The Birth of Modern Britain: A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present
Francis Pryor
From the author of ‘Britain BC’, ‘Britain AD’ and ‘Britain in the Middle Ages’ comes the fourth and final part in a critically acclaimed series on Britain's hidden past.The relevance of archaeology to the study of the ancient world is indisputable. But, when exploring our recent past, does it have any role to play? In ‘The Birth of Modern Britain’ Francis Pryor highlights archaeology’s continued importance to the world around us.The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution were too busy innovating to record what was happening around them but fortunately the buildings and machines they left behind bring the period to life. During the Second World War, the imminent threat of invasion meant that constructing strong defences was much more important than keeping precise records. As a result, when towns were flattened, archaeology provided the only real means of discovering what had been destroyed.Surveying the whole post-medieval period, from 1550 until the present day, Francis Pryor takes us on an exhilarating journey, bringing to a gripping conclusion his illuminating study of Britain’s hidden past.
THE BIRTH OF MODERN BRITAIN
A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present
FRANCIS PRYOR
Contents
Cover (#uf79c2fc0-c9ba-584b-9631-586e101f4a80)
Title Page (#uf6c64b61-a072-5873-87ce-a8a4c2e00f31)
Dedication
List of Plates (#u5a135a22-a8b7-54fa-90ce-08282396d550)
List of Text Illustrations and Maps (#ub0aeadcc-d51d-5928-b010-31074e2041b2)
Acknowledgements (#u835c6b8a-d51f-55be-8930-afa018c559e0)
Table: Dates and Periods (#u471b361b-ac77-5299-ac89-141b25507656)
Introduction: Archaeology and Modern Times (#ua0eaa5c8-593b-5e69-985a-50ac73735af9)
Chapter 1 – Market Forces: Fields, Farming and the Rural Economy (#u3ec553f4-86fd-5f63-9a05-a415196e15dd)
Chapter 2 – ‘Polite Landscapes’: Prestige, Control and Authority in Rural Britain (#uc38df95c-bb2f-5534-8dfc-7c83213fb9c2)
Chapter 3 – The Rise of the Civil Engineer: Roads, Canals and Railways (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 4 – Rapid Expansion: The Growth of Towns and Cities (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 5 – Dynamic, but Diverse: The Development of Industrial Britain (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 6 – Capitalism Triumphant: Markets, Trade and Consumers 186 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 7 – The Big Society: Faith, Justice and Charity (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 – The First Superpower: Defence and Security (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication (#u155bbc38-3183-5940-944a-59034bed9fd7)
For my step-mother, Barbara Jean Pryor, for her quiet support and encouragement.
Plates
Unless otherwise stated, all photographs are © Francis Pryor
Model farm, Holkham Park, Norfolk
A view across the lake towards the Pantheon (1754) at Stourhead, Wiltshire
The restored grotto at Painshill, Surrey
A view along the first turnpike road (1663) in the village of Caxton, Cambridgeshire
The cast-iron Waterloo Bridge which carries the great Holyhead Road across the Afon Conwy at Betws-y-Coed
A paired toll house and weighbridge house on either side of the A5 at Ty Isaf
Milestone No. 73
Sunburst gates at the southern end of the Menai Strait suspension bridge
The brickwork façade of the southern entrance to the Blisworth Tunnel, Northamptonshire
A view along the bed of the tramway that led from the valley up to the navvy camp on Risehill, North Yorkshire
Grooves left by drill-holes to pack an explosive charge
Bridge over the A43, where it is crossed by the M1 at Junction 15, near Northampton
The River Porter in Whitely Woods, Sheffield
York Gate
The Paragon
A view of the Forth Rail Bridge
A view of housing in Swindon, Wiltshire
A tipping-cistern toilet block at Hungate, York
The basement floor of so-called ‘cellar houses’
The Stanley Mills, near Perth, from the River Tay
Terrace housing at Caithness Row, New Lanark
New Buildings tenement block
A view of a lead mine by William Ridley of Allenheads
A view along the Washing Rakes at the North of England Lead Mining Museum, at Killhope, Co. Durham
The potbank at the Gladstone Pottery’s Roslyn Works, Longton
Albert Dock, Liverpool (author’s photograph by permission of the Gladstone Pottery Museum)
The recently restored Swiss Bridge in Birkenhead Park, Merseyside
Hamilton Square, Birkenhead, Merseyside
The 768th (2006) Corby Glen Annual Sheep Fair, in the southern Lincolnshire Wolds, near Bourne
The chancel of St Mary’s Church, Bottesford, Leicestershire
The church of St John the Evangelist at Little Gidding, near Peterborough
The gravestone of Elizabeth Cuthbert (d. 1685) in the south nave aisle of St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney
The Sight of Eternal Life Church, Shrubland Road, Hackney, east London
The Union Workhouse, Gressenhall, near East Dereham, Norfolk
Bridge designed by Robert Adam, built by General George Wade in 1733 across the upper reaches of the Tay, at Aberfeldy (Perth and Kinross)
The Second World War defensive landscape of the southern Wash at Lawyers’ Creek, near Holbeach St Matthew, Lincolnshire
Ruck machine-gun post
The Carmarthen stop line
A view of the Carmarthen stop line from a gun emplacement overlooking the mouth of the River Tywi at St Ishmael, near Kidwelly
Excavation of a series of Second World War defensive works at Shooters Hill, south-east London
Text Illustrations and Maps
Three maps of Shapwick, Somerset. From Gerrard and Aston, The Shapwick Project. Somerset. A Rural Landscape Explored (2007). With kind permission of Professor Chris Gerrard.
Map showing the farming regions of early modern England (1500–1750). From Thirsk, England’s Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History,1500–1750(1987)
Survey of the Buckinghamshire village of Akeley, based on an enclosure map of 1794. From Jones and Page, Medieval Villages in an English Landscape (2006)
Farm buildings from a design by J. B. Denton of 1879. From the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments 1997, p. 153
Map showing the distribution of landscape parks in East Anglia in the late eighteenth century. From Tom Williamson, ‘Designed Landscapes: The Regional Dimension’, Landscapes, Vol. 5, No. 2, p. 18 (2004). With kind permission of Professor Tom Williamson.
Two idealised plans showing the layout of typical model or estate farms in England around 1750–1800 and 1800–1840. From Wade Martins, The English Model Farm (2002), fig. 1
Two idealised plans showing the layout of typical model or estate farms in England around 1840–1860 and 1860–1900. From Wade Martins, The English Model Farm (2002), fig. 1
General plan of Aston Hall, Birmingham. From Post-Medieval Archaeology, Vol. 42, Pt 1, p. 103 (2008)
Map showing the location of eighty-one planned villages erected between c. 1730 and 1855 in south-west Scotland (Dumfries and Galloway). From Philip, Landscapes, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 89 (2005)
Map of the drove roads of Scotland. From Haldane, The Drove Roads of Scotland (2008)
The principal long-distance routes in England and Wales in the seventeenth century, prior to the turnpikes. From Wright, Turnpike Roads (1992)
Map of the Grand Union (earlier the Grand Junction) Canal in Northamptonshire
Excavated traces of wooden railway (or ‘waggonway’) lines. Illustration reproduced courtesy of Wrexham County Borough Council.
Map showing the thirty-five major historic towns and cities of England. From Thomas, ‘Mapping the Towns’, Landscapes, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2006), p. 73
Map showing how space within London was organised around 1750. From Short, The South-East, p. 175
Plan of the archaeological evidence for the Rose theatre. From Current Archaeology, No. 124, p. 186
Excavations at Wednesbury Forge, West Midlands. From Belford, British Archaeology, No. 107, p. 33
The Upper Forge at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire. From Belford, British Archaeology, No. 107, p. 34
Exterior view of a Manchester cellar house in Victorian times. From Miller and Wild, A & G Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats, p. 31 (2007)
Flow diagram illustrating the production of cotton textiles. From Miller and Wild, A & G Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats, p. 162 (2007)
Plan showing the organisation of the industrial landscape around the entrance to the Park Level Lead Mine at Killhope, Co. Durham. From Forbes, Lead and Life at Killhope (1987), p. 19
Map showing the development of urban areas (black) and Wombwell Wood (stippled) in the town of Wombwell, South Yorkshire. From Hey and Rodwell, ‘Wombwell’, Landscapes, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2006), p. 25
Drawing of the constructional details of the traditional ‘hovel’ type of updraught bottle kiln. From Post-Med. Arch., Vol. 42, Pt 1, p. 205 (2008)
Plan of the purpose-built grounds surrounding the Quaker asylum at Brislington House, Bristol. From Rutherford, Landscapes, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2004), p. 30
Outline drawing of a later nineteenth century triangular blue cotton neckerchief. From Oleksy, Post-Med. Arch., Vol. 42, Pt 2, p. 293
Hand-carved model boat found in a large void beneath Court 3, Parliament House, Edinburgh. From Oleksy, Post-Med. Arch., Vol. 42, Pt 2, p. 296 (2008)
Map of Harwich Basin in the early eighteenth century. From Post-Med. Arch., Vol. 42, Pt 2, p. 232
The defensive landscape at Landguard Fort, near Harwich, Suffolk. From Meredith, Post-Med. Arch., Vol. 42, Pt 2, p. 235 (2008)
A composite plan, based on contemporary sources showing the main areas of activity at the Norman Cross (Peterborough) ‘Depot’, or prisoner-of-war camp
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.
Acknowledgements
FROM THE MOMENT I began this four-volume archaeological history of Britain I knew that, when I ventured outside my own field of expertise in later prehistory, I would have to rely on the cooperation and goodwill of many colleagues. But instead of encountering silence or, worse, resentment, I was astonished by the way medievalist scholars took me under their wing and made the task of writing Britainad and Britain in the Middle Ages such a pleasure. For the present work I have had to draw on the knowledge of many post-medievalists and yet I have still to detect any impatience with my ceaseless enquiries. Two people who have had to bear the brunt of my curiosity are Drs Marilyn Palmer and Audrey Horning, both colleagues of mine in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. They gave me informal seminars, sometimes even without the benefit of lunch, which helped me turn my face in what I hope has proved the right direction. Thank you both: my gratitude knows no bounds.
Michael Douglas, series editor at Time Team, shares my interest in the archaeology of more recent periods and played a major part in arranging the excavation of the Risehill navvy camp, North Yorkshire, and the Norman Cross prisoner-of-war Depot, Peterborough. While in Yorkshire, Bill Bevan was a great source of references and advice. At Norman Cross, Ben Robinson, the Peterborough City Archaeologist, was as ever amiable and authoritative, and Dr Henry Chapman, the Time Team surveyor, helped me acquire plans of the Norman Cross Depot site in advance of the full publication, which was scheduled to appear after my own manuscript’s deadline. Dr Mike Nevell has been a splendid guide to the world of industrial archaeology. Neil (now Sir Neil) Cossons and David Crossley were a great help when I was first getting interested in industrial archaeology and we all sat on the Ancient Monuments Advisory Committee of English Heritage. Happy days! Another more than helpful friend, who goes back a long time with me, is David Cranstone. David started life as a prehistorian with me at Fengate and is now a leading authority on industrial archaeology in general and salt mines in particular. He kindly gave me several useful hints and references.
At HarperCollins I am grateful to Martin Redfern, who took on Richard Johnson’s mantle, and to Ben Buchan, whose editorial comments have greatly strengthened this book. I am also deeply indebted to Rex Nicholls who drew the line drawings and to the book’s designer. Special thanks too to Sophie Goulden, Ben Buchan, Richard Collins and Geraldine Beare.
I am also grateful to family members who provided me with unexpected information on various topics: Roderick Luis (Crimean War huts) and Nigel Smith (navvies in the North Pennines). Nigel, a bookseller by profession, found me articles and out-of-print books and his elder sister, my wife Maisie, organised my photographic expeditions and managed to sort out the mystery of the two Causey Arches – an example, incidentally, of how the internet can waste time and lead one astray. Heaven alone knows how she has put up with my moods during this four-book marathon. Finally, and despite the best efforts of all of the above, any errors that remain are mine alone.
Dates and Periods
* Strictly speaking this should refer to the Second Boer War. The First Boer War (1880-81) was more a skirmish, which the Boers won.
IntroductionArchaeology and Modern Times
BEFORE I GET involved with the ‘meat’ of the book I’d first like to say a few words on the nature of modern historical archaeology in Britain, which is probably the fastest growing branch of the subject. When I started my professional life my team worked with the Peterborough New Town Development Corporation clearing land for factory building. That was back in the early 1970s, long before television programmes like Time Team had managed to convince the public at large that there was such a thing as British archaeology. Too often we would arrive at a site and announce that we’d come to survey and excavate, only to be greeted with incredulous stares and humorous comments to the effect that surely we would be better employed in Egypt, Greece or Italy. Then, when I had shown the builders (and anyone else who happened to be hanging around on site) the air photographs with the ring-ditch evidence for Bronze Age barrows and explained that these were as old as Stonehenge – which in turn was much older than the Parthenon or King Tutankhamun – the scoffing would cease and most of my audience would become our enthusiastic supporters. Sometimes their enthusiasm was such that it was hard to get much work done.
But just suppose for one moment that we had arrived on site and announced that we were planning to survey and excavate the ramshackle nineteenth- and early twentieth-century farm buildings that were then such a common feature of the city’s eastern fringes. In actual fact, those buildings were rather important, as the Fens, which were drained in the seventeenth century, were once a major producer of food for Britain’s rapidly expanding urban populations. But I very much doubt whether we would have found it quite so straightforward to silence the scoffing, because even in the better-informed times we currently live in, many people suppose that the terms ‘archaeology’ and ‘modern’ are mutually exclusive.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that a fair amount of time needs to pass before archaeological research becomes possible, let alone desirable, or informative. But, actually, this view is wrong because archaeology is not just about excavation; it’s an approach to the past that can be equally relevant when applied to something as young as a month, or as old as a millennium. Just imagine, for example, that an entire townscape is bombed flat, as happened in Coventry or in large parts of east London. In those cases archaeology is almost the only way to resurrect in any meaningful way what enemy aeroplanes destroyed. Under such circumstances, old pictures and sketches can, of course, be useful, but accurate measurements, made then and there on the ground, will be needed if reconstruction is to be attempted. In postwar years town centre developers did as much damage to Britain’s historic towns and cities as Nazi aircraft, and almost as quickly. Today this would not happen, but in the fifties and sixties pre-development surveys rarely took place. So such peacetime destruction was often horribly complete.
The simple distinction between archaeology (dirt) and history (documents), although never so clear cut, begins to break down in post-medieval times when documents of every conceivable sort become near-ubiquitous: everything from newspapers to till-roll receipts. And much of this material can find its way into the archaeological record by way of local private archives that can survive for years in abandoned offices and dusty attics. Sometimes, however, archaeologists can reveal new documentary sources that the conventional wisdom believed had long been destroyed. It was the professional and amateur archaeologists working as part of the Council for British Archaeology’s Defence of Britain Project who discovered the paperwork drawn up in 1940 that ordered and duly paid for the building of the many concrete and brick pillboxes and other defences that can still be found in their thousands in unexpected nooks and crannies across Britain.
