Of Boroughs and Barrows: Locating the lost burial mounds of Seale. Part one- Five Lowes

 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.

 

The exact location of Fivelowes is now lost to us but with some careful reading of documentary and map evidence we may be able to locate it.  The various 16^th century documents that refer to it have different spellings, but the name is perfectly clear: Five Lowes.  The Gresley Processional Map of circa 1570 indicates an area to the north side of Overseal in a brief reference: ‘Ffyvelowes in leicestershire & in ye lordshippe of ov seale & in the tenure of wm wakelyn’.  Rendered more legibly to the modern eye this becomes ‘Fivelowes in Leicestershire and in the lordship of Overseal and in the tenure of William Wakelin’. 

Figure 1.  Excerpt from the Gresley Processional Map. DRO reference D77/8/102

An undated document held in the DRO is a 19^th 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 y^e same to Mr Grriffyn of Dyngley/ & also saye y^t one Thomas Holland of Lynton did occupye the same & payde for y^e same iii^s iiii^d by yere to . . . . . & after hym one Ric Coke did occupye the same w^th his house in Overseale & payde y^e 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 y^t belongeth the fferme in Overseale to y^e valewe of iii akers wch John Kelynge nowe occupieth of Overseale & payeth to y^e fferme fo the same viii^d 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’.

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: 

Figure 3. Detail showing the comment at the side of the main entry.

‘Mo^re y^t 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.

I am indebted to Sue Brown of Packington for help in understanding the wording of the Tudor map and Gresley's notes.

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[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.

Of Seales and Sallows: the Seale place-name meaning.

 

The Oxford Book of English Place-names gives the meaning of Seal as deriving from the related word shaw meaning trees.  The very helpful Key to English Place Names website from the University of Nottingham is useful but brief in its description of seal meaning “a small copse” and breaks down the elements and their meanings as 

·    nether (Middle English) Down, downward, low.

·    uferra (Old English) Higher.

·    scegel (Anglian) A small wood.[1]

(The references are given as: Watts; Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-names p: 431. A.D. Mills; Dictionary of English Place-Names p: 343 and Cameron; Place-names of Derbyshire p: 645).

The oldest written reference we have for Seale is from Domesday Book, written in 1087 when the villages come under the parish name of Seale.  The settlements of the two Seals were considered as a single village with the hamlet of Overseal thought of as exactly that, a hamlet of the wider village, certainly of the wider parish.  It is hard to know whether the two villages were differentiated by prefixes and called by their later recorded names Uferra-salh and Nether-salh, and whilst likely, we will probably never know that for certain.  Domesday refers to Seale and Alia-Seale, Seale and the ‘other’ Seale, meaning the main village and its outlying northern hamlet.  Other parts of the Seale parish, Boothorpe and Donisthorpe, are included by their separate names.  Gunby must have been occupied as a farmstead as the name is Anglo-Danish, but within the wider Netherseal village and therefore not recorded as a separate entity at Domesday.

We can investigate the name meaning further as the word seal has a still more direct link to the willow tree, or a sub-species of willow, the sallow.  Sallow has the meaning "shrubby willow plant", from the Old English sealh, the Anglian -salh or the Old Norse -selja, all words coming from the proto- Germanic root *saljhon and ultimately from the proto-Indo-European language *sal(i)k all meaning "willow".[2]  The Latin name salix for the genera and the modern name sallow hold the key to understanding the village placename and link back many thousands of years to a language no longer spoken.

Understanding the name derivation for the word Seale is complicated by the fact that the Anglo-Saxon word sele could also mean ‘hall’.[3]  This gives us the old word sheiling, often used for small shepherd’s huts, sheds or similar buildings, and without further documented evidence the derivation of Seale must be considered in the context of its wider surroundings.  This context for us has to be the landscape, and especially the landscape as it would have been in the past, before enclosures allowed modern land drainage and landscape engineering to effectively drain farmland.  All of England was much wetter and marshier in the past, meaning that crop and food production, and farmland drainage and irrigation was managed through the use of ridge and furrow.  Overseal and Netherseal sit between two particularly wet areas, the Mease Valley and the Woulds.  The Mease valley yields especially productive soil and good farmland, across to the Hooborough Brook, beyond which much of the soil becomes a heavy clay and is much more difficult for farming.  The Woulds themselves, on a much higher elevation, provided summer pasture for cattle and other livestock animals, along with other plants that yielded much-needed foods, medicines and building materials.   

