2

Peasants and landscapes

Landscapes provide the physical setting for people’s lives, and geology and topography had a strong influence on farming, housing, communications, and economy. On the other hand, people could make choices about settlements and the organization and use of land which had an impact on the landscape. Two questions arise from this interaction between society and the land: How important was the human factor in forming landscapes, and which sections of society exerted most influence; in particular what was the peasants’ role? Before addressing these questions the region and its various landscapes, must be introduced.

The west-midland region

The west-midland region is defined here as the counties of Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and Worcestershire, three modern shires with origins before 1066 (Figure 2.1). The boundaries of these shires began to be established by the seventh century, when the kingdom of the Hwicce had been assigned a bishop based at Worcester. The kingdom died in the ninth century, but its frontiers were fossilized in those of the Worcester diocese. Four shires were formed from this territory in the tenth and eleventh centuries; originally Winchcomb in the north Cotswolds was the head of a separate shire, which was subsequently absorbed into Gloucestershire. ¹ Worcestershire was extended to the north-west along the Teme valley beyond the boundary of the diocese. The western parts of Warwickshire had been in the kingdom of the Hwicce, but when the shire boundary was drawn it took in a large area to the east up to Watling Street. Gloucestershire largely coincided with the southern end of the kingdom and its diocese, except that it took in land to the west of the Severn, including the Forest of Dean which came under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the bishops of Hereford. These units of local government were political institutions designed to perform specific tasks, but they derived some unity from the inclusion within their borders of the River Severn and its tributaries, in the east the Warwickshire Avon, and its tributaries such as the Arrow, Stour, and Dene, and in the west the Leadon, Teme, and Worcestershire Stour. South of Gloucester the Severn was fed by small rivers that flowed from east to west from the Cotswolds, notably the Frome, the Cam, and the Little Avon. Observers could stand on high ground, such as the Malvern Hills, the Birmingham plateau and its outliers to the north, Edge Hill to the east and the Cotswold escarpment to the south, and overlook a shallow bowl of valley land 36 miles across. Not all of the rivers flowed into the Severn, as in the north of Warwickshire the waters of the Blythe and Tame ended in the Trent, and most of the Gloucestershire Cotswolds were drained by the Evenlode, Windrush, Coln, and Churn which flowed southward into the Thames. The bulk of the land could be cultivated. The predominant soils are heavy, either the reddish marls associated with Mercian mudstone to the west and north of the region, or the grey lias clays of the eastern lowlands. The Cotswolds have ‘calcareous earths’ containing chips of oolitic limestone. Light alluvial soils occur mostly in the river valleys, though there are occasional patches of sand. The western edge of the region, notably Dean and Malvern, are characterized by ancient rocks and a variety of soils. ²

Figure 2.1 Topography of the west midland region.

The people of the three shires in the later Middle Ages must have been well aware of the unifying river valleys and the religious centre at Worcester. Together with their dialect of English these may have given them a sense of attachment to the region. They would also have recognized very clearly the varieties of countryside, with which we are familiar from the writings of the early modern topographers and county historians such as Leland, Camden, Habington, and Dugdale: they used such terms as forest, woodland, wold, champion, and Feldon (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 Landscape divisions of the west midland region.

Areas of land devoted to large trees and underwood were especially prominent in ‘the Forest’, that is the Forest of Dean. Royal forests occupied much of Worcestershire, notably in Feckenham in the east and Malvern to the west, and the short-lived Ombersley and Horwell. In south-western Gloucestershire lay Kingswood. These were legally defined hunting reserves, which gave the king the opportunity to hunt but also to raise revenue by fining the inhabitants for offences against the beasts of the chase and the vegetation that gave them shelter. Ombersley and Horwell ceased to be forests in 1218, and Malvern became a chase, a private forest of the earls of Gloucester. In north Warwickshire Sutton Chase belonged to the earls of Warwick. ³ The boundaries of the forests and chases included some important woods, but also many settlements and fields with few trees or deer.

‘Woodland’ described a large area of the west and north of the region, where important features as well as trees, were the areas of pasture, often in extensive greens, heaths, commons, and moors. In the woodlands the arable lay in small open fields, often with five or more in a single township, and in enclosed crofts; the land was farmed from hamlets (often called greens and ends) and single farmsteads. Figure 2.3 shows the oddly shaped parish of Pendock, with houses strung along winding lanes, with an occasional cluster. The land included six fields, many crofts, parcels of assarts bearing distinctive clearance names like rudding and Newland, with access to large meadows and a moor for summer grazing. The country along the Severn in Gloucestershire below the hills, the Vale, resembled woodland landscapes in many ways, with dispersed settlements and many enclosed parcels. Similarly the wold shared many characteristics with champion country, as both types of landscape cultivated large areas of open field land, often divided into two fields, and their settlements were usually nucleated villages with between twelve and forty households. Figure 2.4 shows the village of Aston Blank and its original two fields, later divided into four, typically with a small grove. ⁴ ‘Wold’ originally meant ‘woodland’, and extensive woods occupied parts of the Cotswolds and still do, but ‘wold’ for medieval people referred to high ground with extensive cultivation, though having access to hill pasture. Champion ran eastwards from the confluence of the Avon and Severn along the Avon valley and below the Cotswold edge, including the Vale of Evesham (‘the granary of Worcestershire’) and parts of central Worcestershire, and then extended across south and east Warwickshire. Here it was called the Feldon—in fact, the English equivalent of champion as both English feld and French champ refer to the abundance of arable land in open fields. ⁵

Figure 2.3 Pendock, Worcestershire. This parish was taken out of a larger land unit before the Conquest in a process that left it in two pieces. It lay within Malvern Chase. This reconstruction of its landscape in c.1300 shows scattered houses, winding roads, fields, crofts, assarts, meadows, and a moor. Its detached wood was in another parish (source: note 4).

Figure 2.4 Aston Blank, Gloucestershire (also called Cold Aston—it was sited on high ground in the Cotswolds). In c.1300, two settlements shared arable in two fields, with pasture and a small grove. By 1752, when the map shows the strips (selions) and furlongs, a single settlement was cultivating arable in four fields, and the northern area was enclosed (see Figures 6.1 and 6.4 for open-field villages in champion areas) (source: note 4).

The four types of landscape—woodland, vale, wold, and champion—contained some distinctive subdivisions, such as the wetlands along the Severn estuary, and the less extensive marshes of Longdon marsh (in west Worcestershire) and the Henmarsh near Moreton in north-east Gloucestershire. Distinctive wooded valleys were an important feature of the mid Cotswolds, around Stroud, Woodchester, and Painswick. Relatively flat country is seen as the Cotswolds dip gently into the Thames valley around Lechlade. Some of the landscape boundaries were and are sharp and distinct, like the ‘edge’ to the north and west of the Cotswolds, but sometimes we find hybrid frontier zones, leaving us uncertain as to how to classify, for example, the villages on the northern and western sides of the valley of the Warwickshire Avon.

Historic landscapes can partly be characterized from their topography of hills and valleys, and from the management of their land, but they were inhabited and a full assessment of the character of landscapes needs to take into account the human and social dimension. Peasants held land as tenants, and were subordinated to lords, and these social conditions had implications for their settlements and lands. Large church landlords, who were especially prominent in the southern parts of the region, had developed combinations of manors located in champion, woodland, and wold, as the varied resources of these landscapes benefited the estates’ production and consumption. However, champion and wold lands predominated, and as bishops and Benedictine monasteries exercised considerable social power, strengthened by continuous control over centuries, their lordship involved a high proportion of servile or customary tenants, who owed regular labour services in addition to cash payments for annual rent and extra dues. In the woodlands lay lords, especially knights and gentry, and smaller church institutions held much of the land and were more likely to gather rent in cash from freeholders or lightly burdened customary tenants. The obligations of tenants were not determined by their lords, as much depended on the productive capacity of their land, and the pull of the market. So it was a complex combination of factors that led customary tenants in the Vale of Berkeley and along the Severn estuary to be paying 12d per acre, while 4d–8d per acre is encountered more often in the Cotswolds and south Worcestershire, but 5d–6d in south-east Warwickshire. In the woodlands they might dip as low as 2d–4d. ⁶ By a paradox that surprises those who expect the unfree to be poor, servile tenants often occupied larger and middling holdings, while many free tenants were smallholders. Although nucleated villages were often inhabited by unfree or customary tenants, there is no exact coincidence between settlements and the powers of their lords. So the unfree tenants with heavy obligations near the Severn estuary lived in straggling hamlets and farms.

