To stand on the quiet lane looking across the fields towards Brattleby village today is to witness a scene of quintessential English rurality. The gentle roll of the Lincolnshire land, the neatly squared fields bounded by thick hawthorn hedges, the sturdy farmsteads set within their geometric plots—it all speaks of a timeless order, a landscape shaped by generations of patient toil. Yet, this impression of antiquity is, in large part, an illusion. The Brattleby we see today, with its specific boundaries, roads, and farm structures, is not the product of slow, organic evolution over a millennium. It is, in fact, a remarkably modern creation, one that was meticulously planned and quite literally drawn on paper during a revolutionary period of agrarian change in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The story of how modern Brattleby was born is preserved in two extraordinary sets of documents: the Enclosure Award of 1779 and the Tithe Apportionment of c.1845. Far from being dry, technical records, these maps and their accompanying texts are the constitutional charters of the modern landscape. They document a quiet revolution that swept away a medieval world of open fields and common rights, replacing it with the rigidly defined, capital-intensive agriculture that still characterises the parish. To understand these documents is to understand the very DNA of the fields we walk through and the properties we live in today.
The World Before the Line: Medieval Brattleby
To grasp the scale of the change, we must first picture the landscape that was lost. For centuries, from the post-Conquest era through to the reign of George III, the agricultural life of Brattleby was governed by the open-field system. This was a communal and manorial arrangement, a relic of a feudal world. The Domesday Book of 1086 records Brattleby (‘Brotelbi’) as a possession of the powerful Norman bishop, Geoffrey of Coutances, with land for seven ploughs, a mill, and a church. Over the subsequent centuries, the lordship of the manor passed through various hands, including the prominent De la Haye family, before being granted in the 15th century to Balliol College, Oxford, which would remain the principal landowner into the modern era.
Under this long-standing system, the arable land of the parish was not divided into the small, hedged fields we see now. Instead, it was laid out in two or three vast, unenclosed ‘Great Fields’. Within these fields, each tenant of the manor, from the more substantial yeoman farmer to the humble cottager, held a number of scattered strips of land. A single farmer might have a one-acre strip in North Field, another half-acre in South Field, and several more scattered elsewhere.
This system, however inefficient it may appear to modern eyes, possessed its own logic. The scattering of strips ensured a fair distribution of both good and poor quality soil among the villagers. The entire community followed a rigid crop rotation—typically wheat or rye one year, barley or oats the next, followed by a year of fallow where the land was left to recover its fertility and used for common grazing.
Beyond the great arable fields lay the parish ‘commons’ and ‘wastes’. This was land, often poorer grazing or heath, over which parishioners held crucial rights (or ‘stints’) to graze their livestock, gather firewood (estover), cut turf for fuel (turbary), and allow their pigs to forage for acorns (pannage). These rights were the bedrock of the subsistence economy for many smaller families, providing a vital supplement to what they could grow on their strips. The governance of this system was a complex tapestry of manorial court rulings and village custom, a shared reality that bound the community together, for better or worse, in a web of mutual obligation.
The Age of Improvement and the Enclosure of Brattleby
By the mid-18th century, this ancient system was increasingly viewed as an obstacle to progress. A powerful movement for ‘Agricultural Improvement’, championed by landed aristocrats and theorists like Arthur Young, argued that the open fields and common rights were inefficient, wasteful, and held back Britain’s potential to feed its growing population. Enclosing the land—consolidating the scattered strips into compact, privately-owned fields and extinguishing common rights—would allow ‘improving’ landlords and farmers to invest in new techniques: better crop rotations (like the four-course Norfolk system), selective livestock breeding, and improved land drainage.
Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries, over 4,000 Parliamentary Enclosure Acts were passed, transforming millions of acres of the English countryside. Lincolnshire, with its vast tracts of fen, wold, and heath, was a prime candidate for such ‘improvement’, and experienced one of the highest rates of enclosure in the country.
The process began for Brattleby on a specific date. In 1779, a petition was presented to Parliament by the major landowners of the parish, overwhelmingly led by the Master and Scholars of Balliol College, Oxford, as Lords of the Manor. They argued that the parish’s open fields, meadows, pastures, commonable lands, and waste grounds were, in their present state, “incapable of any considerable improvement.” The resulting Act, An Act for dividing and inclosing the Open and Common Fields, Meadows, Pastures, and Waste Grounds, in the Parish of Brattleby, in the County of Lincoln (19 Geo. 3 c. 92), set in motion the legal machinery that would entirely redesign the parish.
