We are the common people.
Some of us are arriving on foot in stout boots and thick socks. Others on wheels. A clapped out Ford Fiesta, and a small blue van, with ‘Jack Greene, Time Traveller. Living History For Schools & Museums’ on its side. Jack himself has a Farmer Giles hat, owl glasses, combat jacket, and, separating the last two items, a full set of snow-white whiskers. A shiny blue Volvo draws up. Out of it steps a dog, a brown and cream cocker spaniel. It gives the rest of us a scornful look, and, with what I’d swear is a sigh, allows its owner, a woman in dark green Barbour and headscarf, to fix a lead round its neck. A small boy and girl dart about playing tag, apparently parentless until a large man in a red bobble hat and a bulky camera bouncing on his chest calls them to heel. We stamp our feet and tell each other how cold it is. We adjust our hiking sticks and clean the lenses of our binoculars. In total, there are fifteen of us. I’m guessing that we’re none of us queens, earls, countesses or even knights – the odds are against it. We’re the common people.
We’re gathering in the car park of the Dovecote Inn in the village of Laxton in north Nottinghamshire, and we’ve come here to learn about our medieval forebears, not specifically our family ancestors, but the ordinary folk, who – like us today – made up all but a small slice of the population. We’re doing this because, unlike those ancestors, we’re well educated and want to know about our past, and because, unlike them, we have enough spare time and cash to be free from work for the day. And of course we can travel freely out of the place where we live, something that most of the common people of Laxton in the thirteenth century couldn’t do. We’re not slaves, however much we may complain about the boss on a Monday morning. Our pet dogs don’t have to have their front claws pulled out. We can carry a bow and arrows (if the mood should take us). And if someone robs or cheats us we can get justice in a royal court. We’re not forced to pay out huge, regular sums to the Pope or the local vicar. And if we accidentally run over a deer on a dark night driving home, we probably won’t be punished by having one of our legs chopped off.
And here’s another difference. If we fifteen modern-day common people, stamping our feet here today in the pub car park, happen to be a statistically typical cross-section of England’s population in the twenty-first century, only three of us will actually have our homes in a village or out in the countryside. In the early thirteenth century, it would have been more like thirteen or fourteen out of every fifteen people who lived and worked in – and probably never in their lives stepped outside of – some little agricultural community like Laxton.
So why have we chosen Laxton to learn about country life for our ancestors in the time of King John? It’s because the village is unique. Laxton is the only place in the whole of Europe where people still farm and govern their working lives much as folk did at the time of Magna Carta. I say ‘much as’ because of course, as you might guess, not everything is the same now in Laxton as it was 800 years ago. But enough of it is unchanged to make the village an extraordinary place, worthy of a visit by anyone with a curious mind, not just by someone like me who’s investigating the story of the Great Charter of 1215. And Laxton, as it happens, has a special link with King John. He was Laxton’s landlord, and he made it the administrative centre for Sherwood Forest (home, of course, to Robin Hood and his mythical band of outlaws), where he liked to hunt. And the villagers of Laxton knew at first hand what it was like to suffer the king’s wrath.
You could easily drive through Laxton, remark what a charming little spot it seems, and not notice anything special about it. Like most pretty English villages, it has its comfortable-looking pub, a patently old church, and plenty of houses built before the age of planning regulations. And the place is small enough that from almost every point in its little streets you can see fields – some cultivated, others where sheep are grazing – and beyond, atop long, gently rising hills, trees grouped in stands and coppices.
But if you stop the car near the church, get out and take a walk, you’ll notice something odd about the buildings. Many of them seem to be farmhouses. By this, I don’t mean that they used to be farmhouses which have been converted into five-bedroom residences for retirees from London or Birmingham and have names like Old Glebe Farm or Corn-thrasher House. No, these farmhouses have muddy farmyards alongside them with heaps of hay, cowpats and grimy battered tractors. Now, the occasional working farmhouse, complete with barn and other outbuildings, in the middle of an English village isn’t unusual. But what you won’t find elsewhere are farms in the kind of numbers there are in Laxton. There are no fewer than fourteen farms plus five smallholdings which have their central building right here in the village. It’s a medieval phenomenon. Most villages looked like this in the Middle Ages. It was only later, around the time of Elizabeth I, that it became usual for farmhouses to be built in more isolated spots.
