Haymaking, 1635, The Open Fields by C.S and C.S Orwin, second edition, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1954
GLOSSARY
The following definitions are partly taken from open content sources such as Wikipedia.
The Open Field System is a communal farming system practiced over much of Europe from the middle ages until the nineteenth century. Open fields were regulated by an assembly such as a manor court and belonged as an ‘honour’ to the Lord of the Manor. Arable and meadow land was rented in strips to the tenant farmers or cultivators, and after harvest or in fallow seasons this land was thrown open for common pasture by the stock of the commoners. The cultivators of the strips could also graze animals, gather timber and other commodities on common land.
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Enclosure is the process by which landowners fenced the open fields into large, privately owned, rectangular fields, in order to increase productivity. In pasture areas such as Devon and the South East, enclosure occurred gradually, in a piecemeal process begun in the middle ages. However, the majority of enclosures in the arable vale lands of the Midlands, took place during the Parliamentary Enclosures from 1700 to 1850. After enclosure the peasant received a block of ploughland, though without his common rights he had “no means to support a cow to fertilise it […]. Before very long he stood at a cross roads in his life; in one direction lay the smoke-wreathed factory gate and in the other a life of drudgery and humiliation as a hired farm labourer.”[1]
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Laxton is the only village to have retained both its open fields and its manor court, partly because the two major landowners in the village – Earl Manvers and the Earl of Scarborough – could not agree on how to enclose in the nineteenth century. By the early twentieth century Laxton had become unique and there were cries from historians and journalists to preserve the village. Earl Manvers eventually became the sole owner and in 1951 he sold the manor to the government. Thirty years later, Margaret Thatcher’s government sold the manor to the Crown Estate Commissioners for £1 million. Today, the people of Laxton are farming in a way which is uneconomical in comparison with modern farms. However the village is acclaimed by historians as a place of great educational merit.
Usually found lying outside the open fields, common land had a variety of purposes which could include pasture, timber, fuel and a wide range of local crafts. According to historian Alan Everitt, common land has “always been the private property of manorial lords. They are property, however of a special kind, which all the local commoners, including the lord – but not the general public – traditionally possessed certain rights of usage or ’common’.”[2] Before the enclosures of the eighteenth century, common land comprised nearly 30% of the English landscape, much of which survives as numerous parks and open spaces.
[1] R. Muir, Shell Guide to Reading The Landscape, 1981
[2] A. Everitt, ‘Common Land’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), Rural England: An Illustrated History of the Landscape, 2000
Laxton Common Typeface
A typeface called Laxton Common has been specifically drawn by Jerome Rigaud for Disclosures II: The Middle Ages using the field map of Laxton asa model. The typeface and its sources are freely available at http://
fontnest.net/viewfont.php?font=Laxton%20Common