Dividing the county of Hertfordshire into four broad regions—the "champion" countryside in the north, the Chiltern dip slope to the west, the fertile boulder clays of the east, and the unwelcoming London Clay in the south—this volume explains how, in the course of the middle ages, natural characteristics influenced the development of land use and settlement to create a range of distinctive landscapes. The great diversity of Hertfordshire's landscapes makes it a particularly rewarding area of study. Variations in farming economies, in patterns of trade and communication, as well as in the extent of London's influence, have all played a part during the course of the postmedieval centuries, and Hertfordshire's continuing evolution is followed into the 21st century. Lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, this authoritative work is invaluable reading for all those with an interest in the history, archaeology, and natural transformation of this fascinating county.
Dividing the county of Hertfordshire into four broad regions—the "champion" countryside in the north, the Chiltern dip slope to the west, the fertile boulder clays of the east, and the unwelcoming London Clay in the south—this volume explains how, in the course of the middle ages, natural characteristics influenced the development of land use and settlement to create a range of distinctive landscapes. The great diversity of Hertfordshire's landscapes makes it a particularly rewarding area of study. Variations in farming economies, in patterns of trade and communication, as well as in the extent of London's influence, have all played a part during the course of the postmedieval centuries, and Hertfordshire's continuing evolution is followed into the 21st century. Lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, this authoritative work is invaluable reading for all those with an interest in the history, archaeology, and natural transformation of this fascinating county.
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Overview
Dividing the county of Hertfordshire into four broad regions—the "champion" countryside in the north, the Chiltern dip slope to the west, the fertile boulder clays of the east, and the unwelcoming London Clay in the south—this volume explains how, in the course of the middle ages, natural characteristics influenced the development of land use and settlement to create a range of distinctive landscapes. The great diversity of Hertfordshire's landscapes makes it a particularly rewarding area of study. Variations in farming economies, in patterns of trade and communication, as well as in the extent of London's influence, have all played a part during the course of the postmedieval centuries, and Hertfordshire's continuing evolution is followed into the 21st century. Lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, this authoritative work is invaluable reading for all those with an interest in the history, archaeology, and natural transformation of this fascinating county.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781909291027 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hertfordshire Publications |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Anne Rowe is a landscape historian and author of a number of books on the subject, including Hertfordshire Garden History: A Miscellany and Medieval Parks of Hertfordshire. She has coordinated the research work of the Hertfordshire Gardens Trust since 1998, and also teaches courses in landscape and garden history for the Institute of Continuing Education of the University of Cambridge. Tom Williamson is professor of landscape history at the University of East Anglia, where he heads the Landscape Group. He is the author of AncientTrees in the Landscape: Norfolk's Arboreal Heritage, The Origins of Hertfordshire, and William Faden and Norfork's Eighteenth Century Landscape: A Digital Re-assessment of His Historic Map.
Read an Excerpt
Hertfordshire
A Landscape History
By Anne Rowe, Tom Williamson
University of Hertfordshire Press
Copyright © 2013 Anne Rowe and Tom WilliamsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-909291-02-7
CHAPTER 1
A county in context
Introduction
This book is about the landscape of the county of Hertfordshire. It explains the historical processes that created the modern physical environment, concentrating on such matters as the form and location of villages, farms and hamlets, the character of fields, woods and commons, and the varied forms of churches, vernacular houses, and great houses with their associated parks and gardens. But we also use these features, in turn, as forms of historical evidence in their own right, to throw important new light on key debates in social, economic and environmental history. Our focus is not entirely on the rural landscape. Most Hertfordshire people, like the majority of their fellows elsewhere in the country, live in towns and suburbs, and these too – although often created relatively recently – are a part of the county's historic landscape and have a story to tell. The purpose of this opening chapter is to set the scene, explaining some of the physical contexts and broad patterns of historical development which form the essential background to the more detailed studies presented in the chapters that follow.
Covering a mere 632 square miles (1,638 square kilometres), Hertfordshire is one of the smallest counties in England and – with a population in 2011 of over 1.1 million – among the most densely populated. In some ways it is one of the less remarkable, with no coastline, no very dramatic ranges of hills, no extensive heaths or wetlands. Lionel Munby, writing his seminal The Hertfordshire Landscape in the 1970s, suggested – perhaps a little unfairly – that 'no stranger would think of holidaying here'. In fact, as Munby's text itself makes clear, the county has much to detain the student of history, archaeology and, above all, landscape history, not least because, in landscape terms, there is so much variety in a small compass: for Hertfordshire is a county of remarkable contrasts. Today much of it is urbanised, or suburbanised, and substantial areas of the south now form, in effect, a continuation of London. But the west, and especially the east, can still boast extensive stretches of 'unspoilt' countryside which display a rich variety, ranging from the beech woods of the Chilterns through the intimate, almost secretive clayland countryside around Braughing and the Hadhams and the ancient coppiced hornbeam woodlands west of the Lea valley, to the sweeping panoramas of the chalklands near Royston, Baldock, Hexton and Tring (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). None of these fine landscapes is peculiar to the county itself, however. In all directions different arrangements of fields and settlements, woods and commons flow without interruption into neighbouring counties. The phrase 'the Hertfordshire landscape' is, to a large extent, meaningless.
