Medieval Charters and the Landscape:

Between Durham and the Sea, 1100-1500

Richard Britnell

For an extended version of this discussion, but without the photographs, see my article, ‘Fields, Farms and Sun-Division in a Moorland Region, 1100-1400’, The Agricultural History Review, lii (2004), pp. 20-37.

This paper has its roots in two separate but related research projects. One is my own long-term design to do something towards making the information in the Durham charter collection more widely available by initiating a formal edition of the local charters, initially in the form of a website. The very large number of charters makes it undesirable to rush into expensive hard copy. The second is the project Brian Roberts and I are directing, funded by the ESRC, into settlement and waste in County Durham in the Middle Ages. The research for this project, which began earlier this year, is being undertaken by Dr Simon Harris and Dr Helen Dunsford, and I have benefited greatly from discussions of the issues with them. The two projects are closely connected to the extent that a great deal of the information about moors and commons in the period before the Black Death derives from charter evidence.

So far I have calendared and often transcribed the charter texts and other records relating to a portion of east Durham between the city of Durham and the sea. The reason for choosing this particular area was that it contains the township of Haswell. Haswell has more charters by quite a long way than any other township in the county - at least 166, excluding duplicates - and there are obvious attractions in examining the best documented site before going on to those with thinner evidence. There were three nuclei to Haswell in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, probably none of them very large. There were two settlements of High and Low Haswell (or Over and Nether Haswell). High and Low Haswell were sometimes regarded as one township, sometimes as two.

High and Low Haswell
(Low Haswell upper left)

In addition Finchale Priory had a self-contained grange farm that corresponded to the later Elemore estate. Besides Haswell, the material on which the paper is based includes nearly 400 charters from 29 other townships.

This patch of country covers 69 square miles in the eastern part of Durham county on the magnesian limestone plateau between the River Wear and the sea. The map shows a watershed running roughly through the middle of the region, whose surface undulates gently east of Weardale from about 300 up to higher land at 450-550 feet before dropping down again to the sea. The woodland in this part is generally of modern planting, except in some deep gullies (Hawthorn Dene, Castle Eden Dene) that carry burns eastward into the North Sea. There is also a block of ancient woodland on the boundary of the townships of Haswell and Pittington, most of which belonged in the Elemore estate in the mid nineteenth century, and was earlier part of the Finchale Priory property there. The woodland has been eaten into by clearances for tillage on all sides, from Haswell to the south, from Hetton le Hill to the north and from Pittington to the west. The part in the transparency probably represents clearances made for the Finchale Priory grange. The 2½-inch Ordnance Survey map is sufficient to suggest that within historical times there has been extensive moorland in the region on patches of thin soils. The red dots on the overhead indicate places with a 'moor' element on the modern Ordnance Survey map, and show that they concentrate on the highest part of the plateau, especially in the northern half of the region.

Though Durham and Sunderland were the nearest places that looked anything like towns by 1300, some settlements had the characteristics of central places, there were five parochial centres, Easington, South Pittington, Monk Hesleden, Kelloe and Castle Eden. None of these had any commercial significance, and even the largest was of modest size. Four of them, besides having parish churches, were places of significance for large estates, so they were to that extent centres of secular as well as ecclesiastical authority. Easington, an episcopal manor, gave its name to one of the four wards of the Palatinate. Pittington and Monk Hesleden were the chief properties of Durham Priory in the region. Castle Eden was a property of the Bruces of Skelton from the early twelfth century until the end of the line in 1272. It seems to have become a separate parish only in the twelfth century, perhaps following the grant of the chapel there by Robert Brus to the Priory sometime between 1143 and 1152. In general, though. the size of the settlements in this region was small. This is implied by what we know of tenant numbers from medieval records. Boldon Book records the number of tenants in Easington and Thorpe together, Shotton, North and South Sherburn, Cassop, Shadforth and Tursdale. For what it is worth that implies an average of 18 households in these townships. In the early 1380s an episcopal estate survey numbers not very greatly different from two centuries before. A similar numerical range was characteristic of the fifteenth century. With numbers like these, especially since the figures for the 1180s and 1380s are biased towards larger settlements, it is unlikely that these 30 townships had more than 2,500 inhabitants between them, except perhaps in the thirteenth century when that figure may have been exceeded. That represents a population density of only 36 per square mile, at a time when most of Essex and east Anglia had five to ten times as many.

