Working woodlands

Before the Norman Conquest in 1066, large stretches of Bedfordshire were covered in woodland. New settlers made clearings amongst the trees in places like Oakley (oaks), Aspley (aspens), Little Barford (birches) and Willington (willows). The woods were home to wild boars which gave their name to places like Eversholt and Everton – the Saxon word ‘eofor’ means ‘wild boar that lives in the forests’.

At the time of the Domesday Book, approximately 25,000 acres of Bedfordshire was described as woodland. This wouldn’t have been closely planted trees but more open, grassy or marshy areas with some trees and little undergrowth. Droves of pigs were fed on acorns, nuts and snails in these woodlands and the Domesday Book records how many could be supported in each village. At Luton there was enough woodland to support 2,000 pigs but the usual number was around 100.

Pigs were useful animals to have around, they were unfussy in their eating habits, helping to clean yards and streets, and they provided meat, lard and manure. The woodland that supported them also provided firewood and timber for building. As the medieval period wore on, forests were also home to small scale rural industries such as charcoal burning, blacksmithing, lime burning, cartwrights and bird trapping. Few woodland areas would have been free of this kind of activity which would have supplemented the income from agriculture and supplied the local village with goods.

Riches from the river

The River Great Ouse loops through North Bedfordshire, taking 46 miles to cross a width of less than half that. After it leaves Bedfordshire the river flows via Ely, the eel Island or district of the eels’, and on to the Wash at Kings Lynn.

The medieval river was rich in eels and selling and catching them provided a substantial additional income for millers, alongside the primary function of the mill – grinding wheat for flour. Eels were used to pay tax and rent. They were caught using spears, nets and wicker traps, and at the mill dams huge numbers could be caught. It has been estimated that 25-50% fish in medieval rivers were eels. The eels were cured – salted, smoked and dried, so that they could be stored unspoilt until the rent was due. Fish was also an important supplement to the diet at times when meat wasn’t allowed such as in Lent.

The mill in Bromham was worth 225 eels and 20 shillings. The story was repeated along the river: 200 eels at Odell, 200 at Harrold, 260 at Roxton and 80 at Great Barford. There were also mills along the River Ivel, including at Stotfold where the four mills produced a combined rent of 400 eels payable to Hugh de Beauchamp.

Dyed in the wool

The name of the North Bedfordshire village of Odell was first recorded in the Domesday Book and derives from the Anglo-Saxon ‘woad hill’. Woad was an important source of blue dye and also had antiseptic properties. Water was needed for the dyeing process and Odell sits close to the river. It was one of the three staples of medieval dyeing, along with weld (yellow) and madder (red). It was widely used in England and across Europe in the medieval period but as dye traders began to import indigo during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries its use began to decline.

Dyeing was originally done by women, it was a domestic activity, dyeing cloth for the use of the household. By the twelfth century it was developing into a trade and the activity was taken over by men. The snapshot of Odell given in the Domesday book tells us that there were two landowners, Count Eustace of Boulogne and Walter of Flanders. Between them there was woodland for 110 pigs, a mill, land for seven plough teams, 16 villagers, 12 small holders and seven slaves. The story of activities like dyeing is missing from the Domesday Book and has to be read between the lines, through information like place names. From this we can take a reasoned imaginative leap into the lives of women in Bedfordshire in this period and see them with harvesting the leaves, steeping them in water, cooling and straining the dye – their hands stained blue.

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Watling Street was a busy road, connecting Dover to Wroxeter, once one of the largest cities in the country, via London and St Albans. At Dunstable it crossed the Icknield Way, an ancient path that linked the Dorset coast with East Anglia. It ran along the ridge of the chalk hills, safely above the lower marshier ground, and is estimated to be at least 5,000 years old.

Roman Dunstable was a bustling agricultural settlement. Wells, corn drying ovens and agricultural implements have been found by archaeologists, along with ditches and farming structures, in and around the town. Everyday cooking, storing and serving pots were made locally and were probably sold at the market. Amphorae containing exotic produce were imported from Mediterranean countries. Pottery arrived from the Continent, for example the glossy red pottery, known as Samian ware, from France.

Dunstable was also a Roman posting station, somewhere to change horses, repair wagons, eat, sleep and receive communications. The skeleton of a young Barbary Ape found in the town is an intriguing mystery. They were popular with Romans as household pets but it might equally have been a military pet or mascot. Another Barbary Ape skeleton was found at Wroxeter which was home to a much larger Roman legionary fort.

It’s not an animal whose bones you’d expect to turn up in rural Bedfordshire but it speaks of links to the Mediterranean and North Africa and is part of Bedfordshire’s long story of connections to the wider world. It’s also a symbol of fortune and decline. When the Romans left Britain in the fifth century, Dunstable was abandoned until the reign of Henry I. He granted the town a market charter and founded a monastery, ushering in a new period in the town’s history. By that time, 700 years had elapsed since a Barbary Ape might have enthralled a small boy in the marketplace.