In part this circumstance reflects the fact that the county's boundaries are strangely arbitrary and largely unrelated to natural topography. To the east Hertfordshire is separated from Essex, along most of its boundary, by the rivers Lea and Stort, but the configuration of soils and landforms to either side is virtually identical in character. The county's long northern boundary very roughly follows the line of the Chiltern escarpment and, until the end of the nineteenth century, included the parishes of Kensworth and Caddington and part of Studham (all now mainly in Bedfordshire). But two marked 'salients' reach out onto the level plain of the Midlands to the north, one containing the parishes of Tring and Puttenham and the other, to the north of the town of Baldock, made up of Hinxworth, Ashwell, Radwell, Bygrave, Caldecote and Newnham. The other boundaries follow no natural feature at all, seeming to pick their way through the landscape in an arbitrary manner. Until boundary changes in 1965, they included another marked 'peninsula' extending out into Middlesex to the south, embracing Totteridge, East Barnet and Chipping Barnet. As the authors of the English Place-Name Society put it in their volume for the county, published in 1938, 'There can hardly be a county in southern England which is more obviously artificial than Hertfordshire'. But such things are not so much a problem as part of Hertfordshire's interest. Embracing as it does varied countrysides which extend beyond its boundaries, it provides a particularly good opportunity to study the kinds of factors which have shaped neighbouring but contrasting landscapes.
A focus on this essential diversity of Hertfordshire's landscapes structures much of what follows and serves to some extent to distinguish our book from its great predecessor, Munby's The Hertfordshire Landscape, published in 1977. That book, while certainly recognising the complex variety of Hertfordshire's landscapes, nevertheless adopted a more thematic and chronological approach, discussing the physical environment of the county as a whole as this developed through successive periods, rather than concentrating on the different experience of its constituent parts. Munby's book is now more than 35 years old, moreover, and much research has taken place – into Hertfordshire specifically, and landscape history and archaeology more generally – which has served to challenge or at least modify some of its main conclusions. Some of the most important new work has appeared over the last decade: notable examples include Ros Niblett and Isobel Thompson's remarkable synthesis of the archaeology and history of St Albans, Julia Crick's publication of the charters of St Albans Abbey, the new Historical Atlas edited by David Short, and the impressive synthesis of the county's geology recently edited by John Catt. In the chapters that follow we draw extensively on these works and on other research which has been produced over the last few decades by a wide variety of local historians, archaeologists and others. But, while presenting and interpreting the very latest work, this book does not purport to be a final and definitive statement on the county's landscape history. Such a thing does not and can never exist. New discoveries and new approaches will always undermine or modify old orthodoxies and, if this volume remains as relevant in 35 years' time as Munby's does today, we would both be very pleasantly surprised.
Contexts: geology and topography
As Munby recognised, any understanding of Hertfordshire's history must begin with the natural environment and, in particular, with patterns of topography, soils, drainage and geology. The gently rolling Hertfordshire landscape has mainly been carved from Chalk, and from the relatively soft and recent sediments deposited in the last sixty million years above it. Only in the far north, on the very fringes of the county, is the underlying Gault formation, comprising sticky and poorly draining mudstones, exposed, together with small areas of the Upper and Lower Greensand. The majority of the county overlies the northern section of a great syncline or trough of Chalk, with London and the Thames at its centre, the North Downs forming its southern edge and the escarpment of the Chiltern Hills and their north-easterly continuation, the East Anglian Heights, its northern boundary. This escarpment is higher and steeper towards the south-west, in the Chiltern Hills sensu stricto to the south-west of Hitchin, reaching a height of 244 metres OD at Hastoe Farm in Tring, and becomes more muted and diffuse as it heads north-east. To the south and east of this strip of relatively high ground the land slopes away as a gentle dipslope which is covered by a wide variety of later deposits, and dissected to varying degrees by valleys within which the underlying Chalk is often exposed (Figure 1.3).