The Defence of Britain project shows how very important it is to keep archaeological research and survey up to date, because when it took place (1995–2002) huge numbers of Second World War defences were being destroyed as ‘eyesores’ – their historical importance notwithstanding. Some 20,000 records of military installations were made during those seven years and the most important of these were then given legal protection as Scheduled Ancient Monuments.
(#litres_trial_promo) Without that project it would have been impossible to have drawn up a list of sites worthy of such protection. The same has since been achieved for Cold War sites. Would that something similar had been done before Dr Beeching wielded the axe that amputated the limbs of a once great railway network, whose Victorian stations, bridges and signal boxes now stand mouldering, while local people, stuck in traffic jams, have cause to regret their passing. The past is no less important just because it is recent. The real danger is that we take it for granted, like those wartime structures, because then we won’t realise that it has gone until it’s too late.
Of course, it’s very easy to take things for granted. Everyone today, even the most rich and powerful people in the land, has to cope with repetition: the daily drive to work or the royal flight; the walk to and from the station; regular trips to the parents-in-law, etc, etc. Each time we take a familiar journey we inevitably attach less and less value to the buildings and places we pass by. Whether we like it or not, familiarity does indeed breed indifference, if not actual contempt. Most people would agree that it is impossible to retain one’s enthusiasm for a building at quite the same level as when one first encountered it. But it doesn’t always have to be like this. In my experience archaeology can help keep one’s surroundings fresh and lively, simply by seeking out the links that tie the different parts of a particular place together.
Let’s take the case of a provincial town or city where we have a railway station built in the late 1860s, followed by relatively humble housing developments nearby in the early 1870s. By the 1880s streets of somewhat grander, mostly middle-class, villas start to appear, at which point, too, a large red-brick mock-Gothic church was also constructed. In the mid-twentieth century the area became less fashionable as the middle classes moved to new suburbs on the fringes of town. The church was then converted to a sound-recording studio and a new mosque was built on land that had once been railway marshalling yards. I won’t go on, but it’s the tales of development, setback and change, only slightly hidden away in the layout of our towns and villages, that still have the power to excite me. But for how long will it be possible to reconstruct such stories from dry bricks and mortar? Increasingly the deep foundations of modern developments devour all before them, leaving nothing in their wake for future archaeologists to puzzle over, admire and enjoy.
So those of us with an eye for such things are already looking around at our surroundings, wondering what will come under threat next. And here we are faced with the dilemma that must confront anyone whose job is to predict such things, because almost by definition people in the future will decide that we got it wrong: that it was a mistake to Schedule
(#ulink_fff059cb-4e97-5243-bd8c-ad0ef8da5f8f) multi-storey car parks when it was shopping malls that were then rapidly redeveloped and promptly vanished.
So the answer is probably to cast the net wider and protect whole areas of towns or rural landscapes, rather than individual sites or buildings, if our attempts to second-guess posterity are to have any chance of success.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is already being done in the so-called Conservation Areas and Historic Cores of certain historically important towns and cities; furthermore, designated Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty can help to protect well-known tracts of rural landscape. But inevitably such designations must favour the chocolate-box view of landscape and townscape. I can’t see anyone choosing to put forward the flat, treeless landscape where I have chosen to live, even though I personally regard it as life-enhancing and profoundly beautiful. The same could be said for many suburbs or industrial conurbations, which may well be recognised as important in two hundred years’ time. The other problem, of course, is that such protection can then put a break (it’s often termed ‘planning blight’) on commercial redevelopment and the area then starts to slip into economic decline – a process that can also be ‘assisted’ by those with vested interests.
My approach to archaeology has always been based around the landscape and by that I mean the physical setting for a particular site or monument. So it makes no sense to try to understand the mysteries of Stonehenge without thinking about why it was placed on Salisbury Plain, and why it is surrounded by hundreds of burial mounds and other sacred places, some of which are actually much earlier than the famous Stones themselves. By the same token we can soon come to understand why Manchester and the towns of north-west England became an early centre of the textile trade when we know that this area had been producing woollen fabrics since the later Middle Ages, so was able to take advantage of, or ‘add value’ to, the rapidly developing trade in cotton between Liverpool and the southern United States. So if we are to understand the context of the nineteenth-century cotton industry in the North West, its economic setting should also include Louisiana and Georgia, and latterly the effects of the American Civil War on the supply of raw materials. Similarly, it would be impossible even to think about the hugely important ceramic industry of the area around Stoke-on-Trent without also considering where these millions of plates, mugs, teapots, cups and saucers were traded.
In prehistory stone axes and bronze implements could be traded over long distances – three to four hundred miles was not uncommon – but the amounts were still small. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, trade had become global and the quantities involved were huge: thus pottery exports were measured in tons and improvements in ship capacity meant that distance had almost become irrelevant. So archaeology and those who practise it have had to develop new techniques and approaches if they are to throw genuinely new light on the complexities of the historic past. There is close collaboration, for example, between American archaeologists working on colonial-era settlements in Virginia and New England, and their colleagues in the English Midlands, where many of the exported goods were manufactured. One might perhaps expect that the flow of information was entirely from east to west, but in actual fact the American sites have produced results that have caused considerable surprise in Britain. Archaeology has a wonderful ability to prove the best-based predictions wrong.
There is, of course, always a danger when considering the archaeology of the recent past to become overwhelmed with detail. As a prehistorian I routinely recover a large proportion of the surviving debris from, say, a Bronze Age settlement. That might amount to 5,000 pieces of flint, maybe 200 potsherds and 10,000 bone fragments – half of which could prove identifiable. But today the amount of rubbish being produced by even a small-sized town can rapidly fill huge landfill sites. In such instances the best one can hope to do is to sample what is being discarded and for several years a team of archaeologists in Arizona did just that: in the Garbage Project they sampled what the city of Tucson was discarding day by day.
(#litres_trial_promo) But, again, it’s all very well to sample, but what really matters are the problems you are trying to resolve when you come to analyse the samples. That is undoubtedly why today historical archaeologists have grown increasingly aware that the questions they are posing must be closely tied down and tightly defined. It is no longer regarded as sufficient simply to study, say, steam engines for their own sake, because such myopic attention to detail will only tell us more and more about less and less. Instead, a historical archaeologist might try to understand the social impact of steam power: why did it become so significant and what were the effects its adoption had on the lives of people, not just in the factories where the engines were built, but in the towns and villages where the new, mass-produced goods it helped to produce were sold?
It has been said many times that archaeology is a very broad church and this is particularly true for the post-medieval period.
(#litres_trial_promo) Some specialists have arrived in historical archaeology from their studies of the later Middle Ages; others, often excavators, have grown interested in those upper layers that in the past were given only passing attention on the way down to the supposedly more interesting ancient deposits closer to the bottom of the trench. Many have joined the ranks through more specialist research interests in, say, pottery, or churches. Some have come from outside archaeology altogether – and here I would include those many industrial archaeologists who have come to the subject through their concerns for old mines, factories, vehicles or machinery and the urgent need to protect and preserve them.
As time passes it would seem that the ‘glue’ that will bind these different strands together will be social. In other words, how did people in the past react to a particular stimulus, be it a new chapel, coal mine, crop rotation or steam engine? That, surely, is the key question. Because when all is said and done, chapels, mines, farming methods and machines are of little interest in themselves. Like, dare I say it, flint tools and Bronze Age weapons, they only come alive when they can be related to society and to people.
Earlier I mentioned the distinction between the sources of information drawn upon by archaeologists and historians, namely artefacts and documents. And here I must also admit that there has been a tendency among archaeologists to regard their information, perhaps because it is so very ‘bottom-up’ and derived from the ground, as somehow more reliable than written accounts, which we all know can be distorted in favour of a particular opinion. As a prehistorian I have the enormous luxury – actually it’s a responsibility, too – of working with data whose analysis cannot be challenged by documentary sources, simply because writing didn’t exist at the time. This makes it much harder to contest my conclusions, but that doesn’t make them more reliable. So I still think it important to emphasise that it is just as easy to be misled by a spread of coal and clinker in what might once have been an engine room, as by the letters written by an eighteenth-century ironmaster to his bankers. There is nothing in the ‘bottom-up’ nature of archaeological observations that makes them necessarily more truthful than conventional historical sources. Both are different, that’s all. It goes without saying that both, too, need to be treated with caution and care. I think one reason why historical archaeology is so exciting is the creative tension that appears at the moment, often late in the life of a project, when the written record is set against that from the ground. This is often when a new revelation suddenly becomes apparent.
One might suppose that the very abundant documentary records of the historical period mean that less attention need be paid, for example, to science. But in actual fact many written records don’t address what people thought obvious at the time. So a factory manager doesn’t describe all the details of a process when he purchases a new machine. He just goes ahead and orders one. This means that we must still employ some remarkably sophisticated techniques of scientific analysis if we are to understand what precisely was being manufactured and how it was done. Often, as we will see in Chapter 5 (when we examine the Moffat Upper Steam Forge, near Airdrie), this can be achieved through the careful analysis of material preserved on the floors of long-abandoned workshops. In my experience it’s not always a straightforward matter to distinguish between these industrial deposits and the floors themselves. Again, the scientists in the laboratory can suggest which was what.
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By far and away the most productive approach to the historical past is collaborative: thorough excavation and survey combined with detailed documentary research. Certainly when it comes to the study of topics such as the trade in pottery or, indeed, in slaves, bills of lading, receipts and invoices can throw much-needed light on the thousands of potsherds and clay pipe stems found around the excavated sites of the period. I would go so far as to say that excavation without documentary research would almost certainly prove useless – or, worse, it could do serious damage to an important site.
Many people have heard about industrial archaeology and I quite frequently get asked about it. Most want to know what it is and when it got going. In fact, it has not been around for very long at all. The first widely accepted textbook on the subject traces it back to an article in the Amateur Historian for 1955.
(#litres_trial_promo) The origins of industrial archaeology were diverse. They included a few academic historians and archaeologists with an interest in historical archaeology, but the majority were part-time enthusiasts, some of them active in, or recently retired from, engineering and industry, who were worried that so much evidence for the recent past was being needlessly destroyed by the rapid reconstruction of Britain in the early post-war decades. These enthusiasts covered a huge range of interests, ranging from railways to shipping, mining, road transport and heavy industry. In most instances their enthusiasm was centred on a particular site, usually, but not always, somewhere near where they lived or worked: towns like Coalbrookdale, even entire railways (such as the Great Western). Keen hard-working volunteers, often travelling long distances, helped to record and restore some of the most remote industrial monuments in Britain, such as the abandoned mines of Cornwall or Derbyshire. Inevitably, too, the emphasis tended to be on machines and mechanisms – where much of their expertise, often based on practical experience, lay. Far less attention was paid to the lives of the people who built, maintained and used these things. The machines also tended to be seen as objects in their own right, without, as we have seen, much attempt being made to reconstruct their social setting.
It’s worth noting here that even the best known of the abandoned monuments to Britain’s industrial past were slow to be protected under the Ancient Monuments Protection Act of 1882. Even the great iron bridge of Ironbridge, Shropshire, was not given statutory protection by Scheduling until 1934 and was only taken into Guardianship (i.e. public ownership, display and administration) as late as 1975. The following year the iron-making furnace at Coalbrookdale was at last Scheduled, almost exactly two hundred years after its final major rebuilding by the great ironmaster Abraham Darby in 1777. In retrospect the archaeological establishment was extraordinarily slow to protect the remains of the Industrial Revolution, and this despite one of the greatest acts of official Philistinism in the twentieth century.
The great Doric portico, universally known as the Euston Arch, was demolished in 1962 by the Transport Commission who believed it stood in the way of commercial success. I can remember standing beneath its towering columns and staring up at the classical entablature (not that I knew the word, of course) high above my head. And I can remember wondering why there wasn’t a building directly behind it, as there was at, say, the British Museum. In my child’s mind I couldn’t grasp, any more than could the bureaucrats and politicians of the 1960s, that the great portico heralded the world’s first main line between major cities. It was more than a mere symbol: it was a metaphor for what was to follow. And we tore it down.
There was massive public outcry at what is still seen as an act of wilful destruction, and this despite letters to the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan. The anger was not just that a fine building of 1835 was being unnecessarily destroyed, but it was a building that had come to symbolise the confidence of the Railway Age and ultimately Britain’s role in the Industrial Revolution.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was built by Philip Hardwick to be a triumphal entrance to the London to Birmingham railway and it was intended to impress – which undoubtedly it did.
The fight to prevent the powers that be from destroying the Euston Arch drew everyone involved in industrial archaeology together. Right across Britain, new societies were established involving academics, students, amateurs and professionals. As a result the support for this form of archaeology is probably more broadly based than any other branch of the subject. At first this diversity was seen by many in the academic world as a weakness. But today we generally view such things rather differently; indeed, industrial archaeology is becoming one of the more intellectually rigorous branches of the discipline, yet one which benefits greatly from the hands-on approach of its many part-time helpers. By now the bias in favour of machines over people has largely been addressed and quite soon the adjective ‘industrial’ will slip from general use.
Today industrial archaeology is seen as a branch of post-medieval archaeology which was the last of the major period societies to come into existence. The Prehistoric Society was the first (1935) and the Society for Medieval Archaeology appeared in the post-war years (1957). Just ten years after that (and five years after the destruction of the Euston Arch), in 1967, the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology was founded. Its journal, Post-Medieval Archaeology, is still the bible for anyone with a serious interest in the period.
My own enthusiasm for industrial archaeology goes back some time and owes much to some remarkable people. Ever since I was a child and enjoyed making things with Meccano kits I have admired engineers. I suppose like most boys I grew up almost worshipping men like Brunel and Telford and I can well remember my maternal grandmother, née Nora Parsons, telling me wonderful stories about our relative Sir Charles Parsons as he steered his Turbinia (built in 1897), the first steam-turbine-powered vessel and then by far and away the fastest ship afloat, through the great dreadnoughts at the famous display of British naval might at Spithead. I loved the way he cocked a snook at the naval establishment who were then obliged to commission a turbine-powered vessel from his yard.
One of the first real live engineers to cross my path was a remarkable and very eccentric gentleman who was a distant relative, an old friend of the family and my godfather. He was a lovely man, but a hopeless godfather, at least as far as God was concerned. His name was Julian Turnbull. I first came across him when I was about ten. At the time he worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company, where he specialised in putting out desert oil rig fires, with explosives. Today he would be described as partially sighted and wore glasses with extraordinarily thick lenses. Even then I remember thinking that these must have inhibited his work in the blowing sands of Arabia.
