Hinton Waldrist 2: A Post-Enclosure English Village

Parliamentary Enclosure comes to Hinton Waldrist

One day in 1761, Phipps Weston, a cleric from Fifield, Avery Turrell, a gentleman of Stanford, Robert Hall, a gentleman of Buckland, Robert Jenner, a yeoman from Maysey Hampton and William Stephens, a gentleman from Kemscott, met together at Hinton Waldrist. They were the Commissioners appointed to implement the Parliamentary Act passed that year to enclose Hinton’s open arable fields, common pastures and meadows. Their work changed the lives of the villagers for ever and created the parish as it appears today.

The present ford at Duxford has only been there since the late 19th century - an example of how the parish of Hinton Waldrist has changed, despite it's timeless appearance

Enclosure was about dividing up the commonly-farmed fields and allocating specific portions of land to individuals. It aimed to give each land proprietor an equivalent acreage to their previous allocation  under the open-field system. A survey of the land showed that there was just over 1700 acres to be disposed of. By far the largest amount, 900 acres, went to the Lord of the Manor, the Reverend John Loder. He also received a further 400 acres or so in glebe lands, as he was also rector of the parish. The remaining land, just over 355 acres, was divided between 18 copyhold tenants, whose leases entitled them to hold land for their lifetime and often the lifetime of another generation of their family. The table below gives their names and the amount of land they received. Acreages ranged from 56 for Mary Curtis to just one for Henry Southby.

Commissioners were generally directed to allocate better land, and land nearer their homes, to smaller proprietors, on the reasonable grounds that larger proprietors had more wealth and resources and could bear the costs of poorer and more distant land. The enclosure map that would have been drawn up to show all the allocations has unfortunately been lost, but the diagram below, based on a reconstruction of the map by Jasmine Hawse, shows that the copyholders did indeed have land close to the village itself, or to the hamlet of Duxford, if that was where they lived. However, this meant that in most cases they were allocated one type of land (arable or pasture) and had to make their own decisions regarding whether to use that land for crops or animals, or both. And some villagers who did not lease land but who had enjoyed pasture rights on the commons lost those rights, pushing them further into poverty.

Approximate land allocations following the 1761 enclosure award. The smaller proprietors generally received land nearer to their dwellings in the village, or Duxford hamlet. The glebe lands were spread around the margins of the parish

In some parishes, parliamentary enclosure radically changed the appearance of the landscape, with new straight roads and hedges breaking up the former open vistas. This did not happen to such an extent in Hinton Waldrist. The commissioners ordered only a couple of short and narrow new roads, so the parish’s road layout today is much as it was prior to enclosure. In some parishes enclosure was done with the aim of converting large areas of arable land to pasture, creating a landscape of small, rectangular grass fields, often still retaining undulations of rig and furrow. This did not happen in Hinton, as the land was (and remains) prime arable land. Finally, while new hedges were ordered, particularly in the north of the parish, to demark the copyholders’ plots, much of the south of the parish, which was largely allocated to the Rev Loder, remained unhedged, to facilitate ploughing and reaping the corn.

We do not know how the villagers adapted to the new way of life, or whether enclosure achieved its stated aim of making farming in Hinton more efficient. But fast-forward one hundred years to 1861 and the pattern of land proprietorship in the village was very different. Copyhold tenancy had been phased out as copyholders died and that year’s census showed there were just five large farms in the whole parish, set out in the table below.

Farm	Farmer	Acreage	Labourers
			Men	Women	Boys
Manor Farm	Henry Peacock	618	26	8	9
Glebe Farm	William Gingell	380	18	5	4
Grange Farm	David Lloyd	380	11	4	5
Wales (Duxford) Farm	John Castle	400	18	-	2
Duxford Ferry Farm	William Rose	66	3	1	1

Manor farm was the ‘home farm’ of the lord of the manor, and as the name suggests, Glebe farm was the property of the Rector, at that time, the Rev William Jephson. The owner of Grange farm, David Lloyd, was a doctor and brother-in-law of the then Squire, John Loder-Symonds. The table also shows that a total of 215 men, women and boys were employed as labourers on Hinton’s farms, a high proportion of the parish’s total population of 329 souls. (Two other farms are named in the 1861 census and appear in the south of the parish on the 1876 1:2500 Ordnance Survey map: Welmore farm and the unpromisingly named Starveall farm. Both were subsumed within one or other of the five big farms and the farmhouses were occupied by labourers).

Manor farm, rebuilt in the 19th century, is an imposing building, as befits the 'home farm' of the lord of the manor

The 1861 census also shows that just one of the surnames of the copyhold farmers allocated land in 1761 appears in the parish one hundred years later (Absalom – twelve people of that name are living in the parish, in two families of farm labourers). Hinton had metamorphosed from a parish of small yeoman and tenant farmers to one where farming was taking place on an industrial scale. The nature of arable farming had changed too: there is now no hint of rig and furrow in the arable fields.

Hinton Manor in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries: the Loder Squires

The Loder dynasty held the manor of Hinton for over two hundred years, from the late 17^th to the early 20^th centuries. As we saw in my previous article, the squire who ordered the enclosure of the parish was the Rev John Loder (1725-1805), who was also rector of the parish and Master of the Berkshire Hunt. His heir was his daughter Maria (1775-1820). In 1796 she married Robert Symonds, fourth son of a Herefordshire landowner, a Church of England deacon and a hunting partner of her father. It is reported that at first her father disapproved of the match, but Symonds won him over with a gift of a fine hunting dog. In 1801, the 76-year-old Rev Loder gave Symonds, who by now had taken holy orders, the rectorship of Hinton, in succession to himself.

