Enclosure and the Rural Landscape of Merioneth in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

STUDIES in the evolution of rural landscapes and analyses of critical formative periods in various localities of the British Isles are increasing in number, but there remain several important spheres in time and space which are relatively neglected. Indeed, gaps in our knowledge of certain regional trends in historical geography have enabled long-standing misconceptions to be perpetuated. One such assumption is that the enclosure movement which galvanized economic, social and political life in Tudor England left the Highland Zone of Britain almost unchanged. The greatest impact of the expanding wool trade was felt in the transformation of the open fields from common arable land to individually owned, enclosed pasture land, for arable land was much less important in the agriculture of the Atlantic margin of Europe because of its physical environment, its peripheral position in relation to centres of economic diffusion and its cultural history. It has, therefore, often been accepted that the extreme western fringe of the continent did not experience changes associated with the mainstream of economic trends. However, recent research has demonstrated that similar incentives, for example general urban and industrial growth, were provoking equally profound and simultaneous repercussions in these relatively remote regions. This paper analyses hitherto unused evidence from several sources which illustrate the dynamic character of rural communities situated within the orbit of the ancient Forest of Snowdon-lands inherited by the Crown from the last independent Welsh princes in Anglesey, Caernarvon and Merioneth. Recently discovered historical documents relating to Merioneth illuminate trends in the economic and social geography of the whole of North Wales in the sixteenth century, thus providing a clearer understanding of an integral part of upland Britain at a crucial stage in the evolution of its landscape. A primary source for a reconstruction of patterns of rural settlement and land tenure is a rental of Crown lands compiled in I592.1 Although details of farm boundaries and acreages are not given, and it would be unwise to infer overmuch from their rents, the wide and uniform coverage of southern and central Merioneth on a township basis endows the document with great value, while its information on the names of tenements, as well as isolated fields, together with those of the owner and tenant of the property, is unsurpassed until the estate surveys and tithe apportionments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A second document, which records in the main only additions to the holdings recorded in the rental, is an inventory of encroachments2 on to common lands which on palaeographic and other grounds has been assigned to the closing years of the sixteenth century. In all probability it represents the report to the Court of Exchequer made by the Earl of Leicester's