WHARRAM PERCY – A DESERTED MEDIEVAL VILLAGE – VICTIM OF THE ‘ENCLOSURES

Reblogged from A Medieval Potpourri @sparkypus.com

A glimpse of  St Martin’s church from the millpond looking north.  This wonderful photo thanks to David Ireland. 

Since early medieval times Britain’s landscape has been prolifically dotted with deserted villages.  The abandonment of these villages was the result of, in the main, either pestilence,  which led  to the last few shell shocked survivors of these catastrophic events leaving their homes  or because the landowners wanted to have the land for the more lucrative returns made from sheep farming.  This view has been described as rather simplistic – Harriett Bradley argued in her interesting article that there were already changes afoot prior to the arrival of the  Black Death in the 14th century  – but agreed that the pestilence would have certainly accelerated matters (1).

Let’s look at the latter reason which brought about the forced abandonment of homes and villages by the people that had lived in them, some for generations.  This particular type of eviction became known as the Enclosure Movement which, with all its resultant cruelty,  led to an avalanche of evictions and was much denounced.  Many worthies of the time railed against these evictions including John Rous, the 15th century Warwickshire chantry priest and antiquarian who also listed the  54 places “which, within a circuit of thirteen miles about Warwick had been wholly or partially depopulated before about 1486″ (2).   Rous clearly did not believe in holding back and went full tonto with his  description of Richard III comparing the late king to both the  Antichrist and a scorpion, being born with a full  set of teeth and hair flowing to his shoulders and who was excessively cruel in his days (3).  He made verbal mincement of the unscrupulous landlords of the times and  Matthew Green succinctly describes in his book “Shadowlands” how Rous castigated the landlords, describing them as worshippers of “Mammon”,  “murderers of the impoverished“, “destroyers of humanity,” and “venomous snakes.”   They had shown no mercy to “the children, tenants, and others whom they have forced from their homes by theft,” and so could expect “judgment without mercy” in the afterlife;  furthermore he would certainly not be singing any masses for the souls of these “destroyers of towns‘ (4). 

Thomas More in his Utopia written in 1516 stated:

‘…those miserable people… are all forced to change their seats, not knowing whither to go; and they must sell, almost for nothing, their household stuff.  When that little money is at an end,  for it will soon be spent, what is left for them to do but either to steal and so to be hanged or to go about and beg’. 

Decades later someone would write a short poem entitled ‘Stealing the Common from the Goose’ in the 18th century neatly encompassing the injustice of it all:

“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.”

During the excavations of 1964 the bones of a man who had laid down to die beside one of the houses was discovered.  His name and story are unknown to us and we can only speculate.  Was he, as Matthew Green suggests,  ‘a famished vagabond’  at the end of his journey in this life or was he a villager, ‘obstinate to the end’, who returned home to die?

WHARRAM PERCY