The Origins of Hertfordshire extract

Table of Contents

1. The Identity of Hertfordshire

2. Before the Saxons

3. Politics and Territory, 400–1000

4. Early Territorial Organisation

5. The Saxon Landscape

6. Manor, Vill and Parish

7. The Norman Conquest and Beyond

Extract from The Origins of Hertfordshire

Taken from Chapter 1: The identity of Hertfordshire

This book is about the early history of one English shire, or county – Hertfordshire. It will explore how both it, and its ancient subdivisions, came into existence; and it will examine the subtle and complex relationship between natural topography and the development of territorial organisation. These are matters of more than merely antiquarian interest. The patterns of settlement and territory established in the period before Domesday continued to mould the development of Hertfordshire for centuries: indeed, they continue to do so, to some extent, today. Moreover, it is impossible to understand the history of any district without some knowledge of the administrative structures within which its inhabitants lived, and the shire was a unit of immense significance in the lives of our ancestors from the time of its emergence in the later Saxon period until well into post-medieval times...

Hertfordshire is one of England’s smallest counties: covering a mere 632 square miles (1,638 square kilometres), it constitutes little more than 1 per cent of the total land area of England and Wales. Bounded to the south by Middlesex, to the east by Essex, to the west by Buckinghamshire and to the north by Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire, its boundaries are only loosely related to the broad sweeps of regional topography. It does not correspond neatly to any drainage catchment and, while its long northern boundary follows, very roughly, the line of the Chiltern escarpment, and much of its eastern the line of the Rivers Lea and Stort, its others seem largely arbitrary. In the words of the editors of the EPNS volume for the county, published in 1938, ‘There can hardly be a county in southern England which is more obviously artificial than Hertfordshire’ (Gover et al. 1938, xiii)...

In terms of landscape, Hertfordshire is a county without an identity – or at least, without a clearly defined character of its own. The phrase ‘the Hertfordshire landscape’ is almost entirely meaningless. The landscape of east Hertfordshire forms a continuation of that of the claylands of Suffolk and north Essex: the scenery is seamless, flowing across the county boundary without a break. To the west, the landscape of the Chilterns – a level plateau cut by deep valleys, with broad arable fields and beech woods – is the same in Hertfordshire as it is in south Buckinghamshire and south Oxfordshire. To the south lies London, outside the county and not a part of it, yet arguably the greatest single factor in its history. Certainly, it is the most important influence on the modern landscape, for much of the south of the county is engulfed in its outer suburbs, and once again this landscape – like the distinctive London Clay countryside which it has largely replaced – continues without interruption across the county boundary into Middlesex.

Yet it is also important to note that, to the north, Hertfordshire does not flow quite as easily into Cambridgeshire or Bedfordshire. Here there is more discontinuity. The Chiltern escarpment (and its more muted north-easterly continuation, often referred to as the East Anglian Heights) not only forms the approximate northern boundary of the county, but also constitutes a fundamental divide in the cultural landscape of southern Britain, separating the metropolitan counties and the south-east sharply from the central and southern Midlands. The latter districts have a landscape dominated by nucleated villages, one in which outlying farms and hamlets are a subsidiary and often comparatively recent addition to the settlement pattern. The fields are generally rectilinear, defined by straight hedges of hawthorn or sloe which contain comparatively few other species. Most were created in the period between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries when extensive, hedgeless ‘open fields’ were enclosed by the agreement of the principal landowners, or by parliamentary acts...

Neither urbanisation nor the economic influence of London are new; and the core of most of Hertfordshire’s principal urban settlements still usually retain something of the air of the market town, with a large medieval church, numerous timber-framed or Georgian buildings, and often a marketplace. St Albans, Hertford, Hitchin, Ware, Baldock, Royston, Bishop’s Stortford, Hemel Hempstead and Berkhamsted – even, although to a more muted extent, Watford – still retain their historic cores. All of these towns had medieval origins. Some, as we shall see, first rose to prominence in Saxon times; some have yet more ancient roots...

Physical geography underlies the historical development of Hertfordshire, a hidden hand moulding landscape and territorial organisation in innumerable, often complex, ways. True, there are dangers in taking too ‘determinist’ an approach in matters of human history: but the natural environment needs always to be considered first when attempting to understand the genesis of a region. Early societies were primarily agricultural and so the quality of the soil – the ease with which it could be worked, its fertility, the extent to which productivity might be limited by such factors as poor drainage – was of crucial importance. So too was the availability of a reliable supply of water. The natural environment provided, at the very least, a stage upon which the dramas of local and regional history could unfold.