Rev Symonds was said to take his clerical duties lightly, being more concerned with hunting. The same year as he was offered the rectorship of Hinton, he was also given by a benefactor a substantial living in Herefordshire, a hundred miles away. When the bishop objected to his appointment, on the reasonable grounds that Symonds could not live in Berkshire and maintain a parish in Herefordshire, Symonds breezily replied that he could hunt on Saturday and ride to his parish on Sunday morning in time to take the service. In the event, he only kept that parish for a year, before being formally instituted to the parish of Hinton Waldrist in 1802. Nicholas Davenport, in his entertaining history of Hinton Manor, remarked that, “Together, the two sporting parsons [Rev John Loder and Rev Robert Symonds] managed the Old Berkshire hounds, swearing hard on weekdays, and preaching hard on Sundays”.

Rev Loder died in 1805, aged 80 and Robert Symonds became Squire of Hinton Manor as well as Rector. During the 19^th Century the manor house was altered and expanded, encouraged by the boom in manorial incomes triggered by the passing of the Corn Laws in 1815. The repeal of those laws in 1848 was an early cause of the decline of the English country houses, as over time, cheaper foreign imports undermined their incomes from agricultural land.

Robert Symonds died in 1836 and the Manor passed to his son, John Loder Symonds, who, as a teetotaller, was responsible for Hinton having no public house. He and his wife had no children, and following his death in 1875, the manor passed to a cousin, Captain Frederick Cleave Symonds, an army officer who took the name Loder-Symonds and came to live at Hinton Manor (and wrote about his forebears in a history of the Old Berkshire Hunt). He and his wife had two daughters and five sons, all of whom became military officers, with, as we will see, tragic consequences.

Daily Life in Hinton Waldrist in the 19^th Century

We can call on two literary sources, one indirect and the other direct, for insights into daily life in Hinton during the latter half of the 19^th century. The indirect source is Flora Thompson’s classic trilogy, “Lark Rise to Candelford”, an account of her childhood in the agricultural parish of Cottisford, about thirty miles north-east of Hinton, and very similar in its population size and make-up. Thompson’s biographer, Richard Mabey, describes Lark Rise to Candleford as a mixture of memoir, social history and fiction, and some of her tales of village characters are doubtless embellished, but her overall account of a farming community of poor agricultural labourers and their masters in the depressed 1880s rings true and provides a model for Hinton Waldrist at that time.

All the “components” of a rural parish are present in Flora Thompson’s books. The parish has its manor house, dominated by the rather indolent Squire and his snobbish mother, who is desperate to maintain her social position despite the manor’s shrinking income, while her son strolls around the estate with a shotgun and a pair of spaniels, or sings “negro songs”, accompanying himself on his banjo. The elderly Rector preaches high Toryism from the pulpit, exhorting his labouring parishioners to accept their impoverished lot as God’s will, while his busybody daughter offers friendship and charity to the labourers’ wives (without much by way of thanks). The parish’s only farmer largely directs operations from his substantial farmhouse, leaving supervision of the men to his bailiff, and is confident that he is a good employer despite paying a labourer just ten shillings a week, as he gives them a feast at harvest time and a joint of meat at Chistmas, and does not tell them how to vote. Another important figure is the landlord of the only inn, liked by his customers for his fine ale and for tolerating his customers buying just one half pint each evening. The village schoolmistress does her best with youngsters whose ambitions stretch little further than working in the fields or joining the army (the boys), or going into service for a few years before marriage (the girls) while hoping to be invited to tea at the manor house. In the third book, Candleford Green, Laura, now fourteen, goes to work in the post office in a nearby village and we meet the formidable postmistress, Dorcas Lane, who also owns the village blacksmith’s shop, and the hard but respectful smiths.

The families headed by agricultural labourers who make up the bulk of the population of the parish are treated fondly in Thompson’s account, if sometimes a little archly. The husbands rise early to walk to the farm and their day’s work in the arable fields. When they return, they tend to the family pig or work in their garden or allotment, growing vegetables to supplement the family diet. Then in the evening they convene at the inn for their nightly half pint, an argument about politics and a round of songs. Their wives clean the house, prepare the meals, do the laundry and raise large families of children, and attempt to make ends meet and keep a civilised household on their husbands’ meagre wages. In their scant leisure time they gossip or read 'penny dreadful' novels. Some older women, who are either single or whose families have left home, also work in the fields, but not at the same time as the men.

All these characters can be found in Hinton Waldrist at this time. In 1891 (the year after Flora Thompson left Cottisford) the squire was Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds, then aged 44. At that time he and his wife Elizabeth had six children. The Rector was Rev Frederick Harper, 39 and unmarried, who lived in the rectory with his sister and elderly mother. The schoolmaster was 26 year old Walter Ansell, who lived with his wife and four children in the school cottage. There was a postmistress and shopkeeper, 66 year old Elizabeth Smith. The blacksmith, whose shop was a few doors from the post office, was Frederick Ayris, who took on the business when his father Thomas retired. The parish’s farmers at that time were Henry Chandler (Manor farm), Henry Temple (Duxford farm), Elizabeth Hobbs (Duxford Ferry farm), Joseph Potts (Grange farm) and Daniel Tarrant (Glebe farm). There was even a businessman, George Batts, a butter factor who employed a number of villagers and lived in Glebe Cottage, which, despite its name, was an imposing residence. None of the above-named were born in the parish, and many of the labourers, servants, carters and tradesmen who made up the rest of the population of 301 (including large numbers of children) were also “incomers”, often from nearby parishes: the pattern in the 19^th century was for people to move around relatively frequently, though usually within a relatively small area.