The Act appointed three powerful Enclosure Commissioners: John Hudson of Bessingby, John Grundy of Spalding, and Thomas Espin of Louth. These men were professional surveyors and land agents, part of a new class of experts entrusted with the monumental task of re-ordering the landscape. They were granted quasi-judicial powers. Their first task was to commission a complete and accurate survey and map of the entire parish, detailing every strip, every right, every cottage and close.
Their work culminated in the Brattleby Enclosure Award, a huge and detailed legal document, likely written on multiple sheets of parchment and accompanied by a large-scale map. This award was the final, unappealable judgement. It performed several functions at once:
1. Extinguishing Rights: It legally extinguished all rights of common grazing and other customary uses of the land. The communal pasture that had supported villagers for centuries ceased to exist overnight. 2. Consolidating Land: It re-allocated the land. Each person who could prove legal title to land or rights received a single, consolidated block of land equivalent in value (not necessarily in area) to their former scattered holdings and common rights. 3. Compensating the Church: It allocated a significant portion of land to the Rector of Brattleby, in this case the incumbent appointed by Balliol College, in lieu of the ancient right to collect tithes (one-tenth of all agricultural produce). This freed the new, consolidated farms from the cumbersome obligation of paying their tithes in kind. 4. Creating Infrastructure: It laid out the new public and private road network. The straight, wide lanes we see around the village today—like stretches of the main road heading north and south—are classic ‘Enclosure Roads’, designed by the commissioners for the efficient movement of wagons and livestock between the new, compact farms. They also mandated the creation and maintenance of new drainage channels, essential for improving the heavy clay soils of the area.
The Award was a document of immense power and finality. It decreed that all new allotments must be fenced and hedged, usually with hawthorn (quicksedge), within a set period at the new owner’s expense. This single directive is responsible for the hedgerow network that now defines Brattleby’s field patterns. The commissioners meticulously described each new plot of land by its acreage, its boundaries, and its new owner. The medieval landscape of strips was wiped clean, and a new one, based on private property and geometric precision, was drawn in its place.
The Social and Economic Consequences
For the major landowners, enclosure was an unmitigated success. Balliol College, as Lord of the Manor and patron of the living, emerged with a vastly enhanced estate, its holdings consolidated into large, efficient farms that could be let at much higher rents to substantial tenant farmers. Other significant local landowners likewise saw their assets rationalised and their potential for profit increased.
For the smaller players in the village, the outcome was often far more precarious. The cottager who had relied on the common to graze a cow, a few geese, and gather fuel might receive a tiny plot of land—perhaps less than an acre—as compensation for the loss of those rights. This plot was often too small to be economically viable on its own and came with the significant legal and financial burden of fencing it. Many were forced to sell their meagre allotment almost immediately, often to their larger neighbours.
Thus, a key social outcome of enclosure in Brattleby, as elsewhere, was the acceleration of social stratification. It created a clearer, harsher division between a small class of large tenant farmers who rented the new, enclosed farms, and a much larger class of landless agricultural labourers, now entirely dependent on wage labour for their survival. The old ladder of rural society, where a family might hope to move from cottager to smallholder, became much harder to climb. The village lost its semi-independent peasantry and became a workforce for a more capitalistic mode of agriculture. While historians like J.D. Chambers have argued that enclosure did not cause rural depopulation and was necessary for feeding the nation, the classic critique by J.L. and Barbara Hammond in The Village Labourer—that it was a plain case of “class robbery”—still resonates when one considers the loss of the commons-based subsistence economy for the poor.
The Tithe Map of c.1845: A High-Definition Snapshot
If the Enclosure Award was the blueprint for the new landscape, the Tithe Map was the high-resolution photograph taken some sixty-five years later, showing the results. The Tithe Commutation Act of 1836 was another great modernising piece of legislation. It aimed to finally abolish the deeply unpopular and contentious system of paying tithes in kind, which even after enclosure often still applied in parishes where land had not been allocated to the church. The Act replaced this with a fixed monetary payment (a ‘rent-charge’) based on the value of the land.
To achieve this, every field, yard, cottage, and copse in England and Wales had to be surveyed and valued. The result for Brattleby was a beautiful, large-scale map and a detailed accompanying document called the Apportionment, created around 1845. The Tithe Map is a document of breathtaking detail. It shows the parish after the enclosure hedges had matured and the new farmsteads had been established. It assigns a number to every single plot of land.
