Dartmoor's Alluring Uplands: Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages
320
Dartmoor's Alluring Uplands: Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages
320Paperback
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780859898652 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Exeter Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2012 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.77(w) x 9.69(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Dartmoor's Alluring Uplands
Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages
By Harold Fox, Matthew Tompkins, Christopher Dyer
University of Exeter Press
Copyright © 2012 Matthew Tompkins and Christopher DyerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85989-910-9
CHAPTER 1
Definitions and limitations
'Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain'
Defining Dartmoor's resources
It is tempting to begin a book on an aspect of Dartmoor's past with romantic references to the region's folklore, some of it imposed from outside, to the picturesque qualities of the region's hills and valleys and to literary associations, not least the wild and lusting hound of the Baskervilles. An alternative way to begin is with the voices of insiders and others who knew Dartmoor well, especially their views on the potential of the region for the grazing of livestock, which is the main theme of this book. The latter track is adopted here.
In 1627, William Pellowe, inhabitant of Lydford, testified before an Exchequer court during one of an interminable series of lawsuits about tithe arising from Dartmoor's prime agricultural product, its grazing land. Where rough pasture had been converted into enclosed fields, he said, there was 'good land ... inhabited by rich inhabitants and tilled with oats and rye and with manurance ... with barley', this land being 'prized or esteemed the better by reason of the commons'. The other face of Dartmoor, beyond the improved farms, he continued, comprised 'wild wastes' and 'hilly grounds ... dangerous in the winter to be travelled through by reason of waters, rocks and mires'. These last words echo an injunction of Bishop Bronescombe—written in 1260 and relating to the distance which certain inhabitants of Dartmoor had to travel to their mother church—when he wrote of the 'tempests and floods' which hindered journeys within the region. From a few generations after William Pellowe's time we have a description of a land surveyor who, after inspecting farms in the parish of Manaton and speaking to their inhabitants, described the land as 'very poor, cold and hungry ground full of rocks and naturally heathy but [which] by the extraordinary pains and costs of its owners produces good rye, some wheat but more oats and barley'. Like Pellowe he went on to comment on the value of the rough pastures: 'their comons ... are heathy downs which are large'.
In the summer and winter of 1791 the ever-observant agricultural writer William Marshall, always keen to speak to local inhabitants wherever he went, was staying at Buckland Abbey, home of the Drake family, and frequently set out to study Dartmoor. The great extent of the rough grazings drew from him a most enthusiastic description: 'herbage!' he exclaimed, 'greensward! even of the highest, bleakest hills, frequently intermixed however with heath which indeed chiefly occupies the worst-soiled parts of the mountain; while on the lower grounds the furze [gorse], particularly of the trailing sort, is prevalent.' Five summers later, William Simpson, a surveyor for the Duchy of Cornwall, toured extensively on Dartmoor. He tasted 'mutton ... uncommonly fine and sweet so as to become proverbial', the 'very well flavoured' meat of another writer at about the same time, and he watched the turf-diggers working at their seams. He made careful observations of the region's grazing potential, noting 'how well both the cattle and sheep look upon such a poor, barren soil' and explaining this by the presence, 'among the rocks and loose stones ... of a sweet grass called sheep's fescue'. In conclusion Simpson noted that some parts of the moorlands might be enclosed and then planted with trees to provide timber sales or drained to provide better herbage, but he considered that the isolation of the region from markets was an obstacle to improvement—a point also made by William Marshall and by other near contemporaries. The point made by Simpson about the health of animals grazing upon Dartmoor was repeated in the nineteenth century by Henry Tanner: he wrote that cattle rapidly improved when they came to the summer pastures, largely from the fresh breezes and the fact that there were fewer insects to infect them than in drowsy, warm and windless south Devon.