The system by which people lived and farmed in villages like Laxton – and the system which Laxton’s farmers still work by today – was already at least 300 or 400 years old by the time of Magna Carta. Medieval peasant farmers – while owing allegiance, and much else, to the local landowner – scraped a living from the soil alongside other peasants in the village. Together, they divided up the village’s common farmland into strips, and then each farmer got a share of them, not all in one place, but scattered, one up the hill, one in the valley, one by the wood, and so on. That way, everyone had a fair proportion of the most fertile soil as well as of the more barren, rocky or badly drained land. And at those times of year when land could be used for grazing animals, they shared that too. And because their working lives were so interlocked, they had to have rules about what each could do, everything from the type of crops they sowed, when to plough and harvest, or who could put their pigs, cows, sheep and goats in which field. So they had their own court of law to settle disputes and to fine those who overstepped the mark and broke the rules.
It would be a mistake to see this as an idyllic democratic collective, as some sort of medieval kibbutz. In fact, each man worked his own land. But because so many decisions had to be taken in common, there had to be a degree of co-operation among local farmers in the thirteenth century which is unknown today – except here in Laxton, of course.
The system started to fall apart in Tudor times, when the landowners began to drive their tenant farmers off the common land so that they could enclose it with fences and hedges in order to absorb it into their own large farms. The last remaining medieval farmers had been driven off to the towns by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, and all that was left were their ghosts. Ghosts that still haunt the landscape today. They’re all over the midlands countryside. Look alongside the M40 motorway as you speed through Oxfordshire or Warwickshire, and you’ll see them: long lines of parallel humps and dips on the surface of the fields. They’re the vestiges of the old strips of land, ridges and furrows, once ploughed, harrowed, sown and harvested by strip farmers, year after year, for thirty generations.
By pure fluke, the system has survived in one, and only one, English village: Laxton. During all those centuries when everywhere else was being enclosed, Laxton’s land was split between several owners. They couldn’t agree about anything, never mind about who should fence off which bit. So Laxton’s tenant farmers kept their heads down, quietly got on with their seasonal rounds, and the result was that their anachronistic way of life continued below the radar of the developing industrial age. By the mid-twentieth century, the village and its surrounds were in the hands of a single landowner, Lord Manvers. He appreciated the historic value of the place, and began to worry that on his death, the place and its open fields might be sold off and end up no different from every other rural community in England. The threatened loss of this astonishing little piece of medieval England prompted him to make over the estate to the Ministry of Agriculture, to be held on behalf of the nation in perpetuity. Then in the 1980s, Laxton’s heritage again came under threat. It got caught up in Margaret Thatcher’s drive to sell off the family silver, and its open fields were put up for auction. But a benevolent buyer was found, and Laxton acquired its present-day landlord. Or rather, landlady. The queen. To be strictly accurate, Laxton was bought by the Crown Estates. And as result, its fields and its farmers are now protected species. For the moment anyway.
Our guide arrives in the Dovecote Inn car park. He’s a stocky chap with the sort of ruddy face you get only by spending all day in all weathers outside. He introduces himself as Stuart Rose, and he touches his John Deere baseball cap in a mock salute. He explains that his family, along with the other nineteen farm families in the village, still sow, plough and harvest in strips, just as their ancestors did. Stuart’s own personal ancestors, it turns out, weren’t originally commoners at all. In the year 1500, one Humphrey Roos made a shrewd marriage, and thereby became lord of Laxton. His son and grandson each inherited the title and the lands, and lived blameless lives as country squires. Then the family’s fortunes took a dive. The next master of Laxton, Peter Roos, ran up huge debts, his daughter committed bigamy with a servant, and following a costly court case the Rooses went bankrupt. Peter’s descendants, though, stayed on in Laxton, scraping a living from a small farm. Over the years, the name Roos shifted its spelling and became Rose. And so Stuart Rose, our guide, might – if his ancestor had behaved himself – have been lord of Laxton today. Instead, he’s a commoner, like the rest of us.