Many of Hinton's formerly important buildings are still standing, though none now have their original function - all are private residences. Here we see the rectory...

...the post office and general store...

...the blacksmith's shop...

...and the school

Thompson also describes the occasional set-piece village festivals, such as the harvest feast and the May Queen parade. Doubtless, these also happened in Hinton. A piece in Jackson’s Oxford Journal of 7^th June 1856 describes a celebration to mark the end of the Crimean War:

‘On Thursday the 29^th ult, the public holiday was celebrated in the old English style, in the parish of Hinton Waldrist. The proceedings commenced with divine service in the parish church, after which the whole parish, young and old, to the number of about 400, sat down to a hot dinner of beef and plum pudding, prepared for them in a barn, which had been most tastefully decorated with flags, flowers and evergreens for the occasion. In the evening there was a band of music and a dance on the village green. With other rustic sports, such as running in sacks, and at dark some excellent fireworks; after which God Save the Queen was sung in the open air by the assembled people, and the proceedings of the day terminated with the Evening Hymn’.

The more direct literary source for life in 19^th century Hinton is a fine coffee-table book titled A Village Lost and Found and authored by Brian May and Elena Vidal. It includes reproductions and commentaries on a set of stereoscopic photographs, produced in the 1850s by the photographer T.R. Williams. The set in question depicts scenes from an unnamed rural village, which detective work revealed to be Hinton Waldrist. It appears that Williams spent some of his childhood in Hinton, explaining his choice of location. Although posed and stylised, the sixty images offer a (literal) snapshot of life in Hinton at that time. Brian May, when not occupied by his day job as lead guitarist of Queen, collects such sets, which were hugely popular during the early years of photography.

The set begins, conventionally enough, at the Manor house, with several views of the house and grounds. We meet the Squire, John Loder-Symonds, inevitably carrying his shotgun. The second largest house in the village was the rectory and it is shown with the church in the background, and just a glimpse of the then rector, Rev William Jephson. We also see the village blacksmith outside his shop and a former schoolmistress, now retired. Then follow a number of pictures of farm labourers at work, taken at harvest time, with reaping, loading the corn onto wagons and making hay ricks, and even loading the dung cart. There is a picture of village women ‘gleaning’ – gathering for their own use stray ears of corn left behind after the crop had been harvested.

Several pictures depict scenes around the village and some of the actual villagers make cameo appearances, chatting, drawing water from their wells, looking after their pigs, tending their gardens, and so on. Some of the names correspond to those in the 1851 census, including John Sims, Dick Carter, Joe Bennett and Jane Edmunds. Unsurprisingly, the photographer has chosen to depict the more picturesque cottages, those situated along the high street and the road that heads north from it towards the church. These are all two-storey, thatched and are set in relatively extensive gardens. They were probably once the dwellings of the 18^th century copyhold farmers; the 1761 enclosure schedule tells us that Thomas Dew, Henry Richards and Edward Church lived on the high street and Edward Richards, Richard Humphris and John Absalom lived on the road leading to the church. Many of the cottages shown in the pictures still stand, much altered and gentrified. A terrace of smaller cottages stretched down the lane that ran south from the blacksmith’s shop (now Lamb Road), but these were probably too mean for a photograph set that would have been mainly sold to middle class town dwellers. At the same time, the one picture taken within a cottage shows it scantly furnished and with rough bare walls – just a hint of how poor the circumstances of many of the villagers would have been.

Some of the cottages depicted in Williams's photos still exist, altered and updated. The rear of this cottage is shown in a view entitled "Maria Carson's Washing Day". It is now known as St Giles's Cottage. It is likely to have once been the dwelling of a copyhold tenant farmer

'The Row' on Lamb road was added to in the early twentieth century

Another aspect of Hinton that was depicted in the photographs, but that has now been lost, is the small port at Duxford Ferry Farm. In the 19^th century the river Thames was widened and a weir was constructed to ensure that the water was deep enough for cargo barges to pass through, and the farm, situated on the south bank of the river, had a quay, from where farm produce could be shipped to Oxford and beyond, and coal and other village essentials brought in. The farm also kept a ferry boat and travellers could be rowed across the river. Later in the 19^th century, the natural loop of the Thames that has Duxford at its southern extent was “bypassed” by the construction of a canal known as the Cut. This took water from the Duxford loop and meant that the port could no longer function. Duxford Ferry farm fell into disrepair and was later demolished – the site is now overgrown and just a few stones remain. The ford that gave the hamlet and farm their name was restored and can still be crossed when the river is low.

The ford at Duxford is now a picturesque spot. It was rebuilt in the late 19th century

Hinton Waldrist moves into the Twentieth Century

“All the time, boys were being born or growing up in the parish, expecting to follow the plough all their lives, or at most, to do a little mild soldiering or go to work in a town. Gallipoli? Kut? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? What did they know of such places? But they were to know them and when the time came they did not flinch. Eleven out of that tiny community never came back again. A brass plate on the wall of the church…is engraved with their names” (Flora Thompson, Lark Rise).

The plaque commemorating Hinton’s World War One dead lists fourteen names. Four of them are from the same family. They are all of them sons of the Squire, Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds. To compound the tragedy, one of his daughters also died in the war, killed when the ship taking her and her husband to a war posting in Africa was torpedoed. See here for a web page that tells the war stories of the Loder-Symonds family.