The Chalk, which was laid down on the bed of a warm sea during the Cretaceous Period, between 145 and 65.5 million years ago, comprises a very fine-grained soft white limestone derived from coccoliths secreted by marine algae, together with the skeletons of other marine creatures. Originally forming horizontal beds, it was only later folded into the great syncline as a result of tectonic activity. The Chalk includes bands of irregular nodules of flint, a form of chert (silica dioxide) made up of tiny quartz crystals: a substance which, like glass, breaks with a marked 'conchoidal' (or shell-like) fracture. Early man skilfully fashioned it to make a wide variety of cutting, chopping and scraping tools and weapons; later societies, as we shall see, employed it as a major building material. The walls of the Roman town at Verulamium, and most of the county's medieval churches, are built from it.
Following the end of the Cretaceous, in the Tertiary period, much of south-east England, including Hertfordshire, was periodically inundated and eroded by the sea, and a series of formations was deposited on the eroded surface of the Chalk. The first of these Tertiary deposits was the Thanet Sand Formation, which is largely restricted to the far east of the county. A little later (after another period of uplift and erosion) a brief marine invasion deposited the Upnor Formation more widely across the county. This was followed in turn by the deposition of the Reading, Harwich and London Clay Formations. The Upnor Formation comprises a narrow (usually less than three metres thick) band of sands or clayey sands containing black-coated flint pebbles deposited in shallow water. More important in its effects on the landscape is the Reading Formation, largely comprising multi-coloured non-marine clays and sands, which have been widely exploited for brick-making in the county, with sporadic beds of pebbles. In some areas the coarser sands and pebbles have been cemented together by silica deposited from groundwater to form the only rock for which the county is famous, the so-called 'Hertfordshire Puddingstone'. The most important of these Tertiary deposits, however, is the heavy, impermeable London Clay, which covers much of the south of the county, approaching a thickness of 90 metres on the boundary with Middlesex near Bushey Heath, Elstree and Arkley.
Following this period of deposition, which ended some 51 million years ago, the land was subject to extensive fluvial erosion which gradually moulded its topography into a form approximating to that of today. It also gradually removed more than 140 metres of the sediments overlying the Chalk – the Upnor, Reading, Harwich and London Clay formations – across much of the north and west of the county. Once their thickness had been reduced to about 15 metres, they became more permeable, so that water percolated through them into the Chalk below, rather thanflowing as surface streams, and erosion largely came to an end. The basal layers of the Upnor and lower Reading Formations thus survived but were largely transformed by weathering and disturbance during the Quaternary period (the last 2.5 million years) into the clay-rich Plateau Drift which now covers much of the Chiltern dipslope in the west of the county, and which formerly covered much of northeast Hertfordshire as well. This drift, which varies in character but essentially comprises varying mixtures of pebbles and sandy clay (clay-with-flints and pebbly clay), is thickest (up to 15 metres) in the middle of the dipslope interfluves, furthest from the valleys. Only occasionally do outliers of the Reading and Upnor Formations survive unmodified on the Chiltern dipslope, as around Sarratt and Micklefield Green. They give rise to areas of acid soil which are still frequently characterised by extensive tracts of woodland and commons.
The Quaternary period was marked by a significant deterioration in the earth's climate, producing about fifty glacial-interglacial cycles which are commonly (although inaccurately) described simply as the 'Ice Age'. In the earlier stages of the Quaternary the county was crossed from west to east by the precursor of the river Thames (the 'proto-Thames') which flowed far to the north of that river's present course: north-eastwards from Watford to Roestock, then northwards towards Stanborough before swinging eastwards towards Brickendonbury, northwards towards Bengeo, eastwards again to Mardocks Farm, then south-east to Eastwick, entering what is now Essex between Sawbridgeworth and Harlow. The greatest Quaternary influence on the landscape was, however, the Anglian ice sheet, which covered much of Hertfordshire between 474,000 and 427,000 years ago, eroding and in places degrading the Chalk escarpment on its northern fringes and depositing river gravels, glacial lake sediments and above all the chalky boulder clay which covers the eastern side of the county, obscuring whatever remained of the Plateau Drift after this had been eroded by ice and subglacial meltwater streams. The great ice sheet blocked the easterly flow of the 'proto-Thames' at a point to the east of Ware, creating a large lake (known to geologists as 'Lake Hertford') which extended westwards along the Vale of St Albans. This may have existed for several centuries before the ice advanced over it, impounding the river further to the west and forming another lake to the south of St Albans (the 'Moor Mill Lake'). It eventually overflowed southwards, forming the first part of a new course of the river Thames through London.
