Mediaeval farming and placenames

Settlement and agriculture of Mediaeval Jersey

This article by Philip Stevens was published in the 2021 Annual Bulletin of La Société Jersiaise. Despite its title, the article is mostly about the development of the island and its parish structure, and the origin of names, than it is about farming

Introduction

In looking at Mediaeval Jersey we are hampered by an almost complete lack of evidence: from AD 600-1000 we have virtually no archaeological finds and no documentary evidence at all; and the only dated events are the murder of St Helier (AD 555), visits by 6th-century missionaries such as Saints Marculf, Magloire and Brelade, the exile of Archbishop Praetextatus (AD 597) and the visit of Abbot Gervold (803).

From AD 1000—1500, there is considerable documentary evidence, much of it compiled by agents of the Norman Duke or the English Crown and dealing with revenue, land tenure, feudal obligations, law and order, administration, and defence. One has to search in the margins, like Leroy-Ladurie with Montaillou, for any clues on the life of the people.

Post-Roman settlement

Roman Gaul was brought to an end by the Franks, who invaded in force in AD 481, and took the province of Neustria - Lower Normandy in modern terms - in AD 486 and ended Saxon incursions.

The Franks gave their name to France, and about 800 words to the French language. Frankish words which are found in Jersey Norman - French include fébu (fief) and louai (law).

They probably made some changes to agriculture, giving the language enbalafider (to bobble a cow), afeiter (to plough from the mid-field), and hair (beam of a plough). But it is more likely that they were introduced by French-speaking people from what is now Normandy, than that they were introduced by any Frankish people settling directly in the Islands.

Exclusively Frankish surnames, as listed by Joret, and Frankish place names are not found in the islands.

Emigrants from Britain started to colonise the northern and western parts of the Armorican peninsula in the early decades of the 5th Century, and Celtic missionaries, such as St Samson and St Brelade, visited and probably made conversions. The Island may have been ceded to Salomon of Brittany along with the Cotentin from AD 867-900. But there is no evidence that the Bretons settled in the Island in any numbers, still less occupied it from the 6th to 10th centuries, as has been claimed.

Renaud considers that the Breton heritage was quasiment effacé by the Scandinavians, and there are no Celtic place names in Jersey at all. A list of eight possibles, collected by Paul Quentel, could easily be explained otherwise, and none of the Breton toponyms in Albery Deshayes’ Dictionary of Breton place names finds an echo in the Islands.

Ewen has dismissed the Celtic connection in his article on ‘the Breton Myth’. It is even suggested by some Norman savants that the Islands were largely deserted when the Vikings arrived, and that they used the Islands as a base from which to attack or even seize the Cotentin.

Vikings

It is known that Jersey was still called Angia in AD 803, when it was visited by the Abbot Gervold, but at the time when the Vikings were settling the coast of Normandy, it acquired its present name. Jersey might mean Jarlsey (the island of the Jarl or Count) or Geirrsey (the island of Geirr); but the Island is called Jérri in Jersey Norman-French, without the possessive ‘s’, so the 'Jer' part might be adjectival, as in Jerfleur on the opposite coast of the Cotentin.

In any case, the ‘ey’ termination of Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney and Chausey comes from the Norse '-ey' or '-ray', and means ‘island’; and pre-Conquest names of the Islands are Gersoi, Greneroi, Aurenoi and Calsoi, with many smaller islets called '-hou' from the Norse holmr.

In addition, a great many names for coastal features in all the islands are Norse. Wace recorded that the 'Saracens', as he called the Vikings, had left ruins in a number of places in the five larger islands, but it is likely that, after the initial raids, such as the one which probably burnt the monastery in St Mary, the Vikings made ‘land-grabs’, settling down to farm, as they had done in the Danelaw, mainland Normandy, and Iceland.

Most words of Scandinavian origin in Jersey, however, are to do with boats and fishing, and only a few concern farming. Of the 40-odd terms for features of open fields, only a few are Norse: hoel (habitation or long field), perhaps rande (furrow) and uangr, ‘field’, which may survive in the place names with vent or vente.

Norse words include haustgard for a stack yard, gerhe for a sheaf, and verp for an animal pound, though the presumably older Latinate word fortafaire for a pound survives in the records. Buth, meaning a small house or ‘booth’, is of Norse origin, and there is Clos des Buths near Ville es Philippes in Grouville which seems extraordinarily to have retained its Norse spelling rather than being Gallicised as boos, beuf or boeuf as was normal in Normandy.

Toft (farm), - tét all over Normandy, is rare in the Islands, though Ametot, Hometot, Pretot and Hottot in Jersey may be examples. The Norse haugr (mound or barrow) is found all over the Islands as hougue and houguette.

Bouée, which is also spelt bouvet, and means a bovate or area of ploughland, is also found in the Danelaw. In all, about 60 words of apparent Norse origin form part of place names in Jersey; they are slightly more numerous in the west than the east of the Island.

Thveit (clearing) is found as thwaite in the Danelaw, and tuit or thuit in Central Normandy, but not in the Cotentin, or in Jersey unless touette derives from thveit. In Jersey, clearings are usually called essart, desert, novale or forét. Tharp (village) is very common in the Danelaw as thorpe and in Normandy as tarp and romp, but it is not found in the islands, perhaps because there were no villages, only hamlets (villes).

The type of arable land found by these Norsemen was probably open field without hedges, ploughed in strips using deep ploughs (caruca). Open field strip cultivation was practised in Western Europe from about the 6th century when there was a de-enclosure of small, square fields, often called Celtic fields, and where the plough (aratrum) was a tine that scratched the surface, and then cross-ploughed. This can be seen in many places in the world to this day. It is possible that they called these areas by some word sounding like mare. This place name, often prefixed with a Viking anthroponym (like Colmare, Koli’s mare) or descriptor (like Aumare hor-mare, high mare), is found all over the areas of Normandy north of the ligne Joret, colonised by Vikings, or their descendants, including the islands. Mare can mean a freshwater pond, a mooring, or a stretch of sea off the coast, but it is difficult to believe that the numerous dry mares are all reclaimed ponds, as all the authorities claim. Richard Hocart has shown that the marettes in St Martin, Guernsey, were open field strips in 1488, and the open field strips at Pleinmont are also called Les Marettes.

