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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 05/09/21, SPi
MED I E VA L H I S T O R Y
A N D A RC H A E O LO G Y
General Editors
John Blair Helena Hamerow
Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history,

as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there
has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people
experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities
in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an a nalysis
by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from
AD 500 to 1650.
The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-
rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient
parishes. The analysis draws on a wide range of sources including legal depositions
and thousands of field names and bynames preserved in deeds and manorial documents.
Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period
before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the
framework for inhabitants’ spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way
inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialized,
Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the
bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape
analysis or documentary history.
MED I E VA L H I S T O R Y
A N D ARCHAEOLOGY
General Editors
John Blair Helena Hamerow
The volumes in this series bring together archaeological, historical, and visual methods
to offer new approaches to aspects of medieval society, economy, and material culture.
The series seeks to present and interpret archaeological evidence in ways readily
accessible to historians, while providing a historical perspective and context for the
material culture of the period.
Peasant Perceptions
of Landscape
Ewelme Hundred, South
Oxfordshire, 500–1650
ST E PH E N M I L E SON
and
ST UA R T BROOK E S
1
1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes 2021
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2021
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939066
ISBN 978–0–19–289489–2
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894892.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
SM:
For Christa, Bente, and Valentijn
SB:
In memory of Ralph Thompson (1922–1992)
A CK N O WL E DG E ME NT S
This book is the main output of the South Oxfordshire Project, an investigation of
medieval and early modern landscape and perceptions funded by the Leverhulme
Trust in partnership with Oxford University. The Leverhulme-funded research was
undertaken between 2012 and 2015, after a one-year pilot phase in 2011–12 which
was funded by the John Fell Fund in collaboration with the Oxfordshire Victoria
County History (VCH). The generous support of those bodies, and of the Leverhulme
Trust in particular, made our research possible. Stephen Mileson initiated and led the
project, and Stuart Brookes worked on it for two years as project officer. The principal
investigator was Professor Chris Wickham, then Chichele Professor of Medieval
History at the University of Oxford, who provided vital support and encouragement
throughout, as well as a large measure of freedom which allowed the investigation to
flourish. The pilot phase was headed by Robert Evans, then Regius Professor of
Modern History. In terms of the writing of the book, Chapters 2, 3, and 4 were pro-
duced jointly by Stuart Brookes and Stephen Mileson, and the rest is by Stephen
Mileson. The authors have had many stimulating discussions over the years, and we
are grateful to each other for a fruitful and enjoyable collaboration.
The South Oxfordshire Project was intended as a vehicle to push forward scholarly
understanding of peasant perceptions through an in-depth study of a particular area
over a long period of time. It consciously drew on the detailed research on Ewelme
hundred which was being carried out at the same time by the VCH. Stephen Mileson
contributed to the VCH work, and the project team and the VCH cooperated
throughout. The benefits were mutual, as noted by one review of the relevant VCH
volume, Oxfordshire XVIII, which describes that book as ‘a landmark in the history of
the enterprise’ and the cross-fertilization of the two endeavours as ‘a model for the
future’ (Landscape History, 38:1 (2017), 108–9). The authors are extremely grateful
for the input and ideas of the Oxfordshire VCH historians, Simon Townley (county
editor), Simon Draper, and Mark Page. Simon Townley in particular offered huge
support to a project which deprived him of one of his team members for four years,
and gave much needed encouragement in the seemingly endless late stages of writing.
Many others have contributed to the book, and the authors would particularly like
to thank those who have read and commented on draft text, although they bear no
responsibility for the end result. They are Chris Wickham and Simon Townley, who
read the whole book; Paul Booth, Sue Harrington, and Barbara Yorke (Chapter 3);
Simon Draper (Chapters 3 and 4); Richard Jones and Tom Williamson (Chapter 4);
Paul Harvey (Chapters 5 and 6); Chris Dyer and John Steane (Chapters 5 to 7); and
viii Acknowledgements
Steve Gunn (Chapters 6 and 7). We are also grateful to Jayne Carroll, John Baker, and
Eleanor Rye for reading sections on place names and personal names.
Stephen Mileson is especially indebted to Chris Dyer for his ongoing encourage-
ment, and for his early support for the project’s focus on perceptions. In addition,
OUP’s series editors, John Blair and Helena Hamerow, have given valuable input, and
John has supplied comments on particular chapters. A number of scholars kindly served
on a project board which supplied feedback on the research in progress, namely Grenville
Astill, John Baker, John Blair, Chris Dyer, Ros Faith, Dawn Hadley, Helena Hamerow,
Richard Jones, Kate Tiller, Simon Townley, and Chris Wickham. Audience members
at project talks in Belfast, Groningen (The Netherlands), Nottingham, Oxford,
Winchester, and in a number of village halls asked interesting questions and made us
think harder. Archivists and librarians at Oxford and in numerous other places have
been unfailingly generous in their assistance; particular repositories are listed in the
bibliography.
We would also like to thank the following people and organizations: Sally Stradling
for leading the buildings surveys; members of the Oxfordshire Buildings Record for
indefatigable survey work; the Oxfordshire Probate Group for analysis of wills and
inventories; the South Oxfordshire Archaeological Group and numerous local volun-
teers for help with test-pitting and fieldwalking; Oxford Archaeology for outreach
work on test pit surveys; Roger Ainslie for geophysics; Richard Oram and Susan Lisk
(at Oxfordshire County Council) and Edward Caswell (PAS) for archaeological data;
Maureen Mellor for pottery analysis; Ruth Pelling for her survey of archaeobotanical
data; Kris Poole for his examination of animal bone reports; Dan Miles for dendrochrono
logical surveys; John Jenkins for research on local churches (which was funded by the
John Fell Fund); Damon Ortega and Alessio Palmisano for work on the project GIS,
and Chris Green for discussions about data cleaning; Emily Pennifold for additional
place-name analysis; Rebecca Gregory for advice on place names; Alex Langlands for
discussions about early farming techniques; Andreas Duering for discussions about
demography; Robert Peberdy for information and local contacts; and Marcus Abbott
for his evocative drawings. Aileen Mooney gave crucial help with funding applications.
The MSRG, the Ewelme Society, and Ewelme Parish Council gave additional funds
for fieldwork, and the University of Oxford History Faculty helped meet the cost of
illustrations. Homeowners and landowners across the hundred kindly allowed access,
and several churchwardens rang church bells while we ran off across fields recording
soundmarks.
Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes
Bath and London
CO NT E NT S
List of Figuresxi
List of Tablesxvii
List of Abbreviationsxix
1. Introduction 1
2. Geography and Sources 14
3. The Early to Middle Anglo-Saxon Period, 500–800 44
4. The Late Anglo-Saxon Period, 800–1100 102
5. The High Middle Ages, 1100–1350 147
6. The Late Middle Ages, 1350–1530 231
7. The Early Modern Period, 1530–1650 274
8. Conclusion 317
Bibliography321
Index353
L I S T OF FI G U RE S
1.1 Ewelme hundred within its regional geographical context. Inset: the hundred’s
location within England, and in relation to Roberts and Wrathmell’s ‘central
province’.7
1.2 The parishes and settlements of Ewelme hundred, showing nineteenth-century
settlement and twenty-first-century roads (some of which reflect modern
house-building). For township boundaries, see Figure 2.3. 8
1.3 Symmesdene (1447–8) in Cuxham, an example of close local knowledge
revealed by field names, and the way that names were adapted over time.
This ‘dene’ (‘long valley’, OE denu, ME dene), is located on high ground
south of the village and is only visible to those who walk across the fields.
The first part of the name is that of a tenant family who arrived apparently
in the 1440s (below, pp. 255–6). 11
2.1 The view south-east towards the Chiltern scarp from the Warborough
ploughing monument. 15
2.2 A three-dimensional view of Ewelme hundred, showing modern settlement. 16
2.3 The hundred’s administrative topography. 17
2.4 Photographs of the landscape. Top left: fine views towards the
Chilterns from Easington; top right: view of the vale from near Swyncombe
church; bottom left: Chiltern woodland management at Digberry; bottom
right: vale fields at Latchford. 18
2.5 Solid and drift geology. Data sources: EDINA Geology Digimap Service
and Digimap Ordnance Survey Service, http://edina.ac.uk/digimap,
downloaded November 2012. 20
2.6 Agricultural land classification within the hundred. 22
2.7 The hundred’s landscape in 1797, as shown by Davis. This map illustrates
the survival of some large vale open fields (for example, at Benson,
Chalgrove, and Haseley), and the enclosure of others (for example, Newington).
Woodland cover by this period was under pressure from intensive arable
farming and was probably more comparable in extent to woodland in the
early fourteenth century rather than the fifteenth or sixteenth. 26
2.8 The area’s main routes, showing routeways of different periods. Here as
elsewhere many Prehistoric, Roman, and Anglo-Saxon ways gradually fell
out of use with the spread of wheeled transport later in the Middle Ages.
Sections of the various parallel routeways of the Icknield Way are preserved in
local routes, as are the long-distance Ridgeway path and the Romanized
route along the scarp edge; see Hindle, Roads, Tracks and their Interpretation,
Fig. 8, and, for Roman roads, Margary, Roman Roads.27
2.9 The deeply eroded Bushes Lane hollow way in Nettlebed. This section of
the route remains unmetalled, but the western end, in Huntercombe
(Nuffield parish), is today a minor road. 28
xii List of Figures
2.10 A LiDAR image of the braided droveways in Ewelme (indicated by an arrow). 32

