MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

Beyond the early-enclosed closes of Bampton were large areas of agricultural land. Early county maps illustrate the vastness of the common land around Bampton and Aston. That closest to the settlements of Bampton and Aston were settled into fields that would allow four-field cultivation. The others, principally towards the south were set aside as meadows. There were also a small number of areas enclosed for coppicing.

While many older closes would be abundantly hedged, the strips of each open field would be defined mainly by the tracks and pathways through them. Boundaries between individual strips would be felt in the landscape not in the way we experience modern field boundaries, but more as customary divisions- recognised by neighbours’ mutually accepted understanding of their limits- defined by subtle landscape features such as eroded verges, worn paths or shallow ditches.

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

When, in 1789 the Earl of Shrewsbury commissioned a survey of his estates, comprising land which we must remember was for a long time divided in closes and farmed individually by tenants, his agent noted:

“No plan or measurement of this estate has been made before, it is presumed by the great trouble and expense of making one, the land being dispersed very wide and in such small parcels and for many years several of the tenants have occupied lands belonging to other persons which lie intermixed in their own farms, which are not distinguished by any landmarks and which the present tenants themselves cannot now distinguish which has rendered the present survey very difficult to obtain.”

One can only imagine what the situation was in the unenclosed open-fields!

The history of the English open-field system (in its dramatic and revolutionary demise through parliamentary enclosure) has generated a great deal of rural mythology throughout the modern age, but whatever one’s view the reality was this was a system of common regulation and centralised organisation and enforcement. It was not a flawed proto-capitalism, nor was it a prototype of egalitarianism, or as some would have it, a proto-communism. It relied on its operation by maintaining symbiotic relationships between neighbours; relationships usually managed and regulated by a manorial court. Like any relationships between neighbours ancient or modern, disputes inevitably erupted. Medieval court records of quarrels between neighbours inconvenienced by sharing the same patch of earth are common. Open Field farming was therefore something much more alive, much more in contention than the maps here suggest. A better sense of what this landscape looked like in practice can once again be found in the modern aerial photography that recorded (and in some areas records still) the rhythm and alignment of ridge and furrow ploughing, much of it demonstrating the characteristic long s-shaped tracks of individual strips.

Early mapping of Bampton leaves common meadows essentially blank, or at best shaded as scrub. This belies their very important role in the functioning of the rural economies of Bampton, Aston and Lew. Again, recourse to aerial photography shows that meadows of Bampton were anything but ‘blank’ spaces on the map. Modern aerial photography, and other data can be used to show that the areas of Bampton

MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

maintained under common meadow during the medieval and early modern period were littered with landscape features of ditches, enclosures, pits, and possibly even structures. Many of these features are impossible to date by form alone, but undoubtedly many are medieval and postmedieval and represent of a huge range of activity related to work and movement in this landscape. In some sense the modern experience of peaceful solitude in the modern fields to the south of Bampton is deceptive of how these areas were utilised in the past. These were peopled landscapes. Indeed, commons required effective regulatory systems to manage the potentially conflicting interests of different users. Pressures on commons changed over time in the face of population growth (or decline) and economic or technical change. In the medieval and early modern period this regulation was essentially a matter for the institutions of the manor estate to which each common belonged. In other lowland English parishes there is also evidence that the local populations took matters in to their own hands and formed committees (at the will of the Manor) to manage their commons in conjunction to or ‘in lieu of’ the Manor Court. The villagers of Aston adopted this rather rarer form of organization where four “grass stewards” and a committee of the “sixteens”, a group of commoners elected annually to regulate and manage the crop rotations in the open fields and manage the grazing on the commons. This arrangement continued until the final abandonment of open-field farming system in Aston in 1854.

The main concern was the same- to prevent ‘overcharging’ the commons by excluding the livestock of those without a common right and ensuring legitimate graziers observed the correct limits and best practices as they were understood at the time. To do this, commons were driven at regular intervals to gather in all the animals and weed out any that should not be there. If any were found, the animals were kept at the village pound- the memory of which today is preserved in Bampton as “Pound Cottage” in Bushey Row. To manage this process there was an extensive network of droveways- wide green lanes used to control movement of stock. These were bounded by impenetrably thick hedges and, for insurance, steep marginal ditches. A number of these are visible in early mapping of Bampton, and a few have survived parliamentary enclosure to remain in use as modern private field access. The most easily spotted survival in the modern landscape is the drove way which forms the continuation of Weald Street across the fields to the SW. Communal grazing relied on commoners to act responsibly and to submit to authority but it was not rare for commons to be subjected to all manner of unsuitable, unsavoury and downright unlawful practices. The practical risks of common grazing were omnipresent: The principal problem was one of over-grazing created by an over-population of substandard animals: a scrawny sheep grazed more than its economic worth. Such animals were difficult to separate from larger, legally sanctioned flocks despite owners’ attempts to cut ears in specific patterns to denote ownership. Other problems included commoners ‘bending’ the rules such as the grazing of ‘jades’ (a term variously used to describe ‘vicious’, ‘dumb’, ‘cracked’ or ‘crazy’ horses- all ultimately therefore worthless on the market) were worse because they took up grazing resource without creating any economic value whatsoever. Geese were a particularly unwelcome presence on the commons because they managed to achieve the spectacularly destructive act of simultaneously eating all the grass while also poisoning what was left with their trails of prolific droppings. ‘Untethered’ (which at this date means without nose rings) pigs would churn up the ‘soil’ as reliably as a modern day mechanical digger. One can readily understand the potential for ill-feeling among commoners as rumours spread