The following discussion came about following a review of old local maps and documents held in the Record Office in Matlock, alongside fieldwork on the ground. Reading the landscape is a satisfying pastime in itself, and thinking about the names our ancestors gave to the fields and topography around them may help to give us an insight into their worldview. The realisation that there may well be more than one or two burial mounds in our ancient parish came after quite a long period of study but the recognition that there may once have been very many more came after putting map and documentary evidence together in one afternoon following a discussion with the Rev. Will Bates (retired) and my wife, Kay. That the area had a name, Ffyvelowes, or Five Lowes, made it even more astonishing.
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Figure 1. Excerpt from the Gresley Processional Map. DRO reference D77/8/102 |
An undated document held in the DRO is a 19th century transcript by John Morewood Gresley of the earlier paper held in the family archive, and although undated a little research helps us to resolve that. The relevant passages are:
ffyrrst ý saye that the lands & ground in ffylowes & Brydgemore feld were Mr Appulbyes land who had no land in Derbye shyre & sold ye same to Mr Grriffyn of Dyngley/ & also saye yt one Thomas Holland of Lynton did occupye the same & payde for ye same iiis iiiid by yere to . . . . . & after hym one Ric Coke did occupye the same wth his house in Overseale & payde ye Rent to his Mrs Baylye of Overseale
Rendered in modern English this becomes ‘First they say that the lands and ground in Fivelowes and Bridgemore field were Mr Appleby’s land, who had no land in Derbyshire and sold the same to Mr Griffin of Dingley/ and also say that one Thomas Holland of Linton did occupy the same and paid for the same three shillings and four pence by year to . . . . . [presumably the name was illegible to Gresley or missing from the original] and after him one Richard Coke did occupy the same with his house in Overseal and paid the rent to his Mrs Bailey of Overseal.’
The following passage is as follows:
It they saye that there is land in ffylowes yt belongeth the fferme in Overseale to ye valewe of iii akers wch John Kelynge nowe occupieth of Overseale & payeth to ye fferme fo the same viiid by yere
Which is ‘Item: They say that there is land in Fivelowes that belongs to the farm in Overseal to the value of three acres which John Kelling now occupies of Overseal and pays the farm the same eight pence by year’.
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Figure 2. The passages from the 1578 document mentioning Fivelowes. Original held in DRO. |
In a note at the side of the entry Gresley also copied the following:
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Figure 3. Detail showing the comment at the side of the main entry. |
‘More yt W Wakelyns close lyeth betwixt fylowes and coton pke’.
This seems to place a close or enclosed field belonging to Wakelin between Fyvelowes in the east and Coton Park (not the mining houses in Linton, the estate and farm near Grangewood) in the west. As there is no later field name corresponding with Ffyvelowes we must consider the possibility that it was the name of an area rather than a single field, which seems also to be implied by the statement that there is 'land in Fivelowes that belongs to the farm' ie Fivelowes is divided into smaller parcels of land.
The relevance here is not the sixteenth century dispute over the land ownership, but the name meaning and location of Fylowes or Fyvelowes itself, apparently close to the then county boundary between Leicestershire and Derbyshire, Seale parish then belonging in Leicestershire, and the parish boundary with Linton in Derbyshire. The Gresley Processional Map reference and the documentary evidence dating to circa 1578[1]gives us the name Ffyvelowes (one of its spelling variants). What the map also gives us is the artist’s interpretation of three of the five mounds (see figure 6). In the open fields and directly below the word Est (east) and next to the word Ffyvelowes is a depiction of mounds that can only be representations of the lowes or burial mounds that were still visible in the landscape at that time.[2] By the time of the 1626 survey Booke for the Feilds of Over Seale, the name has been lost, as has Brydgemore Feld (Bridgemoor Field). It is unclear from the passage as to whether Brydgemore Feld and Ffylowes belonging at one time to Mr Appleby were adjacent to each other or connected in any other way than through him owning the two land parcels.
This leaves us with the knowledge that Fyvelowes existed, were visible in the landscape in 1578 and situated to the north of Overseal close to or forming the boundary with Linton. It is not possible to state with any certainty how the barrows were arranged, whether as a cluster or as a linear feature, nor in fact whether there were originally more of them. Based on other sites a cluster is perhaps most likely. These barrows on the northern edge of Overseal, adjacent to the western edge of the Woulds may perhaps have extended over an area corresponding to several modern fields. That the Seale Wood or Great Wood extended as far as the barrows themselves seems likely and the location of the five barrow mounds on the highest point of the village and in fact the highest point on the western edge of the Woulds must surely be of significance. This is important, it means that the people who lived in this area at least as early as the Bronze Age were claiming an area that corresponds to approximately the same area as the later greater parish of Seal and the Woulds. This did not then change until 1800CE when the Woulds were enclosed through an act of parliament, the people separated from the land and the modern parishes created, although themselves based on the manorial system. Which means that the greater Seale parish boundary was created very early in its history and remained virtually unchanged for perhaps 3,000 years.
This seems at first like an extravagant claim but there are precedents for this.[3] Indeed, many Anglo-Saxon settlements across the country may reflect territorial boundaries that are coterminous with Bronze Age ones. The similarities in the use of watercourses and other topographical features in the landscape - high points and hills for example - also aligns with the examples elsewhere in the country. Our difficulty in Seale is that all of our barrows have either been ploughed out or destroyed by opencast mining and no charters exist from the Anglo-Saxon period for our parish. In some ways their loss is not surprising, by the time the Tudor map was created, the mounds at Fivelowes would already have been more than 2,500 years old.
The work of the DAS in discovering the burnt mound and the Birchington House burial mound has helped enormously. The territorial markers therefore seem to imply that the Seal Brook in the west, Fivelowes to the north and perhaps as far as the Hooborough Brook in the east marked the territory claimed for agriculture and pastoral, although the area between Fivelowes and the Hooborough Brook was perhaps a debatable land on the edge of the Woulds. The north-western boundary was the great wood, the remnant of which we now think of as Grangewood, with the conjectural barrows at Bramborough and Whitborough along with the Shellbrook to the east acting as territorial markers for the common grazing and other requirements. The River Mease provided the southern boundary and the proposed Hooborough barrow along the brook of the same name linking the ford at Acresford to Bramborough and then to Whitborough further east. Timber requirements were provided by the great wood.
Without further evidence beyond that provided by DAS’s archaeological work and the evidence provided by placenames and laid out here, this claim for some, if not all, of the ancient Seale parish boundary having been laid out in the Bronze Age is a tantalising possibility, likelihood even, but for now remains conjectural.
[1] See The Unknown Pilgrim https://sealeshistory.blogspot.com/2021/07/john-morewood-gresleys-19th-century.html
[2] Fyfield may stand here for similar place names in England. See Mills, A.D. The Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names. OUP 1991. The word ‘lowe’ from the Old English hlaw means ‘a burial mound’ and is well attested across the county and England as a whole. See Field, J. English Field Names; a dictionary. David & Charles, Newton Abbot 1072 p: 130, & Cameron, K. The Place-Names of Derbyshire. English Place-Name Sociery Volume XXIX, part three. Appletree Hundred, Repton & Gresley Hundred analyses & indexes. University of Nottingham 1993 p: 734
[3] Spratt, D. A. “Recent British Research on Prehistoric Territorial Boundaries.” Journal of World Prehistory, vol. 5, no. 4, 1991, pp. 439–480. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25800605. Accessed 31 July 2021.
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