In the north of Calvados, mare seems to have been replaced by delle, a place name of which there is a single possible Jersey example, in St Brelade, and which contains some ‘long champs’. It is possible that open fields were once called acres as in Les Grandes Acres, St John. Acres are found mainly in the Department of Seine Maritime, an area of dense Scandinavian settlement, and south of the ligne Joret, which has no such settlement, which leaves open the question of the origin of this word.

This suggests that these Norse settlers did not fundamentally alter farming, but may have slightly changed the methods of harvesting and animal husbandry. It seems likely that the native inhabitants continued to plough and reap the open field strips, while Norse overlords collected sheaves (gerbes) in their stackyards (haustgards). Other words to do with farming, of Frankish origin, mentioned above, were probably already incorporated into French spoken in the islands, and cannot help to date their introduction.

The DNA of a sample of people of old Jersey stock is 30% Danish (marker M170), and 70% ‘general Celtic’ — that is from the Gaulish substrate of France, not Celtic in the sense of the people of British origin coming through Brittany. Norse overlords could have constituted about 30% of the population of Jersey.

It is generally accepted by French scholars that Norwegians began the colonisation of the Cotentin, coming via Ireland, in about AD 800 AD, but that the much more numerous Danes, coming along the English Channel, came in about AD 865. The Danes who occupied the Danelaw in England tended to be in family groups, whereas those who settled in Normandy were often single men, and so more rapidly assimilated. Cunliffe on the other hand, shows Norsemen from Norway and Denmark equally arriving from the east from AD 854.

It may be possible to locate the main areas of Norse settlement. It is significant that at least seven of the mill site names in St Peter’s and St Lawrence’s Valleys are of probable Norse origin, and that the high ground between them – coins - bear the Norse names of Tourgis, Hétain and Varin. (Coin probably derives from the Latin cuneus (wedge) but this does not mean that these coins cannot record settlement by Norsemen or their descendants). This suggests that they were cultivating corn in the parishes of St Lawrence and St Peter, perhaps as early as the 9th Century. Place name evidence suggests greater Norse influx in the west of the Island, and old established families with names with a Norse element - Renouf, Burnouf, etc - were more common in the west than the east, according to the Extente of 1331.

A possible narrative is a landfall of Vikings at Greve de Lecq and a land-grab and penetration down St Peter’s and St Lawrence’s Valleys to the south coast, and dispersion west across the tableland of St Ouen’s Ville des Marettes and beyond, and east along the tableland of St Mary, St John and Trinity where Castel Sedeman might derive from the Danish name Sethman: there is a Sedemanvilla with this derivation near Cary-Barville in Normandy. A field at Les Catiaux near Sedeman in Jersey is called Camp de Cesar, and at Pepinvast in the Cotentin there is also Camp de César and earthworks called Les Catiaux. Caesar in this context does not mean a Roman Emperor, but only a powerful leader.

Quayle refers to the possibility that the Camp de César was made by ‘Norman pirates’.

On the north coast, there is a succession of names which incorporate the words nez (cape) and vile or van (creek) and are probably Norse: Le Pulec (Pol Vik?), Rouge Nez, Grosnez, Le Vyi, Lecq, Vau Rougi, Crabbe (Krab-vic), La Fosse Vicq, Ronez, Vicart, Boulay (Bol—vik?), and Nez du Guet. In St Clement are Nez de la Rocque and Le Nez south of Rocqueberg.

There are mares all along the coast from Le Dicq to La Rocque. This supports the thesis that there was another Viking landfall, in St Clement. Place names suggesting defensive earthworks including barre, efitel, catelet, étoquet, pillion and palliere are far more common in the west and north of the Island, though they may be from any period between the Iron Age and the Middle Ages, so they are not necessarily Viking.

Guerche, associated with Le Cételet in St John, may derive from the Norse word virki (castle). Coastal names of Norse origin, especially those probably derived from Vicq (inlet, from which the very word Viking derives) - Pulec, Lecq, Vicart, Boulay, Gouray — are also more common in the north and west of the Island.

One toponym of undoubted Norse origin is haugr, which comes out as hougue. It applies both to a natural mound, and to a man-made barrow or tumulus, of which La Hougue Bie is the most notable example.

Most mounds and barrows must have antedated the Norse influx. A total of 144 hougues have been identified in Jersey, of which half are in the western parishes of St Ouen, St Peter, and St Brelade.

The pre-Norse inhabitants would probably have called mounds by Latinate names like tertre, butte, motte or bimion, but these names are very rare. Mielle, from the Norse melr, sands, are found in the low-lying parts of six parishes. This suggests a wide distribution of Norsemen.

The legend of the dragon in St Lawrence’s Marsh - now called Goose Green Marsh - may have some kernel of truth. In many places where Northmen, including Vandals, attacked there are legends of dragons: in 793 ‘a fiery dragon was seen flying in the air’ before ‘the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne’ says the Anglo- Saxon Chronicle.

Viking boats were called aim/elem (dragons) and some had a carved dragon on the prow. The legend also has it that a lord from Hambie in the Cotentin came to the Island and dispatched the dragon: this may record some forgotten conflict.

It is possible that Jersey was not settled by Vikings when the Cotentin was, in the 9th Century, but that Normans from the Cotentin, descendants of the Vikings but now speaking Norman-French, colonised the still Frankish islands, perhaps after about AD 960 when the Cotentin was incorporated into the Duchy of Normandy.

The Normans would have used Norman-French names for coastal features, like l’Etac, and some inland places, like the bougues and mielles, supplanting whatever Frankish names they already bore.

The Danish element in old Jersey DNA, and Jersey Norman French, would come from these Norman settlers. This would not, however, explain how Angia became Jersey, nor place names like Dannemarche in Jersey. It would also posit that the Vikings avoided settling in the islands, while heavily colonising the north part of the Cotentin.

