Most of us like to know a little about the history of our house, and I was greatly intrigued to find that my house was built on a field called Collards.
Collards are leafy greens, a primitive version of cabbage. They have been around since Roman times, and are the predecessors of our tightly-headed modern cabbage. This discovery set my mind running. Did our field used to be a medieval cabbage field? It’s not unfeasible, I thought. But I’m glad I didn’t live there then, surrounded by the rank and sulphurous smell of brassicas (just like a field of oil seed rape).
Some time later, I looked at a survey of the village from 1635. It listed all the residents of the village, with their bits of land, large or small. And in it I found Steven Westlie, with a “grove of wood called Collards, containing 2 acres”. Now that, I thought, was much more exciting. I love working with wood, whether conventional furniture-making, or the more free-form green woodwork which consists of taking a log and splitting it down into useable lengths and shaping them to make a stool or chair (as they did to make the old Windsor and country chairs). So the idea of a wood was much more appealing. I wondered what the trees were like, and what the wood was used for. Woods in the past weren’t just for decoration, they were as much a part of the village’s farming activity as grain and livestock. Perhaps the Collards was a coppice wood, with hazel and ash. The trees would be cut down to ground level every seven years or so, then allowed to regrow to produce a crop of poles for making hurdles, or for small projects, or even for firewood. Or maybe the Collards was used to grow timber – oak and ash – oak for external timbers, ash for indoors and for furniture. Yes, I definitely liked the idea of a wood.
But what about the cabbage field? There was still that name – collards. Well, I thought, perhaps it WAS a cabbage field in the Middle Ages, and then they abandoned it and let it grow into woodland. But that didn’t seem like a good hypothesis.
Now history research, in my experience, is rarely linear. You ask a question, but you can’t find an answer. So you have to let it sit. And then you’ll be pursuing a completely different question, and you suddenly come upon the answer. It’s a serendipitous process. So it was that I was trying to investigate another field name, with, I may say, very little success. I was trawling through the sources quoted by another writer which, unfortunately, were in Latin. I found myself reaching back into the depths of my memory, nearly 50 years ago, to the days when I studied A-level Latin. The Latin of the classics, I might add, is not the same as medieval Latin. It’s like trying to understand Spanish using your knowledge of Italian. So this was definitely a challenge.
The document I looked at was called a Feet of Fine. It was a legal document, the record of a court case. In the absence of any legal form to document land sales, it had become a way of recording a property sale. And there, in 1348, I found Hugh Collard of Great Shelford who was selling land to John de Berne. Collards was land belonging to Hugh Collard. 1348 was a momentous year, the year when the Black Death first arrived in England. The first cases erupted in Bristol in August. Did John de Berne live to enjoy his new possession, and did Hugh survive to spend what he’d gained by the sale? Well that we’ll never know. But, one thing I learned. It never pays to take too much for granted with names. You have to do your research. My cabbage field vanished, never to be thought of again. My house, it turns out, was built on the site of what was once a wood. It was subsequently cleared and converted to grazing. In 1899 the owner of the field divided it into lots and sold it for development. Our villas were built in 1904, and have sat here ever since.