The Apportionment is the key that unlocks the map. It is a ledger that lists, for each numbered plot:
The Landowner (e.g., The Master & Scholars of Balliol College, Oxford) The Occupier (the tenant farmer’s name, e.g., John Smith) The Field Name (e.g., ‘Long Close’, ‘Five Acre Piece’, ‘Church Hill’) The State of Cultivation (Arable, Pasture, Meadow, Wood) The precise area in Acres, Roods, and Perches The new Tithe Rent-Charge payable
Together, the map and apportionment provide an almost cinematic snapshot of the entire parish in the mid-Victorian era. They are a Domesday Book for the 19th century. We can see exactly who owned and who farmed every square foot of Brattleby. We can trace the names of farming families who would dominate village life for generations. We can identify the location of the blacksmith’s forge, the village inn, and the cottages of the farm labourers. The field names themselves are a mixture of old and new: some, like ‘Ings’ (a Norse word for water-meadow), are echoes of a much older past, while others, like ‘Seventeen Acre Close’, are starkly functional names given to the new fields created by enclosure.
By comparing the Tithe Apportionment with the earlier Enclosure Award, a historian can trace the consolidation of land in the intervening decades. We can see if the families who received allotments in 1779 still held them in 1845, or if they had been bought out by the larger estates. The documents reveal the success of the agricultural revolution on its own terms: large, consolidated farms, managed by substantial tenants, and owned by a distant Oxford college.
Reading the History Written on the Land
The legacy of these two documents is Brattleby’s visible reality. A walk or drive around the parish becomes a historical investigation. The long, straight road to Aisthorpe is an enclosure road, its route determined not by the meandering track of a medieval cart but by the ruler of a commissioner’s map. The grid-like pattern of the fields east of the village is a direct imprint of the Enclosure Award’s geometry. The thick, stocky hawthorn hedges, now rich with biodiversity, were planted by decree in the 1780s to enforce the new boundaries of private property.
The very structure of the farms—a solid farmhouse with a collection of barns and yards, set in the middle of its own block of land—is a post-enclosure phenomenon. Prior to 1779, almost everyone would have lived in the village nucleus, walking out to their scattered strips in the open fields. Enclosure created the isolated farmstead, a more efficient but also more solitary way of life.
These records, now held in places like The National Archives and Lincolnshire Archives, are not just relics for academics. They are the essential title deeds of the parish, providing the ultimate legal proof of boundaries and rights of way. For genealogists, they are a treasure trove, placing ancestors on a specific plot of land at a specific time. For the local historian, they are the key to unlocking the greatest single transformation in the village’s history since the Norman Conquest. They tell a story not of gentle, pastoral continuity, but of radical, planned, and socially divisive change. They show us that the seemingly natural and ancient landscape of Brattleby was, in fact, conceived in a London committee room and drawn on paper by the hand of a surveyor.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Brattleby Enclosure Act, 1779 (19 Geo. 3 c. 92). The original act held at the Parliamentary Archives, London. Brattleby Enclosure Award and Map, 1779. The original award is likely held at Lincolnshire Archives. Researchers should consult their catalogues for reference (e.g., under Parish records or Enclosure Awards). Brattleby Tithe Apportionment (IR 29/20/46) and Tithe Map (IR 30/20/46), c. 1845. Held at The National Archives, Kew. Digitised versions are often available through commercial websites or The National Archives' own portal. Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. (London: Penguin, 2003). For the earliest record of Brattleby.
Secondary Sources:
Hammond, J. L., and Barbara Hammond. The Village Labourer 1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911). The classic, critical account of enclosure’s social impact. Hoskins, W. G. The Making of the English Landscape. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955). A foundational text for understanding landscape history. Kain, Roger J.P., and Hugh C. Prince. The Tithe Surveys of England and Wales. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The definitive academic study of the tithe commutation process and its records. Mingay, G. E. Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to its Causes, Incidence, and Impact, 1750-1850. (London: Longman, 1997). A balanced and authoritative overview of the subject. Russell, Rex C. The Enclosures of Lindsey: A Study in the Parliamentary Enclosures of Lindsey, Lincolnshire. (A series of pamphlets published by the author, 1964-). Russell’s work is indispensable for any study of enclosure in this part of Lincolnshire. Turner, Michael, John Beckett, and Bethanie Afton. Farm Production in England, 1700-1914. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Provides the broader economic context for agricultural improvement. The Victoria County History of the County of Lincoln, Volume II*. (London: Archibald Constable, 1906). Offers foundational historical context for the county, though a specific volume for Brattleby’s wapentake is less detailed.