by Ian Mortimer
Traveller, your carriage awaits.
2
Beyond London
One of the most interesting things about the British countryside in the late seventeenth century is how differently people see it, compared to the modern world. While out riding, they don’t pull on their reins at the top of a hill and exclaim, ‘Oh, isn’t that a lovely view!’ They just don’t associate nature with beauty in the same way that we do. When the antiquary Ralph Thoresby travels throughout northern England in the 1690s he never once expresses any admiration of the scenery. Coming to Lake Windermere, in what we know as the Lake District, he simply remarks that it is ‘the most spacious lake in England’. Ascending the mountain to Hardknott Pass, he talks of the mountains being ‘terrible’ and ‘dangerous’ and of the rivers in the valleys as ‘hideous in places’.1 Celia Fiennes, an intrepid gentlewoman who travels the length and breadth of England in her thirties, similarly talks about ‘those high inaccessible rocky barren hills which hang over one’s head in some places and appear very terrible’.2 When she visits Lake Windermere in 1698 she notes all she has learnt about the manorial rights and customs, how the locals make bread and so on, but there is no indication that she is moved by the view. She pays close attention to rivers and other watercourses – but only because they yield fish and drinking water and drive the mills. She never says that a lake looks beautiful or a high peak wonderful. At Blackstone Edge in Lancashire, she comments that it is ‘known all over England for a dismal high precipice and steep in the ascent and descent at either end; it is a very moorish ground all about … which is very troublesome’.3 When she descends again to Rochdale, she declares it to be both ‘pretty’ and ‘neat’. And that just about sums up how most people in seventeenth-century Britain view the environment. If it looks well maintained and is productive, then it may be deemed fine and admirable; but if it is natural, there is something primitive about it and, more often than not, it is ‘troublesome’.
This attitude is also reflected in how people regard the landscape in its painted form. You will have to search very hard indeed to find a landscape painting by a British artist except as a backdrop to a portrait. There are a few (Robert Aggas, Robert Robinson and Robert Streater each produce a handful), but the man celebrated as the founding father of British landscape painting, Richard Wilson, won’t even be born until 1713. On the rare occasion that you do come across a representation of natural scenery in the gallery of a stately home, it will be by a Dutch or French artist. The fact is that British people don’t take an objective view of the countryside because their lives are still entwined with fields, woods, hedgerows and country lanes. They do not feel the need to praise or replicate nature because it is all around them. They find pictures of cattle and mountains crude and not at all charming. Who wants to look at a painting of cows standing in a muddy field?
What is remarkable about Thoresby and Fiennes is not so much their blindness to natural beauty as the fact that they venture out to these places at all. This in itself hints that attitudes towards the countryside are beginning to change. Another such sign is a growing fashion for great landowners to commission artists from the Low Countries to paint their estates. Jan Siberechts, who comes to England in 1674, is just one of many Dutch and Flemish landscape painters who make a living out of ‘portraits’ of English country houses and their grounds. Such artists naturally set their subjects against the backdrop of the local scenery. Another such artist is Willem Schellinks, mentioned in the previous chapter. Now he appreciates a good view. Having climbed to the top of a hill in Essex, he describes seeing ‘a beautiful view over the finest landscape we have so far seen in England, towards the county of Kent just across the River Thames’.4 Later he stays at the house of Sir Arnold Braems, which he declares lies ‘in a valley of outstanding beauty’.5
The thing is, in order to appreciate a view so fine, you need something to compare it to – a view that is not so pleasant. Up to now, though, when English people have looked around them, they have simply seen miles of fields and trees. A field of corn might look beautiful next to a craggy mountain but, other than that, it is all just as God intended. However, little by little, people in the densely populated towns are beginning to appreciate that country views offer the mind an escape. Every so often, visiting a town house, such as the elegantly furnished home of Elizabeth Manby in Lincoln, your eye will alight on a ‘land-skip’.6 At the same time, the difficulty of escaping a city’s noxious fumes makes people much more appreciative of country air. John Evelyn not only rants against the smoke of London in his Fumifugium (1661), but also remarks that regular visits to the country are necessary to maintain good health. The religious writer John Bunyan is of a like mind. ‘Who would not exchange the stench and fogs of a city for the open balmy air?’ he writes. It seems as if people are opening their eyes to the beauty around them for the first time – or, at least, some of them are.
