population in 1500 was little more than at the end of the Black Death, but it began to increase sharply. There was an urgent need for more arable land and an increase in antagonism towards graziers. Agriculture responded to the demand for food by increasing the area under the plough, reclaiming marginal upland areas again, clearing woodland for cultivations and trying to drain the fens. It was too little too late, and as social unrest grew, enclosures were seen as the cause of the problems. There were angry demands for government to remove existing enclosures and much parliamentary vacillation in the 1530s and 40s. Finally, furious peasants took matters into their own hands and started destroying the enclosures.
The first major incident was in Norfolk with kett’s Rebellion of 1549. On 6 July, the townspeople of Wymondham started ripping down enclosures in the nearby village of Morley St Botolph before moving on to Norwich, tearing out hedges from any enclosed land along the way. Robert Kett and his brother William, themselves wealthy landowners, joined the protesters in sympathy and attracted a mob of 15,000 supporters. Kett and his rebel army attacked and captured Norwich, effectively gaining control the city and major port. From here they issued a petition of twenty-six grievances to Edward VI, who responded by sending William Parr, 1st Marquess of Northampton, with 1,500 men to quash the rebellion.
This expedition was a complete failure and the rebels held Norwich until they were savagely defeated by the Earl of Warwick with an army of around 14,000, including mercenaries from Wales and the Continent. Robert Kett was hung in chains from the walls of Norwich, where his death was drawn out over several days, and his brother William from the roof of Wymondham Abbey. Ten of the other principal rebels were hung from an oak tree on Mousehold Heath, just outside Norwich, which became known as the Reformation Oak. This venerable growth can still be seen, propped, shored, and in-filled with concrete, by the roadside between Norwich and Wymondham. Despite this harsh treatment, agrarian revolts swept all over the nation, and other revolts occurred periodically throughout the century, no doubt inflamed by the Earl of Warwick persuading Parliament to ratify the Statute of Merton. This enabled landowners to enclose their land at their own discretion and was, in fact, only finally repealed in 1948.
THE STEADY MARCH OF AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS
There was a major decline in living standards as the population continued to grow, and this coupled with high unemployment meant a large proportion of the population survived through charity, Parish Poor Laws and scavenging for wild fruit and vegetables. There was a significant migration of desperate people seeking work in the towns, and by the end of the century, the State found itself both distrusted and ill equipped to deal with the social consequences of population growth and inadequate food.
They hang the man, and flog the woman, That steals the goose from off the common; But let the greater villain loose, That steals the common from the goose.
Agricultural improvers were thin on the ground during the sixteenth century, and the handful that existed stand out as voices in the wilderness, including John Fitzherbert, who wrote Master Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandrie in 1531, and the great Thomas Tusser, author of the instructional poem Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, published in 1557. At the end of the century, two people came up with ideas for improving soil fertility. Roland Vaughan, a Herefordshire landowner, experimented with using water from local streams to deposit silt on the fields through the winter on his estate in the Golden Valley, beside the River Dore. Vaughan is reputed to have got the idea of ‘water meadows’ from noticing water running from a piece of ground where a mole had tunnelled too close to a stream. This rivulet was ‘onepace broad andsome twenty in length’, and the grass where the water flowed over it was considerably greener than that on either side. He subsequently dug a channel, called the Royal Trench, from the River Dore across his estate and back to the Dore. Open conduits ran from the main channel to various fields and by using a system of sluices fields could be flooded either during dry periods or through the winter to both protect the grass from frost and provide fertiliser in the form of silt. Vaughan’s invention was a demonstrable success, increasing the value of his land from £40 to £300nd moving his kinsman, John Davis, to verse:
‘His royall trench (that all the rest commands Andholds the Sperme of Herbage by a Spring) In fuseth in the wombe of sterile Lands, The Liquidseede that makes them Plenty bring. Here, two of the inferior Elements (Joyning in Coïtu) Water on the Leaze (Like Sperme most active in such complements) Begets thefull-panche Foison of Lncrease: For, through Earths rifts into her hollow wombe, (Where Nature doth her Twyning-Issue frame) The water soakes, where of doth kindly come Full Barnes, to joy the Lords that hold the same: For, as all Womens wombes do barren seeme, That never had societie of Men; So fertill Grounds we often barren deeme, Whose Bow ells, Water fills not now and then.’
Water meadows were brilliant in their simplicity and supplied the earliest hay, fed the best sheep and produced the finest milking cows. Following the publication of his seminal work in 1610, Most Approved and Long experienced Water Workes containing The manner of Winter and Summer drowning, Vaughan’s discovery was soon widely adopted along river valleys across the country. Remains of old water meadows and their irrigation systems can be seen at Harnham Water Meadows, in Salisbury; Fordingbridge, in Hampshire; the River Kennet Meadows, near Reading; Hurst, near Dorchester on Thames, Oxfordshire; Britford, in Wiltshire; Mere, Gillingham, Blandford Forum and Shaftesbury, in Dorset; Riddlesworth and West Lexham or Appleby, Measham and Austrey in Leicestershire, to name only a fraction.
FERTILISER, OR THE LACK OF IT, WAS ONE OF THE MOST INHIBITING FACTORS IN MAINTAINING CROP PRODUCTION AND ON EVERY FARM A GOOD DUNG HEAP WAS REGARDED AS ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE ASSETS, WITH ANYTHING DEGRADABLE ADDED TO IT.
At much the same time, Sir Hugh Plat, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s courtiers and a keen horticulturalist, was advocating the more scientific use of marl (calcium-carbonate-rich clay) to fertilise fields. Fertiliser, or the lack of it, was one of the most inhibiting factors in maintaining crop production, and on every farm a good dung heap was regarded as one of the most valuable assets, with anything degradable added to it. On the chalk and limestone downs, chalk was dug, crushed and scattered on the loam. Near the coast, farmers gathered the seashell-rich sand that collected along the front of a shingle beach and mixed it in with manure. When a grass pasture was being ploughed out in counties such as Sussex or Surrey, the matted turfs were first shovelled off and burnt, and the ashes scattered in with the ploughing.
There is evidence that lime was being burnt for fertiliser towards the end of the sixteenth century, a practice which was to become common two centuries later. The limitation with chalk, lime and seashells was transportation, and even dung was rarely seen in fields other than those immediately conterminous to the farmhouse. Marling was more feasible since it was simply a matter of digging a pit in the vicinity of the field or fields to be fertilised and extracting the clay. ‘Marl’ or ‘Marl Pit’ are common in field names across the country and many of the ponds seen where the corners of three or four fields meet are old flooded marl pits.
The problem with any fertilising in those days was that farmers did not appreciate the difference in soil types relative to the quantity of fertiliser, or the duration of effective applications before it had a detrimental effect. Barnaby Googe, the Elizabethan pastoral poet observed, ‘In some counties they make their land very fruitful with laying on of Chalke … But long use of it in the end, brings the ground to starke nought, whereby the common people have a speech, that ground enriched with Chalke makes a rich Father and a beggarly Sonne.’ This comment is as true today when farmers force a succession of crops from the same field by increasing the application of
