Introduction

HISTORIANS have long recognised that the medieval settlement patterns and field systems of ‘greater East Anglia’ – here defined as Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and the eastern parts of Hertfordshire – differed markedly from those of the Midlands (Fig. 1). The latter was essentially (although with notable exceptions) a ‘champion’ district: by the thirteenth century the majority of people lived in nucleated villages and farmed their land in extensive open-fields of ‘regular’ form, that is, in which holdings were evenly and sometimes very regularly spread throughout the territory of the vill, and in which one ‘field’ – a continuous area occupying a half or a third of the vill – lay fallow each year. The arable usually took up the overwhelming majority of the land: unhedged open-field strips ran all the way to the boundaries of the township and, in many districts, the only grassland was the areas of meadow which occupied the low-lying alluvial soils. In greater East Anglia, in contrast, a bewildering variety of agrarian arrangements could be found, all of which deviated, to varying degrees, from this familiar textbook norm. In most districts there was a relative abundance of woodland and wood-pasture, grazing and hedges, making for what sixteenth-century commentators described as ‘woodland’ landscapes. Only on the lighter soils extending down the western side of the region – from the ‘Good Sands’ of north-west Norfolk, through Breckland, onto the chalk scarp of south-east Cambridgeshire and north-west Essex – could landscapes broadly analogous to those of the Midlands be found, with villages farming extensive areas of open, intermixed arable. But even here there were differences. Settlement was often poorly nucleated, with ‘villages’ resembling loose congregations of hamlets rather than the tight clusters of houses common in many Midland areas. Indeed, in Norfolk the separate identity of these distinct foci was often emphasised by the proliferation of parish churches, with places like Barton Bendish or Ringstead having two, three or even more. Moreover, although holdings were often spread evenly through the fields, especially in Breckland, the arable usually occupied a smaller proportion of the land area than in the Midlands. Extensive tracts of heathland usually existed on the poorer ground, on which large sheep flocks were grazed.