Place name dating tells us that the Seale parish was settled in the second wave of Anglian incursions (not Saxon), probably in the later 6th century (after 550CE) and the Anglian word ‘salh’ (pronounced ‘sale’) gives us our village names.  The name is also remembered in the local pronunciation of the word and family name ’Sale’.  Locals still pronounce the village names as ‘Ovversale’ or ‘Owersale’, and ‘Nithersale’, and this is a connection to the same root word.  What this means for us is that the place name ending “seal” demonstrates that the area was (and still is) readily populated by species of willow tree, sallows.  A stroll along the river Mease, or the Hooborough brook, the Kesbrook, Sealbrook, Shellbrook or the other watercourses that drain into the Mease is also a stroll amongst the willows and sallows. (Shellbrook, across the Woulds on the Ashby road is another derivation of seal-brook and is nothing to do with shells).  In Appleby Magna the Sale Gutter is a boundary ditch not named after its proximity to the Seales (it is on the far side of their parish from us) but for its value in creating withies from the crop of willows and sallows.

The use of the word ‘settled ‘is probably confusing here, the area was certainly already settled by the British and earlier peoples; finds of Roman or Romano-British origins indicate that the area was settled and farmed, and the fact that Bronze-Age burial mounds occupied one, and maybe more hilltops, along with the Bronze Age axe head nearby suggest that the parish has been dwelt in and farmed for very much longer.  What the Bronze-Age, Iron-Age and Romano-British peoples called the parish though is unknown.  Settlement by the incoming Anglian invaders may well have been aggressive, although place names such as Walton and Bretby seem to suggest that at least some British people remained.   It seems likely that the incoming Anglian people gradually absorbed the natives into their own culture, supplanting it entirely.

Willows and their sub species - osiers, sallows and so on - were of enormous importance in the past as they have a wide variety of uses- from baskets, fences and houses, to fish traps and medicines.  Withy baskets of every size were important in every house.  The houses themselves were timber framed with withy walls, the wattle, over which was layered a mixture of wet clay/soil/ animal dung and straw or rushes, the daub, giving us the wattle and daub walls.  Withy hurdles were vital in livestock management, the open field system required cattle and sheep to be kept off the crop as there were very few hedgerows in the landscape (they are a feature of the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries) and Seale had willows in abundance.  For basket making, withies are cut in the winter, boiled for up to 10 hours to soften the bark and loosen the fibres, stripped of their bark and can then be made into baskets of every conceivable size, shape, and use.  Hurdles do not need to have their bark removed.

The early English are not thought to have differentiated between the pussy willow and the goat willow, properly known as the Great Sallow and the Grey Sallow, both trees being quite similar in appearance, with similar silky catkins.  Charters surviving from the AS period do occasionally use sallows as boundary markers, thane ealde seale ‘the old sallow’ occurs in Winterborne Tomson, Dorset, and tha woche sæle ‘the crooked sallow’ in Pensax, Worcestershire.[4]  If the word ‘seal’ or ‘sale’ for sallows was so common in the past it is not unreasonable to expect to see it in use as a place name across the country.  It turns out that this is the case, although the word is often hidden in plain sight.  Place names referencing sallows abound, stretching right across the country from the Saxon south to the Anglian north and can all be traced to their ‘sallow’ origins.  These include Selworthy, Somerset; Selham, West Sussex; Silton, Dorset; Salford End, Bedfordshire; Salehurst, East Sussex; Selwood, Somerset; Selby, Yorkshire; the city of Salford itself is named from sealhford, the sallows by the ford; there are very many more.

