An Historical Atlas of Hertfordshire extract
Table of Contents
Introduction Nigel Goose
Introduction to the County
1 Geology David Curry
2 Soils David Curry
3 Relief Anne Rowe and Tom Williamson
4 Landscape Character Simon Odell
5 The Origins of Hertfordshire Tom Williamson
Boundaries
6 County, Hundred and Ecclesiastical Boundary Changes Jonathan Hunn
7 Probate Divisions Sue Flood
8 Poor Law Union Boundaries Kate Thompson
9 Local Government Kate Thompson
10 City of London Coal Tax Markers John Donovan
Buildings
11 Roman Buildings Rosalind Niblett
12 Timber Buildings Adrian Gibson
13 Country Houses Adrian Gibson
14 Ice-houses Sylvia P. Beamon
15 Dovecotes Anne Rowe
16 Lock Ups, Cages and Prisons Philip Plumb
17 Cinemas Allen Eyles
Communication Routes
18 Roman Roads Isobel Thompson
19 Medieval Roads and Bridges Philip Plumb
20 Turnpike Roads Philip Plumb
21 Coaching Routes, Post Roads and Inns Philip Plumb
22 Milestones John Donovan
3 Rivers and Navigations Tony Manning
24 Railways Graham Boseley
Demography
25 Medieval Population Mark Bailey
26 Tudor and Stuart Population Nigel Goose
27 Population, 1801–1901 Nigel Goose
28 Population, 1901–2001 Evelyn Lord
Early Settlements
29 Palaeolithic Settlements Stewart Bryant
30 Mesolithic Settlements Stewart Bryant
31 Neolithic Settlements Stewart Bryant
32 Bronze Age Settlements Stewart Bryant
33 Iron Age Settlements Stewart Bryant
34 Roman Settlements Rosalind Niblett
35 Anglo-Saxon Settlements Stewart Bryant
36 Place-names Lee Prosser
Industries and Work
37 Mills Anne Rowe
38 Papermaking Michael Stanyon
39 Agricultural Trades in the Nineteenth Century Nigel Agar
40 Bellfounders, 1570–1825 Joyce Dodds
41 Malting and Brewing David Perman
42 Straw-Plaiting and Hat-Making Nigel Goose
43 Watercress Growing Steve Fletcher
44 The Silk Industry Sheila Jennings
45 Printing Caroline Archer
46 The Pharmaceutical Industry Clare Ellis
47 Film and Television Studios Sheila White
48 Sand and Gravel Quarrying John Wallace
Landscape
49 Ancient Woodland Peter Bigmore
50 Medieval Parks Hugh Prince
51 Elizabethan Parks Hugh Prince
52 Rabbit Warrens Anne Rowe
53 Great Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Anne Rowe
54 Great Gardens and Landscapes of the Eighteenth Century Anne Rowe
55 Parliamentary Enclosure Peter Bigmore
56 Orchards Martin Hicks
57 Agriculture in the Nineteenth Century Nigel Agar
Religious Buildings and Religion
58 Church Dedications Nicholas Doggett
9 Medieval Parish Churches Nicholas Doggett
60 Chapels of Ease Stephen Doree
61 Religious Houses Neil Rushton
62 Medieval and Tudor Graffiti Doris Jones-Baker
63 Protestant Nonconformity Alan Ruston
64 Catholics Stewart Foster
65 Religious Worship in 1851 Judith Burg
Social Issues
66 Convicts to Australia, 1784–1867 Ken Griffin
67 Executions, 1733–1914 Ken Griffin
68 Schools before 1833 David Short
69 Schools, 1833–1902 Eileen Wallace
70 Almshouses Kate Thompson
Towns and Villages
71 Abandoned Settlements Isobel Thompson
72 Markets and Fairs Isobel Thompson
73 Hertford Alan Greening
74 Roman and post-Roman St Albans Rosalind Niblett
75 Medieval and Later St Albans Rosalind Niblett
76 Garden Cities Kate Thompson
77 New Towns Margaret Ashby and Alan Cudmore
War and Civil Unrest
78 Troop Movements during the Civil Wars, 1642–8 Alan Thomson
79 Riot and Civil Unrest before 1700 Heather Falvey
80 Local Volunteers during the Napoleonic Wars John Sainsbury
81 Local Volunteers during the First World War John Sainsbury
82 Local Volunteers during the Second World War John Sainsbury
Extract from An Historical Atlas of Hertfordshire
Taken from the Introduction by Nigel Goose
Hertfordshire is one of the smaller English counties, covering just 632 square miles (1,921 square kilometres) and accounting for marginally over 1 per cent of the total area of England and Wales, its population constituting slightly more than 1 per cent of the total for England and Wales in 1801 and somewhat less than 1 per cent by 1901.1 Despite this, the county possesses a diversity that might come as a surprise to those who do not know it well. Hertfordshire has no simple topographical uniformity, and has been described as ‘a county without an identity – or at least, without a clearly-defined character of its own’.2 Hence towards the east it merges with the claylands of Essex and Suffolk, while to the west the Chilterns extend seamlessly from Hertfordshire into Buckinghamshire. To the north the Chiltern escarpment marks a sharp divide between the southern Midlands, where nucleated villages predominate, and the south-east where settlement is generally (though far from exclusively) more dispersed, while at the other end of the county the Southern Uplands, with their poorly drained clay soils, mark the border with London. While much of the county is clay over chalk, its