To stand today on the edge of Brattleby, a small parish nestled on the limestone escarpment of the Lincoln Edge, is to witness a scene of quintessential English ruralism. The spire of St. Cuthbert’s Church rises above a cluster of stone houses, surrounded by a patchwork of hedged fields that stretch westwards into the Trent Vale. It is a landscape that feels ancient, settled, and permanent. Yet this apparent timelessness is an illusion. The neat, squared fields and the very concept of the single-owner farm are, in historical terms, relatively recent innovations. They are the product of a profound and often painful transformation that dismantled a world of communal agriculture, intricate obligation, and shared custom that had endured for a thousand years.
The closing acts of this long drama were the twin legislative hammers of Parliamentary Enclosure and Tithe Commutation in the 18th and 19th centuries. For an agricultural village like Brattleby, these processes were decisive, rewriting its physical and social map forever. But to understand their impact, we must first journey back, peeling away the layers of the modern landscape to reveal the world that they replaced. Our destination is the Barony of Brattleby not in the age of steam and statute, but in the waning years of the Plantagenet dynasty, around the turn of the 15th century.
The Medieval Tapestry: Brattleby in c. 1400
In the year 1400, England was a kingdom in tumult. The usurper Henry IV, first of the Lancastrian kings, sat uneasily on the throne he had seized from Richard II. The aftershocks of the Black Death, which had ripped through the country fifty years earlier, still determined the economic realities of daily life. For the hundred or so souls who called Brattleby home, these high political dramas were distant thunder. Their world was immediate, tangible, and governed by the rhythm of the agricultural seasons and the authority of the lord of the manor.
The landscape they inhabited would be almost unrecognisable to us. Instead of enclosed fields, two or three vast, unenclosed 'open fields' dominated the parish. Within these fields, the land was not consolidated but divided into a multitude of small, unfenced strips, known as selions, demarcated only by turf balks or marker stones. A single peasant farmer would not work a single block of land but a collection of these strips, scattered across the different fields. This system, designed to ensure each tenant had a share of both the good and less fertile soil, was a masterpiece of communal organisation. The villagers decided collectively which field would be sown with winter wheat or rye, which with spring barley or oats, and which would lie fallow to recover its fertility—the classic three-field rotation.
Beyond the arable fields lay the 'commons' and 'wastes'—vital shared resources providing pasture for livestock, turf for fuel, and timber for building and repairs. Every tenant, from the most substantial freeholder to the humblest cottager, held customary rights to use these common lands, a crucial element of their subsistence economy.
This intricate system was presided over by the lord of the manor. Brattleby, though a small settlement, had a distinguished lineage of lordship. At the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, it was held directly by the powerful Norman bishop, Odo of Bayeux, William the Conqueror’s half-brother. After Odo’s disgrace, the manor passed through a succession of notable Lincolnshire families. By 1400, Brattleby was held by the Tailboys family, who had inherited it through their connection to the great Barony of Kyme. Sir Walter Tailboys (d. 1417) was the lord of the day, a significant figure in county society, serving as a Knight of the Shire for Lincolnshire. For the villagers, he was the ultimate source of temporal authority.
The inhabitants of Brattleby were a mix of free and unfree tenants. The freeholders, or franklins, held their land in perpetuity for a fixed cash rent and owed minimal services to the lord. They were a proud and independent minority. The majority, however, were villeins or customary tenants (by 1400, increasingly known as copyholders). Their ancestors had been legally unfree, bound to the soil and the lord’s will. While the post-Black Death labour shortage had dramatically improved their bargaining power—forcing lords to commute labour services to cash rents and effectively ending serfdom in practice—their tenure was still "at the will of the lord and by the custom of the manor." They paid rent, performed residual duties like "boon-work" at harvest time, and were subject to the jurisdiction of the manorial court, which regulated land transfers, grazing rights, and disputes between villagers. This was a world not of private property as we know it, but of a complex web of rights and obligations, where an individual's livelihood was inextricably tied to their community and their lord.
"God's Portion": The Tithe in Medieval Life
If the lord of the manor represented temporal power, the Church embodied spiritual authority, and its presence was felt just as profoundly in the village economy through the institution of the tithe. The word, from the Old English for "a tenth," was brutally literal. The Church claimed a tenth of all agricultural produce from the land. This was not a monetary tax but a payment in kind, a direct and visible slice of the villager's hard-won harvest.
The collection was divided into "great tithes" and "small tithes." The great tithes, the most valuable portion, consisted of the 'nine nouns' of traditional tithing law: corn, hay, and wood. After the harvest, the rector's agent would walk the fields and physically claim every tenth sheaf of wheat, every tenth haycock. These were then carted away and stored, often in a purpose-built tithe barn. The small tithes were levied on everything else: calves, lambs, piglets, wool, milk, cheese, eggs, and even the produce from a cottager's garden. It was an onerous and often resented obligation, a constant drain on the subsistence farmer.