Our tour starts in the Visitor Centre, a brick barn at one end of the pub car park. The fifteen of us, plus the dog, crowd in and settle ourselves on benches around the edge of the little room. Our introduction to Laxton is going to be a video. Stuart sticks a couple of pound coins into a slot on the wall and the TV screen in the corner changes from black to hailstorm. The film was made over thirty-five years ago, so we have to make allowances for its primitive cine-technique (though, like much else in Laxton, age adds charm to the experience). Its story, however, is unchanged today.
At first we see a grainy picture of trees and hedges, and the soundtrack kicks in with a two-finger version of All Among the Barley on a chapel harmonium. Then a crackly voice explains that farming here is governed by a medieval court known as the Court Leet. It’s a court of law, established by act of parliament.
The Laxton Court Leet still meets each autumn, just as it has – without interruption – for the past thousand years. These days the judicial session is presided over, in a corner of the Dovecote Inn and with due formality, by the queen’s representative, who in our film is a local solicitor (balding, specs, pinstriped suit and antiquated vowels, ‘Weel, nyow, lits stort, shell wi?’).
The Bailiff – one, Edmund Rose, who turns out to be Stuart’s uncle – then announces to the assembled masses of the saloon bar:
Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All manner of persons who owe suit and service to the Court Leet of the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty and the Crown Estate Commissioners on behalf of her Majesty now to be holden, or who have been summoned to appear at this time and place, draw near and give your attendance, every man answering to his name when called, and thereby saving his amercement. God save the Queen and the Lord of this Court Leet!
The amercement is a fine. If anyone who should draw near doesn’t when called, he’ll have to pay. Twopence was the traditional sum – a stout encouragement to turn up in days gone by, but hardly the main incentive these days.
Next, the film shows the court electing a jury of twelve farmers from the village, each of whom, with care and reverence, kisses the Bible. The twelve then put on their flat caps and climb into the back of a hay cart hitched to a tractor, parked outside the pub. And in this style they set off to tour the wheat field of Laxton. The men trudge through the mud, and we see them scratching heads and gesticulating, as the commentary explains that they’re investigating whether anyone has, maliciously or accidentally, encroached on his neighbour’s strip of land. The members of the jury then hammer sticks, the length of a man’s leg, into the ground to mark the boundaries between each farmer’s allotted strip. If anyone has ploughed where he wasn’t supposed to, the jury reports him to the Court Leet, which has the legal power to levy a fine at a level the jury thinks appropriate. The film ends with an idyllic scene of hedges and fields played out by the chapel harmonium again.
Stuart rounds us up and leads us off on our walking tour. The route takes us out of the village along a narrow trackway, to see for ourselves the strips of farmland that make Laxton so special. At first sight, the cultivated fields don’t look much different from fields anywhere in the country.
The four fields where Laxton’s farmers still organise their seasonal rounds just as their ancestors did in King John’s day.
Stuart explains: ‘Each of us farmers has a share of the West Field here. Each man has his own strips.’ He points with his gnarled walking stick. ‘Look just there, you can see the posts that the jurymen have hammered into the ground to mark the boundaries, and running the length of the field is a small gap where no crops have been sown, to separate the two strips in front of us.’
The man with the camera round his neck asks why there’s no sign of the old ridges and furrows.
‘They were the result of horse-drawn ploughing,’ explains Stuart. ‘The old ploughshares always turned the earth over to the right, so if you ploughed up one way and back down the other, the soil got heaped up in the middle. And if you do that year after year, you eventually get a long mound of earth with troughs at the side. And that’s very useful. You’ll notice the old ridges and furrows nearly always run down hill, and that’s because the furrows drain the water away. Today, I’m afraid, even here at Laxton, we don’t use a horse and plough any more. We’ve got tractors and modern ploughs that can be reset to turn the earth either to left or right, and that’s why the land stays flat.’
Running along the edge of the West Field is a lumpy, uncultivated grassy verge 20 or 30 feet wide. This, we learn, is called a ‘syke’, pronounced ‘sick’, an old word for land that’s either too steep or too ‘clarty’ (that’s thick and sticky, for the benefit of non-Laxtonians) to be cultivated. The ploughman was allowed to use it to turn his horse around at the end of each furrow. Or else a farmer, then as now, could keep livestock on it at those times of year when there weren’t crops the animals could wander off and eat.
