21
Richard Jones
Introduction
Landscapes are dynamic entities. Even without human intervention, all landscapes will evolve in response to environmental shifts and the array of natural processes born out of these changed conditions. Against this fluid background, societal remodelling of the landscape will add further dimensions to an already complex picture. At people’s hands, the pace of change can be quickened (more rarely retarded) and its natural rhythms and trajectories disturbed or even subverted. Despite the signatures left on the land by such human mediation, it generally remains impossible to propose anything approximating to a definitive beginning of, or what might be described as a final end to, the making of any landscape.
Focus here is placed on the rural landscape of thirteenth-century England. To isolate a single century for special consideration appears at odds with the notion of landscape as a continually evolving entity. Yet between c. 1180 and c. 1320 the English countryside underwent rapid and extensive transformation. In just a few generations, and as a consequence of extraordinary human enterprise, large parts of the countryside were reshaped and took on a new character. This chapter explores these changes; reflects on the scale and variety of landscape interventions that characterized the period; and looks to identify the principal drivers that explain why the English landscape was transformed in the way it was during the long thirteenth century.
Antecedent landscapes
The broad divisions of the landscape, variously defined by historical geographers, were already of long standing by the beginning of the long thirteenth century. Whether we follow Rackham in distinguishing between an ‘ancient’ and ‘planned’ countryside,1 or adopt Roberts and Wrathmell’s three ‘province’ model,2 it is clear that many of the individual elements and composite structures, which would come to define England’s regional particularities, had their origins in landscape transformations that had already been achieved by the Norman Conquest.
The distinction between the ‘land of villages’ and the ‘land of hamlets’ was already there by the end of the eleventh century. The former was the dominant lowland rural settlement form found on the claylands of central and east midland England, extending south-west into Somerset and Wiltshire and northwards east of the Pennines to the Scottish border. The latter was characteristic of upland landscapes and, if slightly different in nature, of south-eastern England and across larger parts of the north and west. Domesday Book informs, if imprecisely, on other aspects of the late-eleventh-century English countryside associated, and in spatial terms broadly coincident, with these two regional settlement archetypes. In contrast to the more pastoral economies of hamlet country characterized by its complex mosaic of enclosed fields and significant woodland cover, the economy of village England was founded on extensive ploughlands worked in open fields, meadowland, with areas of woodland pushed back to the margins. The extent to which these were actually two distinct countrysides has recently been questioned; so too the extent to which villages had truly developed by the Norman Conquest.3 But there can be little doubt that the basic regional patterns of land use were already largely fixed well before the thirteenth century.
This was true of other components of the physical and administrative landscape even if these were of more recent origin. The parochial system had essentially been formalized by the middle of the twelfth century. With it the most intensive phase of church building had already passed.4 The foundations of the later medieval urban network were also laid in the late-eleventh and twelfth century not thirteenth. Just as this urban geography built on Roman and early medieval antecedents, so the roads that connected these new centres also rested on the same foundations.5 The overland communication network, especially long-distance routes, and its integration with England’s navigable rivers, was thus also firmly established by the beginning of the thirteenth century.
Castles and monasteries again both owe more to the late-eleventh and especially the twelfth century than they do the thirteenth. In the countryside, the geography of castles, built to bolster and protect local centres of power, reflected the broader patterns of estates and landownership established after the Conquest.6 By the end of the twelfth century, many had already fallen derelict. In terms of numbers, the castle would never again be so prominent a feature in the English landscape. For those that did survive on into the thirteenth century, their transformation from earth-and-timber construction to stone had also largely been achieved by 1200.7 The great period of monastic foundation had passed too. Peaking in the 1130s more than 230 houses were founded across England in the first half of the twelfth century, and 220 between 1150 and 1200. In contrast, the first half of the thirteenth century saw just seventy-seven new foundations.8 The long thirteenth century was therefore the inheritor, rather than constitutor, of many key structural components of the English countryside.
Four drivers of thirteenth-century landscape transformation
Landscape interventions are disruptive and costly, and their long-term effects often unpredictable. Most communities will therefore tend toward conservatism, preferring to retain existing structures rather than experiment with new arrangements. Invariably, then, when a landscape enters a phase of rapid development, as the English landscape did during the long thirteenth century, there will be underlying causes that forced or encouraged people to rethink their relationship with the land. While it is often hard to identify the precise factors at play in thirteenth-century England at a local scale, at a national scale it is much easier to suggest what those basic drivers may have been. Some, like rapid population growth, created the pressure for change. Others, such as a favourable climate, a vibrant economy, and legal reform, provided opportunities for exploitation.
Demography
If the scale of population growth across the long thirteenth century cannot be precisely calculated, its upward trajectory is clear, doubling or perhaps trebling over this period. By the early-fourteenth century, England’s population may have stood near 5 million, although lower figures of 3.7 million; 4–4.25 million based on the carrying capacity of the land; and upper figures closer to 6–7 million have been proposed.9 Around 1300, the majority were engaged directly in agriculture or in agricultural-related activities. Urban centres may have been growing, both in number and size, but they still accommodated only 15%–20% of the population.10 Migration to towns and cities certainly relieved population pressure in the countryside, but large parts remained, ‘awash with humanity’.11 At a local level, the picture is inevitably more complex. On the manor of Taunton, Somerset, for example, the adult male population more than doubled from between 1209 and 1311, rising more rapidly before midcentury.12 Bentley, Staffordshire, witnessed a demographic surge of 34% in the decade 1299–1308 alone. Elsewhere, and far less common, were instances where population levels appear to have fallen.13 Across the century, then, more people needed to be accommodated, more mouths needed to be fed.