Frederick Cleave Loder-Symonds’ wife also died in 1918 and the Squire himself died in 1923, aged 77. His heir was his one surviving son, naval captain (later Vice Admiral) Frederick Parland Loder-Symonds One of his sons was to be killed in action in World War Two, as was one of Flora Thompson’s sons. But the long squirearchy of the Loder-Symonds in Hinton Waldrist was drawing to a close. In the mid-1930s Frederick Parland Loder-Symonds sold Hinton Manor and its estates to Nicholas Davenport (1893-1979), an economist, journalist and financier and author of the aforementioned history of Hinton Manor. He lived in the manor house until his death and his widow Olga, a former film actress and painter, continued to live there until her death in 2008.

Nicholas and Olga Davenport at Hinton Manor

This is the nearest a casual visitor can get to Hinton Manor today

The agricultural way of life continued up to and beyond the Second World War. In the 1930s, a farm labourer’s wages were thirty shillings a week, a modest improvement on the ten shillings a week paid in the 1880s. Hinton village only gained piped water from mains in 1947, finally releasing villagers from having to draw water from their wells and using earth closets in huts in their gardens. This, and the coming of electricity (gas has still to reach the village), marked the beginning of its gentrification.

Today, the fields surrounding Hinton village are still intensively farmed, with arable and dairy farming alongside market gardening, but the mechanisation of agriculture means that only a tiny handful of villagers work on the land. The village is more affluent than it has ever been, as it is largely a dormitory for professionals working in neighbouring towns. At the same time, there is less community infrastructure. The village school closed down in 1966 and the shop and post office closed in the 1990s. The parish church is now part of a group of seven churches under a single parson and services are held monthly. The only reason that Hinton has not lost its inn is that it did not have one in the first place. Many of the extensive allotments, a feature of the village since Victorian times, are disused and one wonders how long it will be before more executive houses are built on them. Hinton Waldrist is still a peaceful and enchanting place, and many of its old buildings survive, but its pictorial chronicler T.R. Williams would find little that he would recognise in the parish today.

The rather neglected allotments in the centre of the village give witness to the passing of the rural way of life for the majority of today's residents

Sources used:
Genealogical information avalable at The Genealogist.co.uk 
Historic Ordnance Survey maps available at Old Maps
New Landscapes: Enclosure in Berkshire Berkshire Record Office

Davenport N (1978) The Honour of St Valery: The Story of an English Manor House. London: Scolar Press
Hawse, J.S. (1968) Hinton Waldrist through the Centuries. Unpublished typescript.
Loder-Symonds F.C. & Crowdy P (1905) A History of the old Berks Hunt from 1760 to 1904: with a chapter on early foxhunting.

Mabey R (2014) Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford. London: Allen Lane

May B & Vidal E (2009) A Village Lost and Found. London: Francis Lincoln Limited

Thompson F (1944) Lark Rise to Candelford. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Hinton Waldrist (1): The Story of an English Village from Saxon to Early Modern Times

The little village of Hinton Waldrist sits on top of a ridge that runs west-east through the prime agricultural land lying between Faringdon and Oxford. It is a place I know well, as my wife was brought up there and we were married in its trim medieval church. The parish that it forms part of stretches northwards to the river Thames and south across the main Oxford to Swindon road towards the Berkshire Downs. Indeed, Hinton Waldrist was in Berkshire until 1974, when boundary changes reallocated it to Oxfordshire. The parish is thinly populated; successive census returns have never ventured above 400 souls. Although it contains some fine buildings, it is an unprepossessing place, lacking the picturesque quality of the Cotswolds to the west. These days, it has few amenities. Its school closed down many years ago and it has lacked a shop and post office for the past two decades. It has never had a pub, due to the disapproval of a nineteenth century lord of the manor.

A picture-postcard view of the hamlet of Duxford, at the northern end of Hinton Waldrist parish

Hinton Waldrist is just one of thousands of anonymous villages and parishes that chequer the English countryside. However, its very anonymity makes it a classic example of an English nucleated village in a parish situated among champion countryside. In this article, I will outline its history and explain how it can serve as an exemplar of this aspect of rural England. I will take its story up until 1760, when its farmlands were enclosed by Act of Parliament. A subsequent article will explore Hinton Waldrist’s more recent history.

Woodland Countryside and Champion Countryside

Landscape historians identify two broad types of countryside in medieval England: woodland (or ancient) countryside and champion (or planned) countryside. Woodland countryside was so called because it featured small fields and numerous winding lanes with thick hedges that contained many standard trees, enabling the harvesting of woodland products. It was predominantly found in upland areas of north and west England and also in the south-eastern counties of Kent, Essex and Suffolk. The small well-protected fields were mainly for livestock farming and the pattern of human settlement was for scattered, family-run farms and small hamlets – pastoral agriculture was not labour-intensive. In champion countryside, by contrast, arable farming predominated and the land was largely made up of large open fields with few hedges, easy to plough and therefore suitable for growing grain. Arable farming was more labour-intensive and “nucleated” villages were established in the centre of parishes, as a dormitory settlement for that parish’s farmers and agricultural workers. Champion countryside was mainly found in a band running from lowland Yorkshire in the north-east to Dorset in the south-west, that band embracing the upper-Thames area where Hinton Waldrist is sited. However, both champion and woodland countryside could be found anywhere in England if the land conditions suited, and both arable and pastoral farming took place everywhere – it was the balance of grain and livestock that differed.