A low level of population was no doubt attributable to the poor resources of this part of the country, and it was perhaps for the same reason that some resources were slow to be developed intensively. This is best demonstrated by the continuing availability of improvable waste. The most extensive area of potential arable in the moors at the time when the bishopric was so effectively brought under Norman domination in the late eleventh century was a stretch of relatively high and exposed land running roughly parallel to the coast between Haswell and Easington, and it is here that both the desolate nature of the region and the possibilities of continuing development in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are most in evidence. A string of isolated and compact properties was created along this lined, cutting into the moor - from north to south these were Fallowfield, Pesspool, Boisfield, Flemingfield and Edderacres. Their location corresponds to the area where modern place names suggest moorland was most extensive in the past.

The origins of the earliest of these properties are undocumented. The southernmost within the region, Eddiracres meaning ‘Aethelred’s acres’, was founded before c.1183, when it was recorded in Boldon Book, though there are no details there concerning its size or character. Another such farm was Fallowfield, the High Fallowfield of the modern map, carved out of Hawthorn Moor at 400 feet. It first occurs in the records of the later twelfth century (DDCM, Haswell Ch. 1).

Two Haswells, Two Fallowfields and Pesspool

To the south of Fallowfield was Pesspool, about on the 450-feet contour, which probably dates from the mid thirteenth-century in a grant made by Walter Kirkham, bishop of Durham (1249-60) to his servant John Haldan of 156 acres of moor in Easington. The bounds of the property are described as running from Coves to Pespool stream, to Pespool, to Houstrete, to Houhope, to Pesehopeburn to Petekerford, to Coveburn, and back to to Coves (DDCM, Misc. Ch. 5150). We have a later account of it from 1316, when it was leased, and this gives significant additional detail. This property was described as including, besides the manor house of Pesspool, 119 acres of land lying within stated bounds, beginning on the west side at the ditch between the manor of Pesspool and the field of Haswell, and stretching along this ditch on the west side (DDCM, Misc. Ch. 6159). The ditch in question was evidently a boundary between Pesspool and the lands of the township of Haswell.

The later medieval farm of Boisfield lay in or around where Pespool wood is marked on modern maps, at about 450-475 feet. It was created sometime between 1261 and 1273, when Robert Stichill, bishop of Durham, granted to his servant John de Boys a carucate from the bishop's waste on Easington Moor, bounded from Blakrig to Blacden, to Wytemer, to Grimeswellemerse, to Hokendenthorn, to Lethelowe (DDCM, Misc. Ch. 6153). John acquired an adjacent 24 acres of waste on Easington Moor about 1283 (DDCM, Misc. Ch. 6151). This was another compact farm, explicitly created outside existing township territories, on the bishop’s waste. Boisfield was adjacent to Pespool, and was later integrated with it to make a single farm; they were already in the same hands by about 1383. Its precise location is unknown.

Pespool, Boisfield and Part of Flemingfield

The latest and best example of the creation of a farm from the waste is from nearby at Flemingfield Farm at 500 feet. In this instance we do not have the original charter, but we have two slightly later transcriptions of it. The one shown below (DDCM, Misc. Ch. 7083) is an instrument (technically speaking an inspeximus) issued by the prior and chapter of Durham, attesting that they had seen the original charter and accepted it as genuine.