A distinctive landscape was created from a combination of influences. On the Birmingham plateau in such Worcestershire parishes as Northfield, King’s Norton, and Yardley the poor soils and damp climate encouraged pastoral farming. People lived in dispersed hamlets and farms, cultivated in many small enclosed fields as well as areas of open field, and their livestock could feed in the closes and on large areas of common pasture, often called heaths. The peasants, many of whom were smallholders, tended to hold land by free tenure under lay lords, including the king, a baronial family, and a rich knight; the estates of lesser lords are represented in the physical landscape by moats which had surrounded once prominent houses. Pastoral agriculture in the later Middle Ages was often aimed at the market, and both the country and the towns had a strong industrial dimension. ⁷

A similar group of villages including Cropthorne, Fladbury, Netherton, and Elmley Castle were placed between the river Avon and Bredon Hill, the inhabitants of which produced grain and legumes on both clay and alluvial soils of high quality in open fields. Two of the villages could feed animals on the hay from large riverside meadows, and Bredon Hill provided pasture for the others. The peasants lived in nucleated villages, many with standard holdings of about 15 or 30 acres, made up of strips scattered over the open fields. The majority were customary tenants owing labour services and cash rents to large church estates and, in the case of Elmley powerful lay lords, the earls of Warwick. With little scope for industry the inhabitants lived from agriculture and especially arable farming, sending a surplus of crops and animal products, especially wool, to nearby market towns, Evesham and Pershore. ⁸

The countryside could only function with communications, which in most of the medieval west midlands means roads, lanes, tracks, and paths. These mattered at the most local level: Admington (Warwickshire), a champion village with extensive open fields, was provided with more than 18 miles of access routes to connect its thirty houses with hundreds of small strips. Admington now contains within its boundaries 3 miles of public roads. A woodland settlement of comparable size required a close network of routes for access to scattered small settlements, enclosed parcels, and strips of land in open fields, resulting in more roads than exist today.

Long-distance journeys were most easily made by rivers, but in the region only the Severn was navigable for many miles, though in addition the Bristol Avon connected Bristol to the sea. Some roads were survivals from the Roman network, and the Fosse Way and the route from Bristol to Worcester, and then northwards towards Birmingham and Lichfield attracted much traffic. Hubs for long-distance roads included Cirencester, with connections to London, Gloucester, and Bristol. Droitwich sent salt out over the whole region and beyond on a network of roads. Coventry, the only regional capital in England not situated on a navigable river, had connections with coastal ports as well as smaller places in the region. ⁹ Contrary to modern prejudice, medieval roads could cope with heavy traffic and for example there was regular cart traffic in the fifteenth century between Southampton and west midland towns. ¹⁰ Towns were connected to one another, and to their surrounding villages by roads of varying quality. Many peasants owned carts, and even more used packhorses, and these were the main users of the region’s road system (see ‘Horses’ in Chapter 7). Costly bridges to take major roads over wide rivers, which increased in number in the thirteenth century, were funded by lords and towns. More numerous minor bridges were maintained, and presumably built, together with the metalling of roads, by peasants co-ordinated by villages (see ‘Village community’ in Chapter 4).

Human impacts on the land

The road network is only one case of human intervention in the making of the landscape. A distinctive section of landscape in the south-western corner of the region is the low-lying south bank of the Severn estuary between the mouth of the Bristol Avon and Slimbridge Warth (Figure 2.1). This strip of land, a mile or two wide and 22 miles long, resembles parts of the Netherlands in that the inhabitants exposed themselves to the danger of flooding, but learnt to endure the occasional inundation. They protected themselves from rising water level with sea walls and drainage ditches. They were rewarded for their skill, vigilance, and communal co-operation by being able to take advantage of the wetland resources. They could benefit from lush meadows and good arable land. Beyond the sea wall, the salt marshes were managed to provide plentiful summer grazing, and access to the sea enabled them to profit from salt pans and fisheries. Flooding was not the only hazard, as the inhabitants were probably prone to malaria. The adaptations to the land are still visible, to the east of modern industrial Avonmouth, in a largely man-made countryside, with the ridge and furrow of former cultivation, small irregular fields defined by curving drainage ditches (once creeks in the marsh), and drove roads to give livestock access to reclaimed land (formerly salt marsh). The sea walls, water courses (called ditches, pills, and rhines), and gouts (water courses fitted with doors), still guard against incursions by the sea and flows of water from higher ground. ¹¹ The general message deriving from this example is that material conditions have profound consequences, but that people adapt and create appropriate landscapes. The same is true of the rest of the west midland region, even though dry land did not pose such great challenges and require such elaborate precautions.

Lords and landscapes

Many landscape features emerged in a period well before 1200, when evidence is very thin. It has been said that the lords must have been responsible for settling tenants and dependents in villages, and laying out fields which maximized orderly cultivation and economic efficiency. This could have happened as late as the eleventh century, but formation of nucleated villages could date back to the period before 1000, even before 800. No direct evidence from the early medieval period has been discovered for this process, though some excavated sites in other parts of England of c. 650–850 have quite regular arrangements of rectangular ditched enclosures. ¹² For a later period the planned streets of some nucleated villages, such as the very regular single street with rows of house plots on each side at Elmley Castle, suggests the work of a single authority. The regular plan might have coincided with the development of a market in the thirteenth century when houses were located on both sides of a wide village street which served as a marketplace. Villages, whether with a regular or irregular plans, were often associated with open fields. Were those devised by the lords also? Elmley happens to be a case where in the middle of the fourteenth century the lord can be observed exercising some control over the management of the open fields attached to the village. If a neighbouring village which had access to common pasture on Elmley’s fields wished to enclose part of the fallow, they had to obtain permission from the lord of Elmley. ¹³

Lords have also been regarded as playing a decisive part in the expansion of settlement and cultivation of land in the woodlands, which was still a very active process in the thirteenth century. The evidence comes from grants made by lords to tenants who were expected to bring the land into cultivation. ¹⁴ For example the charters issued by Thomas, earl of Warwick between 1229 and 1242 include twenty-two grants of land in two very large, thinly populated manors in the Arden of north-west Warwickshire, Sutton Coldfield and Tanworth-in-Arden. Most of the land was in parcels of between 2 and 12 acres, often described as heath, and in four cases the new tenant was given permission to enclose or ditch the parcel, and to clear or assart it in preparation for cultivation. In most of the grants no reference is made to a previous tenant, which leads us to believe that the land lay in an undeveloped state, and formed part of the open common waste on which livestock had been grazed. The impression that these were new parcels that were being precisely defined for the first time comes from the boundary descriptions which used as landmarks rivers, streams, roads, and the hedges and ditches around other parcels of land described as assarts. The lord gained only a modest rent of between 5d and 2s each, or about 2d per acre, but he may also have been rewarding a servant, or anticipating future services. A few of the new tenants also paid a more substantial initial sum to gain possession, between a mark and 15 marks (13s 4d and £10). ¹⁵ In most cases the land was being granted rather than sold, and the impression is given that the lord was anxious to develop and populate his manor, offering low rents to encourage new settlers and cultivators. From the boundary descriptions we see a landscape filling up as new plots of land being added to clusters of closes and clearings. The main beneficiaries would have been the new tenants, once they had struggled through the hard work of removing vegetation and digging out tree stumps.

Only occasionally do the grants made by lords refer to the clearance of land by the lords themselves—only one of the group of documents analysed above mentions an assart of the earl of Warwick. In royal forests lords would be reported to the justices of the forest for appropriating land in purprestures, or removing the vegetation in assarts, sometimes in large quantities of 50 acres or more in a single episode. In the case of Westminster Abbey at Knowle in Warwickshire the costs of assarting by a lord appears in the reeve’s account, with £1 ‘for assarting by a certain contract’ in 1293–4, and a total of 16s 6d on labour and repairs to a plough in the following year. In this case one of the assarts lay within a park, demonstrating the versatility of these private landscapes. ¹⁶ The act of enclosing land that had previously been open pasture or wood pasture often caused controversy, and the lord had to deal with lawsuits brought against him under the assize of novel disseisin, which sought to prevent the loss of common pasture. Disputes could reach a pitch which led the defenders of common rights to assemble (commonly at night) and remove the hedges and fences and fill in the ditches around the newly appropriated land. At King’s Norton Wood in 1332, a great crowd of people from King’s Norton (Worcestershire) and adjoining Yardley and Solihull destroyed a bank and ditch which had been constructed by Roger Mortimer across a shared common pasture. ¹⁷ To avoid such confrontations, some lords would make agreements with those exercising common rights, and even buy off those who had been deprived of grazing.

The role of lords in the planning of villages and clearing land should not be exaggerated. If lords were ordering their tenants into planned villages one might expect to see some resemblances between villages across a large and powerful estate such as that of Evesham Abbey or Worcester Priory, but their settlements seem rather varied. The neat and regular plan of Westcote in Tysoe in Warwickshire, which consisted essentially of a single street with rows of houses on each side, can be seen with particular clarity because it was abandoned in the fifteenth century, with its plan frozen in time (Figure 2.5). Westcote was recorded in 1279 as having tenants under the lordship of four church institutions and two laymen. ¹⁸ At the time when the village was laid out in an orderly fashion at an unknown earlier date there may have been two or three lords, but planning here and elsewhere would have needed agreement from a number of interested parties, and the source of the initiative is not known. Nor is it clear what lords would have gained from the complex processes of settling the inhabitants in new houses in neat plots. In the open fields the lords had an obvious interest in maintaining a systematic sequence of crops and fallow if the lord’s demesne and the tenants’ holdings were intermingled across the furlongs of the field system, and both had to follow the same routine. Often, however, the lord’s land was located in a block, and did not have to observe the same rotations as the village fields, and some lords had no demesne at all. The case for identifying lords as the usual organizers and planners of villages would be stronger if they were ever in the situation of starting a village from new, and bringing settlers into an empty countryside, such as an area of moorland. In the midlands the countryside was invariably inhabited, and nucleation and planning involved re-organization, with people being persuaded or ordered to move, coinciding with increased density of population and intensity in land use.

