I was walking among curly-coated Hereford cattle, between the church where the founder of the breed is buried and the house where he was born. They were beautiful cattle. I have always thought of them as having grown from the same red soil of my native Herefordshire, and I remembered driving them along the lanes with my father when they were twice as tall as me, noting that their rear ends were not their best feature, though no doubt they scrub up well in the show ring. I resolved one day to try to find out why farm animals always have mucky rear ends. You never see deer or foxes with filth-encrusted backsides.
All was going well until I heard the farmer shouting ‘Can I help you?’ I guessed he was kindly volunteering to help me to get off his land by the most direct route.
I’d been invited to join in a perambulation of the village local history society, a very pleasant bunch of villagers trying to work out why this was such a lumpy field, and what history of land and water use could be detected there.
I was more interested in the social history of this village. It has a main street where many of the old half-timbered houses were called farms, set in orchards from end to end. I knew that it had once been a village of open fields, where the villagers had had the right to use the land in common. To do this they needed yards and barns and sheds close to their houses on the village street, to store fodder and to shelter their livestock at night and during winter. The land they worked was the land which the whole village had the right to use. Every day they would yoke up their teams in their yards and head out to plough or harrow the strips they had been allotted, or maybe sharpen their scythes before heading out together to make hay on the Big Leasowe. At night the village cowherd would bring all the cattle back to the village from the common grazings, and the cows would each peel off from the herd as the reached their own home byres. There was a deep track too, up to the woods, where they would have driven their pigs to claim their right of pannage (foraging for acorns) in the autumn, and tushed back the various kinds of wood and timber to which they had a right.
Every village had its own customary way of regulating how the open fields, commons and ‘waste’ were managed. People would have been allotted, literally by drawing lots, a certain number of strips to cultivate, and have had the right to graze set numbers of cattle, sheep, horses and geese on the commons. Rules were enforced by elected village officers, with ancient titles such as ‘reeve’, who were paid to enforce the rules out of fines levied on those who tried to bend them. The manorial court might arbitrate if agreement could not be reached, but it was in everyone’s interest that the village lands were looked after, and many of the rules were concerned with maintaining fertility. The arable fields were grazed after harvest so that the animals could dung them, and fallowing the arable rested the soil and reduced the weeds. Such a system ideally allowed everyone to be fed from the communal lands, and provided with essentials like wood, stone, furze and sand from on the common or the ‘waste’. This ancient system allowed the villagers to be sustained by the lands that they worked in common. Tradespeople such as wheelwrights, cobblers, weavers and blacksmiths might also depend partly on their common rights. The Lord of the Manor may have been a landholder, but he was not a landowner in the modern sense. His rights were limited, which is why it was necessary for him to get his peers in Parliament to pass an Enclosure Act if he wanted to convert the communally worked lands into exclusive private property, and turn off the families who had possibly been working the village lands by rights predating the Norman Conquest.
Near our former family home in the village was a farm called Westfield Barn. It took its name from the great West Field, one of the open fields of the village. It is still a wide expanse of farmland with no houses, but divided by the thorn hedges of the enclosure period.
Although the village now has commuter ‘infill’ houses built along the village street on the sites of the old orchards, the skeleton of a village with a sturdy peasantry working the land in common can still be seen.
Before I heard the farmer shouting, I had been looking at the wide expanse of fields there to the north of the village, with no houses except for one huge red-brick eighteenth-century farmhouse and barns. I was speculating that this might have been another of the open fields of the village. If so it would probably have been called the North Field. The farmhouse had been originally the manor house, and would have been well placed to take over the farming of the old North Field when it was enclosed. The enclosure process used parliamentary legislation to extinguish the villagers’ land-use rights, dividing and enclosing the open fields with quickthorn hedges and turning the sturdy independent resourceful peasants of the village into landless day-labourers.
So it was interesting to be offered ‘help’ by the farmer at this point in my perambulations. He pretty soon got into asking how I would like it if he came into my garden. I coped with that argument quite well, I think – I’ve done it so many times before – and I started telling him how the Swedes have the right to walk absolutely anywhere in their countryside, apart from in standing crops and people’s gardens and on landing stages. He didn’t like the sound of that one bit, and started telling me that the sole purpose of this field was to provide feed for cattle. (And money for him, he might have said – but modestly did not.)
We were standing at a place where the right to work the land in common had been stolen by a Lord of the Manor who could get his mates in Parliament to pass an enclosure act on his behalf. It was this enclosure movement which not only destroyed the English peasantry but also started the development of the very British idea of the rich and powerful having exclusive rights to use and exploit the land they had decided that they could own, an idea that they also imposed on the half of the world that they called their Empire.
The temptation to tell him all about this was very strong, but it seemed unfair to irritate him in case that made life difficult for the villagers of the local history society, so after having very politely told him that I did not entirely share his views on the rights conferred by owning property, we parted. Such sweet sorrow.