Durham University Library, Dean and Chapter Muniments, Misc. Ch. 7083

(Click on image for edited text)

The record records that in 1283 Robert of Holy Island, bishop of Durham, had granted to John the Fleming of Newcastle and his wife Isabel a portion of the bishop’s moor of Shotton and Easington with stated bounds, that is. from the road from Castle Eden to Haswell across Goreburne, then from that road northwards up to the bounds of Ludworth, as enclosed by a ditch, then down along the bounds of Ludworth through the middle of Wydeker southward to Goreburn, then down along Goreburne eastward to the road from Castle Eden to Haswell, to hold in severalty all days of the year, holding from the bishop and his successors with common pasture in the moors of Shotton and Easington. In this instance the bounds of the farm can be precisely located. They are clearly defined on a title deed of 1894, and can easily be picked out on the modern 2½ inch Ordnance Survey map. At that time the estate measured 194 acres. The road from Castle Eden to Haswell is the B1280, and the bounds of Ludworth are a stream that marks the boundary between the modern civil and ecclesiastical parishes of Haswell and Shotton. The aerial photograph shows just how well the bounds of Flemingfield were still visible on 15 August 1983.

Flemingfield

These overheads show the line of farms created from the moorland, but also suggest that there were extensive areas of moorland left that survived into modern times - Rymer's Moor, Haswell Moor, Harehill Moor, Crowshouse Moor. In addition to these surviving moors apparently outside the bounds of townships, and available for allocation by the bishop, there were other moors within township boundaries. For example about 1250 William son of Guy of Haswell, seemingly the lord of Haswell, acknowledged that Finchale Priory had a right to two ploughlands in the two Haswells. He granted the monks and their men of the Haswells common pasture through all the moor of the Haswells (DDCM, 1.2. Finc. 2, 54a). In 1314, a deal with the bishop of Durham enabled Thomas du Bois, Lucy of Haswell, William of Silksworth, William of Burdon, and Ralph of Greatham, all landowner in Haswell, to enclose the moors of Haswell to hold them in severalty (DDCM, Haswell Ch. 61). In both these instances we are dealing with moors within the territory of Haswell.

I shall now turn to examine the significance of the charters of this region for the formation of English field patterns, since that is perhaps where their chief interest lies. Most people have come across the classic three field system of Midland England before the enclosure movement. In such an agrarian regime there were three main features. One was the division of the cultivated land into two or three great divisions, each of which would be left uncultivated in turn to allow for animals to graze and to drop their dung before it was sown again. The second was the subdivision of these open fields into furlongs. And the third was the fragmentation of peasant holdings not only between fields but also between furlongs. Each of these elements requires a separate explanation, and because these fields were formed before before documentation becomes generally available explanations are difficult to test and often subject to debate. I shall look at them each in turn.

It is now generally accepted that the division of Midland villages into large common fields was not a Germanic import that came with the Anglo-Saxon invasions, as was once thought, but an adaptation to scarcities of pasture once settlement had become extensive by the tenth and eleventh centuries. If so - if common fields were a way of organising pasturing arrangements efficiently in regions where pasture was scarce - we should not expect to find them in a region like east Durham where moorland pasture was abundant. The region between Durham and the Sea indeed produces few examples of comprehensive township field systems - it is rather surprising that it produces any. An example on something approaching the Midland pattern is to be found at Castle Eden in the fifteenth century (DDCM, 3.8. Spec. 30). The only other township that has left a clear trace of such a system in medieval records is Tursdale. though there may also have been a regular field system in part of Pittington, where there is a mention of 'Estfeld' in the manorial account for 1412/13. None of the townships adjacent to the principal moors has left any trace of a regular system of common fields. In this case, then we find what we expect. Where a three-field system existed, as at Castle Eden, it was perhaps imposed by a particular lord of the estate who was used to the system elsewhere.