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Aurochs were a type of wild cattle which roamed Europe, Asia and North Africa. The earliest fossils date to around 700,000 years ago, they were extinct in Britain by the time of the Late Bronze Age but the last known animal died in 1627 in Poland. They roamed and grazed in small herds across grasslands and open woodland. Compared to modern cattle they were huge – the males could be up to two metres tall, weighing a tonne, and with curved horns up to one metre long. Archaeologists have been able to form a picture of them using bones, cave paintings and historical descriptions. Domestication of these animals is thought to have begun around 10,000 years ago, with people making use of their meat, hides, milk and bones. Over time they were bred to be calm and obedient.

In 2021 archaeologists from the Museum Of London Archaeology unit excavating the site of a new housing development in Houghton Regis, discovered a mysterious group of pits dating from 8,500 to 7,700 years ago. The 25 pits were laid out in multiple straight lines, clustered around former stream channels. They were round with very steep sides, some flaring out at the bottom into a wider base. The archaeologists found animal bones including aurochs, marten, deer and boar. The aurochs bones were radiocarbon dated and helped the archaeologists fix the date of the pits. There was also evidence of butchery marks on the bones so people were eating the cattle. There is no consensus on the use of the pits but they might have had some ritual or special significance. The pits must have taken real effort to dig, given their depth of 1.85 metres and width of five metres. They are too large to have been for hunting or food storage which led the archaeologists to consider their location near water and the specific alignments on which they were placed as evidence of possible ritual activity.

It’s a tantalising glimpse of our deep past, into what people ate, the beginnings of animal domestication and husbandry, and what communal life might have looked like.

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Today the county is landlocked, but its story starts 70 million years ago when the area was covered by a warm shallow sea, teeming with life. The tropical waters were home to microscopic algae known as coccoliths, as they died, they fell to the bottom of the sea and their skeletons formed a deep layer of sediment on the sea floor. In time this turned to chalk, a very pure form of limestone with no trace of sand or mud.

When the Ice Age arrived, around 2.6 million years ago, the sea levels fell, and glacial erosion shaped the landscape into rounded hills, dry valleys and chalk ridges. The chalk landscapes of the Chilterns dominate the south of Bedfordshire, including the dramatic chalk ridge, wildflower rich meadows and fragments of ancient beech woods.

People have lived on, worked with, and crossed the chalk for thousands of years. Prehistoric sites include the Five Knolls Barrow Cemetery on Dunstable Downs. Barrows are burial mounds constructed in chalk over individual burials with later burials (usually cremations) dug into the outside of the mounds. Excavations in the 1850s and 1920s showed that the cemetery dates to the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age periods (3,000-1,200 BC). Sharpenhoe Clappers was home to an Iron Age Hill Fort (800 BC – 43 AD), part of a series of defensive sites along the chalk ridge.

The thinness of the chalky soil would come to frustrate farmers, but the soft stone would be light enough to build church vaults and be carved into fonts.

Landscapes across Bedfordshire were similarly shaped by marine life, from the oolitic limestone of the north to the Oxford Clay region. The seas were filled with sea urchins, corals, sponges, sea urchins, oysters, ammonites, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.

The underwater world of coccoliths and other marine creatures formed the Bedfordshire landscapes we see today, setting in place the geology which would determine how generations of people would live, what they would farm, where they would site monasteries, what building materials they would use and what kinds of work they would do.

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The website features I’ve written have been enjoyable to research and compile but I wanted to find a way to tell a more coherent story about the county, bringing together the many things I’ve learned, and free from the need to to tie pieces to suitable walks or places to visit. Putting the jigsaw pieces in to some sort of chronological order was an appealing idea, but how to give it some focus? Joyce Godber’s 1969 book History of Bedfordshire 1066-1888 provides a comprehensive history of Bedfordshire and has long been my go to volume for research, while the Bedfordshire Archives Community Histories website is an invaluable source of local history information for each settlement in the county. I wanted an option that would allow me to combine a story of continuity and change with the ability to zoom in on details that could illuminate that story.

Why animals and plants?

Bedfordshire understands itself as a rural county made up largely of market towns, villages and countryside. This has certainly been true for most of its history with the rapid growth of Luton coming only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The landscape is geologically varied and a connection to the land is an important part of Bedfordshire’s story.

I’ve always been interested in lives in the landscape. What impact have people had? How have they lived here? There is an enduring myth of an untouched landscape but in reality English landscapes are human landscapes shaped by us throughout history. That relationship between people, animals and plants and land is the thing I hope to unpick through this series.

About the series

Each short post will be focused on a plant or animal as a prism through which to talk about a period. Rather than everything there is to say about it across the sweep of Bedfordshire history, I’ll instead be picking up on a specific theme. These stories will all begin on a small scale but will also be telling bigger stories.

This isn’t going to be a definitive history, these are the stories that have caught my eye, the things that have engaged me. I hope that the variety will be appealing to readers.

Housekeeping

I’m setting this up as a Section so that subscribers to my regular monthly updates can choose to opt out if it’s not of interest, and new readers who’d prefer to receive just this series can do that. You can change your settings by going to my publication home page, selecting ‘manage subscription’ and toggling the A Brief History or Shelly’s Scribblings notifications on or off.

I am planning on monthly posts, published in roughly chronological order.

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