Climate
Climatic conditions during the long thirteenth century were generally benign. Mean annual temperatures, as far as they can be reconstructed, were generally warm.14 The last two decades of the twelfth century were marked by a recovery of temperatures from a temporary midcentury low. Thereafter temperatures plateaued before dipping dramatically in the 1310s. Weather conditions were more variable. Reconstructed weather patterns suggest that continental and anticyclonic systems bringing cold but dry winters and warm, dry summers were the norm in England in all but two decades (1220–40) between 1180 and 1270. In contrast, half of the decades (1270s and 1280s; 1310s) between 1270 and 1320 were characterized by cyclonic or maritime conditions associated with Atlantic westerly air flows associated with mild wet winters and cool damp summers.15
Coastal communities were particularly prone to downturns in the weather. It is no surprise to see that the great sea-floods of the century – those of 1236, which destroyed lives property and livestock in Wisbech Hundred; and the two floods of 1287, which affected much of the east and south coasts – coincided with wet decades.16 The broader impact of weather on agriculture can be traced in the annual grain yields recorded on English manors. Well-above-average yields were obtained between 1240 and 1260 as the crops benefiting from the warm dry summers; but were much reduced and well-below average in the wetter decades of the 1280s and 1310s.17
Economy
The long thirteenth emerges as a period of exceptional economic dynamism driven in part, but not wholly explained by, population growth and the favourable climate. From the 1180s the economy became progressively more monetized. The number of coins minted per annum nearly quadrupled between the 1180s and 1250s. Even against a rapidly growing population, currency per capita trebled in just forty years between 1180 and 1220. As available coinage exceeded transactions, the country entered into an inflationary phase. Between 1170 and 1220 the price of wheat doubled despite increases in the land under cultivation and above average annual yields.18 For landlords these were good times. Incomes rose on Canterbury Cathedral Priory estates by 80% c. 1200–1331; on the Bishop of Winchester’s estates they rose four-fold between 1185–86 and 1312–13. The economic benefits of the age were not restricted to the great landholders, however. Rather they percolated down to even the lowest tier of landowners and the peasantry. The incomes that could be generated from agriculture discouraged landlords from leasing their estates, where income from rents was fixed, instead favouring to bring these back in hand to be managed and worked directly to take advantage of the market. The late-thirteenth century witnessed the floruit of direct demesne farming, which reached its height between 1240 and 1315.19
As the economy commercialised, so lords took advantage by establishing new towns (or developing existing rural settlements as towns) and obtaining charters to hold markets and fairs, often on rural manors. The number of market grants rose progressively across the thirteenth century, peaking between 1250 and 1275 when, nationally, more than 200 were issued.20 One consequence of commercialisation was agricultural and industrial specialisation and the emergence of more clearly defined regional economies. As the economy diversified, so the importance of interregional trade increased. The wealth created through agriculture, industry, and commerce was not spread evenly however. By c. 1330 the richest communities were concentrated in a broad band running from north Somerset and Wiltshire, through the counties of the southern midlands, eastwards through Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire into Norfolk and Suffolk, and northwards across central and southern Lincolnshire.21
Law
The formulation of a well-defined common law in the twelfth and particularly thirteenth century reveals the societal importance of land at the period. The law overwhelmingly concerned itself ‘with rights in land: the possession, or seisin, of land, the services owed for the tenure of land, the inheritance of land, the leasing of land, the wardship of land, the profits of land, the burdens on land, and the wrongs to land’.22 The legal maxim, Cuius solem, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos, ‘For those who have soil, to them is everything to the sky above and to hell below’, which established landowners’ rights to subterranean resources and air space, appears to have been a concept which had its origins in the thirteenth century.23 However, much more of thirteenth-century law was founded, not upon the abstract, but in the realities of the contemporary landscape.
Several clauses in Magna Carta were written with a view to the preservation or removal of physical elements in the landscape. Those with custody over the estates of minors were required to maintain ‘houses, parks, warrens, fishponds, mills, and other things pertaining to the land’ (Clause 5). All fish-weirs on the Thames and Medway as well as on other major rivers across the country were to be removed (Clause 33); and river banks that had been enclosed were to be opened up (Clause 47). The Statute of Merton (1236) sought to ensure that common access to wastes, woods, and pastures was preserved against seigneurial enclosure. By the Provisions of Westminster (1259), lessees were forbidden from damaging the physical assets of their farms and were required to restore any damages in full in the event that they did. Legal frameworks such as these were as critical as any other in dictating the pace and direction of landscape change. This is particularly true of Forest Law, the curtailment of which became a defining factor in the long thirteenth century.