Figure 2.5 Westcote in Tysoe, Warwickshire. The desertion of this village in the fifteenth century means that the plan of the village, unencumbered by modern houses, is visible as earthworks. The curving modern drive to the farmhouse follows approximately the straight line of the original village street, with rows of houses and building plots, at least twelve of them, set on either side of the street. Other houses to the north-west are not so well-ordered (plan by Sarah Wager and the author).

In the woodlands there is more evidence for identifying lords as changing the land by promoting the colonization of wastes. However the charters and legal disputes may be misleading us in presenting the lord as the activist. A lord who granted a piece of land for assarting, like Thomas Earl of Warwick, may have been regularizing a situation which followed the tenants’ initiative: when the lord gave permission for enclosure and cultivation this had already occurred, hence the precision with which the ‘new’ boundaries could be defined. The lord was ensuring that he received rent and other advantages of lordship from an existing clearing. A lord who appeared before the forest justices accused of assarting, like Richard Siward who was said in the 1240s to hold 58 acres in Feckenham Forest dating back about thirty years, may have directed the clearance of the land by his own employees, or by hiring contractors. Or he may have been facing the court on behalf of his tenants. ¹⁹ Similarly a lord who was confronted with protests after common land was enclosed was probably representing tenants who had carried out the enclosure, from which he expected to gain rent. The lord was not controlling the assarting peasants, and was leaving them to shoulder the work and the costs, but they benefited from a partnership in which the lord acted as their defender.

Having presented arguments against regarding lords as the principal instigators of settlement foundation and the extension of cultivation, it should be said that some direct evidence has emerged for a lord enlarging settlements, in the case of Worcester Cathedral Priory on its manors of Crowle, Newnham, and Wolverley in 1336–7. The priory court rolls tell us that the lord (the cellarer, representing the material interest of the monastic community) granted out a total of more than thirty holdings of land to new tenants in three specific locations: on the southern edge of the village of Crowle, and in two woodland hamlets, Bickley in Newnham and Blakeshall in Wolverley. ²⁰ All of these settlements already existed, so that the ventures were enlargements rather than new planned villages and hamlets. The cellarer was seeking to increase the monastery’s rent income. The initiatives were probably the result of a new and focused policy of expansion in the period after the great famine of 1315–17 when the priory like all lords faced financial uncertainties. The landscapes created by the Priory fitted into the existing pattern of settlement, adding a concentrated row of houses along a street leading into the nucleated village of Crowle based on strips in the open field, while at Bickley and Blakeshall the woodland hamlets were expanded, and the tenants’ land came out of reclaimed waste. The lord provided holdings, but the tenants were expected to build their own houses and barns. The planning of the new house plots involved some consultation with local peasants, as they were expected to help with laying out the new plots.

In general there is little evidence that lords habitually created new settlements for peasant tenants, which contrasts with their ability to remodel landscapes around their residences, in particular laying out gardens, ponds, and spaces for hunting, especially parks. They took their houses and castles out of the villages into a parkland landscape where they could live away from the cares of the everyday world. ²¹ They sometimes gave their new houses French names which indicated their aim of enjoying their leisure and isolation. Beaudesert in Warwickshire for example, was named in the twelfth century as an imagined wilderness on the edge of the Forest of Arden. A few miles away the Pleasaunce, a moated house with a garden built around 1414–17, served as a retreat accessible by boat across the mere from Kenilworth Castle. The mere itself was a man-made expanse of water a half-mile in length engineered as a defence and to enhance the appearance of the castle in the early twelfth century. In creating new parks the lords were also acting against the interests of peasants, sometimes removing their dwellings and fields to make way for the pastures and woods of the park. If no houses were removed, park pales still extinguished rights of common pasture, or prevented any future encroachments. This type of disruption of peasant lives would have been the result of the emparking of a thousand acres at Northfield (Worcestershire) by the lords of Dudley Castle ²² (Figure 2.6).

Figure 2.6 Northfield, Worcestershire. This woodland parish was dominated by the lord’s park, which contained a castle. Apart from the lord’s demesne, occupying fields and meadows to the west of the castle, the rest of the parish was occupied by scattered peasant farms, some clustered around greens, reached by lanes, and associated with patches of arable land, small woods, meadows, and pastures. The settlements date between the pre-Conquest and the thirteenth century; the park was probably created in the thirteenth century (source: note 22).

Lords sometimes sacrificed their urge to separate themselves by founding new towns at the gates of their castles, manor houses, and monasteries. Berkeley and Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire are examples which appear in embryo in the late eleventh century. By the thirteenth century, the town of Henley-in-Arden had grown beside the castle and park of Beaudesert. Perhaps an orderly planned town in the eyes of the lords gave the castle an appropriate backdrop, and a market made the castle or monastery a hub for the locality. A small town also generated revenues (£10 or £20) from rents, tolls, and court profits. Most new towns, about forty of them in the west midland region, were established by lords in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries not always as adjuncts of their residences but in locations which promised commercial success. Some grew gradually, but in a number of cases lords acted by diverting roads to bring trade to the town, planning the streets, granting privilege, and obtaining market charters. ²³ Even in such ambitious schemes peasants had a role, because sites were chosen where unofficial trading activities had arisen from local enterprise, for example when parishioners met on Sundays to trade at the door of an important church. The town’s population in its early years was made up of recruits from the country, and later continued to attract peasant migrants from rural backgrounds. Peasants living within about 7 miles of each town provided much of the business flowing through its market. As it prospered, a town could stimulate small settlements to grow nearby, like Bridgetown in the parish of Alveston which developed across the River Avon from Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire) and caught some passing trade from those crossing the bridge. ²⁴ Down the hierarchy of trading places below the towns were villages with markets, some of them founded by lords who acquired a market charter, perhaps hoping for the growth of a commercial settlement. Some places developed as market centres apparently on the initiative of the villagers themselves, without official encouragement or permission. At Bibury (Gloucestershire), King’s Norton (Worcestershire), and Tanworth-in-Arden (Warwickshire) the main evidence is the market place embedded in the plan of the village, and traders and craftsmen who lived around it (see ‘Origins of towns’ in Chapter 8).

To sum up: the authority of lords in the period 1200–1540 is visible in many parts of the landscape, from parks to new towns. They contributed to colonizing woods and wastes, and forming villages and fields. As their role is examined more closely, their social inferiors can be revealed as active participants in the processes.

Peasants and the making of the landscape

Boundaries were often the result of communities defining a territory so as to combine complementary resources, for example by defining a strip of land which ran from a hillside with pasture and wood, through a section of lowland well suited to arable, and down to river valley meadows with mowable grassland, and ending at the river itself. Such a model allocation of land is found between the Malvern Hills and the River Severn at Hanley Castle, and is likely to have had early origins (see Figure 2.7). Manors would base their boundaries on these pre-existing land units, and these might be written down by lords’ officials, but they made no secret of their need to consult local informants about the precise line that they were following. When the monks of Coventry Priory around 1411 gathered information about the small manor of Packwood in the Warwickshire Arden, for a description of the boundary they were clearly relying on the testimony of a local jury of tenants, because at one point the ‘metes, divides and bounds’ went ‘above Bentley Heath on which they have common’. ²⁵ Other landmarks most likely to be known by residents, included two ponds and a small piece of wetland or meadow called ‘Tascham sych’. Knowledge of the boundary was not just a matter of describing the limits of their territory when a higher authority enquired. Communities processed round their parish boundary every year on Rogation days (see ‘Peasants and religion’ in Chapter 10), to make sure that it was known and remembered by everyone, and policed by villagers watching for encroachments.

Figure 2.7 The Malvern Hills and adjoining parishes. Parishes occupied the lowlands between the River Severn and the crest of the hills. Arable and meadow were concentrated near the river, and a number of villages shared the pasture on the hills in intercommoning arrangements (see Figures 2.3 and 9.4 for individual parishes in the area). The boundaries come from modern maps, but some were of pre-Conquest origin.

New boundaries were sometimes following an older line. The houses of the villages of Roel and Hawling (Gloucestershire) were located within regular rows of rectilinear house plots. Such planned villages, typical of the Cotswolds are conventionally dated to the eleventh or twelfth centuries, but the banks, stone walls and ditches forming the framework within which the houses were sited are likely to have originated as a Romano-British field system. ²⁶ Local people who were laying out the plots would be sensitive to pre-existing landscape features.

All of this is to say that medieval people lived in a countryside carved into well-defined units of landholding and agricultural management, but some resources were shared. Groups of settlements around a large area of grazing might ‘intercommon’ the hill, heath, or moor, and manage the pasture collectively. Boundaries would be unenforceable as the sheep and cattle would move across the landscape in search of the best grass. So seven parishes had access to Dunsmore Heath in north-east Warwickshire, and the inhabitants of fifteen parishes pastured their animals on the high ground to the east of the upper Windrush valley in the north Cotswolds, between Broadway in the north and the Guitings in the south. ²⁷ Because these arrangements were of long standing, and worked tolerably well through informal management, they often escaped official record. No single lord or institution was in charge of the intercommoned pastures, so they maintained discipline through persuasion.

