The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

First published 2012

© Graeme J. White, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Graeme J. White has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-4411-6308-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

To my students, 1971–2010

1. Forrabury Common (Cornwall)

2. Ridge and Furrow near Wigston Parva (Leicestershire)

3. Field System, Clotton (Cheshire)

4. Gwern-y-ddavid, Shocklach Oviatt (Cheshire)

5. Morton’s Leam near Whittlesey (Cambridgeshire)

6. Bradfield Woods (Suffolk)

7. Deer Leap, Quernmore Park (Lancashire)

8. Windmill Mound, Cold Newton (Leicestershire)

9. Burton near Tarvin (Cheshire)

10. Barnack Quarries (Cambridgeshire)

11. Kersey (Suffolk)

12. Weeting Church and Manor House (Norfolk)

13. Hungry Bentley (Derbyshire)

14. Plan of Whatborough (Leicestershire), 1586

15. Heath Chapel and Deserted Settlement (Shropshire)

16. St Ives Bridge (Huntingdonshire)

17. Egham Causeway (Surrey)

18. Packhorse Bridge, near Barrow-in-Furness (Cumberland)

19. Moreton in Marsh (Gloucestershire)

20. Bishop’s Castle (Shropshire)

21. No 58 French Street, Southampton

22. Fifteenth-century terrace in Church Street, Tewkesbury (Gloucestershire)

23. Watergate Street Row, Chester

24. Crowland Abbey (Lincolnshire)

25. Rievaulx Abbey (Yorkshire)

26. Mount Grace Priory (Yorkshire)

27. Cockersand Abbey (Lancashire)

28. Gloucester Abbey Cloisters

29. Two Churches in one Churchyard, Swaffham Prior (Cambridgeshire)

30. Rotherfield Churchyard (Sussex)

31. St Helen’s Church, Colchester (Essex)

32. Fotheringhay Castle (Northamptonshire)

33. Hedingham Castle (Essex)

34. Warkworth (Northumberland) from the Town Bridge

35. Goodrich Castle (Herefordshire)

36. Layer Marney Tower (Essex)

37. Ashby de la Zouch Castle (Leicestershire)

38. Stokesay Castle (Shropshire)

39. Hartlepool Town Wall (County Durham)

40. Canterbury Town Wall

M
easurements are normally given according to the metric scale (kilometres, hectares, etc.) but imperial equivalents are shown where these were historically significant. Decimal as well as pre-decimal monetary values are indicated where necessary. Places referred to in the text are normally located by county the first time they are mentioned, except for the most prominent towns including those from which the county name is derived. The ‘historic’ counties are used for this purpose, except where this would clearly be unhelpful: for example, to place Ely within the ‘Isle of Ely’ (which merged with Cambridgeshire in 1965) would be of little benefit to a reader seeking it on a map.

A
s a sub-discipline, ‘landscape history’ is often said to have been born with the publication of W. G. Hoskins’s brilliantly-crafted
The Making of the English Landscape
in 1955. Although this famously railed against the ‘England of the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil’ – along with much else belonging to the mid-twentieth century – the fact that national car ownership more than doubled during the 1950s made this a subject whose time had come. There was now an opportunity previously enjoyed only by a small minority for people to travel where and when they wanted in search of the legacies of the past – and no longer to be entirely dependent on what experts had decided should be presented to them as historically significant. The greatest appeal of landscape history is its accessibility to everyone and, accordingly, this book is the latest in a long line inspired by Hoskins which have sought to provide an historical context for features we live with every day.

While the subject can be defined as the history of people’s impact on the physical landscape, there is some ambivalence over whether this should embrace features no longer apparent above ground or whether the focus should be on what can still be seen – in however modified a form – to this day. On the one hand there is a risk of making the subject too esoteric, the preserve of specialist investigators. On the other there is the danger of skewing the evidence according to the accidents of survival, so giving a misleading impression of our ancestors’ experience. The approach taken here is to emphasize the surviving landscape as an historical source wherever possible, but not to ignore the fuller picture which can only be discerned through archaeological excavation or other advanced research. One of the joys of this subject is the encouragement it gives to the exercise of historical imagination: anyone whose local high street has a series of shops with narrow frontages – successors to burgage plots – or has to drive a car through a market place crowded with stallholders because the street pattern demands it, is experiencing something in common with our medieval forebears even if there is nothing obviously medieval on show. The experience is all the richer if there is also an understanding of what once graced the scene.

There are, of course, limits to the subject as well, quite apart from emphases within this book derived from the author’s own interests. A study of the historic
landscape focuses on the relationships between features made or modified by men and women – broadly interpreted but excluding the natural terrain. The focus is squarely on ‘outdoors’: the interiors of buildings figure only occasionally, usually to explain what can be seen from outside. As for the geographical coverage attempted in the pages which follow, it will not take any reader long to notice that certain parts of the country – Cheshire especially – receive more than their fair share of attention, both in the text and as illustrations. After 40 years pursuing this subject, I like to think that I have some familiarity with most corners of England, but there seems little point in neglecting what I know best. Despite the sterling efforts of several scholars based in the region, the north west in general, and Cheshire in particular, remain under-represented in surveys of the English landscape, so this attempt to redress the balance will, I hope, be forgiven.

It was an honour to be invited to write this book. The invitation came before the turn of the millennium but I was then heavily involved with the project whereby Chester College progressed to become the University of Chester. That goal having been achieved in 2005, further work for the University at a senior level prevented the book’s completion until after my retirement. I must therefore express sincere gratitude to the publishers for their patience and forbearance. Over the years I have learned an enormous amount, and received much encouragement, from a succession of distinguished scholars, among whom I would single out Vivian Fisher and Otto Smail of a now-departed generation of medievalists, and more recently Christopher Taylor, Christopher Dyer and Edmund King. For their friendship and guidance over the years, and in most cases for advice on particular aspects of this book, I am very grateful to Paul Booth, John Doran, Diana Dunn, Peter Gaunt, Nick Higham, Philip Higson, Rob Liddiard, Rachel Swallow and Tom Driver, although it goes without saying that responsibility for any factual errors or for what might be considered misinterpretations is entirely my own. Thanks are also due to those who gave permission for the reproduction of illustrations to supplement those from my own collection, especially Mike Derbyshire who kindly supplied Figure 7; these are acknowledged at the appropriate points. Above all, I should like to thank my wife Heather for sharing my enthusiasm for landscape history and for her many insightful comments and suggestions; along with my daughter Elizabeth and son Benedict, she has been unfailingly supportive. However, my last words here must go to the members of the Chester Society for Landscape History, of which I am proud to be President, and to all the students whom it has been a privilege to teach, first in the Workers’ Educational Association in Cambridgeshire from 1971 to 1977 and thereafter at Chester College, now the University of Chester. It has been a delight to share the subject with them, as a mutual learning experience, and if this book helps them, and others like them, to enjoy, explore and understand some aspects of the medieval English landscape, it will have succeeded in its purpose.