Laxton : Academic says system is deserving of World Heritage status

An academic has argued the Laxton system is so special that it deserves the same level of protection as world heritage sites.

Dr Andrew Gritt, is head of history, languages and global cultures in the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University.

The open field system managed by manorial courts was very much the norm in lowland arable England, and indeed in large parts of Europe.

The three-field system operated on a strict system of crop rotation which was designed to preserve the fertility of the soil.

Different crops use different nutrients from the soil and rotation prevents the land from because exhausted and deficient in certain nutrients.

The manorial courts oversaw the whole farming system and village life, levying fines for transgressions of accepted agricultural practice and also for petty misdemeanours and nuisances. Local farmers would sit on the jury, and would also be sworn in as manorial office holders, although the court itself would be presided over by the Lord of the Manor or his representative.

Within a system of open field arable cultivation, each farmer was allocated strips of land within the field.

But it was still possible for some farmers to have more land than others as some tenements had more land attached to them than others.

If this was the case individual farmers could have multiple strips within the same field whereas others may have only had one.

There were few visible boundaries within the open fields, although boundary stones would usually be used to mark out the strips.

Each farmer had to farm in exactly the same way, being responsible for their own strips.

Under this system the good and bad land within the field was shared out amongst the farmers. However, one of the problems with the system was that scattered strips could lead to additional labour costs and time due to walking from one strip to another to sow, weed, harvest etc.

Across most of the country open field arable was swept away by parliamentary enclosure in the period between 1750 and 1850.

This facilitated the development of a more capitalist, market-oriented agricultural system that helped to feed the growing urban and industrial population.

It meant that farmers could innovate more easily, experimenting with new crops, new crop rotations and benefit from consolidated landholding which reduced the time spent walking between one piece of land and another.

In time, consolidated farms also encouraged the adoption of machinery thus providing further gains in labour productivity.

Critics of the Open Field system suggest that it was an inherently conservative system that restricted innovation and entrepreneurialism.

If one farmer didn't weed his strips then those weeds would spread to neighbouring strips, thus leading to neighbourly disputes.

However, some historians have argued that there was nothing inherently wrong with the open field system from an economic point of view and that most of the productivity gains that we associate with the agricultural revolution of the century after 1750 had already been achieved by farmers operating within an open field system. But not all historians agree on this point.

Village life in an open field system was frequently tightly knit, with a nuclear settlement surrounded by cultivated fields.

This is exactly what we see in Laxton with very few buildings outside of the medieval core of the village until the mid-1800s.

The manorial courts held these communities together and ensured that they had mechanisms and legal process to deal with most aspects of village life. Farmers appointed as jurors and officers of the court ensured that they were part of the system, and not merely controlled by a legal system that they had no part in. As a model of community organisation such a system has a great deal to offer - a system of local courts where minor nuisances, transgressions and petty crimes were brought before the court by neighbours, to be tried by known peers, with penalties that were serious but not crippling.

In terms of Laxton as a heritage asset, this is more difficult. A ground-breaking book by W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, was published in 1955.

Hoskins claimed that the landscape was the "greatest historical record". This is true, but one of the problems is that it requires specialist training to "read" a landscape in order to understand its historical significance.

The Laxton landscape is irreplaceable and of huge significance, but we should guard against it becoming a living museum and too many visitors could threaten the landscape.

The court system in Laxton is also unique, and deserves special legal protection because of this uniqueness.

The court leet is a form of intangible heritage - that is, a cultural heritage asset that is not a physical object. UNESCO created the Convention on Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003 and there are now 175 countries signed up to this convention.

It is designed to recognise and protect intangible heritage around the world. However, the UK government has not signed up to the convention and has claimed that the UK doesn't have any intangible heritage.

This is unfortunate in many ways, not least because there are similar medieval court systems still operating elsewhere in Europe that have UNESCO protection. Laxton's landscape and the court system that maintains it deserves the same level of protection.

This would put it on a par with with the more familiar World Heritage Sites such as Stonehenge or the Great Pyramids.