site.
It is likely that early settlements did not need a name since everybody knew where they lived and it is only when a settlement pattern became more developed so that people needed to refer to places further off or to describe where they lived themselves that names would be needed. These could be simply ‘Jim’s place’ or the ‘place by the green hill’ which would in time become Greenhill. When, eventually, an inspector comes along on some official errand and asks ‘What is the name of this place?’ it is noted down and the name is officially fixed. But that does not mean that the spelling was fixed. Spellings vary greatly over the years so that sometimes nowadays they do not really correspond with the pronunciation like the names of ‘Calne’ in Wiltshire or ‘Frome’ in Somerset.
Many places probably changed their names like Węclingaceaster (Roman fort of the Węclingas (Wacol’s people)) did to St Albans when the shrine of St Alban became an object of pilgrimage and it simply became St Alban’s without any need to particularise any further. Roman roads were described as ‘Roman road of the Earningas (Earn’s people) or ‘Earninga stręt’ later to be Ermine Street, Similarly Watling Street was originally ‘Roman road of the Węclingas (Wacol’s people again) which became Węclinga stręt or Watling Street. Short stretches of Roman roads are likely to become Devil’s causeways, the appellation of ‘devil’ being attached to any ancient site or road but very often they were simply Street (Somerset town) or The Street. Several names like this survive as the names of places. The word ‘Hare’ means ‘army’ and is attached to Street or in field names to Way or Path referring to the width, being enough for an army to march along. By the later pre-Conquest period, most places probably had a fixed name since there seems to have been no problem in Domesday in identifying places.
In order to make the eighth- and ninth-century charters intelligible, it is necessary to accept that the open field system was practised in midland and southern England and probably in the East Riding and the Vale of York. But in other areas, a rather different system seems to have been in use. In Kent, for instance, although open fields were be found, the normal method of assessment was the ploughland which is presumably the equivalent of a field, while the folk lived in scattered hamlets, not in nucleated settlements. Family ownership was more common and the individual farmer occupied a more important place in society. Exactly why this was so, is difficult to say, but it may be related to Frankish settlers who retained a more independent position in society. Further afield, in Wales, the Welsh Laws of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries record the existence of ancient federal estates which apparently were in being before the early seventh century. Organised around a llys, each estate consisted of a number of hamlets, as well as scattered farms. They were inhabited by both bondmen and freemen who, in return for their land, paid rents in kind and performed various services for their lords.
As time went on, the ownership of many estates became fragmented, the result of centuries of inheritance, the passing of property down to several sons, or of business deals in which portions of estates were bartered or exchanged. The result is that in Domesday there are many estates which have multiple owners. Our knowledge of the agricultural scene in the later years of the pre-Norman period owes a great debt to the Domesday Book and the picture it paints is probably not very different from the earlier rural scene. It deals with estates, as did the charters, and the estates can be bigger or smaller than the agrarian units surrounding the settlements i.e the land each tilled.
In order to understand something of the situation on an estate, we can turn to the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum, a document that describes the various inhabitants of an estate (English Historical Documents Vol II). It dates from a generation before the Norman Conquest and its descriptions, like those of Domesday, are probably more or less accurate, in some degree, at least, to the situation as it was earlier since tradition was always a strong ingredient in the life of people of the time.
On this estate which was situated in the West Country, the descriptions the writer gives may have been somewhat simplified or ‘tidied up’ in order to present a coherent account, but it is generally accepted that it is basically accurate. He describes four kinds of free inhabitants. At the top of the pile is the ‘lord’, the thegn who holds the estate from king or a religious landowner like an abbot or bishop and whose rights were set out in a charter. In return he had three services to perform: military when called on, repair of fortifications and bridge-works. In some cases other services might be involved like helping to equip ships or protecting the king when he was in the neighbourhood.
Next came the geneat who paid rent for his land and a swine for the pasture he held and this suggests that he held a quarter of a hide. For this he had to ride and carry for the lord, fetch strangers, guard the lord’s person and to take charge of horses. It sounds as though he was a kind of personal assistant. He also reaped and mowed, looked after fences and hedges, and paid a freeman’s dues. Below him in the social scale was the cottar or border who was still a freeman paying dues to the church and his ‘hearth-penny’. He had obligations to work on the lord’s land every Monday or three days a week during harvest. Instead, on some estates he worked for the month of August harvesting an acre of oats or half an acre of other grain and for that he would receive one sheaf. He paid no rent, and was to have at least five acres of his own in the arable. The cottar may have been the individuals on the estate who were responsible for seeing that some of the lord’s more menial obligations were carried out.