Regional perspectives on landscape change
By 1320, no part of England was entirely as it had been in 1180. But the extent to which the countryside had been transformed and how it had been altered differed from region to region. Assessment of thirteenth-century landscape change must therefore consider broad patterns as well as the fine detail. In what follows, focus is first given to the three landscape pays that arguably saw the most fundamental modification during the period – the woodlands, the uplands, and wetlands. Attention is then turned to specific landscape elements of social and religious significance – seigneurial spaces, villages and hamlets, peasant buildings, churches – before finally considering the economic impacts on the physical landscape of England – the exploitation of raw materials, sources of power, and the transport infrastructure.
Forests, woodland, and waste
The creation of Royal Forests was a phenomenon of the late-eleventh and twelfth centuries. By the end of the reign of Henry II as much as a third of the country, including whole counties such as Cornwall and Essex, was subject to Forest Law. This special legal status, which served to create royal monopolies over its wild fauna (venison) and timber and underwood (vert), severely restricted the freedoms of local lords and their communities to use the landscape and exploit its resources as they might otherwise have done. In particular, Forest Law acted as a barrier to the extension of areas brought under the plough. Indicative of its strictures, the Assize of Woodstock, otherwise known as the Assize of the Forest of 1184, forbade the destruction of woodland, including woods held in severalty by those other than the Crown that were found within the Forests.
From the last decade of the twelfth century, afforestation gave way to disafforestation. In 1190 parts of Bedfordshire and Yorkshire were disafforested; in 1204 the entire county of Cornwall, parts of the forest in Essex, and Devon were disafforested; and in 1207 the county of Surrey.24 Despite such gains, the institution of the Forest and its administration remained major causes of baronial complaint in the 1210s. The Unknown Charter, a precursor to Magna Carta, demanded the disafforestation of all land afforested from the coronation of Henry II (1153). Magna Carta’s disafforestation clause (Clause 47) – which required only those areas brought under Forest Law since the accession of King Richard (1189) to be disafforested – thus represented a compromise between the king and his subjects. However, the Charter of the Forest, drawn up two years later in 1217, went much further. All Forests created beyond royal demesne lands from the beginning of the reign of Henry II were to be disafforested (Clauses 1 and 3). If royal authority was retained over the unlicenced wasting of demesne woodland (Clause 4), other concessions were given with important landscape implications for non-Crown holdings. Thus:
Every free man may henceforth without being prosecuted make in his wood or in land he has in the forest a mill, a preserve, a pond, a marl-pit, a ditch, or arable outside the covert in arable land, on condition that it does not harm any neighbour.
(Clause 12)
As a consequence of the Forest Charter, confirmed in 1225, and again in 1297 and 1300, over the course of the thirteenth century as much as a third of the land area formerly subject to Forest Law was eventually released from royal control.
Assarting, the clearance of woodland to create new arable land, was both a precursor to, and the natural successor of, disafforestation. Under Forest Law, such activity was closely monitored as the Assize of the Forest made clear. In the aftermath of disafforestation, clearances could be undertaken on an altogether different order. After the disafforestation in 1230 of Treville Forest, Herefordshire, three-quarters of its 2,000 acres of woodland would be cleared by 1300.25 Assarting, however, was not confined to Royal Forests, but was a common thirteenth-century experience wherever there was woodland and waste that could be cleared such as in the Sussex Weald.26 The chronology of assarting, however, differed from region to region. In Cheshire most ridding-names signalling woodland clearance postdate 1250.27 In contrast, large-scale clearances had largely been completed in Surrey by the mid-twelfth century; while in neighbouring Sussex, significant acreages were still being brought under the plough in the fourteenth century.
Thirteenth-century woodland clearance might take several forms. At Lillingstone Dayrell, Buckinghamshire, newly assarted land, probably undertaken post-1250 by the community as a whole, was incorporated into the open fields.28 Nearby at Silverstone, Northamptonshire, land was cleared within the woodland, producing a mosaic of small irregular enclosed fields almost certainly farmed in severalty.29 In parts of the west Midlands, it has been suggested that this change might have resulted from the Statute of Merton (Roberts 1973)30; however, as these two east Midland examples shown, it is likely that both forms of assarting continued to operate after its issue.
Uplands
Benign climatic conditions coupled with demographic pressures and socioeconomic drivers encouraged greater exploitation of the uplands. By the end of the thirteenth century, the uplands were far from marginal spaces. At Houndtor on Dartmoor, Devon, the formerly seasonally occupied site recorded in Domesday Book became permanent home to a small community in the thirteenth century.31 The terraced south-east-facing slopes nearby testify to the cultivation of cereals despite being above the 1,200 foot contour and on shallow soils. Later arrivals on the moor were not so fortunate. The small community that established itself at Dunnabridge in the first decade of the fourteenth century cannot have foreseen the climatic downturn that would characterize the 1310s. Here, however, livestock not grain appears to have been the basis of the local economy almost certainly helping it to survive the vicissitudes of the early-fourteenth-century weather.32 On the chalk uplands of the Sussex Downs, thirteenth-century farmsteads at Bramble Bottom and Kiln Combe point to population movement upslope, the former associated with valley entrenchments that served as sheepfolds.33 At the other end of the country in Cumberland, communities had established themselves by 1315 on Alston Moor at Garrigill (thirty-three recorded tenants), in the Nent valley (twenty-two tenants), at Amershaugh (thirteen tenants), and Alston (sixteen tenants) (Winchester 2000).