This is unlikely, and it seems that Jersey was colonised by Vikings at about the same time as the Cotentin was; and it is possible that the Vikings had already used Jersey as a base from which to attack the Cotentin.

Settlement

Settlement in Jersey, as in Guernsey, may be traced through the word ville. There is no doubt that it comes from the late Roman word villa, which originally meant a country estate, rural domaine or latifundia.

Villa acquired a great many nuances and other words like mansus and its derivative masure took over some of the meaning of ville. In Normandy, the Viking invasions substituted their words for the Frankish terms, but ville somehow managed to survive.

The Norse suffixes -buth, -gard, hus, -toft, part of the name of Norse settlements, were often replaced with the suffix – ville; 400 out of 700 villes have a Norse prefix. In Beaumont—Hague, an area of dense Norse settlement opposite Alderney, 81% of communes are of this form. This may seem surprising, but it can be tracked from the records. For example, Buistot (Boia’s settlement) became Biville, and Quettetot (Ketil’s settlement) became Quetteville.”

In Jersey, there is no direct evidence on villes before or after the Viking settlement. There is record of about 75 settlements named ville, villaize (a spread—out settlement), and villot (a small ville). Where ville is a suffix, many are names of places in Normandy, with the Jersey place named after a seigneur, probably absentee. Such are Grainville, Ingouville, Morville, and Surville.

Several more, such as Francheville, Grouville, Hauteville, Léoville, and Longueville, do not seem to be named after a place in Normandy, but in no case, apart from Grouville perhaps, is the prefix an obvious Viking anthroponym.

Most of the Jersey villes are of the form Ville followed by a personal name (Bree, Emphrie, Patier, or Romain Renouf). Some of these family names, such as Renouf, are of ultimate Norse origin. Many more villes are of the form Ville a, Ville es, and Ville de, followed by family names, eg Ville es Descaves, Ville es Gazeaux, and Ville es Pallots et es Pigneaux.

Others are descriptive, such as Ville es Boeufs, Ville La Bas, and Ville Mars, and a few more are locative, such as Ville de Rossel and Ville des Quennevais. The Ville a, Ville es, and Ville de forms are little found in Normandy, but quite common in Brittany.

There is very little evidence here of villes named after a Viking settler, such as one finds all over the Cotentin and Seine-Maritime. Ville Emphrie in Jersey and Ville Anfrie in Guernsey certainly record a settlement of someone of ultimate Norse origin, but not necessary a Viking settlement. (Coins, high ground between valleys, named after people of Viking origin, have been mentioned above).

Nor are there any Channel Island places where a Viking suffix like -buth or -tot (rare as they are anyway in the Islands) has been recorded as changing into the suffix -ville. It is possible that bourg, which is of Norse origin, was applied to certain villes: Ville des Quennevais is also called le Bourg de Quennevais. The bourgs in St Clement, St John, St Lawrence and Grouville are not qualified by a personal name or location.

McCormack considers that ville placenames derive indirectly from Roman villas or farm estates. He sees villes commonly at the end of chasses leading east or west off the ancient north-south ridgeways, such as Mont Cochon.

Few of the Jersey hamlets which are still called villes occupy this sort of position: many are or were on flat exposed land, such as Ville Guilbert (with its pound or fortafaire) and the nearby Ville au Moée, in St Brelade. The Ville Abel and the Ville au Bas are in the campagne of St Ouen.

Most villes are close to open field. The 1309 Rolls of Assize record that St Peter Port is a borough but all other parishes are villes with houses contiguous to the fields; and the same must surely have applied to Jersey. Many ville prefixes have been lost over the ages, but there is no reason to believe that this loss is more likely in the chasses off the ridgeways than in the campagne of St Ouen.

In looking at the pattern of settlement and agriculture, it is necessary to consider both natural features, such as the tableland or plateau, mostly in the northern parishes, streams and coasts; and also man-made features and boundaries - fields, roads, settlements, parishes, vingtaines and fiefs. A working hypothesis is that the original man-made features were large roads (routes) following the ridgeways, with open fields next to them.

In St Mary, the ridgeway, Route des Touettes, respects field boundaries, whereas the surely later Rue de Crabbe cuts across or ‘slights’ fields. It seems likely that the routes, settlements and fields were established at the same time, because corn was the staple and fields and settlements must be accessible.

Off to the north was the site of Ville de Scrée, of which no trace remains, and fields called Le Manoir. Here are La Mare Ballentin and La Mare (where the vineyard is found).

At Les Landes, St Ouen, we have an area of mares bounded by landes (waste ground) and foréts (cleared land). Here are la Villaise and the Villes La Bas and Romain Renouf.

The great majority of surviving ancient houses or sites are found just off the plateau in slight dips at the heads of small valleys. McCormack shows only four surviving pre-1600 houses in St Clement, but 61 in St Ouen. Even allowing for the small size of St Clement, this raises the possibility that the majority of the population was in the north, near areas of corn cultivation, and using ports on the north coast.

Alternatively, it could be simply that the survival rate is lower in St Clement. There is a single surviving pre-1400 site in St Clement - Samares Manor - but in the 14th Century, in the Fief du Prieur alone, there were 104 tenements (masures) owing beans or wheat to the King.

In 1309, there were 120 houses (domus) in the Fief. In 1331the number of houses in St Clement, according to the hearth tax (fouage) returns, was 130.

It seems that the great majority of ancient houses in all parishes have been completely demolished, or are hidden under later building, evading even the detective work of John McCormack.

We can get some idea of the number of houses or households in Jersey from the possibility that vingtaines were originally of 20 houses; from the hearth tax (fouage) returns in the 1331; and a later survey.

