The Commons of the Ancient Parish of Sheffield

Abstract

The enormous parish of Sheffield covered 22,370 acres and was divided into six civil townships, each with their own commons and wastes. Farming systems varied considerably between the townships. The day-to-day decisions on farming practices were sometimes taken by smaller units of administration known as hamlets. The first tasks for agricultural and landscape historians are therefore to define boundaries and to understand the complex local arrangements of the communal townfields, greens, commons and wastes. These are explored in detail from the medieval period up to parliamentary enclosure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As the town of Sheffield spread, the former commons and greens were built upon, but the moorland edges were enclosed within new, rectangular fields and the extensive wastes beyond became exclusive grouse moors.

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1 Introduction

In considering the common lands of a particular district we need first of all to understand the administrative arrangements and to define the boundaries. These can be complex. I have chosen the ancient parish of Sheffield, the whole of which became a borough in 1843 and the city 50 years later, not because it had any authority over the commons but simply to describe the variety of experience within it. Like the other enormous parishes on the edge of the Pennines, it contained numerous small commons and greens and extensive stretches of moorland. Medieval Sheffield formed part of the huge lordship of Hallamshire, a Northumbrian shire that had been taken over intact by the Normans and whose name survives to this day. Sheffield was originally a chapel-of-ease of the parish of Ecclesfield, which covered the whole of the 71,526 acres of Hallamshire and whose eccles name suggests that the Northumbrian shire had even earlier origins. Within this chapelry the Norman lords created a market town around their castle and they provided their prominent knights with sub-manors at Darnall, Ecclesall, Owlerton, and Shirecliff. Manorial records survive only for Ecclesall and for the chief manor of Hallamshire, based on Sheffield castle. Other lands were given to the burgesses of Sheffield in 1296. (Hey 2010).

2 The Parish of Sheffield

The chapelry became the parish of Sheffield in the twelfth century. It covered 22,370 acres, stretching from the present Meadowhall Shopping Centre by the M1 motorway across the town and over the moors to the county boundary. It was far too large to be used for civil purposes, such as overseeing the poor or the highways, or for the practical arrangements for day-to-day farming. Like other Pennine parishes, it was therefore divided into townships, which were sometimes referred to by the Viking word bierlow or in medieval documents as vills. Until the creation of the borough in 1843, Sheffield had six townships: the small urban township of Sheffield, with the lord’s enormous deer park extending over the skyline, and the six rural townships of Attercliffe-cum-Darnall, Brightside Bierlow, Ecclesall Bierlow, Upper Hallam, and Nether Hallam (Fig. 18.1).

Fig. 18.1

Sheffield parish in 1795. This simplified version of William Fairbank’s map of the parish of Sheffield in 1795 depicts the 6 townships and their commons and woods. The whole of the parish became the borough of Sheffield in 1843 and the city 50 years later

Each of the medieval institutions mentioned above had a say in the ways in which the local commons, wastes and greens were organised on a day-to-day basis. Farming systems within the parish of Sheffield varied considerably between the six townships. The contrast between the two that formed the eastern section of Sheffield parish illustrates this point. South of the River Don, the township of Attercliffe-cum-Darnall contained two settlements, both of which were farmed as classic Midland open-field villages, each with three fields divided into strips and a common beyond; hardly a tree was to be seen. Attercliffe seems to have been a medieval planned village arranged around a triangular green—known unromantically as Goose Turd Green in John Harrison’s survey of 1637(Ronksley 1637)—or strung out along the Sheffield-Rotherham road past Beighton or Oaks Green (both of which names were derived from local families) and the township’s meadows by the river. Darnall had a separate 3-field system, with a common and 2 greens covering 5 acres between them to the east. The place-name means ‘secluded nook of land on the boundary’, (Smith 1961) and references to the ‘Old Town’ on the parish boundary in the 1637 survey (Ronksley 1637) suggest that the village was re-planned on either side of the street (Fig. 18.2).

