Burnham Norton Friary: perspectives on the Carmelites in Norfolk, England

Abstract

the Breckland and Norfolk Goodsands. The wide variety of forms in the Middle Ages, the subsequent narrowing and evolution of the system, and the difficulties of reconstructing these features and changes, help to explain why it has baffled historians for so long. Belcher cuts through the complexity with effective descriptions of the main variants and precise assessments of the principal changes over time. He shows that the foldcourse was only found in places characterised by light soils, irregular open commonfield systems with scattered individual holdings, extensive pastures, and nucleated settle ment. He confirms these defining traits through a case study of the Suffolk Sandlings, which possessed hardly any recorded foldcourses, even though it contained exactly the types of sandy soils, irregular open fields and heathland pastures that were home to foldcourse husbandry elsewhere in East Anglia. But the Sandlings were also characterised by a highly fragmented manorial structure, dispersed settlement, limited communal cropping and fallowing practices and extensive salt marshes as an alternative source of pasture, all of which diminished the utility of the foldcourse to local agriculture. Agricultural improvement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries resulted in the engrossment and consolidation of estates, and the more intensive use of pastures, on the Norfolk Good Sands, consolidating the open and planned landscape. The acidity of the soils in the Breckland were less amenable to improvement, and so the region retained the extensive and distinctive lowland heathlands that had characterised the region since at least the eleventh century. Indeed, the close grazing of sheep and rabbits was essential to maintaining this landscape feature. Thus, the heaths and other topographical features of the modern Breckland preserve important elements of its medieval landscape, and the principles of foldcourse husbandry provide basic guidance on how to manage the modern landscape of this exceptional region. Late twentieth-century farming practice here had become too homogenous, and conservationists now recognise the vitality of the dynamic, episodic and disruptive practices in preserving the Breckland landscape...the precise characteristics of the foldcourse. Those old farmers knew a thing or two after all. Indeed, Belcher cites one ‘improving’ landlord who had confided to Arthur Young that he wished he had left one Breckland common well alone. The book is well structured, written and illustrated. It draws upon a vast array of sources over nine centuries and from many places, yet raises its sights above the locality to place the material within wider debates about open fields and the evolution of the landscape. It is a distinguished addition to the scholarship on English field systems and landscape history.