The fourth of the major groups were the geburs who were spent two days in every week and three days during the harvest period working on the lord’s land. They were to pay ten pence at Michaelmas (29th September), after the harvest, twenty-three sesters of barley and two hens at Martinmas, one young sheep or two pence at Easter. During the winter they were to help at the lord’s sheepfold. From first ploughing to Martinmas they were to turn over one acre of land every week, providing the seed themselves. At boonworks they had to offer a further three acres and two acres of pasturage. If they needed more grass they should do more ploughing for it. They also took responsibility for a further three acres sown from their own barn. A gebur had a good many tasks and would need help from his family to carry them out He paid his hearth-tax. With his fellow geburs he kept one hunting-dog for the lord’s use and supplied the herdsman with six loaves when the lord’s pigs were driven out to the woodland to graze.
There is a good deal about the geburs who seems to have borne the brunt of the day-to-day tasks that kept the wheels of the estate turning. It suggests that they were the most numerous class on the estate. Perhaps as an indication of their usefulness, a great many rules were framed to control their activities. When a gebur was first enrolled he would be given some land, be set up with two oxen which he would contribute to the estate’s plough-teams during the winter, one cow to provide milk for his family, six sheep for wool and seven sown acres for his bread. At the end of the first year he would be expected to start paying his dues. He would be given tools for his work and utensils such as a cauldron and other household untensils. When he died the lord would be his heir.
There were also specialist agricultural workers on the estate like the bee-keeper and the swineherd who would be responsible for the supply of meat and hides. Both were to provide a horse for the lord’s use.
Slaves worked at the direction of the lord’s reeve. They were given land, a smallholding sufficient for them to grow some food, and a handful of seed-corn at harvest. We are told that they were protected by customary rights. Their scale of rations were laid down. A male slave’s rations were twelve pounds of good corn and two sheep carcases, one good cow and the right to firewood. A female slave had eight pounds of corn, one sheep or threepence for winter provision, one sester of beans for Lent, and whey in summer or one penny. This scale suggests that it was expected that she would have been in a relationship. Special provision was made for slaves at Christmas and Easter.
What we have here is a unique social arrangement in which provision is made for everybody in the community and all have a place in it and this position, whether high or low, is protected. It is not a golden age, for life was difficult and labour hard but it is probably as near a perfect piece of social engineering as we shall ever achieve.
Further information is given about other individuals in the ‘Rectitudnes’. A free peasant who worked for another without possessing a holding in the open fields himself was entitled to the proceeds of two acres, one sown for him, the other sown by himself. Customary dues are laid down for specialised workers: the sower, the oxherd, the cowherd, the shepherd, the goatherd, the granary keeper, the mill keeper, the woodward and the hayward. The cheese-maker, for instance, was entitled to a hundred cheeses and all the buttermilk apart from the daily bowlful she had to supply to the shepherd. The beadle was freer from manual work than others but he was provided with a piece of land.
At special times of the year there was no work. There were winter and summer feasts: at Christmas and Easter, at reaping, at ploughing, mowing, for making hay stacks, for gathering firewood which apparently was done communally and for the making of corn ricks.
On the estate, a key role was played by the lord’s reeve or estate manager, in modern parlance. If the lord was a more-or-less permanent resident on the estate he would give regular instructions and have discussions with him, but on many estates the lord was only occasionally in residence and the reeve had to act on his own. The writer lists the equipment that the reeve was responsible for. It includes weaving implements – the uprights looms, the shuttle, the combs, the most productive equipment on estates – kettles, ladles, and tubs for making ale - bath-tubs, salt-cellars, besoms, hammers, rakes, forks, ladders – tools for the miller, tailor and tinker.
In summer, the months of May, June and July, the reeve had to ensure that harrowing, spreading dung, mending the hurdle-hedges, shearing sheep, building whatever agricultural structures were needed, making good hedges, repairing buildings, cutting wood, clearing weeds, building sheep-pens, making fish-weirs and clearing the mill-race were all done. At harvest-time, there was reaping, mowing, digging up woad, carrying to the barns, roofing and thatching, cleaning out the fold, and arranging the sheep-pen and pig-sties the winter. In the winter there was ploughing, cutting timber, pruning the orchards, and indoor jobs like making pegs and twine, threshing, cutting firewood, building stalls for the oxen after ploughing and sties for new pigs and making a kiln on the threshing floor for drying grain. In spring there was more ploughing to be done and planting of fruit trees, sowing beans and setting vineyards and the clearing out of ditches. When the weather was fine, madder, linseed and woad are sown and vegetables for the lord’s hall planted.