Fig. 18.2

Attercliffe and Brightside.The contrasting field patterns, commons and woods of the two townships on either side of the River Don is evident from this section of Fairbank’s 1795 map

On crossing the river Don to the north, we come across an entirely different farming landscape amongst the low hills of Brightside Bierlow. The contrast with the neighbouring township of Attercliffe-cum-Darnall, south of the river is immediately apparent. Here were no open-fields and no nucleated settlements. Instead, we find scattered farmsteads and cottages, numerous closes, pastures and meadows held in severalty, and plenty of coppiced woods, including one that had been converted from a medieval deer park. These woods were managed largely to supply charcoal for the local iron industry. Brightside Bierlow’s only common was Pitsmoor, where iron ore had once been mined. However, it had three small greens at the hamlets of Brightside and Grimesthorpe, and the small Assembly or ‘Sembly’ Green on the opposite bank of the River Don to Sheffield Castle. Here a muster of manorial tenants held their land by a special tenure that had once taken place each year (Ronskley 1637). Brightside Bierlow had more in common with the western townships of Sheffield parish than with its southern neighbour (Fig. 18.3).

Fig. 18.3

Crookes in 1795. The hamlet of Crookes was farmed to an open-field system, with commons, pastures and woods beyond, even though the boundary (marked in red) between the townships of Ecclesall and Nether Hallam wove in and out of the strips and across Crookes Moor

By the eighteenth century, the urban township of Sheffield was largely built over. New roads, houses and industrial buildings preserved the former strip boundaries of the ‘townfield’—the usual northern term for a small open-field—which went over the hill to Shalesmoor, the only common in the township, which lay on the boundary with the township of Nether Hallam. This common was known anciently as Sheremore, a name that was derived from ‘shared’. (Smith 1961) The only greens in the township were Castle Green, bordering the medieval castle and the market place, and Balm Green, high on the western border, where the medieval Barker’s Pool provided water for domestic use and to cleanse the streets by a system of sluices and channels leading down to the River Don. Today, one of Sheffield’s central shopping streets is known as ‘The Moor’, but this 17-acre common did not belong to the burgesses, freeholders and tenants of Sheffield township. It was the common attached to Little Sheffield, a hamlet half a mile or so to the south of the town within Ecclesall Bierlow, and it was marked as ‘Little Sheffield Moor’ on Ralph Gosling’s map of 1736.¹

When we turn to the western townships we come to more rugged terrain and more complicated arrangements. The inhabitants of Little Sheffield also had common rights on Sharrow Moor, a name meaning ‘the hill where the shared land was’. (Smith 1961) This 42-acre common was used by the inhabitants of all the nearby hamlets and scattered farmsteads of Ecclesall Bierlow, and a school was built on it in 1668 at the joint expense of all the householders. To the east of the common, the strips of an open ‘townfield’ descended the steep hill from Sharrow Head to Little Sheffield. The majority of the allotments created under the 1788 enclosure award² are still recognisable as the gardens of houses along Psalter Lane, Williamson Road and Kingfield Road. Parliamentary enclosure of commons in an urban setting was often prompted not by thoughts of agricultural improvement but by making land on the edges of towns available for building. When Little Sheffield Moor was enclosed in 1788 it was immediately built upon, as William Fairbank’s map of Sheffield in 1797³ reveals (Fig. 18.4).

Fig. 18.4

Stanedge Pole. This ancient boundary stone marks the western edge of Sheffield on the moors high above the city centre

3 Moor and Common

It is noticeable that in and around Hallamshire the terms ‘moor’ and ‘common’ were interchangeable. Today, we think of moors as remote, unproductive land stretching over the Pennines, but in northern England ‘moor’ was also used regularly to denote a common pasture on the edge of a town, regardless of its size and appearance. A well-known Sheffield suburb retains the name of Crookesmoor, which lay just beyond the central township. The administrative history of Crookes—an Old Norse name for ‘a nook or corner of land’(Smith 1961)—is complex; farms and fields were divided in a perplexing way between the townships of Nether Hallam and Ecclesall Bierlow. When the sub-manor and township of Ecclesall Bierlow was enclosed in 1779–88, a few years before William Fairbank’s map of the parish of Sheffield was drawn in 1795,⁴ the commissioners and surveyors had great difficulty in drawing an exact boundary line between Ecclesall and Nether Hallam. This ran along the village street in Crookes, whose Old Norse name means ‘a nook or corner of land’, set high on a ridge, but then it twisted and turned round the headlands and strips of the ‘townfields’ in bewildering fashion. Crookes was farmed under a three-field system as a hamlet that straggled the township borders. Crookesmoor was also divided between the two townships: 170 acres belonged to Ecclesall and 165 acres to Nether Hallam. Clearly, communal farming in the townfields and commons of Crookes could not be organised at township level. The hamlet was the local unit that mattered.

