Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

LIVING OFF THE LAND 150 Towards the end of the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth, the Board of Agriculture commissioned a series of local and regional reports on the agriculture of the time. The earlier ones were rather scathing about the systems of agriculture in general: essentially they were no more than a variation on the medieval three-field rotation (but reports only a few years later found that improvements had been made). At that time, Buckden’s acres were broken down into arable (2060), meadow (160), pasture (200), commons (40—few parishes had any at all), and woods (40). Buckden is rarely mentioned in the reports, except in terse lists, for example: How watered Buckden, by good springs. Gardens and orchards Buckden, all gardens small, except at the Bishop’s Palace. Manures Brampton, Brington, Broughton and Buckden. Sheep folding, and yard dung. Roads Buckden. Roads exceedingly good 1 . Prices of Labour &c. Buckden, 10s. in winter, 12s. in summer. Those Buckden wages were among the lowest in the county. Many of the labourers lived in poor cottages, often with very small gardens, and worked long hours, dawn to dark in winter and during harvest, and 6 to 6 during the rest of the year. The grumbling opposition of much of the rural workforce to the introduction of threshing-machines and other forms of mechanization finally erupted in 1830 in the violent, widespread and apparently coordinated assault on the landed classes and their property known as the ‘Captain Swing’ riots. Mindful of recent and current popular uprisings on the continent, the government responded forcefully. Although the rioters were not nearly so numerous or organised as had been supposed, they inadvertently created a stereotype: the obdurate yokel who would resist any innovation. This wasn’t always true. The start of the nineteenth century, for example, saw the age-old use of oxen as plough-animals 2 was coming to an end— not always through the desire of employers to adopt new methods (some strongly believed oxen still to be better suited than horses to the heavy Huntingdonshire soils), but through the ‘perverseness of servants’, i.e., the unwillingness of the workers to continue the old, laborious way of doing things: ‘… one farmer [told me] that he had used oxen, but his men used very unpleasant and refractory expressions in his presence, and his scheme ended in the death of one ox from being overdriven, and in another being very much injured…’ As a result only one farmer in the county still used oxen. The most significant event causing changes in Buckden farming methods was the enclosure award of the early nineteenth century, which allotted the parish's remaining unenclosed land to those who were entitled to it by long use. Only 700 of Buckden’s 2500 acres had been enclosed over the preceding centuries: the enclosure movement might have been under way for many years in the rest of the country, but Buckden and some other local areas were slow to respond. Even when the Buckden award had been made (in 1813), it was not formally adopted for another seven years. We still have reminders of the award. Margetts Farm on the road to the Offords is named after the farmer to whom it was allocated. Some of the land allocated to the bishops of Lincoln is still owned by the Church Commissioners. Many smaller allocations were sold off. A small land holding cost more to enclose per acre than a large one; a smallholder without the capital to invest in fencing was likely to end up a paid labourer. From about 1875, agriculture in general passed through a long depression, in great contrast to the previous forty years when there was much innovation, some of it by the Cranfield family, nationally- respected farmers and millers who settled in Buckden in the late 1850s. Buckden continued to have a predominantly arable economy, but there were also sheep and cattle (small dairy farms were a feature). The balance between arable and livestock was further altered by the twentieth century's two world wars. During each of these, the government set up a Wartime Agricultural Executive Committee in each county as part of its drive to grow more food. The main job of the 'War Ags’, as they were known, was to assess and realise the full potential of each farm by bringing new land under the plough. It was far more productive to use the soil of old pastures - enriched by decades of manure and the rotting of grass roots - to raise crops rather than livestock. One person in Buckden spent the Second World War ploughing up fields where the farmer was unable or unwilling to respond to a compulsory ploughing order. 1 Thanks to the work of the turnpike trusts. See Chapter 18. 2 Ox shoes as well as horse-shoes have been found on land at Diddington