The shaded area on this map shows the main area of Champion (or planned) countryside in England. Other areas were predominantly "woodland" countryside. Scotland's pattern of land use was different

Today, woodland countryside can still be identified in many places, largely unaltered for centuries. However, there is little or no champion countryside left that medieval farmers would recognise. The open fields were swept away in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by “enclosure”, which we will discuss later.

The Parish of Hinton Waldrist

Hinton is a Saxon name, meaning “township on a hill”. The suffix Waldrist (there have been many different spellings over the centuries) was apparently added in the early 13^th century, when the parish was owned by the St. Valery family. The manor of Hinton was founded in Norman times and was coterminous with the ecclesiastical parish served by its church. ‘Manor’ in this context refers to an area of land with a single owner (the ‘lord of the manor’) and administered from a ‘manor house’. Today, the civil parish of Hinton Waldrist, founded in the 19^th century and replacing administration by the manor court, follows the same boundaries. This pattern of unified land ownership and civil and ecclesiastical administration is typical of champion countryside, where the population was relatively high. In woodland countryside, ‘townships’ (the name given to local administrative units) were relatively large and may have included more than one manor, while ecclesiastical parishes were larger still, often embracing several townships.

As was common in areas of champion countryside, prior to enclosure in the early 1760s, Hinton Waldrist was a self-contained and essentially self-sufficient community. There is evidence that its boundaries were planned in relation to its neighbouring parishes to ensure that there was fair division of resources in each. The north-south boundary between Hinton and Longworth parishes has a jagged edge in places, indicating that fields were deliberately divided between the two. As we have seen, the village itself is in the centre of the parish, on the top of the ridge. Large, arable fields spread out from the centre down the slopes. Towards the edges of the parish were areas of common pasture land where the parish’s livestock could be grazed and on the flat, flood-prone ground next to the river Thames were fields of meadow, to make hay for winter feed. Animals would also be grazed on the arable fields after the harvest and during fallow years. The river itself, running along the northern boundary of the parish, provided fish and also transport links. There were also areas of woodland, to provide the community with timber and firewood.

Hinton Waldrist as it appeared just before the implementation of the 'Act of Enclosure' in the early 1760s. This is taken from John Rocque's map of Berkshire

On the edge of the village was the manor house, set back in its grounds and next to it the parish church, which dates from around 1250. Houses and cottages of various sizes straggled along the east-west road that connected Hinton with the neighbouring parishes of Longworth and Pusey and along a lane that ran north from this road, past the church and manor house, to the river, where there was a smaller hamlet named Duxford. There was also once another residential area, known as Hinton Burgage, off the Duxford road (this area is now a modern plantation). A dwelling (or 'messuage') would usually have a small piece of land known as a ‘close’ attached to it, which its occupants would use to keep pigs or poultry, to grow vegetables or maintain an orchard. Messuages had individual names; examples include, Slatters, Taylors, Peckes and Pompis. Hinton would have had the necessary amenities for an agricultural community, including a mill (the southward slope from the village to the A420 is known as Windmill Hill), a smithy and a saw mill. The manor house also had fishponds, and a warren for keeping rabbits. In short, Hinton had everything needed to sustain its population, both materially and spiritually (but no pub!)

Hinton's Parish Church, dedicated to St Margaret of Antioch, is the oldest building in the parish, dating to around 1250

The lane to Duxford has a timeless feel

Open Field Farming

Prior to enclosure of the land in the 1760s, Hinton, in common with other champion countryside parishes, used the ‘open field’ system of farming. In this system, rather than farms having their own discrete areas of land, with hedged fields, farming was carried out in large, communal fields. The arable fields were divided into long strips and individual farmers were allocated strips in each field, distributed throughout the fields to ensure that each farmer had a fair mixture of good and less productive land. The hay meadows were similarly divided, while the pasture fields, (named ‘commons’) were grazed by all who owned livestock.

The system was overseen by the lord of the manor, or his land steward and by representatives of the parish community who met regularly at manor courts. These included ‘courts baron’, where administrative matters were decided and ‘courts leet’, which had a disciplinary function. It was a self-regulating, co-operative and communal way of life. At the same time, there were certain things that open-field farming was not:

• ·         It was not a collective, communist system. Some farmers had more land than others and produce was used or disposed of individually, rather than going into a single collective ‘pot’.

• ·         It was not exclusively a subsistence farming system. While some had just enough land for their own needs, others produced a surplus that they sold in the nearby market towns.

• ·         Not everyone possessed land and not everyone who did possess land worked it themselves. Farm holdings of different sizes implied more or less workers and farmers with large land holdings would employ a number of labourers. These may also have possessed strips of arable land for their own use and could graze animals on the commons.

Few owned their land outright. Most leased it in some way or other from the lord of the manor. A common means of land possession in pre-enclosure times was known as ‘copyhold’, where an individual possessed land for their lifetime, or sometimes for the lifetimes of two generations of their family, paying an annual rent to the lord of the manor. Poorer residents were likely to be sub-tenants of copyholders. Wealthier copyholders were referred to as ‘yeomen’.