Households by parish up to 1541

	Vingtaine	1331	1541
St Ouen	120	200	180
St Saviour	120	200	139
St Peter	120	160	120
Trinity	100	200	150
St Martin	100	200	155
Grouville	80	200	123
St Helier	80	160	136
St Brelade	80	120	93
St Lawrence	80	110	105
St Clement	60	130	78
St John	60	100	81
St Mary	40	85	65
Jersey	1040	1865	1425

• Vingtaine= Number of vingtaines multiplied by 20
• 1331 Fouage returns (excluding excepted classes and the poor)
• 1541 Cornysshe’s Survey. May 1541.

This shows a correlation between the number of houses in each parish over the period. The apparent increase in houses and thus population between the distant time when vingtaines might have been set up, and 1331, coincided with a period of improved agricultural efficiency and clearance of waste. The decrease between 1331 and 1541 was probably partly due to the Black Death, which hit Jersey in 1348; elsewhere in Europe it carried off between a third and a half of the population.

Parishes

Marking routes, to be distinguished from the far more numerous rues, helps in considering the evolution of the Jersey parishes. The routes take the high ground and follow ridgeways — that is, the watershed with land falling away on both sides, or they bisect an area of plateau.

Thus Route des Touettes in the campagne of St Mary occupies the high ground between Greve de Lecq and the sea. At Mont a l’Abbé, the parallel routes of Mont a l’Abbé, Maupertuis and St Jean occupy the plateau.

John McCormack considers that the pattern of north—south ridgeways, respected by all field systems, ‘is clearly of immense antiquity’

The route on the northern plateau, linking St Peter’s, St Mary’s, St John’s and Trinity Churches, does not extend west to St Ouen’s Church, nor east to St Martin’s Church. This network is joined by ridgeways up from St Aubin’s Bay - the routes of St Lawrence, Mont Cochon, St Jean, Grande St Jean, and Trinity. It could be that St Mary’s, St John’s, St Saviour’s, St Lawrence, St Peter’s and Trinity, the parish churches on the route network, were the original ones, established by about 500 AD.

It is significant that these six parishes all lie in the watershed of St Aubin’s Bay, unlike the six later ones which lie outside it. This would be consistent with the Papal list of preferred dedications.

At later stages, St Ouen was excised from St Mary; St Brelade from St Peter; St Helier possibly from St Lawrence; and St Clement and St Martin from St Saviour. Later still, Grouville might have been excised from St Martin, with which it shares a dedication. In this case, the routes out to St Ouen via St Peter, to Rozel via St Martin, and to St Clement would have come later. There is no route out to St Brelade or to Grouville, suggesting that they were the last parishes to be formed.

In support of this argument, it is necessary to distinguish strong from weak parish boundaries. The St Peter/St Brelade boundary is weak, straddled by the fief Luce de Carteret, and the Franc Fief/Fief Bekalowe; and the King’s tenants (résseants) in St Brelade were required to grind their corn in St Peter (at Quetivel).

The legend - La Delivrande - that materials for a church at the edge of St Peter’s Valley, or a site on the east of St Brelade’s Bay, were repeatedly moved at night to the present site at St Brelade on the west of the bay, may retain some folk memory of the hiving off of St Brelade from St Peter.

The current St Mary/St Ouen boundary is formed by Greve de Lecq Valley, and is straddled by fief Craqueville, and the prévot for the Fief du Roi in St Mary also acted for St Ouen. The site of the chapel and priory of Ste Marie de Lecq at Creux Baillot is in what is now St Ouen.

The eastern boundary of St Saviour, which touches St Martin and Grouville, is weak, straddled by the Fief Longueville, and the Fief le Roi. In addition, the northern boundary of the St Saviour’s salient — the Vingtaine de Dessous La Hougue — cuts across fields, and an exclave of the Vingtaine around Le Mourin (as shown only in the Godfray map) is separated from it by the Caruée de Pierre Hugon, now in St Martin, suggesting that St Martin was excised from St Saviour.

The King’s résseants in St Martin were required to grind their corn in St Saviour (at Grands Vaux mill). There are exclaves of St Saviour in Grouville and St Martin. The very small salient of St Saviour at Le Dicq looks as if it was left when St Clement was excised, allowing the rump of St Saviour this narrow access to the sea.

The boundary between St Clement and Grouville is weak, as it zigzags through a great area of open field, often cutting across fields; and the Fief l’Aumone is found in both parishes. The prévét for the Fief du Roi in Grouville also acted for St Clement; and they shared a windmill, Beauvoir, which is on the boundary.

The boundaries between the six putative original super-parishes: St Mary/St Ouen, St Peter/St Brelade, St John, Trinity, St Lawrence, and St Saviour/St Martin/ Grouville/St Clement, are generally strong: that is, their boundaries are not straddled by open field areas or fiefs.

Many of the 65 known chapels are dedicated to saints from the 2nd - 6th centuries, suggesting early foundation, perhaps in the period between the six original churches and the later ‘Celtic’ ones. Sixteen of the known chapels are in St Martin, and six in St Brelade, the parishes most removed from the putative mother churches (St Saviour and St Peter, respectively) and thus in most need of a more convenient place of worship.

This must be qualified in two ways: first, the boundary of southern salient of St John, the Vingtaine de Hérupe, cuts through fields shared with Trinity, St Helier and St Lawrence, and the current north-south boundary of St John and Trinity cuts through the Fiefs de la Trinité, de la Lande and es Cras, and through an open field area at Les Marettes, south of Hautes Croix.

This suggests that the otherwise strong boundary between St John and Trinity has been readjusted, and that perhaps St John gained Hérupe and land to the north from Trinity.

The position of St Helier is unclear. Ewen suggests that five original ‘Biblical’ parishes were founded in about AD 475, and St Helier could not have been founded before about AD 555 when he was murdered by the Northmen. McCormack suggests that St Helier was excised from St Saviour, but it is perhaps more likely that it was originally part of St Lawrence: the Bouvée Martin now in St Helier is included in the Fief du Roi of St Lawrence.

