Farming
The Dawn of Agriculture
Deep in our prehistoric past, around 6000 years ago, humankind in the British Isles commenced a slow change in life-style from hunter gatherer to settled farmer. Mesolithic culture was being replaced by Neolithic, almost certainly as the result of 'incomers' from Continental Europe. Such peoples were already agriculturalists, the practice of which had been spreading from the Near East for several millennia.
Groups of families began the laborious work of clearing patches of woodland for the growing of crops and the pasturing of domesticated livestock, thereby allowing them more efficiently than before to take advantage of the soil's productive potential.
The resulting improvement in the quantity and reliability of food supplies allowed a very considerable increase in the numbers of people the land could support. These farming folk were now tied to villages, or looser forms of 'permanent' settlement, rather than wandering with the seasons to reap mainly 'natural harvests'.
The Midlands System
A number of farming methods evolved capable of supplying the demands of a growing population. One such system, typically employed on the clay soils across the English Midlands, was open field agriculture.
Parish land surrounding each village was divided into two or three great fields organised into furlongs consisting of numerous strips or 'selions'. Strips were ploughed in a (usually) clockwise direction thus mounding the soil towards the centre of each and forming parallel ridges and furrows. Over the years the plough, pulled initially by oxen teams and subsequently by horses, dragged soil to either end of the strip forming heads or butts (these terms and many other reminders of the open fields can be found today in the names of modern fields and byways around our older villages). Every village household farmed a number of strips scattered throughout the mainly unhedged, unfenced open fields.
Each year one great field was left fallow to rebuild the soils fertility after cropping.
Sheep and cattle, normally grazed on common pasture outwith the great fields, were folded within temporary enclosures made of hurdles, or 'dead hedges' (thorn branches), so that their manure could enrich the ground. Crop rotation was also practised to maximise productivity.
Arcane and complex by-laws, imposed by village courts, evolved to govern the running of the open fields for the common good.
The open field system probably developed during Saxon times in response to the need to communally regulate the conflict between livestock and crops - sheep and cattle chomping their way through selions of barley or beans obviously could not be tolerated. However if animals were kept to common pasture in the growing season but allowed to graze the weeds on the fallow field in winter the two main elements of mixed farming could functionally co-exist.
The mainly heavy nature of the soils and the need for a communal effort in order to get the land ploughed, during the relatively short periods of time when it was workable, was also likely to have been influential.
The Midlands System was largely confined to those areas of the country that had previously been extensively deforested mainly prior to the Roman invasion. Where woodland clearance was still being undertaken to provide land for arable farming, settlements tended to be more individualist and widely spaced. In regions where moorland, for example, was the dominant land type the open field system was not adopted.
The Agricultural Landscape in 1645
We breed multitudes of hardy men and horses for the service of the Commonwealth, if need be; whereby we also send forth abundance of all manner of corn and grain and pease-fed cattle to the city, to victual our shipping at sea and to countries round about us; all fed with plough in the common fields."
By the mid 17th century significant changes had taken place in the lives of agricultural communities and the feudal system, introduced by William the Conqueror, had long since died out. But the 'annual round' continued much as it had done for the past 700 or so years. It seems that Naseby residents were even more impervious to change than their neighbours - the Rev. John Mastin, writing in 1792, records that his parishioners had not even started growing turnips to help their livestock through the winter!
We do know, however, that crops grown at the time of the Battle included several varieties of wheat, barley, rye, oats, beans, peas and cole (rape); flax was also grown as the raw material for linen and for its oil-rich seeds. In the rural diet of the time grain was the predominant provider of calories.
So at the time of the Battle there were few fences or hedges (except parish boundary hedges) for infantry and cavalry to negotiate, but aspects of the open fields did affect the course of the engagement. Land was undrained, and in places very boggy (peat was being dug from Broadmoor for fuel), soft ground is hard going for both cavalry and infantry. Sheep, cattle and a renowned breed of large pigs were kept, and rabbits provided by a warrener, whose cottage stood on Lodge Hill, supplemented a possible short-fall of protein during winter. The sandy soil of the warren was riddled with holes and overgrown with furze (gorse) - not cavalry country.
Farming method thus unintentionally played a small but significant role in the outcome of the battle itself and in consequence our subsequent history.