By examining the name meanings closely, we can add detail to the more general place name meanings given by the major authorities, a luxury and convenience they do not have, and we may examine our local place names in much greater context by looking around us at the landscape, informed by our local knowledge of the past.  Every time someone speaks the word Seale they are using a word from language that has its roots in the earliest language spoken in Europe.  That uttered breath carries a very ancient meaning, whether we know it or not.  Overseal, being on relatively high ground on the western edge of the Ashby Woulds, is “above the sallows” and Netherseal, low down in the Mease valley, is “below or amongst the sallows”.  When we speak aloud the names of our villages we are connecting with our ancient past and the world our ancestors saw and named.

Figure 1. A view across the Woulds. © Mark Knight 2020

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[1] http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/map/place/Derbyshire/Nether%20and%20Overseal Accessed 28^th December 2020

[2] An asterisk at the beginning of the word indicates that it has been etymologically reconstructed.

[3] Hooke, D. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore, Landscape. Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2010 p:229

[4] Hooke, D. Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore, Landscape. Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2010 p:229

Of Tithe Barns & Smoke Pennies

Like today, throughout recorded history a variety of taxes and tithes were raised on the people of England by those in positions of power and authority, and so too the villages and villagers of Seale Parish were bound by dues imposed on them by church and state.  Amongst these taxes paid to the church were the annual tithes, usually a percentage (one tenth) of the harvest, whether that be in grain or fleeces, which were transported to a tithe barn owned by the church.  Large parts of Overseal and Netherseal were owned by Merevale Abbey in the medieval period and different taxes and tithes would have been due at various points in the year.  Whether there was a tithe barn in the parish and where that tithe barn was located is not known and it may be that either the tithe was transported to Merevale itself or paid as a commuted sum in cash.  

 

There may be a clue in local place names which can help us here.  The word ‘grange’ has the meaning of ‘outlying farm with tithe barns belonging to a monastery’ and there are two in the ancient parish.  Seale Grange in Netherseal and Grange Farm in Overseal are both contenders and may both have had a tithe barn attached.  A further clue in Overseal’s case is found in the old field names; opposite Grange Farm are two fields (presumably once one) that are both called ‘Barn Yard’ and it is possible therefore that the tithe barn was located opposite the farm, which was owned by the Abbey at Merevale, across what was once a lane and is now the busy A444.  

 

Figure 1. Grange Farm and Barn Yard from the 'lost' Enclosure Award Map circa 1755.  Was one of the buildings adjacent to the farm a replacement tithe barn?

Similarly, Grangewood was an outlying wood owned, at least in part, by Merevale Abbey.  Seale Grange, to the west of Netherseal, was an outlying farm also owned by the Abbey and was probably leased out rather than operated by the monks themselves.  It is also the case that tithe barns can be associated with the parish church.  There are some remarkable medieval tithe barns remaining around the country, although they were often replaced by later brick buildings.  If it is the case that the barn associated with Grange Farm stood across the road from it, then the barn was gone by the middle of the 18^th century, although there were a small number of brick-built outbuildings adjacent to the farm, with one of these now having been converted to a dwelling.  The map image showing Grange Farm and the fields called Barn Yard dates to the eighteenth century, and the image of Seale Grange dates to the Tudor period and shows an outbuilding that may be a tithe barn.  The image is taken from a remarkable map that will be the subject of a later post.  The earliest that Seal Grange is mentioned in the records seems to date to around 1216.[1]

 

Figure 2.  Seale Grange from the Gresley Processional Map of the Seale Estate.

Other payments involved the collection of the tax and a procession to pay those dues, which could lead to confrontation.  The collection of Peter’s Pence began as an annual donation under Alfred the Great from England to the Pope in Rome (actually to support the English College in Rome) and lasted until the Reformation.  Pentecostal dues were collected at Whitsun and were a hearth-tax or chimney tax and were therefore known as ‘smoke farthings’ or ‘Whitsun farthings’ (a farthing is a quarter penny- a ‘fourthing’ or ‘fourth part’ of a penny).  Smoke farthings were collected and taken to the cathedral of the see in which the parish was located, which involved a procession of the clergy and representatives from the parish, and until the middle of the 12^th century in the case of Seale parish this entailed a journey to Lincoln Cathedral.  This was long journey, fraught with difficulty and even once the party arrived in Lincoln, fights were common between parishes over precedence of who should enter first (Whitsun battles were common across the country) and no doubt the parishioners of Seale were witness to, if not actual combatants in these brawls.  Bishop Robert de Chesney issued a mandate in the middle of the 12^th century that allowed distant parishes to process instead to suitable churches chosen by the archdeacon, and Seale parish was expected to process to St Helen’s at Ashby de la Zouch, no doubt a significant relief to the locals.  Whether this had fallen into decline by the early 16^th century or whether Seale was paying its smoke farthings to Merevale Abbey or elsewhere is uncertain, but an archdeaconry court case of 1509 reinforced the fact that parishioners were supposed to process to Ashby.[2]  Whitsun was a major festival in the church calendar, and these processions were often the opportunity for a celebration, and it’s tempting to imagine the whole of the parish processing to Ashby in their finery for a decent knees-up, followed by a gentle stagger home over the Woulds later…