He and his wife Dorothy lived in a tiny bungalow in Barnet and I recall my first visit to the shed at the bottom of his garden as clearly as my first step into the great nave of Ely Cathedral. It was impeccably organised, with spanners arranged in order of size, their outlines painted in black against a white background, doubtless to help his failing sight return them to their correct position. But the most remarkable feature of this quite small (maybe 15 x 8 feet) shed was his collection of screwdrivers, which in those days were all wooden-handled. It was vast and must have included hundreds – no, thousands – of examples which ranged from something shovel-sized, used by marine engineers, to a series of minute watchmakers’ tools. The largest was about six foot long and next to it was one a bit smaller and a bit smaller, and so on and so on, until the hut walls had been encircled two or three times. I adored those screwdrivers.
In the middle of the hut was an old Atco lawnmower which Julian had converted to steam power, using the case of a wartime howitzer shell he had found in the desert as a boiler. All the pipes and pistons were lovingly lagged with carefully coiled string. I only saw it operate once on his tiny lawn. But once was more than enough. It belched prodigious quantities of coal smoke and sparks while its almost blind operator blundered around behind it, spending more time wrestling with its handlebars on the weed-choked flowerbeds than the lawn. After ten minutes of mayhem I asked him whether it gave a good cut. He said he had no idea about that, but the hot coals seemed to keep grass growth to a minimum for several weeks. So I suppose it did work after a fashion.
The second person was very different but no less inspiring. Today he is very well known as one of the founding fathers of industrial archaeology and has more recently spent time running the Science Museum and English Heritage. Sir Neil Cossons first crossed my path when he came to give a lecture at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, some time in the early 1970s, when I was an assistant curator there. His talk was on the industrial archaeology of Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale, where he was director of the Museum and the Trust which ran it. I found it inspiring and the following year I couldn’t wait until I had taken all our students from our dig at Fengate, on the outskirts of Peterborough, right across England to see what he and his team had achieved.
As we walked around Ironbridge I realised for the first time just how much archaeology could appeal to the general public, but only if it was well displayed – a lesson I have never forgotten. Later I got to know Neil rather better when we sat on English Heritage’s Ancient Monuments Advisory Committee and I always made a point of seeking him out when we did field trips to industrial sites. This was because he had the rare gift of knowing where to find some obscure feature, nook or cranny which would bring the place vividly to life.
I’ve talked about Ironbridge, the Euston Arch and the origins of post-medieval archaeology and I suppose I ought to cover such major events in the history of industrial archaeology at some length in this book. But, on the other hand, this isn’t a textbook. I’m concerned here not with the history of industrial archaeology, but with current research and the direction in which it is heading. Having said that, I am also attempting to provide a balanced account of the period for the general reader.
I must also come clean and confess that many readers of my earlier books have laughed out loud when I suggested to them that I have been in search of balance. And their response: ‘Balance? You? You’re a born partisan and could no more achieve balance than fly.’ Which wasn’t quite the reply I had expected, but is possibly true, nonetheless. So in this instance I will drop such pretence and follow my instincts, which are to see what the current generation of scholars finds interesting and exciting. I make no apologies for this approach, which will generally concentrate on recent research, because that’s where the new developments are happening.
And while on the subject of bias, I should also add that I plan to pay more attention to those aspects of the period which have tended to be ignored. A classic case in point is the very start of what some historians have referred to as the Agricultural Revolution. For me this is when modern Britain really begins to emerge. I like to think I can identify with those independent farmers who, freed from old ties of feudalism, set about creating, possibly for the first time in British history, a true market-based economy. These were extraordinary times, in many respects far more interesting than the Open Field farms of the Middle Ages which are usually taught in preference at school. And while on the subject of revolutions, of course, what about the big one that everyone still talks about and takes thoroughly for granted?
When, in 1884, the great historian Arnold Toynbee published a book of his Oxford course under the title Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, he probably didn’t realise that the phrase would immediately stick and remain current into the twenty-first century; indeed, by that time television documentaries would proclaim it as proven fact. Some people were even able to tie it down with precision. One of the best post-war historical accounts, by Professor T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution,1760–1830, published by Oxford University Press in 1948, compresses the period into a truly revolutionary seventy years – or roughly three (short) generations.
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Anyone who has any experience of life outside academia will immediately realise that the idea of such a short period of revolutionary change is manifestly absurd. The world – and especially the world of work – simply doesn’t behave like that.
(#litres_trial_promo) All change requires time and things never happen with a single bang: there are always mistakes, false starts and heroic failures such as Brunel’s broad gauge for the Great Western Railway and John Logie Baird’s mechanically based system of television transmission of 1926. But the idea of the ‘Industrial Revolution’ has certainly fixed itself firmly in the popular imagination and I doubt whether it will ever go away completely.
I think there are at least three reasons for this. First and foremost it plays very well in Britain where most of the early innovations were developed, if not (like the blast furnace) actually invented. Second, for the revolution to have happened there had to be heroes to push it forward and, of course, everyone likes to admire a hero. One thinks of James Watt or Abraham Darby; it’s even better if these larger-than-life industrial pioneers were also highly enlightened men, like Robert Owen, Josiah Wedgwood or Titus Salt. Finally, the very idea of revolutionary change is exciting: we can gasp at the sheer pace of the events, wring our hands at the misery of the workforce and then thrill to the mastery of their monumental achievements, many of which are still out there in the landscape.
But for most of the post-war decades nobody working in the academic study of industrial archaeology has believed in a literal Industrial Revolution. Laying aside the impossible pace, revolutions are meant to sweep all before them, like so many aristocrats fleeing France at the onset of the Terror. Factories were supposed to have swept away small hand workshops, but in fact these persisted – and successfully – well into the twentieth century. We can also appreciate that the great heroes were actually ordinary individuals, many of whom didn’t so much invent from scratch as modify a pre-existing machine, like James Watt who adapted Newcomen’s engine to make the steam drive the piston in both directions, thereby more than doubling its power.
(#litres_trial_promo) Similarly, as we will see shortly, great ironmasters such as the various Abraham Darbys used their commercial and marketing expertise to develop good ideas often produced by others working in their foundries. When we examine industrial Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we see that it has many similarities with the contemporary world of the agricultural ‘Improvers’ such as Coke of Norfolk or Jethro Tull. Both history and the British propensity to admire heroes have been very kind to these men, many of whom were indeed great but probably less than heroic.
The final nail in the coffin of the rapid revolution idea has been the realisation that, far from starting in 1760, many of the industries of the period were already fully mature by then, with histories extending back over two centuries or even more, as we will see in Chapter 5 when we look at the early cutlery trade along the rivers of Sheffield, or the latest excavations in and around Ironbridge. In most instances, too, the pattern of trade and industry that developed in specific areas in early post-medieval times determined the shape of what was to happen in the era of massive expansion which began in the later eighteenth century. This was the time when infrastructure – canals, waggonways and roads – was improving rapidly. It also saw the introduction of new technologies such as coal-powered steam. Perhaps most important of all, social circumstances were changing in a way that first allowed and then actually facilitated the growth of industry. We must not forget that the era of industrial expansion was as much about social change as technology.
One might suppose that industrial archaeologists would strive to retain an idea with such popular appeal as the Industrial Revolution, but for many decades it has been only too clear that the process of industrialisation had been extended and in many instances can be traced back to the Middle Ages. One way round this dilemma has been to write of an extended or ‘long’ Industrial Revolution.
(#litres_trial_promo) Another has been to subdivide the extended Revolution into sub-Revolutions, such as a ‘chemical’ followed by an ‘extractive’ Revolution. In Chapter 6 I will discuss the merits of various ‘ceramic revolutions’. These were indeed fast, and revolutionary in their effects. But on the ceramic market alone. They never transformed people’s lives. My own feeling is that these sub-Revolutions are really clutching at straws and are helping to perpetuate the use of a term that ought to be dropped, for the simple reason that it is both inaccurate and misleading.
Students of industrial archaeology study the physical remains of early factories and workshops. They make extensive use of documents – if they are available – but perhaps most important of all they closely examine the archaeological evidence for contemporary housing, for both workers and management. Increasingly today industrial archaeologists are concerned with the long roots of industrialisation and its social consequences.
(#litres_trial_promo) The trend towards social perspectives has affected the scope of archaeologists who are now more concerned with the wider relationship between housing, factories and workshops; the effect has been to look at industries within the landscape: how and why they arose in a particular area and the influences they had on a given region’s population and economy.
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The concept of landscape is particularly significant within industrial archaeology, because it can be used to decide why certain sources of power were originally selected – coal and water are obvious examples. Landscapes can also help to explain why workers’ housing, for example, was located in certain areas, but social considerations always seem to have remained pre-eminent. For example, the switch from waterwheels to steam power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often necessitated twenty-four-hour shift working to cover the additional costs of coal. This in turn meant that housing had to be positioned close by the factory or mill, whether or not the terrain was actually suited to such a change. Sometimes underlying social motives could be less apparent. For example, many of the great mill owners aspired to emulate the landed gentry (which they often achieved with notable success) and to do this they built their new homes to resemble the great country houses of the nobility. Their houses were placed relatively nearby (to enable them to keep an eye on the shop), but the positioning carefully avoided any visual reminders of the mills and back-to-back housing that actually generated their wealth. But all rules have exceptions, as we will see when we come to look at where the great industrialists Robert Owen and his much-underrated father-in-law placed their houses in the model town they created at New Lanark.
I have always had an interest in what one might term modern archaeology and found I had more time for it after I had completed work on the report of my excavations at Flag Fen, a process that occupied me, night and day, for some five years in the mid-1990s. When that was finished I decided I really had to get out more, see the world and ‘get a life’. But I still had a deep and abiding interest in the past and the story behind the creation of modern Britain. So I found my attention was gradually shifting forwards in time. I was, however, completely astonished by the sheer diversity I encountered when I delved more deeply into the archaeology of modern times. It wasn’t just about the obvious themes: the growth of industry or agriculture and the development of towns. I also found that students and researchers were approaching even these topics from unexpected directions, often with surprising results. This was one of the other reasons I decided it was impossible to present a ‘balanced’ view of the archaeology of post-medieval times and have opted instead to examine projects and ideas that give one a new slant or perspective, if not a ‘sideways’ look at the period. Although there are a few excellent history books that cast their nets wider,
(#litres_trial_promo) too often such accounts approach early modern Britain from the viewpoint of the great and the good. Theirs is a story of major politicians, generals, bishops, kings, queens and princes. Mine, I hope, will be about everyone else.
Finally, I must say a few words about the way this book has been organised. Readers of the three other volumes of this four-part archaeological history of Britain will have grown used to a straightforward chronological layout. In fact, I’ll be quite honest and admit that, for the sake of consistency, I tried to organise this book in the same way. But sadly it just didn’t work. I found I was attempting an impossibly difficult juggling act with too many balls in the air at one time. Put another way, too much was happening too quickly across too many different areas of life to sustain a coherent narrative, especially when I switched themes, at which point, like a bad television documentary, I was forced to summarise or recapitulate ‘the story so far’. Anyhow, after a few weeks I abandoned the unequal struggle and decided instead to follow a series of general themes, chapter by chapter. These topics will, however, be approached chronologically. Of course an author is never a good judge of such things, but, fingers crossed, I think it works rather better than I once dared to hope.
(#ulink_9cc130ee-976b-55fe-8859-812ac11c8c4d) I use the terms Scheduled (for ancient sites) and Listed (for standing buildings) to denote that these places are protected by Act of Parliament.
Chapter One
Market Forces: Fields, Farming and the Rural Economy
SO FAR MY investigation of Britain’s archaeological past has taken me almost two millennia this side of prehistory, my own area of expertise. I am now deep within unknown territory, what medieval adventurers might have described as terra incognita. With this in mind I trust readers will forgive me if I follow an old excavator’s principle and work from the known to the unknown.
So I want to start our exploration of Britain in the post-medieval period in the farms and fields of the countryside. There, at least, I feel reasonably at home and not just because I was brought up in a small village, but because over the past thirty-odd years my wife Maisie and I have kept a small sheep farm which would regularly make a tiny profit, until, that is, 2001, when the market value of British livestock collapsed, rather like wheat prices after the Black Death. In our case the miscreants have been BSE/scrapie, foot-and-mouth (twice) and now the dreaded Bluetongue in all its grisly variants. More recently, and much to our surprise, things have picked up. This improvement followed directly on the bursting of the bankers’ bubble in 2008, when the collapse of cheap credit forced an international reassessment of what matters in life. At last people have recognised that the era of cheap food was always unsustainable. Anyhow, my interest in sheep-farming has given me insights into, and much sympathy for, historic and ancient farmers. So let’s start our journey where the food that nourishes human life originates: with farms, with farmers, and their families.
I would guess that over the years archaeologists have excavated hundreds, if not thousands, of prehistoric, Roman and medieval farms, farmyards and field systems. I myself have dug upwards of a dozen. But with one exception, which I will discuss shortly, I cannot think of a single post-medieval or modern farm that has been treated in this way.
(#ulink_bbbbb6bf-9a17-54e6-ba8f-173648b86cf0) This simple fact illustrates, if anything can, how different is the way that post-medieval archaeology is carried out. There are fewer excavations and instead far, far more effort goes into the accurate surveying of upstanding remains which are then painstakingly tied in with the documentary evidence. So that’s how things are done and to some extent it makes complete sense, because why dig when you can measure and survey at a fraction of the cost?
It is all perfectly rational, but nevertheless the digger/excavator deep down inside me feels a bit uneasy: surely without entirely new and unexpected information from the ground there is always a danger that observations derived from surveys can somehow be made to ‘fit’ the documentary evidence? True, these two strands of research can together combine to reveal fascinating stories, but, speaking entirely for myself, I sometimes enjoy seeing theories – even my own – being turned rudely upside down. The inevitable rethink that follows can be wonderfully invigorating and is far cheaper than a bottle of Champagne. That’s what makes the writing up of an excavation such fun: it becomes a prolonged process in which pennies drop with unexpected force, delight and frequency.
British archaeology has a distinguished history of long-term projects in which one or two slightly obsessive characters – and I’m happy to number myself among them – assemble a team of similarly slightly obsessive people who then work closely together, often lubricated with quantities of drink and coffee, to reveal the archaeological story of a particular place or region. In my various books on Britain’s archaeology I have had good reason to thank these people whose work I have ransacked for ideas. Often these long-term projects can produce fascinating tales that develop gradually over the years and become suffused with a life and vigour all of their own. One of the very best of them is about the archaeology of the small Somerset parish of Shapwick. We first visited this village on the edge of the marshy Somerset Levels in Britain in the Middle Ages.
(#litres_trial_promo) As I explained there, one of the slightly obsessive characters behind the Shapwick project is my old friend Professor Mick Aston, better known to millions of viewers today as the grey-haired archaeologist in the stripy jumper on Time Team.