The Malvern Hills, a range of extinct volcanoes, were subject to intercommoning (Figure 2.7). They marked a boundary for thousands of years, as a ditch originally dug in the Bronze Age runs along their crest, two hillforts were provided in the Iron Age, and in the Middle Ages the hills marked the western extent of four territories: the kingdom of the Hwicce, the diocese of Worcester, the county of Worcester, and Malvern Chase. ²⁸ The place-name Malvern refers to the bareness of the hills, so over a long period they have been grazed so intensively that the growth of trees was prevented. Some of the animals wandering the hills were deer, as the eastern slopes formed part of the hunting reserves of the king and later the earls of Gloucester: Malvern Forest and later Malvern Chase. To the west the hunting belonged to the bishops of Hereford. The prehistoric ditch was renewed in agreements made in 1287 and 1291 to define the limits of the earl of Gloucester’s hunting rights, and it has been known as the ‘red earl’s ditch’, and later the ‘shire ditch’. However, cattle and sheep were the predominant livestock on the hills, and they came from a ring of settlements, such as Hanley Castle, Upton-on-Severn, and Castle Morton on the Worcestershire side, and Colwall and Mathon to the west. Early maps (of 1628 and 1744) show access points on to the hill pasture from the lowland villages. Finds of small quantities of late medieval pottery and two iron knife blades near the south gate of the Iron Age hillfort on Midsummer Hill suggest a temporary settlement for herdsmen staying overnight, perhaps in the summer when cows and ewes were milked at the pasture. ²⁹ Colwall and Mathon paid 8 quarters of oats and some hens and eggs to the lord of Malvern Chase to gain access to the grazing on the eastern slopes. In 1540 people from these two villages were forbidden from ‘staff driving’ their stock across the shire ditch, that is, deliberately taking a large share of the pasture where Hanley’s animals grazed. The scale of the pasture can be judged from the sixteenth-century custom on the Worcestershire side that a villager was restricted to keeping thirty sheep on the village’s own pastures, but there was no limit to the numbers that could be kept on the hills. ³⁰

Pasture on the Malvern Hills is a warning that many features of the peasants’ relationships with the landscape were so deeply embedded in their customs and practices that they are not fully documented. Lords’ records show more clearly that connections between distant lands or assets could correct imbalances in resources. In the champion and wold country timber, fuel, and hay could be in short supply, and in Warwickshire and Worcestershire Avon valley manors which specialized in grain production were linked to woodlands in Arden, Feckenham, and Malvern, while high Cotswold manors shared in the abundant meadows in the river valleys of the Thames and Severn, or could make hay in the smaller local meadows watered by the Evenlode or Windrush. ³¹ The extent to which the peasants benefited from these attachments cannot be known for certain, though the occasional grants of timber from remote woods to repair peasant buildings in the fifteenth century (such as trees from Malvern Wood for buildings at Wick Episcopi in the Severn valley) suggest that peasants did not have access by right to quantities of timber. However, peasants from the champion village of Wellesbourne had common rights in the remote Kingswood in the parish of Lapworth. ³²

There is no reason to doubt the role that peasants could play in planning settlements and fields. A group of peasant tenants, who were used to working together, were capable of complex tasks in regulating agriculture in the common fields, and in managing such administrative tasks as tax assessment. Peasants took on a challenging responsibility when the community became farmers of their manor. Farming, that is holding the manor on lease and paying the lord a fixed annual sum, was much used by estates in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but around 1200 a growing number of lords took over direct management by installing officials. Worcester Cathedral Priory persisted in putting manors out to farm, and between 1206 and 1233 six manors were leased to the ‘men of the vill’. The villagers, most of them unfree, ran the lord’s demesne and collected tenants’ rents and dues. They seem to have done this successfully; for example, in 1207 Harvington, which had previously been leased for 12 marks (£8) was put into the hands of the villagers for a rent of 24 marks (£16) and 12 quarters of oats. The estate’s confidence in the villagers’ abilities was justified, because after a twelve-year lease, they were granted another term of ten years. ³³

The Worcester Priory hamlets of Bickley and Crowle in 1336–7 were to be ‘measured by the lord and the vill’, or ‘measured by the lord and neighbours’ suggesting that villagers were equipped with measuring rods which they normally used in allocating land in the fields and meadows. The planning of Westcote village (Figure 2.5) would have required an initial decision by a village meeting, no doubt with consultation with one or more of the lords, but thereafter in a linear village space could be found for new plots and houses by infilling, subdivision of larger plots, and expansion along the main street. In the case of Ufton, based on the map of 1672, the nineteen tenants of 1086 were presumably mainly yardlanders who acquired quite large plots along the two rows on either side of the street. As the numbers of tenants in the next two centuries increased to forty-three the original plots were subdivided and some extra plots added, and the village became a community of half yardlanders by 1279. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as the population declined plots were left unoccupied, and some remained empty in 1672 ³⁴ (Figure 2.8). Analysis of Warwickshire village plans shows that most nucleated settlements belonged not to the street or row type (like Ufton) but fall into the ‘cluster’ or ‘agglomerated’ category which seem to have developed in an informal and piecemeal fashion. ³⁵

Figure 2.8 Ufton, Warwickshire. A map of 1672 shows the village ranged along one street in a planned layout, with a cluster of houses around the church. The original plots were subdivided between 1086 and 1279, but the subsequent decline in population led to mergers of plots and the abandonment of the southern end of the village (source: Balliol College, Oxford, Estate Map 1, reproduced by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Balliol College).

Orderly rows were scarce in the hamlets and smaller dispersed settlements of the woodlands, where houses might be found in clusters. They were planned in the sense that the boundaries of the plots were agreed, but additions to the settlement could be made on an individual’s initiative. Lords or rather their local officials would wish to control the growth of a settlement, as they would keep a record of tenancy and impose rents and services on newcomers, but the neighbours would have a strong interest in managing the encroachments on to public spaces, and ensuring the good character of newcomers. A hint of the process comes from Hinton-on-the-Green in Gloucestershire in 1266–7, when at the end of a detailed survey of tenants the jury, or perhaps the lord’s officials, or both, stated that there were new bordelli (‘small cottages’) ‘built without licence’, on which rents had been imposed. They recommended that these should be included in the survey, that is given full official recognition. ³⁶

The role of peasants in small-scale settlement development can be seen in the addition of cottages to existing building plots, sometimes for subtenants, but often to accommodate family members. At Halesowen in Worcestershire the lord occasionally agreed to modifications to the space occupied by tenants, responding to the wishes of the tenants—in 1295 for example Henry Othehul added land adjacent to his messuage, and William le Leche’s holding is revealed to have been divided into two (see ‘Holding land before 1349’ in Chapter 3). ³⁷

In woodland landscapes, apparent peasant settlement initiatives took the form of individual farms, each surrounded with small irregular crofts, between which lay patches of pasture and meadow, or small open fields that would be shared by a number of peasants. At Northfield to the east of Halesowen, the western and southern section of the parish was covered with farms, some bearing pre-Conquest names, others apparently having origins in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, leaving a large area to the north and east where the lord was in exclusive command of his castle, demesne, and park (Figure 2.6). ³⁸

Throughout this consideration of settlement formation, applied to both nucleated villages and more scattered settlements, lies an assumption that people moved to a new preferred location. One of the explanations for the growth of large compact villages is that peasants left more isolated farms in order to join a larger settlement, and there is some archaeological and place-name evidence for such moves from the early Middle Ages. An oral tradition of a relocation is documented for Stoneleigh (Warwickshire) when estate officials explained the origins of a half-yardland holding at Cryfield. It was held in the 1380s by Richard Thornhale, but his grandfather, William de Thornhale at some time before 1331 had lived at Thornhale in Canley, a neighbouring hamlet. It was said that William was often robbed because ‘he lived a long way from the habitation of neighbours’, so he arranged an exchange of land in order to to settle in Cryfield which had nine tenants in the late fourteenth century, but may have been bigger at the time of the move. ³⁹ The story could derive from an inaccurate folk memory, but reveals peasant perceptions of their possible role in the nucleation of settlement.

The open fields on which crops were rotated each year according to well-established customs seem to have emerged before the Norman Conquest, but in later centuries they were being adjusted by agreements among the tenants. An area of open field might be enlarged by the addition of areas of newly cleared land, for example at Bishop’s Cleeve (Gloucestershire) where assarts on the slopes of the Cotswold edge were added to the common fields by c. 1170. ⁴⁰ Parts of the field were subject to enclosures, initially a temporary measure to allow crops to be planted in the fallow field, but also more permanent fencing of groups of strips for grazing. A close study of ridge and furrow, the surviving physical remains of the medieval arable, reveals variations and modifications which appear in no written record. Sometimes new building plots on the edge of a village took over the ends of selions, or if the settlement was shrinking in size the ploughing ran over the former house sites (as at Stretton Baskerville in Warwickshire). Cultivators could make the understandable but risky decision to expand the land under corn by extending the strips towards a stream, therefore reducing the amount of meadow, but the ridge and furrow revealing these moves can be notably faint, as if the experiment only lasted some years. Ridges in the woodlands of Warwickshire and Worcestershire could be narrow, with a width as little as 5m compared with 7–8m in the champion. Does this relate to a later date of their formation? In south Gloucestershire on the south bank of the Severn Estuary, in a sample of land between Berkeley and Aust, ridges thought to belong to an early phase of cultivation amount to an area of 5,700 acres, while apparently later ploughing, with a more geometric layout and narrow ridges, totalled 1,100 acres. The later cultivation lay in patches on the edge of presumed pastures, perhaps because they had once been part of the grazing land. ⁴¹

Landscape formation is more easily observed outside the champion districts because the process was still continuing in the documented twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The question, ‘who made the landscape?’ can be to some extent be answered in the case of the extension of settlements and cultivated land in the woodlands, from deeds and manorial surveys, but also from the forest records. The 1280 eyre (royal court) for Feckenham Forest dealt with offences against forest law in north-east Worcestershire and adjoining parts of Warwickshire. ⁴² The main offences involved clearing land and enclosing it, that is assarts and purprestures. Of 198 cases, a quarter involved lords of various kinds, from great magnate landholders like the abbot of Evesham to a number of small religious institutions, like the Hospital of St Wulfstan of Worcester and Dodford Priory, and in secular society knights and gentry. These elite holders of land in the Forest accounted for more cleared and enclosed land than the other offenders, because they were said to have cleared large areas. In south-west Warwickshire for example 17 acres were assarted in one village, 23 acres in another, and 43 acres in a third. Some of the areas cleared by lords were so small, such as an acre and a half at Sheriff’s Lench and the same at Abbot’s Morton, that the inference must be that a lord was paying the penalties, but the work was being done by a tenant increasing the size of a holding. The lord would have benefited from the rents received in the long term.