So much for what seventeenth-century people think of the countryside. But what will you see?
Let us begin with the kingdom of England, which at this time officially incorporates the principality of Wales (we will consider Scotland separately). As you are no doubt aware, the landscape is extremely varied. It ranges from the fells of the north to the fens of the east, from the sparsely populated Welsh mountains to the drained marshes of Kent and Somerset. Generally speaking, the south is richer than the north, and the east richer than the west. Wales is considered particularly poor: one-third of its populace does not earn enough to be eligible to pay the hearth tax. Nor is there any easy collective description for the agriculture of these places. In Kent, travelling in the footsteps of Thomas Baskerville, you will pass vast orchards of cherries, pears and apples and great hop gardens. If you journey through Dorset, you might find yourself overwhelmed by flocks of sheep: it is said there are 300,000 of them within six miles of Dorchester alone; nationally the sheep population in 1660 is more than twelve million and rising fast.7 Some industries also show regional variation. On many rivers in Devon and Cornwall you will hear the heavy stamping sound of blowing houses, where tin ore is crushed by massive hammers, powered by water wheels and smelted. Coal mining is carried on in counties such as Berkshire and Shropshire as well as Nottinghamshire and County Durham. Other industries are less localised: the processing of woollen cloth, for example, takes place all over England. Likewise in all regions you will see active woodland management: coppices are maintained for fuel, fencing and coach-building. Foresters pollard oaks and beeches: the timber goes for building houses and ships, the foliage serves as animal fodder and the sticks are used for fuel. In most counties, stacks of willow and alder are covered with turf and burnt slowly for charcoal, which is used in such rural industries as blacksmithing, brewing and gunpowder manufacture. Although you might not instinctively place making explosives alongside thatching and basket weaving as a rural craft, when you consider that, for safety’s sake, gunpowder needs to be produced in damp conditions in isolated buildings with very thick walls and weak roofs, you can see why the mills are located in remote areas.
To give you an idea of the agricultural character of England and Wales at this time, the seventeenth-century statistician Gregory King has helpfully put together a schedule of his estimates for the year 1695. By his reckoning, 7/13 of the total area of the kingdom is used for agriculture. Given that England and Wales have areas of 50,350 and 8,015 square miles respectively, this amounts to 31,427 square miles of farm-land, which is more than 20 million acres.8 Roughly half of this is arable and half pasture or meadow. Another 1⁄13 of the total area (roughly 2.9 million acres) is occupied by managed woods and coppices; another 1⁄13 is forests, parks and commons; and a further 3⁄13 are heaths, moors, mountains and barren land. A quarter of the last 1⁄13 is roadways, another quarter is waterways and the remaining half is developed land: houses and other buildings, plus their associated gardens, orchards and church-yards. By anybody’s reckoning, the country is still very green. But this does not mea
n that the land is underused. King estimates that 75 per cent of the population lives and works in the countryside and villages, and about 80 per cent of these people work in agriculture.9 Overall, the population of England in 1695 is about 5.06 million, which implies a rural density of seventy-five people per square mile.10 Wales is much less populous, with around 400,000 individuals and a total density of about fifty people per square mile, including its towns. As you are more used to modern densities of 1,112 per square mile in England and 390 per square mile in Wales, you will feel that there is hardly anyone at home.