2.11 Fieldwalking and metal detecting in Ewelme, March 2011. Wittenham
Clumps is on the horizon. 33
2.12 An oblique photo of the remains of the deserted medieval settlement at
Rofford (centre) in April 1953, Chalgrove airfield at the top right.
Cambridge University, St Joseph, LK33. Reproduced with permission of the
Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography. 35
2.13 Detail from Davis’s large-scale 1788 map of the shared fields of Benson,
Berrick, and Ewelme, also showing enclosed land at Crowmarsh (bottom left)
and Fifield (right); Blue-coloured strips owed tithe to Benson,
pink to Berrick, and yellow to Ewelme. The distance between the Thames
(left) and the eastern edge of the closes at Fifield is 2 km. 42
3.1 Early Anglo-Saxon burial sites and finds in the South Oxfordshire region.
Includes data from PAS, https://finds.org.uk; EDINA Geology Digimap Service,
http://edina.ac.uk/digimap, downloaded November 2012; Soils data. 51
3.2 Berinsfield graves 28 and 102. Reproduced from Boyle, Two Oxfordshire
Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries, pp. 154, 161. 57
3.3 The excavated features at Benson, after McBride, Great Hall Complexes,
Fig. 7.36. 64
3.4 The Brightwell Baldwin and Cuxham charter boundaries. Includes data
from Environment Agency, special licence, downloaded 5 June 2013;
EDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service, http://edina.ac.uk/digimap,
3.5 The core part of Benson’s territory in the eighth century. Includes data from:
EDINA Geology Digimap Service, http://edina.ac.uk/digimap, downloaded
November 2012. 75
3.6 Ewelme’s Anglo-Saxon meeting and/or trading site. Includes data from:
EDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service, http://edina.ac.uk/digimap,
3.7 Nuffield’s clearing (top) and Swyncombe’s cumb (bottom). 79
3.8 The dūn at Easington, looking across Cuxham’s north field (top), and the beorg
(Town Hill) in Warborough, viewed from near Lane End Farm in Newington,
with the Sinodun Hills glimpsed in the background (bottom). 83
3.9 Artistic reconstruction of an Anglo-Saxon settlement (West Stow). Courtesy of
West Suffolk Council Heritage Services/West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village Trust. 86
3.10 Brooches from the Berinsfield cemetery. Top, from left: cast saucer brooches
from graves 54 and 63, button brooch from grave 18, and cast saucer brooch
from grave 107. Bottom, from left: the great square-headed brooches from
graves 107 and 102. Reproduced from Boyle, Two Oxfordshire Anglo-Saxon
Cemeteries, Figs. 14, 17, 18. 87
3.11 View from the Ewelme cemetery site, looking south-west towards the
Chilterns and Sinodun Hills. 88
3.12 Remembering the Dead, by Marcus Abbott. 90
3.13 The visibility of ‘Ceolwulf’s tree’ and ‘hostage’s ridge’ (above) and
‘Cuda’s tumulus’ (below) in the landscape. 94
List of Figures xiii
4.1 Documented land grants by kings and others between the ninth and
eleventh centuries. Includes data from Environment Agency, special licence,
downloaded 5 June 2013. 105
4.2 Evidence for Anglo-Saxon settlement at Benson, with a grid of four short
perches (18.3 sq m) superimposed over the central part of the settlement. 113
4.3 The early eleventh-century parcel-gilt strap-end fragment with agnus dei
inscription, from Nuffield. 121
4.4 Charter boundary marks divided into three categories: linear, area,
and point. Includes data from Environment Agency, special licence,
downloaded 5 June 2013. 128
4.5 The probable hundred meeting site at ‘Ceolwulf’s tree’. The extensive
views visible from the location can be seen in the distance. Part of the
Fildena way survives as the road to Brightwell Baldwin. For the location,
see Figure 3.6. 132
4.6 The line of putative beacons north-east of Wallingford. 135
4.7 Setting out the Fields, by Marcus Abbott. Something like this would have
happened in Benson, Berrick, and Ewelme in the early eleventh century. 138
4.8 Part of a map of Huntercombe (in Nuffield) in 1665, showing irregular
enclosures and funnel-shaped greens. 140
4.9 The Hundred Moot, by Marcus Abbott. Repeated journeys to the
hundred meeting place and participation in discussions there marked out
freemen as part of a hundred-wide community. 143
5.1 Map showing the location of Lachemera and some other named fields
in Swyncombe parish. 148
5.2 Map of Ewelme hundred, showing settlement and land use c.1300, as
reconstructed from documents and archaeological evidence. Open-field strips
are shown only where their layout can be recovered from early maps, but the
great majority of vale arable was in strip cultivation. 150
5.3 The earthworks of the deserted medieval hamlet of Cadwell in 1943, north
at top right. The tenant houses lay in a cluster (A) immediately west of the
moated manor house (B). The hamlet, which had just six taxpayers in 1306,
seems to have been abandoned by the end of the Middle Ages; it was
replaced by a single farm. NMR, US/7PH/GP/LOC93, Frame 5063 (detail),
copyright Historic England. 165
5.4 Great Haseley (from a map of 1729), top, and Newington (from a map
of 1595), bottom, two settlements in which ‘planned’ elements have
been proposed. Great Haseley: SGCW, CC 11232/5 (SGCW, DIG DOC.1.5). 166
5.5 The ‘bulges’ in Benson’s high street which may have been used as trading
sites, detail from late nineteenth-century OS Map. 168
5.6 Wallingford’s trading hinterland between 1226 and 1242, as revealed
by documents listing individuals from surrounding rural settlements who
paid a fee to be exempt from the market toll. The circle represents a radius
of six miles. 170
5.7 Migration into Ewelme hundred as suggested by bynames in the hundred
rolls of 1279. 175
xiv List of Figures
5.8 Mill Farm, Mapledurham, south Oxfordshire. This early fourteenth-century

house hunkers low to the ground, only its roof visible above the perimeter fence.
In place of the chimney was originally a wooden smoke louvre. 187
5.9 Medieval and early modern field names in Chalgrove. 189
5.10 House orientations in Chalgrove and Cuxham, as indicated by medieval
and early modern standing buildings. Late nineteenth-century OS Map base. 193
5.11 The social topography of Cuxham in 1300. Based on Harvey, A Medieval
Oxfordshire Village, pp. 122, 172–3. As Harvey points out, the bend in
the street is more pronounced on the ground than it appears on the map. 195
5.12 Chalgrove’s medieval ‘ends’. Nineteenth-century base mapping supplied
by James Bond and adapted using a map of 1822 in the Magdalen College
archive (CP3/20). 198
5.13 Medieval and early modern Cuxham field names. 212
5.14 Gravelly soil in Whytelond’, Cuxham. 214
5.15 Medieval and early modern Easington field names. 215
5.16 Medieval and early modern Ewelme field names. 218
5.17 Grim’s Ditch, a view of the section in Nuffield, facing west (towards
the Thames). 220
5.18 An eleventh-century scabbard chape found in Warborough. The object
depicts a warrior leading a horse and wearing a helmet and a long tunic
and carrying a kite-shaped shield and battleaxe. The owner was
probably a Norman soldier. PAS: BERK-3228B7. 226
5.19 The thirteenth-century seal impression of Nicholas le Chandeler (TNA,
E 326/8310, copyright The National Archives); millimetre scale at bottom. 228
6.1 Medieval and early modern Nuffield field names. Calys is shown towards
the bottom right. 232
6.2 The earthwork remains of the medieval settlement of Warpsgrove viewed
from the air in 1962 (Cambridge University, St Joseph, AEE97), with the
probable location of the church marked ‘A’. The site of the church is indicated
by geophysical survey (see inset). North to right. 236
6.3 Cuxham village’s layout c.1500. As in nearby Chalgrove, the word ‘toft’
seems to have been used to indicate a vacant house plot. Based on documents
at Merton College, Oxford, especially 875, 878, 5902, 5932, 1.7A. 237
6.4 The main areas of late-medieval and early modern enclosure. 240
6.5 Part of a map of Huntercombe in 1665 showing the c.60-acre Nuffield
heath, with an adjacent pound for stray animals (top). 241
6.6 The north elevation of 233/5 Thame Road, Warborough in 2013:
originally a four-bay box-framed house with a thatched hipped roof
(now tiled and gabled), in the late eighteenth century it was refaced in
clunch and extended by one bay. 246
6.7 The secluded settings of 233/5 Thame Road, Warborough, and
Old Mill House, Ewelme. OS Map base. 248
6.8 The base of what appears to be a late-medieval stone cross at Chalgrove green. 255
6.9 A numinous sunset over the Sinodun Hills. 258
List of Figures xv
6.10 Medieval and early modern Warborough field names. 260

6.11 The Church Piece cemetery in Warborough as revealed by cropmarks. 261
6.12 Geophysical survey of the Ewelme Manor moated site, with an inset
showing the range of buildings which remained in 1729, representing the
south side of the base court. The western fragment of the range which survives
today is marked with an ‘A’. The 1729 drawing shows a vestige of the moat. 263
6.13 Left: Ewelme’s church–almshouse–school complex, on rising ground. Right:
The fifteenth-century schoolhouse, with its two tall chimneys, still forming
part of a primary school in the twenty-first century. 264
6.14 Clockwise from top left: Benson, Berrick, Brightwell Baldwin, and
Great Haseley churches, showing surviving towers of late-medieval date. 266
6.15 Comparative ‘soundmarks’ of the church bells of Cuxham, Brightwell Baldwin,
and Nettlebed. Note the three settlements in Nettlebed beyond the range
of the bells. 268
6.16 The Dorchester tenor bell. 271
6.17 Berrick Salome church from the north-west. 271
7.1 Detail from a 1729 map of Great Haseley’s field system, naming the
many holders of strips. North at top. 278
7.2 Detail from the Golder and Easington map of 1612, north at bottom. 281
7.3 Crowmarsh in 1638, the land of small tenants on the fringes of the main farm’s
open-field blocks. By permission of the Claydon House Trust. 282
7.4 Places mentioned in Ewelme probate documents between 1543 and 1598. 284
7.5 Detail of Benson as mapped in 1638, showing London road and two inns.
North to right. 285
7.6 Beverley, Warborough (top left); Lavender Cottage, Warborough (top right);
Wheelwrights, Cuxham (middle left); The Old Post Office, Berrick Salome
(middle right); houses around Chalgrove green (bottom). 291
7.7 Large timbers in College Farm, Cuxham. 292
7.8 Areas of houses mainly close to the road in the central parts of Benson and
Nettlebed. Note that most houses are broadside to the street. OS Map base. 293
7.9 Detail from Davis’s 1788 map of Benson, Berrick, and Ewelme, showing
the broadside alignment of village houses. 295
7.10 Ford’s Farm in Ewelme, set well back from the road. 297
7.11 Irregularly oriented and deep-set houses at Crocker End. 298
7.12 The layouts of English Farm (left) and Newington’s rectory house (right,
from a map of 1595). 299
7.13 College Farm House, Benson (top), with its impressive chimney stack
dating to c.1600, and No. 54 Thame Road, Warborough (bottom). 301
7.14 Houses at Warborough Green (as shown on a map of 1606), all with a
shared alignment, apart from the vicarage houses and its neighbour in the
south-west. Note the standing cross shown by the main road at the entrance
to the green, which is likely to have been a gathering place. By kind permission
of the President and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 302
7.15 The seventeenth-century first-floor window at The Lamb, Chalgrove. 304
xvi List of Figures
7.16 The cross at Golder (next to Easington), as depicted in a map of 1612. 307
7.17 New enclosures at Newington as depicted on a map of 1595. The old
open-field strips and divisions are shown in some of the areas marked ‘late arable’. 310
7.18 The memorial of Stephen Rumbold in the church porch at Brightwell Baldwin. 312
7.19 The King’s (earlier Queen’s) Pool (or Pond) in Ewelme. 315
L I S T O F TA B L E S
4.1 Domesday statistics 108

