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The Tudor Parish

Austrey's situation in a small valley half a mile from the highway between Ashby and Tamworth fulfils the two indispensable requirements for an agricultural settlement: a supply of fresh water and access to cultivable land. The first was plentifully provided by tributary streams and natural springs (holy wells), the second by the fertile Keuper marl which covers most of the parish, providing excellent ground for both livestock and tillage.

After the Norman Conquest Austrey was part of a great land redistribution. In Saxon times it formed part of a great block of seventy or eighty midland vills belonging to Wulfric Spot, the Mercian overlord and royal consul who founded Burton Abbey. In Wulfric Spot’s will of 1004 which the monks of Burton carefully transcribed into the abbey register, Wulfric left Austrey 'as it now stands with meat and with men', to one of his thegns who later transferred this part of the vill to the abbey.  After the Norman Conquest, the abbot was forced to share suzertainty with Nigel d'Aubigny, one of the Conqueror’s trusted retinue, who was granted extensive holdings in the parish as part of the spoils of the Anglo-Saxon defeat. Although he retained two and a half hides in Austrey, the abbot was no longer the principal landowner in the parish.  Its not known exactly how much land was under the plough at the time of the Domesday survey because both the carucate and the hide were fiscal units which varied according to land productivity. However reference to at least nineteen plough teams recorded in Austrey in 1086, together with the absence of any mention of woodland, suggests that a large part of the parish was under cultivation.  Domesday Book also records 42 ‘inhabitants’ in the town, indicating an actual population, including women and children, in excess of two hundred. 

The period between Domesday and the Dissolution saw further fragmentation of holdings.  A twelfth-century survey of Burton Abbey lands records ten monastic virgates in Austrey, slightly less than half held in demesne and the rest sublet to tenants. The Abbot’s ten Austrey virgates were almost certainly the same two and a half hides recorded in Domesday. Like other monastic landholders the monks of Burton probably took advantage of rising wool prices in the medieval period to sublet their estates for sheep walks. Aubigny lands reverted back to Burton Abbey

Between 1530 and 1580 there was a major redistribution of lands in the parish, part of a great sale of monastic lands which, as W.G. Hoskins points out, decided the structure of landownership and power in England for the next three or four hundred years. The sale of Burton abbey lands certainly altered the balance of power in Austrey. Its immediate impact was to transfer much of the lands in the parish into the possession of great magnates like Sir William Paget, the king’s secretary and Lady Eleanor Brereton of Cheshire, triggering off a spate of land speculation, and from the late Elizabethan period onwards the release of freehold farms which were snapped up by some of the wealthier tenants. One of the Austrey manors came into the possession of the Kendalls of Smithsby through marriage with one of Henry Alstre’s co-heiresses in 1433. Although their earlier associations with the manor are obscure, land records show that the Kendalls were well established in Austrey by 1550 and that they continued to consolidate their position after this date. The other Austrey manor held by Sir Walter Aston was broken up and divided among his tenants in the early 1600s.

The Tudor parish and the customary tenants

These changes in landownership had an important influence on the village and the farming landscape, particularly with regard to enclosure. In Tudor times the village was divided into two separate parts: the original settlement cluster around the church and market cross at the Upper End and a later extension at the Nether End. The parish church dedicated to St. Nicholas had a mid-thirteenth century tower and refaced fourteenth-century windows and chancel although the four bells (cast by Hugh Watts of Leicester in 1632) had yet to be installed.  After the Dissolution the advowson was granted to George Clifford, then to a succession of prominent landholders including William Paget (1546) and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, who presented it to Elizabeth I in 1579.  From then on the living remained in the gift of the Crown which probably explains why the seventeenth-century incumbents avoided becoming embroiled in secular and religious controversy in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

