Dorchester is bounded on the south by Fordington Field. The parish of Fordington, up to the year 1875, was unenclosed; it lay almost entirely open, and was divided into about eighty copyholds, intermixed and intercommonable, the manor belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall. But in 1875 the Duchy authorities bought out the copyholders, and the old system disappeared.
About three or four miles from Dorchester, along the road to Maiden Newton and Yeovil, are the two adjoining villages of Stratton and Grimstone, forming together the Prebend of Stratton, belonging till recently to the See of Sarum, which have only been enclosed since 1900. The enclosure was effected without any Parliamentary sanction; it was brought about, I am told by the present lord of the two manors, by the refusal of the copyholders, who held by a tenure of lives, to “re-life.” In consequence, all the copyholds, except a few cottages, have fallen into the hands of the lord of the manor; all Grimstone has been let to a single farmer, and Stratton divided into three or four farms.
Besides the very late survival of the common field system in these two manors, there are two other features which make them specially notable. In the first place they are, agriculturally, thoroughly characteristic of the Wessex type of open field village, the type that prevailed over Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. In the second place, the manorial system of village government survived with equal vigour; the proceedings of the manorial courts and the customs of tillage and pasturage forming manifestly only two aspects of one and the same organisation. It is fortunate that the court-rolls for the last two hundred years have been preserved, and that they are in the safe custody of the present lord of the manor.
On the south-west the lands of Stratton and Grimstone are bounded by a stream, the River Frome, flowing towards Dorchester, from which Stratton Mill has the right of taking a defined amount of water. Between the stream and the villages are the commonable meadows; on the north-east of the villages the arable fields, tapering somewhat, stretch up the hill slope to Stratton and Grimstone Downs. The whole arrangement is shown very clearly in the tithe commutation map, dated 1839. The two manor farms were separate and enclosed, and lay side by side along the boundary between the two manors, in each case comprising about one-third of the cultivated land. The remaining arable land in each manor formed, so far as fences were concerned, one open field, divided into three oblong strips, known respectively in Stratton as the East, Middle, and West Field; in Grimstone as Brewer’s Ash Field, Rick Field, and Langford Field. The rotation of crops was: (1), wheat; (2), barley; (3), fallow. The lower part of the fallow field was sown with clover, and was known as the “hatching ground”—a term we find elsewhere in the forms “hitch-land” and “hook-land”—the upper part was a bare fallow. More recently an improved method of cultivation was adopted. The barley crop every third year was maintained, but after it was carried Italian rye grass was sown in the upper part of the barley field (instead of a bare fallow). This was fed off with sheep in the spring, and then put into turnips; the following year barley was sown again. The lower part, however, continued to be sown with clover in the fallow year, this was fed off with sheep, and wheat followed.
The arable fields consisted of “lands” or “lawns,”[3] each supposed to be 40 “yards” (i.e. poles) long, and one, two or four “yards” broad—hence supposed to be quarter acres, half acres, or acres. Half acres were the more common; but whatever the area in theory it was somewhat less in actual fact.
- [3] Mr. A. N. Palmer notes the terms “loons,” “lawnds” and “lownts” in N. Wales and Cheshire (“The Town, Fields and Folk of Wrexham,” p. 2).
The West Field in Stratton was somewhat smaller than the other two in consequence of the extreme portion—that next the down and farthest from the village—being enclosed. These enclosures in shape and arrangement exactly resemble the lands in the open field; they are about one acre each. They are called “The Doles.” Further there are a series of small square enclosures taken out of the down, called “The New Closes.” All the Doles and New Closes were in grass.
A remarkable fact is that all the “lands” were scrupulously separated from one another by meres or balks of turf, which, however, were not known by these names. Among the people they were, and are, known as “walls,” but in the court-rolls one finds the term “lanchetts,” which one connects with “lynches,” and “land-shares,” which seems to explain the term “launchers” which I have found in Devonshire. In the level parts of the fields the “walls” were mere strips of turf about a foot wide; but in the sloping parts they formed steep banks, sometimes several feet high, and the successive “lands” formed terraces one above the other.
All the cultivators, except the tenants of the two manor farms, were copyholders, holding for a tenancy of three lives, the widow of the holder having the right to continue the holding during the period of her widowhood. By the custom of the manor the lessee of the manor had at any time (even though his lease had but a day to run) the right to grant a copyholder two lives, i.e., to accept a fine and substitute two new names for those of dead or dying persons on the “copy.”
The copyholds, when not “cotes” or simply cottages with common rights, were either “half-livings,” “livings,” or, in one or two cases, other fractions of a living. A half-living consisted of four or five nominal acres in each of the common fields, and common rights upon the meadow, common fields and common down, in Stratton, for one horse, two cows, and forty sheep. A whole living consisted of a share about twice as large in the field and meadow, and a common right for two horses, four cows, and eighty sheep. But each copyhold, whether a whole or half-living, included one dole and one new close. There were three whole livings and twelve half-livings in Stratton, and five “cotes,” i.e., cottages with one or two strips of land in the arable fields attached to them. In Grimstone there were four whole livings, six half-livings, one three-quarters living, and one whole and a-quarter living. In either manor, therefore, if we reckon two half-livings as equal to one whole, there were nine whole livings in all; those of Stratton being normally held by fifteen copyholders, those of Grimstone by twelve, though the number might happen in practice to be less. Thus at the time of the tithe commutation (1838) there was in each manor one copyholder who had two half-livings. In all formal documents a “living” is termed a “place,” and a half-living a “half-place.” The common rights attached to a living in Grimstone were slightly different from those in Stratton. They are further explained below.