Fragments from a medieval archive: the life and death of Sir Robert Constable

This article asks what we can know of historical individuals in pre-Reformation England. While recognizing the challenges of writing medieval biography, it points to the opportunities offered by a range of under-utilized sources for engaging both with medieval individuals and the pre-modern world more generally. Using the records of numerous property disputes and related cases litigated at the Westminster equity courts, it examines the actions and attitudes of one individual: Sir Robert Constable of Flamborough (c. 1478–1537), a Yorkshire landowner who was frequently brought before the courts for his involvement in local property disputes and ultimately implicated in the Pilgrimage of Grace. It explores Constable's activities through the multiple and often contradictory versions of events presented to the king, his advisors and the law courts, assessing his motivations and character while also recognizing that the fragmentary nature of the evidence means that Constable will always be an uncertain subject. In focussing on Constable and his connections to the lives and landscapes around him, the article also highlights much about the experiences and agency of the medieval men and women who shared his world. It considers the local personalities and community politics surrounding episodes of enclosure, building on recent work by social historians, archaeologists and historical geographers in order to draw attention to the roles played by ordinary and not-so-ordinary individuals in shaping the landscape. The paper not only underlines the importance of thinking geographically about the pre-modern world, but also goes some way towards ‘peopling’ the medieval countryside, conceptualizing it as a landscape brought into being through the attitudes and actions of those living and working within it

Subverting the ground : private property and public protest in the sixteenth-century Yorkshire Wolds

As a forum for litigating property disputes, the Star Chamber left records that provide crucial evidence for investigating the way people understood and experienced the landscape around them at precisely the time that the modern concept of property in land was emerging. Using cases from the Yorkshire Wolds, the paper explores the roles litigation, direct action and riots played in both asserting and subverting property interests, with the aim of reclaiming something of the materiality of the events reported in the court. Particular attention is paid to two key practices by which enclosure and common rights could be negotiated 'on the ground': that is, by grazing animals on the common fields or closes and by ploughing up - or subverting - grassland

Elite women and the agricultural landscape, 1700–1830

Social and economic histories of the long eighteenth century have largely ignored women as a class of landowners and improvers. 1700 to 1830 was a period in which the landscape of large swathes of the English Midlands was reshaped – both materially and imaginatively – by parliamentary enclosure and a bundle of other new practices. Outside the Midlands too, local landscapes were remodelled in line with the improving ideals of the era. Yet while we know a great deal about the men who pushed forward schemes for enclosure and sponsored agricultural improvement, far less is known about the role played by female landowners and farmers and their contributions to landscape change.Drawing on examples from across Georgian England, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 offers a detailed study of elite women’s relationships with landed property, specifically as they were mediated through the lens of their estate management and improvement. This highly original book provides an explicitly feminist historical geography of the eighteenth-century English rural landscape. It addresses important questions about propertied women’s role in English rural communities and in Georgian society more generally, whilst contributing to wider cultural debates about women’s place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain. It will be of interest to those working in Historical and Cultural Geography, Social, Economic and Cultural History, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies and Landscape Studies

Chapter 4 Improving the estate

Women like Jane Ashley, Amabel Hume-Campbell, Anna Maria Agar, Sarah Dawes and Mary Cotterel were all involved in pushing through parliamentary enclosure awards, while Elizabeth Prowse introduced wide-ranging agricultural improvements after the informal enclosure of the open fields at Wicken. The contributions of these women and others like them to a bundle of related practices – including parliamentary enclosure and agricultural improvement, but also non-agricultural sources of estate income – are discussed in this chapter

