Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

LIVING OFF THE LAND 148 CHAPTER 9/ LIVING OFF THE LAND David Thomas, Robin Gibson, W. B. Carter and others This chapter looks at how the land in Buckden parish has been exploited over the years: not only for food production, but to provide the raw materials for local bricks and distant highways, lobster- baskets and the means of travel (horses) and, increasingly, homes and recreational space. Land use through the ages by David Thomas he strongest reminder of how Buckden was farmed in the medieval period is the name Westfield. The original ‘West Field’ was a large parcel of land which was farmed in common but later absorbed into a single holding, Westfield Farm. This survived as a working farm into the first years of the twenty- first century. We know from the tithe map of 1799 (held at Lincoln) there were also North, Mill and South Fields. These simple names, bare of any indication of ownership (unlike, say Martins Farm), origin (as in Park Farm, once the site of the bishop’s deer park) or specialised use (Little Vineyard) are characteristic of the three-field rotation that was introduced into Britain in the middle ages. Under this system, which was developed from the sixth century to the ninth century, one-third (i.e. one field) of the land under cultivation was allowed to lie fallow each year, while another third was laid down to cereals in the autumn, and the final third to oats, barley, peas and beans in the spring, for late summer harvesting. This was a marked improvement on the preceding system, under which only half the available land was under cultivation each year. Each entitled family would have had a strip in each field allocated by the landowner’s bailiff. Three- or common-field farming provided basic food for the whole of each manor; it was up to each family to vary this rather restricted diet, by growing vegetables in a small garden. (As mentioned above, the tithe map shows four large fields. Four-field rotation came in the eighteenth century. But how the fourth field was brought into being and used in Buckden has not been researched.) Oxen were used to pull the rather crude ploughs of the time: horses were then still quite small, and too many would have been needed to force the shares through the parish’s notoriously heavy clays. Evidence of how these fields were ploughed can still be found in at least two fields to the west of the A1, which still have the typical ridge-and-furrow surface. Ridge-and-furrow was also visible in the river meadows until recently, but was ploughed out by using the furrows as the middle of each strip until the fields were even again. Originally, the furrows were probably drainage channels for when the river overflowed, with the ridges providing grazing animals with refuge or a means of reaching dry land. The establishing of a Buckden residence for the bishops of Lincoln would have led to some land being taken out of food production and used for the upkeep—and probably, in the longer term, for the breeding and rearing—of horses and possibly donkeys and mules: both as pack-animals and as mounts for the bishops, their guards and those of their accompanying clerics and senior household staff whose dignity would have been impaired by having to walk with the raggle-taggle of a huge episcopal retinue. Centuries later, when Buckden became an important stage and posting stop on the Great North Road, it was from the inns that the demand came for land on which to keep and graze horses and grow their fodder (and food for the travellers). Even a small coaching-inn like the Spread Eagle had at least 30 acres of attached land, while in the 1850s the widowed landlady of the George, Mrs Elizabeth Cartwright, also had to run her inn’s 104 acre farm, consisting of 11 acres of grass (the present memorial playing field) and 93 acres of ‘cold, wet [and] not very productive’ arable, located near the juncture of the Perry and Grafham roads. All the George land was leased from the bishops of Lincoln until 1858, when ownership was transferred to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The arable acreage was then incorporated into the large neighbouring holding that later became Park Farm: the name is a reminder that the medieval bishops enclosed and T