The great majority of those removing vegetation and enclosing wastes in the Forest came from below the ranks of the gentry. The forest court records give no hint of the status of the offenders, except that it was assumed that they could pay sums of money at a rate of 3s to 4s 6d per acre. The names of fifty-nine offenders or their relatives can be found in the tax lists, notably that of 1275, mostly paying between 1s and 5s, and therefore in the middle ground of rural society, and one in five paid more than 5s. ⁴³ Twelve of those clearing assarts can be found in manorial surveys near in date to the eyre, and eight of them held less than 15 acres, with the other four below 30 acres, so of middle size. Evidently those converting a parcel of wood or waste into arable land included peasants already in possession of a holding. Those planning the operation needed to have some influence with the manorial officials and the community to obtain their consent. The assarter required time to remove vegetation, followed by hedging and ditching, and the heavy task of the first ploughing. Expenses included the fine to be paid to the forest authorities, and perhaps the employment of labour. Making an assart could well have been supported by a loan of money, so it would have helped if the assarter was credit worthy.

The smallholders could also have had a role in clearance of new land. Of the named offenders in 1280, seventy-nine do not figure in the tax records. Some could have been migrants, or had changed their names, but a proportion were probably exempted from tax because their goods were of low value and fell beneath the taxpaying threshold. A few smallholding offenders can be found in surveys, like Anabel Ervi of Alvechurch who held a messuage and two assarts and no other land, and at Blickley in Hanbury members of the de Blickley family held only assart land. Some of these pioneers may have worked as artisans, like Robert the Roper of Ipsley (who probably made ropes from tree bark or bast) or William le Cupere of Blickley (a maker of barrels). ⁴⁴

The main conclusion that emerges from the 1280 proceedings is that peasants of all kinds carried out assarting, including a large number of middling peasants and smallholders. They cleared land often on a small scale, with many holding a half-acre or one acre of newly cultivated or enclosed land. Cumulatively they contributed a great deal to the area of land under cultivation.

Throughout the woodlands of the region older maps can show small and irregular enclosures characteristic of the assarting process, and careful analysis of the landscape can reveal traces of small fields in the form of ditches, banks, and patches of ridge and furrow. The assarters’ house sites often survive on roadsides which were once the edge of commons or woods, or the houses that were late abandoned are visible as earthworks or have left surface scatters of pottery. Figure 2.9 shows an assarted landscape at Blakeshall in Wolverley (Worcestershire) as represented on eighteenth and early nineteenth century maps. Some of the assarts carry the name rudding or ridding, referring to the removal of trees and bushes, and one is called Newland. Some preserve the names of former tenants, such as Cole, showing that the plots were in the separate possession of individuals. They were surrounded by hedges and ditches, so the name ‘close’ is used, with a common alternative of ‘croft’. The irregular shape of the enclosures reflects the process of piecemeal clearance, and lanes and paths were needed to gain access to these small fields. Some of the plots were occupied with houses or cottages, some of which have been abandoned, but others are still occupied by houses that had medieval predecessors. ⁴⁵ Blakeshall occupied a site on the edge of a large common which still exists, the edges of which had been nibbled away by assarts.

Figure 2.9 Blakeshall, Wolverley, Worcestershire Blakeshall, one township among ten in Wolverley, in 1778 retained much evidence of its development and landscape in the Middle Ages, with scattered houses, small irregular enclosed fields, some bearing assart names like Rudding and Newland, on the edge of a large common (source: WA, ref 970.5, BA 1289).

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Forest of Dean contained large areas of dense woods (Figure 2.10). It would only be in a thinly populated country that wild boar would flourish in such numbers that a hundred of them could be killed in Dean for consumption in the royal household in 1254. Wolves had largely been eliminated in lowland England, but in the 1280s they could still be found in Dean. ⁴⁶ The area went through a sustained period of development in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the number of households can conservatively be estimated to have increased from 324 in 1086 to more than a thousand by the early fourteenth century. Much of that increase was achieved by clearing new land. ⁴⁷ The forest regard of 1282 records that 94 per cent of the 273 assarts contained 7 acres or less, and two-thirds consisted of an acre or fraction of an acre, suggesting small-scale peasant clearance. ⁴⁸ Assarts, for which aristocrats were responsible, were being cultivated by peasants: a knight, Henry of Dene of Little Dean, paid for assarting 20 acres and enclosing another 15, but half an acre from this land was sublet to Henry Witelond to build four houses, and he in turn sublet one of them as a cottage to Alexander Hoc for 6d per annum. Groups of between three and six individuals cleared a single piece of land, suggesting partnerships to provide labour or raise money. The uncertainties of these ventures are implied by the occasional assart that had not produced a crop. On the other hand, some tenants made efforts to improve their land by marling it, for which purpose pits were dug that were reported to the Forest authorities.

Figure 2.10 Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire The estimation of the extent of woodland depends on sixteenth-century sources. The inhabitants lived in both villages and dispersed settlements (not shown). The river ports gave access to Bristol and other towns (source: VCH Glouc, vol. 5, p. 296).

Buildings were added to the assarts and purprestures, mentioned occasionally in Dean, but frequently in enquiries in Feckenham in the 1240s, when dozens of new buildings (sixteen in the small village of Cooksey alone) were said to have been erected mostly by peasants. Some were accommodating animals that grazed in the forest. The assarted land was occasionally held in association with servile holdings. Two tenants at Churcham on the edge of the Forest of Dean, Wymund de Stutebrugge and William Cissmore, held half-yardlands in villeinage and other lands. They were able to add free land to their holdings by acquiring an extra half-acre or acre and a half of assarts. ⁴⁹ Tenants were attracted to occupy free land in forests and woodlands because their main obligation was a cash rent, and they felt secure under the protection of the common law. Lords offered these advantageous terms in order to gain more tenants and income, and to develop underexploited parts of their estates.

Living in a royal forest was in many ways a disadvantage. In Dean the poor quality of much of the soil and the hilly character of the country did not encourage extensive cultivation of grain, and many peasants had only smallholdings of arable, often a cottage with an acre or two, and rarely more than 15 acres. Individuals worked hard and paid a great deal to acquire new land—4s 6d per acre was charged by the forest administration in Dean as in Feckenham, and in addition lords took rents and dues from their tenants. Added to those burdens were the constant well-documented complaints that forest officials took extra payments for their own profit. There was much agitation in the thirteenth century against the royal forests, and in an act of conciliation to his subjects at the end of the century, Edward I redrew the boundaries and greatly reduced the areas under forest law.

For all of the difficulties, the forest offered many benefits. The demands of the crown were not intended to punish enterprising assarters, or to discourage or prevent them. The king needed money, and the sums levied were intended to be affordable: the initial payments were a burden, but they did not continue. Peasants attempted to avoid the penalties of forest law, and they were helped by the inefficiency of the administration. They had their own customs and valued and defended them. In a famous quarrel of the early fourteenth century over the intercommoned pasture on the borders of Alvington and Woolaston, the men of Woolaston drove a hundred sheep off the pasture, which precipitated an agreement between the two monastic lords in 1319 confirming, among other things, the grazing rights of the tenants on both sides. ⁵⁰

The common pasture in the Forest of Dean was available without limits, in contrast with the stints imposed in almost all conventional villages. Forest dwellers were able to gather fuel and various types of wood and vegetation, to use for hedging, fodder, litter, and charcoal. Dean was also the source of materials such as iron ore, mineral coal, and various types of stone. Ropes (from lime bark), barrels, and tanned leather could be made from felled trees. It must be rated as one of the most intensively industrialized districts in England (see ‘Industry within peasant society’ in Chapter 9). Established peasant families can be found among those operating forges in 1282, such as the Jans of Staunton and the Fouls of Ruardean. Peasants who were not drawn into industrial employment could still benefit from supplying the demand from miners, artisans, and labourers for food and drink, or provide transport services for the industries. The forest community benefited from the infrastructure of four boroughs, at least three unofficial market towns (Blakeney, Mitcheldean, and Newland), with roads linking different parts of the forest and taking goods out of the forest, for example to Gloucester, and to small river ports and landing places along the Severn estuary such as Purton. Boats connected the Forest to places up and down the river. Dean had a flexible economy with varied agricultural and industrial resources, and connections with a wide range of customers.