suitability for agriculture varies regionally and even locally, and if the Vale of St Albans and the northern chalk escarpments proved most suitable to early agriculture, there were other workable areas too that punctuated the less friable clays. Hertfordshire field patterns were often irregular, particularly in the south-west of the county. Here irregular open fields were intermixed with ancient closes, and while most of the county was enclosed by 1600 and it was largely waste land that was left to eighteenth-century parliamentary enclosure, the north and east shared a pattern of late enclosure with the neighbouring county of Cambridgeshire, and even then substantial areas of common land, even towards the south west, escaped enclosure completely.3 Over time, of course, agricultural improvement has exerted an influence too. If towards the end of the eleventh century the densest population and more wholly arable area was in the north east of the county, with more sparse settlement and wood-pasture in the south west, by the nineteenth century arable cultivation dominated the county as a whole, and by the end of that century the south west was far more heavily settled than the north east, which was now suffering from agricultural depression.4 Furthermore, if soil conditions had dictated the extent of early settlement and the nature of the agrarian regime adopted in Saxon England, by the 1930s the Land Utilization Survey could classify virtually all the various soils of Hertfordshire as either good or of medium quality, testifying to the extent of improvement across the intervening centuries.5
By the end of the eighteenth century Hertfordshire could be described as ‘the first corn county in the kingdom’ where ‘nearly the whole of the soil is proper tillage land’, while a few years later Arthur Young wrote that arable cultivation was ‘the great object of the Hertfordshire husbandry. By far the greatest part of the county is under tillage, for which the county was singularly famous perhaps before the improvements in Norfolk began’.6 The ‘fame’ of the county for tillage, and its essentially agrarian economy for much of its history, should not, however, blind us to the presence of important industries. While Hertfordshire may not have been at the cutting edge of the industrial revolution, it was by no means devoid of industrial activity, particularly from the later eighteenth century forwards. While it had never played a major part in the production of woollen and worsted cloth, and had no role to play in the burgeoning cotton industry, by this time it could boast a significant involvement in papermaking, silk throwing, brewing and malting and – more distinctively – the manufacture of straw plait and hats, for which it assumed an importance surpassed only by neighbouring Bedfordshire.7 Both brewing and papermaking continued into the twentieth century, and while hatmaking succumbed to competition during the 1930s, that century witnessed the rise of printing, pharmaceuticals, a film industry, and the extraction of aggregates, alongside the increasingly dominant service sector that has become so familiar in every English county.8
Hertfordshire has always been intimately affected by its proximity to London, and this too has added to its diversity, in many ways stimulating its economic development and social richness, in other respects inhibiting its growth. The most obvious example of the latter is in the county’s attenuated urban development, particularly prior to the later nineteenth century. Before its late Victorian urban expansion, Hertfordshire has been very accurately characterised as a ‘county of small towns’.9 As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the 1851 census identified just nine Hertfordshire communities among the ‘cities, boroughs and principal towns in England and Wales’, the largest of which – with a population of only 7,000 – was St Albans.10 But if Hertfordshire towns pale into insignificance in comparison with Birmingham, Manchester or Sheffield, the level of urbanisation in the southwest of the county could still reach 40 per cent by this date, perhaps testifying to the positive impact of proximity to the vast London market, as well as to the implications of that proximity for the development of transport and communications networks through this region.11 Furthermore, if Hertfordshire lacked large towns for much of its history it had an abundance of small ones. Chris Dyer has identified 667 small towns in later medieval England, no fewer than 16 of which (on a conservative estimate) were in Hertfordshire, and this, given the small area of the county, placed it second only to Kent in terms of the density of urban settlements per acre. By the late seventeenth century there were at least 17 small towns, and possibly as many as 22.12 Finally, the later nineteenth century exhibited rapid urban growth, again towards the south west and focused particularly upon Watford, but also in the southern region abutting London where the capital’s suburban development increasingly drew Hertfordshire into its orbit. Shortly thereafter the county played a role of the first importance in the establishment of Garden Cities, and half a century later in the planting of New Towns too.13
