Laxton: Some Views by David E. James and Mike Jackson

In September 1999 the Royal Mail issued a set of four millennium stamps on the theme of The Farmer’s Tale. The first of them was based on a painting by David Tress of the organisation of agricultural land developed by Anglo-Saxon tribes who brought it to England after the departure of the Romans: open field or strip farming. The painting referred to Laxton, a small Nottinghamshire village, the only place where the open-field system of farming has survived.[i]

The open-field system was based, not on enclosed, separately-farmed fields, but on the division of the village land into three, very large fields subdivided into many strips. Tenant families inhabiting the nucleated village at the centre of these fields were each assigned a number of the strips scattered across them so as to ensure an equable division of good and bad, close and distant, land. Originally, each strip was of a size that a team of oxen drawing a mouldboard plough could till in one day, a task that typically involved the co-operation of several farmers.[ii] The fields were subject to a strict rotation, one being winter-sown wheat, another being spring-sown crops and the third left fallow. Outside these strips lay the ‘sykes’ (pronounced ‘siks’), meadowland that provided access to the individual strips and allowed the plough teams to turn and get straight before the next furrow. The overall system, the farming year, and especially each tenant’s observance of the edges of his strips were administered by a Manorial Court Leet, empowered to impose fines to punish infractions.

Everywhere, except at Laxton, these open fields and the untilled commons have been divided and enclosed. The process has been more or less continuous since the thirteenth century when the enormous value of wool provided the initial impetus for landlords to appropriate the common land. It accelerated in Tudor times and especially during the Industrial Revolution when, as Karl Marx and many others noted, the usurpation of the rights of the free peasant became a pre-condition for plentiful destitute urban labour. Over the centuries other putative agricultural improvements along with diverse forms of privatisation and dispossession have supplanted communal ownership, activity, and control. The consequent social dislocations have been recognized since at least 1516, when Thomas More’s Utopia denounced the nobility who ‘leave no ground for tillage, thei inclose al into pastures,’ devastating the peasantry: ‘what can they els doo but steale, and then justly pardy be hanged, or els go about beggyng.’

Lexingtune, as it was originally known, prospered before the 1066 conquest, and by the time of the Domesday book, the 35 adult males mentioned there represented a total population of approximately 120. Under the Normans it became the major administrative center of the Royal Forests of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, with a substantial motte and bailey castle dating from the late 11^th Century, whose remains have been designated by the British Archaeological Association as ‘the most striking specimen of a mount and court stronghold’ in the county. The castle welcomed royalty from Henry II to Edward I, the latter staying there with his wife Eleanor from 13 to 17 November 1290. But in the mid-fourteenth century the Black Death precipitated an economic decline that eventually obliged the last of the hereditary lords to sell the manor. In 1635 it was bought by a London merchant, Sir William Courten, who commissioned a surveyor, Mark Pierce, to map his possessions.  The map, some three yards square, is held at the Bodleian library in Oxford.[iii] Much enclosure has taken place since the seventeenth century, and of the 1894 acres in the open fields divided into 2280 strips that Pierce mapped, only 483 divided into 164 strips remained in 1988.

The agricultural heritage still structures the topography, with the open fields themselves forming the main elements.  One of the most dramatic views is that of Top or West Field as seen from the mound of the castle, known locally as ‘Rice Pudding Hill. ‘

Bisected by Radbeck, a major drainage ditch, and its surrounding sykes, it includes both the strips of the present open field and, in the foreground, the enclosures that over time have been removed from it.  It’s September and the open-field land has been ploughed, while many of the enclosed fields, used for pasture, remain green. On the horizon Westwood, one of the peripheral farms established in the 18^th century, can be glimpsed.

