12
Medieval Productivity
The Open Fields of Laxton, Nottinghamshire
I like working landscapes best of all. Most have their roots firmly in the past, but their early history lies deeply concealed in the shape, layout and dates of farms, barns, churches and fields. Very few places indeed retain the working practices of the Middle Ages into the present day. One of these is the Nottinghamshire village of Laxton.
I first learned about Laxton in history lessons at school. Through various accidents of history it had become the only surviving example of an Open Field parish still operating in England.1 The modern pattern of agriculture in England began in the early 1700s with the so-called Enclosure Movement. Enclosure took place parish by parish and was usually overseen and organized by the local lord of the manor. It gave rise to the pattern of fields, lanes and farms that can still be seen in rural areas today. Laxton, however, lost its lord of the manor in the seventeenth century and the various farmers in the parish didn’t feel the need to enclose the land to form individual farms. The old system worked well for them, so they retained it. By 1952 the village’s unique status was recognized, and some 2,000 acres were purchased by the Crown Estates to be protected and farmed in the traditional way.
At first glance, Laxton looks much like any other east midlands village. It lies in the low hills on the western side of the Trent valley, not far off the Great North Road (the A1), some seven miles north-east of Newark-on-Trent. On my first visit there, in the 1990s, I was greeted by a typically English rural scene: a gently undulating landscape with large arable fields, interspersed with pasture for sheep and cattle. Here and there were trees and woodland, with hawthorn hedges and green lanes. As we approached the village I could see a glint off recently ploughed soil, a reflective shine that told me instantly this was heavy clay land. I was also aware that the pre-Enclosure, medieval system of farming, known as the Open Field System, worked particularly well on heavy clay land: doubtless one of the reasons why the men of Laxton didn’t want to change their traditional ways. One tends to think that ‘traditional’ is often another way of saying ‘simple’ or ‘straightforward’, but not in this case. So first, a few words of explanation.
During the Middle Ages, roughly from just before the Norman Conquest right through to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English rural life was based around the manorial system. Each village was run by a manor, which had its own court, supervised by the lord of the manor, or an appointee. This court decided on all disputes over rent, farming and similar matters. The land was owned by the lord of the manor, who rented it out to the villagers in return for their labour, or even their military service. For their part, the peasant inhabitants of the village were allocated enough land to feed their families, and maybe to make a small surplus in good years.
At Laxton the land to be farmed was originally laid out in four large Open Fields and each tenant was allocated strips of land within them. Everyone was expected to farm the strips in each Open Field in the same way. One field would be left fallow, to regain fertility, while the other three would be given over to spring or winter-sown crops. Somewhat later one of the fields was dropped, so today Laxton possesses three large Open Fields, which still retain their medieval size and shape, although the tiny strips of the medieval farmers are now much larger, to suit modern tractors and equipment. Together the three types of cultivation – fallow, autumn- and spring-sown crop – formed what is known as a three-course rotation. It was a system that encouraged soil growth and fertility, but discouraged the development of diseases. Variants of it are still in use around the world.
The Open Field System was most extensively employed across the central zone of England, where the land was generally heavy but fertile. Though Open Fields existed elsewhere, the system was less rigidly enforced and livestock and woodland played far more important roles. Woodland was seen as yet another resource, which was carefully managed to provide renewable supplies of timber for building, logs for fires and flexible wattle rods of hazel, which were woven into house walls, hurdles and fences.
I was already aware that Laxton had a small castle, so I thought that would be the best place to start. It was reached down a short green lane, lined on both sides by trees and hedges. Incidentally, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the trees were ash, which loves the heavy clay soils of the midlands. Sadly, these are all under threat from the fungal disease ash dieback, which probably couldn’t have spread so far and so fast in the Middle Ages.
The castle is quite unlike the spectacular towered structures of popular imagination. It was my kind of castle. Not exceptional: I suppose you could see it as a ‘jobbing’ castle, a place that existed to project the power of the ruling authority. In its way, the medieval equivalent of the substantial Georgian country houses that are still a feature of the rural midlands. Like many rural castles built by the incoming Norman aristocracy in the decades after 1066, its strength consisted of steep banks and deep ditches, with a wooden or stone tower, known as the keep, which sat on top of a central mound, or motte. The aim of the incoming aristocracy was to establish their power and retain it, and their castles were built to do just that.