A distinct Dean landscape combined nucleated clusters, even a regular row settlement at English Bicknor, with small hamlets and dispersed farms and cottages, as in other woodlands. Forest settlements and their fields and closes were connected by a network of lanes and roads. In the spaces between settlements were large heaths and commons, to which the word ‘meend’ (‘land held in common’) was sometimes applied. At least part of the still visible carpet of cinders from iron forges, and some of the traces of diggings for coal, iron ore, and stone date back to the Middle Ages. The broad outline of Dean’s topography, with its extensive woods protected from destruction, owes much to royal policy, but its intricate detail represents a landscape made by peasants.

The enclosures and the plentiful industrial employment might have encouraged individualism among Forest people, but there was also a need for collective solidarities, such as the common purpose shown by the miners in defending their privileges. The parish had an importance for peasants who otherwise lacked a unifying focus. No less than eight of the Forest villages are known to have had church houses, which were valued assembly points for parish conviviality and fundraising.

Manors in the Forest tended to be small. Their lords did not exercise strong lordship, and tenants owed light rents and services. Parishes could be large and complicated. The modern parish of Newland contains almost 8,800 acres in twenty-two detached parts. Some parcels of land still lack any parochial connections. If the vills chosen for tax assessment in 1327 and 1334 are compared with those named for the taxes of the 1520s an administrative transformation had taken place, reflecting the shifting population. Coleford, a small hamlet in 1349, had become a tax vill with many contributors of its own in 1525, but was linked to Newland in 1522. The lack of administrative continuity makes comparison difficult, but some places seem to have grown in population between the 1320s and the 1520s, in reversal of the normal tendency. This could suggest that the forest dwellers enjoyed opportunities, and were able to benefit from the Forest environment, even when other districts were experiencing hard times.

The distinctive character of the Forest of Dean was expressed in Forest people’s sense of identity: they regarded themselves as special and privileged, and very different from the neighbours across the Wye and in the Vale. An incident in 1430, when they rioted and seized grain being carried downriver in boats from Tewkesbury, provoked royal officials to call them ‘the whole community of the Forest’ (together with the inhabitants of two hundreds between the Forest and the estuary). ⁵¹ Belief in the Forest’s autonomy, and awareness of the differences between Forest dwellers and their neighbours have persisted into modern times. Did other parts of the region identify themselves as set apart? There are hints of special customs in the Arden, including the use of a ‘great acre’, and Arden was used in personal names and place names (William de Arden; Hampton-in-Arden) suggesting that people living outside that district thought of it as a coherent territory. Movements of country people (see ‘Migration’ in Chapter 4) within the boundaries of the Feldon or the wolds resulted from their attachment to familiar landscapes and ways of life.

Peasants, lords, and the changing landscape after 1350

In examining the making of the west midland landscape in a period of growth, up to the middle of the fourteenth century, peasants had a role alongside kings, lords, and townspeople, but surely in the next phase the lords became much more decisive? As the population thinned in the fourteenth century, especially after the plague of 1349, lords are said in many villages to have expropriated peasants, enclosed the common fields, and converted the arable into grazing for herds and flocks. ⁵² More careful consideration of the processes shows that just as a range of people and circumstances contributed to the making of villages, so varied social and environmental factors led to their unmaking. To begin with the settlements of the woodlands, both the landscape and the documents record the abandonment of houses in considerable numbers. At Hanbury in Worcestershire a combination of field observation, maps, and documents demonstrates that at least forty houses were left unoccupied, mainly in the later Middle Ages, from a total of more than a hundred inhabited buildings in c. 1300. Areas of ridge and furrow now preserved in pasture suggest the retreat of cultivation, but this is not closely dateable. At Pendock, in the same county, about twenty from a total of sixty houses were left uninhabited by the sixteenth century (Figure 2.3). ⁵³ From the tithe records of six parishes in north and west Worcestershire, output of grain and legumes fell by 27 per cent during the first half of the fifteenth century. ⁵⁴ This was mainly the result of a reduction in the acreage under crops, which was already in process in 1349–1400. One factor leading to a fall in production was the total abandonment of holdings, or the decision by the tenants to favour grazing (see ‘Arable and pasture: Managing change’ in Chapter 6). The thinning out of the settlements in the woodlands rarely resulted in a complete depopulation of an area of countryside, and similarly, in an agrarian landscape which had always combined pasture and arable, a tipping of the balance in favour of pasture was rarely transformative. The fabric of the historic landscape, with its dispersed settlements, winding roads, enclosed crofts, and areas of common grazing persisted. In the assarted landscape at Wolverley (illustrated in Figure 2.9) some of the closes had contained dwellings before 1350, but after the loss of population remained empty for centuries. The general impression is that the varied and flexible use of land in the woodlands allowed the inhabitants to absorb the shocks of the later Middle Ages.

In the champion and to a lesser extent in the wolds villages could be reduced drastically in size, and were sometimes totally deserted. Settlements were not abandoned as a direct result of an epidemic, even that of 1349. Rather the widespread tendency for people to migrate was the main cause of empty and decayed houses. Migration was a universal tendency, and can be observed in both woodlands and champion, as serfs were reported to have left the manor without permission, tenants’ names disappear, and tenants were reported to be neglecting buildings and allowing them to fall into ruin. Holdings were described as tofts rather than messuages, meaning that the buildings had gone, and land was reported to be lying ‘in the lord’s hands’ or to have been taken on by a tenant as in a process of engrossment. A very rapid turnover of tenants suggests that a village was in terminal decline, like Kingston in central Warwickshire where between 1386 and 1430 few families lasted for more than one generation. ⁵⁵

In the nucleated villages of the champion and wolds the abandonment of holdings has left its mark on surviving villages, like Prior’s Hardwick in Warwickshire. Modern fields to the east of the modern settlement contain the earthwork remains of tofts (closes in which houses had once stood), house sites, and holloways reflecting the complexity of the settlement’s past, with both regular and irregular plot boundaries. Much of the shrinkage must have happened before 1411, when a survey reveals that only seventeen tenants remained of the original thirteenth-century total of forty-four. ⁵⁶ The centre of the Gloucestershire village of Hazleton was much depleted when its original thirty households halved in number, leaving the earthwork outlines of abandoned houses, and six empty plots where houses once stood. ⁵⁷ Engrossment is sometimes visible on deserted village sites when a large holding seems to have absorbed its neighbours, only for it in turn to be left to decay.

Peasants decided to leave their houses for a variety of reasons. Occasionally they may have been impoverished, as was clearly the case at Coton in Warwickshire, where the tenants abandoned by c.1300 small houses built of timbers set in the earth. Their possessions were few and of low-quality judging from the small finds and pottery from the excavation. ⁵⁸ However, some of those leaving villages later in the period were abandoning yardland holdings of 30 acres which should have been capable of supporting a family in some comfort. Excavated houses at Upton in Gloucestershire and Goldicote in Warwickshire where habitation ceased in the late fourteenth century were well built. They do not appear to have been afflicted by decay, and were associated with an impressive range of material goods. ⁵⁹ The migrating inhabitants apparently believed that they could lead a better life in another village, and we can imagine that they left their homes with confidence, not in despair. Not all departures can be described with such optimism. Villages that lost a high proportion of their inhabitants tended to be small and remote, without a parish church, and lacked facilities and much sense of community. In some villages in advanced decline, the manor court had to deal with cases of anti-social behaviour which may reflect some degree of demoralization. ⁶⁰ One factor affecting the tenants who were engrossing their neighbours’ holdings was the lack of workers who could be employed on the large quantities of land that were being accumulated.

Lords often sought to prevent an outward flow of migrants and to encourage newcomers to replace them. They campaigned against the decay of buildings, ordered serfs who had left to return, and allied with the majority of the village community to maintain the rules of husbandry.

A minority of lords adopted a very different policy of removing tenants, but often after a long period of decline. The way was prepared by the engrossing tenants, who prevented newcomers from acquiring land. Some villages were embarking on long term and piecemeal enclosure, which is apparent in the modern hedge lines which follow the curved lines of the ploughed strips in the open fields. Custom prevented lords from evicting the remaining tenants in a decaying village, but they could make life difficult for the inhabitants by enclosing the common pastures or even part of the common arable. The lord’s ally in making such changes would have been the leasehold tenant of the demesne (often recruited from the top ranks of the peasantry), who would stand to profit from a rationalization of the manor and the amalgamation of demesne and tenant land. As life became harder tenants moved to occupy vacant holdings which were available in nearby villages, and potential heirs went to take up employment elsewhere.

