Part 3 – All Is Waste
William of Normandy wasn’t very welcome in England, especially in the North, and in 1068 he despatched an army with orders to wipe out the population and deprive the Northern Earls of the means to oppose him. We don’t know for certain that his troops came through here, but what we do know is that when the Domesday commissioners visited 18 years later they recorded that “all Longdendale is waste”. The villages were abandoned, the people gone – Mottram, former centre of the “Longdendale lordship”, wasn’t even mentioned – although there must have been a few survivors to tell how things had been in the time of Edward the Confessor.
The commissioners noted, however, that “there is land, unpastured, fit for hunting” so the area within Derbyshire was taken into the Royal Forest of the Peak. For William, though, this wasn’t primarily a recreational facility, as like later Norman monarchs he would have spent most of his time in France, but rather a way of making money. People could still live in the Forest, and some would be paid to look after it, but everyone else had to fork out, by paying fines for breaking Forest laws. Timber, for instance, was essential for fuel and housebuilding, but there was a fine for every tree cut down or patch of cleared land cultivated. Inevitably, the villages would have remained very small.
However, in 1157 Henry II created a Manor of Glossop and granted the lordship to the Abbot of Basingwerk Abbey in North Wales. Kings didn’t usually pick fights with Abbots, as there might be consequences in the afterlife, or even in the present if the Pope got to hear, so the tenants of the manor got some respite from the harshest effects of the laws. Finally in 1285 the Abbot negotiated an exemption from most of them, and the villages, under efficient monastic management, would then have been free to expand.
This golden age, though, was short-lived, as 64 years later the Black Death would have reduced the population at least by half. After that, there would have been no need for more arable, nor labour to plough it, and a downturn in the weather, the “Little Ice Age”, was already making it hard to grow crops like wheat. The farmers, led by the Abbey, turned to commercial sheep farming to feed the demand for wool, England’s biggest export.
The fossil open fields are, therefore, likely to show the collectively-farmed area as it was in 1349. It may, though, not have grown much after 1066, as the Abbey appears to have developed its manor by creating self-contained farms on the commons rather than by extending the shared arable. The village centres may not have grown much either – it was difficult to build out into open fields as everybody had a stake in them. The map of Simmondley before all the houses may therefore show it much as it would have been 780 years earlier – the open fields can still be traced to the east either side of Old Lane, the monastic way between Charlesworth and Glossop, with large areas of former common to north, south and west. After the break, we’ll look at the villages one by one.
NEXT – Part 4 Dinting, Chisworth and Chunal
PREVIOUS – Part 2 Clearings in the Woods