Before 1765, Somerton was farmed under the "open field" system, where the land was divided into large open areas, split into sections called furlongs, which in turn were divided into strips of land. The cultivation of the open fields was rotated, leaving one field fallow each year. Each farmer was allocated strips according to his needs. These strips were scattered throughout the open fields, ensuring a fairer distribution of good and bad land.
Somerton had four open fields according to a terrier of 1634. One field lay north of Ardley Way and adjoined Fritwell Moor; a second lay to the south of Ardley Way; and the other two were on both sides of Bicester Way (now Aston View). The rest of the land would have been common land, water meadows, furze (gorse on heath land), and woodland. The farmers of the open fields had the right to graze their own cattle on the common land and collect wood for fuel, fences, and repairs.
By 1734 another terrier describes Somerton as having seven "quarters" or areas, and the cultivated land had been extended towards Heyford. The names of farmers with strips at that time were as follows:
It is difficult to visualise these areas now, especially as part of the parish has been taken up by the former air base, but traces still remain in places of the strips, which were ploughed lengthwise in such a way that the earth was mounded into the middle leaving furrows acting as drains either side — we call it ridge and furrow. The "Ways" at that time would have been tracks, something like Portway as we know it today. Portway was called Oxford Way.
Somerton's Farmers 1279–1734
By Deborah Hayter — published with the permission of Cake and Cockhorse, Journal of the Banbury Historical Society, Vol. 19 No. 5 (Spring 2014)
In 1279 John Cole, 'villanus', held one yardland of land in Somerton; he held it from Robert de Grey, and paid 44d each year for it; it was recorded that he was due to work; he would be tallaged (taxed); and he would pay a fine for his children to leave the manor. Hugh the Reeve also held one yardland for the same payments and services, and after him all the rest of Somerton's farmers were listed, each of whom held half a yardland for an annual payment of 22d and similar services.
This extraordinary level of detail for such a relatively minor place as Somerton came about because of Edward I's desire for information about the diversion or loss of possible Crown income. In 1274–75 he commanded that the operation of local government through the hundreds be investigated. The results were written up in a series of rolls, known as the Hundred Rolls — and Oxfordshire is the most complete surviving example, covering every hundred except Binfield and Bloxham.
Unlike the Domesday Book, the Hundred Rolls listed all the information geographically, place by place, and gave much more detail, down to the names of the peasants who were actually tilling the soil. The word "holds" is important (in Latin, teneo, tenere, hence "tenant" and "tenement"): legally no one except the king owned land, and everyone else held land in return for something — loyalty, soldiery, services, money.
So we see in Somerton that the two lords, Robert de Gray and William de Gardinis (the manor was divided), held directly from the King and had to find three knights to guard Dover Castle. They also had a protected fishery on the River Cherwell, the advowson of the church, and four carucates of land in demesne, with meadow and adjacent pasture.
Including the two lords and the Abbot of Eynsham (none of whom would have been getting their own hands dirty), there were forty farmers in Somerton in 1279, farming between them forty-eight yardlands. The largest holdings were of eight yardlands each (the lords' demesnes) and the smallest were half a yardland, but they were all working alongside each other in the same open-field system.
This was all regulated by the farmers themselves, meeting at the Court Leet, electing a jury and setting out the bye-laws for the coming season. Records of Somerton Court Leet survive from 1482, and they reveal the collective discipline required. In 1527 it was ordered "by the whole homage that no tenant permit his horses to go at large in the common field before the end of autumn." In 1566 even Thomas Fermor himself was fined — 2d for each ash tree lopped "contrary to the custom of the manor."
By the time of the 1573 Court of the Supervisor, when all the tenants had to present evidence of title to their holdings, the forty farmers of 1279 had been reduced to seventeen. Henry Tredwell now had five and a half yardlands (possibly 125 to 150 acres). William Fermour had enclosed eighty acres of arable and turned it over to pasture in 1512. Over the following century the collective decision of the farmers must have been that Somerton grazed best, and they progressively turned furlongs to pasture — without, at this stage, formally enclosing them.
The Court Leet records illuminate the collective discipline that this system required. In 1482 it was recorded that some houses were ruinous and would be repaired or fined; Richard Scrowe had let Somerham mill flood the meadow and the road and would be fined 30 shillings if he did not amend it. In 1527 it was ordered “by the whole homage that no tenant permit his horses to go at large in the common field before the end of autumn.” In 1530 “every tenant should sufficiently repair and scour his hedges and ditches under a penalty of 40d.” Later in the sixteenth century even Thomas Fermor himself was not above the necessity of complying with the communal will — in 1566 he was fined 2d for each ash tree lopped “contrary to the custom of the manor.” Two years later he was taken to task because he had two water mills “and took excessive toll.”
We get a vivid picture of Somerton’s farming in the seventeenth century from a very full glebe terrier of 1634, found in Oxford Diocesan records. The parson’s land was scattered right round the system like any other farmer’s, and the only way to record it — in the absence of a competent map — was to map it verbally, giving the location of each strip in each furlong and the names of the neighbours on each side. For example: “In the Wheate feild lying towards Frittwell moore… Item in Ridge furlong one acre butting into Oxford Way East Robert Apletree North Widdow ffox South.” This terrier shows four fields in use in 1634: the Wheat Field towards Fritwell Moor; a second field on the south side of Ardley Way; a third adjoining the way to Bicester at the town’s end; and a fourth on the south side of Bicester Way.
A later glebe terrier of 1734 shows how dramatically the farming had shifted. By then the parson’s land was described not in strips but in commons: “eight cows commons with a bull; five Lammas commons for horses or cows; and ninety-seven sheep commons.” The arable acres were also described as before but much reduced in number. The cows and sheep commons were an expression of the parson’s rights in the common pasture — the equivalent of his former strips of ploughland. Over the years the collective decision of the farmers must have been that Somerton grazed best, and the village had moved from subsistence strip-farming to something very much closer to a market economy.
Arthur Young famously described Oxfordshire’s open-field farmers as “Goths and Vandals” — “dark ignorance under the covert of wise suspicions… the old open-field school must die off before new ideas can become generally rooted.” But the evidence from Somerton tells a rather different story. The farmers had already moved with the times and reacted to the markets. There were fewer, bigger farms; the landless cottagers were employed on them; and much of the farmland had already been turned to pasture. It was a very long way from the forty peasant farmers of the Somerton of 1279.
Enclosure
In 1765 work began on the enclosure of Somerton's open fields, instigated by William Fermor, Lord of the Manor and owner of the parish. An enclosure map was commissioned from James Jennings, a well-known surveyor who lived in Somerton and was to be the tenant farmer of Hill Farm, living in what is now the old Railway Tavern.
The "Inclosure Plan" sets out the division of the land into eight farms and shows in minute detail the new fields, hedges, existing trees, cottage gardens and orchards. It is superbly executed in coloured ink on an ox hide measuring 6 foot by 5 foot, which is rolled onto an ornamental wooden pole. It was deposited in the Bodleian Library, Oxford in 1958 by Mr James Norman of Park Farm, Middleton Stoney.
Somerton lands were divided into eight farms. The farmhouses and adjoining yards and outbuildings within the village are marked as A, C, D, E, F and G. Troy Farm is marked as B and Somerton Mill lands as H. The Rectory held its own glebe land. Those with very few strips of land before enclosure ended up with no land at all and were presumably employed on the eight farms. Enclosure also took in the common land to which previously everyone had rights of use, thus excluding "commoners" from those rights.
— Alice Bowmaker — Somerton Maps; Deborah Hayter — Somerton's Farmers 1279–1734