As you walk through the English countryside you will notice that many fields are ‘open’ – that is to say, unenclosed by a hedgerow or fence. But that number is rapidly dwindling. For hundreds of years villagers in England have managed the land in common, dividing it up into two, three or more great fields of several hundred acres, which are then subdivided into furlongs, so that every yeoman or tenant farmer has a few strips of land in each of the great fields. In addition, he has certain grazing rights on the commons and regularly attends a court that oversees the administration of the whole manor. Land managed in this way is called ‘champion’ or ‘champaign’ country. But now more and more of these great fields are being divided up and physically separated by hedges, walls and fences. The process started in the Middle Ages, when lords of manors started to replace underused arable land with pasture for their wool-bearing flocks of sheep, but it has gathered great momentum since 1600. In fact, more enclosure takes place in the seventeenth century than in any other: about a quarter of the entire area of England is enclosed, with the greatest level of hedge-planting and wall-building taking place in the years from 1630 to 1680.11 Only nineteen of the 139 parishes in Berkshire have been entirely enclosed by 1634, but two-thirds of the county has been appropriated for the sole use of its owners by 1700.12 Wiltshire experiences a similar fate, being mostly open in the early seventeenth century but mostly enclosed by the end of it. Some counties never had open fields in the first place: Kent, parts of Sussex, Cornwall and Cheshire. In these regions the only unenclosed areas are the commons where farmers might retain the right to graze their sheep and cattle. In 1700 just eleven of England’s forty counties still consist predominantly of unenclosed arable land.13 In all, over the course of the seventeenth century, the proportion of England that remains champion country shrinks from about 55 per cent to 23 per cent.14
‘So what?’ you might ask. Big fields, small fields: does it really make any difference? Yes, it does. Think how often you hear someone in the modern world ask, ‘Why do so few people today own so much of the countryside?’ Part of the answer lies wrapped up in the systematic process of enclosure, and in the meaning of that word ‘own’. At the start of the seventeenth century, most of rural England and Wales is owned by the nobility and landed gentry, but while it is unenclosed, it is not theirs to do with as they wish. Their tenants have rights over it. Almost every householder in an open-field manor will have a few strips of arable land. Even if he only has the use of an acre or two, he will still have the right to graze a proportionate number of animals on the common. In some places he will be entitled to use the collectively owned oxen, which are grazed on the fallow field, to pull a plough across his strips of land. Every man, woman and child in the community joins forces to help with the harvest. They may also have the right to take wood and fruit from hedgerows and woodlands, or to trap birds in the great fields and in a few places to fish in the rivers. What’s more, a manorial lord cannot simply evict his tenants and do what he wants with the land, because their tenures are guaranteed, normally by a copyhold agreement or a lease, and each agreement may cover two or three generations. In other words, an unenclosed manor is not so much a parcel of land as a self-sufficient community, and the lord’s ‘ownership’ does not imply much more than an income from that community and the right to sit in judgement on its disputes; it does not mean he can do what he wants with the land. Hence this change from big fields to small fields represents a massive shift in English society. It means the shift of control from local communities to landowners.
Why, then, does it happen?
Landowners will often tell you that the principal reason is efficiency, and that not just the great fields but also the commons and meadows can be made more productive by enclosure. In unenclosed manors, tenants with larger flocks and herds tend to overstock the pasture, so that there is insufficient grass for those who own fewer sheep and cattle. People are reluctant to plant new trees when all the land is managed in common. They are happy to cut wood down and fell timber, but are not so keen to replace it when they know it will be someone else who reaps the benefit; enclosures that incorporate bushes and trees in their hedgerows are therefore a good thing. As for the arable land, leaving a whole great field fallow every other year is no longer necessary as methods of fertilisation improve; yet it is very difficult to change working practices when so many tenant farmers are working in each field and they all tend to adhere to traditional ways of doing things. Finally, there is the basic inefficiency of having to till strips of land that are in different places; it’s much easier to farm your acres if they are all in one block.