These voices give an accurate picture of small islands of cultivation in a wide sea of rough, often rocky grazing ground and they introduce some of the main products to be had by the harvesters of the hills. The island farms and their occupiers are frequently mentioned in this book, but its main concerns are the open seas of pasture and their management, especially through the practice of transhumance by which livestock were brought to the region from outside (discussed in more detail in the next section). Visitors today can still see the sheep, cattle and ponies of commoners, some from outside the region, browsing on the moorlands and crossing the unfenced roads. (A Japanese lady to whom I introduced the region described her journey through it as 'a great safari'—Plate 1.) This ancient grazing system is now the subject of controversy as ecological studies by distant academics voice disapproval while Dartmoor farmers, wise ecologists through experience, defend customs developed over many generations. The livestock are feeding upon several species of moorland grasses, especially flying bent, bog cotton grass and molinia, and upon heather and gorse, all discussed in a little more detail later in this section.
The grazings are of great extent. The central moor (the parish of Lydford), defined more closely later in this chapter, covers about 54,000 acres and has a circuit of about 42 miles; beyond it, the outer moors belonging to the surrounding parishes, taken together, today cover an area which is even greater than that. The highest ridge, from High Willhays to Yes Tor in northern Dartmoor ('the roof of Devon'), reaches to 2,039 feet, while the heights of the summits of the principal hills in the south range from about 1,200 to about 1,600 feet. Westerly winds hit these hills and discharge rain which keeps the ground moist and suitable for growth of grass. Dartmoor is wet: 'The only thing that is certain in this world,' said Charles Stuart, 'is that it is raining in Tavistock.' Princetown, situated in the west of Dartmoor, receives 81 inches of rain, compared with Plymouth, on the coast to the south of the region, which receives only 38 inches. Rain nurtures the grazing, but for only part of the year, because in winter cold weather stops plant growth. In April the number of days with ground frost on high Dartmoor can be as many as ten to fifteen, but later there is improvement.
Let us begin in winter. Then the relatively small number of livestock on the moorlands feed on the rank remains of the previous season's growth of grass and on the evergreen heather and gorse. After the long, lorn winter a new cycle commences, at first slowly, then triumphantly, 12 May being the traditional date for moor-edge farmers to increase stocking rates on the rough grazings near their farms. Now the grasses begin to lose rankness, shooting at rates which vary according to species, and increased numbers of animals, by their grazing, help to force the new bright growth. We can begin to observe a lovely ripple as the wind bows and bends the fresh green blades. As we move further into the year the volume of feed for livestock greatly increases and the moorlands are at their fullest and most productive: both William Marshall and William Simpson, whose enthusiastic remarks about grazing potential have been quoted earlier, were observers of the bright summer scene on Dartmoor. And so is set in motion that annual cycle of movements of livestock towards the hills which is the main subject of this book as, unfailingly, the pastures offer up their riches. Summer grazing on Dartmoor was especially attractive in those years when grassland elsewhere in Devon, but particularly in the warm south, became parched. A modern farmer and historian, Freda Wilkinson, explains that, because of high rainfall and the moisture-retaining properties of a peaty soil, moorland grass 'can still provide grazing when many of the "down-country" pastures are brown and bare', and William Marshall made the same point at the end of the eighteenth century—especially large numbers of animals were sent to Dartmoor 'in a dry season when the cultivated ... leys [elsewhere] are burnt up'. Later, Sabine Baring-Gould wrote: 'in the abnormally dry summers of 1893 and 1897 Dartmoor proved of incalculable advantage ... [so that] the starving cattle were driven there in thousands and tens of thousands.'
It should not be thought that the grasses of Dartmoor were everywhere simply grazed by the livestock, for they were also mown as upland hay which was taken down to moor-side farms for winter feed. This practice has not received any notice in the huge literature on the region, but it was commonplace and important. Its importance lies in the fact that many of the manors around Dartmoor had very little valley-bottom meadowland, the valleys being so relatively narrow. This is quite clear from Domesday Book which, for example, gives 200 acres of demesne meadow to Ottery St Mary in the wide, lush valley of the Otter in east Devon but only 10 acres to the southerly moor-edge manor of Dean (Prior) and 8 acres to Throwleigh in the north-east of the region. So these slender resources were supplemented by hay mown on the moors, mentioned, for example, in medieval charters relating to the farms and hamlets of Bullhornstone, Ash, Beara and Hurburnford, all in South Brent parish. There are also medieval references to men who attempted to cheat by going up to cut the upland hay before the accustomed time. Presumably the hay was protected in some way from roaming livestock, and this may possibly explain some of the low-banked enclosures still to be seen on the moors today.