 

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[1] DRO reference no. D77/1/7/13

[2] https://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/Courtneyvolume72-2vsm.pdf Accessed 8th December 2020

The Industrialisation of the Ashby Woulds 1700 - 1900

By the end of the eighteenth century industrialisation was an irreversible process; the population trebled from some six million to eighteen million between 1750 and 1850, the economic changes brought about by the process of industrialisation and the dramatic changes in agricultural methods resulted in an acceptance of exploitation of people and machines in return for power and wealth.[1]  This discussion focusses on the changes to the landscape brought about by industrialisation and agricultural change in Britain during the period and focusses on the Ashby Woulds on the border of North-West Leicestershire and South Derbyshire.[2].

 

Prior to 1800, the Woulds had been the waste for the parish of Seale to the west and to Ashby de la Zouch to the east, with the Shellbrook (deriving from the word Seal) the approximate halfway point and dividing line. It had been used as common pasture, and for the collection of reeds for thatch, flooring and basketmaking and for the collection of plants for food and medicines.  During this period of industrialisation and agricultural change, many significant landscape changes took place; not least of which was enclosure.  Parliamentary enclosure had been an ongoing process since the mediaeval period but accelerated towards the end of the eighteenth century; between 1750 and 1830 some four thousand individual Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure were passed in England, about twenty per cent of the county’s surface area.[3]  The Ashby Woulds were enclosed by Act in 1800 following an application by Francis Rawdon-Hastings (1754-1826), 1st Marquis of Hastings and 2nd Earl of Moira in an award in which he was “entitled to the soil and minerals on or within the Common or Waste Ground”.[4]  The wording of this part of the award gives an idea of the nature of the soil on large parts of the Ashby Woulds; that it was largely unproductive as farmland and Rawdon-Hastings’ interests were in the mineral deposits.

 

The heavy clay soils of the Midlands acted to delay the process of enclosure as landholdings and field strips tended to be widely separated and when it did occur, enclosure could be a traumatic business involving depopulation of villages.[5]  The reasons behind the move towards enclosure are complex; starting with the late mediaeval agreements to enclose large areas for sheep pasture and moving into enclosure for political and personal gain.  After 1750 individual Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure circumvented the difficulties especially associated with the heavy clays of the Midlands - namely that of disconnected land strips - by groups of landowners banding together to petition parliament jointly under a single Bill, or by more unilateral action of larger landowners, including members of the clergy.[6]  The ensuing survey and award were supervised by a commissioner to attempt to prevent penalisation of smaller landowners.[7]  It was clear from the start that anyone wishing to be allocated land would have to pay a share of the cost of enclosure and here we can see the start of a problem that has been debated ever since: how fair or unfair was Parliamentary Enclosure?  Writing in 1813, the surveyor John Farey was clear on the subject: 'There cannot remain a doubt, but Inclosures have been and continue to be highly beneficial, in every point of view…'[8]

 

Farey then goes on however, to relate a problematic story: 'The history which I heard, of the Inclosure of the Ashby Wolds, appeared to me to be very extraordinary.  In the beginning of the first year of the Commissioners’ acting, they declared the extinction of the Common Rights, and after driving off the cattle, the Wolds lay entirely unoccupied, while the public Roads were fencing off; and during the next two years the Commissioners let the large fields thus formed, to be either grazed or ploughed, at the option of the Tenants; and 200 Acres were ploughed and cropped a second time with Oats, and the whole produce carried off, by those temporary Tenants, before the Allotments were made; altho’ as I was informed, the Valuation or Qualitying was done in the first year!'[9]