4.2 Old English personal names in the landscape, those from charter bounds in bold 130
5.1 Arable land in 1086 and 1279 156
5.2 Land use in selected settlements in 1300 161
5.3 Tenant numbers, 1086–1279, with rough estimates of total populations at
each date, assuming a household size of 4.5 164
5.4 Possible inter-parish movement as suggested by bynames documented in
the hundred rolls of 1279 178
5.5 Social structures amongst the tenant population in 1279 180
5.6 Topographical bynames and minor toponymic names (mentioned in
1279 or earlier unless specified) 202
6.1 Taxpayers in 1327, 1377, and 1524, giving a sense of the size of settlements
relative to each other, and a very rough sense of overall populations at each date 235
7.1 Taxpayers in 1662 and ‘conformists’ (probably adult inhabitants) in 1676 277
7.2 Surveyed houses in Ewelme hundred of seventeenth-century and earlier date 287
L I S T O F A B B RE VI AT I ONS
ADS Archaeology Data Service (accessible online)

ASC Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: M. J. Swanton (ed.), The Anglo-
Saxon Chronicle (1996), manuscript versions A–E
BAR BS British Archaeological Reports, British Series
BL British Library, London
Blair, A-S Oxon. J. Blair, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire (1994)
Cal. Close Calendar of Close Rolls
Cal. Cur. Reg. Calendar of Curia Regis Rolls
Cal. Inq. Misc. Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous
Cal. IPM Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem
Cal. Pat. Calendar of Patent Rolls
Cal. SP Dom. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic
E.
Cartulary of Godstow Abbey Amt (ed.), The Latin Cartulary of Godstow Abbey,
British Academy (2014)
Cat. Anc. Deeds Catalogue of Ancient Deeds
ChCh Christ Church, Oxford
Davis,
Benson map (1788) R. Davis map of Benson, Berrick Salome, and Ewelme
(1788): Bodl. (R) MS C17:49 (141)
EMC Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds (accessible online)
EPNS English Place-Name Society
Goring Charters T. R. Gambier-Parry (ed.), A Collection of Charters
Relating to Goring, Streatley, and the Neighbourhood,
1181–1546, ORS, 13–14 (1931–2)
G.
Grundy, Saxon Oxon. B. Grundy, Saxon Oxfordshire: Charters and Ancient
Highways, ORS, 15 (1933)
HE Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum: Colgrave,
B. and Mynors, R. A. B. (eds) Bede’s Ecclesiastical History
of the English People (1969)
Henig and Booth, Roman Oxon. M. Henig and P. Booth, Roman Oxfordshire (2000)

HER, PRN Historic Environment Record, Primary Reference Number
Langley Cartulary P. R. Coss (ed.), The Langley Cartulary, Dugdale Society,
32 (1980)
Leland Itin. L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or
about the Years 1535–1543, 5 vols (1906–10)
Macray, ‘Oxon.’ W. D. Macray, ‘Calendar of Charters in Magdalen College:
Oxfordshire’ (typescript vols in Magdalen College archive)
MED Middle English Dictionary
NHLE National Heritage List England
NMP National Mapping Programme
NMR National Monuments Record
OBR Oxfordshire Buildings Record
OD Ordnance Datum
xx List of A bbreviations
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

OE Old English
ON Old Norse
OHS Oxford Historical Society
ORS Oxfordshire Record Society
Oseney Cartulary H. E. Salter (ed.), Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, OHS,
89–91, 97–8, 101 (1929–36)
Oxon. Atlas K. Tiller and G. Darkes (eds), An Historical Atlas of
Oxfordshire, ORS, 67 (2010)
Oxon. Fines H. E. Salter (ed.), Feet of Fines for Oxfordshire, 1195–1291,
ORS, 12 (1930)
PAS Portable Antiquities Scheme (accessible online)
PASE Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England (accessible online)
PN Oxon. M. Gelling, Place-Names of Oxfordshire, 2 vols, EPNS,
23–4 (1953–4)
Rot. Hug. Welles W. P. W. Phillimore and F. N. Davis (eds), Rotuli Hugonis
de Welles Episcopi Lincolniensis AD MCCIX–MCCXXXV,
3 vols., Lincolnshire Record Society, 3, 6, 9 (1912–14)
Rot. Hund. W. Illingworth and R. Caley (eds), Rotuli Hundredorum
temp. Hen. III & Edw. I, 2 vols (1812–18)
Rot. Parl. J. Strachey (ed.), Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6 vols. (1767–77)
S numbers Anglo-Saxon charters are annotated with reference to the
numbering in P. Sawyer, Anglo- Saxon Charters: An
Annotated List and Bibliography (1968). Revised and
updated, as ‘The Electronic Sawyer’ (accessible online)
Sandford Cartulary A. M. Leys (ed.), The Sandford Cartulary, 2 vols, ORS, 19
and 22 (1938–41)
SGCW St George’s Chapel, Windsor
SMidlA South Midlands Archaeology
Soilscapes SS ID The Soils Guide, Cranfield University (2020) (accessible online)
Some Oxon. Wills J. R. H. Weaver and A. Beardwood (eds), Some Oxfordshire
Wills: Proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury,
1393–1510, ORS, 39 (1958)
SRTM Shuttle Radar Topography Mission digital elevation model
(accessible online)
Stonor Letters C. L. Kingsford (ed.), The Stonor Letters and Papers,
1290–1483, 2 vols., Camden 3rd series, 29–30 (1919)
Thame Cartulary H. E. Salter (ed.), The Thame Cartulary, ORS, 25–6 (1947–8)
TNA The National Archives
TTT P. Booth, A. Dodd, M. Robinson, and A. Smith, The Thames
through Time: The Archaeology of the Gravel Terraces of the
Upper and Middle Thames. The Early Historical Period: ad
1–1000, Thames Valley Landscapes Monograph, 27 (2007)
VCH Victoria History of the Counties of England
W Welsh
Watts, Dictionary V. E. Watts, The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-
Names (2004)
Introduction
‘A century hence the student’s materials will not be in the shape in which he finds
them now . . . Instead of a few photographed village maps, there will be many; the
history of land-measures and of field-systems will have been elaborated. Above all,
by slow degrees the thoughts of our forefathers, their common thoughts about
common things, will have become thinkable once more.’
Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 520
‘As medieval peasants have left few records other than material remains in archae
ology, not much can be known about the details of their cultural values and mental
experience.’
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 9
In 1897 the great English historian Frederic Maitland foretold the development of
landscape history. By 1997—‘a century hence’—he was proved correct: the discipline
had matured considerably from its antiquarian roots, especially after the publication
of W. G. Hoskins’ seminal book The Making of the English Landscape in 1955. On the
other hand, Maitland’s optimism about uncovering the ‘thoughts of our forefathers’
may now seem less well placed. Decades of study have demonstrated that reconstruction
of landscape development does not automatically reveal the culture and mentality of
past inhabitants. For aristocrats we at least have literature (for which they were a chief
audience) and something of the priorities revealed by their well-documented estate
management. For other groups, things are different. As Michael Clanchy suggests,
appreciating how medieval peasants (or indeed other poorly documented past inhab-
itants) experienced their environment continues to prove very difficult. Yet Maitland
was surely right to imply a link between material surroundings, everyday practices,
and perceptions, the last defined by one modern writer as an ‘understanding of the
world gained through the interaction of sensory information, cultural values and indi-
vidual attributes/personality’.1
The aim of this book is to develop a richer understanding of peasants’ perceptions
over the long period 500–1650, based on close study of one particular area, the
1
See also Jones, ‘Interpreting the Perceptions of Past People’.
Peasant Perceptions of Landscape: Ewelme Hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500–1650. Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes,
Oxford University Press. © Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894892.003.0001
2 PE A SA NT PERCEPTIONS OF L A NDSCA PE
former hundred of Ewelme in south Oxfordshire, which comprised fourteen parishes

and more than 10,000 hectares of land. The twin questions at the heart of the study
are, firstly, ‘How were perceptions and local identities formed in relation to particular
settings?’, and secondly, ‘How did those perceptions and identities change as a result
of social and landscape reorganization?’ These questions have a deep significance
because those who farmed the land comprised the great bulk of the population and
played a crucial role in shaping the landscape. The findings presented in the pages that
follow are aimed at everyone interested in pre-modern mentalities, especially those of
country dwellers. The study is novel in its chronological range and depth of treatment,
and it builds on existing work of a very varied character.
In recent decades scholars from a range of disciplines have become increasingly
alert to the notion that the material environment played a significant part in the shap-
ing of values. A so-called ‘spatial turn’ has involved an explicit focus on scale within
the arenas of human action, including the size and relationship of political and social
units, and on the way that different spaces were used and represented in discourse.2
The latter speaks of power and inequality but also of meaning, the way in which par-
ticular settings and their uses can be bound up with a sense of engagement and
belonging, becoming ‘places’ rather than mere ‘spaces’.3 For one historian the term
‘place’ can be related to ‘the construction of a social collectivity upon the landscape:
the creation of mutual, affective ties within a distinct locality’.4 It is not difficult to
appreciate that concepts of space or place might be worthwhile methodological tools
for the historian. After all, in the past just as much as in the present, establishing and
marking how buildings and the wider landscape were to be used reinforced the power
of some—amongst ordinary people as well as elites—and reduced that of others. For
that reason, understanding how and when particular patterns of use developed is a
historically important issue: because those patterns affected, and in turn were affected
by, social relations.
In studies of the medieval and early modern periods, the concept of space has
become rather fashionable. Amongst the more productive outputs have been investi-
gations into the way that castles, houses, churches, and religious precincts were used
to shape or reinforce behaviour and attitudes.5 Beyond the confines of buildings,
attention has also been paid to the creation and use of public spaces in cities and
towns, drawing on contemporary language and documents which reveal spatial
sensibilities,6 although specific urban layouts and their implications have seldom been
Campbell, ‘Space, Place and Scale’, 23–9; Withers, ‘Place and the “Spatial Turn” in Geography and History’,
2
639–41; Kümin and Usborne, ‘At Home and in the Workplace’.

