The Produce of Medieval Farms in Amounderness

By Brian Marshall

The Hundred, or wapentake, of Amounderness was a remote and underpopulated area during the Middle Ages. From the Domesday survey of 1086-7 comes a picture of desolation and neglect, while surviving documents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries point to an area that was poorly drained, with extensive peat bogs, or mosses, and many carrs areas of poor drainage where the ground was boggy but on which peat had not formed. Such a dismal landscape might be thought to have held out little prospect for the small numbers of people attempting to win some kind of living from it.

The agricultural potential of Amounderness then was decidedly unpromising, and there were two main reasons for this: the boggy nature of the ground and the cool, damp climate. Cereal crops do not grow well in such conditions. Oats offered the best prospect, and some barley was grown while wheat did poorly in the damp, heavy soil. There were no root vegetables available, though peas and beans provided a nutritious alternative. Furthermore, such crops as were grown, were not produced in any significant quantities. For example, on the Cockersand Abbey demesne estate of Pilling as late as 1536, when a valuation of the Abbey's assets was taken, there were three acres under wheat, ten under barley, thirty-two under oats and two under peas. This amounts only to forty-seven acres: less than 1% of Pilling's total of 6,060 acres, and below 5% of the 1,000 acres of cultivable land that Pilling possessed at the time. Limited areas of cereal production like this could hardly be expected to provide for an establishment such as Cockersand, and on several occasions we find the Abbot sending a ship to Ireland for wheat with which to feed the canons, servants and others for whom he was responsible. Whalley Abbey, too, with some 5,260 acres of land in Amounderness, Staining, Hardhorn and Newton, and much land elsewhere principally in particularly in Cheshire, was often obliged to purchase wheat from other parts of the country. At Lytham Priory, though, we find an occasional surplus such as that in 1461 when wheat, barley and peas were sold for a sum of £3 8s Od. The greatest part of this was probably barley though we are not told how much of the cash was in respect of each commodity.

Surviving records of arable produce in Amounderness speak clearly of very small areas under cultivation and proportionally small returns for crops sown in them. That this was because of conditions rather than policy is indicated by a comparison with estates in other parts of the country. On its demesne at Whalley comprising 502 acres, the Abbey maintained only 60 acres little below 12% - under the plough, while on its Cheshire estate of 1,057 acres there were 611 acres of arable: almost 58%. If we look further afield at estates in the Midlands and south of England it quickly becomes evident that arable farming was widely practised, often on a scale with which Amounderness estates Ramsey Abbey, a great cannot be compared. For example, Benedictine house in Huntingdonshire, held more than 60,000 acres of good land in Huntingdonshire alone, as well as extensive lands in other shires. Much of this Huntingdonshire land was given to corn production as we see from the Abbey's records of its manor of Broughton, comprising 2,372 acres, where 27 tons of wheat were produced in 1392. Not all of this acreage was under wheat of course In 1399, the nearby manor of Holywell - 2,911 acres produced more than seventeen tons of wheat as part of a mixed farming enterprise that included barley, beans, pasture and hay. The Broughton estate realised £20. 8s. 10d. (£20.44p) from the sale of corn in 1267, while in the same year Abbots Ripton, another of Ramsey Abbey's estates, brought in £35. 3s. 4d. (£35.17p). Figures like these can be adduced from countless records of estates both lay and ecclesiastical in many parts of the country, but in Amounderness the picture remained entirely different.

Human societies in temperate lands have often had to make the choice between animal protein and grain as the staple of their diet. Those regions or nations who followed the former course could support only a small human population because the earth's potential to feed went into the animals, while those who cultivated grain were able to increase their numbers because of their ability to produce a surplus and feed people not themselves involved in the production of food. For example, relatively small human populations are to be found in some of the western states of the U.S.A. and the pampas region of Argentina, where cattle rearing at a high level is carried on. This trend is even more marked when we consider nomadic societies such as Mongols or Bedouin where very small numbers of people follow their herds or flocks over vast areas of territory. On the other hand, countries such as China and India, where grain is grown in huge quantities - corn, millet and rice in India, rice in China have been able to sustain enormous populations. In Amounderness the people did not have to make a choice between animal protein and grain; it was largely imposed upon them by climate and terrain. The growing of grain, and with it the opportunity to expand the population, was never a serious option for landholders, and so, though we might say that the economy of Amounderness may not be suited to the large-scale production of grain the mild climate and steady rainfall have always assured a plentiful supply of rich grass on those areas that stood clear of the bog. It was on this grass, therefore, that the farmers of Medieval Amounderness reared the cattle upon which, more than any other beast or crop, they depended for their subsistence.

Sheep are frequently mentioned in medieval documents but in the flat mosslands of Amounderness they did not flourish, nor did pigs though they too were kept in small numbers. Both were were kept in small numbers. Both were to be found in greatest numbers on the rising land to the east of the present A6 road in manors such as Forton, Scorton, Bilsborrow and Claughton. Here, there was little or no bog and animals such as these could be pastured successfully on the sloping ground. Cattle, however, are mentioned in all parts of Amounderness. Where a manor was situated on a couple of thousand acres of relatively dry land there would be cattle, sometimes in surprisingly large numbers. Lords of manors and holders of larger areas of land had herds of considerable size while tenants of no more than a few acres would have one or more cows pastured on the common land. 