 

There were others from all levels of society who were less enthusiastic about the scenic and social effects of enclosure;[10] the poet John Clare wrote in 1821:

 

Inclosure, thou’rt curse upon the land,

And tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann’d.[11]

 

Or then there was a popular epigram that circulated widely at a time concomitant with Clare’s poem:

 

The fault is great in man or woman

Who steals a goose from off the common,

But what can plead a man’s excuse

Who steals a common from the goose?[12]

 

Perhaps the act of vandalism at the Earl of Moira’s proposed new mine on December 4^th 1800 was perpetrated by angry dispossessed commoners.  Two large iron bars were wedged into the Earl’s deep trial shaft, sabotaging further work there: 'the Works at the shaft were completely stopped to the great injury of Lord Moira, the proprietors of the Ashby Canal and the country by preventing that speedy and expected supply of coal of which the trials at this mine afforded a confident prospect and which are greatly wanted in the country'.[13]

 

Joseph Wilkes.

Coal was the fuel of the Industrial Revolution and although relatively small scale production had been happening in the areas immediately beyond the Ashby Woulds since at least the Tudor period, (coal outcrops at Overseal, Measham, Ravenstone and on Gresley Common but lies in deep, relatively thick bands below the Ashby Woulds)[14] it was with the opening of the Ashby Canal that exploitation of the area could begin in earnest.  The canal was one of only a number of achievements of Joseph Wilkes (1733-1805) and his associates, local highly talented entrepreneurs determined to develop an integrated industrial community and Wilkes “must rank as one of the most outstanding community builders in the Midlands” during this period.  Wilkes typifies the entrepreneurial spirit often connected with the age; he had interests in textile manufacture, brickmaking, mining, agricultural improvement, road building, banking, metal-working, canal building and river and waterway improvement, and tramway design, alongside cheese-making, animal breeding and farming.[15]

 

Drainage problems in his coal mines had caused Wilkes to purchase steam engines to pump water from them but problems with underground faults meant that large scale production from his own mines was difficult.  Surveys showed that substantial amounts of high-quality coal, ironstone and clay lay deep beneath the Woulds;[16] indeed it is the geology of the coal and clay that make up so much of the Woulds that caused it to be such poor farming land.[17] Contemporary description tells us that it was a 'tract of land absolutely waste of 2500 to 3000 acres, much of it cold land, with many rushes, some of it hilly'.[18] The land was one of 'relative sterility, providing grazing for only a few wretched-looking sheep'.[19]

 

Wilkes was concerned about the lack of large scale colliery development and from 1796 onwards he strongly urged the earl of Moira to open collieries on the Woulds.  The Earl was not keen to act until the enclosure award was made as an earlier application had failed due to opposition on financial grounds by the Earl of Huntingdon.  Incentives to the Earl of Moira were offered by Wilkes in the form of low-cost steam engines.[20]  One of these may have been the engine that was housed in the Earl of Moira’s blast furnace which he built on the Woulds at his newly built village of Moira.[21]

 

The widespread introduction of industrial methods to production meant wholesale landscape changes although often with character that reflected the nature of the landscapes they were within; the fast flowing rivers of the north were ideal for operating mills, whereas the East Midlands, with its slower moving, meandering rivers, needed steam engines to power mills.[22]  The geology of an area obviously dictated where mines were dug and first canals and then later, railways, were built to transport coal and other goods in and out of the region.[23]

 

