The Medieval English Landscape, 1000-1540 (16 page)

Inland salt production, based on the boiling in lead salt-pans of brine taken from the local rivers, was another industry which focused on a limited number of locations. Domesday Book leaves us in no doubt that
Wich
(later Droitwich) in Worcestershire and the three
Wiches
in Cheshire (Northwich, Nantwich and Middlewich) were very special places: Droitwich was covered in a series of separate entries which demonstrate that a host of different landholders, mostly in Worcestershire but some in neighbouring shires, had a stake in its salt-making activities, while those in Cheshire were dealt with separately from the general run of estates and were described in highly distinctive terms. Although there must have been some inhabitants who farmed the surrounding land, Domesday Book does not tell us about them, nor does it see fit to record any assets for these places other than those connected with salt; they were recognized, in 1086 and throughout the middle ages, as places of national importance for the production of a commodity invaluable as an ingredient of foodstuffs and essential to their preservation. The network of trackways leading from the various
Wiches
– identifiable by names such as Saltway (Oxfordshire) and Saltersford (Cheshire) – are testimony to their far-reaching significance. Even along the coast, where as we have seen
most salt-making seems to have been a part-time activity, there may have been some specialist places, such as the Dorset settlements of Lyme Regis (where 27
salinarii
or salt workers were recorded) and Ower (where the 13
salinarii
were the only inhabitants mentioned).
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Two industrial activities have been left for separate treatment because there are particular stories to tell about their impact on rural settlement. Among the extractive industries, the mining of silver had certain peculiarities. It was found in small quantities within several lead fields at various times during the middle ages, being dug from the surface under the control of local landholders and those individuals to whom they had granted mining rights. However, the crown had a particular interest in silver – essential to the minting of coins, normally a royal prerogative – and was prepared to invest heavily in deeper mining using a full-time workforce. The output of ore of a fourteenth- and fifteenth-century silver miner in west Cornwall has been calculated to be well in excess of that of others – 24 times more than that of a tin miner, for example, six times that of a lead miner, and much more consistent throughout the year, figures which imply work undertaken full-time, or largely so.
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The major source of silver in twelfth-century England was the Alston moors below Nenthead (Westmorland), which expanded rapidly owing to new discoveries in the early 1130s to become – temporarily, during the second half of the twelfth century – the most important area of silver production in the world; activity also spread into Northumberland and County Durham. Collectively known as the ‘Carlisle minery’, since the border town was the headquarters from which the operation was overseen and annual payments were made to the crown, the enterprise greatly impressed contemporaries; the mid-twelfth century writer Robert de Torigni, though based in Normandy, was aware of ‘veins of silver ore discovered at Carlisle’ and of ‘miners who dug for it in the bowels of the earth’. It clearly changed the face of the rural landscape in the vicinity of the mines, with perhaps 1,000 miners in total at work by the 1160s. Yet it seems to have had no lasting impact on the settlement pattern, since within 30 years the industry was in severe decline, as the mines became ever more challenging and costs exceeded the profits to be made: by the 1220s mining here was almost entirely confined to lead, not silver, and had been reduced to the part-time and seasonal activity which was characteristic of the rest of the country.
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Another illustration of the precariousness of this industry, albeit on a much smaller scale, can be seen at Carreghofa, near Llanymynech on the Wales-England frontier. Here, just east of Offa’s Dyke – on land now used as a golf course – the discovery by lead miners of a vein of silver-lead ore led in 1193 to the justiciar Hubert Walter, who was running the country for the absent King Richard I, declaring this a royal mine and ordering the refortification of the border castle, which was garrisoned so as to offer protection. By
summer 1194 three miners were at work here, at the relatively good wage of four pence (1.67p) a day, and the mint at Shrewsbury had reopened to coin pennies from the silver they produced. But, again, the activity proved to be ephemeral. There was not sufficient ore to sustain silver production long-term and the venture petered out during the reign of King John, though lead-mining continued as a part-time occupation for local peasant farmers. The prospect of a major enterprise on the Welsh frontier died almost as soon as it arose.