Although not religious himself, Mick will go to great lengths to help a church in difficulties and when, in the summer of 2007, I read in our local paper that the magnificent building in Long Sutton needed urgent repairs to its roof, I thought of Mick, and together we organised a public lecture, which was to launch the vicar’s appeal for funds. The church is rather extraordinary. Like many around the Wash, it is very large and appears on the outside to be quite late – maybe fourteenth century – but when you enter be prepared for a surprise, because the interior is almost completely Norman, and Norman of a very high order. Mick got wildly excited and was convinced that the superb workmanship around us was Cluniac (a monastic order famous for its first-rate buildings). This book isn’t about the Middle Ages (and I’ll get to the point in a moment), but Mick’s presence drew a huge crowd and the church was thronged with people. There were stalls selling local books and magazines, and the nearby village hall supplied a stream of people contentedly munching their way through vast Fenland cow pies. I was forcibly struck by the scene and realised that the church had suddenly become what it was in medieval times: the centre of a bustling community and not the exalted, pious and remote place that so many country churches have become since the liturgical reforms of Victorian times.
The following morning Mick appeared clasping what had to be the thickest paperback book I have ever seen. He thudded it down on my desk. It was, or rather is, a staggering 1,047 pages long and includes a CD-ROM of many hundreds more. Having written one or two thickish tomes myself, I know just how much effort it must have taken Mick, and his long-term collaborator, Chris Gerrard, to write and assemble such a Goliath. And now, a few weeks later, I have more or less digested its main findings and it is indeed an astonishing work of great scholarship. It is the account of a survey that took place over a decade, from 1989 to 1999, and involved the methodical field-walking and selected excavation of most of the parish of Shapwick.
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Field-walking, incidentally, is the process whereby a group of archaeologists walk slowly over a field, carefully following a grid. As they walk they put any finds they can see on the surface into bags which are marked with a grid reference. Strange as it may seem, this can be very hard work: on wet days heavy clay sticks to your boots and soon your shoulders start to ache because your head is permanently inclined towards the ground; by this stage, too, the constant dipping down to pick up finds gets to the muscles in your back and calves.
You might think that field-walking would best be done in the warmth of summer, but in fact it doesn’t work like that. Obviously land put down to woodland, grass or permanent pasture can’t be fieldwalked, but neither can ground that has been freshly ploughed or harrowed. Ideally, cultivated land should be left to the mercies of wind, rain and frost for at least three weeks before it is walked. That way, finds are washed clean and can readily be spotted on the surface. After a day’s walking, the bags are taken somewhere dry where they are emptied, the finds washed and divided into various categories, such as bone, flint, tile, pottery, brick and clay tobacco pipe fragments (which are common on post-medieval sites of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries).
One reason why post-medieval archaeology is so important is that it allows us better to understand what archaeologists sometimes refer to as ‘formation processes’. In the past these tended to be assumed or were simply taken for granted, which was a shame, because in fact they are crucially important. So what are they? Perhaps the simplest way to think about them is to ponder the many possible ways that archaeological deposits were formed in the very first instance. Take an obvious example: when rubbish was swept under a reed mat or when coins slipped through holes in a tinker’s pockets to land in the mud of a garden path. Some could have been formed through deliberate dumping (what today we would call ‘fly-tipping’), or during religious offerings, sacrifices or perhaps in the course of a cataclysmic event, such as a fire, earthquake, hurricane, tsunami or the eruption of a great volcano.
Usually one can rule out certain options. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are generally infrequent in Britain, for example. But then it gets more complex. Dredging of the Thames to allow larger ships upstream in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries revealed huge quantities of Bronze Age weapons and human skulls. At the time it was assumed that these had been washed into the river from settlements along the shoreline. Somewhat later people preferred to think that much of this material had been lost when ancient travellers had attempted to ford the river. Today we tend to regard most of these river finds as being the result of deliberate religious offerings to the waters. In fact, there is precious little by way of hard and fast evidence to support any of these suggestions. As a general rule such explanations tend to depend on which theories are currently fashionable in academic circles – and nowadays ideas centring around religion and ritual are much in favour.
So let’s suppose that we’ve emptied the contents of our field-walking bags onto a table. The first problem one has to address is simple: how did these hundreds (more usually thousands) of things find their way into, and onto, the ground? Now with very ancient prehistoric material it can be difficult to decide what surface finds actually represent. Soft, poorly fired pottery rarely survives attack by the humic acids in the ploughsoil, and bone succumbs quite quickly as well. So their absence does not mean that they were never there in the first place. As a result, all one is usually left with is flint. And it’s usually impossible or very difficult to decide whether a scattering of flints originated from a permanent village, a camp or a temporary squat, where a handful of hunters stopped to prepare a few new arrowheads after breakfast.
Such conundrums can be easier to unravel in Roman and medieval times when the appearance of bricks, roof tiles and mortar can signal the existence of demolished buildings. But again, although Roman pottery is harder and tends to survive rather better in the soil, bone can soon vanish and iron rapidly rusts away to nothing. Only in post-medieval times does material survive so well in the topsoil that it becomes possible to decide with some certainty how, and indeed why, it originally became incorporated into the earth. And strangely, as Shapwick has shown so clearly, the manner in which some of this material seems to have found its way into the topsoil could be unexpected.
Viewed from an historical perspective, the end of the Middle Ages was traumatic, what with the Reformation, the rise of the Tudors and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. But although these were indeed major events, we will see that their actual impact on the growth and development of Britain’s rural and urban landscapes was surprisingly small. Of course specific sites – and here I am thinking most particu-larly of rural and urban monastic estates – were dramatically affected, but the general run of the landscape was not. It is becoming increas-ingly clear that many of the processes that became self-evident in the mid-sixteenth century had roots very much earlier, usually in the mid-fourteenth; this was the period which witnessed the first impacts of the successive waves of plague we generally refer to as the Black Death. We can see this continuity particularly clearly in the distribution of surface finds at Shapwick.
FIG 1 Three maps of Shapwick, Somerset showing (1) the distribution of later medieval (twelfth–fifteenth centuries) and (2) post-medieval (sixteenth– eighteenth centuries) pottery; map 3 shows the distribution of unidentified brick and tile fragments. These maps clearly demonstrate that there was no break in settlement at the close of the Middle Ages.
I have described how the range and robustness of post-medieval topsoil finds often provide clues as to how they found their way into the ground. Take an obvious example: if surface scatters of brick, tile, cement and plaster are discovered in a field, one might reasonably suppose this was the site of a demolished or collapsed building. Similarly, quantities of pottery and animal bone might indicate the erstwhile presence of rubbish tips. But here we immediately encounter problems, because the idea of useless rubbish is essentially a modern concept, and one which is already, thankfully, on the way out. Even as late as the nineteenth century much rubbish, including human excrement, was actually recycled and spread on the land where it provided a valuable source of nitrogen and other minerals. ‘Night soil’, as the contents of London’s many millions of privies was called, was spread on the fields growing vegetables in Bedfordshire and Middlesex, especially on the lighter gravel soils around Heathrow.
The men given the unenviable task of filling the carts and then transporting and spreading the night soil would smoke a lethal dark shag tobacco in clay pipes, believing this would keep illness, as well as the stink, at bay. Today if you field-walk these fields you will be rewarded by the discovery of thousands of broken pipe fragments. So the discovery of pieces of pipe provides a good indication of how that particular soil might have originated. There are also other clues that allow us to make an informed guess about a deposit’s formation process.
At Shapwick the concentration of small, unidentified brick and tile fragments did show some correspondence with the pottery distribution, but there were also other concentrations further away from the village, some of which could be associated with known demolished post-medieval buildings. Others seemed to have been dumped, most probably after a tile roof had been renewed or repaired. This distribution suggests that brick and tile was finding its way into the ground through a variety of quite different processes. But what about the quite clear replication of the brick/tile distribution with that of the pottery, especially to the immediate east of the village, where both seem to form a concentration in a broad strip, running north–south? We know that this strip was in existence in later medieval times and it is probably best explained as the detritus left, following the spreading of manure.
Today farmers tend to keep their farmyard manure and domestic rubbish separate, but I can remember farms in my childhood where the edible contents of the kitchen pail was fed to pigs and chickens while the stalks and bones were chucked away on the muck heap. Now the muck heap was not the foetid mess that townspeople might suppose. Its purpose was to allow muck to break down – today we would rather primly refer to this process as ‘composting’ – and become manure. This maturation usually took a year or less to complete. It’s worth noting here that if muck is spread onto the fields too soon it has precisely the opposite effect to that intended: it breaks down in the arable ground and in the process removes nitrogen from the soil. And of course it is nitrogen that plants require if they are to grow vigorously.
In the past, household and other debris was placed on muck heaps, which archaeologists, for reasons best known to themselves, like to refer to as ‘middens’. Middens also accumulated burnt wood (for the potash it contains), from which thousands of nails found their way into the soil. In regions where the subsoil was heavy or acidic, farmers would add broken bricks and mortar to help drainage and increase alkalinity. Pottery and glass sherds also helped clay soils to drain, so they were thrown onto the midden along with everything else. Then the process of hand-forking the manure into and out of carts helped break down the pieces of pottery, glass, brick and tile, which would explain the small size of so many of the sherds from that strip immediately east of Shapwick village.
So the distribution of finds from later medieval and post-medieval Shapwick proves beyond much doubt that the villagers continued to live in very much the same place and spread their manure in much the same way from at least the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. After that time in Britain generally we see the gradual introduction of non-farmyard fertilisers, of which the best known is bird dung from the Peruvian coast, known as guano, but other soil improvers were also used, such as gypsum, chalk and lime.
It is now becoming clear that the farming and manuring pattern of later medieval times continued into the post-medieval period relatively unaltered, yet this was a period almost of turmoil in the world of local landowners. Glastonbury Abbey, always a prosperous foundation but possibly the richest monastic estate in England by this time, owned land and two manors at Shapwick which were taken over by private landlords after the abbey’s dissolution in November 1539. This led to the enlargement of the mansion at Shapwick House sometime around 1620–40 when a long gallery was added to the medieval building. All this was happening, and yet the basic management of the landscape continued much as before. It is not, however, until the later eighteenth century that we see the village decline in size as the park around Shapwick House was greatly enlarged, a process sometimes referred to as emparkation. We know, for example, that seven houses near the great house were demolished between 1782 and 1787.
(#litres_trial_promo) This process continued until the great park was completed in the 1850s, a process which even involved the relocation of the parish church!
At this point I should perhaps admit I’ve been a little unfair because I’ve started this chapter by jumping straight into the deep end of a pool of detail. I did that because I wanted to illustrate the complexities inherent in any attempt to understand how the rural landscape developed at this crucially important period at the very beginning of our story. But our tale is about to get more complicated. In many ways this reflects the reality of modern research into rural archaeology: many of the old certainties have had to be abandoned in the face of a growing mountain of evidence that what might once have been seen as clear national trends actually fail to apply at the local level. But this is nothing new, as we saw in the Middle Ages.
One of the great archaeological breakthroughs in the study of English medieval rural geography happened in the 1950s and 1960s with the recognition that many villages in the English Midlands had either been abandoned or had shrunk massively, usually from some time in the fourteenth century. When mapped out, these villages could be seen to form a Central Province which extended in a broadly continuous swathe from Somerset, through the Midlands, Lincolnshire, eastern Yorkshire and into County Durham and Northumberland.
(#litres_trial_promo) The landscapes in this area featured villages that had been reorganised, or ‘nucleated’, by drawing outlying farms into a more focused central village, a process that happened in the centuries on either side of the Norman Conquest. The work of nucleation was carried out by local people, often encouraged by landlords and by other authorities, such as the Church and great monastic houses (as happened at Shapwick).
On both sides of this Central Province of ‘planned’, nucleated or ‘organised’ landscapes, the countryside was less formally structured, with dispersed settlements and smaller hamlets rather than nucleated villages. This landscape has been variously described as ‘ancient’ or ‘woodland’, but as both types are now known to have been very old indeed, I shall stick to the term ‘woodland’ as being slightly less misleading.
(#litres_trial_promo) The distinction between the Central Province of nucleated and the provinces of woodland landscapes on either side can be seen in the distribution of known pre-Norman woods and even, to some extent at least, in that of Pagan Saxon (mainly fifth-century) burials.
(#litres_trial_promo) So whatever allowed people of the Central Province to accept these changes, it must have been a social process with deeply embedded roots. Even more importantly for present purposes, the three provinces can clearly be distinguished when we plot the distribution of nineteenth-century parliamentary enclosures (about which more shortly). Today the landscape still reflects this tripartite split, with larger villages and more formal rectangular fields still largely confined to what had been the Central Province.
Farming in the woodland landscapes continued much as it had done in the Iron Age. It was based on individual holdings, which operated a mixed system of farming based around livestock and crops in those areas where lower levels of rainfall allowed them to be grown. The larger nucleated villages of the Central Province gave rise to the now famous collective Open Field farms of the Middle Ages where tenant farmers in the village shared their labour between their own holdings and those of the lord of the manor.
(#litres_trial_promo) This was the basis of the feudal system, which never developed in Britain to quite the same extent as it did on the Continent. Farmwork itself took place in from two to four huge Open Fields where the individual holdings were organised in strips. Each year the individual Open Fields would grow specified crops or would lie fallow, to be fertilised by grazing livestock. The control of what was in effect a large collective farm lay in the hands of the manorial court, which in turn was overseen by the lord of the manor. This system of farming was particularly well adapted to the heavy clay lands of the Midlands, which require rapid ploughing by many teams of oxen in the spring when conditions are right. Get the timing wrong and you’re left with a porridge-like field of mud.
When I learned about the manorial system at school I gained the impression that, once in place, it remained there, pretty much unaltered. This is perhaps where our views have changed the most. We now realise that it was a dynamic system that was modified from one area to another through time, depending not just on the local soil and climate, but on social factors, such as the wealth, power and influence of landlords. We have also discovered that the once clear distinction between the collective Open Field farms of the nucleated landscapes could not necessarily be distinguished from the individually owned farms of the woodland landscapes. In other words, there was Open Field farming in ‘woodland’ areas and vice versa.
(#litres_trial_promo) So although the very broad distinction into the three provinces can still be said to hold true, it simply cannot (and must not) be used to predict what one might discover in a randomly selected tract of landscape.
These warnings become even more important from the fourteenth century, when the population was massively reduced following food shortages and the terrible impact of successive waves of plague that then continued right through to the seventeenth century. Although, as I have said, the feudal ‘system’ never really took a firm hold in Britain, even after the Norman Conquest, most of the ties and obligations that did exist began to slip when the rich and powerful could no longer rely on a large, docile and cheap workforce.
(#litres_trial_promo) From the fourteenth century peasant farmers and working people realised they were no longer in a buyer’s market, especially when it came to the negotiation of their land tenure and labour contracts. In the western ‘woodland’ regions this less restricted climate began to give rise to a new, dual, rural economy where the families of smaller farmers developed a second string to their bow, which was usually based around something to do with the land, such as spinning and weaving, or coal-mining in places such as the Forest of Dean where coal was readily accessible. These dual economies varied from region to region, but as we will see later they played a crucial role in the development and growth of industry in these areas.