In the northern uplands, especially the central Pennines and the Lake District, vast areas had been given over to cattle breeding and sheep grazing. There were no fewer than a dozen vaccaries in the forest of Stainmore on the border of Westmorland, County Durham and Yorkshire, and a similar number in the forest of Wensleydale, Yorkshire. In Lancashire the Honour of Clitheroe possessed twenty-seven vaccaries housing a herd of c. 2500 cattle in 1296. In the same year, the Augustinian house of Bolton Priory was managing a flock of more than 1200 sheep in bercaries in Wharfedale.34 It was the Cistercians, however, who had the greatest impact on the upland landscape of the north, converting large areas into sheepwalks.35 Sheep became the order’s primary livestock interest during the period 1175–1325. Infamous as depopulators, the number of tenants in more than fifty townships in Yorkshire alone shrank as a direct consequence of the Cistercian push to create new pastures.36 This process, including the total depopulation of some long-established communities, would continue throughout the thirteenth as the order consolidated its lucrative estates. Nor was this confined to the uplands. In Leicestershire, Garendon Abbey was responsible for clearing away the village of Dishley in order to make way for its new grange.37
These monastic granges became a feature of the thirteenth-century rural landscape. Some operated simply as general agrarian enterprises. Others specialised in cattle husbandry, sheep husbandry, horse breeding, and other industrial activities. In Nidderdale, the greater part of which was given over to vaccaries belonging to Fountains Abbey, the monks also established a grange at High Cayton specialising in fish-farming, damming up the river to create large ponds, and pottery production.38 Garendon Abbey’s grange at Roystone in the Derbyshire Peak provides perhaps the clearest sense of the impact on the landscape that a small Cistercian sheep farm might have.39
Wetlands
Writing of the Cambridgeshire fenlands in the mid-twelfth century, Henry of Huntingdon described the great monastic houses of the region that sat in a landscape ‘wide and beautiful to behold, washed with many flowing rivers, adorned by many meres, great and small, and green with many woods and islands…’.40 By the beginning of the thirteenth century there was still much ground to be won, and these challenging environments would witness some of the most impressive engineering works of the age.
On the Lincolnshire part of Holland Fen, it is estimated that a staggering 62,000 acres were reclaimed in just seventy years between 1170 and 1240.41 On Pevensey Level, Sussex/Kent, a smaller but still impressive 23,000 acres were reclaimed more slowly behind a series of seabanks built progressively out toward the coastline across the late-twelfth and thirteenth centuries.42 Such defences, made from earth and turves, remained vulnerable, however, and their failure was not uncommon.
The management of water was key to the long-term survival of reclaimed ground. Thirteenth-century engineers demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of hydraulic principles. The construction of sea defences in the lower Hull valley, Yorkshire, at its confluence with the River Humber, protected against marine floods but blocked the outflow of fresh water, requiring artificial channels to be built to solve this problem. Higher up the valley, large ditches primarily dug to improve transport, such as the Skernedike (1210–20) and the Forthdike (1221–35) also served to drain perennially wet carr.43 On the south coast, and forming the boundary between Romney Marsh and Walland Marsh, a raised canal known as Rhea Wall was constructed in the early-thirteenth century, contained within two earth embankments that took water seven and a half miles from Appledore to New Romney, Kent, in an effort to reduce silting in the harbour.44 Countless sources point to scores of more minor improvements to local watercourses. Representative of such works, in the Fens two new lodes (artificial watercourses) were dug at Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, in the early- to mid-thirteenth century, and another widened to create a quay.45
As the wetlands were drained, opportunities to establish new rural settlements were quickly taken up. This process can be seen in action in the string of coastal parishes between King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, which form the northern part of the area known as Marshland. During the course of the thirteenth century settlements such as Terrington St Clement and Walpole St Andrew spawned new hamlets. These were located on wide droveways that were constructed to connect each of these centres of population to an area of inland marsh located three miles to the south. Field patterns suggest the piecemeal intake of land for arable, a process that like assarting can be traced in names such as Inham and Newlands.46 Around Lydd, Kent, on Walland Marsh, colonisation followed the same chronology. Permanent settlement, which took the form of dispersed farmsteads, can be dated to the second quarter of the thirteenth century.
Beyond their agricultural value, wetlands provided a wealth of natural resources. Thirteenth-century structures associated with fishing and fish processing have been found at East Kirby, Lincolnshire, and around Whittlesea Mere, Cambridgeshire.47 But perhaps the greatest mark left on the landscape resulted from peat extraction. Peat cutters were especially active in the Broadlands, Norfolk, during the thirteenth century. However they, like the residents of Dunnabridge on Dartmoor, cannot have foreseen the climatic downturn that marked the end of the long thirteenth century and that led to the flooding of their workings and the collapse of their industry.48
Social and religious spaces
Lying behind the transformation of the English countryside seen at a regional scale were thousands of individual interventions undertaken at a local scale. From these we can begin to reconstruct a composite picture of change at a societal scale and identify trends and particularities that help to define the long thirteenth century.