A lark is skittering high notes somewhere above us, but I can’t see it against the dark grey clouds. Jack, the bewhiskered time traveller, touches my elbow and points up. ‘There,’ he says, ‘See it?’
Stuart, who has overheard, explains, ‘There are over eighty breeding pairs in this one field alone. The skylarks love the open fields because there aren’t hedges to hide any predators.’
This, however, is only part of the story of medieval Laxton. We shouldn’t imagine from Stuart’s account that country life at the time of Magna Carta was some sort of happy valley of families working in well-regulated harmony to produce bountiful supplies of food. In every age, the life of those who work on the land has been hard. But in the early thirteenth century, in addition to the natural calamities of foul weather, failed harvests and murrain (the numerous unidentified diseases to which farm animals were prey), most folk in Laxton and in other villages across England were also subjected to the constant, severe, unpredictable and sometimes cruel demands of their masters.
The 90 per cent of ordinary English folk who lived in the countryside fell into three groups. The best-off were the freemen, tenant farmers who paid rent to the lord of the manor. Then came the villeins, also tenant farmers, but who had to work – unpaid – for up to three days a week for the lord. Then the lowest of the low were the cottars, who might have a little bit of land to help support the family, had to work – again unpaid – on the lord’s land, but otherwise could earn a day’s wage labouring for a villein or a freeman. You’ll notice that it’s freemen not women. The law at this time hardly recognised the existence of this half of the population.
The big divide was between the freemen and the rest. The freemen had a degree of independence from the lord of the manor as well as certain legal rights. The villeins and the cottars had no such rights and were little better than agricultural slaves. The women were adjuncts of slaves. The term villein, incidentally, gave later generations the word ‘villain’, which tells us a lot about the low esteem in which they were held by the elite establishment of kings, barons, lawyers and bishops. In a place like Laxton there would have been very few freemen, a handful at most.
So, given that 90 per cent of the population lived in the countryside, and that most of them were villeins, cottars or women, you can see that the overwhelming proportion of our ancestors were unfree serfs. So what did that mean?
As well as working on the lord’s own land for part of every week if you were a villein, a cottar, or one of their wives or children, you’d also have to help out on the lord’s farm at busy times in the farming calendar, such as sowing and harvesting – all unpaid of course. Then, in addition, on those red-letter days that happen in every family you’d have to make a payment to the lord of the manor. So, for instance, you’d need to buy a licence from him when any of your daughters got married, or when you wanted to send your son to school, and even if you decided to sell one of your cows. When you died, the lord took your best beast, and your heir had to make another payment before he could take over the farm. If there were only a daughter to succeed, then the lord claimed the right to choose her husband for her, and he would normally offer the woman’s hand to the highest bidder. And just in case all this was not enough, the lord had the right to ‘tallage’ you at will; in other words, he could tax you without excuse whenever the mood took him. It was economic, and to a degree social, servitude.
As an ordinary unfree farmer or labourer, you were the chattel of your lord, a possession he could use as he wished – with the generous exception of murdering you or beating you up so badly that you were disabled for life. You were not allowed to carry a weapon. Your lord could sell your land, and you and your family along with it, whenever he wished.
And the miseries of all those on the lowest perch of Laxton’s hierarchy didn’t end there. The church taxed you ruthlessly as well. All peasant farmers had to pay ‘churchscot’ to support the parson, and ‘Romescot’ to keep the Pope in the manner which was thought fitting. You had to give the parson hens at Christmas and eggs at Easter. When a villein died, his widow or heir not only had to pay the lord, but also the church to get him buried. But the most crippling burden was the tithe. As a peasant farmer, you were obliged to give one tenth of your produce to the church. That wasn’t just the crops you harvested, but everything else as well: lambs and their wool, cheese, butter, fruit and honey.
In addition to all this, the people of Laxton, like many countryside communities, had an extra burden to carry on their already hard-pressed shoulders. The evidence is still here today, and that’s what Stuart shows us next. We climb a gentle slope past the old threshing barn. At the top of the hill, beyond the cricket field and its battered corrugated iron pavilion, the land looks as though some ancient giant baker has kneaded and thumped it like dough into banks, hillocks, humps and hollows. These strange formations are the remains of Laxton’s once mighty castle, a building that would have needed continual – and expensive – repair and maintenance. And much of that work and cost ended up having to be borne by the villagers as well.