This would be consistent with the positions of the three Ministeria, first recorded in 1180: Crapedouit, Groceio and Gorroic. Thus St Mary- St Ouen, and St Peter-St Brelade would have been in the Ministerium of Crapedoit; St John, Trinity and St Lawrence-St Helier in Groceio; and St Saviour-St Martin-Grouville-St Clement in Gorroic. It might also explain why the prévéts of the Fief du Roi in St Mary and Grouville acted for the Fief du Roi in St Ouen and St Clement respectively.

Le Patourel thought that this came about because St Ouen and St Clement did not need one as they had no fief du Roi. But St John and St Helier each had an unshared prévét, and had no fief du Roi; St Lawrence and Trinity also had unshared prévéts, and very little fief du Roi.

The obvious objection to this scheme is that the feudal system of fiefs, including prévots, cannot be dated earlier than about 1020, and that Ministeria are first recorded in 1180, whereas the parishes may be much earlier.

But it is quite possible that the fiefs reflect much earlier, non- feudal, allodial landholding. Ewen noted that fief holdings in St Martin, Guernsey were distributed in non-adjacent strips and suggested that the fief system was imposed on an established distribution of arable.

A further objection to the hypothesis of six original parishes is that it does not work for Guernsey, which has no parishes of St Lawrence and St John; and that there are no examples of contiguous dedications to the five ‘Biblical’ saints in the Cotentin (though there is one example in Rennes).

It could be that the five contiguous dedications from the Papal list in Jersey are a ‘coincidence’ as Myres and Ogier believed; that there would have been wholescale destruction of Christian buildings during the period of Norse devastation; and that the parochial system was set up (by Geoffroy de Montbray) in about 1050 with building of parish churches, even though some might have been on the sites of earlier Christian buildings.

Holt and Everard have argued that the fact that Jersey churches were built on early Christian sites does not prove the antiquity of the parochial system, which they date to the 11th century Ogier has already developed this thesis for Guernsey, arguing that the Guernsey parishes postdate the division of the Island between the Cotentin and Bessin vicomtés in about 1020.

McCormack has suggested that there were originally eight parishes named after Biblical and early saints: St Mary, St Peter, St John, St Lawrence, Trinity, St Saviour, St Martin and St Clement, and that parishes. named after Celtic and later saints - St Brelade, St Ouen, and St Helier, and the second St Martin (Grouville) - were carved out of the original parishes. This differs from what is proposed above in including St Martin and St Clement with the earliest dedications. McCormack has argued that Grouville was carved out of St Clement (not St Martin) and that St Helier was carved out of St Saviour (not St Lawrence).

Vingtaines

It is possible that Vingtaines, generally accepted as groupings of 20 households, predate parishes. There is no evidence that they increased in number in the period up to the 1331 Extente, when there were about 36 households per vingtaine, nor had decreased by 1541 when there were only 27 households per vingtaine.

There may have been divisions much earlier: the boundary between the Nord and Sud Vingtaines of St Mary cuts across fields, suggesting that St Mary’s parish was once a single vingtaine. The two parts of the Vingtaine de Dessous La Hougue in St Saviour are separated by a tongue of land - the Caruée de Pierre Hugon in St Martin.

All these boundaries cut across fields, which would be consistent with St Martin and Grouville taking land from St Saviour, leaving the Vingtaine de Dessous La Hougue much damaged. La Hougue Bie was in St Saviour, but is now in Grouville. The Vingtaines of Petite and Grande Longueville in St Saviour are contiguous with the Vingtaine of Longueville in Grouville.

Rybot considered that the ecclesiastical parishes were formed in order to divide the Island into equally populated, and conveniently sized, areas. But this cannot be the case: St Mary has only two Vingtaines and thus 40 households, and St Ouen has six Vingtaines and 120 households. What is noticeable, however, is that the three Ministeria, with eighteen, sixteen and eighteen Vingtaines, would have had similar populations.

Fiefs

It is generally accepted that the system of seigneurial fiefs was introduced into Jersey by the Normans in about 1020, although the word 'fief' comes from Frankish féhu and not the Norman.

Land not granted to seigneurs remained as the Ducal fief, later Fief du Roi, which still accounts for about half the land in the Island. The average grant was about 1 carucate, or 60 old Jersey acres (240 vergées), an area which de Gruchy equates with the land-take of a Scandinavian settler.

After the break with Normandy in 1204, fiefs of Normans escheated to the Crown. Some of these were granted, along with other Fiefs du Roi, in the reign of Henry III (1216-72). More fiefs escheated with the Suppression of Alien Priories in 1414, and some of these were sold or misappropriated. Fiefs varied from large landholdings with a manor house and manorial court, right down to a single field with no feudal significance.

A great amount is known of the operation of the feudal system, largely through the work of Guy de Gruchy. Charles Stevens’ map shows a patchwork of about 155 located, and 108 unlocated, fiefs, with the residual land all Fief du Roi.

All land had a seigneur – nul terre sans seigneur, nulle seigneur sans terre. Closer inspection of the map shows that by and large, older fiefs respected parish and Vingtaine boundaries. Fiefs also usually respect field boundaries. This suggests, but cannot prove, that fiefs were imposed on an existing pattern of fields and parishes.

In the relatively few cases where fiefs straddle modern parish boundaries, there is often reason to believe that the boundary has been adjusted. For example, in the eastern parishes of St Saviour, St Martin, Grouville and St Clement, some fiefs straddle boundaries, but it is possible that these parishes - the Ministerium of Gorroic - were a single parish based on St Saviour, as stated above.

In the Ministerium of Crapedoit, fiefs straddle the boundary between St Brelade and St Peter - which might once have been a single parish - but not between St Ouen and St Peter, which was never, so this argument runs, a single parish.

The exception to this is the fief of Vingt Livres, which is now in three parishes, but was only in St Peter in 1309. In the Central Ministerium - Groceio - consisting of the original parishes of St John, St Lawrence, including St Helier, and Trinity old fiefs respect parish boundaries except on the north-south Trinity/St John boundary which cuts across fields and divides some fiefs, which suggests that that boundary has moved.

Before 1020, the land must have been worked in parcels, probably of one carucate, comprising ten bovates.