We do not know whether this estate, if it existed in reality, was owned by a secular or an ecclesiastical landlord. In the case of monastic lands, estates were in the hand of a single landlord very often for hundreds of years so the opportunity for organising the agricultural activity along the most efficient lines could (literally) reap dividends. An interpretation based on the situation in Wessex in the tenth century, a period and place of growing commercialisation, has cited Glastonbury Abbey as an example of a ‘go-ahead’ landlord concentrating peasants into new nucleated villages and replacing their scattered holdings by ‘cereal farms’. Leading monasteries were the most entrepreneurial of landlords throughout both the pre-Conquest and post-Conquest periods.
Draught animals on the estate would have been oxen. Cows could be used for the purpose by small farmers and they had the advantage of giving milk but there were no breeds that we could recognise today. Mules seem to be common for ploughing if we go by the ploughman pictured in the Bayeux Tapestry whose animal has ears that are quite unhorselike. Goats were useful for they would eat almost anything and give milk and cheese but we do not hear much of them in the period. Sheep were common as a result of the trend towards large-scale sheep-farming in late Roman times – British cloth was well-known in Rome. By the end of the eleventh century, Hoskins (Provincial England) has estimated that there were 7.5 million in the country but, like the cattle, selective breeding was not practised and no breeds had been established. Pigs were probably the commonest farm stock as we can see from frequent contemporary references to them and the numerous place-names that contain the element ‘swine’ or ‘swin’. They would have been the razor-backed type, perhaps running free in the farmyard or marshalled by swineherds on different parts of the estate according to the time of the year. In the autumn they would have been in the woodland where no doubt they interbred with the wild boars that were still common in the countryside. . Horses were seldom put to the plough; they were not often agricultural animals and were almost invariably used for riding. However, there are illustrations of horses being used for harrowing. Some six types have been recognised, ranging from small Celtic ponies, no larger than Shetlands, to heavy cavalry horses. No doubt more attention was paid to their breeding because they were the aristocratic animal. Hens and geese were common while bees were kept to produce the honey that was one of the great luxuries of the period. Judging from the references to them in charters, most farmers would have had a hive. Dogs, of course, were common, used both in hunting and guarding while cats were fewer than they had been and some households used weasels as mousers.
We have a picture of a Saxon plough in a manuscript in the Bodleian Library which shows that it had a ploughshare, a mould-board and a coulter while the beam passes right through from the handle to the collars of the pair of oxen. This is just as we would expect to see but what is unusual is the pair of large wheels that take the weight of the implement. This may have been a development of the tenth century which is also shown in the Bayeux Tapestry illustration. It is likely that, as in the later Middle Ages, sowing and harrowing were done at the same time to prevent crows and rooks eating the broadcast seed.
Hay was vital for feeding the stock during the winter. We have illustrations in medieval manuscripts showing the hay harvest and it is certain that the pre-Conquest grass was cut in exactly the same way as it was to be for a thousand years with a long-handled scythe. In construction it is the same implement as today with a thin rod connecting the blade to the lower end of the pole to prevent the angle between the two being clogged with grass. Women and children followed the mowers and had a great deal of fun throwing the hay about so that it lay evenly on the ground to dry in the sun. This could take some time and when it was judged to be finished, drag rakes would be used to bring it in quickly and pile it into stacks.
Grain was cut with a sickle, the reaper grasping a bundle of stalks in one hand and then drawing the sickle through it about halfway up the height, leaving the rest to be cut for thatching or to be eaten by grazing cattle. Corn stalks were a good deal longer than they are today. The reapers were followed by the binders who used bindweed or some other plant of the kind to bind the corn up into sheaves. An eleventh-century illustration in the British Museum (Queen Mary’s Psalter) shows the process finishing with the sheaves being loaded into a cart. On the left of the illustration is a man standing on a tussock and blowing a horn. This is the man in charge of the team known as the Lord of the Harvest whose job was to superintend the jobs and also regulate the hours of work with the aid of his horn.
