medieval-atlas/economic-development/286

Transcription

Medieval rural settlement The documentary evidence for medieval rural settlement tends to be vague or allusive. As yet, field work has not made good this deficiency. A growing number of possible medieval sites have been surveyed, but few have been excavated or dated accurately. Moreover, where sites have been excavated, as at Lix (Perthshire), it has emphasised rather than resolved the problems involved. To a degree, pre-improvement estate plans drawn up during the eighteenth century support some inferences about earlier forms, but their facile use can attach a false stability to settlement morphology. Such difficulties must make any generalisations provisional. With this proviso firmly in mind, we may tentatively assert that the commonest form of settlement was the small fermtoun, an irregular cluster of farmsteads, outbuildings and kailyards occupied by the co-or joint-tenants who shared possession of the toun. The small scale ofsuch settlement (generally 2 to 6 tenants) can be ascribed to the fragmented nature of good-quality, undrained arable soil and to a process whereby growing ferm-touns tended to fission into smaller units. Its random plan can be attributed to the absence ofa formally-designated area for the farmsteads and to their part construction out of perishable raw materials like wattle and turf. As in medieval England, the ordinary peasant dwelling needed regular replacement and, over time, shifted between different positions and alignments. Although the most widespread form of rural settlement, small, irregular touns were not the only one. The layout ofsome pre-improvement estate plans discloses a greater semblance of order, perhaps by being arranged on a one-or two-row basis or around a simple, open courtyard. Possibly these more orderly plans were associated with the wider adoption of stone-built housing and more efficient farming over the seventeenth century. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that some had medieval antecedents. Scattered references to tofts from the twelfth century onwards bear this out. In theory, tofts were allotments specifically set aside for the farmsteads of a toun, an area of private space. They imposed a stable and, usually, an orderly framework of bounds around the farmsteads of the toun and ipso faCIO limitations on their movement. Toft systems were laid out on a one-or two-row basis and even on either side of a green (for example Midlem in Roxburghshire). There are also descriptions of 'full' or 'half tofts as if there was a calculation to their size, whilst the possession of others was clearly seen as betokening the possession of a particular holding, but the extent to which their size or sequence of allocation was linked to that of holdings has still to be demonstrated. Indeed, whilst we find touns in which each landholder was required, as on the Coupar Angus Abbey estate, to 'set his bygyn apon his awin toft' , there are hints that this was not the case everywhere. The landholders who shared a ferm-toun faced the choice of either dividing their portions into separate, consolidated holdings or laying them out in the form of intermixed strips (or runrig). Although the first of these options was used to a limited extent, runrig was the more widely-adopted strategy, illustrated here at Auchencraw and one that invariably forced tenants into a degree of cooperation over husbandry. Prior to the improving movement, the toun economy was organised around areas of intensive cropping or infield, of alternate grass and arable husbandry or outfield and common grazings. The precise cropping of infield and outfield varied from one region to another. Generally speaking, infields in the more fertile east and south-east might carry a crop of wheat as well as the staple grains of oats and bere plus a crop of peas or beans, whereas those of the north and west were subjected to a monotonous cycle of oats and barley. The main differences in outfield cropping practice lay in the proportion cropped and the duration of each cropping cycle, with touns to the north and north-west developing the more exploitive system. Rights of access to common grazing were contingent on possession of a holding, with the amount of stock grazed by each landholder being carefully stented. Where pasture was abundant, the more distant grazings were exploited through a shieling system. There is ample evidence that shieling systems were initially developed in areas like Larnmermuir as well as throughout the Highlands. However, with the development of the monastic economy, hill pasture in the southern uplands was used to support a more independent pastoral economy. Outwardly, infield, outfield and common grazing represent different sectors of farm activity. However, they possess a further dimension of meaning. Ab origine, infield formed that part of the medieval township which was assessed as arable and measured in terms of standard tenemental units such as merklands or husbandlands, whilst outfield represented a later expansion, perhaps as late as the fifteenth or sixteenth century, into the surrounding waste. The temporary cropping of outfield can be attributed to the fact that the only manure which it received was that provided by the tathing of livestock during the summer prior to its cultivation, so that its limited reserves offertility declined until, after three or four years of cropping, it was abandoned to grass again. Location Map RAD 286