Seigneurial space
It is not always easy to account for the many landscape transformations associated with the medieval elite. These included, inter alia, the construction of impressive houses, moated enclosures, parks, and gardens, and even settlement renaming. The most obvious explanation for the remodelling of lordly spaces during the long thirteenth century is to see it as the product of an increasingly self-confident group of landlords with access to disposable income that might finance major infrastructure projects. Investment in the landscape was nontransferable. The willingness of thirteenth-century lords to lock away their wealth in the physical trappings of lordship might suggest that they envisioned a bright and stable future in which their long-term tenure of property was secure. The alternative view would be to interpret such investment as the by-product of a seigneury that was much less sure of itself, who were seeking to bolster what limited or fledgling authority they held by carving out socially exclusive and meaningful spaces for themselves. This, however, was much more likely a fourteenth-century experience.49
The rising wealth of landowners was often diverted toward building projects. Licences to crenellate began to be issued during the reign of King John. These were not strictly a legal requirement, but they did add prestige to particular projects and their patrons. Thus while licences cannot reveal the true scale of works on high-status houses across the period, the sixteen licences issued to private individuals between 1190 and 1260, and the 111 granted between 1260 and 1320, give some sense of both the busy-ness and growing interest of the wealthier landowners in improving their properties over the long thirteenth century.50
For the lesser aristocracy, investment in manorial buildings is less visible in the historical record but was almost certainly more widespread. Illustrative of this wider trend is the fine first-floor hall built in stone in the late-twelfth-century at Boothby Pagnall, Lincolnshire.51 At Raunds Furnells, Northamptonshire, a timber-aisled hall was demolished to make way for a stone-built manor house in the thirteenth century, and the other buildings of the curia such as bakehouse/malthouse were likewise relocated and rebuilt in stone in a major transformation of the site.52 If there is a general trend to be drawn from the hundreds of individual cases where lords were active in developing their places of residence across the period, then it appears to have been a desire on the part of the aristocracy at every level to define social space more clearly and to create greater separateness between themselves and their tenants.53 This manifested itself most clearly in two thirteenth-century phenomena – moat-making and emparkment.
Few moated sites have been excavated. Those that have have invariably been dated to the late-twelfth to early-fourteenth centuries. Their national distribution is uneven with major concentrations in Essex, Suffolk, and Hertfordshire; in the west Midlands; in Norfolk and Lincolnshire; and in Yorkshire. In part this reflects the impermeable geologies required for their water-filled ditches. But moats were also found in large numbers in parts of the country that were well wooded in the thirteenth century or in areas of waste, suggesting that their construction was a by-product of the intake of new land.54 Many were manorial centres. Others appear never to have been built upon and their primary function remains somewhat enigmatic. Others still can be tenurially linked to freemen and the upper strata of the peasantry. Moat-making thus reflected the more general trend, witnessed across the long thirteenth century, of the widespread adoption of landscape components, formerly the preserve of the elites, at lower levels of society. Where moated sites can be confidently identified as manorial, it is possible to contrast those constructed as integral components of their settlements such as at Shapwick, Somerset where the moat itself was the principal element used to differentiate social space;55 and those found beyond centres of population where both moat and distance were used to draw this distinction as was the case at Goltho, Lincolnshire.56
Parks offered an alternative way for social elites to create exclusive and physically defined spaces.57 Like many aspects of the thirteenth-century landscape, firm chronologies for emparkment prove difficult to establish. Dates of first reference provide a crude proxy; but since these often refer to the repair or restocking of parks, or to park breaking, it is clear that many must have been of some age before it featured in the historical record.58 The issuing of licences to empark provides a more solid chronological foundation, but even these could be granted retrospectively. Despite such uncertainties there can be no question that it was during the long thirteenth century that the park became one of the pre-eminent symbols of lordship and one of the most significant features in the English countryside. Leicestershire is illustrative. Of the thirty-four parks mentioned before 1517, twenty-four appear before 1320. Only two are recorded before the end of the twelfth century (and one of these may be dubious). Five are first referred to between 1201 and 1250; thirteen between 1251 and 1300; and a further four between 1301 and 1320.59
Park size might vary considerable and reflect the status of their owners. At its greatest extent in 1311, Durham Cathedral Priory’s park of Beaurepaire, County Durham, covered an area of 1,300 acres. Established by 1213, the park was extended as a result of important grants of moorland in 1242, 1248, 1267 (when a royal licence to empark was granted), and 1311. Within the confines of the park, the prior built a manor house in 1258.60 But this park was much more than a hunting reserve. It provided the priory with building materials and fuel, and housed a horse stud as well as farm.61
Not all seigneurial expression in the landscape took physical form. Over the course of the thirteenth century, local lordship became reflected in place-names, as the names of manorial families became attached to hundreds of existing settlement-names across the country.62 The process by which such names formed remains hard to pinpoint. Some must certainly have begun life as convenient bureaucratic tools for distant administrators wishing to link manor to family for taxation purposes. But others were clearly coined locally and used. At Lillingstone Lovell, Buckinghamshire, the adoption of the manorial affix appears to have been coincident with a major phase of village replanning c. 1250 involving the construction of a new manorial curia at the centre of the village and necessitating both the realignment of the village streets and the relocation of peasant tofts.63 The Lovells were very minor lords, a reminder that the transformation of the thirteenth-century seigneurial landscape was not the monopoly of the barony or magnates.
