Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 209

Although it is a county that features heavily in the social, economic and agrarian history of England, particularly during the early modern period, very little has been published on the field systems of Essex. As the preface to this work notes, students of the subject may well have been deterred by the injunction in H.L.Gray’s seminal work that few counties’ systems were ‘so difficult to describe’ as those of Essex. The reason is the sheer diversity of such systems, and the way that they crowd in upon one another in this densely settled county.

John Hunter’s short book provides a welcome attempt to impose some order on these systems, tease out a chronology of development, and to map the results. His study begins with a brief review of general trends in field systems in the county from prehistory, through Roman, Saxon, medieval, Tudor and Stuart, to Georgian and the nineteenth-century. He then moves on to consider a series of four case studies, drawn mainly from central and southern Essex. These demonstrate the ebb and flow of field boundaries and subdivisions, even if they illustrate examples of the best surviving sources rather than a typology of common field systems in the county. Hunter points out with some irony that the post World War II grubbing up of hedges and the expansion of field sizes in parishes such as Cressing Temple and Broxted has led to the recreation of fields the size and shape of those of demesne farming before the Black Death. The intervening centuries saw the morcelization of these fields and their subdivision by hedgerows under ever-encroaching farming in severalty. Tusser, a native of the county, rhymed in praise of such agrarian organization. Hunter also maps the areas of common field and heath enclosed in the nineteenth century. Such maps emphasize the acreage of the rough heath and wasteland in the county before Williamson and Wade Martins’ ‘light soils revolution’.

Hunter’s maps suggest an explanation for the curious, contiguous, oblong parish/manors of Little Warley, Childerditch, West and East Horndon that lie parallel to each other across a long ridge in the south of the county. He hypothesizes that circa 900 AD these manors formed 210 the agricultural links between the wooded commons of the ridge, and the summer grazing of the coastal marshes. Their corridor-like plan answers their original function as conduits from summer to winter pastures.

The variety of settlement patterns, parish boundaries and field systems means that these could be dealt with exhaustively only in a massive volume. Hunter’s study is a splendid illustration of the possibilities and the potential worth of this type of research. It also shows how much can be gleaned from fieldwork and from the numerous estate maps and surveys within the county’s extensive and well-ordered archives. It is to be hoped that he continues his researches, and that this work will inspire a larger, systematic study.