Settling the Boundaries

          The first job of the Great Shelford Enclosure Commissioners was to define the boundaries of the parish. This wasn’t really difficult. All our neighbouring parishes had already been enclosed, and their Commissioners had pretty much done the work for ours.

         The work was not, in any case, particularly onerous. Everyone, it seems, knew where the boundaries were. They just weren’t written down or drawn on a map. In that respect the Enclosure marks a big cultural shift. For centuries the people of the village held all the important knowledge in their heads, and passed it down by word of mouth. Knowledge was not what was written in books or drawn on maps, but a matter of local knowledge or “Custom”, based on traditional practice. Safety lay in the fact that everyone knew. Documents could easily be forged, and in the medieval period they sometimes were, to give false title to some possession. By contrast, in a world where Custom ruled, if you wanted something resolved, you went to the old men of the village, and they would give you chapter and verse, an account of how it had been during their lifetimes and as it had been handed down to them by the previous generation.

         So, for example, in 1812, when the Stapleford Enclosure Commissioners wanted to define the boundary between Stapleford and Great Shelford, a boundary which is rather wiggly in character, they went to the old men of the village. Two Great Shelford men, Thomas Pratt who was 69, and William Wollard, about 65, both gave their account of the line of the boundary. Pratt described it, starting from Hills Road, as following a ditch which he thought was dug in the middle of a Mereway.

         Now mere – or mere or meare – is an interesting word. It derives from the Saxon word for boundary, and in a typical tautology, people often spoke of “meres and boundaries”. A mereway, presumably, was a track that ran along the boundary. The old men seemed quite clear where the boundary was. And of course they would. Boundaries were important. They defended your rights to land, and a clear knowledge of them prevented unnecessary and time-consuming disputes with your neighbours.

         We’ve all heard of the tradition of Beating the Bounds. It’s one of those country traditions we are so nostalgic about. But, in the days when knowledge was transmitted by word of mouth, the annual Beating of the Bounds, or Perambulation of the boundaries, was one of the ways in which this knowledge was reinforced and handed down through successive generations. And in the walking, you could point out the exact place, the exact landmark, and the boundary would be indelibly fixed in everyone’s memory.

         When the Stapleford Enclosure Commissioner was ready to define the parish boundaries once and for all, he put up a notice advertising a perambulation so that everyone could see and confirm the truth of what he was laying down. Only then did he draw the map. And those maps, which were drawn up in the early 1800s became legal documents, and have defined the boundaries of the parishes for the last 200 years.

         But let’s return to Great Shelford and the boundaries definitively recorded on the Enclosure Map. The boundary with Trumpington ran roughly north-west, starting at the Hauxton end, and running towards what is now Cambridge Road, along another Mereway. The very name of mereway confirms it as boundary and track. Beyond Cambridge Road, the open Shelford Moor merged into Trumpington Moor. Pre-enclosure, parishioners, from either parish, could graze on both sides of the boundary. This was called intercommoning. So this boundary was, you might say, a permeable one. For all that, I’m sure everyone knew the line of the actual boundary. Looking at the map, it’s pretty straight, and seems to follow the line of the drains or streams. Maybe it was also the next stretch of the old mereway. Just before Hills Road, the boundary took a sudden turn eastwards. This stretch, too, was labelled Mereway. Most likely it was all one long track.

         The boundary with Cherry Hinton followed the line of the old Roman road in another long straight line. Then it turned south along the Stapleford boundary we’ve already mentioned. The boundary weaves backwards and forwards here. There’s obviously a story behind those meanders, but I don’t know what it is. But one item of significance is that the arable field halfway along this southern boundary had a piece in it called the Mingle Lands. Here there were strips belonging to Shelford parishioners and strips belonging to Stapleford parishioners, “promiscuously intermixed” (or all mixed up) one with another. The Stapleford commissioners divided the Mingle Lands up in a more regular fashion – their land on one side, ours on the other - and this accounts for another bump in the boundary.

         The boundary with Stapleford wobbles on until it reaches the river, and here matters get easier. The river forms a straightforward geographical boundary between us and Little Shelford, and then between us and Hauxton. Between Hauxton and Great Shelford, there was another small area of intercommoning, and here too a division of lands had to be made. Since Ollick (or Hollick) Meadow belonged to both parishes, 7 ½  acres, running along the riverside, were taken out and given to Hauxton.

         So that’s how the boundaries were set, once and for all. But this was only a matter of tidying up a few anomalies and drawing the definitive map. In reality, the boundaries had long been decided. Boundaries have a habit of persisiting through time. But this is a topic for another time...