Rural settlements
If it is possible to identify the role of lords behind the transformation of the spatial arrangement of certain rural settlements, the need to accommodate a rapidly growing rural population was a more commonplace driver of change. Local solutions might differ. Over large parts of the Midlands, the answer was to extend out from existing settlement cores. At Whittlebury, Northamptonshire, around 1250, the village was extended southwards in an orderly fashion with the laying out of two rows of regular plots along the main road from Buckingham to Towcester.64 Elsewhere in this county, opportunities were taken to infill greens and commons within the settlement core itself.65 In Cambridgeshire, there are plenty of examples of new properties built at the sacrifice of arable land, their curving boundaries signalling that they followed the orientation of previously cultivated strips in the open fields.66
The alternative solution was to establish new outlying hamlets, a process more typical but not confined to the more pastoral regions of England. At Hanbury, Worcestershire, where the population doubled between 1170 and the end of the thirteenth century, three new hamlets were formed through assarting across this period.67 If hamlet creation of this kind was a more common experience in areas already characterized by dispersed settlement, or where new land was being won, it was not absent from the ‘land of villages’. At Wicken, Northamptonshire, two small hamlets appear to have been purposefully planted just one mile from the village centre on what was the then edge of open-field cultivation.68
A second factor driving changes to the location and layout of rural settlements in the thirteenth century was the market. At Whittlesford, Cambridgeshire, for example, a new market place was created on the edge of the village in 1206. More dramatically, the entire village of Caxton, Cambridgeshire, was relocated to a newly laid out market space on Ermine Street when its lord was granted the right to hold a market in 1247.69 These examples, and countless others, demonstrate how settlements were remodelled to provide dedicated market spaces and precious street frontages so vital for trade and commerce. Further impetus for change was provided after 1285 when, by the Statute of Winchester, the holding of fairs and markets in churchyards, previously the most convenient open space within villages, was forbidden.
Even in rural settlements whose plan altered little, important changes to the housing stock, especially peasant dwellings, were effected across the country at this period.70 Most significant of all was the general move away from earth-fast timber structures toward buildings with stone footings. Setting timbers into the ground restricted the life-span of a building to between twenty to forty years. The introduction of stone sills, seen at Wharram Percy, Yorkshire, and pad-stones at Barton Blount, Derbyshire and Goltho, Lincolnshire, was therefore a significant innovation, for it might extend the life of a building to anywhere between seventy and hundred years.71 Contemporary improvements did not end with the buildings. Cobbled yards or outside surfaces became much more commonplace features of the thirteenth-century peasant toft. On occasion, the whole homestead ensemble might be remodelled. This appears to be the case at Great Linford, Buckinghamshire, where around 1250, one property comprising the principal domestic building, a sizeable barn, and other ancillary buildings were arranged around a cobbled yard, the whole enclosed by walls and ditches.72
Alongside improvements made to the peasant housing stock, within rural settlements the most significant investment focused on the parish church. By the middle of the twelfth century, the ‘great rebuilding’ of parish churches that had begun c. 1050 was largely complete. The long thirteenth century witnessed instead the enlargement of existing structures and piecemeal embellishment. A common experience was for aisles (notably north aisles that were less disruptive to the existing structure) to be added to naves, less commonly for chancels to be extended, and for towers, porches, and chapels to be constructed. Morris estimated that over 80% of churches in the Warmington district of Northamptonshire show signs of significant investment in their fabric over the period 1190–1300.73 However, the true extent of building work at this period cannot be accurately judged, in part because so much thirteenth-century work was subsequently removed as new styles were adopted in later centuries. But that 100 churches in Essex should currently retain some architectural elements of the thirteenth century (or fifty-seven in Berkshire, thirty-nine in Bedfordshire, thirty-six in Northumberland, thirty-five in Cornwall, nine in Cumberland and nine in Westmorland) at least goes some way to showing the sheer scale of building programmes executed across the country during the period.
The emergence of a new style of plain and understated church architecture in the 1180s, dubbed ‘Early English’ by nineteenth-century architectural historians, is coincident with the beginning of the long thirteenth century and helps to define it. This architectural departure marks an important moment in the reduction of continental influence in England and has been interpreted by some as an indication of growing resentment amongst Anglo-Norman patrons of French power.74 Around the 1280s, a new architectural style, dubbed ‘Decorated’, began to be adopted and would last down to the final quarter of the fourteenth century.
Following the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, but only probably widely adopted in the 1240s, responsibility for the upkeep or improvement of naves fell to community while the chancel became the responsibility of the rector. These two spaces thus became more socially and well as religiously defined. This division of responsibility may start to explain why complete rebuilding was a rarity. Where seen, as at Dunsfold, Surrey, and Potterne, Wiltshire, this must reflect the strength of local lordship.75 However, elite patronage cannot account for the total redesign of the parish church at Felmersham, Bedfordshire, around the second quarter of the thirteenth century and it would be unwise to underestimate more generally the role that the community at large played in church works at this time.
