Hertfordshire: A Landscape History extract
Table of Contents
1 A county in context
2 Hertfordshire’s ‘champion’ landscapes
3 The landscape of east Hertfordshire
4 The landscape of west Hertfordshire
5 The landscape of south Hertfordshire
6 Woods, parks and pastures
7 Traditional buildings
8 Great houses and designed landscapes
9 Urban and industrial landscapes
10 Suburbs and New Towns, 1870–1970
Extract from Hertfordshire: A landscape history
Taken from Chapter 1: A county in context
Post-medieval developments
The radical social changes of the early modern period, with the growth of a centralised state and the dissolution of the monasteries, have left an indelible mark on the landscape of England, not least in the decline of great residences with pretensions to defensibility and the rise of true ‘country houses’, accompanied by extensive parks and gardens. Of equal importance, but extending into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the development of a more sophisticated economy which was both more urban and more industrial in character, and in which agriculture became more specialised and carried out by larger farms, developments which in Hertfordshire’s case were closely associated with the continued growth of London. These agricultural changes, so important in moulding the character of the rural landscape, are particularly complex and are discussed in more detail in the chapters that follow, but, in essence, as time went on local farming became more and more adjusted to the particular circumstance of soils and topography, a process which sometimes generated continuities of land use but sometimes radical change. The generally fertile and calcareous soils formed in Chalk and chalky boulder clay in the north and east of the county continued, for the most part, to be farmed as arable, albeit with some pasture land on the heavier clays of the level plateaux. In agrarian terms the main development here was an increasing dependence on the cultivation of barley, much of it processed into malt either locally or in London; and, in landscape terms, it was the disappearance of the open fields. These were particularly extensive in the main river valleys and on or below the escarpment, where the main exposures of Chalk were to be found. They often contracted gradually through informal, piecemeal enclosure, but were mainly swept away by a series of enclosure acts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was the period of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, when farmers raised cereal yields by employing a range of new techniques, especially crop rotations featuring turnips and clover. On the narrower strip of heavy land associated with the Gault Clay, to the north – that is, in the two ‘salients’ which extended the county boundary out onto the Midland plain around Tring and Ashwell – ‘champion’ landscapes likewise tended to disappear through large-scale planned enclosure, although here, as we shall see, often at a rather earlier date, and largely to create grazing farms – a continuation of the process of enclosure and adjustment on this difficult land which had begun in late medieval times.
In the west of the county, on the Chiltern dipslope, the enclosure of open fields tended to occur even earlier, and again through informal methods, many townships losing their open arable completely before the end of the seventeenth century, although the vast commons on the crest of the Chilterns generally survived until enclosed by parliamentary acts – and some still remain today. In this district mixed arable farming tended to predominate throughout the post-medieval period, albeit with the widespread adoption of new crops and rotations in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some expansion of pasture on the poorer land. The most striking developments in farming were on the Southern Uplands. Most of the London Clay and Reading Formation soils had been under cultivation in the Middle Ages, but the extent of pasture on the former increased steadily through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, following enclosure in the decades after 1800, the great heaths on the Pebble Gravels, occupying the highest ground, were also laid to grass. By the time the tithe award surveys were made in the years around 1840 some parishes in the south of the county were almost entirely occupied by pasture. This was partly to provide meat and milk for the capital, but partly to supply the crops of hay necessary to sustain the many draft horses kept there.
This was one of many ways in which London’s influence on Hertfordshire grew steadily in the course of the post-medieval period, a development epitomised in the landscape by the ‘New River’, an artificial watercourse constructed between 1608 and 1613 to bring water from Chadwell Springs near Ware to the capital.1 In the sixteenth century the fertile north and east remained the wealthiest and most densely settled area of the county, but by the late seventeenth century a clear distinction was beginning to appear between towns in the south of the county and those in the north and east, the former expanding to a greater extent than the latter. This trend was exacerbated, and the influence of London further increased, by improvements in transport which occurred in the course of the eighteenth century, with the establishment of turnpike trusts and the construction of the Grand Junction canal through the west of the county. One key aspect of this, explored in some detail in Chapter 8, was the growing tendency for wealthy Londoners – politicians, administrators, lawyers, merchants and eventually industrialists – to purchase property in the county in order to build country seats within easy reach of the capital. Although a number of large estates did emerge in Hertfordshire in the post-medieval period, such as Hatfield, Gorhambury, Ashridge and Cashiobury – principally in the south and west, where land was poorer and cheaper – this influx of London money limited their development. Arthur Young, writing in 1804, described how ‘Property in Hertfordshire is much divided: the vicinity of the capital; the goodness of the air and roads; and the beauty of the country’ had led ‘great numbers of wealthy persons to purchase land for villas’.2 The impact of large landed estates on Hertfordshire’s landscape was also limited, when compared with some other parts of the country, by the simple fact that the county was, by the seventeenth century, already largely divided into fields and woods and filled with numerous well-built houses. This was very different to the situation in the Yorkshire Wolds, for example, where the enclosure of vast tracts of open-field land and heathland ensured that the Sykes family had effectively a blank slate on which to create their estate, involving extensive schemes of building and tree-planting around West Heslerton. On most Hertfordshire estates, in contrast, extensive areas of woodland had existed from medieval times, and farms and cottages tended to be provided with picturesque details, or were rebuilt only gradually, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
1. W. Branch Johnson, The industrial archaeology of Hertfordshire (Newton Abbot, 1970), p. 99.
2. A. Young, General view of the agriculture of Hertfordshire (London, 1804), p. 18.