The formation of furlongs is generally agreed to be a technically convenient way of providing for ploughmen to pass and repass with their ploughteams while accommodating the natural lie of the land to allow for drainage. There was no technically necessary length for a furrow, and so no fixed dimensions for a furlong, but the existence of some such unit might be expected to be universal where farmers depended on horse-ploughing and natural drainage. We should therefore expect to find furlongs or their equivalent in our charters even if we do not find common fields. Castle Eden, interestingly, is the only township in the region where the field-name element ‘furlong’ occurs. In the east field Thomas Claxton had two separate pieces on Langforthlang or Langforlang, and he had three separate pieces on Waterforlang (DDCM, 3.8. Spec. 30). However, the existence of units equivalent to furlongs is universal. The commonest name for such a unit in the region was a flat. This term also occurs at Castle Eden. Since the fields were not organised into larger fields, the furlong type of unit, or flat, was the principle means of locating bits of land in the thirteenth and fourteenth-century charters. This point can be demonstrated from some of the earlier charters of the collection. One example is the early thirteenth-century grant by which Alan of Pittington gave 50 acres to the Durham Priory from his land of Duna (DDCM, 1.8. Spec. 3). Another is the grant from the same period of half a ploughland from Simon of Hawthorn’s demesne in Hawthorn (DDCM, 2.8. Spec. 45). Simon of Hawthorn was the lord of Hawthorn, and his demesne was the land that he directly controlled himself and was cultivated to his advantage. These records attest a system in which the lands were located by reference to furlongs without any high organisation into fields. They also suggest that a relatively light degree of subdivision was a general characteristic of the region.

The fragmentation of individual holdings between furlongs is much more problematic. Historians have debated this for over a century, simply because it seems so contrary to legal and practical rationality that the land of a village should be shredded into small interspersed strips and plots. Their explanations have followed two different routes, one to explain why the minute division of the land was rational, and the other to explain how it came about. These two approaches are different, unless we assume that common fields were all created by rational planners, though the answers are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The favoured argument concerning the rationality of subdivision is that different soils responded differently to different climatic and economic challenges, and that a lord or tenants whose land was scattered across the different soils of a township was less likely to be embarrassed by a single disaster. For the same reasons medieval merchants, like the Merchant of Venice, assigned their cargoes to many ships, rather than to trust everything to a single one. One of the difficulties of this explanation is to explain why subdivision proceeded to different lengths in different contexts - why some fields were much more subdivided than others. Another is, of course, to explain how such subdivision came about in practice. It is one of the attractions of the region between Durham and the Sea that, because of its relatively tardy development, its charters can contribute towards answering these questions, and the remainder of what I have to say will be devoted to this issue.

The examples of larger properties lands we have looked at - those of Alan of Pittington and Simon of Hawthorn - show a very light subdivision of furlongs. It was not uncommon for the lords of manors to have blocks of several acres lying together. And yet it is not uncommon to find a much more fragmented pattern among smaller freeholders. For example, two grants of land by William Burdon of Haswell and his wife in the 1320s show quite an advanced subdivision of the land with individual parcels as small as a rood (a quarter of an acre). These examples also show a feature that must surely be of some relavance for explaining this fragmentation of the fields - that is the recurrent relationship between the Burdon family's land and that of the widow of Ralph of Greatham (DDCM, Haswell Ch., 28, Haswell Ch. 39, Haswell Ch. 43). Such regular patterns are also quite common in open fields of the Midlands. The old idea that such relationships represented practices amongst tenants who ploughed together, so that each contributor to the team had his land ploughed in turn, would work in theory, but there are now recognised to be weighty arguments against it. It would imply that such ploughing arrangements between peasant farmers were fossilised regardless of the wealth or changing circumstances of landlowners, so that for generation after generation the make up of plough teams for every furlong was fixed. It also runs up against the problem that there is no evidence whatever in its favour. Charters from between Durham and the sea provide an exceptionally strong confirmation of an alternative explanation, even if it is an explanation that itself requires some explaining.

Sometime between 1188 and 1212 John of Hulam granted to the monks of Durham 12 acres with a toft and with rights of common pasture for the monks and their men alongside his own beasts and those of his men. In effect he had created a new bovate on which the monks could settle a tenant. The way he had done this is clearly stated in the charter. The land is granted ‘in my 12 culture in that township in which I have assigned the monk’s 12 acres, that is to say one acre nearest towards the sun in each cultura. The translation of cultura is problematic, but John would probably have said ‘flat’ (DDCM, 3.7. Spec. 6). This is an important charter because it apparently shows an early stage of subdivision in a terrain of compact holdings. The flats are implied to belong to John of Hulam - presumably blocks of demesne land like those encountered on the demesne at Castle Eden. But rather than give the Durham monks a block, the donor is systematically subdividing each of 12 flats to give them the southern or eastern acre in each. That presumably meant assigning to the monks three or four rigs fom the end of each of the 12 flats.