The sykes are as intrinsic to the agricultural system as the strips themselves. Occupying low-lying land, mostly by streams, the sykes are generally too damp for grain farming and, like the undeveloped heaths, are held in common for grazing oxen, sheep, and cows and for hay to feed animals through the winter. They hay is still sold by auction in June or July, with the proceeds used to pay the auctioneer, the expenses of the Court Leet, and the repair of roadways in the open fields. Comprised of old-fashioned grasses including timothy, cocksfoot, sweet vernal, and fescue, but with very little ryegrass, most of the sykes are presently protected as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and may not be ploughed. Among the grass in May, Long Syke in Bottom Field has meadow buttercups (Ranunculus acris), red clover (Trifolium pratense), and dandelions (Taraxacum officinale).

In his poem, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad (1845), Robert Browning called buttercups ‘the little children’s dower’, but despite their bucolic associations they are toxic for both humans and cattle. Clover, on the hand, is an important food for bees and butterflies and, among a diversity of other grasses, is eaten by cattle.  All parts of the dandelion are edible for humans, as well as making excellent wine.

Until the eighteenth century, the main access to Laxton from the south was a lane from Kneesall that descended to a stream, Moorhouse Beck, before rising again through a wide syke into Mill Field.  When snow falls, the vista becomes a virtually monochrome composition of brown hedgerows and trees. But by the pale light of an autumn morning, the colours of the sky, the fallow land and the hedgerows all harmonise, with the horizontal row of trees marking the beck.

On the opposite hillside a few bales of straw remain to be brought home, though already winter wheat is beginning to sprout in the enclosed fields.  The wheat stubble will be left as fallow for eleven months to provide for ground-nesting birds including the skylark, English partridge and lapwing. The copse of trees on the horizon marks the place where the mill that gives the field its name once stood.

The first record of a mill in Laxton was in the 13^th century. Reflecting the paramount importance of ground cereals in subsistence farming, the village eventually supported three, all wind-powered. The last, a post mill made entirely of wood at 312 feet that could be turned through 360 degrees to catch the wind, was blown down in a storm in July 1916 and not rebuilt, though photographs exist.

Planted in the 1970’s, the copse where it once stood is a focal point in the landscape, as here, where it is approached from the boundary between two distinct strips of wheat.

The other focal point in the landscape is the castle mound itself. Though Laxton used not to be poppy country, this field of common or corn poppies blooming with the castle mound behind is as sumptuous as those in Claude Monet’s The Poppy Field (painted in 1873 soon after his return from England).

Papaver rhoeas was brought to Britain from mainland Europe by Iron Age farmers. A cousin of the opium poppy (papaver somniferum), it contains rhoeadine, a mild sedative. An annual that relies on its seeds for regeneration, it flourishes in disturbed ground, often on the edges of wheat fields, along with field chamomile (Anthemis arvensis), also an annual. Farmers think both are agricultural weeds and since the Second World War crop herbicides have sent them into a severe decline so that now the chamomile — but not the poppy — is endangered.

The open fields are still administered by a Court Leet. On the last Thursday in November a jury of twelve men selected by the Bailiff walk the open field that has been sown with wheat to check that the strip boundaries have not been encroached upon, that the dykes (ditches) are clear, and that the roads are well maintained. Jury members hammer wooden stakes into the ground at the correct corners of each strip — this is known as “pegging in” — and record contraventions. Here Mr. Ivan Rayner and Mr. Roy Hennell are seen pegging in.  Apart from the farmers’ clothes, nothing seems to have changed since Mediaeval Village, the first of the several films about Laxton, was made in the 1930s.

After the inspection, the jury retires to the pub to discuss any fines to be levied and the field foreman completes the presentment paper. One week later the court meets again, and the presentment paper is handed to the Steward of the Manor.  The offending farmers can make representation to the court to have the fine reduced or replaced with a warning.  As with everything else about Laxton, the future of the Court Leet is now in doubt.