It is significant that the terms feodum and caruée were used interchangeably in the Norman period. It seems likely that the Normans allocated feudal holdings of one carucate, taking account of previous tenure, and entirely possible that the system they introduced was a feudalisation of existing allodial tenures, in which land was mainly held by men of Norse origin, but mainly farmed by natives of Frankish culture.

The difference was that no duties were imposed on allodial tenants, whereas under the feudal system, duties were numerous and onerous.

Fields

In Jersey there are no livres de perchage, no known surviving appariément earlier than 1594, and no Royal Court or manorial court records before about 1550, so that by the time extant records began, the Island was largely enclosed.

It is possible to use field names and field shapes to locate open field areas using a probabilistic and contextual model. Some words - like champ/camp - certainly record former open field strips; others, such as piece or fosse (trench) may do. Where two possible open field terms are contiguous, this increases the possibility that both record open field.

There are about 800 recorded field names involving camp/champ in Jersey; some are precisely located, some only by parish, some not at all. But names change, so that when a camp or camps are enclosed in a single clos, information can be lost unless, as quite often happens, it is a clos des camps. Several camps are actually called demi-verge or demi-vergée.

The average size of a champ is about 1.5 vergées, which means that the area in Jersey known to have been open field is of the order of 1,200 vergées, only a fraction of the likely original area.

Even the most detailed map of recorded names is a palimpsest largely hiding the ancient pattern beneath. To pursue this further we can look at the Extente of 1331, which records the names of tenants of bouvées in those parishes where there was Fief du Roi, or King’s Fief.

In St Martin there were 64 bouvées, each named after its tenant. A bouvée is usually reckoned at 24 vergées. On the reasonable assumption that bouvées were holdings of arable, this means that the King’s Fief contained about 1,536 vergées of arable.

But the King’s Fief covers only just over half of the parish of St Martin, with the remainder belonging to private fiefs, much of which, on level ground, would have probably been arable also. This means that the total area of arable in the parish might have been of the order of 2,500 vergées.

But only about 60 camps have been recorded in the parish, which suggests that a great majority of camps were enclosed and lost the name. Thus it is misleading to generalise from the obvious open field areas, such as the campagnes of St Ouen, St Mary and Trinity, or Les Camps in St Martin, Guernsey.

Less apparent are the low-lying coastal open field areas, such as the coastal area stretching south from La Sente Maillard in Grouville, along the coastal band of St Clement, and up to the Franche Carruée des Pas to the east of Mont au Boeuf (what is now Fort Regent). This carucate is bisected by the Rue du Long Bouet (the road of the long bovate, not ‘the long muddy road’) - now Roseville Street. North-west of the Verte Rue (a green lane through the open field) now Green Street, is an area of froids vents (out- fields, not ‘cold winds’) reaching north to the Issue de la Ville, around Snow Hill.

To the south, is a terrain des vents stretching down to Les Marettes or Mathettes (open fields, now Marett Road at Havre des Pas, and nothing to do with the family Marett).

The area between Rue du Long Bouet, Colomberie and Rue des Ronces (St Clement’s Road) was called La Boyarde, the meaning of which is unclear. North of Colomberie is Rue des Alleurs (Don Road) suggesting that this area, in the Fief du Buisson, contained allodial holdings.

Franche Carruée des Pas itself, south of Colomberie, might well have been an area of allodial holdings, going back to a Scandinavian land-take, before it was enfeoffed in the Fief La Fosse, losing its character as franche.

Agriculture

Open field areas are usually on level ground - understandably as it is difficult to plough on an incline - so that they are overwhelmingly found on the plateau, or the low ground in St Clement and Grouville, and almost never cross parish boundaries; in the rare cases where they do, there is often reason to believe that the boundary is newer than the fields.

From seed-time (1 March) to harvest in September (aoust, mession) open fields would have been fenced off (reduite a closture) to prevent damage from stray cattle, and guarded by a messier. The fenced-off areas were called clostures des labours; the 1463 Lempriere Trial records that the Lady of Rosel worked for an hour in one before going off with her husband.

When the closture was opened, cattle grazed on the harvested land (vaine pature). This banon was enshrined in the Ancienne Coutume de Norrnandie and was probably introduced much earlier than the feudal period.

The Seigneur would have profited only indirectly from banon. Guillaume Terrien, the jurist, wrote that land is en deffens - forbidden — from March to September (the growing season) and common (commune) otherwise when beasts may wander through the fields without a shepherd, except in the case where it has been enclosed or forbidden from ancient times.

Ploughing by carruca is recorded as early as 1299. This was the grande charrue, or wheeled deep-plough, probably drawn by a yoke of oxen, and the area an ox could plough in a year was called a bouvet (bovate). Oxen were stronger than the horses which replaced them later.

Some strips were probably sinuous, a reversed S-shape, the fact preserved in the name of several fields called teur champ or tor champ - twisted strips.

Whereas the old plough (aratrum) had scratched the surface with a tine, the deep plough sliced the ground on the side and below, turning the sod through 135 degrees while moving it sideways. The furrow made by each pass of the plough was called a sillon, and the ridge thrown up a raie.

If the ploughman started at the outside edges and ploughed into the centre, it was called defaiter; if outwards, it was called affaiter - casting. When the ploughman approached the end of the strip, he lifted the plough from the ground, depositing some earth on the headland (fourriére, butte or buttiere) before going back in the direction from which he had come.

Between strips, there might be a grass baulk (herbeuse, devise) or, if wider, a franche raie; there is a very clear example at Pleinmont, Guernsey. Camps at right angles to another group were called traversains or sommiers.

There is little Mediaeval evidence in Jersey of crop rotation. With this system, an in-field (probably the caude terre) is in continuous arable, while the out-field (froide terre or perhaps froid vent) is in pasture, cultivation or fallow. . It is likely that the use of vraic in Jersey made fallowing less necessary.

Enclosure

In England, it was not only arable strips that were enclosed: communes, meadows, woods and waste might also be enclosed, and the same is likely to be true of Jersey.

