MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME

and recriminations made. In Bampton the manor courts seem relatively free of significant cases of dispute (not withstanding that these courts were much denuded institutions in the post-Latin era and soon to be absorbed by the functions of modern local government), but by the mid 19th Century Rev Giles alluded to what was supposedly formal (and largely honorific) roles of bedels and bailiffs of Bampton fulfilling their ancient roles as a “terror to all evil doers, old and young in the town and neighbourhood”.

Commons were places of the poor. Inevitably they were often considered by those in authority as synonymous with people on the margins of mainstream society- known by various names in antiquity. Many of the transient, seasonal or semipermanent inhabitants of English commons were firmly described in pejorative terms by modern parlance- they are squatters , pedlars, hawkers, tinkers, runaways, Scots, Irish, Egyptians (Gypsies), itinerants, and ultimately, the catch-all term, vagrants.

Bampton Horse Fair was a longstanding and wellknown festival that is known to have attracted visitors and horse traders from across the country. It must surely have attracted itinerant groups also. I have found nothing specific relating to travellers and other itinerant groups’ relationship with Bampton and its commons, but that probably says more about the general scarcity of historic evidence of itinerant groups and their transient role in rural economies than anything else. Either way, there was most probably a lot ‘going on’ in those blank areas of Bampton’s historic maps!

Commons were increasingly viewed not only economically inefficient, but hotbeds of lawlessness and immorality, ‘edgy’ places on the edges of parishes, where clandestine or illegal activities took place. In debates about wide scale enclosure in the late 18th Century and early 19th Century the relationship between commons and the poor was central. While most tended to recognise that access to common resources for the poor was a key feature of them sustaining themselves there was a significant point of difference. For those who advocated enclosure this relationship bred a sad dependence and idleness by encouraging the very poor to adopt no more ambitious strategy in life than passively collecting whatever they could from the land around them to sustain life, even unlawful measures. To detractors of enclosure the process threatened to break the link between working the land and having a share in owning it- a system in which even the poorest were inevitably investors in their regional economy.

To these people, common farming was an imperfect form of capitalism, but one that could be made to work in the interests of the poor’s basic subsistence- with some tweaks.

In a survey of his holdings dated 1789 the Earl of Shrewsbury’s agent made very clear his view on enclosure writing:

“There is but very little enclosed ground here. The land lies in very small parcels and farms are very dispersed the inconvenience which nothing, but a general exchange or enclosure can remedy but an enclosure is not likely to take place as the Tithe owners oppose on the supposition it will lessen the values of their Tithes”.

Bampton vicar Rev Giles later in the century also made his views on the matter of enclosure very clear. When describing the farming system in what he called the “primaeval” villages of Aston and Cote (which retained an open-field system into the 1860s) he lamented that the inhabitants there “are hardly a hundred acres of enclosures, the system of farming in common prevails and forms a fatal obstacle to the improvement which the land is capable of receiving”. Although not objecting to common farming on strictly moral grounds (as many religious men of the time did),