Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

for cheese production. 31
Both animal and vegetable produce also provided raw materials
for many of the manufactures discussed below.
Until the Enclosure Award of 1771 Alcester still had its medieval open fields -
one serving the town itself and two for the hamlet of Kings Coughton. 32
However, the
system had been modernised to a large extent before 1600 by consolidation of the strips,
enabling the land to be farmed more economically. 33
Those who farmed Alcester’s open
field actually lived in the town. Individual houses had been notionally connected with
certain strips, but by 1600 some houses had as many as 15 strips while others had none.
This not only indicates a rationalisation of the way the land was farmed, but also that
many Alcester folk had yielded their strip in favour of earning a living entirely from nonagrarian
pursuits. Nonetheless, several tradesmen had agricultural implements and
produce in their probate inventories and tradesmen also figured in documents relating to
agricultural land, whether leased in their own right or sub-let from others. 34
Other
tradesmen let their land out, an indication of the slow shift towards specialisation
whereby tradesmen gradually left off their farming activities. 35
Just as the arable field had been rationalised piecemeal over the centuries, so had
the wasteland. By 1660 there were many small enclosures, although other commoners
still had rights to graze their cattle from Lammastide (early August) to early spring on
such ‘Lammas land’ held by others. 36
The common rights were no doubt used in various
31 N. Alcock, People at Home: Living in a Warwickshire Village 1500-1800, (Chichester, Phillimore,
1993), pp. 191-2, discusses the national popularity of Warwickshire cheese c. 1700.
32 Saville, Alcester – a History, p. 43.
33 Saville, ibid., p. 44.
34 WaRO, CR1886/BL, and DR360, Alcester property deeds.
35 For example, in WoRO, probate of Stephen Fisher, Alcester, saddler, 1746, the testator mentions his
arable lands which are used by someone else.
36 Saville, Alcester – a History, p. 45. Similar arrangements occurred in places such as Walsall,
Staffordshire, cited by French, ‘Urban agriculture, commons and commoners in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries’, p. 173.
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