BISHOPS Farm

The antiquity of the original settlement is attested by a line of defensive earthworks below the church, and by its proximity to a natural spring or holy-well.  The 'new' settlement at the Nether End probably originated with Earl Leofric's original grant to Burton Abbey, which would account for the siting of the monks' farmstead at nearby Bishop's Farm. By 1550 the pattern of settlement was scythe-shaped with the medieval tenements lining the main street running roughly parallel to the ridgeway from Orton to No man's heath. The earliest record of the customary tenants on Sir William Paget’s demesne in Tudor times is a partial list of the Austrey copyholders with the number of virgates held by each from a surviving manor court roll. All but two of the twelve tenants listed on the demesne in 1546 held a single virgate; one (Richard Cryspe) had a quarter and the other (Elizabeth Clerke) two virgates. Most of these family names are listed in the seventeenth century attached to Austrey farmers or craftsmen paying for a single hearth in the hearth tax returns.

Of course these were not the only tenants in the parish. The Patent Rolls show that Eleanor Brereton had twenty messuages on one of the Austrey manors in 1554. As Thorpe and others have demonstrated through studies of parishes such as Wormleighton in Warwickshire and Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire, there was a great deal of trading, amalgamation and exchanging of lands and tenement plots in the late medieval and early Tudor period, all helping to undermine the last vestiges of common ownership. Throughout the midlands ambitious new owners took advantage of manorial disintegration to enclose arable to pasture. The Austrey farmers were probably no exception in this regard.

          Sources and Notes

For an explanation of settlement typology see: B.K. Roberts, 'Timeless Villages from Medieval England', in Man-Made the Land: Essays in English Historical Geography, eds.  A.R.H. Baker and J.B. Harley (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 46-58.

Domesday population estimates using the conventional multiplier of 5: H.C. Darby, 'Domesday England', A New Historical Geography of England (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 33, 45, 54.

C.G.O. Bridgeman, 'The Burton Abbey Twelfth Century Surveys', SHC, 1916, 244-7. Paget held lands in Appleby and Austrey for 1/20th of a knight's fee in 1546: Jeayes, 'Burton Abbey Charters', SHC,1937, 187; For Walter Aston’s manor see Cal.Pat.Rolls (Philip and Mary) II, pg. 135

S.R.O. Paget Papers, Court Roll D(W) 1734/J2009.

H. Thorpe, ‘The Lord and the Landscape; illustrated through the changing fortunes of a Warwickshire parish, Wormleighton’, TBAS, lxxx (1962), pp. 55-9.

Austrey’s Population in the Tudor Period

Austrey experienced rapid population increase in the late Tudor period.  Estimates derived from the 31 taxpayers recorded in the 1524 subsidy and the 42 householders in the 1563 census, indicate that there may have been as many as fifty or sixty dwellings in the parish by 1600, if we include an indeterminate number of squatter cottages set up on the heath. In late Tudor times Austrey's population was probably around 250 inhabitants, allowing for the influx of labourers and transients from other parishes. The high birth rate of the 1560s and 1570s revealed in the parish register seems to have slackened off by the early 1600s, possibly indicating some sort of crisis, but there was steady growth throughout the seventeenth century. There is no figure for Austrey communicants from Liber Cleri of 1603, which is regarded as an accurate count of regular church attenders, but calculations from the parish register suggest that that there were at least 300 people in the parish in 1642 when the Protestation Oath was taken. The 84 Austrey households recorded for the hearth tax in 1670, and the 247 communicants and nonconformists in the Compton Census of 1676, tend to confirm these estimates

The Fields, Meadows and Cow Pastures

References to field strips and enclosures in probate wills, glebe terriers and deeds gives no reason to suspect that the settlement pattern and field layout of the parish in 1600 was any different to that shown on the 1840 Tithe Map.  There is certainly no hint of any major changes in the physical structure of the parish in the intervening period.  The bulk of the evidence relating to sixteenth and seventeenth-century farming in the parish is derived from 80 wills and 91 inventories drawn up by Austrey inhabitants between 1550 and 1720. Most of the smallholders or husbandmen were what we would now call “mixed farmers”, producing livestock and grain. A list of 20 inventories belonging to householders worth more than £15 between 1580-1620 for example reveals that somewhere around two-thirds had ploughs or barrows and most had cattle, sheep, horses and pigs as well as hay, wheat and pease. The farmers included husbandmen, yeoman and a gentleman farmer, Mr Kendall (widows’ inventories being excluded since most would have already passed on their holdings to the heirs).                                                                                  