So for practical purposes, we can see the Middle Ages in rural Britain drawing to a close from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, for which reason the following three hundred years have been described as an age of transition in which political and religious changes did not necessarily happen smoothly. But viewed in the longer term they did indeed happen, and what is more, the evidence they left behind can be traced both on and in the ground, for example in the way that people changed their attitudes towards rites of burial and memorial and even in more mundane aspects of life, such as their choice of domestic pottery.
(#litres_trial_promo) The effects of these continuing processes of change, however, only became highly visible during the Reformation (c. 1480–1580), a period which saw the rise of Protestantism and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
I think I can understand why the version of history taught at school paid so much attention to the Open Field farms of medieval Britain. It was, after all, a very different way of doing things and it also gave teachers a chance to discuss the social ties and obligations of feudalism, while at the same time it brought the Church, monasteries, great landowners and manorial courts into the story. I can well remember being struck by the mystery and romance of the times, supposing myself a wandering troubadour strumming a lute at the feet of beautiful maidens. Although on second thoughts, this makes me think I wasn’t quite so young as I once imagined. Anyhow, the period that followed was, if anything, rather more fascinating, because it witnessed social and economic developments that are still affecting British life.
There can be no doubt that in many rural areas, especially in the old Central Province of the English Midlands, the post-medieval period got off to a shaky start. I’ll have more to say about this later, but in essence the general population decline of the later fourteenth, fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries, which was ultimately brought about by successive waves of plague, left its mark on early modern towns and villages in the countryside. However, things were about to improve, slowly at first, but then with gathering rapidity.
At this point I must add a quick note about the process known as ‘enclosure’, which I will discuss in greater detail shortly. When we discuss the end of the Open Field system we find it replaced by enclosure. Used in this way the word refers to a change in landownership where several owners are replaced by one. I think many people still labour under the misapprehension that the manorial system and Open Field farming both came to an abrupt end some time between the Battle of Bosworth (1485), which saw the effective end of the Wars of the Roses, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when a near-tyrant king effectively pulled the rug of power from under the feet of the Church. At least that is how things appeared. We now realise that both society and landscapes actually take rather longer to modify in so drastic a fashion. As I noted earlier, the seeds of change were planted in the mid-fourteenth century, but that was just the beginning. In many parts of Britain, especially in the Midlands and eastern parts of England, Open Field farms continued through the sixteenth century, but by its end nearly half had succumbed to enclosure. By 1700 three-quarters had been enclosed. So when statutory or parliamentary enclosure (see below, p. 38) began in earnest in the later eighteenth century only a quarter of the Open Fields required enclosure – and of course today we are left with just a single surviving Open Field parish, at Laxton, in Nottinghamshire.
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We have just seen that, although the dissolution of the great monastic house of Glastonbury had an immediate effect on landownership at Shapwick, the direct effect on patterns of farming was relatively slight. Only somewhat later, when the process of emparkation had got under way, did the longer-term results of the shift in landownership become evident in the landscape. In some places, however, the Dissolution had a sudden and dramatic effect. And nowhere was this more evident than in the Fens where a vast area of new land was drained, largely through the good offices of the Earls and then the Dukes of Bedford who had acquired money plus the vast estates of Thorney Abbey during the Dissolution; this provided the basis for the region’s prosperity from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
(#litres_trial_promo) We will see shortly that drainage, mostly to improve pasture, rather than to provide new arable land, was to become an important feature of the second phase of post-medieval farming improvements of the early and mid-eighteenth century.
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries we see a gradual move away from the Open Field system of farming towards a more complex set of regional patterns which better reflected local soil types, transport networks and what today we would call marketing opportunities. It was never simply a matter of finding the best soil to grow a particular crop. Take, for example, the vegetable farms around Sandy in Bedford. Here, as any vegetable gardener could tell you, the Ouse Valley terrace gravels in their natural state are rather too light and well drained to grow the top-quality brassicas, such as the Brussels sprouts that are still such a noted speciality of the region; and it was only the addition of much manure and fertiliser, together with the ready availability of the vast market provided by a rapidly growing London population, that allowed the vegetable trade to develop successfully.
Plotting the development of early modern (1550–1750) farming has been a process which has owed much to economic historians and geographers, such as Joan Thirsk and Eric Kerridge, and without the basis of their pioneering research the recent work of more archaeologically orientated scholars, such as Susanna Wade Martins and Tom Williamson, would not have been possible. Today agricultural history is going through a very exciting period indeed. Thanks to people like Joan Thirsk we have long since abandoned some of the rather simplistic ideas – I almost said ideals – exemplified by terms such as the Agricultural Revolution and are now in the throes of creating a new history of rural Britain, based more on facts unearthed from survey and from detailed examination of sources such as estate records, than on over-arching concepts that sound good, but actually mean little. I shall return to the evidence for the timing of that supposed agricultural ‘revolution’ shortly.
In the later 1950s and 1960s Kerridge, followed in the seventies and eighties by Thirsk, together with other economic historians, began to produce maps that plotted the extent of early modern agricultural specialisation in England. These maps were actually plotting complexity, so they themselves can be daunting to read. But I make no apologies for that. I don’t think it’s necessary to grapple with precise details of individual regions, unless, of course, one has a specific interest, but the overall picture is nonetheless important, so I have reproduced Thirsk’s simplified general plan here. This map was based on two more complex maps, the first of which showed English agricultural regions in the century and a half from the start of the sixteenth century (actually from 1500 to 1640); the second illustrated how the situation developed in the following century or so, from 1640 to 1750.
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The two detailed maps are, however, important because they illustrate well the growing complexity of the post-medieval farming landscape. Both show a sharp distinction between mixed farming (arable and pasture) and pasture farming, which in turn is subdivided into woodland pasture and open pasture. All three main categories are then further subdivided into different varieties of mixed, woodland and open pasture farming. In the earlier map there is still a broad swathe of mixed farming that extends if not quite from Somerset, then from the south, through the Midlands, Lincolnshire, most of east Yorkshire and up to County Durham and Northumberland. Although this zone has altered somewhat from the Central Province of the earlier Middle Ages it is still broadly recognisable, despite now extending into parts of Norfolk, Kent and Essex. By the time we get to the second map, the areas of mixed farming have slipped south and east, largely departing from the medieval pattern.
FIG 2 Map showing the farming regions of early modern England (1500–1750).
The principal difference between the two maps is the far greater complexity of the second, later, one. Take just two regions. Post-medieval innovations are perhaps most marked in my own area, the Fens, which are shown in the earlier map (and indeed in the simplified one reproduced here) as a single region, given over to open pastoral farming involving stock-fattening with horse-breeding, dairying, fishing and fowling. After 1640, and the first phase of widespread, though still incomplete drainage, the earlier style of farming has been confined to a narrow area of marshland around the Wash, whereas the bulk of Fenland now comprises two broad areas, one to the north of silty soils that are devoted to stock- and pig-keeping, fattening, and corn-growing, while to the south the more peaty land is still mainly used for grazing and, of course, no cereals are grown. Incidentally, somewhat later, in the earlier nineteenth century, following the introduction of steam pumps, we see a further near-complete transformation of this particular landscape.
In Kent and Sussex, although the distinctive oval shape of Wealden geology continues to exert an influence (as indeed it does to this day), the varieties of farming become very much more complex in the period covered by the later map. This in part reflects the arrival of entirely new ideas, such as the introduction of fruit orchards and hop fields. The point to emphasise here is that early modern farming was a dynamic and increasingly specialised business which was becoming ever more dependent on the growth of towns and cities. Nowhere was this more important than around the two principal capitals of Edinburgh and London, which by the end of the Middle Ages had come to dominate the region and countryside around them. The areas peripheral to the large towns and cities not only provided food and raw materials for the growing urban population, but perhaps as significantly, they also provided a constantly renewing pool of labour, especially following the recurrent waves of plague that bedevilled many of the larger cities in later medieval and early post-medieval times.
We are still in the realms of general economic history and I want soon to come down to earth and see how individual farms and fields were adapted as economic conditions changed around them. But first we must briefly examine the idea of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ which is traditionally thought to have happened between 1760 and 1830. A slightly longer view (1700–1850) would allow the main events to have happened in three stages, the first stage being completed sometime around 1750–70. These initial developments involved the introduction of new crops, especially root crops such as turnips, which we now know were pioneered not in Britain, but in the Low Countries, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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As early as 1600 growing Dutch influence had seen the introduction of cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips, carrots, parsnips and peas to market gardens around London. Turnips were introduced to East Anglia from Holland in the mid-sixteenth century and they then formed an important element in the famous Norfolk four-course (crop) rotation of wheat, turnips, barley, clover and/or grasses.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Norfolk four-course rotation required the land to lie fallow for less time (if the land had become too depleted the final crop of clover and/ or grass could be extended for an additional season).This cycle of crops produced more grazing and fodder in the form of turnips which in turn resulted in more and fatter livestock and, perhaps just as important, more manure to be spread on the fields. I also believe it must have given livestock farmers greater security and peace of mind.
As I have discovered to my cost, in seasons when late winter rains continue into March and April it can be unwise to turn young animals out onto muddy fields and waterlogged pasture. As any livestock farmer knows to his cost, fast-grown grass is deficient in minerals and both ewes and lambs can soon develop ‘grassland staggers’. So you house them for longer, but the next thing you discover is that the hay and straw they have been happily consuming over winter simply lack the nourishment that growing lambs so desperately need and soon they start to look thin, lanky and bony. They also lack vigour and don’t rush about in that wildly enthusiastic, but completely mad and pointless fashion that can make them so endearing. In such situations today one buys in (expensive) supplements usually in the form of ‘cake’, but as farmers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew only too well, the sprouting heads of growing parsnips and the roots themselves were almost equally nutritious – and a lot cheaper.
Perhaps the most significant reform that enabled changes to happen in the British countryside was the concept of enclosure. Having said that, we shouldn’t go overboard in our enthusiasm. For a start, huge areas of the later medieval landscape had never come into collective ownership and large estates, both private and owned by ecclesiastical authorities, were already in existence in the Middle Ages. As we saw at Shapwick, the latter could readily be transferred to private ownership. Many of the small farms of the two later medieval woodland provinces began to rationalise their holding first in later medieval times and with increasing rapidity from the sixteenth century. This was enclosure, but not carried out by individual Acts of Parliament, as was to happen much later. It has been termed ‘enclosure by agreement’ and it also involved the dismantling of Open Field farms and the taking in of common land.
Although we should record that in many instances the ‘agreement’ was imposed by a rich landowner and his lawyers (and this is particularly true in the case of the many large enclosures of Tudor times that were created to make vast, open sheep runs). The main era of enclosures by agreement was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and today these landscapes can still be seen to cover large tracts of countryside in the west and south-west of England, especially in Devon and Cornwall.
(#litres_trial_promo) As a general guide, early enclosures of this sort often preserve features of earlier landscapes in their layout, such as the gentle reversed S boundaries of abandoned Common Fields. That distinctive shape, incidentally, was a ‘fossil’ left by years and years of strip ploughing, where the plough teams had restricted space to turn at each end, thereby leaving a slightly sinuous furrow.
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Modern landscapes that arose through early enclosure, or enclosure by agreement, and by means of parliamentary enclosure appear very different. Not only do the early enclosures incorporate previous features, such as those reversed S boundaries, but although they are generally square-ish or rectilinear, their fields certainly don’t follow a rigid pattern and it is usually obvious that they arose as a series of distinct, one-off agreements. As such they tend to follow the shape and ‘grain’ of the topography rather better than the later (often parliamentary) enclosures which were accurately surveyed in. As a consequence, in these later enclosures dead straight lines and right angles predominate. Although many would disagree with me, I still like these later landscapes which I find have a charm all of their own – maybe it’s because I grew up in them that I feel at ease there.
Parliamentary enclosure took place rather later in our story, generally in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Essentially it was a response to the increasing pace of enclosure by agreement in those areas of central and eastern England where the medieval Open Field system had left a complex legacy of sometimes quite large parishes with numerous smallholdings belonging to many tenant and owner-occupier farmers. In such complex situations agreement was often difficult or impossible. So the passing of individual Acts of Enclosure was seen as a way through these problems. In theory at least it was a fair and transparent system where the process of enclosure was overseen by a parliamentary commissioner who also saw to it that the land was surveyed and parcelled up by official surveyors. But there was much scope for potential abuse: for example, areas of common land and so-called ‘wastes’ (where nobody claimed actual ownership) had to be reapportioned among the landowners of the parish. And as so often happens, the actual results were rather different and by the end of the process the big estates had done very nicely thank you, while substantial landowners and rising yeoman farmers also generally increased the size of their holding; more importantly, these holdings were now arranged more rationally and could be farmed much more efficiently. But small farmers often ended up proportionately worse off than their larger neighbours.
The first Parliamentary Act of Enclosure was passed in 1604 and in the eighteenth century these rapidly became the dominant method of enclosure, with some four thousand Acts passed between 1750 and 1830, covering about a fifth of England’s surface area.
(#litres_trial_promo) The process continued through the nineteenth century. Apart from a contribution from the taxpayer, most of the cost of parliamentary enclosure was paid for by the larger landowners and this was probably why they tended to fare better than smallholders. It’s not hard to work out why. If one bears in mind what one learned as a child about the ratio of surface to volume, the men with the smallest holdings had proportionately the longer boundaries. These then had to be re-fenced and re-hedged at their owners’ expense. In many instances this was to prove too much so they sold out to their larger neighbours.
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In the English Midlands parliamentary enclosure must be considered successful, but that cannot be said for everywhere, even in England. In upland areas of northern England, for example, parliamentary enclosure often ignored topography and was sometimes frankly irrational. If anything, it made efficient farming more difficult.
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In Scotland enclosure was by agreement, or latterly by imposition of powerful landowners. In the Lowlands the process was well under way in the 1760s and 1770s and in the Highlands towards the end of the century, where they became known as the Highland Clearances; these enclosures often involved the clearance of entire rural populations to make way for sheep pasture and later for moorland game reserves. The Clearances continued late into the nineteenth century when huge numbers of people were either removed to new settlements often within the landowners’ estates along the coastal plain, or were sent abroad, principally to Canada. To give an idea of the scale of the Clearances, some 40,000 people were removed from the Isle of Skye between 1840 and 1880.
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I think it would be a big mistake simply to think of the earlier post-medieval period in terms of big all-transforming movements, such as enclosure. Many poorer rural people lived outside the world of what one might term legalised land tenure. Theirs was an existence where possession was nine-tenths of the law and nowhere was this more evident than in the less prosperous parts of upland, non-Anglicised Wales. Because these holdings were, at best, quasi-legal, they have left little by way of a paper trail. So to track them down, my old friend Bob Sylvester (who initially made his name by sorting out the medieval archaeology of the Norfolk Fens) has had to turn to archaeology.