By the end of the first phase of the Anglian glaciation boulder clay, known as the Ware till, had been deposited over much of central, northern and eastern Hertfordshire. As the ice sheet stagnated and started to retreat, meltwaters flowed away from it in two main directions: south-westwards along the Vale of St Albans and southwards down the lower Lea valley, depositing the extensive spread of gravels which are now a distinctive feature of both. The ice subsequently readvanced on three occasions, depositing further layers of boulder clay known to geologists as the Stortford till, the Ugley till and the Westmill till, the last of these a layer of calcareous clay up to eight metres thick which generally forms the surface of the interfluves in east Hertfordshire today. Lobes of ice extended down the Vale of St Albans as far as Hatfield and along the lower Lea valley as far as Hoddesdon, but they did not encroach upon the main area of the London Clay uplands to the south-west of Hertford Heath. Nor, during any of the glacial stages, did the ice sheets approaching the county from the north-east manage to rise over the Chalk escarpment west of Luton, consequently leaving much of the Chiltern dipslope unglaciated.
The geological history of Hertfordshire is thus highly complex but the county may, for convenience, be divided into four or five main landscape areas which, very broadly, correlate with the character of the surface deposits just described (Figure 1.4). In the north of the county, on and below the Chiltern escarpment, the Chalk is exposed in a wide, sweeping landscape, while on the level plains to the north – on the very fringes of the county – the underlying Gault formation, comprising poorly draining mudstones, is found on the surface, together with small areas of the Upper and Lower Greensand. Both the escarpment and the plains below were characterised in the Middle Ages by clustered villages farming extensive 'open fields' of the kind familiar from school textbooks, in which the holdings of individual farmers comprised numerous small, unhedged strips which were intermingled with those of neighbours and scattered evenly through extensive 'fields, over which communal routines and rotations were imposed. This 'champion' countryside, as it was called by sixteenth-century topographers, generally survived into the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Open fields were then removed by large-scale, planned enclosure, usually effected by parliamentary acts, and as a result the district is today characterised by straight-sided fields defined by species-poor hawthorn hedges.
Countryside like this extends northwards, far into the Midlands, but the Chiltern escarpment forms a major 'frontier' in southern Britain and to the south of it rather different kinds of landscape can be found, sometimes described as 'ancient countryside' by modern academics and as 'woodland' by early topographers, in part because they contained (and often still contain) large areas of managed woodland, but also because they boasted an abundance of hedges and hedgerow trees. Open fields of a kind could be found in these districts but they usually disappeared at an early date and were everywhere accompanied by land farmed 'in severalty', as hedged fields in individual occupancy. The settlement pattern, instead of consisting solely of nucleated villages, also included numerous isolated farms and small hamlets. Landscapes of this type took a variety of forms, corresponding to the main topographical districts within the county.
In the west, on the Chiltern dipslope, the Chalk is exposed in the main valleys but is mainly buried beneath the Plateau Drift – the 'clay-with-flints' (a fairly permeable clay with flint pebbles) and the 'pebbly clay' (a more complex mixture of stony clays, sands and gravels), which give rise to relatively infertile and acidic soils. These are interspersed with surviving fragments of the Upnor and Reading beds, associated with pockets of even more acidic soil. For much of its history this remained a sparsely populated district, and even today large areas of woodland survive on the highest ground, above the escarpment, often occupying tracts of former common land, while other commons – Chipperfield Common, Nomansland Common in Wheathampstead and Harpenden Common – still remain on the poorest soils of the dipslope. The largest settlements were always in the principal river valleys – those of the Chess, Ver, Gade, Bulbourne and upper Lea – and here extensive areas of open-field land often existed in medieval times. The wide interfluves between, in contrast, were characterised by more scattered settlement – small hamlets, isolated farms, loose girdles of dwellings around the margins of commons – and by a mixture of enclosed fields and smaller areas of common arable. It should perhaps be emphasiseed at this point that both in this part of Hertfordshire and elsewhere most areas of common land were probably wooded in the early Middle Ages. Some continued to be occupied by 'wood-pastures' into post-medieval times, but most gradually became more open land as individual trees died or were felled, and could not be replaced because of the intensity of grazing: commoners' livestock simply consumed the young trees. Over the last century or so, however, grazing on most commons has come to an end, so that they have gradually become covered in scrub and trees once more.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hertfordshire by Anne Rowe, Tom Williamson. Copyright © 2013 Anne Rowe and Tom Williamson. Excerpted by permission of University of Hertfordshire Press.
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