CHAPTER VIII.

NORFOLK AGRICULTURE.

When we come to Norfolk we find hints at so many special features that Norfolk agriculture demands separate treatment. The preamble of a Norfolk Enclosure Act is remarkably different from those for the rest of the country. A typical one is 1795, c. 67:

“Whereas there are in the parish of Sedgeford in the county of Norfolk divers lands and grounds, called whole-year lands, brecks, common fields, half-year or shack lands, commons and waste grounds.... And whereas there are certain rights of sheep-walk, shackage and common, over the said brecks, half-year or shack land, commons and waste grounds. And great part of the said whole-year lands, as well as the brecks, common fields, and half-year or shack lands, are inconveniently situated,” etc.

Or again 1804, c. 24:

“Whereas there are in the parish of Waborne in the county of Norfolk divers lands and grounds called whole-year lands, common fields, doles, half-year or shack lands, commons and waste grounds.”

“Whereas the said common fields, doles, half-year lands, shack lands, commons and waste grounds, are subject to certain rights of sheep-walk, shackage and common, and great part of the said whole-year lands, common fields, and half-year or shack lands are inconveniently situated for the various owners and proprietors thereof....”

Other Norfolk acts mention doles, ings, carrs, and buscallys. Buscallys we may take to mean woods in which rights of common for fuel were practised. Dr. Murray’s Dictionary gives us bushaile or buscayle, from Old French _boschaille_, Low Latin _boscalia_, shrubberies, thickets, etc. “Dole,” is connected etymologically both with “deal” and with the word “run-dale,” concerning which see below. The word is frequently found elsewhere, as in the “dolemeads” at Bristol and Bath, and usually means meadows, the ownership of which is intermixed in small parcels, which are commonable after hay harvest, but sometimes the word is used of arable land (see below). The Act for Earsham, Ditchingham and Hedenham (Norfolk, 1812, c. 17) has the sentence, “The said dole meadow lands lie intermixed and dispersed.” The “ings” and “carrs” are best understood by the help of the old Ordnance Survey map for Norfolk. The carrs are the lowest, swampiest part of the common pastures which reach down to the rivers; the ings, while also low-lying, are separated from the rivers by the carrs, and intervene between the carrs and the tilled lands.

There remain the expressions whole-year lands, half-year or shack lands, and brecks, to interpret.

Half-year lands obviously means lands commonable for half the year, _i.e._, after the crop has been carried. They are also “shack” lands, or lands on which right of “shackage” exists. “Shack” is connected with “shake,” and right of shackage appears to be the right to carry off the gleanings after the crop has been carried and the fields are thrown open. It is, however, to be noticed that half-year or shack lands are mentioned as something distinct from common fields. The distinction is said to be that common rights on shack lands can be exercised only by the owners or occupiers of those lands. Shack lands may be termed common fields, but the term common field may be reserved for those fields over which cottagers or toft holders or others also possess rights of common.

“Brecks” are asserted by William Marshall (“Rural Economy of Norfolk,” Vol. I., p. 376) to be “large new-made enclosures,” but as is seen from the wording of the Acts quoted, they are enclosures still “subject to certain rights of shackage, sheep-walk, and common.”[31] Lastly, what are “whole-year lands”?

[31] 1820, c. 29 (Blakeney, Wiverton and Glanford) mentions “whole-year lands, whole-year brecks, whole-year marshes.” In this case, apparently, brecks are not commonable.

Since half-year lands are lands which for half the year are common, and for half the year are in individual ownership and use, one would argue that whole-year lands must be lands which are in individual ownership and use the whole year; for if they were common the whole year they would be termed simply “commons.” We get further light by comparing the preambles of other Norfolk Acts. Some instead of whole-year lands mention every-year lands, others speak of “whole-year or every-year lands,” while finally Icklingham in Suffolk (1813, c. 29) gives us “every year lands or Infields.”

Now “infields” is a familiar expression in Scottish agriculture. Even in the Lothians, up to the middle of the eighteenth century the cultivated land was divided into infield and outfield. The outfield, like the outfield on the Yorkshire Wolds, only bore occasional crops, and was never manured, all the manure being reserved for the infield, which was made to bear a crop every year. In Haddington the customary course was: (1) pease; (2) wheat; (3) barley; (4) oats; and then the land was dunged and planted with pease again; and leases stipulated for “the preservation and regular dunging of the mucked land shotts.”[32] Such lands might obviously be described as every-year lands, and since this method of cultivation implies that immediately one crop is carried preparation must be made for the next, and therefore is not easily consistent with common rights, so these lands are also “whole-year lands.” It may be noted that the Norfolk preambles (as in the Sedgeford example, quoted above), while stating that the “whole-year lands,” as well as the brecks, common fields and half-year lands are inconveniently situated, _i.e._, are intermixed, by implication give us to understand that they are not subject to rights of shackage, sheep-walk, and common.

