Fieldtrip, November 24th 2013

Laxton Field Trip.  Sunday 24th November 2013

Friends, family, etc welcome - including children who can cope with a bit of a walk!  Dogs will be fine if kept on a lead as we may encounter livestock.

Meet at the Visitors' Centre at 12 noon for a walk around the village and Church. 

Lunch in the Dovecote Inn (if required) food from 12.30pm Sunday (booking essential).  www.dovecoteinnlaxton.co.uk (nb 10% discount if booked on-line!). Tel: 01777 871586

Alternatively, picnic in the visitors' centre.

We will reconvene at 1.30pm to explore the castle and field system, finishing at dusk (about 4pm).

Directions

Sat-Nav: NG22 0SX (but allegedly unreliable)

From Nottingham take the A614 north to Ollerton.  At the outskirts of Ollerton take the 4th exit from the roundabout (marked A616 Ollerton).

At the next roundabout take the first exit (A6075) into Ollerton.  Continue through Ollerton on the A6075.

As you leave Ollerton, passing through some industrial and manufacturing buildings, the main road turns sharply to the left, with a minor road on the right (Cocking Hill) passing steeply uphill under a railway bridge.

Follow the minor road uphill (you are climbing up one side of the Mercia Mudstone ridge that forms the spine of Nottingham).

At the brow of the hill you enter Laxton parish, passing across the Westwood Common (enclosed in the 1950s).  The woodland on the left at the heart of the old common has existed since at least 1635 and was mapped by Mark Pearce.

Follow the road as it winds down into Laxton village.

Continue through the village, passing the parish Church on your right.

About 200 yards past the Church the road forks at a small triangular green (Crosshill).

You will see the Dovecote Inn ahead and to the right.  Follow the road round to the right and turn left into the car park.

Park at the far end of the car park (uphill).  The visitors' centre is immediately opposite the pub entrance.

Bring

Maps, notebook, camera, GPS

Warm, waterproof clothing

A flask and a snack.  There are no shops or tea shops in Laxton!

Walking boots and gaiters or wellington boots preferred. It can be muddy underfoot so shoes are NOT recommended
A good walking stick/staff/shooting stick is not a bad idea either if you have one.

Understanding the Archaeology of Landscapes

English Heritage's excellent and free introduction to landscape archaeology Undertanding the Archaeology of Landscapes is available to download from their website.

English Heritage also produce a wide variety of free guidance booklets, some highly specialist, but many of more general interest, which can be accessed from here.

Class 9: Preparing for Fieldwork

The slides for Class 9: Preparing for Fieldwork are available to download from here.

A Field trip to Laxton

In the Autumn of 1902 the Thoroton Society hosted a field visit to Laxton (in the rain!) and then the propert of Earl Manvers.  The visit was reported upon in the Transactions of that year.

After passing through Moorhouse, Laxton Fields, where the open-field system of agriculture still survives in a modified form, were traversed in a drenching shower.  This property belongs to Earl Manvers, and at a later period in the day, Mr. W. Stevenson took an opportunity of explaining the leading features of this old communal system of agriculture, which still holds its own in this partially unenclosed lordship. It was explained that the wheat field of this year would be a pulse crop next year, and then lie a year in fallow, in the latter case with the broad headlands of grass to become the com­munal sheep pasture of the lordship by which the land would be again prepared for corn... (Read More)

Mark Pierce, Laxton 1635

Below is one panel from Mark Pierce's great 1635 map of Laxton, held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Other panels and the terrier (accompany field book) can be viewed on the Oxford Digital Library website and also on their Treasures of the Bodleian website.

George Sanderson's Map of Laxton, 1835

George Sanderson's 1835 map of Twenty Miles Round Mansfield provides a fantastic introduction to historic mapping.  Published by subscription just before the first Ordnance Survey map of Nottinghamshire, but at a larger scale of about two and a quarter inches to the mile, Sanderson, who worked variously as a surveyor and Enclosure commissioner, based his map on his own surveys of the countryside.  Beautifully drawn, the map captures an early 19th century landscape in transition.  The open fields are largely gone, but Nottingham still sits among fields, the Park is still a deer park, and the railways just a threatened line across the landscape (often wrongly placed as the routes were changed after Sanderson published his map).

