A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott
Fellmongers, Horsemongers, Flshmongers, Shieldwrights, Shoewrights, Turners and Salterers. A new socioeconomic order was becoming established which was centred on the church and monasteries, the climate entered a warm cycle and Britain started to become prosperous again. This prosperity is reflected by the periodic discovery of rich hoards of Anglo-Saxon treasure, such as the priceless discoveries at Sutton Hoo or the 1,500 pieces of gold objects found by a metal detector in a Staffordshire field in 2009. Nor is there any shortage of archaeological sites: Spong Hill at North Elmham in Norfolk, the largest Anglo-Saxon cemetery, with associated field boundaries, enclosures and sunken huts; or West Stow, where an entire village has been excavated. There is also an extensive site at Cheddar, in Somerset, where King Edmond had his palace and settlements in the Yorkshire Wolds, such as Wharram Percy and Cottam; sites at Loughborough, Barrow and Rothley in Leicestershire; Yardley and Kings Norton near Birmingham and Langford in Oxfordshire, which formed part of a large comital estate, probably including Broadwell and Great Faringdon.
ADVANCES IN FARMING
The Normans arrived in an aggressive blizzard of super-efficiency. Within a matter of years, rebellion was quashed and the old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy eliminated. The estates of the 4,000 or so principal Anglo-Saxon landowners were confiscated and divided among just 170 Norman knights. By 1096, all Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics had been replaced by Normans and the extensive church lands were in Duke William’s hands. Fifty per cent of Britain was now owned, subject to their obligation to the King, by the 170 ‘tenants in chief, whilst William and the Church owned the rest. Because he was able to grant his followers vast tracts of land at little cost to himself, William’s prestige increased tremendously. His awards also had a basis in consolidating his own control; with each gift of land and titles the newly created feudal lord would have to build a fortified manor or castle and subdue the local Anglo-Saxons. The social structure of the country was organised round the system of feudalism, which was built upon a relationship of obligation and mutual service between vassals and lords, with everyone owing fealty to the King. In practice the country was not governed by the King but by individual lords, or barons, who administered their own estates, dispensed their own justice, minted their own money, levied taxes and tolls, and demanded military service from vassals who held land as a grant from a lord. As the country settled down after the Conquest, small farmsteads started to nucleate, hamlets formed and the familiar landscape of villages, manor houses and churches took shape.
A typical Norman estate consisted of a manor house, one or more villages and up to several thousand acres of land divided into meadow, pasture, forest and cultivated fields. Fields were further divided into strips: a third for the lord of the manor, less for the church, and the remainder for the peasants and serfs who worked the land. This land was shared out so that each person had equal portions of good and poor. At least half the working week was spent on the land belonging to the lord and the church. Time might also be spent doing maintenance and on special projects such as clearing land, cutting firewood, and building roads and bridges. The rest of the time the villagers were free to work their own land.
The open-field system developed by the Saxons was widely adopted by 1100 AD; land was divided into strips and allocated amongst the community on a changing basis. This gave rise to a ridge and furrow effect across the field where the soil in the strip was continually ploughed back into the centre of itself and away from adjoining strips. Ridge and furrow often survives on higher ground where the arable land was subsequently turned over to sheep walks in the fifteenth century and has never been ploughed out since by modern ploughing methods, today surviving as pasture and grazing for sheep where the effect is clearly visible, especially in certain lighting conditions. A defining feature of medieval ridge and furrow is the curved ends making the overall shape of an elongated reverse-S. This arose because of the tendency of the team of oxen ploughing with the primitive single furrow ploughs to pull to the left, in preparation for making the turn.
This shape survives in some places as curved field boundaries, even where the ridge and furrow pattern itself has long since been ploughed flat. Some of the best-preserved ridge and furrow survives in the Midlands up on high ground in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire. There are very good examples at East Leake in Nottinghamshire, Grendon in Northamptonshire and the Vale of Evesham in Warwickshire. There are many others in different parts of the country, such as Ledgers Park, near Chelsham, in Surrey; Thrislington, in Durham; Willen, near Milton Keynes; Allestree Park, in Derby; Willington Worthenbury, near Bangor Is-y-coed, North Wales; and a particularly well-preserved example at the Braid Hills golf course in Edinburgh. It has been estimated that three and a half million hectares were under cultivation, and as the more productive three-field rotation of cultivation used by the Romans became universally adopted, arable production increased by 50 per cent, helped by the continuing warm climatic cycle.
Horses started to be used for the first time to replace the slower oxen for ploughing, which helped to increase the speed of cultivation. Large numbers of cattle were kept on the un-ploughable valley slopes and, as ever, goats, fowl and pigs for personal consumption. Rabbits were farmed in a big way in purpose-built warrens, some of which covered many thousands of acres. By 1300, sheep farming had developed into the most important agricultural industry, with a national flock of twenty million breeding ewes providing a surplus of twelve million fleeces for export.
The Cistercian and Benedictine Orders were principal owners of sheep farms, establishing enormous flocks across the uplands of Northern England and Southern Scotland, and using the wealth from wool to build magnificent abbeys at Kelso, Melrose, Jedburgh, New Abbey in Dumfriesshire or Rievaulx and Fountains in North Yorkshire, to name only a few. Wool wsa traded principally with the Italians, who had a very sophisticated economic system in those days which enabled the monks to sell wool on futures contracts in exactly the same way as some producers do today. For example, an arable producer would be offered a price to sell his grain by a merchant long before harvest, based on what the merchant thinks the world demand for grain would be; the farmer has the option of taking the money then, or waiting for harvest in the hope that the price will be better. The economy was now strongly trade-and cash-based, with over a million pounds of coins in circulation and accountants calculating profits. Taxation was also a key part of this market economy, which satisfied the King’s need for revenue rather more easily than through owning land direct.
The rise of taxation also led to the rise of ‘parliament’, where representatives of the regions would come to London when summonsed to hear of the King’s initiatives, and gradually these representatives were afforded more power. Twenty per cent of the population lived in the 800 or so towns, where craftsmen specialised in their trades under control of the various guilds. New professions developed and doctors, lawyers, administrators and clergymen all found a living in the new urban environment.
Britain was effectively a part of France and benefited from trade opportunities for cloth, leather and surplus corn. However, there was a fly in the ointment: advances in agricultural production had enabled the population to grow from two and a half million at the end of the Anglo-Saxon era to seven million by 1300. This population peak coincided with agricultural yields reaching maximum output and, as with all organic systems, the medieval farmers struggled to maintain fertility. In an effort to meet the demand for grain the three-crop system of rotating grain with fallow which provided natural fertilisation was abandoned and grain was grown in the same field year after year without a break. This merely leached all the fecundity out of the ground and harvest yields fell. Landlords attempted to ameliorate the problem by reclaiming more land in marginal areas of heath, marsh and high moorland where the effort and cost of production were often greater than the output.
The price of foodstuffs escalated for both humans and livestock, which prohibited keeping enough beasts through the winter to provide the manure desperately needed as fertiliser. Suddenly, the country was in a self-perpetuating spiral of declining fertility, collapsing harvest yields and ever-increasing prices. Added to this, the 500-year warm cycle came to an abrupt end and the weather turned cold, wet and