The inventories reveal that most of the Austrey farmers had a small herd of cattle with a few draught horses and a flock of perhaps one or two dozen sheep.  Some two-thirds had pigs which were probably kept in the yards or home closes. More than half of them had wheat and barley worth more than £5 on the premises and at least a third were engaged in subsidiary enterprises such as growing flax, brewing beer or producing cheese.  Thomas Erpe, for example, had nine hives, and a quantity of flax, bees, honey and malt worth more than £3 among his goods in 1612.

Livestock production was becoming increasingly important. In their wills, Austrey farmers make frequent allusions to 'meadow pieces' and 'common field leys', emphasising the use of field land for stock fattening.  Several Austrey wills mention the testator's 'tacke' (or 'tackle'), which refers to a leasehold farm with its attached pasture rights. Another common formula refers to leasehold tenure, as for example William Mould's grant of the ‘occupation of ... my leases' (1598) and Robert Clark's reference to his 'leases, farme, or farmes' (1601)

RECONSTRUCTED MAP OF OPEN FIELDS c. 1650

A reconstructed map of the seventeenth-century parish compiled from wills and glebe terriers shows the Austrey town meadows forming a great swathe of low-lying pasture farmed separately from the common field arable. The earliest surviving church glebe terrier (1635) reveals that certain meadow pieces, like those at Synderhead and Warton Stones, were apportioned into 'doles' - small parcels of land ‘meared with stakes and stones' - while pasture rights were allocated proportionable to the yardland in the Nether and Upper End Moors, the Common Greens and the Old Hay.

The enclosure of Austrey’s open fields

The evidence in probate wills and indentures suggests that the process of conversion from arable to pasture was well advanced by 1600.  The old demesne lands at Hall Fields Farm, abutting the common meadow at the Over End, were almost certainly laid down to grass by the early 1570s when Brereton sold the manor.  A series of enclosures, including Linden close (1580), Long Withey Furlong (1618), Broadway (1616) and the Newes in Hartshillor (1618) were all created by exchanges and amalgamations of field strips. The earliest glebe terrier shows that arable field strips along Stockwell brook and at Lyttlemore Furlong, Knights Acre, Rood Furlong and Ralph Greaves, were all 'inclosed and holden in severally' by 1635. And there can be little doubt that this process of consolidation had the support of the principal inhabitants.  A conveyance between William Spencer of Norton and John Spencer of Austrey, for example, refers to a close on St. Mary's Green which had been exchanged 'for land of William Spencer lying at the end of ... Henry Kendall's house... now enclosed and holden in severally’. The expanding acreage of enclosed pasture and meadow may explain why Austrey's common fields - Hastley, Ridgeway Hill and Deadmore - were already being described in 1633 as 'the three fields of the neither end’.

The earliest surviving Austrey glebe terrier shows that in 1635 the parson had fourteen and a half 'beasts pastures' and a 'follower' (or half-pasture for a small beast) in the Common Moor, eight beasts pastures in the Old Hay and stints proportionable to one and a quarter yardlands in the Common Greens and Sheep Commons. The term 'hay' was commonly used to describe enclosure direct from the waste.  Stints were of fixed duration as shown, for instance, by the reference in 1611 to 'years yet unexpired in certain lands commonly called the ould hays' in Alice Lacon’s will.