Landscape, territory and common rights in medieval East Yorkshire

The paper examines issues of landscape, territory and common rights, with specific reference to the multi-township, multi-manor parish of Burton Agnes in the north-east Yorkshire Wolds. Burton was a territorial unit of considerable antiquity which survived as a distinct estate until the late twelfth century when it was split between coheiresses. This produced a complex territorial and tenurial situation, characterised in the later medieval period by ongoing conflicts over common rights between neighbouring manorial families on behalf of themselves and their various tenants. Crucially — given the lack of adequate commons governance structure — such conflicts proved not only almost impossible to resolve but also productive in documentary terms. This paper examines the far-reaching consequences of the 1199 division of the estate in two linked sets of sources: firstly, by using legal documents and estate records to examine conflicts about common rights in the parish moor in the later medieval period; and secondly and relatedly, by utilising standing buildings, landscape and documentary sources to interrogate the built landscape as a site to articulate territorial claims (including to rights and resources in the parish moor) and the patronage thereof by local manorial families. In this sense, the paper both traces the consequences of earlier territorial arrangements and explores the range of strategies by which local manorial families might make and mark territory in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In doing so, the paper makes the case for writing ‘grounded’ historical geographies of the commons which both set individual commons within their wider temporal, spatial and territorial contexts and recognise them as always entangled within the broader politics and landscape of the parish

Women, Land and Property, Then and Now: An Afterword

The papers in this special issue make an important contribution to a growing body of work, exploring not only the ways gender and property were co-constituted in Britain and the British colonies in the long eighteenth century but also the sources scholars must work with in uncovering women's lives and experiences. In this afterword, I explore some of the possibilities and prospects for developing research in this area, highlighting new directions and themes, as well as teasing out some of the wider implications of this persuasive and fascinating collection

Chapter 3 Managing the estate

Using material drawn from across eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, this chapter charts single, widowed and married women’s contribution to estate management. It explores women’s role in the financial management of landed estates as well as other more ‘hands on’ aspects of estate management, including setting and collecting rents, negotiating with tenants about rent, tenancies and repairs, supervising home farms, managing timber resources and otherwise determining estate polic

Chapter 4 Improving the estate

Women like Jane Ashley, Amabel Hume-Campbell, Anna Maria Agar, Sarah Dawes and Mary Cotterel were all involved in pushing through parliamentary enclosure awards, while Elizabeth Prowse introduced wide-ranging agricultural improvements after the informal enclosure of the open fields at Wicken. The contributions of these women and others like them to a bundle of related practices – including parliamentary enclosure and agricultural improvement, but also non-agricultural sources of estate income – are discussed in this chapter

Occupy! Historical geographies of property, protest and the commons, 1500-1850

This paper examines issues surrounding protest, trespass and occupation - brought to the fore as a result both of recent social movements including the global Occupy movement and of emerging critical discourses about so-called ‘new enclosures’ - through a historical lens. Wary of histories of property and protest that rely heavily on the notion of the ‘closing of the commons’, the authors present a different story about the solidification of property rights, the securitisation of space and the gradual emergence of the legal framework through which protest is now disciplined. They do so via an exploration of three episodes in the making of property in land and three associated moments of resistance, each enacted via the physical occupation of common land. The first examines strategies for opposing enclosure in early sixteenth-century England; the second considers the Diggers’ reimagining of property and the commons in the mid seventeenth century; and the third analyses the challenge to property rights offered by squatting and small-scale encroachments in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In so doing, the paper begins to rethink the relations between past and contemporary protest, considering how a more nuanced account of the history of common rights, enclosure and property relations might nevertheless leave space for new solidarities which have the potential to challenge the exercise of arbitrary power

Turf wars : conflict and cooperation in the management of Wallingfen (East Yorkshire), 1281-1781

This paper explores the origins and management of Wallingfen, a large tract of waterlogged marshes and carrs near Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Subject to annual flooding throughout much of its history, the area was utilized by the surrounding parishes and townships throughout the medieval and early modern period, providing a range of important resources to the neighbouring communities including fish, fowl, turves and summer grazing. In this it had much in common with wetland commons elsewhere in England and on the Continent. Yet while the East Anglian Fens and the Lancashire mosses were being drained and enclosed in the seventeenth century – as too were the wetlands around the southern shore of the North Sea Basin in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands – Wallingfen remained wet, marshy and entirely unsuitable for arable agriculture long into the eighteenth century. In other ways too, Wallingfen was highly unusual. Not only was a true form of intercommoning practiced here until parliamentary enclosure under an act of 1777, but there is evidence too of a cooperative system of wetland management which fell outside the direct authority of the neighbouring manors or any higher form of overlordship. The survival of precedent rolls and notebooks preserving extracts from the annual court rolls of Wallingfen from as early as 1425 gives a fortuitous and rare picture of the governance of a large wetland common and its resources over a period of several centuries