3
Muir, Approaches to Landscape, 271–95.
4
Wood, The Memory of the People, 188.
5
Beattie et al. (eds), The Medieval Household in Christian Europe; Graves, The Form and Fabric of Belief;
Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture; Andrews (ed.), Ritual and Space in the Middle Ages.
6
For example, Keene, ‘Text, Visualisation and Politics’; Symes, ‘Out in the Open, in Arras’.
INTRODUCTION 3
worked through. Research on rural settlements has felt some of the influence of this
spatial turn,7 but the impact has so far been limited. Most landscape history continues
to focus on landscape as structure rather than landscape as meaning. Discussions of
the use of space in houses usually end at the front door or, at best, the farmyard gate.8
The result, according to one recent survey of medieval landscape history, is that
addressing ‘perception and performance or practice’ is ‘a prospect that still lies largely
ahead’.9 Early modernists have supplied some powerful studies of the way custom and
memory were embedded and contested in the landscape, but the analysis has tended
to be broad and thematic rather than taking the form of fully developed reconstruc-
tion of particular localities or settlements.10 Nor have there been sustained compari-
sons between the medieval and early modern periods. As a result, older claims—based
ultimately on antiquarian writings—that the peoples of the champion and woodlands
developed distinctive social and religious outlooks remain underdeveloped.11
Thanks to generations of research on landscape development and local communi-
ties, we now have the opportunity to approach perceptions at the village level as
part of a nuanced picture of medieval and early modern rural life. That picture has
long recognized the significance of relations between lords and tenants, and the
influence of demographic change and commercialization on farming practices and
family structure.12 More recently it has been enriched by explorations of the grow-
ing but differentiated involvement of villagers in secular government and church
life.13 Scholars have fruitfully investigated the sense of local community, and how far
it was affected by social change, notably by the elaboration of hierarchy and growth
of geographical mobility after the Black Death,14 and indeed in the sixteenth and
7
Hindle and Kümin, ‘The Spatial Dynamics of Parish Politics’.
8
For example, Alcock and Miles, The Medieval Peasant House; Dyer, ‘Living in Peasant Houses’; Kowaleski
and Goldberg (eds), Medieval Domesticity; Johnson, English Houses 1300–1800; Buxton, Domestic Culture in
Early Modern England; Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England. For a call to exam-
ine the spaces between houses: Dyer, ‘Vernacular Architecture and Landscape History’.
9
Dyer and Everson, ‘The Development of the Study of Medieval Settlements’, 28.
10
For example, Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape; Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape; Wood, The
Memory of the People.
11
Thirsk, ‘The Farming Regions of England’, 109–12; Everitt, ‘River and Wold’, 2–3; Underdown, Revel,
Riot and Rebellion, Ch. 4; Plumb, ‘A Gathered Church? Lollards and their Society’, 133–5.
12
For example, Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism; Britnell, The Commercialisation of English
Society; Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages; Razi and Smith (eds), Medieval Society and the Manor Court;
Schofield, Peasant and Community in Medieval England.
13
Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record; French, The People of the Parish; Duffy, The Stripping of the
Altars; Forrest, Trustworthy Men.
14
Smith, ‘ “Modernisation” and the Corporate Medieval Village Community’; Reynolds, Kingdoms and
Communities in Western Europe, Chs 4 and 5; Dyer, ‘The English Medieval Village Community’; Schofield, ‘The
Social Economy of the Medieval Village in the Early Fourteenth Century’; Larson, ‘Rural Transformation in
Northern England’; Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death.
seventeenth centuries.15 There is also increasingly sophisticated discussion of the