4 Hamlets

The popular meaning of hamlet is a small group of farmsteads and cottages, but the term was also used in a more technical sense to describe a small, compact area with its own fields and common. In parts of northern England, we occasionally find that men brought their agreed rules and regulations about farming practices to the manor court for ratification. Although we are only dimly aware of hamlets in the records, their memory survived well into Victorian times. When the first edition of the six-inch Ordnance Survey map was published in the mid-1850s for Yorkshire—much earlier than in most parts of the kingdom—the boundaries of these hamlets were marked, even though their townfields and commons had long since gone. In the northern parts of Hallamshire, for instance, the 6-inch Ordnance Survey map shows the boundaries of the hamlets of Holdworth, Onesacre, Worrall and Ughill, all of which were recorded in Domesday Book. Such hamlets were ancient institutions.

At the southern edge of Sheffield parish, Heeley provides another example of how a hamlet could have been an effective organising unit within a complex administrative system. This ‘high clearing’ was squeezed in between the large deer park of the lords of Hallamshire and the river Sheaf and the Meersbrook which marked that lordship’s boundary. Until 1904, Heeley was a detached part of the distant township of Nether Hallam, an extraordinary relationship that must date from the time when Ecclesall Bierlow was carved out of the area designated simply as Hallam. Heeley had two small townfields and a common. On the hillside to the south was Heeley Green, which by 1795 had attracted a number of cottages under the name of Upper Heeley. The smaller greens - Mill Green, Newfield Green and Hanbank - had also attracted cottages by the late eighteenth century as the Hallamshire cutlery industry expanded and the population soared.

5 Moors, Greens and Commons

The western townships had extensive moors, which stretched over to the county boundary high on the Pennines, and they also had numerous greens. Documentary evidence for greens in this district is hard to come by. The earliest records of their names date from the late sixteenth century, but we are left with the suspicion that by that time at least some of them were centuries old. Perhaps they were noted in documents only after farmhouses or cottages had been erected upon them? We cannot tell whether their origins were associated with medieval assarting or with the recovery of the national population in Elizabethan times, or both. By the eighteenth century, when the first maps and field-books become available, most of these greens and small commons had irregular groups of buildings attached to them.

The manor of Ecclesall covered the whole bierlow or township. A list of the ‘Commons and Waste Grounds’ of the manor of Ecclesall in 1587 (Wigfull 1930) included Whirlow Green and Whiteley Wood Green, together with ‘the Benty-haughe’ and ‘the Dale marshe’, known later as Bents Green and Marsh Green. Oakes Green, or Broad Oak Green as it was also known, was not recorded, though it may have been subsumed under Bents Green, as it lay adjacent. The topographical nature of the names of these greens suggests that they pre-date the settlements that grew up around them.

The only name that incorporated ‘common’ in the 1587 list was Little Common, but other stretches of common land took their names from cliffs and hills. Graystones Cliff, Dobbing Hilll and Brockwell Hill were recorded, but curiously not several others that were included within the Ecclesall enclosure award of 1788: Brincliffe Edge Common, Dovehill Common, and the thin strips of Cherry Tree Common, Carter Knowle, Button Hill, and Millhouses Lane, which must surely have been used as commons in some way or other in earlier times. It is hard to see why some of these landscape features were referred to as greens, for example Bents Green, Oakes Green and Nether Green, while others of a similar size were known as commons, for instance Little Common. It was not a question of size, for their measurements overlap considerably. The most likely explanation is that, unlike the commons and moors, communal rights on the greens were restricted to the grazing of tethered livestock and the unrestricted wanderings of geese, ducks and poultry, as on Goose Turd Green in Attercliffe; no peat was available for fuel in these rough, grassy pastures, and perhaps nothing else was taken from them either.

