The W G Hoskins Lecture 2009

‘Exploring Anglo-Saxon Farms’ presented by Dr Rosamund Faith.

The twentieth Hoskins lecture

The Friends could not have had a better guide to exploring Anglo–Saxon farms than Dr Ros Faith. Ros obtained her PhD here at the Centre (then Department) of English Local History in 1962 with a thesis on the peasant land market in Berkshire in the later middle ages. She has spent the intervening years studying the English peasantry and the landscape in which they lived and had their being. She is now a fellow at Kellog College, Oxford, and tutor with the Department of Continuing Education. She is writing a book for Oxford University Press on Anglo-Saxon farms.

Following Hoskins lead on Devon’s Domesday farms, which he felt were ‘much the same size as the ones he knew, and about the same distance from each other, and in much the same location’, she began to explore actual Anglo-Saxon farms. Place names often provide the first clue, in Devon frequently taking the form of a personal name + ‘worthy’. More evidence comes from the ancient curving boundaries of farms, the banks on which the walls are built sometimes being very ancient boundaries indeed. With Andrew Fleming, who has studied the reaves of Dartmoor and the landscape of Swaledale, she made a breakthrough in the research at Yadsworthy. The field was bounded by such a low bank and carpeted with bluebells, indicating that the land had been part of the rough woodland grazing of the farm. Ros commented on the rather arable bias of settlement studies, the archaeology of farmsteads often producing evidence for growing crops rather than animal husbandry. However, the ubiquitous loom-weights testify to sheep-keeping. She proposed to work ‘against the grain’ and look at the settlements from the point of view of animal husbandry. She began by stressing the omnivorous nature of early breeds, compared to the silage and cow-cake diet of their present descendants. These early animals browsed on bushes and young saplings as well as grass, a point made by Oliver Rackham when he said that the key shapers of woodland were not people but animals. Then followed a discussion of the meaning of leah, first defined by Margaret Gelling as clearings in woodland, an interpretation later modified by Della Hooke to suggest grazing land interspersed with trees, in short, wood-pasture.

If Anglo-Saxon farming were more pastoral than arable, then what effect did that have on people’s mental world and their perceptions of the landscape? Borrowing certain ‘tools to think with’ from Pierre Bourdieu, notably the concept of ‘social capital’ (as exemplified in common rights) and the notion of ‘habitus’ enables one to attempt an understanding of the mental world of our forebears. Not that Anglo-Saxon farmers were entirely removed from outside influences and even, as is becoming more apparent, from the pressures of the market.

Ros described the settlements along the gravel terraces of the Thames as an example of reading the landscape ‘against the grain’. What if these terraces were not settled primarily because their soils were easily ploughed, as is the conventional wisdom, but because they allowed access to a variety of pasture types. The gravels themselves were overlain by rich meadow, as a recent study of Yarnton in Oxfordshire has shown. Beyond that lay a low ridge of heathy soils, backed by wooded hills. At the other end of the Thames, at Mucking in Essex, the available pasture included fen and woodland as well as tidal saltmarsh for the sheep. The habitus, ‘our place’, of these farmers and their families was not confined to the farm yard and the surrounding fields, but would have covered an area of some miles about. These territories might be bounded by rivers, which in turn gave their name to the chief place and the people, like that around the river Walkham in Devon. Similar small territories may be identified in the lathes of Kent or the scir which is a widely dispersed place name element. Jolliffe has suggested that these scirs ‘must be the regio of the grants of the eighth century’. The key thing is that the territories had access to common pasture. Where neighbouring peoples and territories had to share such pasture, as on Dartmoor, there developed a complex system of common rights and a clearly defined system of boundaries. Everyone knew ‘their place’ and its bounds.

Ros then went on to discuss the social importance of the communal turning out and rounding up of beasts. Livestock business was at the core of these meetings, but they were also opportunities for marketing, feasting and match-making. They were also one occasion on which authority could meet the dispersed population, often in the form of collecting taxation and other payments, usually at a traditional meeting place, a hill or tree, seemingly remote from the settlements. It is possible, as suggested by O.S. Anderson, that the hundreds often derived from ancient districts and that it was the meetings which took place at these sites that gave them their importance. ‘The thing (meeting) was what mattered … a district centred on the moot rather than the manor.’ She acknowledged here the importance of Charles Phythian-Adams’ work in reinstating folklore as evidence for past times. The drovers and lookers called on spiritual elements in the landscape, something brought out, too, in the work of Graham Jones.

Having set the Anglo-Saxon farm in a much wider context than just the farmstead and having stressed the importance of animals, Ros acknowledged that arable farming was, however, very important. It was reasonable of the Domesday scribes to enquire how many ploughs there were in each place and whether more could be employed. There was an increase in cereal production after the Conquest and the origin of the communal field system is rightly an ongoing preoccupation of rural history. A more subtle interpretation is possible, though, by acknowledging the relationships of animal and stock husbandry.

Different areas had different proportions of animals to crops, and this in turn seems to have been related to different social organisations. For example, the sokemen of the wolds of Lincolnshire did seem to be freer of manorial control than the men who worked the in-field/out-field system in the valleys. Can this close study of farming types help us to understand not only the landscape, but also something of the social structure of the Anglo-Saxon farmers too?

The annual gathering of local historians in honour of their ‘patron saint’ W.G. Hoskins, in quest of the common right of knowledge, closed with the usual feasting on tea and cakes and the marketing of second-hand books to raise money for the common good.

From an original report by Sylvia Pinches.