Another illustration shows threshing in progress. This would be done in the open air. Two men are threshing using flails, an implement in two parts, the handle and the beater or swingle which was attached to the handle by a leather thong so that when it was brought down on the corn it would do so with greater force. Threshed grain was flung up into the air with shovels so that the breeze carried off the chaff. This is the winnowing process. In the drawing, corn is being sifted with a sieve and grain in a large basket suspended from a pole on the shoulders of two men is being carried past the teller who records the number of baskets of processed grain on a notched stick.
A question that should concern archaeologists is when discriminate farm buildings appeared. So far, little investigation had been done in the Roman period but they are likely to have used then in the milieu of commercial villa farming and one would think that they might have been continued in use during the post-Roman period in the same way as farmers today continue to use medieval barns. The barn was probably the first general purpose building, being useful for threshing, storage, shearing and a host of other tasks but more specialized buildings were soon developed. In the Germanic barbarian legal codes, besides the house (domus) there were workshops usually reserved for the women for spinning and weaving (the grubenhauser or sunken floor huts), and various sheds for barns and livestock (suria cum animalibus, sutes cum porcis) and structures for storage (spicarum, cellarium, horreum, horreum, horreum sine tecto, granarium, machalo). (Chapelot and Fosseier). Excavations on the Continent have uncovered likely buildings with some of these functions at Warendorf in Germany in occupation during the seventh and eighth centuries and at Kootwijk in the Netherlands where forty-five grubenhauser, three barns and three post granaries have been found in use from the seventh to the tenth century. With the exception of the grubenhauser, so far few of these buildings have been recognised in Britain although there are sites such as Catholme in Staffordshire, dating from the late-fifth/sixth century to the early tenth century where they might have been expected to have been found since the pattern there seems to be groups of building with a large central building enclosed within an agricultural enceinte like Warendorf.
Apart from the thegn’s residence and any church he may have founded, the other purpose-built structures on the estate could have been a granary or perhaps a barn or similar-sized building for storing wool and a water mill. Presumably the workers built their own accommodation on a co-operative basis with those who had specialized skills like thatching lending their expertise and neighbours getting together to manipulate the heavier timbers
Although the Rectitudines account is perhaps to be viewed as a description of an ideal West Country medieval estate, a great many of these activities would have been necessary everywhere. We cannot tell whether the Rectitudines settlement was a nucleated one or whether several clusters of houses were scattered around the estate. Domesday describes that in areas of Danelaw, a settlement could house workers who worked on different estates in the vicinity while the ownership of the estate could be shared by more than one owner. At Weston, on the outskirts of Bath, there were two owners at Domesday. One, Bath Abbey, had shared it before the Conquest and the lay owner after the Conquest was a Frenchman who must have acquired it from Edric, the pre-Conquest part-owner, whether by purchase or by confiscation we cannot tell. The estate lay in a steep-sided combe on the southern slopes of the Cotswolds as they dip down into the basin where the River Avon flows and Bath lies. Its slopes are dotted with a holy well and springs, one of which gives rise to a good-sized stream that flowed down to the River Avon.
Domesday has these entries:
‘The Church holds Weston itself. Before 1066 it paid tax for 15 hides. Land for ten ploughs, of which eight and a half hides are in lordship; two ploughs there; seven slaves. Seven villagers and ten smallholders with six ploughs and six and a half hides. A mill which pays ten shillings; meadow (of) twenty acres; underwood, one league in both length and width. One cob, 200 sheep. The value was £8, now £10.’
The second entry:
‘Arnulf of Hedin holds Weston from the King. Edric held it before 1066; it paid tax for five hides. Land for seven ploughs. In lordship two ploughs; ten slaves; four hides, less half a virgate and three acres. Six villagers and one smallholder with three ploughs and one hide, half a virgate and three acres. A mill which pays twenty shillings,; meadow (of) thirteen acres; pasture (of) sixty acres; woodland (of) thirty acres; in Bath three houses which pay twenty-seven pence. Six cobs, eight cattle, sixteen pigs; two hundred and fifty sheep. Value formerly and now £8.’
