16 September 2025
For our return to indoor meetings in September, we heard from the Society’s member Peter Smith with the second part of his talk on Thurcaston & Cropston Before the Enclosures. Having dealt with the settlement of the villages and the pattern of roads in his first talk, this time the focus was on fields and field names.
You might remember from school that during the medieval period much of central England was farmed in a system of open fields. The system developed in about the 8th century, when the Saxons moved from Roman-style country estates to live in nucleated villages at the centre of each parish, and it continued with little change for 1000 years.
Most villages had three large fields, which were sown in rotation with peas or beans one year, wheat or barley the next year, then left fallow. Animals were grazed on the fallow field to fertilize it with their manure, as well as on the regrowth – the “aftermath” – in the other fields after they had been harvested, and on permanent meadows along the river valleys. Farmers’ land was spread through the three fields so they would always have a balance of each crop. The parcels were in long strips because of the difficulty of turning a plough pulled by a team of bullocks or heavy horses. Blocks of adjacent, parallel strips were known as furlongs.
What evidence do we have for this system of farming in our two villages? There are still surviving areas of ridge and furrow, which resulted from the plough always turning soil towards the centre of the strip. Landscape painters were more interested in Tuscany than Leicestershire so images of the countryside from that time are rare but the tomb of Joseph Danvers (1745) in Swithland churchyard includes a fine slate carving of a furlong being ploughed. There is also documentary evidence. The Record Office holds several “terriers”, which are surveys of the land belonging to the lord of the manor, the rector or private freeholders. Taking each open field and meadow in turn, they itemize all the strips belonging to the farm in question, naming the furlong in which each strip falls and often the occupiers on either side. We also have surviving agreements between the farmers of Thurcaston, which deal with matters such as how many animals each person is entitled put into the fields; the fine for recovering a stray animal from the pinfold; and the annual election of field reeves to oversee the process. References to the “wheatfield” and the “peasefield” confirm that crop rotation was being practised.
In 1600, Thurcaston’s landowners agreed between themselves that they would enclose the common meadows for their private use. Other cottagers, who had ancient rights to use the common land but were not parties to the agreement, were to be “satisfied” with the aftermath of Bybrook Meadow instead. Various grievances rumbled on, especially when a new Rector was appointed, and eventually, when Richard Grosvenor wanted to sell the lordship of the manor to William Palmer of Wanlip, some of the payment was withheld. It took a referral to the Court of Chancery in London, with all the local farmers appearing as witnesses, before the terms of the agreement were essentially confirmed in 1635. By the 18th century, parliament recognized the need for more widespread enclosure of open fields, which would allow landowners to invest in new agricultural processes that could feed the rapidly growing population of Britain’s cities. The Enclosure Acts for Cropston (1781) and Thurcaston (1798) appointed commissioners to re-allocate the land, resulting in the private fields divided by hedges that we are familiar with today.
In the course of his research, Peter has compiled a list of about 500 old names of fields, furlongs and other features of the local landscape – but is it possible to locate them on the map? Sometimes there are enough clues in the documents themselves. For example, we know that Rye Leys was opposite David North’s because the Thurcaston Enclosure Award set aside land there to quarry materials for maintaining the parish’s roads. Rye prefers to grow on well drained land so the presence of a gravel quarry and the name of nearby Sandhills Farm provide confirmation.
The Cropston Enclosure Award enables us to locate the village’s three open fields: Bybrook or Holgate Field to the west, Open Dale or Anstey Field to the south and Bashpool Field to the east. From the terriers mentioned earlier, we know that Thurcaston’s open fields were Bybrook or Mill Field to the north, Beaumont Leys or Park Field to the south and Alitha or Littleland Hill Field to the east, though their exact boundaries are less certain. The name “Alitha” has not been satisfactorily explained and, as an unrecognizable word, it has appeared in all sorts of variations over the years, from Albethough to Hollythorn.
A different approach is to see whether any of the old furlong names have survived in current field names. The W.I. carried out a field-name survey in 1971 and Peter has identified 15 of them that can also be found in pre-enclosure documents. Some are unchanged, like Mill Meadow and Lady Willows, but unfamiliar words are more likely to have altered over time. For example, Thistle Bridge was originally Thistle Breach – “breach” meaning ground that was broken up for cultivation. The strange name Monigo was originally Many Goars; when a furlong that was not square was divided into strips, a “goar” was one of the awkward tapering pieces left at the edge. Incidentally, the W.I. survey names two fields along Anstey Lane as Miller’s Field and Millea. Peter has not found those names in early documents but, as the fields are on top of a hill, quite far from the watermill, could they suggest that Thurcaston once had a windmill on this site?
Some of the terriers contain enough information about neighbouring plots that it appears it should be possible to fit the furlong names together like a jigsaw. Peter felt he had had some success doing that with a 1759 survey of Thornton’s farm in Cropston but then found little overlap with another Cropston terrier dated only 8 years earlier. Overall, he has to sympathize with a poor land agent, John Andrew, who was faced with the same task in 1596 and wrote, “Nether can I doe yt without the help of the tenants ... because one furlong hath some two or three names and yt taketh such a long tyme.”