construction of gender norms and their influence on values and behaviour.16 Such
difficult subjects as the emotions, memory, and self-perception have been opened
up through close analysis of proofs of age, wills, and other documents, as well as
material culture.17
What this book proposes is an examination of how the layout of settlements and
agrarian resources affected interactions between inhabitants which are currently under-
stood mainly in non-spatial terms. It will also highlight the way inhabitants may have
used spatial arrangements to create or reinforce certain patterns of behaviour. Such an
analysis of social interactions in relation to the local landscape promises to bring us
closer to real people and the choices they made in response to particular conditions.
Until now, historians have gathered a good deal of information about how individual
elements in a village were used, and have occasionally considered in a more rounded
way the material environment in which practices and relationships took place.18 But
most often village features are considered in isolation, divorced from their topograph-
ical circumstances: the church and its yard, the ale house, the playing field, and so on.
Where village space has been considered as a whole, the picture presented has often
been rather generic: we are offered a somewhat universalized impression of the fabric
and features of ‘the village’.19 Except in a recent article by one of the present authors,20
there has been no analysis of the way rural social life may have been influenced by spa-
tial relationships such as the density and layout of housing, the orientation and position
of buildings, the number, type, and location of shared resources. This is despite the fact
that these relationships, in tandem with the economic and social structure of a settle
ment, were likely to shape patterns of regular movement and interaction.
In the absence of a well-developed spatial approach, many of the most sophisti-
cated analyses of local society are conducted in the abstract realm of quantification
and revolve around the tenure of office, appearances in the manor court, patterns of
lending and borrowing, and, especially for the sixteenth century and later, relation-
ships revealed by wills.21 Long-r unning discussions of the causes of variation in settle
ment form seldom give any consideration to the potential social consequences of that
15
For example, French et al., The Parish in English Life; Wrightson, ‘The “Decline of Neighbourliness”
Revisited’; Hindle, ‘Beating the Bounds of the Parish’.
16
Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture; Goldberg, ‘Childhood and Gender in Later Medieval England’;
Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England; Herbert, Female Alliances.
17
Bedell, ‘Memory and Proof of Age’; Kane, ‘Social Representations of Memory and Gender’; Pollman,
Memory in Early Modern Europe.
18
Homans, English Villagers; Wrathmell (ed.), History of Wharram Percy, 312–56 (contributions by
Christopher Dyer and others).
19
Hanawalt, The Ties that Bound, 21–44; Gies and Gies, Life in a Medieval Village, 31–41.
20
Mileson, ‘Openness and Closure in the Later Medieval Village’.
21
From a huge bibliography: Schofield, ‘The Social Economy of the Medieval Village’; Briggs, Credit and
Village Society; Whittle and Yates, ‘ “Pays Réel or Pays Légal”?’.
INTRODUCTION 5
variation. Where medieval historians in the 1980s and 1990s offered views on the
link between rural society and settlement typology, they tended to minimize the
significance of the latter: village society was shaped by common institutions and col-
lective obligations that existed both in tightly clustered (or ‘nucleated’) settlements
and in areas of scattered hamlets and isolated farmsteads.22 Nor have views such as
these been challenged by more recent research. Archaeologists have supplied some
provocative suggestions about the influence of settlement plans on rural social life,
but these have not been accompanied by close engagement with documentary evi-
dence and, as a result, they have had a limited impact.23
The approach of the book is to use peasants’ own testimony to bridge the gap
between practice and perception. As we shall see, that testimony does in fact exist,
even if it survives in indirect form and needs to be hard won. We already know that
uncovering something of pre-modern country people’s perceptions is possible in spe-
cial circumstances, notably where elites conducted extensive interrogation of inhabit-
ants’ everyday lives. Such interrogation was conducted at the turn of the fourteenth
century by Dominican inquisitors on the trail of heresy in the Pyrenean uplands, the
results made famous by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s book about the village of
Montaillou.24 Le Roy Ladurie’s study offers us an intimate portrayal of village life,
from the house and household (or domus) which acted as the key economic and social
unit, to the village street containing closely packed houses from which night-time
conversations could be heard and the doorsteps on which people chatted during the
day, to the spring in which women washed clothes, and the fields and mountains
beyond, the last the special domain of the roving shepherds. At a larger scale, we learn
about a mental geography which linked domus to terra (village) and to the Comté de
Foix as a political unit, itself subdivided between the uplands and the lowlands, the
latter dominated by the town of Pamiers and the Dominicans.
Le Roy Ladurie was not centrally concerned with the relationship between the
material environment, perceptions, and identities, but something of that relationship
emerges from a careful reading of his text. There is the perennial problem of disentan-
gling representation and experience, a problem presented here in the form of narra-
tives crafted by those being questioned by clerical inquisitors trying to root out
Catharism.25 Yet in the resulting peasant accounts, which by necessity had to focus on
the plausible, we can see that relations between individuals and between households
were influenced by material surroundings—by the material fact of topography, but
also by choices people made in terms of what they built their houses from, where they
22
Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities, 152; Dyer, ‘The English Medieval Village Community’, 410.
23
M. Gardiner, review of Altenberg, Experiencing Landscapes, in Medieval Archaeology, 48 (2004), 360–1;
Saunders, ‘The Feudal Construction of Space’.
24
Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou.
25
Davis, ‘Les Conteurs de Montaillou’.
built them, how they arranged their tenement plots and farmyards, and the way the
division of labour influenced the movements and interactions of men and women.
South Oxfordshire was not Languedoc, but even without inquisitorial registers it
supplies a strong focal point for an intensive study of rural perceptions. In an import
ant sense it is good because it was not special—as an area of mixed countryside with
open-field villages and scattered woodland hamlets, it can stand for many parts of
lowland England, and less directly for other European lowlands. In fact, the core
study area, Ewelme hundred (like other hundreds, abandoned as an administrative
unit in the late nineteenth century), cuts across the border of what historical geog
raphers have called England’s ‘central province’—a swathe of countryside between
Northumberland and Dorset with, historically, many relatively large, compact villages,
and extensive open fields—and the contrasting regions either side, where settlement
was less clustered and communally run open fields were less significant (Figure 1.1).26
Ewelme hundred, that is to say, has some of the former and some of the latter. No
strong overriding landscape type is presented here, such as mountain or salt marsh,
and the area constitutes no preconceived ‘cultural province’. Rather than being a
heartland of any kind, the area was open to a range of influences in different periods—
Saxon and Anglian early medieval cultures,27 rule by the kingdoms of Wessex and
Mercia,28 several Old and Middle English dialects,29 and cruck- and box-frame build-
ing traditions.30
The hundred, which was based around an early royal estate centre at Benson,
included eleven parishes in the Oxford clay vale and three in the Chiltern Hills, where,
in addition, some vale parishes also had detached outlying portions (Figure 1.2). A
number of small towns lay just beyond the hundred’s bounds, and its relatively central
position in the country gave it good links with surrounding regions. It was well con-
nected to the capital by road and river. In the west and north of the hundred the clay
vale was dominated by villages and open fields, while the Chiltern area to the south-
east—part of the chalk ridge that runs north-east from the Thames at Goring to
Hitchin in Hertfordshire—was characterized by woodland, early enclosure, and dis-
persed settlement. The vale becomes more undulating towards the scarp of the
Chilterns, beyond which the land surfaces rise unevenly to a local high point of
225 metres at Cookley Green in Swyncombe, and then falls away as an elongated
dip slope down into the London basin. The vale landscape of the hundred was broadly
26
Roberts and Wrathmell, An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England, 5, 42–3, 49; Williamson et al., Champion,
192–3.
27
Blair, A-S Oxon. 6–9, 46–8, 50, arguing that Oxfordshire was mainly Saxon, but noting Anglian cultural
influence; PN Oxon. I, xix, describing the county as a ‘border zone’ in linguistic terms; see pp. 48, 52, 75.
28
Blair, A-S Oxon. 42–99; Hamerow et al., ‘The Origins of Wessex Pilot Project’, 49; Holmes,
‘ “In Bynsingtun land…” ’, 1–10; see pp. 52–3.
29
Moore, Middle English Dialect Characteristics and Dialect Boundaries, map between 2 and 3; Laing,
A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English; Lass, ‘Phonology and Morphology’, 34 (map).
30
Alcock and Miles, The Medieval Peasant House, 4–8; Oxon. Atlas, 66–7.
INTRODUCTION 7
F igure 1.1 Ewelme hundred within its regional geographical context. Inset: the hundred’s location
within England, and in relation to Roberts and Wrathmell’s ‘central province’.
F igure 1.2 The parishes and settlements of Ewelme hundred, showing nineteenth-century settlement
and twenty-first-century roads (some of which reflect modern house-building). For township boundaries,
see Figure 2.3. Data sources: EDINA Digimap Ordnance Survey Service, http://edina.ac.uk/digimap,
downloaded November 2012; SRTM; Satchell et al., 1851 England and Wales Census Parishes.
INTRODUCTION 9
replicated in surrounding valleys, notably the vale of Aylesbury to the north (in
Buckinghamshire). The Chiltern part of the hundred is similar to neighbouring hill
country, although beyond the hundred’s confines the bottom of the dip slope to the
south-east and the wider interfluves to the north-east are characterized more by
nucleation and open fields.31
Ewelme hundred has other advantages as a study area, of which the first is strong
documentation and the existence of early estate maps. A substantial number of records
were generated by institutional landowners including the Crown, Canterbury
Cathedral priory, and several Oxford colleges. The area is also relatively rich in archae
ology, some of which relates to the built environment and settlement layout, some to
land use and farming. Both the historical and archaeological data—which are described
in greater detail in Chapter 2—were pieced together painstakingly during four years
of research. The result of this intensive investigation is a body of detailed evidence of
considerable size and range. Early place names, including minor place names and field
names, peasant bynames (the precursors of hereditary surnames), manorial surveys of
lordly and tenant holdings, and local depositions about common rights and boundar
ies, all have the potential to yield insights into perceptions. Court rolls supply vital
information of social relationships and the use of village space, as, in a different way,
do surviving and excavated buildings. Such sources, when looked at in depth and
handled imaginatively, offer, at least indirectly, much-needed testimony about prac-
tices and attitudes as well as material conditions. And, importantly, there are similar
sources in other areas. Findings on Ewelme hundred can therefore potentially stand
as a model for future research in different regions and landscapes.
The key unit for comparison is the rural settlement, defined as a group of house-
holds occupying and exploiting a territory. Such settlements were consistently present
across the area, in all periods. From the mid to later Anglo-Saxon period onwards they
were part of a framework of lordship and administrative organization imposed from
above, at first the large estate and then later the manor, the parish, and finally the tax
‘vill’ or township (representing the village or larger hamlet). The manors and vills
together formed the hundred, which itself was a component of the county of
Oxfordshire created in the early eleventh century. But the local settlement survived as
the fundamental unit, whether it was large or small (village or hamlet), its houses
clustered or scattered. Taking this unit, it is possible to interrogate social space. A key
way of doing that is in terms of access and permeability—in other words, how ‘open’
or ‘closed’ (or, more crudely, ‘public’ or ‘private’) the components of a settlement
were, and how the spatial relationships between these components affected their use
and social significance. For both buildings and open spaces, permeability can be
31
Roden, ‘Field Systems of the Chiltern Hills’, 325–9; Hepple and Doggett, The Chilterns, 1–14; VCH Oxon.
XVI, 1–3, 189–90, 210, 282; XX, passim.
understood in relation to ease of entry and freedom of use, factors that were shaped
by social norms and regulations, and delineated by physical markers and barriers.
It will be argued here that differences in openness and closure across space and time
supply a guide to rural social interaction as a whole in both the Middle Ages and the
early modern period. It will be argued that the character of social life, and also of
inhabitants’ sense of attachment to place, was profoundly affected by the nature and
quantity of shared (or ‘open’) spaces, and vice versa. The shared life of the group was,
of course, not wholly territorial, since inhabitants of rural settlements operated within
a range of overlapping collective identities, some of which, such as family affiliation,
status, and occupation, were not necessarily related to place of abode. These iden
tities, and others such as sex and age, profoundly affected the use of space. Scholars
attempting to conceptualize medieval perceptions of space—usually in relation to
towns—have argued cogently against a binary opposition of ‘public’ versus ‘private’,
and above all against any simple equation of the public realm with men and the private
with women.32 The case has been made for the existence of a gradation of more and less
restricted areas, access to which varied according to time and season as well as status
and gender, and for the influence of situation on the publicity of a place (number/
type of people present, whether or not buying and selling was going on, and so
forth).33 Such nuances strengthen the spatial approach adopted.
It is possible to come closer to the meaning inhabitants ascribed to their environ
ment by examination of the names given by local people to the landscape and (in the
early periods before hereditary surnames) to each other. Thousands of field names
and personal bynames have been collected as part of the research from a wide range
of published documents and manuscripts, and their meanings investigated. Where
possible, the names have been mapped at a large scale, in other words that of the
individual village and parish. Mapping at such a scale supports a far more sophisti-
cated analysis of bynames and field names than that which has previously been
attempted, generally without detailed local landscape reconstruction. The name
corpus—which is far larger than that previously gathered by the authors of the
county surname and place-name volumes—opens up a long view of perceptions of
place and connection, of the character of the land itself, the ways it was controlled
and exploited, its religious and historical associations, and differences in inhabit-
ants’ sense of attachment over time and space.
Crucially, we can be confident that field names and bynames were coined by peas-
ants. That local people did the naming is shown by the close knowledge of terrain,
location, and (in bynames) personal characteristics that the names contain—a level of
32
Giles, ‘Public Space in Town and Village’, 294; Rees Jones, ‘Public and Private Space and Gender in
Medieval Europe’.
33
McSheffrey, ‘Place, Space, and Situation’; Masschaele, ‘The Public Space of the Marketplace’; Reyerson,
‘Public and Private Space in Medieval Montpellier’, 15–16; Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England,
43–4.
INTRODUCTION 11
F igure 1.3 Symmesdene (1447–8) in Cuxham, an example of close local knowledge revealed by field
names, and the way that names were adapted over time. This ‘dene’ (‘long valley’, OE denu, ME dene), is
located on high ground south of the village and is only visible to those who walk across the fields. The first
part of the name is that of a tenant family who arrived apparently in the 1440s (below, pp. 255–6).
knowledge surely beyond that of lords, many of whom were absentees, or even
their estate administrators (Figure 1.3). These names reveal much about peasant
perceptions since they represent a subjective and collective choice: any feature,
area, or person could be described in numerous different ways, so the name which
was most commonly used—or most commonly written down—during a certain
period says something about those doing the naming. Name evidence has its limi-
tations, and certainly requires careful interpretation,34 but in using locally gener-
ated names and descriptions we can follow inhabitants past the ‘winter brook’ in
Berrick (Wynterbroke, c.1270–80) or the ‘pillory barn’ in Great Haseley (Peloribarne,
1492–3),35 out into the fields, pastures, and woods, and see something of the land-
scape through their eyes.
34
See further, pp. 207–8.
35
Magdalen College, Chalgrove 33B; PN Oxon. I, 130.
The decision to cover a very long chronological period was taken in order to identify
what were the crucial developments that affected ordinary people’s ways of looking at
their surroundings. The book encompasses structural changes of different kinds which
influenced life inside the hundred as much as elsewhere. These changes include
Christianization; the growth of political units culminating in a unified kingdom and
administrative units such as hundred and county; the appearance of intensive local
lordship and small estates, accompanied by the greater nucleation of settlement and
expansion of collaborative farming; the growth of literacy and bureaucratic govern-
ment; commercialization; the rise of the parish community; the weakening of lordly
engagement and the growth of village hierarchy after the Black Death; and the ideo-
logical fracture of the Reformation. Each had its effects, some easier to trace in the
documents and material evidence than others. Each is considered here but is not
allowed to drive the analysis through a priori assumptions—hence the decision to span
traditional period boundaries, for all the dangers of attempting analytical treatment
across them. The risk seems justified by the finding that perceptions exhibit some
deep-seated continuities as well as undergoing striking transformations. The year 500
has been taken as an approximate starting point because it is safely after the end of
strong Roman influence on government and estate structures (but not, as we shall see,
on landscape organization).36 The year 1650 seems a suitable ending place because
the mid to later seventeenth century saw significant changes in rural life, notably the
growth of a class of landless wage labourers and the institutionalization of parish-
based poor relief.37
Finally, a word or two ought to be said about definitions. Firstly, the ‘peasants’ who
are the subjects of the book are broadly conceived. The term peasant is taken to mean
country dwellers who sustained themselves mainly by working the land—smallholding
farmers, village labourers, and rural craftsmen (most of whom were farming too, part
of the time).38 These people were at best partially tied in to incomplete markets and,
to a greater or lesser extent, were subject to the demands of powerful people outside
of their social group.39 For the relatively less hierarchical and non-urban early Anglo-
Saxon period the word should be understood to comprehend the large majority of
people, as discussed in Chapter 3.40 For subsequent periods the main focus is on rural
people below an elite which variously comprised the kings and local leaders of the mid
Anglo-Saxon period and the lords and landowners of later centuries. Needless to say,
elites had a significant impact on the landscape and their culture cannot be neatly
extracted from that of their subordinates (just as urban and rural culture were not
36
Fleming, Britain after Rome, 29; see pp. 25, 29, 31, 68–70.
37
Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 225, 316; Hindle, On the Parish?, 450–5; Snell, Parish and Belonging, 85–6.
38
For a similar definition, and useful discussion: Faith, The Moral Economy of the Countryside, 5–7.
39
Scott, ‘Introduction’, 2.
40
See pp. 54–63.
INTRODUCTION 13
fully distinct). Lords will therefore be brought in to consideration quite a bit, but
from a bottom-up perspective.
The word ‘landscape’ is notoriously slippery, and has attracted a large theoretical
literature.41 In this book the word is mainly used in the sense of the local material
environment (both natural and man-made), but of course scholars have often used it
to convey something perceived. In the English language the term landscape originally,
in the seventeenth century, denoted a pictorial representation,42 and it came to carry
connotations of aesthetic appreciation, on the one hand, and possession and control,
on the other. The latter was related to techniques of surveying and map-making asso-
ciated with proprietary ownership and the overriding of customary rights.43 In the
early modern chapter we will assess whether such a view of landscape had any impact
on how the main run of inhabitants understood their world. Whether it did or not,
it is possible to accept a more broadly applicable definition of landscape as ‘a social
construction, a collective way of seeing, into which are built collective ways of
remembering’.44 Or, as the European Landscape Convention of 2000 put it,
‘ “Landscape” means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of
the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors.’45
* * *
The main part of the book is divided into seven chapters. The first of these supplies a
detailed description of the hundred’s geography and the data for the study. Each of
the remaining chapters deals with a particular period: three of them cover the early
Middle Ages (or Anglo-Saxon period) and three the twelfth century onwards. The
stretch of time dealt with by a particular chapter is determined by what have been
identified as turning-points in local perceptions. For ease of comparison each chapter
broadly covers the same set of issues and is structured in the same way. At the start
there is a characterization of the development of settlement form and land use and
related changes in economy and social organization. This is followed by analysis of
perceptions, taking in the use of space, attitudes towards the land and its resources,
and the difficult question of inhabitants’ sense of belonging. Inevitably the nature and
scale of treatment is affected by the information available, with the appearance of local
documents in the ninth and tenth centuries enabling some themes to be pursued in
greater depth thereafter than is possible for the earlier period. A conclusion presents
the main findings and their implications.
41
For summaries, see Johnson, Ideas of Landscape; Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives; Muir,
Approaches to Landscape. Also Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, 153–7.
42
Oxford English Dictionary, online edition.
43
Olwig, ‘Sexual Cosmology’, 307; Thomas, ‘Archaeologies of Place and Landscape’, 166–70; Seipp, ‘The
Concept of Property in Early Common Law’, 88–91.
44
Wood, The Memory of the People, 188–9.
45
European Landscape Convention, Florence, 20 Oct. 2000, Article 1, Definitions.
Geography and Sources
The river makes a beautiful curve below Shillingford, at the termination of which
Bensington, or Benson church, which has been recently repaired, meets the eye in
a pleasing point of view; little more than the spire, which is perfectly white, appears
above a luxuriant range of yellow waving corn fields, while in the distance the back
ground is formed from the hills of Nettlebed and the adjoining woods. The village
of Benson, though at present of little note, is extremely ancient, and formerly had
the appellation of a royal vill.
S. Ireland, Picturesque views on the River Thames . . ., I (1792), 144–5
Samuel Ireland’s picturesque description of Benson and surrounding countryside in