The whole map has been republished several times, most recently in 2001 as a two book reprint by Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Library Services, which is sometimes to be found in bookshops and is well worth having if spotted.  Below is a zoomable extract for the parish of Laxton, compare with the modern Ordnance Survey mapping to try and discern just what has changed in Laxton over the past 180 years.

Class 8: An Unexpected Corner

The slides for Class 8: An Unexpected Corner, Hoskins on Towns are now available from here.

Laxton Manuscripts at the University of Nottingham

The Manuscripts and Special Collections section of the University of Nottingham Library hosts a dedicated website presenting part of their extensive collection of documents relating to Laxton. The website explores aspects of life in Laxton between 1635 and 1908. Despite the fact that Laxton was never fully enclosed, it was a typical example of a Midlands open field village and its history can therefore shed light on life in hundreds of similar places.

• Theme 1: Landholding and enclosure
• Theme 2: The open field system and the manorial court
• Theme 3: The Village Population

The resources include images and transcripts of original archive materials including maps, surveys, manorial and ecclesiastical court records, correspondence and reports. 

Class 7: A Desirable Spot to Build

The slides for Class 7: A Desirable Spot to Build, are available for download from here.

A Short History of Enclosure in Britain

In an excellent article in The Land Simon Fairlie describes how the progressive enclosure of commons over several centuries has deprived most of the British people of access to agricultural land. The historical process bears little relationship to the “Tragedy of the Commons”, the theory which ideologues in the neoliberal era adopted as part of a smear campaign against common property institutions.

Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population,1 while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line. Read More.

Ancient Trees in Sheringham Park

One of a series of short films by the National Trust, the clip below discusses evidence for ancient woodland in Sheringham Park, North Norfolk.

 

Ancient & Remarkable Trees from Lightly Frozen Productions on Vimeo.

Class 6: A Curse Upon the Land

The slides for Class 6: Parliamentary Enclosure, a Curse Upon the Land, are available for download from here.

Laxton Maps at the University of Nottingham

The Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at Nottingham University Library holds a large collection of material relating to Laxton, including many maps. Here are three fine maps spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, reproduced on their Laxton focused web-based collection of primary materials.

Hand-drawn and coloured map of the lordship of Laxton and Laxton Moorhouse, 1789

Hand-drawn map of the parish of Laxton, 1820

Hand-drawn and coloured plan of Earl Manvers’ estate in Laxton, 1862

Map Regression Exercise

Map Regression is an important tool for exploring and understanding the development of landscape. Laxton is fortunate in having a wealth of historic mapping, allowing analysis of landscape change and development at a high resolution. 

You can compare two of the principal sources of mapping that of Mark Pierce (1635) and George Sanderson (1835) using the interactive maps on this website.

Map Regression Exercise
Using the historic mapping of Laxton provided below trace the development of either Town End Farm or Church Farm. 



Your aim is to understand the origin and antiquity of features of the modern landscape – so aim to produce a map of the present farm that demonstrates these two based on you map analysis.  You might care to visit the English Heritage website to investigate the context for such analysis of historic farms.

• Laxton in 1635 Map
• Laxton in 1789 Map
• Laxton in 1812 Map
• Laxton in 1812 Map
• Laxton in 1834 Map
• Laxton in 1862 Map
• Laxton Today

Treasures of the Bodleian: Mark Pierce's Map of Laxton

Mark Pierce's wonderful 1635 map of Laxton is owned by the Bodliean Library at the University of Oxford. Here the Nick Millea the map librarian  introduces the map in all its glory.

Class 5: An Excess of Sheep

The slides for Class 5: An Excess of Sheep can be downloaded from here.

