The English Village Explained: Britain’s Living History Read Online Free PDF

century first affected those forced to farm marginal lands like upland areas and moors where the weak, thin soils would have struggled to support a good crop even in better weather, and now they were abandoned. The Black Death had an even more devastating effect as it left the great open fields around the village only partly farmed. The lord of the manor, anxious to maintain the income from his estate, would have encouraged those who survived the epidemic to work their neighbours’ land rather than see it idle and unproductive. Others may have decided it was best to lease or even sell their land to ambitious villagers, who began to form a new rank of yeoman farmer.
    These changes in land ownership started to alter the physical appearance of the countryside as the old common fields and wastes were divided up into enclosed blocks of land held by one farmer. This form of enclosure by agreement usually occurred where there had been such a loss of life or so many people had moved away that the land could be easily divided between the few remaining villagers. They would firstly have to group their holdings together as their arable strips were scattered at random around the open fields, thenonce they had bought and exchanged these between them, the new farmers could set about enclosing their consolidated holdings.
    Such early enclosures seem to have occurred mainly in the west and north, in counties like Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire and Lancashire, and also in parts of Suffolk, Essex and Kent. Where the common system of open fields was dominant, especially in the Midlands and up into Yorkshire, enclosure at this date is rare; the new farmers bought up abandoned strips but continued to farm as a community. It would have been too complicated, especially if the village was well populated, to enclose the fields by all parties reaching agreement. There were some exceptions. For instance, when a farmer wanted to grow a different crop from the surrounding one in the open field, he could fence in his strip, leaving long, thin fields which you can still identify today.
    In the 15th century many landowners decided to change from arable farming to rearing livestock, especially sheep, due to its low labour cost and the rising price of wool and cloth. A greater profit could be achieved by clearing the land of houses and their crofts, enclosing the fields and turning them over to pasture. These attempts to remove villages and enclose common land brought much protest, especially in the Midlands, though it often still went ahead despite legislation, investigations and commissions. It also seems to have been prevalent in the wastes in the North and areas like Gloucestershire where sheep farming had always been an important part of the local economy.
The village
    The Black Death is often credited as the cause of the desertion of many villages in this period. However, it is more likely that although disease directly claimed a few, it was the combination of this and other factors over a longer period which weakened them and finally resulted in abandonment often in the late 14th or 15th century. Today, so far, some3,000 deserted medieval villages have been identified.

    FIG 3.3: A diagram showing how a planned village could, with the abandonment of plots in the 14th century (cream-coloured in the centre map) and their adoption by neighbours, lose its original regular layout .
    Whether a settlement survived this period of despair could depend on its size and population. A larger village which maintained a good number of residents would show signs of decline in the form of abandoned houses and plots of land between those which were still occupied. Over a period of time these may have been re-occupied by a neighbour, and in this way parts of a village with a 12th- or 13th-century planned layout became irregular with a mixture of different sized plots. The smaller, less populated settlements were more likely to become deserted. This could be a