from round about 1750, following directly upon the demonstrable successes of what some have called the ‘yeoman’s revolution’ of the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries.36 Prior to 1750, most landowners had invested any profits from their estates, not so much in farm improvements as in extra land or in additions to their stately homes. After that date they (and their agents), having seen what the yeoman farmers were able to achieve, decided also to invest time, money and ingenuity in improvements to their own farms.
By the mid-eighteenth century the attitude of most British landowners to their tenants had begun to change significantly. A national market was also beginning to emerge for farm produce. Prices for wheat rose steadily and then shot up when Britain declared war on France, in 1793. It now became a patriotic duty to ‘improve’. These developments allowed landlords to increase their rents, and tenants to pay them. After 1750 both yeoman farmers and successful tenant farmers had prospered and were now in a position to negotiate new tenancy deals that stipulated realistic rents and encouraged landowners to invest capital in the new farm businesses.
From the mid-eighteenth century the old subservient relationship of tenant and landlord was gradually being replaced by partnerships where both parties profited from a shared enterprise. From as early as the Restoration (1660) independent yeoman farmers began to be replaced by a growing body of tenant farmers, and the more successful of these were able to take advantage of the wholesale reorganisation of estates that was happening through enclosure, which, as we have seen, was well under way when King Charles II resumed the throne.
To place these developments within context, the century from 1640 saw London’s population increase by 70 per cent, and the growing metropolis was successfully fed by farms linked into the system of markets via a well-used specialised network of drove roads, which allowed sheep and cattle to be driven long distances from places as far afield as Scotland, down to specialised farms in East Anglia and the Home Counties, where they could be fattened for slaughter.37 So the system worked and both landowners and their tenants prospered. But Susanna Wade Martins points out that the landowners were not looking for tenants motivated by Enlightenment ideals; instead they sought practical men who would be able to maximise income from their farms.38 Social attitudes were changing.
This very broad-brush account of the first two centuries of post-medieval farming forms the background to the relatively few buildings of the period that still survive in the landscape. As we saw in the case of Shapwick, our best chances of learning about early modern times come from studying the final years of the Middle Ages. Rather strangely, perhaps, I cannot find studies that are specifically addressed towards rural sites and landscapes of the decades that followed the medieval period. It’s almost as if nobody cares. More to the point, I suspect this void reflects one of the great historic divides in British archaeology, between the academic worlds of medievalists and post-medievalists or industrial archaeologists. In the past two decades, however, detailed regional research projects, although often geared towards specific periods and problems, no longer just ignore those topics that are not of immediate interest to them.39 Along with a greater emphasis on entire landscapes rather than specific sites has come the realisation that continuity has more to teach than a narrow concentration on a particular period.
One of the best of these new regional studies has examined some twelve parishes in the heart of the Central Province on the Buckinghamshire–Northamptonshire border.40 Recently the principal results of the Whittlewood Survey, as it is known, have been published and they show clearly that it can be very risky to make sweeping statements about rural settlement at the close of the Middle Ages. It would seem that while some villages, especially in those areas where the settlement pattern had been concentrated or ‘nucleated’, to use the correct term, were actually abandoned, others shrank, sometimes forming two sub-settlements within the same parish. This is not an uncommon pattern in lowland England. Indeed, the village where I grew up at Weston, in north Hertfordshire, had two clear centres, a smaller one around the Norman church and a larger, slightly later one around the village crossroads and the principal inn, the Red Lion, where I spent much of my youth.
Although on a larger scale than Shapwick, the Whittlewood Survey also combined detailed documentary research with field-walking and limited excavation and they were able to demonstrate the extent to which individual villages had changed their shape at the close of the Middle Ages. One example should illustrate the point.41 Although most of the shrinkage that villages experienced during the later Middle Ages resulted in the random loss of houses, rather like gaps in a set of teeth, such a haphazard pattern was not universal, however, and it would seem that people were aware that communities needed to remain coherent, if not intact. This sometimes gave rise to village layouts where whole districts rather than single houses were abandoned.
The Whittlewood Survey showed that the centre of the village of Akeley in Buckinghamshire, along the existing Leckhampstead Road, had been abandoned quite early (by 1400). The survey was based on an enclosure map of 1794 which marked the houses of the main village around the medieval church and an outlying hamlet to the east of the by then long-abandoned Leckhampstead Road community. Plainly a map as late as 1794 cannot be taken as an accurate illustration of the later and post-medieval settlement pattern, so the survey also recorded the presence of houses that probably pre-dated 1700. In addition, they dug a series of very small test pits where the finds were carefully retrieved and sieved. These pits revealed a fascinating picture. They completely failed to discover sherds of Red Earthenware pottery, so characteristic of the sixteenth century and later, either around the abandoned Leckhampstead Road settlement, or in the fields between the two surviving communities, where, by contrast, such pottery was abundant. Clearly both these settlements thrived in the sixteenth century.
FIG 3 A survey of the Buckinghamshire village of Akeley, based on an enclosure map of 1794. The distribution of pottery and of surviving buildings that pre-date 1700 clearly show that the centre of the original medieval village had been abandoned. Documentary sources suggest this happened very early, before 1400, but the new pattern continued largely unaltered into the sixteenth century.
Although the population declined in the later Middle Ages, the housing stock was deteriorating. This partly reflected the fact that many medieval buildings were made of timber, which soon begins to decay if maintenance ceases for any length of time. So the houses of ordinary rural people of the sixteenth and earliest seventeenth century are remarkably scarce. Very often the best way to find them is to examine seemingly late medieval buildings, which often, on closer inspection, prove to be more complex. A good example of this is given by Maurice Barley in his very readable and pioneering study The English Farmhouse and Cottage (1961).42 Maurice used to be the Chairman of the Nene Valley Research Committee when I excavated at Fengate, in Peterborough, during the 1970s, and I used to look forward to his site visits keenly. He was excellent company and like many of his contemporaries was equally at home in an excavation or working out the different phases of a medieval house. He certainly needed these skills when it came to a house in Glapton, Nottinghamshire, which was torn down in the senseless orgy of post-war destruction in 1958.
The Glapton farmhouse showed how a post-medieval farmer had made the most of the then dire housing supply by adapting an earlier, medieval, cruck-built barn sometime around 1600.43 Readers of Britain in the Middle Ages will recall that crucks were those long, curved beams that ran from the foot of the walls up to the apex of the roof.44 Many crucks were made