the late eighteenth century remains recognizable today, despite much house-building
and the construction of a bypass. The tower of Benson church can still be seen from
the river, at least where the view is not obscured by buildings and trees. The ‘corn
fields’ have been largely replaced by houses and an RAF airbase, but the landscape
background is little altered: when one stands on the roadside between nearby
Shillingford and Warborough, next to a small monument celebrating the 1956 world
ploughing contest, the view is of wide, open lowland fields framed by the steep scarp
slope of the Chilterns, Ireland’s ‘hills of Nettlebed’ (Figure 2.1). This contrast
between the south Oxfordshire vale, with its villages and large fields, and the hilly and
wooded Chiltern landscape of scattered hamlets and enclosures is a long enduring
feature of the region, and it supplies a fulcrum for the analysis of landscape percep-
tions offered in the pages which follow.
The main purpose of the present chapter is to introduce the fundamentals of topog-
raphy, geology, soils, and communications—the bones upon which inhabitants built
up the flesh and blood of developing local communities. Its other function is to
describe the data available for our analysis, in all their richness, variety, and imperfec-
tion. The main discussion of landscape change, which was just as significant a feature
of the period 500–1650 as any other time, comes in later chapters.
Peasant Perceptions of Landscape: Ewelme Hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500–1650. Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes,
Oxford University Press. © Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192894892.003.0002
GEOGR A PH Y A ND SOURCES 15
F igure 2.1 The view south-east towards the Chiltern scarp from the Warborough ploughing monument.
T H E GEOGR A PH IC A L FOU N DAT IONS
The historic hundred of Ewelme covered an area of 25,096 acres (10,156 hectares) or
39 square miles (just over 100 square kilometres) in south Oxfordshire.1 In outline it
was irregular and slightly pear-shaped, its elongated northern arm (Great Haseley par-
ish) forming the pear’s stalk (Figure 2.2). In the south-west, the hundred boundary
followed the River Thames, and, for shorter stretches in the west and north-east the
River Thame and the Haseley brook; elsewhere there were no significant natural bor-
ders. From Great Haseley in the north to Nuffield in the south is a distance of 20 km,
and from Warborough in the west to Nettlebed in the east 14 km. The northern arm
of the hundred was much narrower, measuring just 1.5 km across. Topographically,
the hundred can be likened to a large ramp. At the base of the ramp, in the west, a
third of the hundred comprised a flat plain lying between 40 and 80 metres OD,
dropping gently towards the Thame and Thames valleys. To the south-east, the land
rises up into the Chilterns, reaching over 200 metres. In its three Chiltern parishes,
nearly a third of the hundred’s land surface lay at over 120 metres OD.
The hundred was established before Domesday (1086), when it belonged to the
large royal estate of Benson, as did the other four Oxfordshire ‘Chiltern hundreds’ of
1
VCH Oxon. XVIII, 18.
F igure 2.2 A three-dimensional view of Ewelme hundred, showing modern settlement. Data source:
SRTM.
Binfield, Langree, Lewknor, and Pyrton.2 The precise extent of the later Anglo-Saxon
Benson estate is unknown, but it certainly extended across the Chilterns as far as
Henley-on-Thames (in Binfield hundred), and as far south as Wyfold (in Langtree
hundred), and probably considerably further.3 At first Benson gave its name to the
hundred, but from the thirteenth century the latter became known as Ewelme hun-
dred, presumably reflecting Benson’s decline as an administrative centre and the fact
that, almost certainly, the hundredal meeting place lay within Ewelme, by then separ
ated from royal lordship and existing as an independent parish.4 The hundred was
rated as a ‘half-hundred’, although its constituent manors (first fully documented in
the thirteenth century) incorporated 121½ hides and its measured extent in the nine-
teenth century was larger than that of the other Chiltern hundreds.5
The hundred’s main part was a relatively compact block of land stretching north-
west to south-east. The inclusion of Great Haseley, its main outlier, may be explained
by its continued connection with Benson manor in the eleventh century, by contrast
with places to its east and west (perhaps including Dorchester) which had been
2
Ibid. 18–19. For the hundred’s origins, see pp. 118–20.
3
VCH Oxon. XVI, 15–16; XX, forthcoming, discussing Checkendon, Little Stoke, and Mongewell’s links to
Benson/Ewelme hundred; see pp. 74–5.
4
See pp. 119, 132–4.
5
VCH Oxon. II, appendix iv: Binfield hundred, 22,749 acres; Langtree, 21,577 acres; Lewknor, 19,414
acres; Pyrton, 14,163 acres.
Draycott (Ewelme Hundred

N Waterstock detached)
(Thame Hundred)
Thame
BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
Tham e
B ullingdo n Ry.
Hu n d red Princes
Hund red Risborough
La.
Great Haseley L e wkno r
Tham e GH Hu n d red
Hund red LH
P yr to n
W
Hu n d red
Wa.
Ro.
Br.
Le. Lewknor
Holcombe
Chalgrove Es.
Ne
Dorc hest er
win
Hund red Wd. Pyrton
Cux
g
ton
Brig win
ham
W Berrick
ar Bald
bo Prior
Watlington
htw
ro
ug Berrick BS
Dorchester h
Salome ell
BP
Shillingfo
Shillingford BP
Fif. BS
Ewelme
Benson Sh.
Swyncombe
Crowmarsh
Wallingford Gifford
Nuffield Ew.
Nettlebed
Bix
BERKSHIRE Langt ree
to 1974 Hund red ve
r T
Ri
ha
m
Do r c s
e
hest
er H
county boundary (d e t
ac un
he d d re Wyfold
) d Henley-on-Thames
Ewelme Hundred boundary Rotherfield Greys
and Peppard
other hundred boundaries
parish boundary
township boundary Langt ree B i n fi e ld

R
iv
Hund red Hu n d red

er
Chiltern hills (above 125m.)