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According to Bob, the traditional archaeological view of Wales was ‘a single undifferentiated upland landmass, appended to the western side of England’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, such attitudes made no allowances for the distinctive landscapes of Wales which often arose through the action of people and communities that were very different from those further east. One such distinctive feature has been termed ‘encroachment’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As the population of Wales began to grow from the later seventeenth century, and most particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth, impoverished landless people built themselves small houses and laid out smallholdings on the common land of the uplands, usually without the landowner (often the Crown) being aware. These people were often given moral and practical support by local parish councils who did not like seeing perfectly good land being left to stand idle. Sometimes landowners themselves encouraged such encroachment, especially if they were looking for labour to exploit coal and other mineral resources in these otherwise under-populated upland regions.
Informal settlements of this kind are fairly distinctive on the ground. They consist of a seemingly random scatter of small single-family households, within a couple of acres of land. Sometimes the more successful homesteads acquired the additional outbuildings of an upland farm and the various houses are usually served by a single, meandering lane. Encroachments are by no means confined to the uplands and can be found in valley floors, especially on land that was once poorly drained and uncontrolled, such as many of the tributary valleys of the Severn along the border country of Montgomeryshire and Shropshire.
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Despite local difficulties of the sort we have just discussed, the rationalisation of the rural landscape brought about by enclosure of all types meant that farmers and landowners were now able to take practical measures to improve their land. In most cases this involved under-drainage, which was particularly effective in the clay lands of East Anglia, where huge areas were drained in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under-drainage involved the cutting, by hand, of a series of parallel, deep, narrow trenches containing brushwood, gravel, stone or clay pipes, these then emptied into ditches along the field’s edges, which in turn had to be deepened and improved. The work was often paid for by landowners.
(#litres_trial_promo) The other major innovation which has left a distinct mark in the landscape, mostly of western Britain (although it was tried without the same success in drier East Anglia, too), was the extensive ‘floating’ of land through the construction of artificial water meadows in the years between 1600 and 1900.
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These projects involved the digging of numerous channels to carry water from a main cut, usually alongside a natural river, and from there into a series of subsidiary streams carefully positioned to distribute it evenly across the meadow. These flooded meadows could be extensive, covering many acres, and their construction also involved the erection of numerous sluice gates which had to be opened and closed in a specific order, depending on what was needed. In fact the actual business of operating and maintaining water meadows required labour, plus considerable skill and experience, which might help explain why they failed to thrive after the opulent period known as Victorian high farming (which I’ll explain later) was brought to an end by the great agricultural depression of the 1870s.
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Ultimately water meadows were intended to extend the initial flush of spring and early summer grass, both through simple watering and by the laying down of a very thin layer of flood-clay (alluvium) which provided early season nourishment to the growing grass. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and well into the nineteenth, water meadows made the keeping of sheep and the growing of corn on the chalk downlands of Wessex and southern England such a profitable business. This is because the rather thin grass cover of the chalk downs doesn’t really start growing in earnest until May, so the new water meadows on the richer soils of the valley bottoms meant that abundant grazing was now available in March and April, when stocks of hay were nearly exhausted. Almost as important, it also meant that the arable parts of the farm now had an even more plentiful supply of
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There is now a general consensus that the concept of a short-lived and as such truly revolutionary period of agricultural ‘improvement’ is mistaken and instead we should be thinking of a more extended era of ‘improvement’, from, say, 1500 to 1850. And many, myself included, would reckon that such a length of time – some 350 years – was more evolutionary than revolutionary.
(#litres_trial_promo) It’s roughly the same length of time that separates the present from the execution of King Charles I. With all of this in mind, I prefer to refer to the period as the era of agricultural development – because it could be argued that, with hindsight, some of the so-called ‘improvements’ were actually nothing of the sort.
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Whatever one’s definition of the period, the changes I have just been discussing are generally seen to have been the result of pioneering work carried out by enlightened, reform-minded, high-profile individuals, who are usually lumped together under the general heading of agricultural ‘Improvers’. Jethro Tull, largely I suspect because of the 1970s rock band named after him, is the best known of these ‘Improvers’. I remember being taught at school that he invented the seed drill, whereas in reality he urged its adoption and was a great believer in it. He didn’t actually invent it. Other important ‘Improvers’ were the 1st Earl of Leicester, Thomas William Coke (1754–1842) of Holkham Hall, Norfolk (known at the time as ‘Coke of Norfolk’), and the Whig Cabinet Minister Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend (1674–1738) who helped to promote the Norfolk four-course rotation. We must not forget that the period also saw the introduction of important new breeds of livestock through the researches of men like Robert Bakewell (1725–95), of Dishley Grange, who farmed the heavy clay lands of Leicestershire.
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When one reads the correspondence of the different ‘Improvers’ it is hard not to be carried along by their sheer infectious enthusiasm. It is abundantly clear that they were convinced that their work was important for the general good of society. They were not in it either to create agricultural ‘improvements’ for their own sake, or just to make money (although that helped). The concept of ‘improvement’ had a philosophical basis firmly rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was seen as a part of the new rational ideal, the triumph of civilisation over nature. It’s not for nothing that great agricultural ‘Improvers’, such as Coke of Norfolk, were also keen landscape gardeners. As with the new style of farming ‘Neatness, symmetry and formal patterns, so typical of the eighteenth-century landscape garden, represented the divide between “culture” and “nature”. Indeed, many landlords saw little difference between the laying out of parks around their houses and the new farmland beyond.’
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The ‘Improvers’ were undoubtedly remarkable men, but for various reasons to do with their social status at the time, or their enthusiasm for the promotion of a pet project (such as Tull and the seed drill), they have been treated more favourably by history than many of their humbler contemporaries. Modern research is, however, starting to redress this imbalance, largely thanks to detailed studies of individual estates and farms by historians such as Susanna Wade Martins, whose work is helping to transform our understanding of the period.
I hope readers will forgive me, but at this point I cannot help thinking how strange it is that certain remarkable people can drift in and out of one’s life, barely leaving a ripple in their wake. Only later do you kick yourself for not seeking out their views at the time. It’s rather like being the man who chose to argue the price of eggs with Sir Isaac Newton. In the case of Susanna Wade Martins, her husband Peter was the director of an Anglo-Saxon excavation I took part in, in 1970, at their home village in Norfolk. Susanna was around and about, but I knew her interests lay outside our dig and, afflicted by the myopia of youth, I failed to discover what she was researching at the time. A major lost opportunity, that.
Over the years, and perhaps more than anyone else, Susanna has thrown light on the lives of individual farmers; maybe this is in part because her academic work is deeply rooted in the experience that she and Peter have acquired running their own small farm. Indeed, as I have related elsewhere, we bought our first four sheep from them, back in the early 1980s.
(#litres_trial_promo) Peter warned me that sheep could become addictive – and he was dead right.
Susanna sees the initial development of modern British farming as being the responsibility of ‘yeoman farmers’. These men and their families emerged from the slow collapse of the feudal system and became very much more common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yeomen were independent, small farmers who usually owned most, if not all of their own land. Later, they might enter into tenancy agreements with larger landowners, while retaining a core of land for themselves. In some instances they used the profits of their land to acquire estates and to better themselves in the greater worlds of politics and industry. A good example of a successful yeoman family were the Brookes of Coalbrookdale who did so much to develop the iron industry there in the later sixteenth century – but more on them in Chapter 5.
It was yeoman farmers who developed the system of ‘up and down husbandry’ in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This system involved a sort of long-term rotation where the land was cropped for arable – usually cereals – for, say, seven successive years, before it was returned to pasture to recover for a slightly longer period of up to a dozen years. This sort of farming was very productive and was adopted across most of the English Midlands. Interestingly, although the population of Britain was rising from 1670, grain prices actually fell year on year – which indicates, if anything can, the productivity of ‘up and down husbandry’.
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Landowners only start to become generally interested in agricultural ‘improvement’ 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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 of1794. The distribution of pottery and of surviving buildings that pre-date1700 clearly show that the centre of the original medieval village had been abandoned. Documentary sources suggest this happened very early, before1400, 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).
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many crucks were made from black poplar which was abundant at the time and which always curves its trunk away from the prevailing winds. But what makes this building so fascinating is the fact that the original medieval cruck beams had been numbered by the carpenters who erected them. Maurice quickly spotted this and was able to deduce that the eastern bay had been demolished when the building of the new conversion began.
So our anonymous Nottinghamshire farmer – who knows? Possibly an early yeoman – had spotted the Glapton barn as being ripe for conversion. The original building was of three bays and he still required half of it (i.e. 1½ bays) as a barn, for storage. He converted the remaining half-bay into a small farmhouse which he extended well beyond the old barn, mostly to the east – just as one sees so often today when Victorian barns are converted into houses, or second homes. The new timber-framed house was laid out in a way that was not strictly speaking medieval, but would nonetheless have been familiar to someone from the Middle Ages: there was a hall and parlour facing each other on either side of a cross-passage which led to service rooms (dairy, kitchen and buttery) behind the parlour. The house continued to be modified in various small ways for the rest of its long, but sadly finite, life.
If, as the Glapton barn/house showed, physical evidence for the rise of the first yeoman farmer families can be hard to track down, the success of their descendants has left a distinctive mark on the landscape, in the form of some fine seventeenth-century houses. These houses indeed proclaim the message ‘We have done well in life’, but without the over-the-top ostentation and tasteless vulgarity of the much later ‘financial crisis’ profiteers. The latter eyesores are aggressive and lack any charm whatsoever, whereas their seventeenth-century antecedents reflect the fact that their builders were still rooted in the real world of cattle and sheep, ploughs and ploughmen. I suppose in the final analysis the surviving yeoman farmhouses of Britain can justify their prominent place in the countryside, because they were based on genuine risk and on real, non-paper products that actually fed the rapidly growing population.
The century after 1720 witnessed the rise of a new type of carefully laid out and planned farm whose architecture reflected the classical ideals of the great landowners of the time. These buildings are often Italianate in style, reflecting Palladian grace just as much as the need to house cattle or store turnips. What a great shame it is that modern farmers have completely abandoned any attempt to give their crudely functional buildings any architectural merit at all. It’s as if they felt obliged to proclaim that their structures were erected to do the job cheaply and efficiently and to hell with the look of the landscape. They could learn much from later eighteenth-century architects such as Daniel Garrett or Samuel Wyatt whose elegant Italianate farm buildings still function as they were originally intended. Some of his best-known creations can be seen around the estate of ‘Coke of Norfolk’, at Holkham Hall.
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Many of the elegant Italianate buildings of eighteenth-century model farms were still successfully in use during the next major phase of British farming, sometimes known as Victorian high farming, which began around 1830 and lasted until the great agricultural depression of the 1870s. This was a period of unparalleled prosperity which saw the construction not just of well-planned and laid-out new farms, but of farms which, even by today’s standards, would be regarded as industrial. Designs for farms of this sort can be seen in contemporary pages of the sort of journals that progressive landowners read, such as that of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, where the range of buildings by J. B. Denton, illustrated here, first appeared.
(#litres_trial_promo) Today nearly every medium-sized farm in Britain can probably boast a few buildings of this era, but those belonging to large estates where capital-rich landowners were able to choose competent tenants and together form mutually beneficial partnerships, are particularly well endowed and have left us a rich legacy of fine farm buildings. I shall have more to say about the development of farms and farming on large rural estates in the next chapter.
FIG 4 The prosperous era known as Victorian high farming lasted for much of the nineteenth century, from 1830 to 1870. It saw an increasing number of close partnerships between landlords and tenants, where the latter acted as efficient managers and the former provided capital. The resulting farms could sometimes resemble large factories. The farm buildings shown here are from a design by J. B. Denton of 1879, and were erected at Thornington, near Kilham, Northumberland, around 1880.
In lowland England, if not in Wales and Scotland, it is probably true to say that the big and medium-sized farms of the nineteenth century have had a disproportionately large influence on the shape of the modern landscape. Recently archaeologists have quite rightly focused attention on these places, which for some reason were largely ignored in the 1970s and 1980s. However, there is also a much older tradition of recording so-called ‘vernacular architecture’ which I will define for present purposes as buildings built by people rather than trained architects often using traditional designs and materials. I say ‘often’, because sometimes buildings that are vernacular in spirit can be fashioned from mass-produced components, such as some converted barracks in Shropshire or the ‘Tin Tabernacle’ in Northamptonshire, which I discuss in Chapter 7.
(#litres_trial_promo) There used to be hot debate about what buildings were truly vernacular and which were not. But it was a fruitless debate and today we are less concerned about what is or isn’t ‘truly’ vernacular and now include many threatened nineteenth- and twentieth-century buildings, such as prefabricated temporary school buildings and cinemas.
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Much of the earlier surviving post-medieval rural architecture of Scotland and Wales is vernacular and a surprising amount survives in England, despite, or in some instances because of, the era of high farming.
(#litres_trial_promo) Many farming families are quite conservative and were reluctant to demolish earlier buildings, which they often ‘improved’ by adding huge and usually unsympathetic new wings and ranges. My own great-grandfather more than doubled the size of his modest Queen Anne house in Hertfordshire, a few windows of which now appear to squint out from behind a massive red-brick late Victorian pile. Indoors, and with sufficient time to spare, you can just work out the shape of the earlier building.
The post-medieval centuries witnessed the creation of the diverse rural landscapes that we all inhabit. True, there is evidence within those landscapes of much earlier times, but this is often hidden away, as humps and bumps, or sinuous field boundaries. Most of the ‘furniture’ of the countryside, the fences, gates and the drystone walls that surround our fields, were erected in the past two centuries – and if not, you can be certain that they have been extensively repaired in that time. Similarly, although there are indeed a few surviving ancient hedges (although sadly we no longer believe that these can be aged simply by counting their component species
(#litres_trial_promo)) these will have been laid, interplanted and today trimmed back by mechanised flail-cutters countless times in the last hundred years.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the British countryside will be aware that the eastern side of the country has a drier climate, which is why the landscape here is given over to arable and mixed livestock and arable farming. To the west the more moist, Atlantic climate tends to favour pasture. This broad distinction was first mapped by the farm economist James Caird in 1852 and it applies with even greater force today, when grazing livestock are almost completely absent across huge areas of east Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and East Anglia.
(#litres_trial_promo) If livestock are absent I also fear for the knowledge and traditions that were once a part of animal husbandry. The much-parodied grasping ‘barley baron’ whose eyes are only focused on the ‘bottom line’ and whose vision requires him to grub up all trees and hedgerows to create vast prairie-like fields, was, until very recently, not a complete figure of fun. Although most farmers used the availability of EEC grants responsibly, such men indeed existed and their depredations can still be seen, especially in parts of eastern England.
Indeed, anyone blessed with good eyesight could appreciate the devastation that was caused to the landscape of lowland Britain from about 1950 to 1990 when some 400,000 kilometres of hedgerow were destroyed.
(#litres_trial_promo) As I noted, much of this was perpetrated in the name of agricultural progress (I almost mistakenly said ‘improvement’) and often with huge injections of taxpayers’ money. The trouble is that any taxpayers with interests other than increased agricultural efficiency were simply ignored. With the single exception of Scheduled Ancient Monuments (i.e. sites protected by law), no regard was taken of any archaeological remains that might be damaged by the new methods of power-farming. After some thirty years of unrestrained destruction, during which the vast majority of lowland sites and monuments were either destroyed or severely damaged, the powers that be reluctantly acknowledged that the plough was a threat to what little remains of our past.