This example provides the key to understanding a remarkable grant by Alan of Hutton, son of William of Hutton, to Nigel of Rounton, for his homage and service, of half his demesne land in the field of Hutton. The date is about the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Alan describes this as 23 acres 3 roods of cultivated land lying nearest the sun in Thinnethornes, Stanilawe, Ticclinwelle, Dedeside, and so on (DDCM, Misc. Ch. 6284). In this case it is less open to surmise that the parcels of the donor’s demesne were complete flats, but the principle of division is the same. The halving of the property had divided not one piece of arable land but at least 24. The operation of such a principle could reduce compact lands to shreds within a few generations.

These two examples illustrate two of the circumstances in which land was alienated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries - the donation of land to pious foundations and the rewarding of dependants, though it is questionable just what the significance of Nigel of Rounton’s ‘homage and service’ might be. Family settlements were a further occasion for the splitting of lands, and there are examples of this in the charters too. In 1321 William son of Hugh Burdon granted to his son in law, Peter Burdeus of ‘Harebaru’, on the occasion of the marriage, all lands and tenements that he has in the township and territory of Great Haswell except for one bovate. We have a complementary charter by which less than a fortnight later he granted that bovate to William the chaplain of Haswell. Both charters specify where the bovate in question lay, and it is apparent from this that the bovate had been newly created by the process we have already observed. William divided ten of his lands rather than maintain such integrity as his property had (DDCM, Haswell Ch. 36, Haswell Ch. 37). This type of family subdivision is relevant to charters where the granter’s land is consistently next to that of some family member.

One final example, that takes us back to Fallowfield, one of the farms that lay outside the territory of a township. Sometime in the early fourteenth century, before 1316, Walter of Haswell divided his lands at Fallowfield between the two sisters, Lucy and Juliana, daughter of his brother Robert of Haswell. They were perhaps Walter’s neices. We still have indented deeds made out one each to Lucy and Juliana, both attested with the same witness list and no doubt drawn up on the same day. Lucy’s document gives her ‘half a toft nearer the sun in Haswell

and half all the arable land, meadow, turbary and moor nearer the sun with their appurtenances in Haswell in a place called Fallowfield’. Juliana’s document gives her ‘half a toft further from the sun in Haswell and half all the arable land, meadow, turbary and moor further from the sun with their appurtenances in Haswell in a place called Fallowfield’ (DDCM, Haswell Ch., 3, 4). There was some chance that these halves of the property would come together again, but the splitting of properties between sisters is a frequent source of medieval fragmentation. In this case we are dealing not with ancient fields, but with land that had never been township lands. The case seems to show how even a compact farm like Fallowfield could start down the road to runrig. The origins of subdivision in this part of Durham are mostly earlier than our documentation. However, the evidence is quite enough to show that the breaking up of arable lands needed no principle other than the division of properties by the splitting of individual flats, and that even compact demesnes were liable to become subdivided in the course of time. There were seemingly methods of splitting other than dividing lands nearer and farther from the sun; the grant to Matilda of Seaton, discussed earlier, shows that Margaret of Greatham’s land was sometimes east and sometimes west of the land being granted.

I have only imperfectly described the agrarian system because there is a severe limit to what can be achieved from charter evidence. There is little material in them to define how people would have explained what they were doing. The prejudice against granting a block of land rather than subdividing individual units suggests that some element of risk-sharing was involved. The subdivision of flats would make best practical sense if individually they were units of cropping and pasturing, since otherwise there would be numerous grounds for conflicts of interest between neighbours. That seems likely to be the case given their small size, but that principle would make little sense unless fallow pasture on each flat was restricted to those with land there and, also, unless there was some principle of agreement about cropping amongst those who shared a flat. In these townships we seem to be dealing with very small numbers of freeholders. Perhaps the management of agrarian resources operated with a degree of informality that could hardly have been tolerated in a large Midland village.