The W G Hoskins Lecture 2012

 ‘Medieval Open Fields and their Origins’ presented by Doctor Susan Oosthuizen.

The twenty-third Hoskins lecture

Doctor Susan Oosthuizen, University Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education, gave this year’s Hoskins’ Lecture. Her subject was the origins of the medieval open fields, a much debated question which has recently seen a renewal of interest, prompted in part by Dr Oosthuizen’s own work.

Her most important contribution to the debate has been Landscapes Decoded. The Origins and Development of Cambridgeshire’s Medieval Fields, Explorations in Local and Regional History, no. 1 (Hatfield, 2006), in which she advanced theories based on a detailed analysis of four parishes in the Bourn valley in Cambridgeshire. In a 2007 article in Agricultural History Review she extended those ideas to the rest of country, to argue that common fields may have originated in the kingdom of Mercia in the ‘long 8th century’ (c670 – c840) – an earlier origin than the more usually proposed 10th century. Her talk, profusely illustrated with maps and photographs, presented these theories, though with some new additions and modifications – as she explained, they are work in progress, still in development.

Dr Oosthuizen began by defining some terms. ‘Open fields’ are, of course, areas of farmland divided between two or more cultivators, but without physical boundaries between the holdings. In the past she and others have followed Joan Thirsk in drawing a distinction between Open Fields and Common Fields. These were virtually identical physically, but differed as to the farming systems operating within them. Open Field systems were less regularly laid out and organised (often subdivided into blocks rather than strips) and less tightly controlled – farmers there usually had more freedom to farm their land as if they held it in severalty. Common Field systems, on the other hand, were regularly organised and divided (into two or three great fields, then into furlongs and strips, with individual holdings spread evenly across the furlongs and fields), and were subject to tight communal regulation, requiring uniform rotation of crops, regular fallows, and communal grazing of the fallows and the stubble.

This distinction between Open Fields and Common Fields had its problems, however; they were often indistinguishable physically – the differences lay in the agricultural and tenurial regimes which governed their use – and the latter were really just a specialised sub-category of the former. In her lecture Dr Oosthuizen adopted a newer terminology recently introduced to medieval landscape history from economics by Martine de Moor and Mark Bailey – one utilising the concept of the Common Property Regime. The new terminology acknowledges the physical similarities of the two systems by calling them both open fields, and distinguishes only between their agricultural regimes. Thus what were formerly termed Open Fields are now ‘open fields with narrow Common Property Regimes’, while the former Common Fields become ‘open fields with wide Common Property Regimes’.

A Common Property Regime is a system which regulates communal use of land and resources, determining such matters as when, how and by whom they can be exploited. Such regimes can take many forms, of course, and ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ describe two halves of a spectrum. In a narrow-CPR the open field might be subdivided into large, irregularly distributed blocks, effectively held and farmed in severalty, with the only communal exploitation being common rights of pasture over the post-harvest stubble, exercisable for only a few weeks of the year. A wide CPR, on the other hand, would be that operating in the classic three-field township, subdivided into furlongs and strips, with holdings of standard sizes more or less even distributed across the furlongs, rotation of crops and fallows, communal grazing across the fallow field and the stubble etc. Open fields with wide CPRs were typical of the Midland Zone or, in Roberts and Wrathmell’s terminology, the Central Province; open fields with narrow CPRs were found everywhere, including Midland Zone.

Dr Oosthuizen then posed her questions: When did open fields and Common Property Regimes first appear in England? Why were they adopted? And what determined whether an open field operated under a narrow or wide Common Property Regime?

No one knows when they first appeared. Dr Oosthuizen had begun the lecture, as was appropriate, with a quote from W.G. Hoskins’ introduction to the 1963 Royal Commission report on The Common Lands of England and Wales (p. 6);

Common rights were … the residue of rights that were once more extensive, rights that are in all probability older than the modern conception of private property. They probably antedate the idea of private property in land, and are therefore of vast antiquity.

However the first documentary reference to open fields and CPRs is in the Laws of Ine, of 670 A.D, which refer to ceorls who ‘have a common meadow or other land divided in shares’, each of whom must fence his portion so that their cattle do not ‘eat up their common crops or grass’. Few modern historians believe that open fields predate the Anglo-Saxon period, however, and most argue for an origin in the later Anglo-Saxon period. Dr Oosthuizen argued that in some places at least open fields may date from the Roman-British period, though perhaps with only narrow CPRs.

There are certainly many places where the Roman-British field system can be discerned and is obviously different from the later medieval open field system which overlay it. But there are also places where continuity can be demonstrated. Infield/outfield cultivation was practised in both periods. Many medieval enclosures were curvilinear; many Iron Age fields were rectilinear. Medieval open fields are characterised by their long thin strips – but so were many Iron Age and Bronze Age fields. The difficulty lies in discerning the regimes which governed their cultivation – were these pre-medieval strips farmed in severalty, or as part of a CPR? Dr Oosthuizen suggested that the absence of physical divisions points towards the presence of a CPR. Her conclusion was that narrow-CPR open fields were a traditional form of cultivation in England, developed over a very longue durée.

The origin of wide-CPR open fields is a more difficult question. It is particularly difficult to explain why they developed only in some regions, principally the Midland Zone. The only certainties are that there is no evidence for them before the Norman Conquest, and that there is some correlation between their distribution and that of nucleated settlements. Dr Oosthuizen could offer no explanations, only speculation.

Two other possibly significant correlations noticed by Della Hooke are with anciently cleared arable landscapes and areas of greater Romanisation. The Midland Zone, in which wide-CPRs are most common, is not only a region of nucleated settlements, but also one with a long history of extensive arable farming. This can be seen in the low ratios of woodland apparent in Domesday Book and earlier sources. It may be that wide-CPR open fields were laid out in areas where grain production was particularly important.

Wide-CPR open fields may also have been associated with regions with high proportions of unfree tenants, as measured by the distribution of substantial Romanised buildings, though the correlation is less close than with nucleated settlement or woodland. Did some Roman villas farmed by slaves become Anglo-Saxon estates farmed by bordars?

Lastly Dr Oosthuizen proposed that the approximate correlation of wide-CPR open fields with the kingdom of Mercia suggested a causal link with that kingdom during its period of dominance, the long 8th century (c.650 – 870). Offa and other Mercian kings of that period emulated Charlemagne and other contemporary Carolingian rulers by endowing monastic houses with large estates. Could those monasteries have re-organised their new possessions in emulation of the best practice then current on the vast Frankish royal and monastic estates, which were beginning to allocate intermingled strips to individual tenants, but retaining control over agricultural decisions, such as cropping?

The lecture ended with a lively range of questions and comments from the audience, culminating in Mick Aston’s suggestion that what is needed is more archaeological evidence for early medieval field boundaries, to be obtained by digging up lots of ancient hedgerows.

From an original report by Matt Tompkins.