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whittlewoodproject Historical Research
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Leckhampstead Church (Bucks) The Whittlewood project makes
use of a variety of historical documents, both medieval and modern, in
order to provide a context for the archaeological research. Studies
have been made both of individual settlements and the project area as
a whole. An important feature of the
project area was that it was subject to the king’s forest law. This
was a Norman innovation, imposed soon after the Conquest, primarily in
order to protect the king’s hunting. The law was unpopular with
landowners, whose freedom of action, to hunt deer and to clear,
enclose and farm their land, was curtailed by forest officials. Part
of the project area was disafforested in about 1300. Further
details. Forest justices imposed fines
for poaching the king’s deer. The manor known as Heybarne
(located in a detached part of Lillingstone Dayrell) appears to have
originated as an isolated farmstead from which poachers raided the
king’s forest. In later centuries the destructive actions of the
deer damaged the manor’s arable. The land belonging to the
manor of Heybarne was cleared of trees and underwood and converted to
arable in a process known as assarting. This occurred frequently in
Whittlewood Forest in the 12th and 13th centuries when the population
was rising. Several examples of assarting leading to the creation and
growth of settlements are well documented. These include Puxley (in Passenham
parish) and Stockholt (in Akeley
parish). The study of Akeley parish is
aided by the survival of a series of manorial court rolls, which
reveal many aspects of everyday life in the village in the 14th and
15th centuries. Similar series of records also survive for the manors
of Silverstone and Whittlebury,
originally a single estate before the creation of separate parishes,
the courts for which were held by Luffield Priory and Burnham Abbey in
the later Middle Ages. Evidence of the division of large estates to create smaller manors and parishes can be found in other parts of the project area. For example, the Lillingstones were probably a single estate before the Norman Conquest, of which Lillingstone Lovell appears to have been the primary settlement. The village of Akeley may also have been a relatively late development, its territory originally part of an estate centred on neighbouring Leckhampstead. Most of the medieval
settlements of the project area still survive today, either as living
villages or as earthworks which can be surveyed and planned. The most
notable exception is the village of Stowe,
which was removed by the Temple family to make way for their landscape
gardens in the 17th and 18th centuries. Almost no trace of the
medieval village survives. The surviving documents, however, reveal
something of the lives of its inhabitants in the Middle Ages. December 2003 |
