24 C O N T E X T 1 4 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 6 rural community that works the surrounding fields has gone: the same fields are now worked by a small handful of people, using powerful machinery. One of the curious features of the English landscape is regional variations in the pattern of settlement, fields and boundaries, and highways; patterns that persist to the present day. In the Central Province (from the borders of Wiltshire and Dorset through middle England to Lincolnshire andYorkshire) there is a swathe of medieval nucleated villages every one to two miles in a landscape of large-scale, medieval, open-field systems divided into just two or three fields that extend over most of each parish.The underlying pattern in the north west, south west and south east is predominantly of small hamlets and homesteads with multiple, small, irregular open fields set in areas of wood and pasture.Why is this so? Susan Oosthuizen of the University of Cambridge provided a glimpse of the factors behind nucleation and open fields. Some people contend that open fields arose in the 12th century; others, that the open fields and nucleated settlements occurred in the mid-9th century. Oosthuizen presented a case for open fields being present before the time of the Roman occupation, citing both archaeological evidence and Celtic names that imply common use. Open fields and nucleated villages are far more than matters of building and landform.An essential part of all open-field systems is the notion of common property and rights of access to common resources, as well of collective decision-making and governance. She suggested that the origins of small-scale open fields under narrowly limited collective governance might be found before the time of the Roman occupation, citing both archaeological and documentary evidence that implies their shared use. The origins of the large-scale open fields under wide powers of collective governance that flowered fully in the 12th century might, she suggested, be found in demesnes of the extensive estates that underpinned the middle Anglo-Saxon economic renaissance. Focused on making a surplus,measures were introduced to improve agricultural productivity: nucleation brought existing colonies of unfree tenants under supervision, while in the fields new crops and advances in agricultural technology (such as the mouldboard plough) were introduced. The eventual need to expand the labour force to include leaseholders, Oosthuizen suggested, underlay a negotiated compromise between freer peasants and lords: peasant buy-in to managerial innovations in existing open-field layouts on the demesne – including intermingled tenure and collective management of crop rotations – was assured by the adoption of traditional forms of collective governance for the governance of open arable that assured peasant status.Those systems, initially introduced on the demesnes, had been adopted across the entirety of whole parishes by the 12th century. But why should nucleation and large-scale open fields occur particularly in the Central Province? Oosthuizen proposed four predisposing characteristics in which middle Anglo-Saxon minsters played a catalytic role. That is, the beginnings of nucleation and large-scale open fields might be found on those middle Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical estates where there had been a continuous history of arable production since Roman period; where groups of unfree, tied peasants (the coloni of RomanoBritish estates) were still working those demesnes; where there was a single manor in each vill; and where the estate lay in the heartland of the middle Anglo-Saxon state of Mercia. There is a great amount to understand here, and those seeking a simple explanation will be disappointed, but should not be put off, for here is possibly the core to understanding the story of the development of England. The conference included a trip to the deserted village of Riseholme. Created in the 12th century, it is or was a planned village, based on the perch as the unit of measure. There is a single straight street running east Historians and an inquisitive ewe on the site of the deserted medieval village of Riseholme, Lincolnshire.The village seems to have declined slowly: fewer than 10 households were recorded in 1428 and the site was ruined by 1602.
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