Those in favour of open fields and the communal culture of the countryside have much to say in defence of the old way of life. Tilling the land supports large numbers of people who have no other form of livelihood. As customary tenants of the manor, their rents are cheap and they often cannot legally be increased. Farming collectively allows the less well off to benefit from communal assets, such as teams of oxen. Thus, in many small ways, the wealthier tenants support the poorer ones. As for the opinion that open-field farming prevents innovation, villagers point out that they can adapt: they can select specific furlongs to leave fallow rather than whole fields; they can introduce different spring crops or turn areas over to grass for more animal husbandry.15 And the scattered ownership of strips of land is not without its benefits: in years of heavy rainfall, your low-lying strips might be waterlogged but the higher ones will drain well; and when there is little rainfall, the lower ones make up for the withered crops on the high ground. What’s more, although it might seem that leaving a great field fallow every other year is inefficient, it serves a purpose if it is feeding the cattle. Lastly, what will the rural farmer be, if he does not have a part in the management of the land? He will simply be an individual renter. All the ties of loyalty, community support and mutual respect will be commuted to a single money payment.
This is the battle for the heart of England. However, as you will be aware, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. The plain fact is that enclosures are indeed more efficient than open fields. Old-style collective farming might be able to innovate to a degree, but not to the same extent that an outright owner can. The new forms of fertilising the land – such as the sowing of turnips and clover to replenish the soil’s nutrients (introduced from Flanders by Sir Richard Weston in the 1640s) or ‘denshiring’ it (burning the vegetation and digging in the ashes, as they do in Devonshire) – are more easily adopted over an enclosed field than over individual strips in a great field. At the end of the day, these economies all add up; they make farming more profitable, and serious farmers who want to improve their land are prepared to pay higher rents to do so. Last but not least, if landlords can enclose the land (either by agreement or by Act of Parliament), they can extinguish all those customary tenancies and cheap rents, and instead lease out the land at market rates.
This suggests that avaricious landlords are to blame for the transformation of the English countryside and its outright ownership. However, chatting to a few of them will show you that this is only partly true. When there is a dire harvest or a particularly bad winter on an unenclosed manor, the small husbandmen with only a couple of acres cannot make ends meet. Some give up farming their own land, choosing instead to earn their living by manual labour; others leave the manor. In such cases, the steward has to reallocate the redundant strips of land to other tenant fa
rmers. Gradually, as the bad weather continues, the land is concentrated in fewer hands. Before long the farmers who are left in business want all their lands to be in one place, for ease of sowing, fertilising and harvesting. Thus pressure to enclose the land grows from the major tenants too, and not just from the landlords. When enclosure finally takes place, the smallest farmers are forced off the land altogether. Two or three small enclosures by themselves are not enough to enable a poor husbandman to sustain a family – especially when he has lost his use of the communal oxen, meadows, commons, firewood and the rights to trap game, birds or fish. By separating the working practices of big and small farmers, the big ones no longer help the small, and the small ones are forced to sell up. Your typical manor of sixty or seventy tenant farmers, working collectively, is suddenly reduced to two dozen farmers working independently, employing twenty or thirty labourers between them. The unemployed remainder have little choice but to head off to the nearest town and look for a job.
The drive to improve the land is gradually reshaping the countryside in other ways too. The boundaries of the newly enclosed fields are designed to run in dead-straight lines; hence you can easily tell them apart from the ancient hedgerows of the medieval period, which are never straight. Similarly, when the open fields were laid out in the Middle Ages, the villages where the people lived were all built as groups of cottages, often around a village green. In those days it was unusual for farmers in these regions to live in isolated farmhouses. Now, with communal farming coming to an end and farmers having all their fields in one block, it is sensible for them to live in the middle of their land, where they can keep an eye on their animals. Therefore many new farmhouses are being built in the open countryside. Naturally, the roads leading to these new dwellings are straight, leading from the highway to the farmyard – quite unlike the lanes twisting between ancient hedgerows such as you find in Devon, Cornwall, Kent and Sussex. As for the old farmhouses in the villages, they are frequently converted into rows of cottages for rural labourers.
