Read The English Village Explained: Britain’s Living History for Free Online Page A

from abandoned plots and new two-storey houses for successful yeoman farmers and merchants giving villages a more pronounced third dimension .
    The villager looking out across his land in 1550 may have admired his own ingenuity in acquiring land and a social standing his ancestors would never have even dreamed of. His neighbour, on the other hand, may have been full of foreboding as the threat of plague was still prevalent, the markets which they now traded in were prone to fall as well as rise, and the church and religion which was the bedrock of his family life was suddenly entering an unknown future. From this uncertainty would emerge in the next period the successful, entrepreneurial gentry and farmers while at the other end of a widening social spectrum in the village, the humble peasant living at a subsistence level on the diminishing common land would face poverty and eviction .

C HAPTER 4
Enclosure and
Emparkment
     
      1550–1800  

    FIG 4.1: In this view a new country house has been built by the lord of the manor and a landscaped park created around it. The old village which stood here has been removed and all that remains is the parish church and the grassed over footings of the old houses (foreground). This fashion for emparkment was just one of the drastic changes which could affect villages in this period when great estates were created but poverty and discontent blighted the poor .
    H enry VIII’s formation of the Church of England after his break from Rome caused deeprooted fear and friction between families rich and poor, resulting in the persecution of Catholics. At the otherend of the religious spectrum those who wanted to take reform to extreme lengths included the Puritans who by the 17th century made up a large part of the gentry and, hence, Parliament. Their distrust for King Charles I and his Catholic wife, heightened by his demands for money to finance a war against the Scots, helped to ignite the Civil War in the 1640s. Battles and skirmishes took place all over the country, opposing armies trampled crops, requisitioned livestock, destroyed castles and manor houses, and stacked up casualties. This was a conflict which affected everyone, including the humble villager.
    Although the monarchy was restored in 1660, the influence of Parliament and the landowning class had grown. Now their new role in government brought in additional income, which along with exploiting mineral resources on their land, and agricultural improvements on their estates, made them even richer. Rather than spending their money embellishing churches they built themselves great mansions filled with treasures from all over Europe and surrounded by huge landscaped parks. The fate of the village and the villagers in the 17th and 18th centuries was often a story of emparkment and enclosure.

    FIG 4.2 MORETON CORBET, SHROPSHIRE: This small castle (left) had a huge Elizabethan south range (foreground) added in the late 16th century in the latest Classical style. However, during the Civil War this Royalist family had the castle defences destroyed after resisting Parliamentary forces in 1644, with the rest falling into ruin later .
The countryside
    During this period there were rises in the population which demanded additional food production. This encouraged farmers to put new fields under the plough and to look at ways of increasing their productivity. The 17th and 18th centuries were a time of great innovation in crops, production methods, and breeding of livestock which played their part in changing agriculture from husbandry – the caring for and nurturing of the land – into farming for a profit. Another way of increasing productivity was to increase the amount of land under the plough and during the 17th century there was a resurgence of land reclamation from woods, heaths, moorland, and most famously from the drainage of areas like the Fens. Where this occurred, new hamlets and villages could be founded, especially when the