.

Class 4: Awaiting the Sound of a Human Voice

The slides for Class 4: Awaiting the Sound of a Human Voice can be downloaded from here.

Domesday Book

William of Normandy's great survey of England is a fascinating source of evidence for the social, political and economic organisation of late 11th century England.  This complex and much studied documents continues to yield new insights into the landscape and society of Saxo-Norman England.

The National Archives guide to Domesday is a good starting point for study.  There are also several on-line versions of the book (beware those that try to charge you for an extract). The best is domesdaymap.co.uk. Here you can search by place and person, view facsimile images of the original folio volume, read a digest of each entry and generate your own interactive maps. Below for example is the entry for Geoffrey Alselin, Lord of Laxton in 1086.

There is also an interesting report by English Heritage on mapping Domesday data: Lowerre, A. 2008. Mapping Domesday Book using GIS. Research News: Newsletter of the English Heritage Research Department. Number 8, which may be downloaded from here.  And as if that wasn't enough, Darby and Maxwell's classic Domesday Geography of Northern England is available as a free Google E-book from here.

Class 3: Becoming a Land of Villages

Belatedly, here are the slides for this week's class, Becoming a Land of Villages, with in particular, details of the types, uses and evidence that may be gleaned from aerial photography.

Hoskins's England:A Local Historian of Genius

Charles Pythian-Adam's appreciation of Hoskins's life and legacy was published in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society after Hoskins's death in 1992.  You can read the full text here.

Hoskin's published much of his early research in TLAHS.  It makes fascinating reading in its own right and it is possible to see his great themes, expounded in Making of the English Landscape, beginning to emerge.

You can download and read all of Hoskins's early works from the LAHS website, search the pre-War volumes for the majority of his work.

Aerial Views of Laxton

As promised, digital versions of the air-photographs discussed in this week's class.

The Castle from the north-east

The Castle from the north

Fish-ponds south of the church

Making a Home. English Culture and English Landscape by Matthew H. Johnson University of Southampton

Making a Home. English Culture and English Landscape by Matthew H. Johnson University of Southampton

Every weekend, thousands of people take a walk in the English countryside. A walk in the country is about exercise, but it is also much more than that. It is enabled by the tracks and paths, the public rights of way over private property. The surrounding scenery is of fields, hedges, grasslands, moorlands, studded by the spires and towers of medieval churches, and the distant prospect of Georgian houses amidst parklands.

All these elements are and were human creations...Read More

Making a Home : The Public Value of the Humanities : Bloomsbury Academic

Aerial Phoography of Laxton

Laxton from the Air

Both Google Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps have useful aerial imagery of Laxton. Look in particular for he shadows of subtle earthworks on the Bing Maps image.

Google Maps

Microsoft Bing Maps

Novelist William Boyd on Re-Reading Hokins

William Boyd: Rereading The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins

Novelist William Boyd discusses rereading Hoskins's Making of the English Landscape for Guardian Books.  Hoskins provided his readers with an innovative lens through which the history of the English countryside could be decoded – and inspired in me an enduring fascination with the land around me, says William Boyd in Guardian Books  [Read More]

The Making of the British Landscape

The Making of the British Landscape, by Francis Pryor.

A perfect up to date counterpoint to Hoskins. Pryor quickly shows, the neolithic, iron and bronze ages are really not [empty] at all. Under his gaze, the landscape starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today. Pryor shows us bumpy ridges, the kind of thing you might ignore on an afternoon's walk, which turn out to be the surface traces of bronze age fields, together with some untidy stumps that are actually the remains of a buried forest. Kathryn Hughes The Guardian. (Read Full Review).

Class 2: Darkening Hills

The Slides for Class 2, Dakening Hills, can be downloaded from here.

 

Class 1: Unravished England

The slides for Class 1, Unravished England can be downloaded from here.  They are in Adobe PDF format, you will need Adobe Reader (a free download) to view and print them.

