The world of open-field farming and the manorial system

Closes and Enclosed

         An enclosed piece of land is a piece of land with a fence or hedge round it. Obvious, isn’t it? There is even an English word for such a piece of land – a Close. On old maps which show field names, you will see many such names. In Great Shelford, there was Pond Close, Gutter Close, Tenter Close, Hoppers Close, Old Joe’s Close, an endless list. And village people would have known where those closes were, such was their familiarity with the land.

         If you look at the Enclosure Map, which gives a snapshot of the village in 1835, you will find that almost every cottage had a Home Close. The Home Close was the small field right behind your house where you could keep your livestock confined, or run chickens, grow fruit trees, whatever you wanted. If you were rich and had a horse, then it might be a paddock for the horse. Most of the arable land and grazing were outside the village centre and necessitated a journey, so you really needed this one bit of land right by your back door, and usually all the barns and sheds and other outbuildings were thereabouts too.

          The village in the early 1830s (and in previous centuries) was small and compact, and all these closes were in the centre of the village, near to the houses. These were the only enclosed bits of the village. The rest of the land, outside the centre, and separating Great Shelford from its neighbours was unenclosed land - with no fences and no hedges.

      So we know what AN enclosure is, but what was the Enclosure (or Inclosure as it was more usually spelt in the 19th century)?

The Manorial System

      To understand enclosure, you have to travel back to the Middle Ages, and to 1066 and William the Conqueror.  You have to understand the manorial system and open field farming. The Normans invaded and conquered England, and William handed out the land to his faithful Norman followers, displacing the Anglo-Saxons who’d held it before. Land ownership was organized in a sort of pyramid. All land was considered to be owned by the King. He in turn granted it to the great lords, who held it in return for giving him military service and providing soldiers from among their tenants. There might be smaller lords below these great lords, or just the tenants, and these too owed service of one sort or another to their lord.

         The lord’s property was a manor (and he might have one or many). Each manor was in a given place. Sometimes it was a whole village, sometimes only part of one. There would be a manor house, and a farm belonging to the lord (the demesne). Then there were the lord’s tenants, who held land from him. 

            Like so many things in England, the manorial system lived on for centuries. Over the course of those centuries, the overlords became less powerful, the serfs became free, but the manorial system continued, changing and adapting all the time.

        I will skip over these earlier centuries, and concentrate on describing how it was from the 1700s. The Lord of the Manor still remained lord of all the land in the manor. He had his own estate or demesne - the manor farm - which consisted of arable, pasture and meadow, and with it came the right to use the commons. He might farm his land himself - or, rather, employ men who farmed it for him. Or he might lease it out.  But he also had tenants who held their own land. Some owned their property freehold, but most were what was known as “copyholders”. They, you might say, almost owned their property. They could leave that property in their wills, or sell it, but the transaction had to go through the Manorial Court. When it did so, there was a “fine” to pay – the fee for a change of ownership. There was also a regular small rent payment to the lord, and by the 1700s this rent rarely reflected the true value of the land. In turn, the tenants might choose to rent out their land, rather than work it themselves, or rent out the houses for income, rather than live in them themselves. So you see, the copyholders really were well on the way to owning their land. But the open field system meant that, whether lord, freeholder or copyholder, they had very limited choices when it came to farming their land. 

The Open Field System

         Great Shelford was a parish of about 2,000 acres. Of this, three-quarters was cultivated land, and the remainder was "waste".  I will explain later about waste, but for the moment let's concentrate on the arable land. Most of the arable land in the parish was land which was said to be “in the open fields” or "in the common fields".  This common field arable system was highly organized, and was based around a number of very large arable fields. These fields were divided into strips and a tenant would have a number of strips within them. These strips were fixed and his, but the field had to be managed as a whole, by all the tenants in common. You have to imagine it as like a giant allotment site, with strips of cultivated land, running parallel to each other, and periodically separated by access paths - the grass baulks - like the allotment paths. From a distance, the fields would have looked much as they do today – great stretches of open field, with few trees, and even fewer hedges – except that the fields were divided into individual strips.