The value of cattle can readily be seen in the collateral value placed on grass. In 1401, for example, one, Nicholas Bekanshowe was brought before the Duchy Court at Lancaster charged with un- lawfully pasturing animals on land at Preesall belonging to Cockersand Abbey, and also of cutting and carrying away 200 willows and 200 poplars. The total value of the timber was given as 40 shillings, while the grass, 'there growing' was valued at £20. This figure appears particularly high when we note that the alleged offence took place on 26th December, a time when there would have been no growth in the grass and the ground so saturated that it would have turned to mud under the hooves of the mares, foals, oxen, cows and sheep that Nicholas turned onto it. He must have been desperate indeed for fodder that he resorted to such an extreme measure.

References to animals and the provision of pasture abound in medieval documents, and not uncommonly, individuals were prepared to go to law in order to secure rights of pasturage for their cattle. We see this in 1311, and also at some unspecified date shortly before that, when the Abbot of Furness and a lay- brother, Roger de Wyral, went to court to defend the Abbey's rights of pasture in Stalmine. Roger was almost certainly the grangarius, or manager, of the Furness Abbey grange of Stalmine whose job it was to see that the Abbey's rights in that manor grazing rights in particular were upheld.

Medieval sources say little about actual numbers of cattle and it is not until the sixteenth century that we begin to gain some idea of just how many there might have been. Even then it is only the larger landholders whose herds are mentioned. The Cockersand valuation of 1536 shows that at Pilling the Abbey had a total of 175 cattle of various kinds: 58 milk cows, 30 heifers in their third year, 42 stirks and three bulls, together with 24 draft oxen and 18 wild cattle. This was a herd of considerable value with milk cows assessed at eight shillings apiece, heifers at six shillings and eight pence and stirks at three shillings and fourpence. These were of course not the only cattle in Pilling. Those belonging to tenants are not mentioned and could easily have more than doubled the total. Wild cattle such as the ones mentioned here were relatively common in remoter parts of Northern England. A small herd of them may still be seen at Chillingham in Northumberland.

By comparison with the cattle, the valuation of 1536 refers to 89 sheep, 18 pigs and 10 horses held by Cockersand Abbey on its Pilling estate. We would not expect to find anything like this number of sheep in an inland manor such as Nateby or Catforth. Pilling and Cockerham were exceptional among the manors with extensive moss in that they also possessed large areas of salt marsh which was, and is, ideal for sheep.

The folk of Amounderness in the middle ages lived off a diet that varied little. Oat bread, and pease pudding would often have constituted the daily fare. This would have been supple- mented by seasonal vegetables such as brassicas. Occasionally a beast would be slaughtered and the salted meat eked out to provide some variety in an otherwise monotonous diet. Poultry, too, were a feature, providing eggs, and from time to time a bird for the pot. Fowls were often included as part of the rent payable to the landlord. Wildfowl might offer some opportunities for extra food, though these were usually the prerogative of the lord of the manor who would probably have held full 'right of warren', and though there are few natural lakes or ponds apart from meres such as those at Marton and Bispham, villagers would find 'snigs' in the moss drains like Pilling Water and Grangepool, and those living in coastal manors would catch 'flukes' in the tidal waters.

All these extra protein sources, however, were occasional and unreliable. What was very reliable was the protein obtained from cattle, and to a lesser extent from sheep. This, of course, was in the form of cheese. The proportion of milk cows seen in the Cockersand valuation of 1536, and the number of heifers that would be milking within the year, are clear indications of the heavy reliance on dairy products. Virtually every household would have engaged in cheesemaking, larger manors and estates doing so on a commercial basis, selling their cheeses Lancaster, Preston, Garstang, Poulton and Kirkham. Butter tubs on the markets at and churns together with cheesemaking frequently in household inventories that have survived in some equipment appear numbers after about 1500, and cheeses themselves are often listed. For example, at Rufford Hall, a little way outside our area, a dozen cheese vats and two cheese presses were listed in 1620, while at Middleton Hall in 1618 there were 107 cheeses worth £7 5s 10d, (£7.29p) and at Lytham Hall in an inventory of 1620 we find 58 pounds of cheese valued at 3d. per pound. In 1616, the Shuttleworth family of Gawthorpe Hall was consuming around eleven pounds of cheese per week.

Figures such as these indicate that cattle and the dairy industry were as important to the local economy in the middle ages as they are today when 86% of agricultural land in Lancashire is still under grass. Medieval landholders and their tenants were the founders of the extensive Lancashire cheese industry and men of Amounderness, a district remote and agriculturally backward, counted their wealth, not in money or in corn, but in cattle.

Extracted from the author's M.Phil. thesis: 'Monastic Landholding in Amounderness 1066-1540.' University of Lancaster, 1999.