Landscapes of economic exploitation
Across the long thirteenth century, the exploitation of England’s natural resources intensified. New landscapes of agricultural and industrial production emerged, and regional economies became more specialized. Alternative sources of energy to fuel economic activities were tapped and vital infrastructure was improved.
Animal, vegetable, mineral
In the case of wool, production shifted away from eastern England toward the north and west. This reorientation is reflected in the vocabulary of the finished cloth exported to the continent: the cloths of Stamford, Lincoln, Beverley, and York, much sought after on the continent in the twelfth and early-thirteenth century, had been replaced by the fourteenth by the cloths of Kendal, Ludlow, the Cotswolds, and the Mendips.76 In the south, and in part due to improved husbandry methods including better livestock housing, flock sizes doubled to around 30,000 between 1208–09 and 1259 on the Bishop of Winchester’s vast estates.77 Sheepcotes became commonplace in regions such as the Cotswolds where, like on the Chilterns and the Wessex chalklands, sheep had come to dominate manorial economies by the second half of the thirteenth century.78
The mechanisation of fulling was one of the most significant industrial innovations of the age. When fulling mills made their first appearance in England is unknown; but the earliest solidly dated examples are those of Newsham, Yorkshire, and Barton-on-Windrush, Gloucestershire, both belonging to the Knights Templar from the mid-1180s.79 Other early-thirteenth-century sources show that monasteries were earlier adopters of this new technology, so too the episcopal estates. By 1208–09, the Bishop of Winchester had four mills at Brightwell, New Alresford, Sutton, and Waltham, Hampshire.80 By the early-fourteenth century fulling mills had become widespread. If they were thick on the ground in Yorkshire, the Lake District, and in the south-western counties of Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall, they remained less common in eastern England. The critical determinant of this distribution appears to have been hydrology, as they required fast-running streams more commonly found in western parts of England.81
The thirteenth century also saw the aggressive exploitation of subterranean sources of stone, metal, and mineral resources. Important stone industries developed in places like Purbeck, Dorset, from the 1170s,82 Bere, Devon, and Barnack, Cambridgeshire.83 Lead was the principal metal being mined out of the Pennines from c. 1200. Mining rights on Alston Moor, Cumberland were confirmed by royal charter in 1235. But it was lead extracted from the High and Low Peaks in Derbyshire which dominated the market down to the 1280s.84 In the south-west the main metal was tin and, toward the end of the period, silver mined on Exmoor and in the Tamar valley.85 The issuing of the Charter of Liberties to the tinners of Cornwall and Devon in 1201 formalizing an already well-established industry. By the 1220s, the main centres of tin production were found in Cornwall, replacing the earlier focus on Dartmoor, Devon. Stream works, a technique that used water to expose tin-rich ores just below the surface, left highly visible scars on the landscape. In 1314 it was complained that Devon tin miners were laying waste to 300 acres a year as a result of their activities.86
Power
At the end of the twelfth century, sources of energy, so vital to support the growing economy, remained largely limited to the burning of wood and charcoal and the use of water. These would continue to play a major role in driving industrial and agricultural economic growth across the thirteenth century. By 1300 it has been estimated that there were c. 10,000 mills in England, the greater majority watermills located wherever the head of water was sufficient to drive their wheels.87 On the coast, tide mills were also a feature of the thirteenth-century landscape. Thirty-seven are recorded before 1300 including the ‘sea-mill’ recorded at Fareham, Hampshire in 1210–11, and those at Walton, Suffolk, and Milton Hall, Essex, where windmills replaced them after they were destroyed by storms towards the end of the thirteenth century.88
If the notion that the thirteenth century witnessed a ‘power revolution’ has been questioned there can be no doubt that the period saw a diversification of the energy base. Almost coterminously references to both windmills and coal mining appear in historical record from the 1180s. The first proof of windmills in England are references to them at South Cave, Yorkshire, and Amberley, Sussex in 1185 and Dinton, Buckinghamshire in 1187. That this technology was rapidly adopted is indicated by a further twenty examples known to have been in existence before 1200. By 1230s, the windmill had become an important feature of the rural landscape in most eastern counties. Here they might exploit the strength of the North Sea winds and provide additional grinding power in places where sluggish streams proved insufficient for efficient working of water-driven mills.89 Windmills tended to supplement rather than replace watermills. By the early-fourteenth century, for example, windmills appear to have constituted only around 12% of the total number of mills in the west Midlands where such figures can be calculated.90 Thus examples of replacement – as at Holm, Norfolk, and Fiskerton, Lincolnshire – were atypical.