The right to receive these tithes belonged to the rector of the parish. However, in a practice known as appropriation, this right could be granted away to a corporate body, such as a monastery or, later, an Oxford or Cambridge college. This is precisely what happened at Brattleby. In the 14th century, the advowson—the right to appoint the rector and receive the tithes—was acquired by Balliol College, Oxford. This was a common arrangement, providing the college with a steady income stream to support its scholars. For the villagers of Brattleby, it meant their tithes were not supporting a local priest but funding the education of young men hundreds of miles away in Oxford. The college would appoint a vicar to care for the parish's spiritual needs, paying him a small stipend or allowing him the 'small tithes', while the valuable 'great tithes' flowed directly to the college bursary. This system of appropriation and absentee tithe-ownership would persist for five centuries, becoming a major source of friction and a key driver for eventual reform.
Seeds of Change: From Dynastic War to a New Gentry
The world of c. 1400, though governed by tradition, was not static. The 15th and 16th centuries brought a series of shocks that began to unravel the medieval tapestry. The Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1487), a brutal dynastic struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York, convulsed the English nobility. Lincolnshire was a key theatre of the conflict. Brattleby’s lords, the Tailboys family, were staunch Lancastrians. Sir Walter’s grandson, Sir William Tailboys, the "Earl of Kyme," was a famously violent and partisan figure, attainted for treason by the Yorkists and eventually beheaded after the Battle of Hexham in 1464. Such violent shifts in fortune at the top of the feudal pyramid destabilised local power structures and weakened the old bonds of lordship.
A more fundamental change was wrought by the Tudors. Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s represented the single greatest transfer of land in England since the Norman Conquest. In Lincolnshire, a county rich in monastic foundations, the impact was seismic. Great abbeys like Barlings, Kirkstead, and Revesby were suppressed, their vast estates seized by the Crown and sold off to a new class of gentry and urban merchants. Although Brattleby itself was unaffected—as its tithes were owned by a secular college, not a monastery—the Dissolution fundamentally altered the land market. Land became less a source of feudal power and more a commodity to be bought, sold, and exploited for maximum profit.
This new economic mentality fuelled the first wave of enclosure. Landlords, eyeing the lucrative wool trade, began to see the open fields not as a basis for community subsistence but as an inefficient impediment to profit. They sought to consolidate their demesne lands and enclose common pasture to create large, private sheep-runs—a process famously lamented by Sir Thomas More in his Utopia (1516), where he wrote that "sheep…devour men." This early enclosure was often done by force or coercive agreement, leading to peasant riots and protests, such as the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536. Throughout the Tudor and Stuart periods, the landscape gradually shifted, with piecemeal enclosure nibbling away at the edges of the open-field system. By the 17th century, the manor of Brattleby had been acquired by the Monson family, prominent local gentry who would become the dominant landowners in the parish for the next three hundred years, and who were fully part of this new, commercially-minded landed class.
The Great Transformation: The Scythe of Parliamentary Enclosure
The piecemeal enclosures of the early modern period were a prelude to the revolutionary force of Parliamentary Enclosure. From the mid-18th to the mid-19th century, over 4,000 separate Acts of Parliament were passed, enclosing more than 6.8 million acres of land—roughly a quarter of the entire country. This was a landlord-driven process, a legal mechanism for rapidly and irrevocably dismantling the open-field system.
The process typically began with the principal landowners in a parish—in Brattleby’s case, the Monson family and Balliol College—petitioning Parliament for an enclosure act. Once the act was passed, independent commissioners were appointed. These were powerful figures, usually land surveyors or lawyers, granted quasi-judicial powers to redraw the entire map of the parish. Their first task was to undertake a meticulous survey, valuing every strip of land in the open fields and assessing every traditional right of common.
Their second task was re-allotment. The entire land fund of the parish—arable fields, meadows, and common waste—was treated as a blank canvas. The commissioners extinguished all existing rights and re-allocated the land in consolidated, private blocks. The lord of the manor (Monson) received a large allotment for their demesne and for the "right of soil" in the commons. The owner of the great tithes (Balliol College) received a substantial block of land as permanent compensation for the extinguishment of their tithe rights. The remaining land was divided among the freeholders and copyholders in proportion to the value of their former holdings.
For Brattleby, this decisive moment came with the Brattleby Inclosure Act of 1805 (45 Geo. III c. 50). The Act named three commissioners charged with "dividing, allotting and inclosing the Open and Common Fields, Half Year’s Meadow Land, Common Pastures, and Waste Grounds, within the Parish of Brattleby." The outcome was a total revolution. The ancient open fields vanished, replaced by the hedged, rectilinear fields we see today. The new landscape was one of stark private ownership. The Monsons emerged with a greatly enhanced and consolidated estate. Balliol College became the outright owner of a significant farm, its income now derived from rent rather than tithes.
