Another great book got me semi-obsessing on the ‘history of the method of English settlement’, as sparked by Domesday Book. Has obvious analogous geographic and anthropological layers – the meaning of life explained through the plough? As every historical social, political, martial, commercial and academic action recorded in England has its technology, nomenclature and practical ethics based in agriculture. Is hardly surprising and I doubt you care, but I am impressed by Mr Seebohm’s research and have composed a rough time-line of significant sources of events and characters found in the work.

  • Pytheus 300BC. Observed Britons harvesting tons of wheat and threshing in barns because of the very rainy weather.
  • Strabo 30BC. Mentions export from Britain of ‘corn, cattle, gold, silver, skins, slaves and dogs.’
  • Tacitus 90AD. Wrote a biography of travelling ambassador Agricola which contained details of freedom-loving Britons ruled by ‘insatiably acquisitive’ masters. His Germania describes the Gallic tribal politics and agricultural system which was imported to Brittanica when the Romans left.
  • Valentinian 371AD. Deported the Bucenobantes among others to Britain from Southern Gaul as punishment for unruly behaviour. Installed a three field system.
  • Gregory of Tours 582AD. Wrote the Historia Francorum on Gaul, describing King Hildebert’s granting villas to the Bishops being brought into cultivation. The death of Chrodinus left large amounts of property to the Church, slaves and all.
  • Ceawlin 570AD. Won the province of Tidenham from the Welsh instigating the Saxon manorial system. Offa retook the land in 750AD, built and gave name to the dyke now on it.
  • The Rectitudines. Sixth Century. A section of the later Quadripartitus 1118AD. Provided information on the Thane, or theign as a Lord of Manor, but soldier first. A knight bonded to the trinoda necessitas of:
1. military service – fyrd
2. work building castles – burhbote
3. maintain bridges – brigbote
The Thane’s ‘inland’ became a manor/demesne, geneat or gestates as tenants’ land, later villenage. ‘If a gesithcundman neglects the fyrd let him pay CXX shillings and forfeit his land.’
  • Bede 655AD wrote of Ethelbert as the first Christian Anglo-Saxon King of England. In 603AD he defeated the Britons and exterminated or subjugated the peoples with their lands made tributary to the English and their church.
  • Almannic Codes 622AD. Spread of Christianity in Germany. Notes the unchristian dealings in serfs by monks. The earliest version of Magna Carta.
  • The Dooms of Ine 680AD. Saxon Wessex land laws observing scattered non-manorial ownership and open-field farming systems. Similar to Welsh land laws.
  • Kemble’s Codex Diplomaticus 800AD. A collection of 1300 charters granting land or recording a privilege contained in the cartularies of English abbeys. They included diplomas, writs and wills with open field boundaries described by features measured in gores, headlands, furlongs, linches. Romans had measured in marchae and limites. Saxons did not bother as tribal lands were considered set.
  • Polyptique d’Irminon 823AD. A survey of Saint-Germain monastic estates which contained detailed information on the lives of tenants; their families, workings, rights etc.
  • Welsh land laws 900AD. Three codes: the Venedotian of North Wales, the Dimetian, the Gwentian of South Wales. Employed co-aration with cooperative eight-oxen ploughing. Was a tribal nomadic pastoral society which stands as an example of pre-Saxon farming in cattle not corn. Julius Caesar records in 55BC, ‘The Welsh feed on milk, cheese, butter and flesh in larger portions than bread.’ They practised and relished universal military training, as late as the 1200s. Free Welshmen were tied by common defence, tillage and law; each was entitled to five free acre strips; co-tillage of wastelands; hunting; a homestead consisted of house, cattle-yard and corn-yard. There was no villenage – only the elected tribal chief was above them and only for military and taxation situations.
  • King Edwy 957AD. Granted a manor to the Abbott of Bath. Leased to Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury; rents part paid as 6 porpoises and 30,000 herring.
  • Domesday Book 1080AD. Records cases of common lands under a three-field system: rotation of tilth grain/ etch grain/ fallow or winter corn/ spring corn/ fallow – with fallow land used for grazing. The system was originally from China, introduced by Romans – or an adaptation of older nomadic two-field system alternating crops with grazing. A German system with the same crops year on year required extra work with peat manure and marling. Which explains the importance of cooperative ploughing or was there an ancient reason for the unreasonable, inconvenient, inefficiency of the open field system? This was folk-land or terra regis consisting allodial allotments awarded to conquering soldiers or grants to monasteries – they were not free communities but royal manors. The serf system was fully employed.
  • Book of the Dun Cow 1100. Abbott of Clanmacnois has explanation of the Irish tribal agriculture coming under ecclesiastic control.
  • Liber Landavensis 1125AD. Book of Llandaff. Contains 500 years of land-grant charters with massed specifics of tenants and standings.
  • Liber Niger 1125AD. 40 years after Domesday with identical formatting. Gives the first indication of the breakdown of serfdom. Noted the increase of irregular holdings, oxen team numbers, graded tax amounts, previously unknown complex social connections etc.
  • The Bolden Book 1183AD – lists of villani holding bovates making payment in kind by maintaining the bishop’s hunting grounds; feeding horses, dogs, harriers and cordons; building a Bishop’s Hall with chapel, lodges, hedges and 18 booths for the fairs of St Cuthbert.
  • Court Leet and View of Frankpledge 1111AD. Registered and monitored ownership of strips in common farmed fields. As Manor Rolls describe two distinct lands; the ‘Lord’s demesne’ and ‘villenage’ as intermixed strips in an open three-field system.
  • The Hundred Rolls 1279AD. Edward I. Describes a demesne of home farm and portions let out to free tenants; villenage land rented in virgates and half-virgates; then cottiers on smaller holdings. King’s manors, abbeys, private landowners. There is weekly work at ploughing, reaping, carrying for three days a week, mostly at harvest time. Boon-days or precariae or extra services by request. Payments in kind at Christmas etc. for gafol or rent as churchshot, tallage and scutage.
  • Fleta 1290AD. Anonymous treatise of common law directives for land-owners’ management of their estates.
  • Rotulus Redituum 1290AD. Literally a roll of Scottish bovates, oxgangs, seliones, stuhts or allotted chattels, husband-lands as controlled by monasteries.
  • Piers the Ploughman 1370AD. Describes the faire felde mornings with the whole town out working, watching feasting, drinking on the open commons.
  • Thomas Tusser 1557AD wrote of open-field as, ‘champion farming’ – commending the three-field rotation system.
  • Sir John Davis 1607AD. Instituted the Bailebiatagh survey of County Monaghan. Irish land laws and farming procedures as described as tribal, open field, joint ploughing with food rent to the chief and all land belonging to tribe. A return to ancient Brehon Laws.
  • Enclosure Commissioners 1800s. Officially divided land into blocks to be hedged and allocated to farmers.10,000 parishes in England were subjected to 4,000 Enclosure Acts between 1760 and 1844.

  Each of these notations has a hundred books written about them. I recommend you read every one of them. Ha!