Industrialisation necessitated good transport links and the provision for interconnected roads in the Acts of Enclosure demonstrate this.  What it also did was standardise road widths and improve cartage and provide the basis for a national infrastructure.  The development of regional centres and a self-conscious awareness of differences like dialect acted towards developing a uniformity of regional character.  National governmental oversight of regional affairs accelerated the centralisation of political power and it is perhaps in the reformation of the poor laws in the 1830s and in the move towards enclosure through parliamentary acts from the 1750s that we see this 'meddling of central government' render the provinces ever more dependent upon Westminster.  With the development of industrial centres came migration of workers, expansion of villages, towns and cities, and a general move away from an agrarian to a wage-based economic system; the agricultural depression towards the end of the nineteenth century saw huge numbers of people move from the land to the towns and cities- in the East Midlands this is particularly marked by the expansion of the major towns and cities and the South Derbyshire and Leicestershire coalfield.[24] Expansion of the cities brought with it major environmental problems, the low quality of working class housing the foremost of these.[25]

 

Industrial development of the Ashby Woulds necessitated housing for the influx of workers and their families and the Earl of Moira alongside men like Joseph Wilkes built new houses with bricks from their own brickyards (Wilkes being famous for a double sized brick known as 'Wilkes’ Gobs' which were intended in part to circumscribe the 1785 brick tax and also to speed up house building);[26] Wilkes developed Measham from a village to a small town and the Earl built new housing close to his mining endeavours[27] which became the village of Moira.  Later in the century, as clay working developed into a major industry on the northern edge of the Woulds and in nearby Swadlincote, further settlements occurred; Albert Village was founded and the new village of Woodville grew up around the toll house on the turnpike road from Burton to Ashby-de-la-Zouch.[28] After Wilkes’ death, and despite the best efforts of his successors, Measham went into decline as his creditors were repaid through sale of his business assets and by 1835 Wilkes’ empire had all but collapsed, the lifetime of work put in by Wilkes and his brothers to create a small economic miracle was undone within thirty years of his death.[29]

 

Deep mining for coal had dramatic transformative effects on the landscape beyond the immediate sinking of shafts and associated buildings, roads and canals (and later in the century the railways), it also had major consequences for forests and woodland.  Coal mining requires large amounts of wood to provide props for underground road and roof support and the mines on the Ashby Woulds were no exception.  Seale Wood and Grange Wood had been exploited for timber to supply the mines around Swadlincote and Measham for centuries but with the introduction of several new mines on the Ashby Woulds, Seale Wood was eventually reduced to nothing and replaced by low-grade farmland.[30] The Ordnance Survey (OS) maps (and others) show this gradual reduction of the size of the Seale Wood over time.[31]

Seale Wood was once connected to Grange Wood.  The road passed through the wood.  The OS map shows Seale Wood reduced in size, a separated part of it now called Short Wood.  Netherseal Colliery is situated immediately to the south west of Seale Wood and contributed to its demise.  Note the field boundaries, divided by enclosure acts into straight-edged packages and also the railway, built to transport coal from the railway to join the main line at Church Gresley.  The older roads maintain their more sinuous course.  Workers’ cottages are built in long terraces at Linton Heath.

 

The general quality of housing provided by the Earl of Moira for his burgeoning workforce has been considered to be of relatively high standard, each house had a parlour, kitchen, front room, two bedrooms and a large garden.  None had a front door.[32] Despite plans to turn one into a museum piece, none of his 'Stone Rows' survive; they were terraces of stone built cottages but in an ironic twist of history they were subject to severe mining subsidence and were demolished by British Coal in the 1980s.

The Earl of Moira and the Ashby Canal Company between them laid a complex series of pre-locomotive railway links.  These horse drawn railways served to supply goods to and from the canal and the coal mines and to bring in limestone to the lime kilns at the Moira Furnace site.  They were sold to the Midland Railway Company, along with the Ashby Canal Company in 1846.[33]

The OS map covering the Ashby Woulds for 1900 shows a landscape of enclosed fields, areas of heavy industry, rows of workers’ houses and the straight roads so beloved by the enclosure surveyors.  Francis Pryor comments on the nature of these roads: 'The Parliamentary commissioners […] seemed to prefer [straight] roads with wide verges.  They certainly did not favour the narrow winding lanes that are such a distinctive feature of ancient landscapes.  They have been criticised for this but I cannot see what else they could have done'.  Pryor goes on to discuss the absurdity of adding touches of the Picturesque to working landscapes.[34] 

The Burdett map of 1791 shows the Woulds on the cusp of enclosure, a virtually trackless heath.[35] Supposed improvers like the Wilkes family developed methods of burning off heath, (using coals from their own mines) improving land drainage and productivity of what they saw as waste or 'cold' land.[36]  Within fifty years heavy industry and transportation would change the face of the Woulds beyond recognition.