There are two Westons today: Lower Weston by the river Avon and Upper Weston further up in the combe and it seems likely that this is the ancient situation with two distinct settlements as described in Domesday. Probably, the estate of the Church (Bath Abbey) was in the combe for in its entry the larger area of woodland is mentioned, some of which still exists, lying on the upper slopes of the valley. A league was probably one and a half miles but the measurement was not exact for the shape of the woodland could never have been regular but the approximation, which it is, would fit on the upper slopes very well. The term ‘hide’ refers to arable land on which tax was paid and was 120 acres in extent while a virgate was a quarter of a hide. Clearly, the stream was put to use with two watermills, the smaller one upstream of the other. ‘In lordship’ means that the land was being farmed by the lord, the rest would be farmed by his tenants on their own behalf. The term ‘plough’ is an abbreviation for plough-team. Arnulf came from the Pas-de-Calais and was a Frank, not a Norman, but a follower of the Conqueror and his estate probably lay along the river. By 1100 his land had come into the hands of Bath Abbey as a gift from his son-in-law. This was the common way in which the Church acquired land. Bath Abbey then held the whole of Weston. Land for ten (seven) ploughs refers to the amount of land a plough-team of eight oxen could cultivate. It seems strange to us that the Church had slaves on its estate but the practice took some years to die out after the Conquest. That the area containing the two estates is still described as an entity (Weston) in Domesday despite the division suggests that it had a long ancestry otherwise the two estates would have been given separate identities. This ancestry could have gone back to the early post-Roman period or even to the Roman period itself.
One cannot think that entrepreneurial activity was restricted to urban communities during the period. People with those skills must have existed in rural settlements as well. In the area mentioned above, there was wool, a commodity that was in demand, not only in Britain itself, but, increasingly, across the Channel in Flanders, where favourable conditions included a soil congenial to dye plants, plenty of the cleansing agent, fuller’s earth, as well as proximity to England, the source of fine wool, advantages that were to make it one of the leading European producers of textles during the medieval period.
In Britain, it is probable that the vendor, whether it was the lord himself or one of his tenants, would strike deals with the itinerant merchants or agents of continental firms who made the best offers and this would lead in time to the establishment of a market in a rural area that, in time, could extend the range of its commodities to other agricultural products like sheep and cattle. Identification of some of these places today is done by identifying a market space in a small town or village and regular markets or fairs could also have been held in the countryside. The former, of course, appear in the topography of the present settlements that date back to the medieval period, but how far they are a fossilisation of what was there in the pre-Conquest period is impossible to demonstrate. But, in view of the widely-accepted ‘tenth-century revolution in trade and technology’ there is no reason to doubt that they were. Examples of places that later fall into this category are Longnor and Wheaton Ashton in Staffordshire (Slater) Lacock, Biddestone and Castle Combe in Wiltshire and Norton St Philip in Somerset where the monks of nearby Hinton priory later built a guesthouse in 1223 to accommodate merchants who attended their wool sales. All these places are in the wool production area of the Cotswolds around Bath which would have been the alternative market place for their wool. That other types of ‘traders’ were operating in other parts of the countryside is made clear by the concern of the law-codes in the late-ninth and early tenth-century with cattle rustling
Could these places have been described as agricultural settlements in pre-Conquest Britain? Or perhaps were they simply conglomerations that grew up around a ‘countryside’ market?
There has been some discussion as to whether agricultural settlements in pre-Conquest times should be described as villages. We certainly know what a village is today and presumably also in post-Conquest times But as far as the lord in pre-Conquest times was concerned, all he needed was a work-force that served the needs of his household and agricultural holding as described in the Rectitudine: the inhabitants would have assessed their settlement in terms of community: and, if the lord had a social/religious conscience and there was a church, the priest would have thought of the settlement in terms of his congregation None of these by themselves would qualify the place as a village but perhaps, if we are searching for a definition, all should be taken into account. But, only if the lord saw pecuniary advantages in promoting a market-place on his estate, could one have been founded there.
Perhaps the establishment of a rural market helped to ‘tie’ a settlement to its site rather more firmly than the church seems to have done in some circumstances – sordid profit triumphing over faith. This rather glib statement however, does less than justice to the role of what seems to have been a most important element in the lives of people at the time.
Further west, there is no evidence of such estates although this is not to say that they did not exist. Individual settlements like Houndtor have been excavated on Dartmoor where the standing stone walls of the later 1200-1350 period houses are stratified above their turf-built tenth- and eleventh- century equivalents. Characteristic of the structures is the ‘long-house’ in which the cattle were housed at one end and the people at the other. The cattle-end incorporated a drain while at the other was a hearth whose smoke would have percolated through the thatched roof. (Minter) These buildings are identical to the houses uncovered at the site of Mawgan Porth, mentioned above.
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