were left to rot. Henry of Knighton, an Augustinian canon at the Abbey of St Mary of the Meadows, Leicester, who wrote a detailed eyewitness account of the Black Death, observed: ‘Many villages and hamlets have now become quite desolate. No one is left in the houses, for the people are dead that once inhabited them.’’ The Scots saw the pestilence ravaging England as a splendid opportunity to invade, but before they had got very far the army fell victim to the plague and the soldiers dispersed, spreading the plague deep into Scotland where 20 per cent of the population died. The cumulative effects of the famine years and Black Death reduced the population in an incredibly short period of time by 50 per cent, to below three million people. Entire communities were lost and population levels did not reach those of 1300 until some three centuries later. Many of the new villages that had been formed in the preceding centuries were deserted, soon to become ruined and disappear into the landscape. Ambion, Andreskirk, Elmesthorpe and Soby in Leicestershire are examples, or Lower Harford in the Cotswolds. Here the bumps, hollows and flat-topped banks covering about a hectare indicate a sunken medieval main street. Hovels were once strung out on the level areas and the outlines of banks and ditches mark where these villagers kept livestock and grew a few crops. After the Black Death the much-reduced demand for grain lead to marginal arable land being converted to pasture or reverting back to scrub, woodland and moor. Although the area of arable declined, it did not shrink as much as the fall in population numbers, so food supplies increased comparatively and grain prices began to revert to affordable levels. Flax became re-established as a fibre crop, having been largely absent since Roman times, and although the cloth made was of poor quality, it eventually had a place in the growing textile industry. Sheep farming and wool production remained the main pastoral activity but patterns of taste changed and wool exports were reduced by the Hundred Years’ War. Increasingly the wool clip was utilised at home in the fast-growing textile industry, largely based in towns near fast-flowing streams that ran the mills. While wool exports declined, exports of cloth increased. Out in the fields an increase in the use of the horse brought about higher ploughing work rates and assisted in the production of grain from a reduced workforce.
There was a profound change in farming systems. With a decimated population, peasants who had been bound to their lords by feudal ties suddenly found that they were able to leave for better terms elsewhere. The lords who now found it difficult to find sufficient workers gave up their role as direct producers, becoming landlords and leasing their land to tenants. These were to become a new class of yeoman farmer who provided the main driving force behind change in the countryside, typically consolidating their holdings, specialising in arable or livestock and building their own homes.
THE BIRTH OF MODERN FARMS
As the consolidation of farms began, so the practice of enclosing land was taken up by both farmers and the peasants themselves who collectively agreed to the rearrangement of their holdings in the search for efficiency. By 1400 economic activity was again picking up, and with the enclosures a new chapter in the development of the countryside began.
Enclosure, or inclosure, is the process by which common land is taken into full private ownership and use. Common land is owned by one person, but other people have certain traditional rights to it, too, such as using it for arable farming, mowing for hay or pasturage, grazing cattle, horses, sheep or other animals. There might also be piscary, the right to fish; turbary, the right to take sods of turf for fuel; common in the soil, the right to take sand and gravel; mast or pannage, the right to turn out pigs for a period in autumn to eat mast – acorns and other nuts; and estovers, the right to take sufficient wood for the commoner’s house or holding (usually limited to smaller trees, bushes such as gorse and fallen branches). There are a considerable number of places in Britain where commoners’ rights still exist – the Ashdown Forest and New Forest, to name but two – and these ancient rights are as fiercely defended today as they were in the Middle Ages, when common rights were of immense importance to the survival of those who held them.
Existing commons are almost all pasture, but in earlier times arable farming and haymaking were also included in the commons system, with strips of land in the common arable fields and common hay meadows assigned annually by lot. When not in use for these purposes, such commons were also grazed. A few of them still survive, for example, common arable fields around the village of Laxton, in Nottinghamshire, and a common meadow at North Meadow, Cricklade. Under enclosure, such land is fenced – enclosed – and deeded or entitled to one or more private owners who then enjoy the possession and fruits of the land to the exclusion of all others.
The main thrust of the Parliamentary Enclosures was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but throughout the medieval period piecemeal enclosure took place in which adjacent strips were fenced off from the common field. From as early as the twelfth century some open fields in Britain were being enclosed into individually owned fields. This was sometimes undertaken by small landowners, but more often by large landowners and lords of the manor. Significant enclosures, or emparkments, took place to establish deer parks, particularly in the early years of Norman rule, and this was ratified in 1235 under the Statute of Merton, which gave lords of the manor the right to enclose common land, providing sufficient pasture remained for the tenants: ‘setting out in what cases, and in what manner, Lords may approve part of the wastes, woods, and pastures, belonging to their Manors, against the tenants’. There was a significant rise in the enclosure of common land during the Tudor period as surplus-to-requirement arable hectares were converted to pasture for sheep. The primary areas of enclosure were in a broad band from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire diagonally across England to the south, taking in parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, large areas of the Midlands, and most of south-central England.
The woollen industry was the backbone of the economy and cloth exported to the continent was Britain’s most important manufactured output. Flemish weavers fleeing the horrors of the Hundred Years’ War with France were encouraged to emigrate to England, with many settling in Norfolk and Suffolk. Others moved to the West Country, the Cotswolds, the Yorkshire Dales and Cumberland, where weaving began to flourish in the villages and towns. Lavenham, in Suffolk, is widely acknowledged as the best example of a medieval wool town in England, its fine timber-framed buildings and beautiful church built on the success of the wool trade. In Tudor times, Lavenham was said to be the fourteenth wealthiest town in England, despite its small size. Merchants made immense fortunes from wool and gave us the magnificent and architecturally stunning ‘wool’ churches such as St Peter and St Paul at Northleach, St Peter at Winchcombe and St Mary’s at Fairford, in the Cotswolds, Holy Trinity at Long Melford, in Suffolk, or St John’s, St Martin’s and All Saints’ churches in Stamford.
Sheep were also seen as being essential for maintaining the soil fertility of arable ground, and periodically ploughing out sheep pasture became part of the improved rotation of cultivated land. The sheep industry was of enormous benefit to the land-owning elite, the wool merchants and the Crown, for whom it raised vast sums. It also created something of a quandary: on the one hand the economy was buoyant, on the other, enclosures led to the depopulation of villages, displacement of farm labourers and a decrease in crop production, which made England more susceptible to famine and higher prices for domestic and foreign grain. The Tudor authorities were particularly nervous about how the villagers who had lost their homes would react. They had every reason to be worried: in Leicestershire over thirty-one villages were abandoned, and this must have run to many hundreds across the country. In Tudor Britain, a man who lost his home and his livelihood automatically became a vagrant, and vagrants were regarded as criminals. Anxious minds envisaged multitudes of vagabonds and thieves roaming the countryside as a result of continued enclosures, and Parliament began passing acts to stop them. The first such legislation was in 1489 and over the next 150 years there would be a further eleven Acts of Parliament and eight Commissions of enquiry on the subject, none of which stopped land from being enclosed.