Laxton’s first castle was built soon after the Norman Conquest in 1066. It was radically extended in the century before Magna Carta when the lord of Laxton was one Robert de Caux. He was appointed Hereditary Keeper of the Forests of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, a vast area of woodland later known as Sherwood Forest. De Caux’s new role was an important part of the royal administration, and he rebuilt the castle in a much more opulent style. Today, when we climb to the top of the highest of the hillocks – the site of the motte, the word we encountered back at Mirebeau, that is the castle’s most defensible fortress tower – we can see laid out below us the complex plan of banks and ditches which were the site of de Caux’s palisade wall and moat. Here and there, hawthorn bushes sprout at crazy angles. One of the banks is now punctured with holes big enough to put your foot into. ‘Badger setts,’ explains Stuart. ‘We’re plagued with them here.’
Although the peasant farmers of Laxton in the early 1100s would not have had to bear the whole cost of extending the castle, it was inevitable that the de Caux family would turn to their tenants for at least part of the cash and labour needed.
And the castle’s importance was not just military. It had to be equipped with kitchens, stables, bedchambers and halls because the king and his entourage might turn up here at any moment and expect to be fed, watered, wined and entertained for however long the monarch decided to stay. The big attraction of Laxton for John was the nearby forests, where he could indulge in his favourite pastime, hunting. In 1204, when he had just lost Normandy and his attention was concentrated back in England, he cemented his link with the place by taking Laxton’s castle into his own hands. We get an intriguing glance into one of his visits from the records of the time. In 1213, two years before Magna Carta, he arrived here with Queen Isabella. According to the expense accounts, the King required ‘six boarhounds and eight greyhounds’, plus a ‘veltrarius’ – the man in charge of the dogs – and ‘two tuns of wine’. This is around 500 imperial gallons (625 American gallons). It’s tempting to imagine the royal couple threw one hell of a party during their stay, since there would have been enough wine for every courtier plus every man, woman and child in the village to knock back the equivalent of half a dozen bottles each. But a more likely explanation is that the royal butler was stocking up for the weeks ahead.
Living in a place like Laxton where the king could relax and enjoy himself did not imply any kind of royal favouritism. In 1207, the people of Laxton had to scrape together a fine of £100 ‘to have the King’s peace and to spare their village from being burnt to the ground’. The records don’t show what the folk of Laxton had done wrong to merit having all their homes put to the torch. But we may assume that at least part of the fine was met by another tax on the peasant farmers.
Today, from the top of the old castle hill, we can see cultivated fields for 20 or 30 miles to the north and east, broken only by the odd clump of trees. To the west, Laxton’s sykes and strips spread before us like a counterpane. In John’s day, Laxton and its little farms would have looked like a large clearing in Sherwood Forest. In many ways, life within the royal forests nearby could be even grimmer than it was for the farmers and labourers in the village itself. The forests had their own laws, mostly designed to stop anything which might in any way interfere with the king’s pleasure in chasing and killing deer and wild boar. It was bad enough that the poorest forest dwellers couldn’t supplement their meagre diet by killing any of the animals the king might wish to hunt and that their dogs, for instance, had to be ‘lawed’ – that is, have their front claws pulled out so they couldn’t be used for poaching. But in addition, the commoners were also banned from cutting trees for firewood or for building material.
The royal officials who policed the forests and ran its courts weren’t paid. They were expected to ‘live off the land’, which meant they were permitted to extort from the forest people in their area as much cash, corn and meat as bullying, threatening and physically abusing could deliver. It was an officially sanctioned reign of terror; even even the officially sanctioned methods used to enforce the forest laws themselves were little short of Stalinist. At Maidford in Northamptonshire, 80 miles south of Laxton, during the summer of 1209, the king’s foresters patrolling the woods came across the severed head of a deer. To kill a royal beast was a dire offence that could be punished by having an arm or a leg chopped off. The royal officials summoned all the menfolk of Maidford to an extraordinary court of inquisition and demanded they name the culprit. Whether the villagers didn’t know or wouldn’t tell isn’t recorded. It didn’t matter to the royal foresters. Their vengeance was terrible. Everything the villagers of Maidford owned, all their crops and livestock, what little money they might have made from selling their produce, their cooking pots, even their ploughs and other farm tools, in short – as the royal records state – ‘the whole of the aforesaid village of Maidford was seized into the king’s hand.’