[32] George Buchan Hepburn, “Agriculture of East Lothian,” 1794, p. 49.

It is the more curious to find that Norfolk and the adjoining part of Suffolk followed a traditional method of cultivation in this respect similar to that of the East of Scotland, because there are so few traces of anything similar in the intervening counties. I find infields mentioned twice in Northumberland, once in Lincoln, whole-year lands once in Huntingdon. There is also mention of half-year lands in Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire. The Wessex custom of “hitching the fields,” or “cropping the homeward or bettermost part of the common fields every year” is not the same thing, because there, as we saw in the case of Stratton and Grimstone, the extra crop was raised for common, not for individual, benefit. Battersea common fields were worked as every-year lands, and so are the Axholme fields to-day; but in these cases the custom was locally derived from some other form of cultivation; whereas in Norfolk and Suffolk the peculiar customs must have been indigenous and ancient.

One is also tempted to ask whether it is a coincidence that Norfolk farmers in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and Lothian farmers in the nineteenth, enjoyed and deserved an extremely high reputation for scientific, enterprising, and skilful agriculture. The ancient custom of raising crops every year from the same land must have necessitated the gradual accumulation of knowledge on the best ways of preventing exhaustion of the soil, by marling, manuring, deep ploughing, and various rotations of crops. When turnip culture was introduced into England, it was to Norfolk that the new idea was brought. There was no obstacle to growing turnips on the Norfolk whole-year lands, such as would have arisen if toft holders had the right to turn horses, cattle and sheep on to the lands at Lammas; and the intervention of a new crop which gave an opportunity for getting the land clean of weeds, and increased its fertility for grain crops, was a far more obvious boon there than on lands subject to a periodic fallow.

But to return to the typical Norfolk Enclosure Act preamble. We have only half explained the problem suggested by the four different names, each evidently with a distinct meaning, but all meaning arable land in which ownership is intermixed as in an ordinary common field, viz., whole-year lands, half-year lands or shack lands, brecks and common fields. The rest of the explanation is, I think, to be looked for in the direction suggested by the prominence given to the statement, “They are subject to rights of sheep-walk.” Elsewhere one finds a close connection between sheep and common fields. Thus we have seen that at Eakring certain common right owners make a speciality of pasturing sheep on the common fields. The Swedish traveller Kaln, whose account of his visit to England has recently been translated into English, observed the same thing on the open field parishes of Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire in the year 1748 (p. 302). But in 1793 where there were open chalky downs in open field parishes the right of pasturing sheep on the downs and of having the combined flock of the village folded over the arable in the common field was valued too highly by every occupier to be ceded to an individual speculator (Davies, “Wiltshire,” pp. 8, 15, 61, 80). In these cases right of common for sheep has been democratically shared.

But this is not universal. The Enclosure Commissioners, in their thirty-eighth report (1883), record the application for an Enclosure Act for Hildersham, Cambridgeshire. In this parish the two _manor farms_ had the right of turning their sheep every sixth year on to the stubbles of the other farms. Similarly, I am told by Major Barnard, of Cheltenham, that in the Cambridgeshire parish of Bartlow, where he was born, which was enclosed with Shudy Camps and Castle Camps in 1863, that the right of feeding sheep on the common fields belonged to the lord of the manor only. These Cambridgeshire parishes are close to the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk, and the following passage from Tusser’s “Champion and Several” (date 1573) suggests the same rule as applying to Norfolk and the “champion” (_i.e._, open field) part of Suffolk:--

_In Norfolk behold the despair_ Of tillage, too much to be born, By drovers, from fair to fair, And others, destroying the corn, By custom, and covetous pates By gaps and by opening of gates.

What speak I of commoners by With drawing all after a line; So noying the corn as it lie, With cattle, with conies and swine, When thou hast bestowed thy cost Look half of the same to be lost.

_The flocks of the lords of the soil_ Do yearly the winter corn wrong, The same in a maner they spoil With feeding so low and so long, And therefore that champion field Doth seldom good winter corn yield.

If it be urged that the two italicised lines are not necessarily to be read together, in view of the other topics touched on in the intermediate lines, the argument is not much affected, for Tusser shows no knowledge of any “champion” counties other than Leicestershire, Cambridgeshire, and Norfolk, and elsewhere in the poem he deals with the special evils afflicting the two former counties.

