The Birth of Modern Britain: A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present. Francis Pryor
too soon it has precisely the opposite effect to that intended: it breaks down in the arable ground and in the process removes nitrogen from the soil. And of course it is nitrogen that plants require if they are to grow vigorously.
In the past, household and other debris was placed on muck heaps, which archaeologists, for reasons best known to themselves, like to refer to as ‘middens’. Middens also accumulated burnt wood (for the potash it contains), from which thousands of nails found their way into the soil. In regions where the subsoil was heavy or acidic, farmers would add broken bricks and mortar to help drainage and increase alkalinity. Pottery and glass sherds also helped clay soils to drain, so they were thrown onto the midden along with everything else. Then the process of hand-forking the manure into and out of carts helped break down the pieces of pottery, glass, brick and tile, which would explain the small size of so many of the sherds from that strip immediately east of Shapwick village.
So the distribution of finds from later medieval and post-medieval Shapwick proves beyond much doubt that the villagers continued to live in very much the same place and spread their manure in much the same way from at least the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. After that time in Britain generally we see the gradual introduction of non-farmyard fertilisers, of which the best known is bird dung from the Peruvian coast, known as guano, but other soil improvers were also used, such as gypsum, chalk and lime.
It is now becoming clear that the farming and manuring pattern of later medieval times continued into the post-medieval period relatively unaltered, yet this was a period almost of turmoil in the world of local landowners. Glastonbury Abbey, always a prosperous foundation but possibly the richest monastic estate in England by this time, owned land and two manors at Shapwick which were taken over by private landlords after the abbey’s dissolution in November 1539. This led to the enlargement of the mansion at Shapwick House sometime around 1620–40 when a long gallery was added to the medieval building. All this was happening, and yet the basic management of the landscape continued much as before. It is not, however, until the later eighteenth century that we see the village decline in size as the park around Shapwick House was greatly enlarged, a process sometimes referred to as emparkation. We know, for example, that seven houses near the great house were demolished between 1782 and 1787.3 This process continued until the great park was completed in the 1850s, a process which even involved the relocation of the parish church!
At this point I should perhaps admit I’ve been a little unfair because I’ve started this chapter by jumping straight into the deep end of a pool of detail. I did that because I wanted to illustrate the complexities inherent in any attempt to understand how the rural landscape developed at this crucially important period at the very beginning of our story. But our tale is about to get more complicated. In many ways this reflects the reality of modern research into rural archaeology: many of the old certainties have had to be abandoned in the face of a growing mountain of evidence that what might once have been seen as clear national trends actually fail to apply at the local level. But this is nothing new, as we saw in the Middle Ages.
One of the great archaeological breakthroughs in the study of English medieval rural geography happened in the 1950s and 1960s with the recognition that many villages in the English Midlands had either been abandoned or had shrunk massively, usually from some time in the fourteenth century. When mapped out, these villages could be seen to form a Central Province which extended in a broadly continuous swathe from Somerset, through the Midlands, Lincolnshire, eastern Yorkshire and into County Durham and Northumberland.4 The landscapes in this area featured villages that had been reorganised, or ‘nucleated’, by drawing outlying farms into a more focused central village, a process that happened in the centuries on either side of the Norman Conquest. The work of nucleation was carried out by local people, often encouraged by landlords and by other authorities, such as the Church and great monastic houses (as happened at Shapwick).
On both sides of this Central Province of ‘planned’, nucleated or ‘organised’ landscapes, the countryside was less formally structured, with dispersed settlements and smaller hamlets rather than nucleated villages. This landscape has been variously described as ‘ancient’ or ‘woodland’, but as both types are now known to have been very old indeed, I shall stick to the term ‘woodland’ as being slightly less misleading.5 The distinction between the Central Province of nucleated and the provinces of woodland landscapes on either side can be seen in the distribution of known pre-Norman woods and even, to some extent at least, in that of Pagan Saxon (mainly fifth-century) burials.6 So whatever allowed people of the Central Province to accept these changes, it must have been a social process with deeply embedded roots. Even more importantly for present purposes, the three provinces can clearly be distinguished when we plot the distribution of nineteenth-century parliamentary enclosures (about which more shortly). Today the landscape still reflects this tripartite split, with larger villages and more formal rectangular fields still largely confined to what had been the Central Province.
Farming in the woodland landscapes continued much as it had done in the Iron Age. It was based on individual holdings, which operated a mixed system of farming based around livestock and crops in those areas where lower levels of rainfall allowed them to be grown. The larger nucleated villages of the Central Province gave rise to the now famous collective Open Field farms of the Middle Ages where tenant farmers in the village shared their labour between their own holdings and those of the lord of the manor.7 This was the basis of the feudal system, which never developed in Britain to quite the same extent as it did on the Continent. Farmwork itself took place in from two to four huge Open Fields where the individual holdings were organised in strips. Each year the individual Open Fields would grow specified crops or would lie fallow, to be fertilised by grazing livestock. The control of what was in effect a large collective farm lay in the hands of the manorial court, which in turn was overseen by the lord of the manor. This system of farming was particularly well adapted to the heavy clay lands of the Midlands, which require rapid ploughing by many teams of oxen in the spring when conditions are right. Get the timing wrong and you’re left with a porridge-like field of mud.
When I learned about the manorial system at school I gained the impression that, once in place, it remained there, pretty much unaltered. This is perhaps where our views have changed the most. We now realise that it was a dynamic system that was modified from one area to another through time, depending not just on the local soil and climate, but on social factors, such as the wealth, power and influence of landlords. We have also discovered that the once clear distinction between the collective Open Field farms of the nucleated landscapes could not necessarily be distinguished from the individually owned farms of the woodland landscapes. In other words, there was Open Field farming in ‘woodland’ areas and vice versa.8 So although the very broad distinction into the three provinces can still be said to hold true, it simply cannot (and must not) be used to predict what one might discover in a randomly selected tract of landscape.
These warnings become even more important from the fourteenth century, when the population was massively reduced following food shortages and the terrible impact of successive waves of plague that then continued right through to the seventeenth century. Although, as I have said, the feudal ‘system’ never really took a firm hold in Britain, even after the Norman Conquest, most of the ties and obligations that did exist began to slip when the rich and powerful could no longer rely on a large, docile and cheap workforce.9 From the fourteenth century peasant farmers and working people realised they were no longer in a buyer’s market, especially when it came to the negotiation of their land tenure and labour contracts. In the western ‘woodland’ regions this less restricted climate began to give rise to a new, dual, rural economy where the families of smaller farmers developed a second string to their bow, which was usually based around something to do with the land, such as spinning and weaving, or coal-mining in places such as the Forest of Dean where coal was readily accessible. These dual economies varied from region to region,