Land-use in Lowestoft Parish – 17th & 18th Century 

It is unarguable that maritime influences were the major factor in shaping Lowestoft during the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods. Yet, agriculture was also an important element in the development of the town, creating employment for a number of the inhabitants (and limited wealth for a few) and leading to a number of associated trades and occupations. It also acted as a safety-net for the community, something that was always there as part of the economic structure – something that could, in periods of adversity, provide subsistence until better times returned. 

The Manor Roll of 1618 – Suffolk Archives (Ipswich), 194/A10/73 – gives a detailed breakdown of land ownership in the parish and also of use: in terms of whether the soil was growing crops or pasturing livestock, or whether it consisted of bruery or woodland. Only the six main common greens (Denes, North Common and Warren, Goose Green, Church Green, the unmanaged parts of Drakes Heath with Smithmarsh, and South End Common) are unaccounted for in the document because, although in ownership of the lord, they were available to townspeople on a controlled basis mainly for the pasturing of livestock. Their absence from the reckoning removed about 415 acres from the overall area of the parish which, when added to the sixty acres occupied by the town and a further twenty taken up by roads and trackways, left 991 acres available for farming and other uses. The official measured area of Lowestoft parish, according to 19th and 20th century surveys, is 1,485 acres, three roods and thirty-one perches – in other words, almost 1,486 acres.

Skamacre Heath is referred to as West Heath in the Manor Roll and may once have served as one of the town’s common greens. However, at some point, it had been parcelled up into nine pieces of bruery: managed heathland, used for rough grazing by tenants and not available to anyone else – except, perhaps, by sub-letting. The total area shown in the Manor Roll as committed to cultivation, to pasture, to bruery and to woodland came to over 990 acres, so the two overall figures agree very closely. Annual rent payable to the lord on this portion of the manor was 2d. per acre, regardless of use, meaning that the total financial yield of lands beyond the confines of the town (once the sixty-eight acres of manorial demesne have been removed from the calculations) came to just under £8 a year. The total annual value of the rental in Lowestoft was about £14: £7 19s. 2d. from the farmland, £4 14s. 10½d. from the copyhold houses in town, and perhaps £1 5s. 0d. or so from the freehold dwellings (the last sum is an estimate). By 1676, the value had risen to £18 4s. 2½d. See Suffolk Archives (Ipswich), 194/A10/122 – a surviving rental for that particular year.

Nearly all of the agricultural land was freehold and, at the time the Manor Roll was compiled, was held by a total of fifty-six individuals and two corporate bodies. The larger holdings, ranging in size from about thirty acres to 123 acres, were largely concentrated in the hands of the two corporate bodies (Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Town Trustees) and nine local gentlemen. None of them farmed the land themselves, but leased it to people who did – some of whom may, in turn, have sub-let portions to other men. There were fewer consolidated holdings at the time compared with the period of the Tithe Apportionment (1842), when ten nucleated farmsteads can be seen on the map accompanying the textual listing of land held, regularly spaced throughout the parish (Norfolk Record Office, TA 658). The various abuttalments given in the Manor Roll show that the only really recognisable ones were those held by William Cuddon, Francis Wrott (gentleman) and Magdalen College in the north-western part of the parish, and by Robert Jettor (gentleman) and Thomas Jenkinson (gentleman) in the south-western sector. Wrott was lord of the manor at Gunton; Jettor and Jenkinson were large holders of land in Flixton and Oulton.