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There is, however, one area where we can speak with greater conviction about the long-term legacy of silver mining, partly because the enterprise lasted a considerable time (from the end of the thirteenth century to the early sixteenth, though with a break after the Black Death) and partly because it has been thoroughly researched. This is the Birland peninsula between the Tamar and Tavy estuaries in south Devon, not part of the royal estates but a place where in 1292 the crown exercised its prerogative to take control of mineral extraction, recruiting miners from Derbyshire, north-east Wales and elsewhere and also tinners from the south west who were skilled in drainage work; within six years there were over 300 miners and about 100 tinners employed. The mineworkings themselves have been identified, mostly shallow shafts and open trenches of which good examples survive at Cleave Wood just north of the Tamar estuary; evidence of the adits (almost horizontal tunnels) used to drain off water from the deeper workings, and even of an air-shaft leading off one of these, have been found at Furzehill (south west of Bere Alston). Of particular significance is the 16-kilometre Lumburn Leat, constructed in the late fifteenth century to carry water from a point west of Tavistock in order to power suction-lift pumps installed in the more northerly of the Birland mines, by then using shafts which could not be drained by adits and were too deep for water to be lifted out manually. The fact that these pumps were the latest technology – invented in Italy earlier in the century – and that the leat was on a scale which makes it unique in medieval England is testimony to the importance attached to the continued operation of these silver mines, even when supplies were becoming more difficult to extract.

Yet despite all this, evidence of purpose-built settlement remains very limited. There are documentary references in the very early years of the enterprise to housing and administrative buildings first at Maristow then at Calstock, apparently for the use of managers and refiners, and in 1360 the sheriff of Devon was instructed to ensure that there was no hindrance to the provision of housing for mineworkers, but no archaeological trace of settlement in the immediate vicinity of the mines has been found. All the signs are that we are looking again at temporary dwellings which left no lasting impression on the landscape, or the absorption into the existing dispersed pattern of some additional accommodation for miners. A fifteenth-century list of named places within the parish which covered the Birland peninsula, compiled for
the purpose of organizing a rota for hearing confessions, gives no indication that there were at that time ‘extra’ hamlets close to the mines, now unknown because they disappeared once mining ceased; it does suggest, however, that the established settlement pattern had been influenced to the extent that hamlets relatively near the mines had tended to become larger than the rest. One exception stands out – though better regarded as a town than a village – in the shape of the Bere Alston, close to the northern end of the mines, founded about 1305 by Reginald de Ferrers, lord of the manor whose silver resources were now being exploited by the king. This already existed as a small settlement with open fields, but, following the grant of a weekly market and annual fair in 1295, burgage-plots were laid out over some of the strips to its east and south, evidently in an attempt to salvage some profit for the lord from all the crown-sponsored activity on his estate. The fifteenth-century confessions rota shows this to be the largest settlement in the parish and the unusually small size of the burgage plots (37–49 metres long by about 10 metres wide) reinforces the impression that many of them would have been leased to working miners. This was certainly a place which, largely if not entirely, owed its existence to the mining industry, and it is rightly acclaimed as ‘probably … the first specialist mining town in Britain’.
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The final group of ‘industrial villages’ which ought to be considered, also along the coast, are those based on fishing. Longshore fishing in distant waters was certainly known in medieval England, but for most of the period seems to have been a full-time occupation for men living in those towns which served as coastal ports. East and West Looe (Cornwall), for example, were deliberately founded as new settlements, carved out of the manors of Pendrym and Portlooe in Talland respectively, on opposite sides of the Looe estuary; both were in existence by 1201 and despite temporary decline in the later fifteenth century they thrived for much of the period both as ports for trade with France, Spain and Ireland – drawing on a hinterland which included the tin-producing area of Bodmin Moor – and as bases for Atlantic and inshore fishing. It was reported in 1555 of West Looe, generally regarded as the lesser of the two, that ‘most part of all the … country between Exeter and Bridgwater are served with fish from the haven’.