Passing mentions in the Bolden Book of 1183 to colliers and smiths who were required to find their own coal, and a monastic franchise to mine coal issued at Escombe in 1188, are the first signs of the exploitation of coal in the north-east coalfields. Coal seams exposed through erosion of the north-east coastline were being worked in the early decades of the thirteenth century. By 1238, collieries were in operation in Newcastle, the exploitation of underground seams aided by the invention of the windlass, which gave miners vertical access down shafts to the working face. This local industry was formalized a year later when Henry III granted a charter to Newcastle ‘to dig coals and stones in the common soil of the town without the walls thereof, in a place called the Castle Field and the Forth…’. By the end of the century most of the major coal-producing areas – such as in Lancashire in the area around Colne and Rochdale and in the Leicestershire and South Derbyshire coalfield at Swannington and Worthington – 91 were being worked if on a small scale.92 By the end of the long thirteenth century, then, the energetic potential of the four elements – earth, water, air, and fire – had effectively been tapped for the first time.
Roads and bridges
If waterways remained the most important arteries for the transport of bulk goods in the thirteenth century, roads and bridges were vital to the functioning of the economy.93 Work undertaken on roads in the period tended to be small scale. Minor diversions were effected around parks or to ensure that passing traffic was funnelled toward new market centres as was the case at Woolpit, Suffolk.94 Of more significance for the national road network was the Statute of Winchester (1285), which required that:
highways leading from one market town to another shall be enlarged, whereas woods, hedges, or dykes be, so that there be neither dyke, underwood, nor bush whereby a man may lurk to do hurt, near to the way, within two hundred foot of the one side and two hundred foot on the other side.
Physical evidence that this was done can be found at Brackley Hatch near Silverstone, Northamptonshire, where the road from Oxford to Northampton ran through Whittlewood Forest.
From the early-thirteenth century, pontage grants allow communities to collect tolls, generally for a prescribed period, for the maintenance of bridges.95 The earliest, dated 1223–24, relates to the bridge at Brentford, Middlesex. Such grants became more common during the reign of Edward I. The task of maintaining local bridges might also be a requirement of tenure. The Hertfordshire Placita de Quo Warranto rolls of 1277–78 record the liabilities of tenants for the repair of more than eighty bridges across tributaries of the River Lea between Ware and Stratford. Most of these were very small structures indeed, but as crucial for the flow of traffic as the major bridges: one William le Plumm’, for instance, was required to maintain a bridge just seven feet long and 5½ feet wide between Lynche and Tummanhille.96
If the greater majority of thirteenth-century work on bridges attended to repair and maintenance, important civil engineering projects were also undertaken especially on England’s major rivers. At Swarkestone, Derbyshire, a mile-long causeway was constructed over the Trent floodplain between 1190 and 1205. At Hemington, Leicestershire an early-thirteenth-century bridge supported on wooden piers was replaced midcentury by another carried on stone piers.97 On the River Dove, the bridge at Stretton, Derbyshire, was rebuilt by the prior of Burton Abbey during the first half of the thirteenth century. In north Devon, Barnstable Long Bridge over the River Taw, a 159 metre-long structure of sixteen arches, underwent construction work in the 1280s. Nearby, the impressive wooden bridge at Bideford over the tidal River Torridge, had been completed by the last quarter of the thirteenth century. Lesser crossings were not ignored. Sutton Bridge, over a tributary of the River Ivel in Bedfordshire, has been radiocarbon dated to the mid-thirteenth century. On architectural grounds, the bridges at Bakewell, Derbyshire, and Braybrooke, Northamptonshire can also be assigned to the thirteenth century. England was literally on the move.
Conclusion
Thirteenth-century descriptions of the English countryside are rare. Those that exist, written invariably for purposes other than objective reportage, can hardly be trusted to paint an authentic picture of contemporary realities.98 England, Robertus Anglicus informs us,
is … fecund in every kind of metal, it has fields widely scattered; hills, too, in flourishing cultivation, on which varied crops spring in their season from the rich glebe. It has forests, too, full of all sorts of game, in whose dells and alternate pastures grass grows for the animals and flowers of varied colours distribute honey to the roving bees. It has verdant meadows, also, pleasantly situated at the foot of its hills, where clear springs, flowing with gentle murmur through clean streams, refresh those reclining on the fragrant banks.99
Embedded in this mythology are certain historical truths. The thirteenth-century countryside was unquestionably varied. Whether defined in terms of its physical geography or its regional economies, there was no one English landscape but many. And this was, certainly, a ‘flourishing’ landscape whose natural potential and raw materials were arguably more fully understood and being more fully exploited than in any preceding century. But in other respects, Robertus’ prospect does not chime with the reality. Rural England was far from tranquil. Rather it was the focus of frenetic activity unprecedented in its reach and significance. People delved toward hell to extract its metals and minerals and stretched up to the sky to harness the wind. People advanced into the woodlands and wastes, pushed into the hills, and won back land from the sea. The countryside took on a new look as churches were built in an English style, peasant housing was improved, rivers were spanned in stone, and lords embellished their holdings with new buildings and created parks. The countryside echoed to the sound of the axe, the pick, the hammer, and the grindstone, drowning out the sound of the ‘roving bees’.
This chapter has sought to reflect the range and scope of the remaking of the English landscape witnessed during the long thirteenth century and set this in its wider demographic, climatic, economy, and legal contexts. It has attempted to show that no part of the country was left unaffected. In the space of just six generations the fabric of the English countryside was remodelled from north to south, and from east to west, at the hands of lords and peasants whose vision and enterprise have left indelible signatures on the land down to the present day.
Notes
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