h
T
am
scarp es
BP Britwell Prior (Newington detached)
BERKSHIRE
BS Britwell Salome (Lewknor Hundred)
Br. Brookhampton
Es. Easington parish
Ew. Ewelme (detached)
READING 0 mile 3
Fif. Fifield (Benson parish; Dorchester
Hundred, detached) Ro. Rofford liberty
GH Great Haseley tithing Ry. Rycote tithing 0 km 5
La. Latchford tithing Sh. Shambridge (Newington detached)
LH Little Haseley tithing W Wheatfield parish (detached); Wd. Woodford meadow (Drayton St Leonard);
Le. Lewknor meadow (Lewknor detached); added to Chalgrove 1886 shared by Benson, Berrick Salome,
added to Easington 1886 Wa. Warpsgrove parish Ewelme, Newington, Warborough
F igure 2.3 The hundred’s administrative topography. Source: VCH Oxon. XVIII, Fig. 1. © University
of London.
granted away at a much earlier date.6 The hundred included several minor detached
areas of which the most distant were Wyfold, a hamlet in the Chiltern parish of
Checkendon, and Draycott, a hamlet of the Buckinghamshire parish of Ickford
(Figure 2.3). Wyfold was included as part of Benson’s former ancient demesne, and
Draycott probably because of its connection with the honor of Wallingford, a feudal
lordship which took over much of the jurisdiction of the Chiltern hundreds in the
thirteenth century, and which was succeeded in 1540 by the honor of Ewelme.7 In
Benson itself a five-hide estate called Fifield was a detached part of Dorchester hun-
dred, having been granted to the bishop of Dorchester before the Conquest, although
administratively it was treated as part of Benson parish.8
Ewelme hundred incorporated a considerable variety of terrain (Figure 2.4), pre-
sumably as a result of a deliberate early apportionment of lowland and upland resources
amongst the Chiltern hundreds. The western part forms a portion of the south
F igure 2.4 Photographs of the landscape. Top left: fine views towards the Chilterns from Easington;
top right: view of the vale from near Swyncombe church; bottom left: Chiltern woodland management
at Digberry; bottom right: vale fields at Latchford.
6
Paragraph based on VCH Oxon. XVIII, 2, 18–19.
7
For Draycott’s possible early function within the Anglo-Saxon estate of Benson, see pp. 74–5.
8
VCH Oxon. XVIII, 21, 33, 37.
Oxfordshire clay vale, a gently undulating expanse of countryside largely devoid of

woodland. Low eminences in Warborough (Town Hill), Newington (at Ewe Farm),
and north-east of Great Haseley (Milton Common) break up the lower ground, but
the main impression of this landscape today is of flat farmland divided into large,
regularly shaped fields by long, straight hedges. Numerous watercourses are sur-
rounded by low-lying grassland, with the arable land beyond lying slightly higher and
drier. Apart from an appreciation of its river scenery and the surrounding hills, mod-
ern writers have generally characterized this as a rather ordinary kind of countryside,
according to Mary Russell Mitford (describing Chalgrove’s fields in 1812): ‘A com-
mon spot of earth, where grows / In summer time the yellow corn’.9
The centre of the hundred, from Easington in the north to the south-eastern part
of Benson parish in the south, is a transitional area of more uneven terrain, which
includes deeper valleys and steeper slopes. The cross- over from this area to the
Chilterns proper is marked, in some places more clearly than others, by the north-
west-facing Chiltern scarp. This is the most distinct topographical feature of the
region, visible from large parts of the vale as a grassy, occasionally creamy white, wall
bisected by narrow coombs and valleys. Beyond the scarp, the Chiltern upland itself
presents a stark contrast to the vale. The land surface is deeply fractured and, in many
areas, densely wooded; horizons are generally short, though from a few high points
there are long views back across the vale or down the dip slope into the London basin.
South of the study area, in Binfield and Langtree hundreds, the long tail of the lower
dip slope meets the gravel terraces and alluvial meadows of the Thames. The Chiltern
woodlands have attracted much literary approbation, and in 1965 were included in
the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), within which develop-
ment was restricted.10
Ewelme hundred’s contrasts of relief and vegetation derive ultimately from geo-
logical differences, especially the resilience of particular types of rock in the face of
flowing water (Figure 2.5). On the edge of the hundred, the Thames and the Thame
have cut into the bedrock and deposited terraces of limestone gravel, notably in
Benson and Warborough. The present relatively stable course of streams through the
gravel terraces emerged about 10,000 years ago, replacing a much less fixed pattern,
though the character of the floodplain has continued to be affected by changes in
water level and varying rates of alluvial deposition. The lowest (first) gravel terrace is
regularly flooded and its fertile alluvium provides good grass for hay meadows or
grazing animals. The higher (second) terrace is usually dry and more suitable for
cereal farming and settlement (Figure 3.1).11 However, periods of prolonged rainfall
9
‘Watlington Hill’, poem.
10
Stevenson, ‘An Autumn Effect’ (1875), in his Essays of Travel, 119–20; Brooke, ‘The Chilterns’;
Massingham, Chiltern Country; Oxon. Atlas, 158–9.
11
Marshall, The Land of Britain, 198–206; Powell, The Geology of Oxfordshire, 57, 59–62; PN Oxon. I, xi–xiii;
Blair, A-S Oxon. xv–xvii.
N
N
Great Haseley
W
ar
p
sg
ro
Lewknor pa.
Chalgrove ve
Easing-
ton
Newington Cu
xh
am
Brightwell
Baldwin
Berrick
Warborough Salome
Br
w
el
it
lS
alo
me
Benson Ewelme
Swyncombe
Legend
Water
Study area
DRIFT SOILS
Alluvium Nuffield
Clay-with-flints
River Terrace Deposits
Nettlebed
BGS NAME
Chalk including Red Chalk
Corallia
Kimmeridge Clay and Ampthill Clay
Lower Greensand
Reading beds
Oxford Clay and Kellaways Beds