Altogether, there were 944.125 acres of freehold land listed as having some kind of productive use – a figure that can be rounded up to about 960 acres because of six small fields which do not have their areas recorded. Added to this was a further thirty four-and-a-half acres of copyhold land – which puts the total in excess of 990 acres, as outlined in the second paragraph of this article. The use of the acreage available for agriculture and other purposes may be seen in Table 1. The dominance of arable land is apparent, but the importance of various types of grazing is also noticeable. All terms reproduced in the “Use” column were employed in the Manor Roll, with the exception of “arable”, which may be inferred from frequent references to enclosures (clm terr) and to unenclosed “pieces of land” (peciam terr). It is safe to regard these as the areas under cultivation because there are other references to “pasture enclosures” (clm pastur) and to “pieces of bruery” (pec bruer). There are even a few examples of mixed use within the same plot, such as “an enclosure of land and pasture” (clm terr et pastur) or “a piece of land and bruery” (peciam terr et bruer), thereby making clear the distinction between what was cultivated and what was not. The abbreviation clm represents clausum, meaning “enclosed”.

What may appear surprising is that the amount of arable land, at something over 600 acres, was only 150 acres more than it had been at the time of the Domesday Survey – 532 years before. That extra ground, however, would have been brought into cultivation with some degree of difficulty. The Lowestoft soils were largely light, poor and acidic, and the location of the parish bleak. Hence, the presence of so much waste (common land) and bruery.

Table1.  Land use and acreages in 1618

As far as the seven specific terms used in the table to describe land-use are concerned, garden, woodland and osier yard speak for themselves (the last-named providing material used for making baskets), but the other four require some explanation. All of them relate to the feeding of livestock. Bruery was heathland, but of a managed nature. It was marked out in strips, or fenced off into enclosures, and used for rough grazing. Any gorse growing on it would have been cut for fuel and any bracken mown either for fuel or animal bedding. The parish Tithe Accounts 1698-1787 (Norfolk Record Office, PD 589/80) show that gorse cut on bruery or common green was taxable at 3s per thousand bundles. It was in great demand for firing bread ovens.

The term meadow means permanent grassland, as opposed to pasture, which was sown and maintained as grass for a desired period. At the end of this time, the land might well have been returned to arable use or ploughed up and re-sown with grasses once more. Both meadow and pasture were used for the direct grazing of livestock or the production of hay. They were probably used for both purposes if the hay crop was cut first and the animals turned out onto the aftermath. Stintland was definitely organised in this way. It was either permanent or ley grass, often set out in strips, which had the hay crop taken off and then the animals put onto it. If the stints were unenclosed, then the livestock would have had to be tethered. 

By the year 1618, much of the farmland in the parish was already enclosed. This fact fits in with comments which have been made about Suffolk being regarded by 16th century commentators as either completely or largely enclosed. It also matches what has been said about the eastern part of Norfolk – an area that was geographically close to Lowestoft. Just how long the process had been going on cannot be stated with certainty because manorial documentation for the manor during the late medieval period does not seem to have survived. However, a clue may lie in certain documents relating to the ancient manor of Akethorp(e), which was situated within the parish and which belonged to Magdalen College, Oxford, from the 1460s onwards. Once it came into the possession of the college, it seems to have lost its manorial status and become simply an agricultural estate. By the time that the Lowestoft manor rolls of 1610 and 1618 were compiled, it had become subsumed into the manor of Lowestoft. Among its surviving documentation, a 14th century rental, an account roll of 1438-9 and a terrier of the early sixteenth century all refer to enclosures of varying sizes (Magdalen College Archives, 151/19, 73/4 and FP 105). 

The overall process of enclosing land was probably of the piecemeal and partial types, rather than the result of a single concerted move on the part of all interested landowners. Furthermore, with the parish as a whole being well-endowed with areas of waste to provide common greens, enclosure of the common fields would have been able to proceed without great inconvenience being caused to people through loss of grazing rights. The process must also have been assisted by weak manorial control, because Lowestoft did not have a resident lord. Demesne land had probably been sold off piecemeal over a long period since, by 1618, it was only sixty-eight acres in extent (forty-six arable, nineteen bruery and three grassland), located in different parts of the parish and rented out to various people. 

