Our English Towns and Villages

by H. R. Wilton Hall

4. Many of the farms, though they were separate holdings, still had strips in the big fields of the parish. The crops were sown and gathered according to the ancient customs, and the cattle turned into them and out on the waste lands at certain seasons, just as they had been in the Middle Ages.

5. But about the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a pretty general movement towards breaking up these big fields into separate parts, and letting each farmer have his portion to himself, so that he might know exactly what land was his and what belonged to his neighbour. So it came to pass that Enclosure Acts were passed for parish after parish. The old common arable fields were divided amongst those who had rights in them. Then many of the old wastes, heaths, commons, and marshes were treated in the same way.

6. That caused a great change in the appearance of the parish. Instead of the fields in long, straight strips, with unploughed balks between them, the strips belonging to each farmer were thrown into one, and hedgerows planted. In time they became smooth fields, separated from each other by hedges, in which grew here and there timber trees. The old cart-tracks, winding across and round the common fields, in time became lanes bounded by high hedges. The trackways across many of the old wastes and commons in a similar way were turned into lanes, and the waste broken up into fields. Still a good deal of the waste land was left, and has never yet been enclosed. So far as we can see now, this is not likely to happen, because we feel more and more every year that, for the sake of the health and recreation of the people, it is absolutely necessary to preserve them as open spaces.

7. The fields, the hedgerows, and the lanes which delight us so much in the country are, most of them, some two hundred years old.

8. When the farm had its own separate fields allotted to it, it became convenient for the farmer to live in the midst of his land. So we find the farmhouse and its buildings, with a few labourers' cottages, a long way out of the village, and away from the church. If you take notice you will find that from this outlying farmhouse there is usually a pretty straight field-path to the parish church.

9. Then, too, in parishes through which a big main road ran, as the traffic on the road increased, houses of entertainment for man and beast became necessary; ale-houses and inns sprang up, with little farmsteads round them. Coaches were put on many roads in the time of King Charles II, and had regular stopping-places, and these little inns often became important centres of business. Gradually hamlets sprang up round many of them.

10. The roads were so bad that horses frequently cast their shoes, tires came off wheels, and wheels came off carts and coaches; so under many "a spreading chestnut-tree" a little smithy and wheel-wright's shop arose. A smithy is always a centre of life and news, as everybody knows. You can see to-day, along many of our roads, sheds and shops being opened, where broken-down cycles and motor cars can be repaired and supplied with odds and ends which they may happen to need.

11. Thus hamlets have grown up away from the old village green, its church, and its manor-house. In scores of places the hamlet has become of more importance than the old village, and has grown into a little town, where new churches and chapels and public buildings have sprung up.

12. Then there are the districts where new industries and manufactures have been planted. That is too large a subject to deal with here, but think of the great changes these have wrought on the face of the country in the coal and mineral districts of England in the last two hundred years.