We have introduced the grazings of Dartmoor with reference to grass, but two other plants, abundant in the region, provided food for livestock, namely gorse (always called furze in Devon) and heather. Animal mouths are more tolerant of gorse and other prickly species than we might think: holly was once an important source of animal feed in parts of England, while as long ago as 1379 John de Brie (in a treatise on flock management written for Charles V of France) noticed how sheep fed with relish on thistles growing in their pastures. Gorse can be bruised to make it slightly more edible and on Dartmoor I have seen horses doing this with their hooves (in relatively modern times a bruising machine was invented, though I have been told by a Dartmoor farmer that it was never introduced into the region). At the beginning of the twentieth century John French of Middle Merripit (near Postbridge) cut low-growing gorse, known as 'dell-vuzz', in winter and put it through a chaff-cutter before feeding it to his horses. Gorse is deep-rooted, taking up minerals and trace elements which are not found in the grasses and which prevent certain types of sickness in animals. The plant grows high, so when snow lies, covering the grass, it is an especially valuable source of feed for over-wintering livestock. It was also widely used as a fuel. For all of these reasons, the poet's line—'With blossom'd furze unprofitably gay', cited by Hoskins—is not entirely accurate: gorse was profitable, being valued in medieval surveys at four times as much per acre as rough pasture (for example, at Okehampton in 1292).
The gathering of gorse from the lord's waste was a common right on most of the moor-edge manors and there are frequent references, in charters to free tenants, of grants of this right; for example, a medieval charter from Lutton (Cornwood) gives the tenant gorse in 'reasonable' quantity and 'sufficient for his own use', that is, not to be sold on. A document of 1382 refers to rights of gorse gathering 'from time immemorial'. As well as growing wild it was a cultivated plant in the Middle Ages, a fifteenth-century survey of Milton Abbot referring to the 'cultivation' of the plant (while there is a reference in a 1347 deed for Brixham, way beyond Dartmoor, to a strip in an open field which was cultivated with gorse). Presumably medieval farmers or their daughters gathered the seed and then sowed it in enclosed or protected places where it was safe from browsing animals and could be cut when needed and given to stall-fed animals during the winter. Later on, the seed was sold commercially, William Marshall in the eighteenth century noting how Tavistock had 'long been a market for furze seed'. A local farmer tells me that gorse was cultivated on Dartmoor up to 100 years ago.
The charter for Lutton mentioned above also gives the grantee right to cut heather on the lord's moors. This was another useful moorland plant, also deep-rooted and therefore, like gorse, taking up minerals. Heather is browsed by livestock and in the past was also gathered for winter feed, litter and other uses. It too is mentioned as having been taken 'from time immemorial' in the same document of 1382 quoted above for its reference to gorse.
The natural resources of Dartmoor have been introduced here through plants which were edible to the livestock of people involved with transhumance, the subject which is the main theme of this book. The region provided medieval people with many other resources. The very bedrock of most of Dartmoor, the granite, was gathered and hewn. Granite is the first feature which strangers visiting Dartmoor notice, even before the grazing animals, because in many places it outcrops in the strange shapes of the tors, famously in one case in the form of a crouching hound which much influenced Conan Doyle's mind. The names of the tors tell much of local legend and folklore and association—the hound, kite, crow, fox, hart, the goat, the vixen, mist and wind and laughter, a bell, a cromlech, a seat. Granite is also visible where it appears to spill down the slopes of hills in blocks of various sizes detached from the tors themselves in ancient geological time. The blocks are known locally as clitters, an Old-English word meaning 'loose stones', and Clitters is the name of a farm to the south of the rock-strewn slopes of Sheeps Tor (also of a settlement on the north-east flank of Bodmin Moor, likewise a granitic upland; Clithers, perched on the moorland edge in Chagford parish, may be another such name). There are rather few medieval references to the exploitation of granite, the best coming from the manor of Shaugh Prior, to be mentioned in chapter 3. Tin is another of Dartmoor's inanimate resources, possibly exploited in the Bronze Age, possibly in the sub-Roman period and certainly from the twelfth century onwards. Its exploitation gave employment to many, enriched a few, and has left striking traces in the landscape. Associated with tin working was the seasonal occupation of turf-cutting, undertaken by carbonarii, for turves, after having been turned into peat charcoal, were used to smelt the metal: in her Home Scenes (1846) Rachel Evans described, near Whitchurch, 'the hills in the distance glowing with the conflagration of the turf cutters'. Turf was also the common fuel of Dartmoor farms and households. Dartmoor was distinctive in its many other resources, including bracken and rushes (both mentioned in medieval grants of rights of common), deer, for sanctioned and illegal hunting, and rabbits—possibly introduced quite soon after the Norman Conquest—for which Dartmoor provided an excellent home, far from the temptation of munching arable crops. There were other resources which we might today call 'minor', although they were not thus to the people who used them, such as the partridges of the moors of Sampford Courtenay.