W.G. Hoskins and the Making of the English Landscape

Have you ever wondered by the landscape around us looks as it does, who shaped the fields, villages and towns that we live in and when?  Nearly sixty years ago the Leicester landscape historian W.G.Hoskins published The Making of the English Landscape, a book that for the first time set out to explain the evolution of the English landscape as we know it.  This seminal book and Hoskins’s approach to the study of landscape had a profound impact on landscape studies influencing things as diverse as the format of Time Team to ideas of what it means to be English.  

This website accompanies a series of classes run by me (Keith Challis) for the Workers Educational Association (WEA) in Burton Joyce, Nottingham in Autumn 2013.  During the classes we will embark on a guided reading of Hoskins’s book taking in the development of his ideas, discussing their relevance today and examining new evidence gathered over the sixty years since publication and their impact on our appreciation of Hoskins’s world view.  

As the classes progress I will use the website to share lecture content and slides, make reading recommendation via the on-line course bookshop (run by Amazon) provide digital copies of handouts and other resources and expand on ideas discussed in class.

Laxton Castle

You can learn more about Laxton's castle from a mini website dedicated to the castle and the student and community lead survey work. Read about it here. Also on the Laxton Castle website is a copy of my paper on the development of the village (with a very unHoskin's title!) published some while ago in Transactions of the Thoroton Society.  Read it here.

Virtual Laxton

If you were intrigued by the computer game generated virtual Laxton castle glimpsed at the end of last weeks class you can watch the full video below.  There are a number of other game generated virtual archaeological sites available from here.

Broadside Ballads Online

The Bodleian Library has produced a searchable database of its substantial collection of original Broadside Ballads, which includes digitized facsimile copies of every ballad.  This fantastic resource provides access to the authentic voice of 18th and 19th century England and shouldn't be missed.

Laxton Manuscripts at the University of Notingham

The Manuscripts and Special Collections section of the University of Nottingham Library hosts a dedicated website presenting part of their extensive collection of documents relating to Laxton. The website explores aspects of life in Laxton between 1635 and 1908. Despite the fact that Laxton was never fully enclosed, it was a typical example of a Midlands open field village and its history can therefore shed light on life in hundreds of similar places.

• Theme 1: Landholding and enclosure
• Theme 2: The open field system and the manorial court
• Theme 3: The Village Population

The resources include images and transcripts of original archive materials including maps, surveys, manorial and ecclesiastical court records, correspondence and reports. 

Mark Pierce's Map of Laxton Lordship in 1635

The original copy of Mark Pierce's 17th century map of Laxton is held by the Bodlian Library at the University of Oxford.  The Bodlian have made digital copies of the nine panels of the original map available via their website.  The resource includes the digtised map and a digital facsimile of the entire field book that accompanied the map. The panel that includes the village is reproduced below.



The University of Nottingham hosts copies of the Orwin's tracing of the map on their website.

Map Regression

Map Regression is an important tool for exploring and understanding the development of landscape. Laxton is fortunate in having a wealth of historic mapping, allowing analysis of landscape change and development at a high resolution. 

You can compare two of the principal sources of mapping that of Mark Pierce (1635) and George Sanderson (1835) using the interactive maps on this website.

Map Regression Exercise
Using the historic mapping of Laxton provided below trace the development of either Town End Farm or Church Farm. 



Your aim is to understand the origin and antiquity of features of the modern landscape – so aim to produce a map of the present farm that demonstrates these two based on you map analysis.  You might care to visit the English Heritage website to investigate the context for such analysis of historic farms.