Proximity to London shaped Hertfordshire’s history in a myriad of ways: it provided a concentrated market for agricultural produce, was an important source of manure, stimulated the development of the county’s transport network, encouraged the development of its industries, served as a source of labour supply in early industrial England and as a source of employment for the Hertfordshire commuter in post-industrial England. Its proximity also facilitated the transfer of capital, ideas and culture, and for Londoners Hertfordshire was the ideal place to establish a country seat, its parks and gardens testifying to its attractiveness to those with both landed and commercial wealth, as well as to those seeking to combine landed with political capital.14
The diversity and particularity of Hertfordshire help to explain the range of topics presented in this atlas: another is the variety of interests that Hertfordshire local historians display. Few county historical atlases will be able to boast such detailed information on, for example, ice-houses, dovecotes, medieval and Tudor graffiti, local volunteers for military service, or eighteenth and nineteenth century transportations and executions.15 On the other hand, there are no doubt topics that are less well represented, while this atlas shares with many others a tendency to shy away from the twentieth century, no doubt the product of the interests of its contributors in the history that preceded their own lifetimes as well, perhaps, as the daunting volume of source material that confronts the historian of more recent times.16
1. T. Williamson, The Origins of Hertfordshire (Manchester, 2000), p. 3; and calculations from British Parliamentary Papers 1852–3, vol. LXXXVIII Part I, 1851 Census Report: Population Tables II and British Parliamentary Papers 1904, vol. CVIII, 1901 Census Report. The ancient county of Hertfordshire accounted for 1.10 per cent of the total for England and Wales in 1801, and 0.77 per cent by 1901.
2. Williamson, Origins, p. 4.
3. Williamson, Origins, pp. 4–19; P. Dewey, ‘Agriculture’, in Pope (ed.), Atlas, pp. 1–4; Munby, The Hertfordshire Landscape, pp. 164–6, 181–2; W.E. Tate, A Handlist of English Enclosure Acts and Awards, Part 16, Hertfordshire (Lawes Agricultural Trust, Rothamsted, unpublished), p. 21, cite in L. Meredith, ‘Did Late Implementation Lessen the Effects of Enclosure on a Community? A Case Study of Aston, Hertfordshire’ (unpublished undergraduate dissertation, University of Hertfordshire, 1995).
4. Williamson, Origins, pp. 132–44; chapters 27 and 57, below; N. Goose, Population, Economy and Family Structure in Hertfordshire in 1851. Vol. 2 St Albans and Its Region (Hatfield, 2000), pp. 117–19.
5. The results are reported in E. Doubleday, Hertfordshire: Survey Report and Analysis of County Development Plan (1951), p. 60.
6. D. Walker, General View of the County of Hertford Presented to the Board of Agriculture (1795), quoted in VCH Herts, Vol. 2, p. 1239; A. Young, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hertfordshire (reprinted Newton Abbot, 1971, first published London, 1804), p. 55.
7. Chapters 38, 41, 42, 44, below; N. Goose, ‘The Straw Plait and Hat Trades in Nineteenth-Century Hertfordshire’, in N. Goose (ed.), Women’s Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives (Hatfield, 2007), pp. 97–137.
8. Chapters 45, 46, 47 and 48, below.
9. T. Slater and N. Goose (eds), A County of Small Towns: The Development of Hertfordshire’s Urban Landscape to 1800 (Hatfield, 2007).
10. British Parliamentary Papers, 1852-3, vol. LXXXV, 1851 Census Report, Population Tables I, pp. cciv–ccvii.
11. See chapters 18–24, below.
12. C. Dyer, ‘Small Towns 1270–1540’, in Palliser (ed.), Cambridge Urban History Vol. 1, pp. 505–8. See also C. Dyer, ‘Small Places with Large Consequences: The Importance of Small Towns in England, 1000–1540’, Historical Research, 75 (2002), 1–24. For further discussion of the number of small towns see N. Goose, ‘Urban Growth and Economic Development in Early Modern Hertfordshire’, in Slater and Goose (eds), County of Small Towns, pp. 113–18.
13. See chapters 27, 28, 76 and 77, below.
14. See chapters 13 and 50–54, below.
15. Chapters 14, 15, 62, 66, 67, 80, 81 and 82.
16. See E. Lord, Investigating the Twentieth Century: Sources for Local Historians (Stroud, 1999).