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Let’s finish this chapter by taking the long view. There can be little doubt that there were far larger changes to Britain’s rural landscapes than those that began in and then followed the Second World War. The arrival of farming itself in the Neolithic, around 4500 bc, is an obvious example. The development of the first fields in the earlier Bronze Age, from about 2000 bc, is another. In historic times further eras of change included the later Saxon period (in, say, the three centuries after ad 800), when we saw the rise of the Open Field system and the nucleation of dispersed settlements into more compact villages.
(#litres_trial_promo) Finally, and as we have just seen in this chapter, the disruption to rural life caused by successive waves of plague in the two centuries following the Black Death of 1348 was to prove of great importance, as it led directly to the regionalisation of the countryside that was such a prominent feature of the early modern period.
The rural transformations of prehistory and history, however, happened slowly, usually as part of more widespread changes in northern Europe (although the development of fields in Bronze Age Britain does still seem to have been a largely insular development).
(#litres_trial_promo) And when I say ‘slowly’, I mean over at least two, and more usually three or four centuries. In the case of the Neolithic adoption of farming, the process took a full millennium. But the changes that the British government decided to push through, in order to meet the threat to food supplies posed by the Nazis across the Channel, happened very rapidly indeed. Something broadly similar took place in the Roman period when southern Britain became, in effect, the western Empire’s ‘bread basket’, providing huge quantities of wheat for the Roman army. But unlike the rural reforms of the Second World War, the Roman changes were reversed in the late fourth and fifth centuries, when the troops were withdrawn – and large areas of the countryside reverted to grassland.
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The rapid movement out of pasture and into cereals and other crops that happened between 1939 and 1945 seems to have had a permanent effect. Recent research has drawn attention to the wartime changes to British farming which were intended to feed the populace, despite Hitler’s U-boat Atlantic blockade.
(#litres_trial_promo) Those reforms were urgently needed but they helped turn farmers and landowners from countrymen to businessmen, and everything that followed – especially the grant-driven over-production inspired by Brussels – was made possible by what happened then.
The wartime changes to the farming economy and landscape of Britain do help explain why subsequent developments, largely funded by EEC grant-aid in the form of the Common Agricultural Policy, or CAP, had such different effects on either side of the Channel. The small – tiny by British standards – landholdings of the French countryside were largely sustained by the injection of CAP cash – as, indeed, the legislation had intended from the very outset. But in Britain the far larger landowners and farmers, who had developed their businesses during the war, duly accepted the CAP handouts and used the money to further increase the size, and therefore the profitability, of their operations. They now had the capital to buy up smaller, generally less efficient operations, with the result that commercial farms in Britain grew rapidly in size throughout the seventies and eighties. Meanwhile in France, CAP money continued to support what was in effect a peasant-farming economy.
So ultimately, when I’m out field-walking and I angrily ponder the dark line left in the soil by a recently destroyed hedgerow, I first blame Nazis and then Eurocrats. I suppose it’s much easier than blaming myself, and millions like me, who allowed such terrible things to happen to the countryside of lowland Britain in the last three decades of the twentieth century.
If torn-out hedgerows are a prominent feature of the rural landscape bequeathed to us by the later twentieth century, then so-called ‘agri-mansions’ must be another. These large houses, built by successful farmers, contractors and farm managers, feature all the trappings of the more affluent outer suburbs, from swimming pools to gazebos and barbecues able to grill a medium-sized elephant. Large four-wheel-drives may be seen on their appropriately vast paved forecourts. These places were not built to conceal wealth. Far from it. They are latter-day symbols of power and prosperity: expressions in brick and stone of individual success and personal wealth. And as such, of course, they are nothing new.
(#ulink_652ff25a-4ffb-54a5-a874-9761076907a5)More to the point, nor can Dr Audrey Horning (University of Leicester).
Chapter Two
‘Polite Landscapes’: Prestige, Control and Authority in Rural Britain
IF THERE IS ONE aspect of Britain that is widely celebrated abroad it must surely be the literally astonishing beauty of its parks and country houses. I use the word ‘literally’ because I’ve long been addicted to house and church visiting and I still come across scenes in parks and gardens that make me gasp in astonishment. I will never forget, for example, a visit to Stourhead in Wiltshire, once the home of perhaps Britain’s greatest early archaeologist/antiquary, Sir Richard Colt Hoare. The park around Stourhead was designed by his ancestor Henry Hoare II and has remained open to visitors since the 1740s.
(#litres_trial_promo) The carefully laid-out walk around the great artificial lake takes one past a succession of beautifully positioned temples, vistas and grottoes.
As a keen gardener myself, I am convinced that the main reason why the layout of the grounds at Stourhead work so well is that Hoare created them gradually, by degrees. Unlike most garden designers today, he did not start with a blank piece of paper and then impose his design on the landscape. Instead, the design is the landscape, only subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, modified to fit its creator’s long-term vision. For me, Stourhead, together with Stowe (Buckinghamshire), Painshill (Surrey) and the water gardens at Studley Royal (North Yorkshire) are some of the greatest achievements of British art and design. One reason for their success is the discipline acquired by accepting the confines of their respective landscapes; I think this is why such gardens are infinitely superior to the stage-design set pieces one encounters today at events like the Chelsea Flower Show.
I well remember the hot autumn day when my wife Maisie and I first visited Stourhead. We had almost finished the descent from the last of the great garden buildings, the Temple of Apollo, and as we walked down the path we were both thinking similar thoughts, along the lines of a cool drink and a large sandwich. We approached the houses of Stourton, the estate village that successive owners of Stourhead had subtly altered to make more attractive, when my gaze was suddenly taken by a glint off the water to my left. I had forgotten all about the lake in my eagerness to find lunch and almost missed one of the greatest man-made views in the British landscape, over to the Palladian bridge and across the lake towards the Pantheon. I was so captivated by the scene before me that I then spent the next half-hour wrestling with cameras and tripod, attempting to take the perfect photograph. Meanwhile, lucky Maisie was grabbing something to eat before the pub closed for the afternoon.
Of course that view at Stourhead was no accident and was always meant to be the visitor’s final coup de théâtre. After more than two and a half centuries it had lost none of its power or magic. A succession of inspired individuals have contributed to the growth and development of the British landscaped park, which is still regarded by many as the nation’s greatest contribution to world art, so I would like to make it clear from the very outset that in this chapter I shall not attempt even a superficial history of its development, as others are far better qualified to do that than I.
(#litres_trial_promo) Instead, I want to look at what archaeology can reveal about what was happening around the periphery of the great houses, parks and gardens; at how the estates and houses that went with them were built and run; and how private individuals and public authorities together organised life for the ordinary inhabitants of rural Britain.
But first, a few words on garden history and archaeology which over the past thirty or so years have become sub-disciplines in their own right.
(#litres_trial_promo) One of their spin-offs has been the movement to restore old or overgrown parks and gardens to something approaching their former glories. This in turn has led people to research into more abstract subjects, like Georgian aesthetics and attitudes to landscape, because you cannot attempt sympathetic restoration without appreciating the subtleties of what the original gardeners and landscape designers were trying to achieve.
(#litres_trial_promo) There have been a number of major excavation projects like those by Brian Dix, at Hampton Court Palace, or the great ruined Jacobean house at Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire, which have subsequently been followed by the restoration of entire formal gardens.
(#litres_trial_promo) Garden archaeology has established itself as a subdiscipline in its own right. These highly specialised digs make extensive use of historical documents, and a variety of clever procedures, such as the meticulous plotting of the many rusted nails used to join the edging boards of long-lost flowerbeds.
As a general rule, many of the features revealed by garden archaeologists can be very slight. Although they are from a much earlier period, I’m put in mind of the shallow trenches dug for the elaborate box hedges at the palatial Fishbourne Roman villa in Sussex.
(#litres_trial_promo) Very similar traces have been found at the two sites just mentioned, Hampton Court and Kirby Hall. In many instances even these slight remains can be detected without putting a spade in the ground, through the use of various geophysical surveys.
Put simply, geophysics involves the use of highly sophisticated machines which are wheeled, dragged or lifted across the ground, and in the process record certain aspects of what lies beneath the surface.
(#litres_trial_promo) Resistivity meters measure minute fluctuations in the soil’s ability to conduct an electrical charge; magnetometers can detect tiny changes in the local magnetic field. Both techniques can reveal buried wells, post holes, ditches and walls.
Recently an entirely new generation of machines has come into being. Known as GPR, or ground penetrating radar, these instruments detect the way that radio waves are distorted and reflected back to a receiver on the surface. GPR plots a succession of buried layers and can penetrate deep into the ground. A particularly useful geophysical technique to industrial archaeologists is known by the rather unlovely name of magnetic susceptibility sampling, or ‘Mag Sus’ for short. Mag Sus can detect areas of magnetic enhancement caused by burning and can provide a fairly accurate indication of the temperatures involved – so it can readily distinguish, for example, between a bonfire and a furnace. More to the point, its results are instantaneous.
The rapid development of fast, lightweight, portable computers has revolutionised geophysics. When I began in archaeology in the early 1970s, I would routinely have to wait a week or a fortnight for my survey reports. Today it’s usual to have finished results in an hour or two. Indeed, when filming for Time Team, our resident geophysicist, Dr John Gater, has been known to produce an accurate printout in minutes.
Although, of course, they are deeply wonderful (and France, for example, is full of them), I have to say I don’t find strictly formal gardens very attractive, largely, I suppose, because I can imagine myself spending weeks and weeks meticulously trimming pyramids of box hedging and quietly going mad in the process. My own favourite restored garden is the one at Painshill in Surrey, which was originally laid out by Charles Hamilton between 1738 and 1773.
(#litres_trial_promo) As at Stourhead, visitors perambulate around a great lake and are treated to a series of contrived views which include the usual colonnaded temples and a magnificent Turkish tent, successfully and imaginatively re-created in fibreglass. Perhaps the greatest feat of restoration at Painshill involved the rebuilding of a fanciful watery grotto, complete with side chambers, waterfalls and glittering crystal spar stalactites.
Today it is true to say that gardens are places of beauty and pleasure, but they have largely ceased to be instruments of political advancement and even intrigue. While most gardens were indeed permanent fixtures, some were created for a specific purpose, often the visit of a monarch and his or her court, and were always intended to be temporary – rather like the show gardens at Chelsea. Much controversy has recently been caused by the reconstruction at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire of such a temporary garden, created by Robert Dudley, Earl of Essex, to impress Elizabeth I when she made a two-week visit there for nineteen days, between 9 and 27 July 1575. Dudley, of course, is famous for being the Queen’s favourite and we can only imagine what might have been his true motives for creating such a magnificent showpiece, which cost English Heritage the eye-watering sum of £2,100,000 to reconstruct, largely on the basis of a sketch and a single, albeit detailed, eyewitness letter.
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The garden is now permanently open to the public and it does give visitors a good impression of the lengths that people were prepared to go to impress the Tudor court, although doubts remain as to the so-called ‘eyewitness’ letter, which may have been a contemporary spoof or satire on Dudley’s pretensions. But even if it was, one could argue that the garden it depicts might have been the sort of creation that would have been inspired by such a royal visit. On the other hand, there is some archaeological evidence to support it, such as the discovery by Brian Dix of fragments of a fountain similar to the one described in the letter. Taking all things together, I tend to accept that the garden was indeed constructed and I find the controversy, which has already generated at least one television documentary, fascinating. The modern re-creation was constructed just before the financial crisis and only six months later, in less profligate times, it now appears an excess. Doubtless the original garden impressed Her Majesty, but if I had been one of the impoverished tenants of the Dudley estate I might well have been rather less enthusiastic.
I have stated that I have no intention of attempting a history of designed landscapes, but it is worth pointing out that many books that approach the subject from an art historical background tend to ignore the complexity of what actually happened out there in the real world. Today garden fashions come and go with bewildering rapidity: a few years ago everyone was covering their lawns with pergolas and wooden decking, then they painted their garden furniture blue, and now one cannot step into even the smallest back garden without running the risk of toppling into a water feature. Much the same could be said about the past except that then taste was not dictated by television makeover programmes. Of course there were highly influential people, such as ‘Capability’ Brown or Humphrey Repton, whose general influence was widespread but there were also other, often complementary traditions, too.
Recently the landscape archaeologist and historian Tom Williamson has called for a more regional approach to garden archaeology. There is a natural tendency to sing the praises of a particular, often grand garden and to make it sound as if it stood in magnificent isolation, whereas in reality it was often surrounded by parks and horticultural creations of comparable quality. Tom has eloquently pointed out that the estates and homes of less grand, local landowners helped create regional traditions with a unique style all of their own.
(#litres_trial_promo) It wasn’t just that earlier traditions remained popular with many people, but sometimes innovations, which the textbooks would have one believe were universally and rapidly adopted, actually failed to find acceptance in certain areas. For instance, the new and characteristically ‘English’ landscape parks of the second half of the eighteenth century failed to catch on in Hertfordshire, where formal plantings of avenues and rides were laid out in the 1760s at major houses such as Cassiobury, Ashridge and Moor Park.
(#litres_trial_promo) Such geometric features belonged to an earlier era and went very much against the ‘natural’ spirit of landscape designers, such as Brown or Repton.
FIG 5 A map showing the distribution of landscape parks in East Anglia in the late eighteenth century.
We ignore these smaller parks and gardens at our peril if we want to create a true picture of the past that is not just based on a few well-known and very grand places. Such information will be invaluable when we come to interpret the remains of lost parks and gardens threatened by the immense expansion of housing that we are told will happen when the current economic downturn ends. Take one example: the large number of parks created in East Anglia in the late eighteenth century. Their quantity is impressive and their distribution pattern very informative.
There are, for instance, very few parks in the Fens, which were then plagued by endemic malaria and were characterised by numerous small landholdings. The heavy clay lands of Suffolk were also poorly emparked, but there were large parks on the poor, sandy soils of Norfolk’s Breckland (north of Bury St Edmunds, mostly around Thetford), where prominent families had owned hunting estates since the Middle Ages. Another interesting development was the proliferation of small parks around the increasingly prosperous urban centres of Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and south Essex, which was already feeling the influence of London.
I mentioned that it was possible to discern distinctive regional styles and one of the best of these is the use of canals in parks and gardens of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Suffolk. It is debatable whether this was a result of the area’s proximity to the influence of the Low Countries or reflected the suitability of the heavy, water-retentive clay soils that had been widely used for constructing moats in the Middle Ages. It is, of course, entirely possible that some people in the area simply created their own traditions of garden design as a conscious reaction to the increasing influence exerted by London fashions and popular designers like ‘Capability’ Brown, which many independent local landowners resented.