In the champion major changes in land use are also made apparent in the documents with as much as a third of the land being recorded as pasture in the late fifteenth century (see section on ‘Arable and pasture: Managing change’ in Chapter 6). Before 1400 most of the pasture lay in shared commons which could not be calculated as a specific acreage. This tendency to expand pasture was obviously being driven to extremes in the case of the deserted villages. Kingston in Warwickshire, which in 1430 had eleven tenants, by 1496 consisted of two closes, East Field and West Field (the former open fields) held by farmers. Five large fields were depicted on an estate map of 1697, one of which was called ‘Grazing Towne’. ⁶¹ The lords’ motive for the changes is apparent from the high valuations given to the enclosed pastures that succeeded a village and its fields, which often exceeded £20 and could rise to £40 or £60, far in excess of the rents paid by a decaying village with a handful of tenants with run-down holdings. The process by which a village and its corn fields was transformed into an enclosed pasture is visible in the field as well as in the documents in the case of Weston-juxta-Cherrington in Long Compton parish in Warwickshire. Now sixteen house sites can be identified on both sides of a village street, with the remains of the manor house at the end of the street. At least two other houses stood to the east, and probably another group to the west. There had been twenty-four households in 1279, which had fallen to fourteen in 1353. Then another six were lost, so that when Henry Keble (a London merchant who had become lord of the manor) decided to act in 1509 there were seven houses and a cottage to be ‘devastated and destroyed’ and allowed to fall into ruin, according to the enquiry into depopulation in 1517. This left thirty-eight people ‘without their work, dwelling and occupation’. In 1527 the farmer of Weston left in his will 1,640 sheep and 130 cattle, so the conversion to pasture seems to have been complete. ⁶² The story of the village’s decline is not untypical in the succession of tenants leaving their holdings over many years, followed by the lord closing down the village in a final denouement. A rather similar sequence of events overtook the village of Westcote (Figure 2.5), which has left the very clear outline of the foundations of the abandoned houses still visible in the landscape. The language used by the reports of the enquiries of 1517 (quoting Warwickshire examples) reflect the different pathways to depopulation, with some forceful statements about lords removing villagers, such as ‘the whole hamlet of Barcheston was desolated and annihilated’ and people were ‘expelled from their houses’, but often the actions seem more indirect, such as the lord of Weston Mauduit ‘converted’ the arable so that people ‘departed’, or at Shuttington the lord ‘allowed the land to fall into decay’, and converted it to pasture, so that six ploughs were ‘displaced’ and people ‘withdrew’. The same phrases about ‘allowing decay’, and people withdrawing were used at Dorsington. ⁶³ The stiff legal language seems to have been describing a variety of processes by which peasants left of their own accord, or departed under pressure, or were directly expelled.

Most champion and wold villages survived with reduced numbers but with intact open fields. The leading peasants who managed the fields expanded their pastoral resources by converting part of the open field to semi-permanent grazing by turning arable strips into fenced leys. Other enclosures might take the form of small crofts, often on the edge of the open fields. They were able to allow cultivated land to be converted to grazing by intensifying cultivation of a smaller area of arable. Woodland settlements were thinned by piecemeal abandonment of houses, cottages, and areas of cultivation, but a little noticed trend in the century before 1540 was a small-scale resumption of assarting and the building of new houses and cottages, some by lease-holding farmers who were re-organizing their land and moving their farmhouses in consequence, but also cottages were being established on the edge of commons, like Heathhouses in Kingsbury and Rotton Row End in Middleton (both in the Warwickshire Arden). ⁶⁴

Conclusion

The proposal that societies were moulded by the variety of land that they occupied has some merits. People also created landscapes, sometimes consciously and deliberately, sometimes by taking actions with unforeseen outcomes. The landscape of the west midland region was the work of many hands stretching back before the Middle Ages: roads and boundaries were a legacy of the prehistoric or Roman periods, while some land is likely to have been under continuous cultivation between the second century and the fourteenth. Roman field boundaries could provide a framework in which medieval fields and settlements developed.

Kings, aristocrats, and the higher clergy all had a direct interest in their own surroundings, and devoted much attention and resources to the gardens and parks around their residences. They protected some landscape features, such as woods, and promoted agricultural expansion, sometimes clearing and cultivating themselves, more often encouraging and sanctioning the work of others. They had a role in settlement planning and the layout of fields, but were selective in their concern: a town for example was a special and valuable asset, and they were likely to be involved in planning its streets and manipulating its communication network. Lay lords often had a transient interest in particular places, making occasional visits to a residence, and, unlike estates held by undying institutions, their tenure tended not to continue over centuries.

Peasants had a very direct concern with the landscape in which they lived, and every detail had a bearing on their well-being and sense of identity. Boundaries mattered a great deal, and were embedded and renewed in the collective memory. Villagers managed common assets, and maintained their share in intercommoned pastures. They had a role in planning and modifying settlements and fields, and cleared new land. They were responding to encouragement, but also taking the initiative. They infringed the rules by cultivating wastes without authorization, but on occasion they resisted clearance, again in defiance of authority if necessary. Peasants responded to the need to make changes in the landscape when demand for land and food were expanding in the thirteenth century. They scaled down their farming in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, leading to inevitable if unplanned reductions in the size and number of settlements. Peasants had a vital role in making the landscape.

Peasants Making History: Living in an English Region 1200–1540. Christopher Dyer, Oxford University Press. © Christopher Dyer 2022. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847212.003.0002

¹ A.H. Smith, ‘The Hwicce’, in Franciplegius: Medieval and Linguistic Studies in Honour of F.P. Magoun, edited by J.B. Bessinger and R.P. Creed (New York, 1965), pp. 56–65. D. Hooke, The Anglo-Saxon Landscape: The Kingdom of the Hwicce (Manchester, 1985); J. Whybra, A Lost English County: Winchcombeshire in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (Woodbridge, 1990). The idea of using these three counties as a regional entity was advanced in R.H. Hilton, A Medieval Society. The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (reissue Cambridge, 1983), pp. 7–14.

² H.C. Darby and I.B. Terrett, The Domesday Geography of Midland England (Cambridge, 1954); B. Hains and A. Horton, British Regional Geology. Central England (London, 1969); J.M. Ragg et al., Soils and their Use in Midland and Western England, Soil Survey of England and Wales, Bulletin no. 12 (1984); D.C. Findlay et al., Soils and their Use in South-West England, Soil Survey of England and Wales, Bulletin no. 14 (1984).

³ C.R. Young, The Royal Forests of Medieval England (Leicester, 1979), pp. 62–3 reproduces an incomplete map compiled in 1921. John Langton is preparing an atlas of forests and chases in England and Wales: info. sjc.ox.ac.uk/Forest/maps.html.

⁴ C. Dyer, ‘Dispersed Settlements in Medieval England: A Case Study of Pendock, Worcestershire’, Med. Arch. 34(1990), pp. 97–121; C. Dyer, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Medieval Village: Little Aston (in Aston Blank)’, TBGAS 105(1987), pp. 165–81.

⁵ This is based on a variety of sources, such as Hooke, Anglo-Saxon Landscape; H.C. Darby and I B. Terrett, The Domesday Geography of Midland England (Cambridge, 1954); various essays in Field and Forest. An Historical Geography of Warwickshire and Worcestershire, edited by T.R. Slater and P.J. Jarvis (Norwich, 1982); H.P.R. Finberg, Gloucestershire: An Illustrated Essay on the History of the Landscape (London, 1955); O. Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London, 1986); B.K. Roberts and S. Wrathmell, Region and Place: A Study of English Rural Settlement (London, 2002); J. Thirsk, ed., Rural England: An Illustrated History of the Landscape (Oxford, 2000).

⁶ Many observations are involved in this generalization, but published works dealing with the issue include J. Kanzaka, ‘Villein Rents in Thirteenth-Century England: an Analysis of the Hundred Rolls of 1279–80’, EcHR 55 (2002), pp. 593–618; B.M.S. Campbell and K. Bartley, England on the Eve of the Black Death. An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land and Wealth 1300–49 (Manchester, 2006), pp. 251–68.

⁷ G. Demidowicz, Medieval Birmingham: The Borough Rentals of 1296 and 1344–5 (DS Occasional Paper 48, 2008), pp. 31–4; G. Demidowicz and S. Price, King’s Norton. A History (Chichester, 2009); T.R. Slater, Edgbaston. A History (Chichester, 2002); V. Skipp, Medieval Yardley (Chichester, 1970).

⁸ CR Elmley, pp. xi—xvi; R.K. Field, ‘The Beauchamp Earls of Warwick and the Castle of Elmley’, Transactions of the Worcestershire Archaeological Society, 3rd ser, 15 (1996), pp. 135–46; E.K. Vose, ‘The Estates of Worcester Cathedral Priory in the Later Middle Ages’ (typescript, University of Birmingham, 1990), pp. 104–40; RBW, pp. 125–50.

⁹ B.P. Hindle, Medieval Roads (Princes Risborough, 1982); Hilton, Medieval Society, pp. 10–13.

¹⁰ M. Hicks, ed., English Inland Trade 1430–1540. Southampton and its Region (Oxford, 2015), pp. 105–7, 108–9; a carrier connected London and Worcester by regular cart journeys: E.S. Fegan, ed., Journal of Prior More (WHS, 1914), pp. 208, 260.

¹¹ S. Rippon, The Severn Estuary. Landscape Evolution and Wetland Reclamation (Leicester, 1997), pp. 186–267; J. Allen, ‘A Short History of Salt-Marsh Reclamation at Slimbridge Warth and Neighbouring Areas, Gloucestershire’, TBGAS 104 (1986), pp. 139–55; R. Hewlett, ed., The Gloucestershire Court of Sewers 1583–1642 (GRS, 35, 2020), pp. xxx–xxxv, xli–xlv, xlix–lix; P. Franklin, ‘Malaria in Medieval Gloucestershire: an Essay in Epidemiology’, TBGAS, 101 (1983), pp. 111–22.

