Ridges in the Grass: A Historian's Notes on Village, Town and Fair

Field Notebook of Dr. Lena Okoro, Medieval Historian

1July 8, morning. Walked down a quiet valley in the Yorkshire Wolds to Wharram Percy, a village that people left about 500 years ago. Only the ruined church of St. Martin still stands above ground. Everywhere else, grassy humps and banks mark where houses and garden plots once stood. Archaeologists dug here almost every summer from 1950 to 1990. Records suggest that around 1500, the lord turned the village fields into pasture for sheep, whose wool sold well, and the last few families had to leave.

2July 8, afternoon. On the hillside, the grass rises and falls in long, parallel ridges a few meters wide, like waves frozen in place. This is ridge and furrow. It formed when heavy plows, pulled by teams of oxen, turned the soil toward the middle of the same strip, year after year. Each ridge often matched one strip in a great open field. Strips held by different families lay side by side, mixed in with strips farmed for the lord.

3July 9. Found the earth dam of an old pond at the south end of the village, where water once turned the lord's mill. The lord's manor house stood on higher ground to the north. Like peasants on many manors, Wharram's tenants owed the lord days of work in his fields and paid to grind their grain at his mill. Some of the pottery found here was made in workshops elsewhere in Yorkshire, so villagers probably bought at least a few goods at markets.

4July 12. Took the train to York, a little over 20 miles to the southwest. In the Middle Ages, York was a walled river port on the Ouse and one of the largest towns in England. Like many towns, it had won royal charters that let its citizens run their own courts and markets. I visited the Merchant Adventurers' Hall, a timber guild hall begun in the 1350s. Members met in the great hall upstairs to do business and make rules for their trade. In the undercroft below, the guild ran a hospital for poor and sick people, and it had its own chapel. Nearby street names still recall trades, such as Spurriergate, the street of the spur-makers.

5July 15. Archive day in Cambridge. Read about Stourbridge Fair, held each year in a field just outside the town. In 1211 King John granted the fair to a hospital for people with leprosy, which kept the tolls that traders paid. The fair grew into one of the largest in England and lasted several weeks in late summer. Merchants arrived by river and road with wool, cloth, iron, salt fish and wine, and some came from overseas.