The castle at Laxton had been carefully placed at the top of a steep escarpment in a naturally strong defensive position. The layout of the castle is remarkably well preserved, beneath a thick covering of grass. The earthworks date to early Norman times and consist of a high motte and two banked, defended yards, known as the inner and the outer bailey. The lord’s family and retainers lived in the timber keep, atop the motte, and in times of trouble the inner bailey protected the villagers, whose livestock were kept safe in the outer bailey, both of which survive almost intact. Some masonry walls, built in the thirteenth century, survive on the banks of the baileys. The unpaved green lane I had followed from the village branched left just before the castle and then ran straight for a few hundred yards, out to one of the three surviving Open Fields, the West Field. This grassy, ash-tree-lined lane, which runs along and behind the village, is called Hall Lane.
Hall Lane captures the essence of what it would have been like to have lived here in the Middle Ages. Each of the houses that faced on to the main village street had long rectangular back gardens, known as tofts, which were much larger than modern urban gardens: they had to provide families with milk (from a house cow), pork, eggs, fruit and vegetables. Hall Lane ran along the back of the tofts and would have allowed people, animals and produce to move freely between different properties. It also gave access to the castle and the Open Fields. Today it is a wonderfully peaceful hedged and tree-lined green lane, but in medieval times it would have been bustling with activity. What a tractor can today achieve in a few hours would have taken days. So Hall Lane would normally have been busy, with men and teams of horses and oxen constantly passing along it. The lane is fully wide enough for two modern trucks to pass each other, with room to spare, and this shows it had originally been well used. On heavy clay land in wet weather, carts and other vehicles need to avoid deep waterlogged ruts, which is easier to do if the roadway is sufficiently wide.
As you stroll down Hall Lane today, you can quite clearly see the boundaries between the tofts, and just as in medieval times, each holding is different: mown grass and miniature goal posts for children, vegetable patches, flower beds and chicken sheds. Those chickens, flowers and vegetables told me that the cottages in Laxton were still lived in by real country people, who didn’t buy all their food from supermarkets.
Eventually I reached the end of Hall Lane, which simply stopped. Ahead of me stretched a vast plain of stubble. It wasn’t remotely what I’d envisaged. It resembled nothing more than a modern ‘grain plain’, of a type I am only too familiar with in the Fens. So my mental picture of the medieval countryside had been wrong. I don’t know why, but the sheer wide-openness of the Open Fields had escaped me. I’d somehow imagined there’d be more trees and hedges, but of course that would have been ridiculous in such an intensively ploughed and cultivated landscape. This is because the teams of oxen and horses needed to pull ploughs through the heavy clay soil could only be turned around at the end of each row if there was adequate space. In such landscapes, trees and hedges simply got in the way.
The rural landscape at Laxton is one of my favourite places in England, because it replaces our sometimes rather romantic view of courtly medieval life with some gritty realities. Before the Black Death of 1348, the population had been steadily increasing, and in some areas there was clearly pressure on food. So the rural economy had to rise to the challenge, and this is what Laxton is essentially all about. As a way of productively farming heavy clay land, the essentially collective and co-operative Open Field System worked very well. It meant that the village’s farmers had access to the lord’s ploughs and teams of oxen and horses, as part of their tenancy agreements – and without such practical measures cultivating the heavy clay soils would have been impossible. Co-operation would have required agreement among the villagers, and numerous disputes about who had what and when would have arisen almost daily. Most of these would have been sorted out by the lord’s agent, but sometimes a higher authority, the manorial court, was needed.
The early medieval manorial court would have convened in the castle, with the lord of the manor in the chair. It was a form of rapid justice, where one man was in control, but ordinary villagers had a strong voice. And it was an open system, where cases were made and judgments were given in public. Ultimately, it was in everybody’s interest – both the lord and the commoners – that the administration of justice helped to maintain the local economy and allowed it to run smoothly. Disruption would have favoured nobody.
We have long known that the Open Field System worked effectively and helped to maintain a reliable supply of food to a large and growing population until the start of the fourteenth century, when practical problems, such as poor harvests, were encountered. Some fifty years later, the Black Death and successive waves of plague were to provide a lasting, if very cruel, solution to these difficulties. But we have tended to under-estimate the sheer efficiency and effectiveness of the earlier system, which may have been based around individual manors and parishes, but which, we now realize, depended upon sophisticated internal and external supply chains. Powerful horses – what today we would call carthorses – were the heavy movers of the age and they were bred and traded through a complex and sophisticated system that extended across the country.2 They hauled the large loads of grain that were needed to supply urban markets. Manure was the medieval equivalent of modern chemical fertilizers, and the manorial system ensured that all the peasant holdings within a parish received their supply, which allowed the Open Fields to produce far more than they would have if left to nature alone.3 So those lovely tree-lined leafy lanes at Laxton have suddenly acquired a new relevance: they were once part and parcel of a highly productive working landscape, which, I’m glad to say, continues to this day. This is no re-enactment. It is real, living history.