 

Industrialisation in England happened through a sequence of events, seemingly haphazard, which it is tempting to look back upon and present as an inevitable 'march of progress'.  This is clearly not the case; many entrepreneurial ventures relied heavily upon the vigour and spirit of individuals, Wilkes’ endeavours failed shortly after his death, the Earl of Moira’s only succeeded after they were taken up by companies like the Moira Coal Company; he died abroad since he could not return to England to repay his creditors.[37] Some improvers used methods we would today consider 'bad' science,[38] and the destruction of swathes of woodland without careful management and a clear replanting programme is foolhardy.  As many blind alleys were followed as clear routes to 'progression'.  Acrimony and litigation between landowners could last decades.[39]  Wilkes' use of child labour in his Measham mills is rarely discussed, perhaps he and others like him thought that by providing dancing lessons halfway through the child labourers' long and arduous shift they would dance home of an evening, envigoured by the largesse of their employer.  

Enclosure, for many reasons - not least of which was individual greed -[40] divided up the land in a way not attempted before in Britain, resulting in the patchwork quilt of fields and hedgerows so beloved today.[41] Industrial development created extended and new towns and villages, whilst others remained virtually unchanged; at the end of the seventeenth century Leicester numbered some five thousand people and was still the largest town between the Trent and the Thames,[42] by 1801 that number had grown to 17,000 and by 1901 it was a staggering 211,600.[43]Coalville in Leicestershire was an entirely new town, built around coal mining, whereas Swadlincote expanded but nearby Ashby de la Zouch remained relatively static by comparison.[44]

The integrated approach favoured by many industrialists gave us many of the villages and towns we see today, along with the workplaces closely associated with them.  By the early 20th century a scene of heavy industry, smoking chimneys, railways, roads and canal, cheek-by-jowl with villages and farms, all within a wider landscape of fields and hedgerows was commonplace.  Between 1700 and 1900 industry impacted heavily upon the urban and rural landscape, creating squalor alongside remarkable improvements in living standards, riches beside incredible poverty and irrevocably changing the face of the English countryside.

---

[1] Burnett, J. Idle Hands. The Experience of Unemployment, 1790-1990. London, Routledge 1994 p:8

[2] The visual impact of industrialisation was until very recently largely unchanged since the nineteenth century.  See Palmer, M in Reed, M. Discovering Past Landscapes. Beckenham, Crook Helm Ltd 1984 pp:86-8

[3] Pryor, F. The Making of the British Landscape.  How We Have Transformed the Land from Prehistory to Today. London, Penguin Books 2012 p: 465

[4] Mammat, E. The History and Descriptions of Ashby-de-la-Zouch with excursions in the neighbourhood. Ashby-de-la-Zouch W&J Hextall 1852 p: 53

[5] Pryor, F. The Making of the British Landscape.  p: 465

[6] Stocker, D., England’s Landscape: The East Midlands. London, Harper-Collins 2006 p:91

[7] Pryor, F. The Making of the British Landscape.  pp: 465-6

[8] Farey, J. General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire: with observations on the means of its improvement. Volume 2 London 1813 p:77 (Italics in original).

[9] Farey, J. General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire pp:79-80 (Original spelling and grammar retained).

[10] Muir, R., Approaches to Landscape. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan 1999 p:169

[11] Hayward, J., (ed). The Penguin Book of English Verse. London, Penguin 1956 p:304

[12]Cited in  Muir, R., Approaches to Landscape. p:171

[13] The Leicester Journal December 5^th 1800, cited in Owen, C., The Leicestershire and South Derbyshire Coalfield 1200-1900 p: 166

[14] Marshall, C.E. Guide to the Geology of the East Midlands. University of Nottingham 1948 p:61

[15]Owen, C., The Leicestershire and South Derbyshire Coalfield 1200-1900 p: 167 and see also: http://www.josephwilkes.org.uk/career.htm