All who possessed arable land were obliged to farm it in the same way, as determined by the community at the ‘courts baron’. It was usual for the parish’s arable land to be divided into two, three or four large fields, that were farmed in rotation on a three-year cycle, embracing wheat or barley in year one, oats, peas or beans in year two and fallow in year three. Hinton’s three arable fields were, rather prosaically, named Little Burrow field, Middle Field and Field next to Longworth. As stated above, each farmer would have an allocation of strips of land distributed within each field. As well as the tenant farmers, there would be allocations of land for the lord of the manor (known as demesne lands) and for the rector (glebe lands). Arable fields had a distinctive corrugated appearance, as each was made up of ‘rigs’ and ‘furrows’, wave-like undulations running the length of the field, produced by medieval ploughs throwing the soil up on one side, the mounds of earth deepening as the years passed. Rig and furrow also helped with drainage and assisted the demarcation of individual land holdings. Both the open-field system and rig and furrow developed in late Saxon times, contemporaneous with the division of the land into manors and parishes, strongly suggesting a planned reorganisation of agriculture at that time (hence ‘planned’ countryside as an alternative title to ‘champion’ countryside).

This drawing, derived from John Rocque's map of Berkshire, shows the main features of the parish of Hinton Waldrist in pre-enclosure times. The village itself is in the centre of the parish, with hamlets to the north at Hinton Burgage and Duxford. The three open fields, Little Burrow field, Middle field and field next to Longworth, sweep down the hill to the south. In the west and north are two areas of common pasture and in the north-west, adjoining the river Thames is an area of meadow. Finally, Westfield copse, on the western edge of the parish, provided the main supply of wood

This enlargement of a section of Rocque's map shows part of the three open arable fields to the south of the village. While it should not be taken literally, it gives a flavour of how those fields appeared when they were made up of a patchwork of strips of rig and furrow, with access lanes in between

Rig and furrow fell out of use following enclosure, as new ploughing techniques rendered it obsolete. There is now no evidence of rig and furrow in Hinton Waldrist. However in other parishes, some arable fields were converted to pasture after enclosure and never ploughed again. The former rigs and furrows may still be seen today, somewhat worn away. This shows a field in the parish of Cropredy, near Banbury, where rig and furrow survives. The peaks and troughs can be seen running left to right across the picture, which was taken while the field was being used as a camping site during the annual Fairport's Cropredy Convention music festival. The white lines sprayed on the field help highlight the undulations of the ancient rigs and furrows

The site of Middle Field is still used for growing grain, but its smooth, regular appearance would not be recognised by those living in pre-enclosure times, when it would have been a patchwork of strips of rig and furrow

Looking north towards the river Thames, we see the site of Hinton Common, which would have been the main area of summer grazing for the parish

So by Norman times, Hinton was established as a largely self-contained, self-sufficient and self-regulating community, with its own manor house, church, open arable fields, commons, meadows, etc. And so it continued, changing little, until the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Manor of Hinton

The story of Hinton Manor has been entertainingly (if somewhat speculatively) told by a twentieth century owner of the manor house, Nicholas Davenport (a more succinct account can be found in the Victoria County History of Berkshire). The Manor was apparently formed following the Norman conquest of England and was granted, along with other extensive land holdings, to the St Valery family. The St Valerys were relations of William the Conqueror and were major landholders in Normandy and Brittany. The St Valerys built a motte and bailey castle on the site of the present manor house; the motte and part of the moat that surrounded the site still survive. The castle became the headquarters of the 'Honour of St Valery' and Davenport believed that the St Valerys lived there themselves during the twelfth century. The manor remained in the possession of the St Valery family for over two hundred years, until it was disposed of during the reign of Edward I and became part of the Crown possessions. Briefly in the late 14th century, a resident of Hinton Castle was Marie de Bohun, wife of Henry Bolinbroke, later King Henry IV and the mother of the future Henry V.

At some point, possibly during the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century, the castle was abandoned. The manor lands remained Crown possessions until the 17th century. Davenport suggested that the present manor house was probably built by George Owen, who leased the manor from Edward VI in 1549. Owen had been physician to Henry VIII and had overseen Edward VI's birth in 1537. The manor house was altered and extended in the 18th and 19th centuries. Around 1618 the estate, along with the neighbouring estates of Longworth and West Challow was purchased from the Crown by Sir Henry Marten, a judge of the Admiralty court and a close ally of King James I. Following has death, his estates passed to his son, also Henry Marten (1602-1680).

Henry Marten, Lord of the Manor of Hinton and Regicide

Henry Marten junior was a colourful character. A lawyer and politician as well as a landowner, he was Member of Parliament for Berkshire during the English Civil Wars. He made Longworth Manor his official residence, installing his wife there while he spent most of his time in London with his long-term mistress, Mary Ward. During the Civil Wars he supported the Parliamentarians and in 1649  was among the 'regicides' who signed the death warrant of King Charles I. Following the retoration of the monarchy in 1660, the regicides were required to surender to the Crown and Marten did so, a decision which probably saved him from execution. He was however imprisoned for life, dying at the age of 78 in Chepstow Castle.

In passing, the Civil Wars briefly touched Hinton Waldrist itself. In May 1645, Cromwell and his troops were pursuing King Charles through Oxfordshire and reputedly stayed a few days at Hinton manor house. Then in 1649 a group of mutineering Levellers militia were trying to cross the river Thames but found their way blocked by Parliamentarian soldiers. Locals showed them an alternative route across the ford at Duxford, whence they made their way to Burford. During the night they were surprised by Cromwell's troops, many were taken prisoner and the ringleaders were shot against the wall of Burford church.