But it seems that most enclosure was of arable strips. At the beginning of the period, about 1300, nearly all arable was in unenclosed strips; by 1810, when responsibility for banon - the right to graze animals on open fields after harvest - was partly transferred to the parish, there was little open field left. The question is when fields were enclosed. There are references to enclosure from the 13th Century onwards, when monks at the Priory of Ste Marie de Lecq were allowed to enclose 29 perch of land with a wall; in 1299, the Clameur de Haro was raised to stop demolition of a field enclosure; in 1306, there is reference to a novum clausum in St Peter’s Valley; and in 1402, Johan Esclenque paid a cabotel to the Priory of St Clement pour clorre son clos'.

In 1682, Poingdestre stated that the country in about 1582 lay ‘almost open with few enclosures’.

Falle placed enclosure at about 1584. Philip Dumaresq added that it was not so late as 100 years before, ie it was some time before 1582

Elie Brevint, writing in about 1616 in Sark, repeated what he had been told by Guernseymen, namely that Sark was, perhaps 150 years before, divided into beaux petits sillons, comme en Normandie with no traces of levees or fossets. Helier de Carteret’s colonists, who settled in Sark in 1565, were surprised to find that Sark was open field. He proceeded to enclose 300 vergées of it The colonists came mainly from St Ouen, which suggests that enclosure in Jersey had already reached St Ouen by 1565.

There can have been no sudden enclosure: clearly it had been going on for a long time in Jersey, perhaps reaching its climax in the middle of the 16th Century.

The 1594 Apperiément for the Fief du Roi in Grouville, which covers most of the parish, shows one or more camps in 99 places, with only 87 clos. This suggests that enclosure in Grouville was still in progress in 1594.

Poingdestre was able to describe in detail banks ‘newe made’ into a smooth mud wall, which he must have seen before he left the Island in about 1626. The Actes des Etats in 1673 distinguish between terre clos, and terre de champagne, which would hardly have been necessary if the campagne had all been enclosed.

The 1771 Code of Laws expressly allows inhabitants of the campagne of La Moye to make gates on the public road for the préservation des labours Banon, which depends on open fields, was still in force in 1810. Most of Guernsey was enclosed by 1640, though the Campagne des Hougues was only enclosed in the 18th Century.

In the 1594 Apperiément of Grouville, reference is to between one and seven camps in any particular place, without direct reference to ownership, whereas the clos are single ones, more often than not with the name of the owner. This suggests that when camps were enclosed, the owner gave his name to the clos.

It is suggested below that those clos which include fossets and reliefs on all sides were the first to be enclosed.

In St Martin, Guernsey, Richard Hocart had been able to freeze the process in 1488, with marettes, part of a réage, interspersed with enclosed land.

In the Cotentin, embocagement began in the 13th Century. In England, Leonard considered that the process lasted more than four centuries. For 18 counties surveyed in England, the peak period was 1518-1577.

It is likely that enclosure started later in some Jersey parishes than in others. In 1629, Peter Heylyn said that Jersey was ‘very much of small inclosure’.

The number of camps/champs recorded goes from 146 in St Brelade to only twelve in St John. This might mean that there were always more camps in St Brelade than in St John, or that the enclosure started earlier in St John leading to earlier loss of the designation camp/ champ, or both.

It is interesting that the parish of St Saviour - home of Poingdestre and Falle - has only 37 camps/champs, and St Clement, home of Dumaresq, had only 49, whereas St Brelade and St Ouen, about as far as they could go, and admittedly bigger, had 146 and 98 respectively.

The Fief of Noirmont still had two messiers as late as 1625, and the last one was mentioned in 1709. It is significant that by 1787, 100% of St Saviour’s cultivated land was enclosed, while the proportion for St Brelade was only 36%. Some of the remaining 64% of St Brelade was open field, but it probably also included uncultivated land.

It is likely that dating of enclosure was generalised by Heylyn, Dumaresq and Falle from the southeast to the rest of the Island, and that that enclosure took place later in the west and than in the east.

It may be significant that fields in the eastern parishes - St Martin, Grouville and St Clement - are much larger (nearly four vergées on average) than those in the west - St Brelade and St Ouen (about 2.25 vergées on average).

It is also likely that, as in Guernsey, enclosure of camps involved exchanging of dispersed strips, so that an owner had all the camps in his clos.

Once enclosed, a field might be a closture des labours, like the one recorded at Rozel in 1463; it was not planted with fruit trees, but continued as arable.

But the massive new banks would have meant a great loss of farmland. With enclosure, the fields were assembled into a corpus fundi, with a new house at its centre. This would explain the ‘great rebuilding’ of 1550-1650 and the large number of houses in John MacCormack’s survey dated after 1600. Many of these had the single voussoir round arch, which went out of fashion in about 1673, when the States prohibited building of new houses without at least 20 vergées to support them.

Most enclosures were taken out of plough and converted to growing of fruit trees (there is a record of trees in an enclosure as early as 1299) or grazing of animals. The reason for this is that cider had become the staple drink and was also being exported in large quantities.

The decline in arable meant that by the time of Poingdestre, half of the grain consumed in Jersey was imported from Brittany and other places, whereas Jersey had been a net exporter at the time of Heylin’s 1629 visit.

Poingdestre added that tillage was a ‘painefull occupation’ and that men, women and children would rather knit stockings and waistcoats, and would not assist husbandmen ‘but with repugnancy and at such rates as cannot consist with that moderate price at which foraigne corne is sold in the market.’

Making of these enclosures, which Poingdestre had described and probably witnessed, represented an enormous effort in moving earth. In Jersey, hedges were recorded as 6-7 feet high in the 17th Century, and, surprisingly, 8-10 feet or more in 1827 and 10 feet in 1881.

They were planted with quicksets or timber trees. A strip (relief) was left between the boundary (borne, devise), often marked by a boundary stone with small witness (témoin) stones around it and the base of the bank; from this strip earth was dug to pile on the new bank (fosset), leaving a trench (fosse) in the relief. This allowed the bank to spread and avoided litigation.