And I was pleased a little later on, over a beer in one of the villagers’ houses, when we got out the 1853 Tithe map to look at the field names. Many of the enclosed fields that I had thought might have formed part of the big communal North Field now had names like Low Northfield and Old Northfield. We had been viewing stolen land alright.
I was tactful enough to hold my peace with that farmer, but forbearance comes at a cost. One of these days in such circumstances an unsuspecting farmer is going to get an earful. And if he does not deserve to be blamed for what his ancestors did, he certainly does for believing that it is possible to own and exploit and degrade a portion of the planet for his own personal gain, and be answerable to no-one. Those villagers of the local history society may not wish to work the land in common now, but that should not mean that they have no say in how their village lands are nurtured (or exploited), nor that they should be excluded from all but a few narrow footpaths. It is in all our interests that these farms should be managed so as to restore the health of the biosphere in which all of us are stakeholders.
I have since discovered that the open fields of the village were enclosed by an Act of Parliament in 1797. The lands enclosed included 611 acres of arable common fields, of which the North Field was 87 acres, the West Field 168, and Hope Field 140. There were also several smaller open fields. The rest of the parish, the meadows, commons and ‘wastes’, must have been enclosed at some later date. Of the common grazings of the village only a tiny fragment remained, which soon became a place where the dispossessed could live if, according to the legend, they could build and get a chimney smoking within the day. There is now no common land whatsoever, only the name remains.
That the land that once supported the whole village is now owned and used by three or four families is clearly not something that can be easily reversed. To suggest this would be quixotic. What is at stake here, it seems to me, is who controls the use of land.
At the conquest William distributed the land among 180 barons, but they only ‘held’ the land on sufferance from the king, and he promised to uphold the ancient laws which gave the peasants their rights to work and graze the common lands, and to dig peat, sand and stone, to feed their pigs on the acorns in the village woods, and so on.
We now have almost none of the rights that those peasants enjoyed. Instead of the Norman landholders we now have landowners who have whittled away the rights and the land of the common people and attempted to restrict our access to the surface of our very planet. Worse still we pay them all large sums of money, even those of us who don’t own enough land to park a doormat, and we allow them to use the land no longer for the common good but for their own individual enrichment. I frankly would not give a damn who owned the land, on paper, if it were not that landowners have no incentive to look after the land in the interests of all of us. We do not have what the great American ecologist Aldo Leopold called a’land ethic’, and at present we cannot stop owners from drenching the land with chemicals that interfere with vital life-processes; we cannot stop them from using the land in ways that have destroyed much of the wildlife of this country.
We need to restore the biosphere as a matter of extreme urgency. The biosphere after all is the system we depend on for our survival. The biosphere, or the tattered remains of it, occupies all the land that is also currently occupied by farmers. They are pretty strange bedfellows. We cannot restore the biosphere to the kind of health that is essential for our survival if we continue with current farming methods. For restoration to be possible we need to reassert control in order to halt the way our land is being exploited. For the farming that once supported the seventeenth century village to be allowed to continue to develop as a system that threatens to poison or starve the very fabric of life on earth is not tolerable, and yet it carries on as a comfortable world of agronomists, investment planners, consultants, four-by-fours and pheasants and tweedy gun-toting country folks while our children mourn for the future we are stealing from them. Demanding change to the freedoms conferred by land ownership is not communism, or socialism or any other ism except pragmatism.
There are, to take a simple example, no regulations governing how much fungicide you can spray on your fields. Your farmers in your village are free to use as much fungicide as they like, although we know that in the soil the exchange of nutrients that supports plant growth is mediated by fungi in symbiosis with the plant roots.* In the Food and Environment Research Agency statistics for 2018 95% of the area under cereal crops, for example, was sprayed with fungicides, of which 50% was sprayed ‘more than four times’ during the season. They don’t seem to count above five. All the cereals surveyed were also sprayed twice in the season with glyphosate, a nasty carcinogenic chemical often sold as a weed killer (Roundup) but here used as a ‘growth regulator’ and hence not listed as a pesticide. That’s seven doses of pesticides on 50% of cereal crops.This merely hints at one of the many risks to the biosphere on which we depend for our food, inflicted by farmers and chemical manufacturers who are free to use and sell as many farm chemicals as they want, putting their short term interests ahead of the soil fertility and food supplies of the future. The original injustice to the people of the village has created a system that allows landowners the freedom to damage ecosystems in a way that will in time come to be regarded as a crime against the planet.
http://www.pan-uk.org/pesticides-agriculture-uk/
https://secure.fera.defra.gov.uk/pusstats/surveys/
*Entangled Life’, M. Sheldrake, Bodley Head 2020, passim.
Great to read this having just finished 'The Midland Peasant' by WG Hoskins. I'd read his Making of the English Landscape years ago - such a brilliant man.
This is great. I’ve never read such a detailed and convincing historical account of a past life that is often seen as illusory. You give a crucial
perspective on the problems we face and suggest a radical solution.