          If you want to gain an idea of what this looked like on the ground, there are a number of places where pasture fields still show the lines of the old strip farming. One of them is the park at Wimpole. If you follow the path up to the lime avenue, you can see the clear outlines of a field system on your left. Alternatively, there's a pasture field just opposite Toft church where the strips are beautifully clear. As you walk across the field, you rise, fall, rise, fall, rise, fall. You are walking across a line of long, narrow strips. These strips were highest in the middle and sloped down towards a low point which marked the boundary between two strips.  Essentially each strip  has a whaleback profile. This would have given the benefit of drainage. What is most surprising to me is how narrow each strip is - perhaps 15 paces. When you are used to modern fields, worked using tractors and combine harvesters, the strips seem impossibly small for growing corn. But that is how it was.

           It is hard to know how the strips were distributed in the early days of open field farming, but over the centuries strips had endlessly changed hands. Some were inherited, and if there were several children, one man's strips might have been divided between several children. There'd been lots of buying and selling too. Even the Lord's strips were mixed in with the rest. The result was a dog's breakfast where any one farmer might have strips dotted right across the parish. Some farmers had succeeded in consolidating a few of their strips, but only to a very limited extent. You can see that a lot of time would be spent moving between strips, and rationalization was one of the looked-for goals of enclosing the open fields.        

         The manor also had “commons” on which livestock was grazed. This is what was meant by the waste. It wasn't literally a waste - it was just land unsuited to cultivation. The grazing on the commons wasn’t divided up. Instead everyone who had the right to graze livestock on it was restricted to a given number of animals. 

          You can see that such a system meant that the land - whether arable or grazing - wasn’t “mine” in the sense in which we view it today. Much of what happened had to be discussed with the other commoners, and that meant mutual cooperation. If they didn’t cooperate – and sometimes people didn’t – then it could be a real mess.

   The Enclosure, you will soon see, was the process by which this system of open field farming was overturned.

Open field arable farming

          The agricultural thinkers of 1835, brought up on notions of agricultural improvement, saw the old open field system as a primitive and outdated way of farming. But when introduced, the open field system had been an advanced and sophisticated system for keeping the fertility of the land. It was also entirely sustainable. You didn't have to import anything from anywhere else. It kept the land fertile, year after year after year. 

           We don't really know when the system was first introduced, but there is a growing body of opinion today that it was the monastic landlords of the Anglo-Saxon period who first introduced it. Seeing the results, other landowners followed suit. And then, when the Normans came along, they continued with the system. It was highly efficient.

          Open field farming consisted in dividing the arable in the parish into large open fields. By organizing these open fields into groups of three, you could operate a crop rotation system. It allowed you to use sheep to maintain the fertility of the land.  In 1814, as for centuries previously, the rotation practiced was 1st year: wheat, 2nd: barley, oats or peas, 3rd: fallow. When the fields were fallow, the sheep were grazed on them. So valuable was their manure, that it was more important than the wool they produced. Without it there'd be no corn. The sheep were called "The Golden Hoof".

The sequence of crops had a logic too. Wheat needs the greatest fertility, so it followed on from the fallow-fertilized-by-sheep. Barley doesn't need such fertile soil, so could happily follow the wheat. By the time two years of crops had been taken, it was time to replenish the soil fertility by grazing the sheep.

The Layout of the Great Shelford Fields

            The arable land which runs from Church Street and Cambridge Road as far as Hauxton (much of which is now Rectory Farm) was divided into three open fields. The names varied across the centuries, but in the 19th century these were generally called: Church West Field, Hauxton West Field and Causeway West Field (the Causeway was Cambridge Road). Together they made up the West field, and the three of them would have formed one rotation group.

          On the other side of the parish, east of Cambridge Road and running on either side of Granhams Road and Hinton Way was another set of fields. These were Nine Wells Field, Beans End Field, White Field and Heath Field. There was also a smaller field called Mill Field. I have not been able to discover how these were organized into a rotation.

          Because the strips were randomly distributed around the fields, and by no means equally distributed across the three fields in the rotation, it strikes me that the amount of crop a farmer took home must have varied somewhat from year to year.

v1 © Helen Harwood, uploaded February 2025