I may also refer to the Act, 25 Henry VIII. c. 13, to limit the number of sheep which may be possessed by a single owner, in which occurs the passage:--

X. Be it also further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That no manner of Person or Persons, of what Degree soever he or they be, being Lord or Lords, Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers, of or in any Liberty of Fold Courses within any Town, Tything, Village or Hamlet within any of the Counties of Norfolk or Suffolk, from and after the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord God next coming, shall take in farm, for term of years or otherwise, any Quillets of Lands or Pastures, that is to say, any number of Acres of Land or Pasture appertaining to any other Person or Persons, lying and being within the limit Extent or Precinct of the said Liberty of the said Fold Courses; but that they shall permit and suffer the said Persons, having or being, for the time, Owner or Owners, Lessee or Lessees of the said Quillets, to manure and pasture the said Quillets; and also to suffer sheep of the said Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers of the said Quillets, after the Rate of the said Quillets, to go with the Flock of the Owner, Farmer or Occupier of the said Liberty or Liberties of the said Fold Courses, paying the customary charge for the same, after the Rate and Use of the Country, there commonly used, without any interruption therein to be made by the said Owner or Owners, Farmer or Farmers, or Occupiers of the said Liberties, upon pain of forfeiture for 3_s._ 4_d._ for each offence.

“XI. Provided ... it shall not ... be available to any tenant Owner or Occupier of any such Quillet or Quillets to claim, have or use hereafter any such pasture, or Feeding of his sheep, in or with any such Fold Courses, but only where the tenants, Owners and Occupiers of any such Quillets have had, or might have had heretofore of Right and Duty, or used to have Pasture and Feeding in the said Fold Courses, by reason of their tenures, and Occupations of the said Quillet and Quillets, and none otherwise; and where they have not used, nor ought to have any Sheep fed or kept within such Fold Courses, by reason of the said tenures, that the Owners or Occupiers of such Fold Courses may take such Quillets, lying within their Fold Courses, in Farm, agreeing with the Owners or Occupiers of the said Quillets for the same.”

It would appear from these clauses that there had been in still earlier times generally throughout Norfolk and Suffolk a right pertaining to the Lord of the Manor of feeding flocks of sheep over the whole manor, that this right, in the reign of Henry VIII. was frequently sold or leased under the denomination “A Liberty of Fold Courses”; secondly that the exercise of this right was apt to interfere with the cultivation of peasants’ holdings in the common fields; thirdly that it was customary for the sheep belonging to the peasants to be pastured and folded with the flock of the Lord of the Manor for a fixed customary fee.

There is yet another respect in which Norfolk agriculture shows a difference, but of degree, not kind, from other common-field agriculture. Complete enclosure of common-field arable involves three processes--

(1) The laying together of scattered properties, and consequent abolition of intermixture of properties and holdings;

(2) The abolition of common rights;

(3) The hedging and ditching of the separate properties. This third process is the actual “enclosing” which gives its name to a series of processes which it completes.

But sometimes the hedging and ditching takes place independently of the other two processes, and strips of an acre, two or more acres, and even half-an-acre are enclosed in the middle of the common-fields, and, what is more remarkable, the little enclosed strips are sometimes the property of several individuals. In the collection of maps of open field parishes belonging to certain Oxford Colleges, published by Mr. J. L. G. Mowat, several such instances may be noticed.

Such enclosures were at first commonable; but common rights were of course exercised over them with greater difficulty than over the open parts of the enclosed fields, a fact on which the above quoted opinion on the Barn farm at Elmstone Hardwicke incidentally throws some light. The maintenance of these common rights is a sort of test of the democratic vigour of the village, and it may be noticed that old enclosures subject to common rights were particularly numerous in Yorkshire.

Norfolk was remarkable for the extent to which actual hedging and ditching preceded legal enclosure. The Board of Agriculture reporter says, “for notwithstanding common rights for great cattle exist in all of them,[33] and even sheep-walk privileges in many, yet the natural industry of the people is such, that wherever a person can get four or five acres together, he plants a white-thorn hedge round it, and sets an oak at every rod distance, which is consented to by a kind of general courtesy from one neighbour to another.”[34]

[33] _I.e._, of the enclosures he is going to describe.

[34] Nathaniel Kent, “Norfolk,” p. 22.

Two Acts incidentally show to what an extent such hedges enclosed lands belonging to two or more proprietors. One Norfolk Act has the provision, “All enclosures where two or more proprietors are connected and where the property is not separated by a hedge or ditch shall be deemed to be Common Field.” The same clause differently expressed occurs in the Act for Ormesby and Scratby (1842, c. 9): “All old enclosures within the said parishes in which there are lands belonging to different proprietors, shall be deemed to be open Fields.”

A brief account of a surviving Norfolk open field parish is given in Appendix E., p. 331.