Agriculture around the Four Parishes

This page provides an introduction to agricultural history in the Highley/Billingsley/Kinlet/Stottesdon area. On your left are links that allow you to explore some topics in more detail

Introduction to Agricultural History

For most of its history, agriculture has formed the backbone of south-east Shropshire. Most people in the community worked on the land, either as labourers or independent farmers and it was farming that created wealth and sustained the local community. Even today, in terms of land use, the area is dominated by agriculture.

The earliest people in the area would have been farmers. In the Bronze Age, they would have begun the work of bringing the land into cultivation, exploiting natural clearings and removing scrub. Gradually a few dispersed farmsteads would have appeared, each surrounded by a cluster of small fields where crops would have been grown and animals grazed. This first phase of farming probably continued throughout the Iron age and the Roman period; aerial photography has shown the sites of several possible Romano-British farmsteads.

The end of the Roman occupation saw a collapse in population and it is likely that many farms were abandoned. It is very difficult to tell what exactly was happening in South Shropshire at this period; all that we know is that by the end of the 7th Century the area had become a province of the Saxon kingdom of Mercia. In the following centuries there were profound changes in the way in which people farmed. Instead of individual farms, scattered over the countryside, there was a movement towards communities clustering into small hamlets. Each community farmed the land in common with individuals have their own strips scattered over several large common fields that were cultivated collectively. The medieval system of open field farming was born. It offered certain advantages, for example the costs of expensive items such as a team of oxen could be shared by the whole community. It was well suited to the feudal society of the time, where individuals held land by virtue of performing services to their overlords.

At the time of the Norman conquest, in each settlement, there were probably three fields. One would be sown in the winter with wheat or rye, one in the spring probably with oats and the third would have been left fallow. Ploughing was done by teams of 8 oxen; each team could probably have ploughed about 80 acres a year. There would also have been other animals. At this period, swine and goats were common; sheep were kept for their wool and their milk. Cattle, other than draft animals, were rare. A special form of woodland called woodland-pasture allowed animals to graze at the same time as preserving growing trees. The oxen would need hay for the winter and so there would also be meadow land.

The story of area up to the early 14th Century is probably one of expansion. In the 250 years after the Norman conquest, the population of England grew steadily; to feed it, more and more land had to be brought into cultivation. There were inevitably pressures between the desire to preserve woodland for hunting and for timber and the need to clear land to produce more crops. The latter was usually the more lucrative option and so won out. Expansion took several forms. Sometimes land was cleared to add new acreage to the common fields; the original three open fields multiplied as settlements added extra land. Individuals were also encouraged to clear land for their own private use, producing isolated farms in what had previously been woodland. This process was known as assarting and was in some ways similar to the pre-Saxon pattern of self-contained farms. It is perhaps debatable whether the isolated farmstead ever completely vanished in heavily wooded places, even at the height of the move to open-field farming and nucleated settlements. It is likely that piece-meal assarts extended the area of cultivation over a period of several centuries; these in turn coalesced into small communities as the size of the assarts grew and attracted casual labourers. The very names of some of these farms speak of the first pioneers who created the new holdings. This land was particularly likely to be sold and so pass out of the reckoning of the manor. Much woodland however remained and found special uses as “parks”; effectively deer farms to keep the woods populated for hunting. A full-time park keeper often lived in a house in the park; the lodge. The park would have been surrounded by a ditch and bank topped by a wooden fence to keep the deer in and the locals out. This was not always successful as there are accounts of mass raids to steal both deer and wood.

In the 14th Century the population of the whole country plummeted. This was due to a series of bad harvests in the early part of the period followed by the Black Death in 1348/9. The aftermath of this brought about major social and economic upheavals. The pool of cheap labour that had sustained the extensive arable farming vanished. The major landowners turned to livestock farming, particularly sheep. Wool had been an important commodity in Shropshire before the 14th Century; after it, large areas of ploughlands were converted to sheepwalks. The tenant farmers also turned to pastoral farming. As the population and the economy gradually recovered from the Black Death in the 15th Century, the old system of farming in common became less attractive and both arable and pasture started to be enclosed. In Tudor times society became increasingly polarised, with a small number of wealthy yeoman farmers, able to absorb the smaller holdings of their neighbours and larger numbers of labourers with very little land of their own. The open fields had gone by the start of the 17th Century. Some form of mixed farming was probably carried out on most farms and this was to be the pattern over the forthcoming centuries.

The 17th and early 18th Centuries were to bring about significant changes in agricultural practice, as the enclosed fields and the independence of individual farmers allowed experimentation and competition. The traditional medieval rotation of wheat, oats and fallow was replaced by more productive regimes, where land was seeded with grass and grazed to restore fertility before being ploughed again. Around 1700 clover and sainfoin became important as crops; they restored nitrogen to the soil and further maintained fertility. Rotations also were developed that alternated cereal crops with clover and then roots such as turnips.

The Napoleonic wars produced 25 years of generally rising farm prices. This in turn lead to the era of Victorian “high farming”. Prices and output increased. Mechanisation became important, with numerous horse-drawn machines developed for use in the fields whilst back in the farmyard a host of smaller devices found their way into the barns and dairies. The “model” farm arrived, with new buildings laid out around a courtyard. Scientific methods were applied to breeding of both animals and crops. New chemical fertilisers improved productivity; the available of cheap, mass-produced earthenware pipes greatly improved land drainage. The large landowners such as the Childe family at Kinlet often readily adopted the new ways in agriculture and in turn made sure that their tenants did the same. Some also built better quality cottages for their labourers

The period from 1875 to the Second World War was a bad one for British agriculture. Problems became apparent with a short but sharp national depression in the 1870s. Whilst much of the economy recovered from this, agriculture did not. Grain prices fell in response to imports of cereals from the USA. Imported meat from countries such as New Zealand hit the livestock farmers, although they did not fare as badly as their arable cousins. Locally there was a movement away from arable back to pastoral farming; the same response to the farming crisis of the 14th Century. Marginal land reverted to scrub. The growth of a small mining town at Highley provided a welcome new market for some; farmers who lived near enough often developed milk rounds to serve the miners.

It took the Second World War to bring about a general recovery in agriculture, with the widespread ploughing of old pasture. It was at this time that modern machinery was first introduced onto the local farms. The die was firmly cast in favour of greater mechanisation and subsequent national policy favoured subsidised farm production. Yields on local farms improved out of all recognition. There was a movement towards fewer, larger farms, although conditions for the few left who worked on these were immeasurably better than for the pre-war labourers. Whilst recent events have once again led to a depression in agriculture, there is no doubt that farming will continue to dominate the local landscape.