¹² R. Jones and c. Lewis, ‘The Midlands: Medieval Settlements and Landscapes’, in Medieval Rural Settlement. Britain and Ireland ad 800–1600, edited by N. Christie and P. Stamper (Oxford, 2012), pp. 197–201; T. Williamson, R. Liddiard, and T. Partida, Champion. The Making and Unmaking of the English Midland Landscape (Liverpool, 2013), pp. 74–100; C. Dyer, ‘Rural Settlement in Medieval Warwickshire’, TBWAS 100 (1996), pp. 117–32; C. Dyer, ‘Villages and Non-Villages in the Medieval Cotswolds’, TBGAS 120 (2002), pp. 11–35; H. Hamerow, Rural Settlements and Society in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 2012), pp. 67–98.

¹³ CR Elmley, pp. xi–xiii, xxi.

¹⁴ B.K. Roberts, ‘A Study of Medieval Colonization in the Forest of Arden, Warwickshire’, AgHR 16 (1968), pp. 101–13.

¹⁵ D. Crouch, ed., The Newburgh Earldom of Warwick and its Charters 1088–1253 (DS, 48, 2015), pp. 223–50.

¹⁶ WAM 27693, 27694.

¹⁷ Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1330–4, p. 268.

¹⁸ WHR, pp. 268–70.

¹⁹ Rec Feck For, p. 7.

²⁰ C. Dyer, ‘The Midland Economy and Society, 1314–48: Insights from Changes in the Landscape’, Midland History 42 (2017), pp. 36–57.

²¹ O.H. Creighton, Designs Upon the Land. Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2009).

²² S. Mileson, Parks in Medieval England (Oxford, 2009); C. Dyer, ‘Lords in a Landscape: the Berkeley Family and Northfield (Worcestershire)’, The Fifteenth Century 14 (2015), pp. 13–37.

²³ M.W. Beresford, New Towns of the Middle Ages. Town Plantations in England, Wales and Gascony (London, 1967), pp. 439–41, 498–501.

²⁴ Reg Wig, p. 83a. This shows that the hamlet had grown within 44 years of the town’s foundation.

²⁵ Cov Reg, p. 55.

²⁶ J. Bond and C. Lewis, ‘The Earthworks of Hawling’, TBGAS, 109 (1991), pp. 150–1, 165–70.

²⁷ C. Dyer, ‘Seasonal Settlement in Medieval Gloucestershire: Sheepcotes’, in Seasonal Settlement, edited by H.S.A. Fox (Leicester, Vaughan Papers 39, 1994), pp. 26–7.

²⁸ B. Smith, A History of Malvern (Leicester, 1964), pp. 25–40, 84–7; M. Bowden, The Malvern Hills: A Sacred Landscape (Swindon, 2005).

²⁹ Society of Antiquaries, Prattinton V15 68.2; WA, ref. s705:974, BA 9063; S.C. Stanford, Midsummer Hill. An Iron Age Hillfort on the Malverns (Hereford, 1981), p. 149.

³⁰ J.M. Toomey, ‘A Medieval Woodland Manor: Hanley Castle, Worcestershire’ (PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1997), p. 51; J. Bowen and A. Craven, Colwall (London, Victoria County History, 2020), p. 51, Smith, Malvern, p. 40.

³¹ RBW, pp. 103–5, 139–40 shows links between Bredon and Welland and Fladbury and Bradley; VE, vol.3 p. 252 shows meadow at Bourton-on-the-Water and Broadwell connected to Eyford.

³² WA, ref. 009:1, BA 2636, 175/92476; 92482; 92491; WHR, pp. 166–8.

³³ H. Luard, ed., Annales Monastici, vol 4, Annales Prioratus de Wigornia (London: Rolls Series, 1869), pp. 391–425 ; Hilton, Medieval Society, p. 153.

³⁴ Balliol College, Estates Map 1, survey E.11.7. It is discussed in N.W. Alcock and D. Miles, ‘An Early Fifteenth-Century Warwickshire Cruck House Using Joggled Halvings’, Vernacular Architecture 43 (2012), pp. 19–27; general arguments for villagers planning their own settlements are made in Williamson and others, Champion, pp. 81–100; S. Mileson, ‘People and Houses in South Oxfordshire, 1300–1650’, Vernacular Architecture 46 (2015), pp. 8–25.

³⁵ B.K. Roberts, ‘Village Forms in Warwickshire: a Preliminary Discussion’, in Field and Forest, edited by Slater and Jarvis, pp. 125–46.

³⁶ Hist Glouc, vol 3, p. 61.

³⁷ J. Amphlett, ed., Court Rolls of the Manor of Hales, 1272–1307 (WHS, 1910), pp. 320–1, 335.

³⁸ Dyer, ‘Lords in a Landscape’, pp. 29–35.

³⁹ R.H. Hilton, ed., The Stoneleigh Leger Book (Dugdale Society, 24, 1960), p. 221.

⁴⁰ RBW, p. 351.

⁴¹ The dimensions of ridges in woodlands derive from observations by D. Pannett and the author; for Gloucs, J.R.L. Allen, ‘A Reconnaissance Map of Medieval Alluvial Ploughlands in the Vale of Berkeley, Gloucestershire and Avon’, TBGAS, 110 (1992), pp. 87–97.

⁴² Rec Feck For, pp. 119–46.

⁴³ J. Willis Bund and J. Amphlett, eds., Lay Subsidy Roll for the County of Worcester circa 1280 (WHS, 1893).

⁴⁴ RBW, 180–1, 221; Rec Feck For, pp. 49, 78.

⁴⁵ WA, ref. 970.5:197, BA1289.

⁴⁶ VCH Glouc vol 5, pp. 285–94, 354–62 (wildlife on p. 290); C.E. Hart, Royal Forest (Oxford, 1966), p. 41.

⁴⁷ From figures in A. Farley ed., Domesday Book (London, 1783) and P. Franklin, ed., The Taxpayers of Medieval Gloucestershire (Stroud, 1993).

⁴⁸ C.E. Hart, ‘Dean Forest Eyre of 1282’ (MA dissertation, University of Bristol, 1955).

⁴⁹ Hist Glouc, vol 3, pp. 135, 137–8.

⁵⁰ VCH Glouc, vol 5, pp. 5, 9.

⁵¹ T. Johnson, Law in Common. Legal Cultures in Late-Medieval England (Oxford, 2020), p. 126.

⁵² M.W. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England, revised ed. (Stroud, 1998); H. Thorpe, ‘The Lord and the Landscape’, TBAS 80 (1965), pp. 38–77.

⁵³ C. Dyer, Hanbury: Settlement and Society in a Woodland Landscape (University of Leicester Department of English Local History Occasional Papers, 4th series, 4, 1991); C. Dyer, ‘Dispersed Settlements in Medieval England. A Case Study of Pendock, Worcestershire’, Med Arch 24 (1990), pp. 97–121.

⁵⁴ C. Dyer, ‘Peasant Farming in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Tithe Estimations by Worcester Cathedral Priory’, in Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy. Essays in Honour of Bruce M.S. Campbell, edited by M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon, and P.R. Schofield (Turnhout, 2015), p. 91.

⁵⁵ British Library, Egerton Rolls 2106, 2108; SCLA, DR 98/438, 463a.

⁵⁶ Warwickshire County Museum Aerial photograph WAN 6854/32; WHR, pp. 203–6; Cov Reg, pp. 541–4.

⁵⁷ C. Dyer and D. Aldred, ‘Changing Landscape and Society in a Cotswold Village: Hazleton, Gloucestershire, to c. 1600’, TBGAS, 127 (2009), pp. 235–70.

⁵⁸ A. Maull and others, ‘Excavations of the Deserted Medieval Village of Coton in Coton Park, Rugby’ (unpublished report by Northamptonshire Archaeology, Northampton County Council, 2001).

⁵⁹ R.H. Hilton and P.A. Rahtz, ‘Upton, Gloucestershire, 1959–1964’, TBGAS 85(1966), pp. 70–146; P.A Rahtz, ‘Upton, Gloucestershire, 1959–1968. Second Report’, TBGAS 88 (1969), pp. 74–126; P. Thompson and S.C. Palmer, ‘Iron Age, Romano-British and Medieval Settlements Excavated on the Transco Newbold Pacey to Honeybourne Gas Pipeline in 2000’, TBWAS 116 (2012), pp. 1–139.

⁶⁰ C. Dyer, ‘Villages in Crisis: Social Dislocation, 1370–1520’, in Deserted Villages Revisited, edited by C. Dyer and R. Jones (Hatfield, 2010), pp. 28–45.

⁶¹ Calendar of IPM, 2nd ser, Henry VII, vol 1, p. 1052; M.W. Beresford and J.G. Hurst, Deserted Medieval Villages (London, 1971), pp. 41–2.

⁶² WHR, pp. 241–3; SCLA, DR 98/865–6; I.S. Leadam, ed., The Domesday of Inclosures (Royal Historical Society, 1897), vol 2, pp. 415–16; E. Rainsberry, Through the Lych Gate (Kineton, 1969), pp. 46–7.

⁶³ Leadam, Domesday, vol 2, pp. 395–6, 416–17. I am grateful for the chance to see Spencer Dimmock’s translation of documents of the Commissions, including Weston Mauduit and Dorsington.

⁶⁴ C. Dyer, ‘Peasants and Farmers: Rural Settlements and Landscapes in an Age of Transition’, in The Age of Transition. The Archaeology of English Culture 1400–1600, edited by D. Gaimster and P. Stamper (Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 15, 1997), pp. 61–76, especially pp. 70–1; A. Watkins, ed., The Early Records of Coleshill c.1120–1549 (DS, 51, 2018), p. 22.