[INSERT JPEG OF 1793 ENCLOSURE MAP]

Austrey’s enclosure came about through a series of 'mutual and unanimous exchanges' among the tenants, completed in 1744 and ratified by written agreement in 1796. By 1744 Austrey's open fields had shrunk to 270 acres, covering a mere 13% of the parish in the northeast corner of the parish and surrounded by 'ancient inclosure' with 216 acres of heathland, moor and meadow. The scale of the 1744 undertaking (23 landholders disposing of 504 acres of open-field arable, common and pasture) leaves no doubt that this was the end of communal agriculture in the parish. When in 1790 William Marshall included Austrey among 'the four townships that remain in any degree open' he referred to the comparatively open appearance of the landscape not yet broken up by hedgerows, rather than to any remains of the communal farming system. By then Austrey’s open fields had shrunk. Deadmore or Nether Field with 215 acres dwarfed Ridgeway and Hastley Field which covered less than 50 acres between them.

Judging from the contents of farm wills and inventories the fields may well have been as shrunken as this in 1700.  Only one of the thirteen mixed-farmer's wills from 1680-1720 makes any reference to common-field arable and only a third of the inventories list sheep, whereas nine out of ten record cattle and horses. The innovation that made possible an increase in stockholding was the common cow pasture. These were large commonable closes made on behalf of the whole farming community in which pasture leys were allocated at a fixed rate per yardland and operated as an extra field - a system of particular benefit to the poorer inhabitants

The moors and meadows were Austrey's most valuable asset. The 1840 tithe map shows a 'cow pasture' at the centre of the parish below Ridgeway Hill. Not all parishes retained cow pastures but they were a familiar part of Warwickshire farming operations at this time. An earlier hint that there was an extra field in operation before 1700 is the concentration of grazing rights into the hands of the principal landholders.  A list of those responsible for the upkeep of the church fence, entered opposite the accounts for 1708 in the churchwarden's account book, suggest that 24 freeholders between them held 30 yardlands of arable. Mr Kendall held the largest holding of three yardlands, while Messrs. Spencer, Toons, Hill and Gutteridge (all mentioned in the 1744 Agreement) had two yardlands apiece.  Yet in 1744 Kendall is known to have held as many as twenty five and three-quarter 'beastgates in the moor' while the other freeholders had seven and a quarter, twenty-four, eight and fourteen beastgates respectively.  Clearly, these pasture rights bore no relation to the size of their arable holdings.  A further indication of the decay of arable farming which accompanied an increase in stock raising  is Dr Thomas' silence as to the number of 'teams' in Austrey in his editing of the 2^nd edition of Dugdale’s survey in 1730. As he explains 'teams may increase or diminish more or less every year, according as ground is broken up or laid down, especially in inclosed lands'. The Austrey farmers’ enclosure of the greater part of the common fields and their institution of a system of stints on the communal cow pasture to better exploit the low-lying meadows, caused a major transformation of the farming landscape of the parish over the course of the seventeenth century.

Sources and Notes

L.J.R.O. inventories, Thomas Erpe, 1612, wills, Robert Clarke, 1602; William Mould, 1598, John Spencer, 1553/50, John Orton, 1559/187; Elizabeth Smart, 1562/56; John Molde, 1590/31, John Spencer, 1633

          W.R.O. conveyance William Spencer of Norton, CR 1044/2.

L.J.R.O. Austrey glebe terrier B/V/6/1635

P.R.O. will of Alice Lacon of Austrey, PROB 11/14/123.

W.R.O. Enclosure Agreement, CR 466; Inclosure Map CR 468.

An undated schedule recording conversion of 170 acres of field holdings into farms may also date from around 1744: DRB 48/109.

William Marshall, Rural Economy Vol. II, pg. 275.

For discussion of the operation of the common cow pasture in Warwickshire see B.K. Roberts, ‘Field Systems of the West Midlands’,

Studies in the Field Systems of the British Isles eds. A.R.H. Baker and R.A. Butler (Cambridge, 1973) pg. 203.

 W.R.O. Churchwardens' Account Book, DRB 48/30.

Dr. Thomas lists 5 teams in Seckington, 8 in Newton Regis: Dugdale, Warwickshire (2nd edition) Vol. I, pg. x; Vol II, pg. 1124.

© Alan Roberts, November 2002