15 October 2024
In October, our member Peter Smith gave the first part of a talk about Thurcaston & Cropston before the Enclosures. The present layout of the fields and roads was created in the late 1700s, when the larger landowners obtained Acts of Parliament – one for each village – which allowed them to group the land into the pattern of individual, private fields surrounded by hedges that we are familiar with today. The commissioners appointed to carry out these Enclosures also diverted and straightened many of the roads. For many preceding centuries, each village had been surrounded by three large, open fields. These were farmed communally with a succession of peas & beans, wheat and then a year when no crops were planted but animals were allowed to graze and fertilize the soil so the cycle could begin again. A farm’s land would be divided into narrow strips scattered through the open fields so that there were always some strips of each type in production. Along the valleys of the River Lin and the Thurcaston Brook, there were also meadows for grazing animals and making hay – some in private ownership and some as common land.
There is no known map of our parish before the Enclosures so Peter has been trying to work out what it might have looked like and to find the locations of some of the wonderful furlong names like Bashpool Over Shoot, Lady Willows and Long Wong.
He began with a quick canter through how our local landscape might have developed, from the tundra-like conditions at the end of the Ice Age, through the growth and then clearance of the wildwood and the gradual settlement of the land by farmers. It was not until the arrival of the Saxons that the settlements were in the form of villages under a feudal system, with the peasants owing service to a local lord, who in turn owed service to the king. The -ton suffix of the names Thurcaston and Cropston tells us that they were founded in Saxon times but the prefixes are thought to derive from the Viking names Croppr and Thorketil. They were presumably chieftains who seized the villages when our area fell under the Danelaw. Cropston is situated on top of a ridge with good communications, while Thurcaston runs along the side of the valley, perhaps because this position gave the best access to drinking water. The Domesday Book tells us that in 1086 there were 22 households, a mill and a large wood (6 by 1½ miles), which probably lay between here and Leicester.
Peter reviewed some early maps of Leicestershire, of which the first to show the road network was made by John Prior in 1777, just five years before the Cropston Enclosure. Many of the roads on it are different from today’s, although most of their routes have been preserved as footpaths or bridleways. The modern Leicester Road did not exist: the main crossing of the brook was via Sandham Bridge, while the old road to Leicester ran from the bend at the top of Rectory Lane to Greengate Lane. Bradgate Road seems to have continued in a straight line from the Hallgates to the Rothley boundary, and Station Road perhaps veered left to cross it and reach Rothley Plain; early OS maps show a long narrow field that might have been its route. Some of the roads heading out of Thurcaston can be traced in the landscape as deep holloways worn by the passage of feet, hooves and cartwheels. They show up clearly in relief maps produced by LIDAR scans. Two seasonal ponds – one alongside Brooky Lane and another behind the mill – have a similar form and Peter suspects that they might be corresponding holloways on the western side of the brook.
Look out for Part 2 of the talk, which will say more about the open fields and furlongs, as well as trying to identify those names!