The social consequences were profound. While substantial farmers received viable, consolidated holdings and might benefit from the new efficiencies, the impact on the rural poor was catastrophic. Smallholders often received allotments so small they were uneconomic to farm or fence, forcing them to sell up to their larger neighbours. Cottagers and landless labourers, who had relied on the common for grazing a cow, a flock of geese, or for gathering fuel, lost these rights entirely. Though the commissioners might set aside a tiny plot for a "Poors' Allotment," this was scant compensation. The enclosure of Brattleby, like thousands of others, created a landless rural proletariat, wholly dependent on wage labour from the very farmers whose consolidated estates they had helped to create.
Commuting the Tithe: The Final Piece of the Modern Puzzle
Enclosure Acts often dealt with tithes by awarding land in lieu, as happened at Brattleby for the great tithes. However, where tithes remained, they continued to be a source of immense conflict. Payment in kind was inefficient, discouraged agricultural investment (as the tithe-owner claimed a tenth of any improvement), and led to endless disputes.
The final step in modernising the rural economy came with the Tithe Commutation Act of 1836. This national legislation sought to sweep away the ancient system once and for all. It established Tithe Commissioners whose task was to convert every remaining tithe payment in kind into a monetary cash payment, known as a 'tithe rent-charge'. To do this, they undertook an extraordinary new survey of the entire country.
For every parish, surveyors created two key documents: a Tithe Map and an accompanying Apportionment Schedule. The Brattleby Tithe Map, produced around 1840, is a staggeringly detailed snapshot of the post-enclosure landscape. It records the owner and occupier of every single field, its name (often preserving a memory of the older landscape), its precise acreage, and its state of cultivation. The Apportionment Schedule lists these details and calculates the new monetary rent-charge payable, which was indexed to the fluctuating price of corn, barley, and oats.
These documents, now held at The National Archives and in local record offices, are a goldmine for historians. They crystallise the results of the long agricultural revolution. The Brattleby map shows the dominance of the Monson estate, the solid block of land owned by Balliol College, and the smaller holdings of the few remaining independent freeholders. The intricate mosaic of medieval strips is gone, replaced by the clean lines of capitalist agriculture. The communal village of 1400 had become a community of landlords, tenant farmers, and landless labourers.
Conclusion: A Landscape Forged by History
The journey from the open fields of Lancastrian Brattleby to the hedged landscape of the Victorian era is the story of England in microcosm. It is a tale of shifting power, from the feudal lord to the commercial landlord, and of changing ideas about the very nature of land itself—from a source of communal subsistence to a private, profit-making asset. The enclosure of the open fields and the commutation of tithes were not merely administrative tidyings-up; they were the final, decisive acts that created the rural world we now inhabit. When we look upon the fields of Brattleby today, we are seeing not an unchanging pastoral idyll, but a landscape forged in the fires of social and economic revolution, its boundaries drawn by the surveyor's chain and the parliamentary statute. The ghosts of the open fields are still there, buried beneath the hedges, a silent testament to a lost world of shared custom and common soil.
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Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. (London: Penguin, 2003). For Brattleby, see Lincolnshire, 6.13. The National Archives, Kew: IR 29/20/38: Tithe Apportionment for the Parish of Brattleby (c. 1840). IR 30/20/38: Tithe Map for the Parish of Brattleby (c. 1840). C 78: A copy of the Brattleby Inclosure Award, pursuant to the Act of 1805, can often be found enrolled on the Close Rolls. An Act for dividing, allotting and inclosing the Open and Common Fields… within the Parish of Brattleby (45 Geo. III c. 50), 1805. Baker, J.H. (ed.). The Reports of Sir John Spelman*. Vol. II. (London: Selden Society, 1978). Contains details on the history of Balliol College’s property.
Secondary Sources:
Bailey, Mark. The English Manor, c. 1200 - c. 1500. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). Chambers, J. D., and G. E. Mingay. The Agricultural Revolution, 1750-1880. (London: Batsford, 1966). Hill, Sir Francis. Medieval Lincoln. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948). Homans, George C. English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). Hoskins, W. G. The Making of the English Landscape. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955). Neeson, J. M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Russell, Eleanor and Rex. Landscape Changes in South Humberside: The Enclosures of Thirty-seven Parishes. (Hull: Humberside Leisure Services, 1982). Provides excellent local context for Lincolnshire enclosures. Tate, W. E. The English Village Community and the Enclosure Movements. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967). The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln*, Vol. II. (London: Archibald Constable & Co., 1906).