The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

• 258 • Paul Stamper
‘open’ —without boundaries and apparently lacking planning (see also Chapter 10). A major
change took place in the early tenth century, affecting all aspects of settlement, as rectilinear
enclosures were laid out, probably (as at West Cotton nearby) to a standard width of 20 m, and a
new building technique was adopted using foundation trenches. One of the new buildings was
much longer (37 m) than the rest and has been identified as a manor house, another major
addition to the settlement at this time being a church.
In fact it now seems likely that the replanning extended beyond the villages to encompass the
whole landscape, and that the bringing together of estates’ tenants from their previously dispersed
farms and small hamlets into much larger settlements went hand-in-hand with the creation of
new, integrated, arable land-holding patterns, the great open field systems of medieval England.
OPEN FIELDS
Across most of lowland medieval England, settlement land was divided up in such a way that
while individuals grew and harvested their own crops, it was within a communal system. Each
holding enjoyed, at least in theory, a fixed allocation of resources and rights: so much arable land,
so much meadow, so many loads of wood, and so on. The most important feature of the system
was that the whole of the settlement’s arable land was organized in a single rotation, with onethird
or one-half left uncropped (fallow) each year. That fallow was used as communal grazing land,
as was the remainder of the arable land once the crops were cut. This system is known variously as
the three- or (if half the land was left untilled) two-course rotation, or the open-field system—the
latter name because each of the ‘open’ fields would have been entirely without visible internal
boundaries: a prairie to rival anything in modern Norfolk. Another feature of arable farming in the
Middle Ages, certainly in areas of heavier soils, was the ploughing of lands into ridges of between
5 m and 15 m in width. In a period without underdrainage, this was a deliberate technique to raise
as much soil as possible into a relatively dry raised bed (ridge), separated from the next by a furrow
that helped drain it. The technique produced whole landscapes of ‘ridge and furrow’ that in many
parts of the countryside remained intact until relatively recently, when EEC policies encouraged
farmers to plough up land that had been down to grass since the end of the Middle Ages and,
incidentally, to erase these most tangible remnants of the medieval countryside.
The mapping of ridge and furrow, and comparison of those results with detailed surveys and
field books compiled while the systems were in use, has done much to elucidate the origins and
operation of the open fields. The most important work has been that of David Hall in
Northamptonshire (Figure 14.6). This has shown how in the early Middle Ages, individuals’
allotments of strips fell in a regular cycle (in other words, in a village of 32 households, every
thirty-second strip belonged to the same tenant), and that those cycles can be related to eleventhcentury
fiscal returns. Another recent observation, made first in Yorkshire and later in the Midlands,
is of evidence for what have been termed ‘long lands’. These are individual strips that run for up
to 2,000 m, sometimes right across townships, through and underneath what can be deduced to
be later sub-divisions of the arable land into furlongs. These ‘long lands’ appear to represent the
first stage of the great replanning of the countryside c.900, and their discovery is very exciting.
To what extent this replanning of the countryside, embracing the creation of new villages and
the reordering and reapportioning of large parts of the farming landscape (further reflected in
the proliferation of charters with boundary clauses), required lordly coercion, rather than peasant
co-operation or initiative, is unknown, although in a more hierachical and frequently taxed society
there may have been many advantages in a tenantry where each had an equal share of the resources
and each the same obligations. Glenn Foard has gone so far as to suggest a precise context for the