It has been estimated that by the end of John’s reign, around one third of England was royal forest, including for example the whole county of Essex. John, like his brother and his father before him, was notorious for his woodland land-grabs. The barons regarded this as an abuse of royal power, and with Magna Carta, they tried to take back some of the forests seized into royal hands. Not through any charitable sympathy for the plight of the common people who lived there, but because they themselves were losing their own right to exploit and abuse these lowly folk.
The little village of Laxton, with its castle, was disproportionately important because it was the king’s administrative centre for Sherwood Forest stretching 50 miles to the south and west. But at the same time it was typical of most small farming communities in the early thirteenth century with its peasant families working together on their strip farms in the open fields.
The fact that this system is still practised in the twenty-first century in this one village – though of course without the near-slavery, arbitrary fines and punishment by mutilation – is extraordinary. As Stuart leads us back along Laxton’s main street past the rows of working farmhouses, I catch up with him and ask why he carries on farming in this way. It can’t be a profitable way of life, surely?
‘You’re right,’ he says, ‘It’s hard to make a living, what with having your land scattered, one bit maybe a mile or two from another. None of us in Laxton can get by just from farming. Take me for example. As well as working my farm, I’m a qualified agricultural engineer as well. And it only works for us because we get grants.’ I give him a quizzical look. ‘From the European Union,’ he adds. ‘It’s 30 per cent of my income.’ So why does he carry on? ‘Well,’ he replies, ‘how could I not do it, when this is what my ancestors have done on this very same land for so many generations? I suppose it’s in my blood.’
The tour is at an end, and Stuart invites us all to join him in the Dovecote Inn. Jack, the time traveller, says he’ll buy him a pint, and the chap with the fancy camera says we’ll all want that privilege. We laugh and troop into the bar, home of the Court Leet.
Now, beer was something that suffered no shortage here in Laxton back in the days of King John. The water supply was unreliable and often polluted, so everyone – children included – slaked their thirst with ale. And in between all that ploughing and sowing, and paying tithes and taxes, and avoiding the royal wrath, there were – it’s a relief to discover – times when ale consumption was upped beyond the everyday quota. Merrymaking in Laxton was usually associated with Christian festivals or even ancient pagan rites: Christmas, May Day, Midsummer. The excuse was to call upon saints, or ancient gods, to deliver a rich harvest, and to thank them when they did. There would have been wrestling, cock-fighting, skating in winter and maybe even a game of competitive scrambling to see who could kick the head of a slaughtered goat (or foteballe, as it became known two centuries later).
So was there anything in Magna Carta that protected what we would call the ‘human rights’ of the peasant farmers and labourers of Laxton? Not a lot, I’m afraid. The Great Charter of 1215 decreed that royal justices should not fine a villein so heavily that he lose all his crops. An act of kindness on the part of the barons? No way. The barons were concerned that the king would strip the peasants bare before the lords themselves could milk them dry. And the handful of freemen in the village were on the winning side again. Magna Carta granted them the right not to be punished without a proper legal process. The villeins, cottars and women, with their near slave status, who made up the overwhelming proportion of the population, were given no such right. Their harsh lives – made no easier by Magna Carta – give the lie, perhaps more than anything else in thirteenth-century England, to the myth that the document laid down a universal right to freedom. It did achieve many things we can be proud of. But common people back then gained little from the Great Charter of 1215.
But if life in Laxton was typical of 90 per cent of English people back then, what about the 10 per cent whose homes weren’t in the countryside, and who lived in towns or cities?
From the top of the old castle mound on the edge of Laxton, you can see on the horizon the towers of Lincoln Cathedral 20 miles away. Today, Lincoln is a modest place with some splendid old buildings. Back in the thirteenth century, it was England’s third-wealthiest city, a thriving centre for trade. Its story is very different from that of Laxton.