The W G Hoskins Lecture 2014

‘Who made the medieval Landscape’ presented by Professor Chris Dyer.

The twenty-fifth Hoskins lecture

7 June 2014

This year’s Hoskins lecture saw a record turnout, which is perhaps not surprising as Professor Chris Dyer was the guest lecturer. Chris’s subject was an appropriate one for an occasion where we remember W.G. Hoskins and his work: ‘Who made the medieval landscape?’

Chris used recent, and as yet largely unpublished research, to address the question of agency in the formation of the landscape. Was the layout of town, hamlet and field the result of lordly planning? Or did settlements evolve to meet the needs of their less grand inhabitants? Chris characterised the discussion as one of ‘top down’ development versus ‘bottom up’.

In investigating this question, Professor Dyer was intent on following what he described as Hoskins’s greatest achievement: the use of the modern landscape as first class historical evidence. Chris made the point that Hoskins himself had a very balanced view of this question, and commended his non-dogmatic willingness to attribute the making of the landscape to many groups. Since Hoskins’s time the ‘top down’ views had gained credibility, however. The ninth and tenth centuries have been seen as periods of wholesale replanning, with the castle then being the ‘powerhouse’ that moulded the landscape, and elsewhere much credit being given to Cistercian monks. Chris contended that the time had come to give attention to the ‘bottom up’ view of the forces making the landscape. In doing this, Chris looked first at urban settlements, and then at villages and their fields.

Stratford-on-Avon was presented as a town whose planned nature was evident from the grid system of the streets. This was supported by documentary evidence from 1196. But even here some ‘bottom- up’ development was evident from the growth of Bridgetown, a settlement on the far side of the bridge that had grown up to service the needs of travellers crossing the bridge. After the initial planning of the town, the growth of Stratford-on-Avon was driven by the inhabitants of the town.

Chris also made the point that the town’s grid system was not orthogonal, but rather followed the patterns of the plough strips of the earlier landscape, so even here the agency was not quite as clear-cut as might first be assumed.

Elsewhere, Chris found evidence of commercial development of towns driven from below. Bibury in Gloucestershire was in many ways a typical Cotswold village, but its village plan revealed that it had a market square at its centre, even though there was no documentary trace of a market charter being granted, or of any other form of lordly planning. The commercial centre of the township seems to have been the result of the actions of its residents. Kings Norton in Worcestershire (now part of Birmingham) was another example of a settlement with a square, but no official market. Again, commercial development seems to have happened through the initiative of the local population (in this instance, many of whom were wool traders). The landscape thus gives evidence of a mobile, informal, shifting pattern of trading; one that was outside lordly control.

Chris also produced an example of a planned settlement that had failed in the form of Bretford in North Warwickshire. It had been a project of the Verdon family, who diverted the Fosse Way in an attempt to take traffic into their new town. Evidence from an earthworks survey, fieldworking, aerial photography, a lidar survey and documents show that there were some twenty families in the 1220s and some twenty-three burgage plots. There is also lidar evidence that they had a settlement across the bridge (like Stratford) to catch traffic on the Fosse way. But the Bretford today is no more than a hamlet. All that remains of its previous incarnation is a fine fifteenth- century house on a burgage plot (the house belongs to centre student – beware, Maureen, ‘Friends’ might start appearing on your doorstep in search of a cup of tea and a tour of your burgage-plot garden). Chris suggested that, while the plan showed the power of the lords, the town failed because the ordinary people were reluctant to settle there; they could not see the potential of a town so near to Coventry, situated on what was not a major route. There was nothing to promise that a good living could be made there, and so Bretford shrank back to a hamlet once more.

Chris next turned his attention to an example of a lord remoulding the landscape for his own pleasure. In 1421 John, Duke of Bedford (the third son of Henry IV) saw the potential of Fulbrook, situated between Stratford and Warwick, as a pleasure ground. The lidar survey shows a conventional Warwickshire felden village: a manor house with a moat, a village street, a pond with a mill, and everywhere else ploughed fields. The duke removed the village and built a great park with associated grand residence in the form of a hill-top brick castle. Fulbrook was something of a ‘holiday home’ for John, as his main residence remained Rouen. Although the village virtually died (only four villagers remained in 1428), there was an area of common pasture still in use in the 1430s. There was intercommoning among the surrounding villages, and even the Duke of Bedford had to accept their rights.

Fulbrook was, in many ways, a very untypical park, being carved from the felden rather than the arden. More typical of this type of development was Northfield (now a housing estate in Birmingham). The evidence here shows two distinct landscapes developing side by side: one the result of ‘top down’ management, the other the result of ‘bottom up’. The original manor house had been next to the church, but in the 12th century it was moved to a northern position, in the form of a castle surrounded by a 1000 acre park, with a compact block of demesne land. Villagers were dispossessed in the formation of this lordly estate, but elsewhere in the parish there was dispersed settlement where inhabitants continued to farm in small enclosures or small open field systems, which were a survival of the pre-conquest period. The lord was content to ignore this peasant landscape.

From his evidence, Chris concluded that the ‘top down’ versus ‘bottom up’ controversy was a false opposition. Both models of development operated side by side. He did not want to suggest that lords and peasants were particularly ‘friends’ or ‘in it together’, but rather suggested that they demonstrated a capacity for compromise and negotiation.

Chris provided more examples of settlements that illustrated this duality of formation. Matt Tomkins found documents in Worcester cathedral identifying Bickley as a late example of planning. The lord, worried about his falling rent roll in 1337, was trying to kick-start development by handing out plots of land ‘as measured by the lord and the village’. The now-deserted Westcote (Tysoe, Warks) looks from the evidence to have been a regular planned village, but this village had four manors raising the question of how this was accomplished. Was it an example of planning by committee?

These examples illustrate how villages were created by a complicated process. Lords had an interest, but a great deal depended on those who lived in the village. The answer to the question ‘who made the landscape’ seems to be that everyone was likely to have a hand in it.

As is customary, the lecture was followed by the consumption of tea and cake, accompanied by stimulating conversation and frenzied book buying.