Portland Beds
0 1 2 4 km
Upper Greensand and Gault
F igure 2.5 Solid and drift geology. Data sources: EDINA Geology Digimap Service and Digimap
Ordnance Survey Service, http://edina.ac.uk/digimap, downloaded November 2012.
can lead to more widespread flooding, as was demonstrated during the winter of
2013–14, when large-scale inundation occurred near the confluence of the Thames
and Thame in Warborough and Benson.12
Within the main body of the hundred, most of the waterways flow westwards into
the valleys of the Thame and Thames. In the north, the arc of Haseley (or Rofford)
brook defines parts of the hundred boundary before cutting west between Chalgrove
and Little Haseley to the Thame. Further to the south, rising in Watlington parish,
the Marlbrook stream flows west through Cuxham and—as the Chalgrove brook—
through Chalgrove, joining the Thame at Stadhampton. Finally, in the south-west
corner of the hundred, the Ewelme brook flows from Ewelme through Benson to the
Thames. These streams are associated with further areas of gravel, notably in Chalgrove
and to a lesser extent elsewhere. The surrounding terrain is based on superficial
deposits of Gault Clays and Greensand, which form broad belts running south-west
to north-east along the base of the Chiltern scarp. In the north, around Little Haseley,
there is an outlier of late Jurassic Portland Beds, composed of laminated clays and
limestones.
At the foot of the Chalk, between Chilterns and vale, a narrow band of Upper
Greensand—a fine-grained sand known as Malmstone—has been cut by small tribu-
taries of the Thame. The tributaries emerge from springs (which have long attracted
settlement) where the porous Greensand meets impermeable clay, and create an
undulating landscape of hills and valleys. The Chiltern Hills themselves are made up
of Chalk, including Red Chalk, geologically the youngest and least eroded strata. This
highly porous bedrock ensures that the upland areas are today characterized by dry
glacial valleys without regular surface streams. This was almost certainly the case in
the Middle Ages too, even if modern boring has slightly lowered the water table.13
Residual deposits of Clay-with-flints (a sandy clay mixed with broken flints and sarsen)
are found in pockets in Nettlebed, Nuffield, and Swyncombe.
These different geologies support agricultural land of varying character and quality
(Figure 2.6). Most of the vale soils belong to the heavier Denchworth series of stag-
nogley soils, lying on bands of Kimmeridge and Gault Clay. These soils are stoneless,
clayey, and, because they are relatively impermeable below the surface, waterlogged
for long periods in winter.14 Though reasonably fertile, they are hard and difficult to
cultivate, as well as being sticky and prone to flooding when wet, especially without
modern field drainage. The majority of soils in Chalgrove, Great Haseley, Newington,
and Warpsgrove is of this type. During winter months walking on the soil can cause it
to compact badly and become unable to support the growth of plant roots; accord-
12
Oxford Mail, 6 Jan. 2014; ‘Benson Drainage Strategy: Phase 1’, Thames Water report (c.2015), available
online.
13
See pp. 169, 200.
14
Soilscapes SS ID 18, Unit 0712b Denchworth.
F igure 2.6 Agricultural land classification within the hundred. Data sources: Agricultural Land
Classification of England and Wales (1971); EDINA Geology Digimap Service, http://edina.ac.uk/
digimap, downloaded November 2012; SRTM.
ingly, it is often only in late spring that it can be worked. In 1813 a farmer in Golder
(in Pyrton parish, close to Easington) described several types of clay, including ‘a
whitish calcareous loam, which is apt easily to run together with rain, and then to cake
and encrust’, and ‘gravel in clay, very stiff, tenacious, and difficult to plough, and
when hard, mattocks will scarcely pick it’.15 The damage which rock hard clay caused
to ploughshares is indicated by manorial accounts from Watlington, next to Cuxham,
where in 1296–7 extra money was spent on plough maintenance because of unusually
dry weather.16 Today much of this land is classified as grade 3 or, in the far north,
grade 4 agricultural land.
The vale’s best soils are found in the southern half of Great Haseley parish (where
there are Frilford and Aberford loams),17 and, further south, in a band stretching from
Warborough in the west to Cuxham in the east, especially where the Greensand coin-
cides with lighter gravels and loams. The southern parts of Warborough and Great
Haseley parishes (especially Little Haseley hamlet) stand out in having significant
areas classified as grade 1 agricultural land; much of the rest of the southern vale is
grade 2 as far as Ewelme. In the Chilterns, where most of the farmland is classified as
grade 3, patches of workable gravel are mixed with acidic and infertile sandy soils
covered with heath and rough pasture, and intractable clays mainly associated with
beech woodland.18 At a localized level, quite pronounced changes in land quality long
influenced land use. Around the village of Great Haseley, for example, in 1701 (and
during the Middle Ages) the arable fields occupied an area of sandy limestones, clays,
and sands that support a loamy soil,19 whereas the pasture closes were located to the
south and east on sands that yielded to a buttery clay, and to the east (at Latchford,
which was enclosed in the late Middle Ages) on heavy soils formed on Gault Clay.
Close to the stream which marks the Latchford township boundary, where the sand
geology disappears beneath alluvium and clay, was an area of marsh called Spartam
Bog, from which turves were dug.20
The physical framework of landscape was also affected by climate. Since detailed
records began in the nineteenth century there have been small but significant climatic
differences between vale and surrounding hills, including the Chilterns,21 and prob
ably these broadly reflect historic patterns. In fact, the disparity is likely to have been
more pronounced during the periods c.400–1000 and c.1570–1900, which were
15
Young, General View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire, 8. Golder’s best soil was a loam formed from chalk
and clay: ibid. 9.
16
Midgley (ed.), Ministers’ Accounts of the Earldom of Cornwall, I, 86.
17
Soilscapes SS ID 5, Unit 0511a Aberford; Soilscapes SS ID 10, Unit 0544a Frilford.
18
Young, General View, 7, 9−10, 224−5; VCH Oxon. XVIII, 1, 275, 285, 306, 368.
19
Young, General View, 11 describes it as a ‘sort of stonebrash’.
20
Ravenhill, ‘An Early Eighteenth-Century Cartographic Record’, 85–91.
21
Marshall, The Land of Britain, 206–11; Tilney-Bassett, ‘Forestry in the Region of the Chilterns’, 271; MET
Office: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/learn-about/
uk-past-events/regional-climates/southern-england_climate-met-office.pdf, accessed March 2014.
characterized by cooler and wetter weather than modern times.22 Today in January,
the coldest month, the mean monthly temperature in the vale is around 3.5°C, com-
pared to just 0.5°C on the higher ground. In the warmest month, July, the average
temperature in Abingdon is 16.6°C, around a degree higher than on the hills. In the
Chiltern Hills snow lies longer on the ground and the valley bottoms sometimes form
frost pockets as late as April and May. Another potential disadvantage in the Hills, at
least for arable farming, is the slightly lower amount of sunshine and higher amount
of rainfall. The Chilterns has on average 100 hours less bright sunshine a year, and, in
its highest parts, over 200 mm more rainfall. Higher rain, and especially summer rain,
reduces wheat yields,23 though today this is a minor issue since the region as a whole
experiences the kind of low rainfall that produces heavy wheat crops.
Over the centuries, inhabitants have reacted to this landscape framework in dif-
ferent ways. The extent and character of settlement and the intensity and type of
agriculture have altered greatly since prehistory. Today the vale is characterized by
denser and more nucleated settlement than the Chilterns. The same was true in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and also in the high and later Middle Ages
when the relatively clustered villages of the lowlands contrasted with the scattered
hamlets of the hills. Yet the difference was not a timeless one. The similarities and
contrasts in settlement between the two areas have shifted considerably over time,
and in some ways, as we shall see, their modern-day distinctiveness owes much to
developments which occurred after 900, especially the laying of extensive open
fields and the nucleation of settlement. As elsewhere, the evolving relationship
between land and people has a complex history which has to be understood in
terms of wider political, economic, and social changes as well as local population
levels and environment. Earlier Anglo-Saxon inhabitants, small in number and
using scratch ploughs, are likely to have concentrated their activities on the easily
tilled gravel terraces, which had the further benefit of being located next to the
floodplain and its supply of feed and water for their animals.24 In the late Anglo-
Saxon period the adoption of heavy ploughs is likely to have facilitated cultivation
of the clays, spurred on by demographic growth which continued until the fourteenth
century.25
In later centuries there were also significant changes to land management and field
systems, especially as remaining open fields were enclosed in the sixteenth to nine-
teenth centuries, with great tracts of open-field land enclosed in the 1850s to 1860s
at Warborough, Berrick, Benson, and Ewelme. Marsh was drained, including Spartam
Bog, which in the generation before 1701 was turned into a pasture called Spartam
22
Lamb, ‘Climate from 1000 BC to 1000 AD’; Matthews and Briffa, ‘The “Little Ice Age”’.
23
Williamson, Shaping Medieval Landscapes, 35; Roden, ‘Demesne Farming in the Chiltern Hills’, 13; Roden,
‘Field Systems in Ibstone’, 48.
24
See pp. 63–7.
25
See pp. 111–12.
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Bingham, Angelica Kauffmann, Mrs Hoare and her baby, Countess
Waldegrave and daughter, Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, The Graces
decorating a Terminal Figure of Hymen, the Duchess of Devonshire and
baby—here we have a few of the female portraits by which the painter
would have achieved success if he had painted no others.
He painted four or five portraits of King George III., two of his wife, and
two of George IV. as Prince of Wales; the number of peers is legion. Among
statesmen Edmund Burke sat to him five times and Charles James Fox four.
Brinsley Sheridan sat twice and Horace Walpole three times. Other men
sitters of note were Bartolozzi the engraver, Dr Burney, David Garrick, Dr
Johnson, Boswell, Oliver Goldsmith, Gibbon the historian, Tobias Smollett
and Laurence Sterne. Of himself Reynolds painted between forty and fifty
portraits.
Successful as he was in expressing the moods of men and the fascination

of women, it is impossible in writing of the charm of Reynolds to forget the
part the children play in his work. It would be hard indeed to find a painter
who has expressed the joy and happiness of childhood with equal effect.
Some of the children so depicted are seen with their mothers, and one feels
that the portrait was painted more for the mother than for the child; but there
are many canvases from which the children alone smile at us, captured for
our time in all their youthful radiance though some have lain for a century
dead. The children of Lady Smythe stand happily apart from their rather
self-conscious mother, and among the single-figure portraits of children are
Lady Catherine Pelham Clinton, Lady Caroline Howard, Miss Emma Hart
(afterwards Lady Hamilton), Charles, Viscount Althorp, Miss Bowles the
Strawberry Girl, "The Age of Innocence," "The Infant Samuel," and many
others that the mind and the memory love to dwell upon. How pleasant it is
to remember that Nature so careless of the individual is so careful of the type
that it blossoms anew with every generation!
Having written, however briefly, of the children in Reynolds' picture, it

seems unnecessary to say more of his charm; they will stand for it until the
end comes, the hour when the pigments can endure no longer and the labour
of the master is ended.
There is little to add to the story of Sir Joshua after he became President
of the Royal Academy. Down to 1789, when sickness came suddenly upon
him, his was a prosperous career, passed in the most stimulating company of
his age, associated with foreign travel and delightful English holidays. Only
once in all these later years does his critical insight appear to have failed
him, and this was when he went to Holland and remained unmoved by the
work of Franz Hals. What, one wonders, did he see or fail to see when he
stood before the portrait of the Laughing Cavalier and the musician (Der
Vaar), the painter's wife and the market girl? Londoners mourned when
Reynolds' life came to an end, and they buried him with much pomp and
ceremony by the side of Sir Christopher Wren. But he may well be content
with the measure of his own immortality. No British portrait painter has
seriously challenged his supremacy, and few may hope to rival his output.
The Graves and Cronin catalogue mention three thousand pictures and
probably leave well over a thousand unnamed. It is possible for the amateur
to name a hundred examples of his portraiture, any of which would have
justified a claim to posthumous honours.
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TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
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(Download PDF) Peasant Perceptions of Landscape Ewelme Hundred South Oxfordshire 500 1650 Stephen Mileson Full Chapter PDF

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Peasant Perceptions of Landscape:

Ewelme Hundred, South Oxfordshire,

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One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist

The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history,

2. Geography and Sources 14

3. The Early to Middle Anglo-­Saxon Period, 500–800 44

4. The Late Anglo-­Saxon Period, 800–1100 102

5. The High Middle Ages, 1100–1350 147

6. The Late Middle Ages, 1350–1530 231

7. The Early Modern Period, 1530–1650 274

xii List of Figures

2.10 A LiDAR image of the braided droveways in Ewelme (indicated by an arrow). 32

List of Figures xiii

xiv List of Figures

5.8 Mill Farm, Mapledurham, south Oxfordshire. This early fourteenth-­century

6.10 Medieval and early modern Warborough field names. 260

xvi List of Figures

4.1 Domesday statistics 108

ADS Archaeology Data Service (accessible online)

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

former hundred of Ewelme in south Oxfordshire, which comprised fourteen parishes

639–41; Kümin and Usborne, ‘At Home and in the Workplace’.

seventeenth cen­tur­ies.15 There is also increasingly sophisticated discussion of the

Geography and Sources

Samuel Ireland’s picturesque description of Benson and surrounding countryside in

T H E GEOGR A PH IC A L FOU N DAT IONS

Draycott (Ewelme Hundred

Hund red Wd. Pyrton

township boundary Langt ree B i n fi e ld

Hund red Hu n d red

Chiltern hills (above 125m.)

Oxfordshire clay vale, a gently undulating expanse of countryside largely devoid of

Oxford Clay and Kellaways Beds

This picture, sometimes known as "The Jumping Baby," is

It is impossible to compile a list of the distinguished men and interesting

Successful as he was in expressing the moods of men and the fascination

Having written, however briefly, of the children in Reynolds' picture, it

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

START: FULL LICENSE

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

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2. Geography and Sources 14

3. The Early to Middle Anglo-Saxon Period, 500–800 44

4. The Late Anglo-Saxon Period, 800–1100 102

5. The High Middle Ages, 1100–1350 147

6. The Late Middle Ages, 1350–1530 231

7. The Early Modern Period, 1530–1650 274

2.10 A LiDAR image of the braided droveways in Ewelme (indicated by an arrow). 32

5.8 Mill Farm, Mapledurham, south Oxfordshire. This early fourteenth-century

6.10 Medieval and early modern Warborough field names. 260

4.1 Domesday statistics 108

seventeenth centuries.15 There is also increasingly sophisticated discussion of the