Clothall (Herts).
Clothall is a parish lying on the north slope of the chalk hills of Hertfordshire, just off the Great North Road, which passes through the adjoining parish of Baldock. Approaching it from the south, one gradually ascends the long slope from Hertford, and suddenly at the summit has before one a far-stretching view over the flat country of Bedfordshire and adjoining counties. The road descends steeply and passes through the Clothall common fields. At the time of my visit the harvest (of barley) was being gathered in; the arrangement of the field was clearly visible. The long, narrow strips of stubble, never quite straight, and never quite of uniform width, were divided by “balks” of grass, grown tall and gone to seed. Each balk was reduced to as narrow dimensions as it could be, without endangering its continued existence, for the sake of separating one strip from another. A view of this field is shown in Mr. Seebohm’s “English Village Community.”
But there is in Clothall the husk only, and no surviving kernel of the English village community. The whole of the field, estimated at about 600 acres, is let to a single farmer, who cultivates it on modern principles, but who is bound to preserve the balks. There are but three owners of land in the field. Fifty-six acres are glebe, the remainder belongs in alternate strips to the lord of the manor (the Marquis of Salisbury) and to a gentleman to whom possession passed by marriage, from a family which had been engaged in brewing. The land is famous for barley, and the owner of a local brewery in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century gradually bought up nearly all the land in the common field that did not belong to the lord of the manor. Application was made in 1885 to the Board of Agriculture for enclosure, the manorial authorities and the vicar both desiring it, but the other owner objected.
It is interesting to find that the villagers still hold to the tradition that they have rights of common upon the balks, a tradition which is probably well founded. But they dare not attempt to exercise those rights. An enclosure here, accompanied by the provision of ground for allotments and recreation, would be a boon for the villagers; and it would probably pay the landowners to get rid of those balks, which are as great a nuisance agriculturally as they are interesting from an antiquarian point of view.
The counties of Hertford and Bedford have been, in recent years, particularly rich in survivals of common field, for the enclosure of Totternhoe ([p. 63]) was only completed in 1891; Yelden had a common field of about 600 acres up till about the year 1881, when the chief proprietor, by buying out or compensating all the other proprietors or owners of common rights, obtained exclusive ownership of the unenclosed land; and at Studham and Renhold similar voluntary enclosures were carried out under the pressure of the chief landowners within the memory of old inhabitants. Fragments of commonable pasture in three different parts of Renhold parish, and a common of about 60 acres in Studham, remain as memorials.
Bygrave and Wallington.
Beneath the long sloping hillside of Clothall lies the little town of Baldock, adjoining Letchworth and the “Garden City”; and on the other side of Baldock is the parish of Bygrave; which is, like Clothall, still unenclosed, and for the same reason; the Marquis of Salisbury being here again the lord of the manor, and the other Clothall proprietor the next largest landowner. But in Bygrave the farms, as well as the properties, are very much intermixed. Here and there there are grassy balks between adjacent properties; and in places the growth of bushes on these has almost made them into hedges, but as a rule there is no boundary between strips belonging to different holdings and different properties. A road through the open fields at one point cuts off the end of a strip of land belonging to Lord Salisbury from the rest of that strip; it forms a triangular plot too small to repay the trouble of bringing the plough across the road to plough it; and the men who hold the adjoining land revere the rights of property too much to touch it; it therefore remains a refuge for all manner of weeds.
As in Clothall, no common rights are exercised over the common fields of Bygrave by the poor of the parish, nor could I hear of any tradition of rights belonging to the poor or to cottagers. But the different occupiers of land in the common fields have, and exercise, the right of shackage, i.e., of grazing cattle after harvest, over one another’s holdings. And the lord of the manor has a special right of “sheep-walk” over the whole, for a month, from the first week in May and October. This right is let with one of the farms. It is not actually exercised, because the other occupiers of lands in the open field buy exemption.
The hamlet of Luffenhall, also near Clothall, has “shack lands” held under similar conditions.
The next parish to Clothall on the east, Wallington, is also unenclosed. It has a small common on which cottagers have the right to keep a cow and a calf, but so far as the rest of the parish is concerned, the only surviving feature of the externals of the common field system is the wide, breezy stretch of open land, under wheat, roots and grass; and of the spirit of the “village community” there is nothing. There are but two farms; the wages paid are only 10s. to 12s. per week. Such wages, so near London, naturally fail to keep the labourers in the village; and the population is now (1903) less than 100, though the church has seats for 260. As the men go, more and more land is laid down in grass, and machinery is more and more used; the absence of hedges of course facilitates the use of certain kinds of agricultural machinery. The unenclosed parish of Wallington, in fact, represents in an extreme degree the triumph of all those tendencies against which the opponents of enclosure waged war—great farms, absolute dependence of the labourer, low wages, rural depopulation.