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Outside the ports, sea fishing is generally regarded for most of the middle ages as having been a part-time activity, though one seen as sufficiently important for inland manors to retain detached portions of shoreline in a way familiar from the arrangements made for access to extra woodland, pasture or meadow. A detailed study of the south Devon coast, for example, has shown how at Stokenham (inland from Slapton Sands) both fishing and also ‘fish-watching’ – to report the movement of a potential catch – seem to have been imposed as manorial obligations, though elsewhere it was a small-scale activity for middle-ranking freeholders acting independently. Key to their success were the storage
arrangements on the shore for boats, nets and other fishing gear, in huts known as cellars, as a reminder of which Coombe Cellars on the Teign estuary survives as a place name. But these were at best temporary dwellings for those who lived inland.
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The picture changed towards the end of the middle ages with the foundation of some dedicated ‘fishing villages’. Mevagissey and Gorran Haven (Cornwall) were both in existence by the early fifteenth century, established as secondary coastal settlements attached to manors based inland. Dittisham, Hallsands, Westwood, Middlewood and Cockwood (Devon) have all been identified as former cellar settlements transformed into permanent villages towards the end of that century. But the reasons for the development of these permanent sites differed from one county to the other. Mevagissey and Gorran Haven appear to have been speculative ventures by manorial lords seeking an alternative income in the post-Black Death era: Mevagissey, despite its twisting streets, seems to have been planned around a marketplace and had a pier and quay provided by the lords of the manor of Treleaven, while Gorran Haven was supplied with a new church. The Devon examples, on the other hand, have been interpreted as a response to a local upsurge in population from about 1480 which (it is argued) led those who could not be accommodated on the land to seek an alternative livelihood, meeting what would have been a parallel increase in demand for food. These were definitely ‘unplanned’ settlements, as houses were built by incomers close together (without gardens or crofts) wherever there was space between the beach and the fields behind, and to this day there are narrow winding lanes, successors to the gaps left between one dwelling and the next: they have been described as ‘a close-knit disarrangement of buildings’. Elsewhere along the English coastline, a similar tendency for temporary settlements to become permanent can occasionally be glimpsed from the place name element
scela
(Old English) or
skali
(Scandinavian) meaning a ‘temporary hut’, which though normally referring to seasonal pastures may indicate the fishing origins of coastal settlements in Cumberland such as Sandscale and North Scale, both near Barrow-in-Furness, and Seascale just south of Sellafield. The process can be demonstrated very well in the case of North Shields (Northumberland), which according to a case heard by parliament in 1290 had begun as ‘three huts (
sciales
) only’ made on the bank of the River Tyne by fishermen; here, the prior of Tynemouth as lord had clearly taken an interest since he proceeded to erect further buildings, so that it had developed into a port which the burgesses of Newcastle-upon-Tyne now saw as a threat.
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In fishing, at least, we can point with some conviction to the sort of temporary settlements which housed workers in a variety of enterprises taking on a permanence which gave a legitimate claim to the title ‘industrial village’.

Whatever the overall arrangement of housing within a rural settlement, dwellings were usually – though not invariably – located inside an enclosed plot. Among lesser folk, the enclosed area was generally known as the toft; a separate area, the croft, was often – but again not always – attached to the toft. At an élite level, that of a lord of a manor or a substantial freeholder, the plot on which the house stood might be recognizable today as a platform enclosed by a moat. On a national scale, the distribution of moated sites can tell us a great deal about the incidence of dispersed settlement, since this was the context in which most were created. About one-fifth of the 5,000-plus moats identified in England are in Suffolk and Essex, shires characterized by their multiplicity of dispersed hamlets; in Dennington (Suffolk) immediately north of Framlingham, for example, there are no less than eight moated sites, and in the next parish to the north, Laxton, a further five, all apparently associated with a fragmented pattern of both lordship and settlement within the territories concerned. Elsewhere, such as the Welsh borders and the west midlands (notably the Arden area of Warwickshire) a relatively high density of moated sites appears to have been the consequence of sustained woodland clearance, again resulting in a proliferation of small settlements each marked by the presence of one dwelling set apart from the rest by its moat. Conversely, in areas of nucleated settlement, generally with more concentrated lordship, moats are less abundant, and where they occur there is commonly only one per parish.
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