[16] Cranstone, D. (ed). The Moira Furnace: a Napoleonic Blast Furnace in Leicestershire. North West Leicestershire District Council. Coalville 1985 p: 2

[17] Marshall, C.E. Guide to the Geology of the East Midlands. University of Nottingham 1948 p:61

[18] http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/text/chap_page.jsp?t_id=Young&c_id=6&p_id=563#pn_33

[19] Mammat, E. The History and Descriptions of Ashby-de-la-Zouch with excursions in the neighbourhood. Ashby-de-la-Zouch W&J Hextall 1852 p: 53

[20] Owen, C., The Leicestershire and South Derbyshire Coalfield 1200-1900 p:165-7

[21]This engine was itself transferred to Reservoir Colliery in 1851, where it was in use until it was decommissioned and is now in the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan, USA.  See both Prentice, D. One Man’s Moira. Moira Ashby Woulds Town Council 1982 p: 15 and  Palmer, M & Neaverson, P. Industrial Archaeology, Principles and Practice. London  Routledge 1998 p:143

[22] Stocker, D., England’s Landscape.  pp:93-4

[23] Palmer, M in Reed, M. Discovering Past Landscapes. Beckenham, Crook Helm Ltd 1984 pp:86-8

[24] Becket, J.V., The East Midlands from AD 1,000. pp:190-3

[25] Burchardt, J. Paradise Lost; Rural Idyll and Social Change since 1800. London, Tauris  p:16

[26] www.josephwilkes.org.uk/career.htm#BRICKMAKER

[27] Owen, C., The Leicestershire and South Derbyshire Coalfield 1200-1900 p: 167

[28] Ashby Woulds Enclosure Documents (as yet un-accessioned) held in Ashby Museum

[29] Owen, C., The Leicestershire and South Derbyshire Coalfield 1200-1900 p: 168

[30] Owen, C., The Leicestershire and South Derbyshire Coalfield 1200-1900 p: 114

[31] See for example the Earl of Huntingdon’s map of Overseal circa 1760 (held in Stafford Record Office) or John Prior’s 1791 map of Leicestershire.

[32] Moira Furnace Education Pack. Leicestershire County Council/ Moira Furnace Museum Trust Ltd 2009 p:1

[33] Palmer, M., and Neaverson, P. in Evans, A. & Gough, J. (eds). The Impact of the Railway on Society in Britain: Essays in Honour of Jack Simmons. Aldershot, Ashgate 2003 p:25

[34] Pryor, F. The Making of the British Landscape.  pp: 475

[35] Reproduced in Hull, O. South Derbyshire and its People: A History.  Matlock. Derbyshire County Council 2004 p:208

[36] http://www.josephwilkes.org.uk/career.htm

[37] The Earl of Moira is another figure who deserves greater recognition; he distinguished himself militarily during the American War of Independence (1775-1783) and was appointed Governor-General of India in 1812 although he seems to have been less astute as a politician and his extravagance, particularly in his support of the Prince of Wales, meant that pecuniary difficulty was to dog him throughout his later life. See Nelson, P.D. Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Marquess of Hastings, Soldier, Peer of the Realm, Governor-General of India. New Jersey, Associated University Press 2005 for further (although a little obsequious) discussion.

[38]  Pryor, F. The Making of the British Landscape.  pp:476

[39] See, for example, documents deposited at Ashby Museum in 2007 by Messrs Crane & Walton (solicitors) reference AYZMU:93xy detailing litigation between landowning clients on such matters as mineral rights, encroachment onto mining land, of railway activity and of clay leases,  between 1847 and 1880.

[40] Muir, R., Approaches to Landscape. Basingstoke, Palgrave MacMillan 1999 p:170-2

[41] Pryor, F. The Making of the British Landscape.  pp:466

[42]Hoskins, W.G. Leicestershire: An Illustrated Essay on the History of the Landscape. London, Hodder and Stoughton 1957 p:67 (My italics).

[43]http://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-council-services/council-and-democracy/city-statistics/population-statistics/population-1801-2001/

[44] See census returns for years 1841- 1901 available through www.ancestry.com