Laxton changed hands several times after Courten bought it in 1635, eventually coming to Charles Pierrepont, 1st Earl Manvers, in 1788. His family retained it until 1952, when it was given to the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food to be held in perpetuity. As part of its privatisation of national assets, the government of Margaret Thatcher (herself born only thirty miles away) attempted to sell Laxton but was unable to find a buyer. In 1981 it was relinquished to the Crown Estate, who decided to sell it in 2018. At that point, the estate consisted of 1,845 acres of land, of which 525 were in the unenclosed open fields, seventeen working farms, ten cottages, and the Dovecote Inn, the village pub. The asking price was seven million pounds along with the stipulation that any buyer would preserve the village’s historic functioning. In April 2020, after negotiations with Hugh Matheson, the Trustees of the Thoresby Estate bought Laxton back from the Crown Estate. Responsibility for Laxton was handed over to Matheson’s son, Gregor, who has taken the name Gregor Pierrepoint. The announcement of his plans for Laxton was delayed by the Covid virus, but at a meeting held on 22 September 2021 at Laxton Village Hall, the new Lord of the Manor announced his intentions.[iv]

In addition to repairing and restoring the estate’s assets, which the Crown Estate’s neglect had left in poor condition, he specified two priorities: developing a new visitor centre and other facilities that would allow the village’s special historic nature to be shared and appreciated more widely; and ‘keeping the village as a living, working place rather than a tourist attraction’ by managing the extreme economic difficulties now faced by farmers trying to make a living on their relatively small holdings.  The maintenance of the open fields and the Court Leet that has administered them for so long, he argued, ‘will require tenant farmers [to develop] viable secondary businesses which are historically appropriate’, such as livestock, horses, pedigree sheep and other acceptable agriculturally-focused side businesses.  Here, with Gregor Pierrepont’s manifestly sincere commitment to the village’s heritage and his well-informed intentions for its future, Laxton presently waits.

***

This essay is extracted from a book length collection of some seventy photographs of Laxton along with explanatory text.

David E. James was born into an old Laxton family and grew up there.

Mike Jackson M.A. has been a farmer in Laxton since 1974 and is closely involved in the Countryside Stewardship in the village.

Stamp image from Royal Mail, from a painting by David Tress.

Photographs of the Mill courtesy of Laxton History Group.

All other photos by David E. James, copyright 2021.

Footnotes

[i] Reference materials about Laxton may be found at https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/learning/laxton

Several inhabitants recorded accounts of village life in the early twentieth century. Of the more readily available books, J. V. Beckett’s A History of Laxton: England’s Last Open Field Village (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989) is the most authoritative account, while C.S. and C.S. Orwin’s account of the farming system, The Open Fields, 3^rd edition with preface by Joan Thirsk (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), remains a classic work of agricultural historiography. More recently the villagers themselves have produced a series of short books about the village. Of these, Mary Haigh’s Open Field Farming in Laxton (Nottingham: Nottingham Local History Association, 2016) is an invaluable introduction. The books may be obtained from the Laxton Local History Group at www.LaxtonHistoryGroup.org.uk.

[ii] Accounts of the mouldboard plough’s history trace it as far back as ancient China, and some argue that it made possible the dramatic expansion of the Northern European economy around the turn of the first millennium. Though it continues to be refined in the present day, its essential components and structure have been consistent: a horizontal beam (often supported by a wheel in front) holds a leading wedge called a coulter that cuts vertically down through the ground followed by a curved ploughshare that carves a furrow and turns the earth over to the side, burying weeds and bringing the lower soil with its nutrients to the surface. Pieter Bruegel’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c1560) clearly depicts these components as well as the long thick ribbon of soil the mouldboard cuts and turns. The plough and the animals that pulled it shaped the landscape and sustained the village’s economy.

[iii] Pierce’s map maybe downloaded at http://bibliodys- sey.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/ laxton-open-field-survey-map. html

[iv] See “Minutes of the Parish Council’s Village Meeting held at 7.00 pm on 22/02.21 Laxton Village Hall”, Open Field: The Monthly Publication of the Parish of Laxton & Moorhouse (November 2021, np): www.openfield.org.uk.