Of the combined overall area specified in Table 1, 68% was enclosed. If the three main categories of land within the overall total (arable, grass and bruery) are analysed, it is found that 73% of the cultivated acreage was enclosed, 92% of the meadow, pasture and stintland, and 31% of the bruery. The very high percentage of grassland that was fenced should come as no surprise, given the need to keep stock confined. Nor is it remarkable that so much of the managed heathland should have remained unfenced, in view of its traditional open nature. However, the fact that three-quarters of the arable land was enclosed by 1618 shows just how far the move away from open-field culture had progressed. Vestiges of the strips remained in one or two areas, on either north-south or east-west alignments (according to the directional sloping of the land) – but, for the most part, the old medieval landscape had gone.

Ironically, by a combination of chance and municipal planning, a sector of the former South-west Field has been preserved as a park and playing-field and it is just about possible to ascertain (or at least imagine) something of its former nature. Normanston Park constitutes about 15%-20% of the former South-west Field, largest of the three common fields. It has a pronounced slope from north-west to south-east, which means that the strips would probably have run on a north-east to south-west alignment in order to avoid soil-creep.

The two words that give the clue to which land was enclosed and which was not have already been identified and commented on. The use of clausum (abbreviated to clm) is self-explanatory, but peciam is worth remarking upon. In at least one part of rural Suffolk the word simply meant an area of land somewhere, but in another it has been classified as an unenclosed remnant of the open-field system. The latter view was definitely the case in Lowestoft, and it is possible to see from various abuttalments given in the 1618 Manor Roll whether the strips were on a north-south or east-west alignment. The piece has even been called the basic unit of land tenure in East Anglia, the equivalent of the Midlands selion: a strip of land, half an acre in area. Some of the Lowestoft pieces were half an acre in extent, but the majority were between one and three acres. It is possible, therefore, that these larger sizes were the result of the amalgamation of strips which had taken place over the years.

The respective sizes of both enclosures and pieces varied a good deal, as may be seen in Table 2 – though the overall tendency was towards smaller ones than became the norm for fields later on. By the time of the Tithe Apportionment in 1842, a considerable change in the agricultural landscape had taken place in Lowestoft. The Manor Roll of 1618 shows a parish with about three-quarters of its arable land enclosed, much of it in small fields (thirty-five of the seventy enclosures were smaller than the median size of 3.5 acres). The Tithe Map itself shows one which is totally enclosed – and not just the farmland: over 200 acres of common green had also been either parcelled up or built over. Only the Denes area (located between the base of the cliff and the shoreline) was left open, largely because this particular space served the town as an open-air wharf in the absence of a harbour – before such a facility was constructed during 1827-30. And it was also the place where fishing-gear was mended and laid out to dry after preservation treatment, where cod livers from the Iceland lining voyages were boiled down for their oil, and where ships and smaller craft were both built and repaired. A certain amount of rough grazing for livestock took place there and it was also used by visitors to the town during the summer months as the access to sea-bathing and for “perambulation” (as it was termed) to breathe in the sea-air and admire the local views. Samuel Morton Peto’s development of his “South Lowestoft” resort during the 1850s changed all that!

Table 2.  The size of enclosures and pieces (in acres)

The move to full enclosure of parish land, probably, really got under way as the second half of the 18th century advanced, because there is no evidence in the Tithe Accounts (the surviving ones beginning in 1698) that it had begun on any significant scale before 1750. With a basic charge of 2s. per acre made on major field crops, it is noticeable that the sums of money paid on certain, named fields (e.g. Paradise, Ringbell, Fir Pightle, Long Close and Gravel Pit) suggest sizes much the same as one hundred years before, when the Manor Roll was compiled. If further consolidation had taken place in the meantime, it is not detectable. However, by the time that the Tithe Map of 1842 came to be drawn, all the little enclosures and strips of over 200 years before had been amalgamated into the classic, rectangular configuration of fields anything between three and twelve acres in size – the pattern which became regarded (and perhaps still is, even now, in spite of modern field enlargement) as the quintessential English landscape.

CREDIT: David Butcher