RURAL HISTORY Rural History Today is published by the British Agricultural History Society TODAY Issue 26 | February 2014 Above: cover of Joan Thirsk’s Alternative Agriculture, Letters from Joan published 1997. left to get on with it; Joan supported me at every turn with the most generous encouragement and guidance delivered in long carefully typed letters, 42 of which survive, pinned to relevant topics and latterly collected into a file, ‘Joan’s letters’. These letters date from 1996 to 2006 when we Many readers will have seen went over to emails and phone calls of which nothing the obituaries to Joan Thirsk survives, except the memory of her voice. The (1922–2013) in the national period covers the time she was finishing Alternative press and the most recent volume of AHR and may Agriculture and making a start on Food in Early Modern have attended the conference England which she wrote simultaneously with Hadlow: in her honour in London in Life, Land and People in a Wealden Parish, 1460–1600. I January. Liz Griffiths came to can hear her laughing, ‘I am an old woman in a hurry’. know her well when she lived Both books were published in 2007. in Kent and has written her Reading through her letters, I am struck not only by personal reflections on this her kindness and the prescience of her advice, but her remarkable woman. With Joan Thirsk, taken in 1993. Courtesy of Jane Robinson. strongly held feminist views and steely determination. whom she enjoyed a close Wherever she could she promoted the interests of friendship. Joan Thirsk died on 3rd October, aged 91, after a fall female historians. On choosing four speakers for a at home in Hadlow Tower where she and her husband, conference session, she wrote in May 2000, ‘I shall be Jimmy had lived since her retirement from Oxford. My specially pleased if I can find three women and only first thought, after remembering the steep staircase one man! In a letter from 1998, that exemplifies her leading up to her study, was thank goodness she had formidable work ethic and surely captures every aspect been spared the trials of a long and debilitating illness. of her personality, she says, My first encounter with Joan was when she came ‘I have put the file of your Green Book on the seat Also in this issue to examine my PhD at the UEA in 1987. She was that I occupy in the evening and I will treat it as my Walking and particularly interested in two things: my evidence of main evening occupation from tonight! I have just working sheep – 2 sharefarming in seventeenth century Norfolk and the finished a tedious, yet very necessary (evening) job fact that I had been a dairy farmer in New Zealand. She indexing all the names appearing in the Kent Feet of Rural History 2013 – 4 had a deep conviction that practical farmers, especially Fines, Henry VIII. It was holding up further publication Wartime Farm revisited – 6 female ones, understood agriculture better than the and no one was willing to do it. I volunteered, without theorists, so I had much to live up to. any prompting or pleading from anyone, and realized Conferences – 5 But in those days, with Maggie Thatcher at the that I was conforming exactly to the female stereotype New books – 8 helm and little prospect of an academic career, post by so doing! But I also knew that I might uncover a graduates often bit the bullet and went into school whole host of unexpected things from concentrating teaching. It was not until 1995 that I contacted Joan in such detail on listing people who were buying and soon after Peter and I moved to Kent. Any thought that selling properties in Kent temp. Hen. 8. You really never this would be afternoon tea with homemade cakes and know what will come out of such a tedious exercise. a little old lady, was quickly dismissed as I was launched And it has been most instructive. So I am satisfied to into another world of BAHS conferences, papers and have done it and can turn to other long-standing jobs’. articles and getting myself established in the academic This must be music to the ears of those who have community. By the following spring I had decided on a grappled with similar publications! rest from teaching to concentrate on my new activities. Beyond the letters, I’ll cherish the memory of Joan’s Such is the effect Joan had on people. But I was not visit to Norfolk, to which we had returned in 2002, Continued on page 7 RURAL HISTORY TODAY Issue 26 | February 2014 1 Walking and working sheep on the south central chalk uplands* in the late medieval and early modern periods The practice of walking and movable folds/temporary enclosures were organised working sheep (the moveable in the common arable fields. What is clear is that the fold) is generally regarded as system was about feeding off the pasture in one area the vital element in common and depositing the manure in another. It is also evident field sheep and corn farming that the system as practised on the south central chalks on the south central chalks, depended on maintaining one-third to one-half of the but agricultural historians total farmed land as permanent pasture. have given scant attention In the late medieval and early modern periods the to how the system actually movable fold system was only practised in the spring worked. However it is and summer months. The system was based on the possible to establish what growth of natural herbage on permanent downland is likely to have happened, pasture, and started at the beginning of May each year and what could not have and finished by the end of September. By the latter time happened, with regard to a combination of the weather, diminishing daylight, farming these chalk uplands and a slow-down in the growth of herbage meant that during the review period. it was “not worthwhile to carry it on longer” (Joan A current idea, that the The current confusion about the practice of the Thirsk, ed, Cambridge Agrarian History of England and common flock was walked moveable fold is understandable because the Wales, vol. 4, 1500–1640, 1967, p 188; William Ellis, and worked all the year management system which came to replace it The Shepherd’s Sure Guide, 1749, p 284). round on the south central during the course of the eighteenth century was It is probable that the movable fold was principally chalks, is challenged here by also described as ‘folding’ by contemporaries, and carried out on the full fallow which preceded the sowing Gavin Bowie. similarly involved moving hurdles around a field of the winter wheat crop. This was managed as pasture in order to control and confine the stock. The later during the autumn and winter, after which it was system can be described as strip grazing where the normally ploughed twice between the beginning of May sheep were no longer walked and ‘worked’ but instead and mid-August. The main purpose of such ploughing lived more or less sedentary lives feeding off arable was weed control, and the reduction of the soil to fodder crops in enclosed fields. Hence the system to a manageable tilth. Such attrition with the plough, be described here pre-dates the introduction of arable combined with the movable fold, had the potential to fodder crops for green feed in the late seventeenth provide a weed-free and manured soil by the time of the century, but continued well into the eighteenth third ploughing. Here the furrows were made shallower century where common field farming prevailed and closer together than with the first two ploughings, (Raine Morgan, The Root Crop in English Agriculture, so as to provide a seedbed. It will be appreciated that, 1650–1870, unpublished PhD thesis, University of because of the above cultivations, there would be very Reading, 1978). little green feed available for the sheep in the night fold in summer (D. Oschinsky, Walter of Henley and other The sheep flocks kept on these chalk hills could be treatises in estate management and accounting, 1971, pp large, sometimes over 2000 sheep, and were usually 265, 315, 321; C.W. Chalklin, Agriculture in Kent in the managed in three groups, which were also described as 17th Century,1965, pp 82–3). flocks. These were the ewe flock, lamb flock and wether A reasonably abundant supply of daytime feed was flock and their characteristics will be described later. essential for the night fold to be worthwhile. In Master Separate and distinct wether flocks were also a feature Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry, 1534, the shepherd is of the system. advised that “in the morning when he cometh to his The movable fold system practised in the late fold, let not his sheep out anon, but raise them up and medieval and early modern periods can be defined as let them stand still awhile, that they may dung and * The south central pasturing the sheep on permanent downland, rough piss”. William Ellis states in the mid-eighteenth century chalk uplands grazing and other pasture during the day and then, that without a ‘bellyful’ of feed a sheep’s “dung and for the night, walking them to, and intensively folding stale will prove a poor dressing”. The fresh herbage are defined as the them on, a portion of arable land that was being required to provide the energy and protein necessary downlands of east prepared for growing a crop.