• Laxton in 1635 Map
• Laxton in 1789 Map
• Laxton in 1812 Map
• Laxton in 1812 Map
• Laxton in 1834 Map
• Laxton in 1862 Map
• Laxton Today

Laxton in 1835

George Sanderson's 1835 map of Twenty Miles Round Mansfield provides a fantastic introduction to historic mapping.  Published by subscription just before the first Ordnance Survey map of Nottinghamshire, but at a larger scale of about two and a quarter inches to the mile, Sanderson, who worked variously as a surveyor and Enclosure commissioner, based his map on his own surveys of the countryside.  Beautifully drawn, the map captures an early 19th century landscape in transition.  The open fields are largely gone, but Nottingham still sits among fields, the Park is still a deer park, and the railways just a threatened line across the landscape (often wrongly placed as the routes were changed after Sanderson published his map).

The whole map has been republished several times, most recently in 2001 as a two book reprint by Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Library Services, which is sometimes to be found in bookshops and is well worth having if spotted.  Below is a zoomable extract for the parish of Laxton, compare with the modern Ordnance Survey mapping to try and discern just what has changed in Laxton over the past 180 years.

Montaillou: Village Life in the Middle Ages

It is hard to place ourselves into the minds of medieval peasants and understand how they viewed the landscape and their relationship to it, or indeed how they lived worked and socialized together.  There are very few historical sources that give an authentic voice to this period.  One of the most remarkable are the records of Catholic Inquisition of the Cathar village of Montaillou, high in the hills of the Midi in the Ariège department in southwestern France.  In the late 13th century the local bishop Jacques Fournier, later Pope Benedict XII, launched an inquistion against the  Albigensian belief also known as Catharism, considered heresy by the dominant Roman Catholic powers.  The records of the inquisition, dozens of interviews with the 250 odd inhabitance of the village, preserve the minute details of life in Medieval France and were taken to the Vatican Library by Fournier when he became pope.  A fascinating precis of the records was published in 1975 by radical French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie as Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324.  Translated into English a new edition of the book was published in 2005 and is widely available second hand from Amazon. Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou is a fascinating glimpse into the medieval mind that reads like a good historical novel.  History is rarely more satisfying or more accessible than this.

Mapping Laxton

If you are starting to look at the Google and Microsoft provided aerial photography of Laxton we discussed in class it might be useful to have a fresh copy of a good large scale Ordnance Survey map of Laxton to hand to compare with the photographs and for sketch mapping.  Below is Microsoft Bing maps Ordnance Survey 1:25k mapping of Laxton. It's also worth signing up for the Ordnance Survey's free Get a Map service for customized mapping you and print and download.

View Larger Map  View Bird's Eye

Book Recommendations: Landscapes, Englishness and Heritage

Landscape and Englishness (Picturing History) by David Matless

Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material - topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural, progressive and preservationist, took shape around debates over building in the countryside, the replanning of cities, and the cultures of leisure and citizenship. He concludes by tracing out the story of landscape and Englishness down to the present day, showing how the familiar terms of debate regarding landscape and heritage are a product of the immediate post-war era, and asking how current arguments over care for the environment or expressions of the nation resonate with earlier histories and geographies.

On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain by Patrick Wright

The hulk of Henry VIII's flagship is raised from the seabed in an operation that captures the mind of the nation. The leader of the Labour party wears an informal coat at the Cenotaph and provokes a national scandal. An elderly lady whose ancient house is scheduled for demolition dismantles it, piece by piece, and moves it across the country... 

On Living in an Old Country probes such apparently fleeting and disconnected events in order to reveal how history lives on, not just in the specialist knowledge of historians, archaeologists and curators, but as a tangible presence permeating everyday life and shaping our sense of identity. It investigates the rise of 'heritage' as expressed in literature, advertising, and political rhetoric as well as in popular television dramas, conservation campaigns, and urban development schemes. It explores the relations between the idea of an imperiled national identity and the transformation of British society introduced by Margaret Thatcher.   This is the book that put 'heritage' on the map, opening one of the defining cultural and political debates of our time, and showing why conservation is a subject of such broad significance in contemporary Britain. This new edition includes an extensive new preface and interview material reflecting on the ongoing debate about the heritage industry which the book helped to kick-start.