Henry Marten was a spendthrift who lived life to the full and had to sell his estates to offset his debts. Hinton and Longworth manors went to John Loder (1622-1701), originally a small landowner from Harwell who, following advantageous marriages, purchased the estate in 1658 and came to live in Hinton manor house in 1668. Following John Loder’s death, the estate passed to his son Charles (1666-1727), whose only son predeceased him. The estate was then inherited jointly by Charles’s four daughters and the manor house became the residence of his eldest daughter Mary and her husband, a cousin named the Rev. Seymour Loder (1693–1743), who was also rector of the parish. By the time their son John (1725-1805) was eighteen, both his parents were dead and the estate was managed by his aunts until he came of age and inherited it under the terms of his grandfather’s will. Before coming into his inheritance, John went to Balliol College, Oxford and took holy orders. As soon as he was ordained he followed his father in becoming rector of the parish as well as lord of the manor. Like his father he lived in the manor house, presumably renting out the fine rectory.

We do not know how devout the Reverend Loder was, but we do know that he was committed to hunting, being a founder member and first master of the Old Berkshire Hunt. And as we will see, in the 1760s he enthusiastically added to the value of his estate by being an early adopter of land enclosure.

Life in Hinton Waldrist in Pre-enclosure Times

Some documentary evidence has survived that gives us hints as to life in Hinton in the centuries leading up to enclosure in the 1760s. Many of these documents were painstakingly transcribed and typed up in the 1960s by Jasmine Hawse in her “Hinton Waldrist through the Centuries”. The best sources are probably the minutes of meetings of the Courts Baron and Courts Leet, which were held at regular intervals for hundreds of years. The Court Baron was the main administrative body for a manor and met regularly under the chairmanship of the lord of the manor or his land steward. Decisions were made by a ‘jury’, made up of representatives of the village, usually the more prominent farmers or tradesmen. The business of the meeting included formally noting the surrendering or passing on of copyhold tenancies and appointing village officers, such as the Hayward, responsible for ensuring the upkeep of hedges, fences and other boundaries and the Leasmen and Grass Stewards, who oversaw the common meadows and pasture fields. The court baron also made decisions regarding the management of the common fields and dealt with minor infringements of discipline among the village inhabitants. Originally, courts baron were held every few weeks but by the mid-eighteenth century they appear to have been reduced in Hinton to annual events. The Court Leet was held less frequently and was essentially the lowest court of the royal criminal justice system, dealing with minor crimes and misdemeanours. The penalties applied for infringements at both courts baron and leet were invariably fines that went to the lord of the manor - a sometimes lucrative means of income generation.

Reviewing examples of court baron records covering several centuries, one is struck by how little things changed. Lords of the manor came and went but the same issues were discussed year after year, century after century, underlining the slow, constant way of life of the village. A routine issue was ensuring that “mounds” were properly built and maintained. These were the boundaries of the common fields, which had to be kept up by all those who held land within the fields, each taking responsibility for a particular section. Thus, in 1571:

Henry Newburye and Richard Newburye, for their part, before the feast of St. Andrew, will well and sufficiently build their mounds in the nether side of the Bridges Close, from the Shephowse of Master Kennell to the lane at Humphrys Busshes, under penalty of 3s 4d.

Another regular item of manor business was the setting of “mere stones”, that marked the boundaries between each tenant’s allocation of land within the common fields. So in 1651:

The whole homage is to mett to sett meare stones behind Burgage on the twentieth third daie of Januarie at tenne of the clocke in the morning for every default not appearing at 3s 4d.

Timber cutting was also closely regulated. In 1725 the court directed that:

No tenant shall cut down and timber whatsoever without leave of the Lord.

But at the same time:

The Lord cannot cut down any timber from off the Copyhold premises without leave of the tenant except to repair the Manor House, outhouses, barns and other buildings thereto adjoining.

The grazing of animals was another regular concern. In the summer, stock would graze the common pasture, or the arable field that was that year left fallow. In winter, they would graze on stubble following the grain harvest. The number of animals that a tenant could keep was regulated by the court baron, as was the seasonal movement of stock. In 1733, the court determined that:

By the Custom of the said Manor all the tenants within the same are for every yardland they possess by Copy [a yardland comprised twenty acres of arable land] to have the pasturing of thirty sheep, four Rother cattle and two horse beasts, and so according to that rate more or less.

In 1651 it was ordered:

That no Beasts nor sheipe shall be baited nor kept in the summer tilthe field from London Way quite down to Hay Gate from the sixteenthe day of Januarie to the 25^th daie of march next coming, for every default 3s 0d.

Sometimes court orders appeared somewhat pedantic. In 1725 it was solemnly noted that:

Anyone may stock a cow upon a horse common but not a horse on a cow common, any one stocking a horse upon a cow common shall forfeit five shillings to the Lord of the Manour for every horse so stockt.

Disciplinary matters tended to be mundane. Court leet records from 1437 state that:

John Sonte (3d fine) made assault on William Schand with one dagger…and that Nicholas Bridde made assault upon John Sonte with one stick…and that the same Nicholas made assault upon John Whyting with one gisarm [a kind of halberd] against the peace and so is in amercement…and that Amy Whiting (2d) and Sibill Finch (2d) are shrews to the injury of their husbands so they are in amercement.

Later records give a more settled picture. The majority of individuals “presented” to the court for misdemeanours were fined for failing to maintain their properties, or for neglecting to make “mounds” or set mere stones. Grazing animals on the commons at the wrong time, or sewing crops on a pasture field could also draw fines. And in 1715 the court leet ordered:

That Francis Crosse shall remove his dunghill out of the highway by midsummer next and that he lay no more dung in that place nor elsewhere which shall prove prejudiciall to the highways or other wise to forfeit Twenty shilling.