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We tend to think that the great parks and gardens were the product of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with perhaps a few Tudor excesses such as Hampton Court, Hatfield and Burghley Houses to point the way forward. In reality, however, members of the upper echelons of medieval society were showing off their power and influence by constructing staged and elaborate approaches to their castles, and by fashioning their own landscaped parks.
(#litres_trial_promo) A particularly fine example is to be found on the approaches to the now ruined castle at Castle Acre, in Norfolk. This involved the redirection of a Roman road in the mid-twelfth century, by way of a newly founded Cluniac priory. Even when driving these narrow rural lanes today, this circuitous diversion, which was only done to impress visitors with the family’s piety, still feels distinctly odd.
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By the same token, we also tend to see ‘agri-business’ and industrial farming as rather unpleasant and ultimately unnecessary creations of the later twentieth century, but, again, the reality is rather different. The rapid growth of Britain’s population throughout the nineteenth century meant that the additional mouths had somehow to be fed and although imports could (and did) help to meet the shortage, in pre-refrigeration times the majority of food, especially of milk and meat, had to be produced at home. And here the well-laid-out model farms of the large rural estates were to play a crucially important role.
We will see in Chapter 5 that the monuments to Britain’s industrial past have been cared for and cherished since the subject of industrial archaeology first emerged from the shadows back in the 1960s. But their rural equivalents have only very recently received anything like their fair share of recognition – and almost too late, because numerous farm buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are now becoming rather tatty and even derelict, simply because farmers in the twenty-first century are finding the money for their maintenance harder and harder to come by.
(#litres_trial_promo) A proportion has been saved for posterity by conversion to office or light industrial use, but sadly these remain a minority. The rest are quietly slipping into neglect and disrepair.
The great landed estates that were such a feature of the countryside from the seventeenth to the earlier to mid-twentieth centuries have, of course, left us superb country houses, parks and gardens.
(#litres_trial_promo) But these were essentially the cherries on the top of the cake. They were the obvious symbols of power and success, but much of the money needed to build and maintain such grand edifices came from the land surrounding them, which therefore needed to be efficiently farmed. And make no mistake: some of the estates could be very large indeed: the Census of 1871 shows that estates of the Duke of Bedford in his home county comprised a staggering 35,589 acres (14,408 hectares).
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By any criteria these estates were major businesses and they needed to be well run. They also had a huge influence on the development of the countryside and of rural communities – a role that has recently been recognised by historical archaeologists.
(#litres_trial_promo) But this was also the period when educated people had learned the lessons of the Enlightenment. They were not simply concerned with making money, but needed to establish and maintain their place in society, while at the same time demonstrating their good taste. It was a period, too, when growing urban industries could provide alternative sources of employment for rural people. So for these and other reasons, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the construction of a series of model farms, the majority of which (as we saw in the previous chapter) were built as partnership ventures between entrepreneurial tenants and their estate landlords.
The slide into disrepair of so many estate farms has happened quite slowly, and bodies such as English Heritage have been able to anticipate events by carrying out surveys of model farms which have given rise to specific reviews and an excellent overall synthesis by the leading authority on the subject, Susanna Wade Martins.
(#litres_trial_promo) I have to say that, although I was aware of changes in the design of modern and early modern farm buildings, I was not able to discern any obvious pattern, apart from a general progression from small to large and also from decorative – even whimsical – to the more businesslike and severely functional buildings of Victorian high farming.
I mention whimsicality because sometimes farms occurred within sight of a carefully arranged view from a landscaped park, in which case they needed to be camouflaged to resemble a suitably romantic Gothic pile.
(#litres_trial_promo) Susanna gives several examples of these, one of which, illustrated in the pages of the Gentleman’s and Farmer’s Architect for 1762, actually includes corner towers that appear to have been reduced by artillery fire.
(#litres_trial_promo) My own favourite is the disguise of a range of farm buildings overlooking the great park at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, which have been made to resemble the turrets and battlements of a not very convincing medieval castle, which looks particularly odd – rather like a brick-built film set – when viewed from the modern road, which passes by on the ‘wrong’ side.
The evolving patterns of farmyard layout are important as they illustrate the changing attitudes and outlook of the great landowners, and those who served and advised them. Sometimes, but not always, these shifts in emphasis mirror developments in the design of the great parks and gardens they helped to finance. More often than not, however, they reflect wider changes in the worlds of politics, trade or economics and latterly, too, of agricultural science. The recent survey of model farms by English Heritage has revealed that four broad phases can be discerned, beginning with the philosophy of ‘Improvement’ whose underlying principles could be defined as beauty, utility and profit. This phase, which I’ve discussed in Chapter 1, lasted from 1660 until 1790 and was followed by one of ‘Patriotic Improvement’ (1790– 1840). During these years farming and profitable estate management were seen as patriotic duties at a time when Britain was often at war with France, and food prices generally remained firm. George III set an example to all by employing the well-known land agent Nathaniel Kent to manage the farms and other resources of Windsor Great Park profitably.
The third phase (1840–75) was characterised by ‘Practice with Science’ and coincides with the time of Victorian high farming. The final phase, ‘Retrenchment’, from 1875 to 1939, saw estates hit by the collapse of prices and the farming depression of the 1870s. This was a result of many factors, including the import of cheaper food, especially grain, shipped in bulk from overseas. It could also be seen as a much-delayed after-effect of Peel’s repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws of 1846.
In the 1850s and 1860s, British farming was able to cope with the freed-up market, but the large-scale importation of grain, made possible by the introduction of larger ocean-going vessels from the 1870s, caused major problems. After that, British farming entered a prolonged recession which continued, with a few relatively minor ups and downs, until the Great Depression of the 1930s, followed by the Second World War, when many of the great estates started to disintegrate – a process that was hastened in the post-war years by the introduction of death duties and other taxes on inherited wealth.
This brief history of the development of later post-medieval estates could readily have been derived from historical sources alone, but what makes the recent survey of model farms so important is the large number of buildings that were measured and photographed right across England. The owners and workers were also able to provide the surveyors with information on how the different spaces were actually used within living memory. The result is a hugely important body of information which will undoubtedly form the basis of many studies in the future. But to give an idea of its general scope, they have provided English Heritage with brief county-by-county summaries of the principal estates, their best surviving farms and a glimpse of their histories.
(#litres_trial_promo) It makes fascinating reading as it stands, but the information behind it has also been used to construct four plans of typical farm layouts between 1750 and 1900, which I have reproduced here.
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All farm buildings, whether on large lowland estates or on small upland family farms, were constructed to provide shelter for livestock and to keep stored crops dry. They could also be used for threshing and other crop-processing tasks, and for the preparation of fodder (e.g. hay and straw) or feed (e.g. grain or turnips) for livestock. Other uses, such as specialised milking parlours, became increasingly popular later, especially in farms near large cities. One additional important function of a post-medieval farmyard was the converting of chemically ‘hot’ raw animal dung to benign, nutrient-rich manure for spreading on fields. This is a biological process that involves the storage of the material in a muck heap, or midden, in well-drained conditions, with or without a roof.
The earliest estate farms (1750–1800) were based on a courtyard plan with the house on one side and the barn opposite. On either side of the yard were stables and animal sheds with a muck heap at the centre of the yard. In this layout the house was an integral part of the farmyard as nearly all the labour, including threshing, was carried out by hand. In the next period (1800–40) the house has been completely detached from the yard, which has now become E-shaped, with a main two-storey threshing barn at right angles to the long range, from which sprang three parallel ranges (the arms of the ‘E’), where the horses and livestock were housed and fed. By this period many tasks were now mechanised, the power being provided either by horses or water. On many farms you can still spot the circular walls that surrounded a horse ‘gin’, where a horse or horses pulled or pushed a long arm, rather like a treadmill.
FIG 6 The layout of typical model or estate farms in England around 1750–1800 (left) and 1800–1840 (right).
FIG 7 The layout of typical model or estate farms in England around 1840–1860 (left) and 1860–1900 (right).
The plan of earlier Victorian estate farms (1840–60) remained essentially E-shaped, but now the layout had become increasingly industrial, with the functions of the barn moved closer to the livestock accommodation. By this time, too, imported feeds were becoming more important and machinery previously used to thresh home-produced corn was now used to process the new feeds. The fattening of livestock was also becoming better understood and animals were separated into individual stalls or smaller groups to prevent undue competition. Some of these stalls were serviced by way of a central feeding passage. These better designed and more compact yards were often roofed over to keep the middens dry, thereby speeding up and improving manure production.
In the final decade of Victorian high farming the builders of model farms turned their attention to livestock units when the earlier plan with a central barn at right angles to the other ranges reappeared, but this time the building functioned more as a feed-processing factory than a barn. In the late nineteenth century (1860–1900) all livestock was housed in stalls that were conveniently accessed by feeding passages. By this time labour was becoming more expensive and routine tasks such as feeding and mucking out were made as straightforward as possible, with feed in some instances being moved on trolleys and tramlines. The two central covered yards continued to be used for the maturation of muck into manure.
I can well recall sitting down to watch television on freezing winter nights when I was working at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, in the 1970s. Inevitably I sometimes felt rather homesick, which is probably why I watched repeats of all the episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, a British TV series then being shown in Canada. I still think it was a fabulous series, beautifully researched and acted, and quite rightly hugely popular in Britain and North America. What I didn’t realise at the time was how remarkably archaeological the approach of the programme makers was, because they showed precisely how a great house was serviced and operated; this is not something one can generally read about in novels of the period, which tended to focus on the goings-on of the great and the good ‘upstairs’.
Television costume dramas have played an important part in the way that country houses are now shown to the public, with greater attention at long last being paid to the servants’ hall, the cellars, the kitchens and the butler’s pantry – not to mention the stables, carriage house and scullery. I for one would far rather look at a nineteenth-century kitchen range than a display case stuffed with Meissen porcelain – or, indeed, some luckless volunteer dressed up rather awkwardly as a Georgian ladies’ maid or a footman. I find that the practical things of daily life, such as tools and implements, especially if they still retain the patina and scars of repeated use, have a power to re-create the past, something that fine objects often lack.
The service ranges of large country houses were where the work took place. Often they were of comparable size to the space occupied by the family itself. It was not uncommon to find that several entire storeys, or sometimes complete wings, were occupied by the domestic servants and there was a network of stairs and passages that allowed them to go about their daily duties without bumping into anyone from the employer’s family. In larger houses the world ‘below stairs’ was indeed a world – and, as Upstairs, Downstairs showed so well, it was often as vigorous and exciting as that in the great drawing rooms ‘upstairs’.
If we examine the shapes and layout of these domestic ranges they can tell us a great deal about the social changes that were taking place in early modern times, especially if the excavations are on a reasonably large scale. A few small slit trenches might establish construction dates and that sort of thing, but one needs an entire range to be stripped and excavated if one is to understand how it was used. Happily, this is exactly what has happened in a fine Jacobean (formerly) country house now surrounded by the streets and dwellings of modern Birmingham. I had been aware for some time of the presence of a great house as one drove towards the city centre on that long stretch of raised road south of the M6, but, to be honest, I had dismissed it as something Victorian – which I’m now aware was an error on my part. But I’ve been back there since and taken a closer look, and to my surprise I was completely wrong. Aston Hall really is rather special: a large three-storey Jacobean house with prominent turrets and banks of chimneys, elevated on a natural terrace and still dominating the landscape, which, as I’ve said, consists mainly of modern urban buildings. The notable exception is the village of Aston’s medieval parish church nearby, and a small park, which manages to retain a reminder of the area’s once rural surroundings.
Today Aston Hall is run by Birmingham City Council Museums and Galleries and in 2009 it reopened after a £13 million programme of repair and refurbishment, which included extensive excavation.
(#litres_trial_promo) As the digs were a part of a major project they took place on a suitably large scale. Anything else and the results would inevitably have proved less conclusive and, of course, far less exciting.
The house itself was built between 1618 and 1635 by Sir John Holte, probably to the designs of John Thorpe, and it represents a clear statement of the new relationship between master and servant that had developed in post-medieval times.
(#litres_trial_promo) Had Aston Hall been built in the early fifteenth century the kitchens, pantries and other domestic rooms would have been inside the main buildings, together with servants’ accommodation which was not kept particularly separate from that of the owner’s family. Although the family would have dined at a separate high table, when eating on public occasions few efforts were made in the Middle Ages to separate the lives of the domestic staff from those they were serving. All of that changed quite rapidly in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when new houses were designed to keep the activities of resident domestic staff separate from the daily lives of the owner’s family.
In new houses of the seventeenth century, domestic staff would have been housed in their own quarters in either a basement or a separate wing and additional sleeping space would have been provided in the (often rather draughty) attics. For the first time, these various rooms would have been linked by their own network of stairs and passages which meant that the owner’s family need never contact a servant unless, that is, he or she wanted to. Similarly, although the kitchens remained in the main house (but very much within the domestic area), the rooms where other household activities took place, such as the brewhouse, stores, washing rooms, bakehouse and dairy were removed either to separate wings, or (as at Aston Hall) an altogether separate Service Range.
The Service Range at Aston was very carefully positioned at the foot of a slope some twenty-five metres from the main house, and largely concealed by a tall brick wall. It is interesting that Dugdale’s 1656 view of the house uses perspective to give the impression that the Stable Range is even more removed and it entirely conceals the Service Range. Indeed, guests at the great house need never have been aware that the Service Range even existed. The main house and its North Wing formed one side of the domestic Stable Court, which was open to the west but enclosed to north and east by the Service and Stable Ranges. Inside the North Wing were the kitchen, the wine and beer cellars, scullery and servants’ sleeping quarters on the upper floor. This arrangement meant that no guest or member of the owner’s family need ever have to look out onto the Stable Court.
In anthropological terms the increasing separation of ‘those upstairs’ from ‘them downstairs’ might be seen as hierarchical, but the developing social hierarchies did not stop there. Below stairs, and fully recognised by the owner’s family, we see an emerging ranked society in which senior household servants, such as the butler, who waited directly on the owner, the cook and housekeeper and others were accommodated within the domestic apartments of the main house, which at Aston Hall were in the North Wing. Junior servants would have to find their sleeping spaces in the Service Range or attics.
I must have read thousands of excavation reports and a high proportion of them have been almost unendurably dull. This sad situation has arisen because over the past twenty or so years, ever since changes in planning law made it compulsory for developers to pay for archaeological examination of sites they were about to destroy, large numbers of quite insignificant excavations have had to take place – and then reports be written up. In theory – and in practice, too – these small projects add to our sum of knowledge about a given region and in time they start to produce coherent stories. But it is not a rapid process and much of the work is, at best, humdrum. That is why most archaeological contractors leap at the chance of doing larger projects, where the element of new research is greater and where it might be possible to write a good, original report. And that is exactly what happened after the Aston Hall excavations, where the team from Birmingham University have combined evidence from the trenches with historical research to produce an absolutely fascinating story. I’ll be quite honest: before I started, I thought a paper about a dig on an abandoned service range would make extremely dry reading, but I was completely mistaken.
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