Dartmoor and its parts
How to delimit Dartmoor? One could select a contour line, because height influences temperature and rainfall, and both affect the growth of grass and therefore pastoral management. But which contour? One could use a geological criterion, but to select simply the granite, Dartmoor's main rock, would be to discard many tracts of country, such as Roborough Down, which insiders and outsiders regard as part of the moorland landscape. The present-day boundary between improved land (crops and good pasture) and rough pasture, that is 'moor', is clearly inappropriate as a marker for the past, because tides of cultivation have ebbed and flowed in prehistoric and historic times. To define Dartmoor as including all parishes which have a slice of the rough pastures would be to include large tracts of, say, southern Ugborough or northern Okehampton in which elevation and geology give human landscapes which have no resemblance at all to the common image of Dartmoor. 'There is difficulty in defining the limits of Dartmoor,' wrote the region's great luminary, R. Hansford Worth, in the 1920s and the problem is no easier today. Some complicated combination of all of the measures mentioned above might solve our problem, but that is not attempted here. Instead we shall discuss some distinctive aspects of the material culture of Dartmoor's people in the past, thereby evading the question of boundaries, for the evidence for those topics is sparse and sporadic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dartmoor's Alluring Uplands by Harold Fox, Matthew Tompkins, Christopher Dyer. Copyright © 2012 Matthew Tompkins and Christopher Dyer. Excerpted by permission of University of Exeter Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Colour Plates vii
List of Figures viii
List of Tables x
Editors' Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations xii
Introduction Christopher Dyer Matthew Tompkins 1
1 Definitions and limitations 7
Defining Dartmoor's resources 7
Dartmoor and its parts 12
Transhumance and its types 27
Limitations of this book 43
2 The red tides: impersonal transhumance and the central moor 46
The central moor: ownership and commoners 47
Distances travelled and middlemen 55
Pastoral management: the herdsman's year 61
Livestock: numbers and types 69
3 The red tides: impersonal transhumance and the outer moors 81
Ownership and commoners 81
Pastoral management: drifts, structures, strays 88
Perambulation and dispute resolution 94
Order and disorder: outer moors and the central moor 99
4 Personal transhumance: distant detachments 108
Cockington and Dewdon 108
Ipplepen, Abbotskerswell and their links in
Detached parts of the hundreds of Exminster, Wonford and Kerswell 114
Kenton with Heatree 117
Paignton and its parts 120
Lifton and Sourton 123
Northlew, Venn and Lettaford 125
Tavistock and Cudlipp 126
Bickleigh and Sheepstor 128
The significance of the detachments 129
5 Personal transhumance: archaeology, topography, place-names and history 139
Archaeology and topography 140
Place-names and history: economy and society 148
6 Domesday Book and beyond: the transition from personal to impersonal transhumance 158
The role of colonists 158
The role of lords 166
The role of the Crown 181
7 Dartmoor and beyond 191
Droveways 191
Pastoral husbandry 210
The implications of transhumance for lowland farming 220
Conclusion Christopher Dyer Matthew Tompkins 224
Notes 229
Bibliography 258
Index 275