The courts baron also formally noted when copyhold tenancies were given up or passed on, usually following the death of the copyholder. One example from 1737 gives a feeling for the extent of a tenant farm in Hinton at that time:

The homage before named upon their oaths present the death of Richard Castel, a Customary tenant of the Manor who dyed seized of one Messuage, one Barn, one Cowhouse, one Court Yard, one Orchard and Close adjoining to the said Messuage, And one parcel of meadow called Fettiplaces with appurtenances in Duxford under the yearly rent of eight shillings and four pence. And also of one yard land and three quarters, one parcel of land called Two Staves, one other parcel of land called Two Watermen, one acre of land called the Boot Acre, under the yearly rent of twenty six shillings and two pence. Whereby a Herriott [a sum of money paid to the lord of the manor on the death of a tenant] of twenty pence became due to the lords. And that Lydia Castell his widow ought to enjoy the said Messuage and several tenements during her Widowhood according to the custom of the said Manor.

The Agricultural Revolution comes to Hinton Waldrist

In 1701, at Crowmarsh Gifford near Wallingford, just 20 miles from Hinton Waldrist, a gentleman farmer named Jethro Tull designed and manufactured a mechanised seed drill, which (he claimed) greatly improved the sewing of arable crops. Tull’s innovation was one manifestation of a range of changes that have come to be known as the English Agricultural Revolution. Their net result was a massive increase in both agricultural output and productivity, contributing by the mid-19^th century to a huge increase in the population of the country and also a dramatic reduction in the proportion of the population who worked on the land. This increase in the ability of the nation to feed itself has been cited as a vital factor that paved the way for the 19^th century British industrial revolution.

Change happened over a period of time and had many facets. Technological innovations such as Jethro Tull’s seed drill were probably less important than changes in animal husbandry and the introduction of new crops. The selective breeding of livestock increased both the size of animals and their meat and milk yields. The introduction of fodder crops such as turnips and clover into the crop rotation in the arable fields increased fertility by boosting nitrogen in the soil and reduced the need to leave land fallow, thus increasing grain production. At the same time, farming was reorganised, with changes in tenancy arrangements that replaced long-term copyhold tenancies with shorter term lettings, shifting the balance of power from tenants to landowners. Most controversially, enclosure transformed the common open fields into smaller units possessed by individual farmers. Historians still argue over the relative importance of the various factors – and some dispute the concept of an agricultural revolution at all. However, it is clear that changes did occur and that agricultural efficiency increased greatly from the late 17^th to the mid-19^th centuries.

By the mid-18^th century, such changes were evident in Hinton Waldrist. They were prompted by the lord of the manor, the Reverend John Loder. From the 1750s, court baron records show that turnips were being grown as part of the crop rotation in the arable fields. There is also evidence that copyhold tenancies were being phased out; as tenants died they were not replaced by new copyholders. Then in 1759, Rev. Loder wrote to his tenants to notify them of his intention to:

Improve my estate at Hinton by obtaining an Act of Parliament if I can for inclosing the same and flatter myself that my behaviour hath been such that you will not obstruct any advantage to me where you may have proportional benefit.

Hinton Manor and Parliamentary Enclosure

Enclosure was about reorganising the agricultural land within the manor by replacing the open fields and common pasture and meadows with smaller, privately owned fields. The land was to be divided up, with each current landholder being allocated new fields near to their farm houses for their sole use, the new holdings being equivalent in size to their former acreage in the common fields. The new system was supposed to be more efficient and productive, as it gave larger landholders arable land in discrete blocks, rather than scattered throughout the common fields and their own pasture and meadow, as opposed to sharing it with the rest of the village. Also, landowners could farm their land as they wished, rather than having to bow to the collective decisions of the court baron.

Historians still argue as to whether enclosure of open field systems led by itself to greater productivity. Recent studies suggest that openfield systems could be as productive as enclosure and had the benefit of beingmore flexible and adaptable to changes in conditions. At the same time, enclosure clearly benefited landowners, who could increase rents, and disadvantaged the poorest tenants who had too little land to warrant being allocated enclosed fields for their own use. Many of the latter left the land to seek work in the growing industrial towns, or became day labourers, selling themselves at hiring fairs to work for their more fortunate neighbours.

If tenants in a manor would not agree to enclosure, the landowner sought an Act of Parliament to compulsorily enclose the land. As Parliament was dominated by the landowning class, Acts were invariably agreed. Around 21% of land in England was enclosed by Act of Parliament between 1700 and 1850, with Hinton’s enclosure coming early in a wave of enclosures of arable land that took place in the 1760s. Hinton’s tenants formally wrote to Rev. Loder to set out their objections to his proposals, their main concerns being the uncertainty that they would not be disadvantaged by the new arrangements and the expense they would incur in setting up the hedges and other boundaries around their land allocations. However, their objections were ignored and in 1760 the Act for the enclosure of Hinton manor was passed by Parliament and the village and its way of life changed for ever.


Sources Used
New Landscapes: Enclosure in Berkshire Berkshire Record Office
Davenport N (1978) The Honour of St Valery: The Story of an English Manor House. London: Scolar Press
Hawse, J.S. (1968) Hinton Waldrist through the Centuries. Unpublished typescript.
Allan R (2001) Community and Market in England: Open Fields and Enclosures Revisited
Muir R (2000) The New Reading the Landscape. Exeter: Exeter University Press
Rackham O (2003) The Illustrated History of the Countryside. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.