Making a Home: Matthew H. Johnson on English Culture and English Landscape

Making a Home. English Culture and English Landscape by Matthew H. Johnson University of Southampton

Every weekend, thousands of people take a walk in the English countryside. A walk in the country is about exercise, but it is also much more than that. It is enabled by the tracks and paths, the public rights of way over private property. The surrounding scenery is of fields, hedges, grasslands, moorlands, studded by the spires and towers of medieval churches, and the distant prospect of Georgian houses amidst parklands.

All these elements are and were human creations...Read More

Making a Home : The Public Value of the Humanities : Bloomsbury Academic

Laxton from the Air

Both Google Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps have useful aerial imagery of Laxton. Look in particular for he shadows of subtle earthworks on the Bing Maps image.

Google Maps

Microsoft Bing Maps

Laxton

The village of Laxton in Nottinghamshire and its landscape will form the subject of our group practical study underaken as part of this course.  We will be applying Hoskins's research and field methodology to the Laxton landscape. Today Laxon is best known for the survival of Open Field farming, but its interest lays well beyond this peculiarity in the richness and diversity of its landscape and the wealth of surviving documentary evidence and historic cartography.  

For now a good introduction to Laxton can be had from the Visitor Centre website.

Book Recommendation: The Making of the British Landscape

The Making of the British Landscape, by Francis Pryor.

Pryor quickly shows, the neolithic, iron and bronze ages are really not [empty] at all. Under his gaze, the landscape starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today. Pryor shows us bumpy ridges, the kind of thing you might ignore on an afternoon's walk, which turn out to be the surface traces of bronze age fields, together with some untidy stumps that are actually the remains of a buried forest. Kathryn Hughes The Guardian. (Read Full Review).

Hoskins in the TLAHS

Hoskins published most of his early historical research, establishing himself as a scholar of distinction, in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society. He continued to publish in TLAHS until the late 1950s.

The far-sighted editorial team of TLAHS have made back editions of the journal available for free on-line.  Below I have collated all of Hoskins's papers from the journal for easy access. It is fascinating to trace the development of his scholarship and his thinking about locality and landscape through these papers.

The population of an English Village 1086-1801: A Study of Wigston Magna Volume 33 for 1957

Seven deserted village sites in Leicestershire Volume 32 for 1956

Croft Hill Volume 26 for 1950

The Origin and Rise of Market Harborough Volume 25 for 1949

Studies in Leicestershire Agrarian History- Introduction Volume 24 for 1948

The Leicestershire Crop returns of 1801 Volume 24 for 1948

Leicestershire Yeoman families and their Pedigrees Volume 23 for 1947

The Leicestershire farmer in the Sixteenth Century Volume 22 for 1941-2

A Short History of Galby and Frisby Volume 22 for 1941-2

The deserted villages of Leicestershire Volume 22 for 1941-2

The Leicestershire Country Parson in the Sixteenth century Volume 21 for 1939-40

Murder and Sudden Death in Medieval Wigston Volume 21 for 1939-40

Wigston Magna Lay Subsidies 1327 to 1599 pp. 55-64 Volume 20 for 1938-9

A History of the Humberstone Family, pp.241-287 Volume 20 for 1938-9

Further notes on the Anglian and Scandinavian settlement of Leicestershire pp. 93-109 Volume 19 for 1936-7

The fields of Wigston Magna pp. 163-199 Volume 19 for 1936-7

The Anglian and Scandinavian settlement of Leicestershire pp. 109-147  Volume 18 for 1933-35

I also include Charles Pythian-Adams's posthumous appreciation of Hoskins Hoskins's England: A Local Historian of Genius and the Realisation of his Theme and his obituary from the Transactions.

Hoskins My Hero

Author Penelope Lively writes in the Guardian 25 November 2011 of the influence that reading The Making of the English Landscape had on her thinking and career. 'Those years stumping around in muddy fields gave me an imagery of the juxtaposition of past and present that would feed into fiction for years to come'. Read the full text of her article here.