Brevint, writing between 1619 and 1640, said that reliefs, which he also called quenets, were 3 feet wide, so that someone repairing his fossets did not take any of his neighbour’s unhedged land.

Poingdestre said that most hedges, walls and fossets are not metoyen - that is, placed over the boundary line - but for défense de terre, that is, on one or other side of it.

But this leaves open the question of how contiguous fields were enclosed. The answer can be deduced from the 1701 Appariement of the King’s Fief in St Martin. Some fields are described as being with fossets and reliefs tout autour, which means that where one side of a neighbouring open field touched, or was au pourportant with it, it would use the bank of the fully enclosed field.

Other fields would include fossets and reliefs on one, two or three sides, and any side without a fosset would use the neighbour’s. A shared fosset (mitoyenne), exactly straddling the field boundary, was very rare.

Thus, for example, the north bank of Matthieu Nicolle’s Clos de Catherine (St Martin’s Field 489) acted as the south bank of the Philip Collas’s Court Clos d’Edouard Payn (413); and the relief of the southern field would be just inside but not legally part of, the northern field.

The reason is that it would make no sense, and waste a lot of ground, to have two parallel fossets, with a double relief between them. It must be that fields with their fossets and reliefs, tout autour were enclosed before or possibly at the same time as, but certainly not after, neighbouring fields which do not have fossets et reliefs tout autour.

Those embanking fossets in a way that impeded a right of way had to put in gates (héches) or steps (escaliers) to avoid the raising of a clameur. The new enclosures were hedged with quicksets and bounded by lanes (rues, ruettes) lined with trees which had to cut back to allow passage of carts - brancbage - which, significantly, is first mentioned in 1682.

Discussion

The sequence suggested by Ewen has Megalithic farmers, coming ultimately from southern Europe, arriving in Guernsey in about 1500 BC, and establishing open field areas. They were ringed by Megalithic monuments, and each became the basis for a parish, with a church at its centre, and nucleated villages.

Communally owned landes, essarts and other waste ground were always found on parish boundaries, representing the limits of the agricultural area of each parish.

None of these assertions can be proved from the data. In the first place, there is no evidence that Megalithic people introduced open field arable, or any other form of agriculture, into Guernsey. Second, there is no reason to suppose that the open field areas next to the churches are the original ones; there are open field areas all over the high parishes.

Third, the absence of megaliths in open field areas is easily accounted for by the long-standing practice of removing them from fields - a point made by John Toland in reviewing Falle’s second edition leading to correction in the third edition — and there are very few places where megaliths are clearly on the edge of open fields. It is true that ancient settlements – villes - are usually very close to open field areas, but it is not possible to show that any ville has a connection with Megalithic settlements; anything could have happened in the intervening 2,500 years.

It is quite possible that the country consisted of dispersed farms among small rectangular or square hedged fields, which were de-enclosed in the early Middle Ages, only to be re-enclosed in the late Middle Ages, with increasingly dispersed habitat.

It is true that megaliths have been found at St Brelade’s Church, to say nothing of the carved menhirs at the churches of Catel and St Martin in Guernsey, but with a great many Megalithic sites, and a great many Christian sites, this may be coincidence. In Jersey at least, landes are found on the boundaries of St Mary with St John and St Ouen, but not evidently on other parish boundaries.

What can be said is that the pattern of routes, open field and villes identified for Jersey applies equally to the High Parishes of Guernsey. The routes follow the watershed, go through open field areas, and link churches.

The Chevauchée de St Michel very much followed the main route through the arable land, and significantly stopped at King’s Mills to receive flour from the miller, as if to emphasise its connection with corn land.

Ewen’s hypothesis, which he thought would also apply to Jersey, suffers from the same objections as in Guernsey. The areas of likely Neolithic agriculture, following the Mesolithic period, identified by Renouf and Urry in Jersey, are mostly low-lying coastal patches, in St Ouen’s Bay, St Brelade, St Helier and St Lawrence, the east coast and even the Ecrehous; and areas of Neolithic and Bronze Age arable, identified from cereal pollen found at Beaumont, St Helier and the high ground above it, and Les Ruettes at St John, are quite different from the known areas of Mediaeval open field on the plateau and down in St Clement and Grouville.

It is possible to suggest more tentative findings for developments in Jersey. Its should be stressed that these do not purport to be incontrovertible facts, but only hypotheses of varying degrees of probability. In the Frankish Period (486- c 856), the Island was converted to Christianity. Square ‘Celtic’ fields were turned into open field, with the use of the deep plough. Open field boundaries became the basis for field patterns which have continued to our day. Routes linked the original six parish churches, occupied the ridgeways between the north-south valleys, and did not cross field boundaries.

There were numerous chapels, some of which were later incorporated into churches. Some form of allodial tenure linked overlords with tenants. It was largely unaffected by the migration of people from Britain to Armorica, but parts of some of the parishes were hived off to found new parishes, taking the names of Celtic or latter- day saints.

In the Viking period (856- c960) Norsemen, mainly Danish, made land grabs, and subordinated Frankish tenants, but only allodially. This settlement was especially in the north, west and centre of the Island, and on the coastal plain at St Clement and Grouville.

They presided over the continued cultivation of the open fields, areas of which were called mares, but did not radically change agriculture. People of Norse origin, now speaking Norman-French, moved from the Cotentin to Jersey, merging with people in Jersey of like ancestry.

In the Norman period (c960-1204) Jersey was divided into fiefs, which were carved out of the Ducal domaine, and might have simply replicated allodial holdings.

Open field cultivation continued as before. In the post-Norman period (from 1204), fiefs proliferated, the population increased until the Black Death, subsided, and started to grow again.

Enclosure began, probably first in the east and later in the west, peaking in about 1550. With enclosure began the relative decay of nucleated villes, and the spread of dispersed habitats, with houses in the middle of their corpus fundi, the Jersey landscape of farmhouses among hedged fields which is still very visible today.