Enclosure
Probably throughout the whole period during which the Midlands system (of open fields) was in operation some sections of the great fields were aggregated and enclosed by individuals for their own convenience to, for example, control their livestock - and some parishes were enclosed to create sheep walks as early as the 12th century, usually by monastic establishments. But from the 16th century onwards the pace of enclosure increased as the inefficiencies of the open field system became more obvious in an environment more and more dependent on cash to purchase goods from outside rather than being an essentially self-sufficient community.
Eventually enclosure was seen to be the only way forward in a country entering upon an agricultural, and subsequently an industrial, revolution and so the era of Parliamentary enclosure began.
Parishes were carefully surveyed and divided up in ways which usually benefited the local gentry and all farmers became responsible for planting the hundreds of miles of quickset hedges which are now such a conspicuous feature of the Midland landscape. Naseby itself was enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1820.
The Seasons
To most people today the succession of the seasons means little more than alternating periods of warmth and cold. But so cosseted are we from the weather, the effects of daylength, and supplied endlessly with imported foodstuffs that obliterate the individuality of spring, summer, autumn and winter that the profound significance of 'season' to rural communities just a generation or two ago is almost beyond comprehension. But then the seasons dictated the daily activities of everyone in the countryside.
Winter
Winter nights would have been long, dark and cheerless for the majority of country dwellers, for whom lighting would have been a considerable, even unaffordable, expense - though some crafts could have carried on by the light from the hearth. After the midwinter celebrations, signs of Spring have been eagerly awaited and the 'sap' would have risen in plants and people alike as lengthening days and warmer weather introduced the season of hope.
Spring
Spring cleaning really meant something then. The accumulated filth of winter, smelly bedding, the unwashed (because largely undriable) clothes and the fetid air of winter months were flushed from the rustic hovels as men, women and children re-launched themselves into their natural element - the open air - and the 'great' fields!
Before mechanised cultivation, chemical weed and pest control, and the advent of new cultivars of traditional crops, far less sowing was completed in the autumn than is the case today. Consequently in the fields spring work was to some extent a continuation of autumn's labours. But whereas in autumn the quality of the harvest was known, the hope engendered by spring was mediated by constant worries about the next one. What would the current year bring in terms of growing conditions, and would their efforts bring sufficient returns of grain and meat to see them through another winter? Would their animals be affected by the ravages of disease that regularly swept the country? (It is interesting to note that food shortages, when they occurred, were most keenly felt, not in winter but late summer when the bounty of the previous harvest was largely exhausted).
Ploughing, sowing, and harrowing continued into early May and apart from constant bird scaring and ensuring that livestock did no damage to the growing crops the farmers could, for the time being, do little more than a stint of hoeing to ensure their future well being.
But there was never any shortage of work to be done and, then as now, some were more inclined to get on with it than others. Some kept-up or improved the standard of their property whilst others, no doubt, let things drift, and in that simple difference of approach lies one of the reasons for piecemeal enclosure and perhaps also helps to explain the rise of the Yeoman farmer, a social rank above the common labourer, but definitely below that of the gentry. Successful men would combine their own strips with those acquired from their less industrious, or unlucky, neighbours and, fencing them off from the rest of the open field, farm them as they wished as pasture or arable. If done efficiently some wealth and further holdings would thus have accumulated.
Summer
Summer arrives - and the hopes and fears of the villagers fluctuate with the elements. A crop can appear to promise a barn filling yield one week, but after a bout of wind and rain might lay flat and sodden on the earth. Mood changes with the weather - not only their prosperity but their lives depend on it - now the stuff of small talk weather was then a much more serious topic of conversation. In order to keep the soil of the fallow field workable it was ploughed several times during summer, so winter was the only season in which the plough and the draught animals were not in demand.
In summer the harvest began. Reaping, stooking, carrying, stacking and finally, and only when the all the harvest was gathered in, gleaning was allowed. Finally livestock were driven in and allowed to graze the stubble.
Unlike today not all grain was threshed immediately after harvest but was stored in stacks until required for malting or grinding into flour. An Arcadia for rats and mice.
Autumn
Autumn, and the last of the crops, good, disasterous or indifferent are stored for winter. Now the ploughing, sowing, harrowing bird scaring started all over again; and belts began to be tightened.
For a community so rooted in perennnial tradition the Battle must have seemed like the Apocalypse.