Scattered manorial records give approximate dates to some of the encroachments onto the edges of greens and commons, for these squatters were tolerated by the officers of the manor on the grounds that their rents provided the lord with extra revenue. For example, in 1578, the Court Leet of the Manor of Sheffield noted that at Owlerton ‘Robert Shawe hath builded a lytle house of the Lordes waste there conteyninge one Bay for the which he doth paye yearly the Rent of iiijd.’(Anon 1926) After the passing of the Act of Settlement (1665), however, such cottages became a concern for the overseers of the poor. Thus, in 1685, Christopher Lee, an Ecclesall labourer, and Robert Glossop of Ecclesall, mason, were charged with ‘erecting a Cottage upon the Common in the night without lawful leave’,⁵ and in 1718 Thomas Colley was fined ‘for erecting a Cottage at Crookesmoorside’.⁶ Of course, a shrinking common meant reduced shares of the resources for those with common rights. This was not only rights of grazing but in the case of the manor of Sheffield in 1650, the right to get stone, turf, clods, earth and clay. In 1718, the Ecclesall manor court declared that none ‘shall keep more Sheep upon the Commons in Summer time than they can keep on their Inlands in winter’,⁷ a common practice that was known to English lawyers as levancy and couchancy. Seven years later, a visitor saw a grinding wheel on common land by the River Sheaf and was told that ‘this common or moor has been of late years much enclosed’ (Historical Manuscripts Commission 1901) The parliamentary enclosure award of 1788 dealt with the moors that have already been mentioned and with the High Moors that covered 268 acres at the western edge of the bierlow, as far as the Derbyshire border.

As well as having a large share of Crookesmoor, and a small common at Owlerton, the freeholders and tenants of Nether Hallam township enjoyed common rights on the 25 1/2 acres of Ranmoor (whose name referred to its position on the edge or boundary with Ecclesall township, with the small Cockpit Green just beyond), and the steep slopes of Walkley Bank, Peyham Bank and Bell Hagg, which descend to the River Rivelin, totalling another 212 acres between them. Bell Hagg took its name from a coppice wood and this alerts us to the customary rights within some of the woods of the Manor of Sheffield. For instance, Harrison’s 1637 survey noted that Scraith Bank, covering nearly 20 acres on the north-westerly tip of Brightside Bierlow, was ‘a Common and spring wood of 21 years growth. The wood thereof belongeth to the Lord but the Feed to the Tenants’(Ronksley 1637).

The sparse population of the remaining township, Upper Hallam, was scattered in isolated farms or small hamlets, mostly arranged around greens—Birks Green, Brookhouse Green, and Nether Green—and Fulwood, the ‘foul or dirty wood’ that had long since been cleared by medieval assarting. The presence of the lords of Hallamshire was keenly felt here, for the entire township, together with much of the township of Stannington in the Chapelry of Bradfield beyond the northern border of the parish of Sheffield, formed the huge deer hunting ground known as Rivelin Chase, which encompassed 6,863 acres, of which 5,531 lay within Upper Hallam. Lodge Moor (which took its name from the hunting lodge) and Stanage Moor stretched across the bleak moorlands to the county boundary. On the edge of the moors, the medieval lords of Hallamshire had a deer keeper’s lodge at Redmires, a cattle-rearing farm at Fulwood Booth, and a 429-acre pasture named after the Hawley family but now known as Hollow Meadows; nearby was Fulwood Grange, which the lords had donated to the canons of Beauchief Abbey. But as hunting was not a regular pastime, the freeholders and tenants of the neighbouring farms were granted grazing rights within the chase. Other parts were rented to framers from further afield. In the 1440s, for example, the accounts of Henry Wrasteler, the forester of Rivelin Chase, included ‘pasturing-rents for divers plough-cattle on the moor from strangers there’. He also noted sales of wood, charcoal and tiling-stones and a quarry for grindstones. In what appears to have been a roundabout way of receiving rents, fifteen people were presented at the manor court for ‘pannage of swine’ and two men were fined for felling and carrying away ‘two loads of green wood of the lord, out of Le Firth of Revelinge’. (Thomas AH 1914; Hall 1928) In 1723 the manor court fined people ‘For putting cattle upon the commons called Riveling Wood, having no common right to do so’ and ‘For burning bracking on the above Common’.⁸

6 Disputes and Enclosures

In the centuries before maps were made to accompany parliamentary enclosure awards, boundary disputes on the moors were a common occurrence. When such a dispute between the inhabitants of Sheffield, Bradfield and Hathersage was resolved by arbitration in 1724, the depositions of old men called as witnesses provide a glimpse of the common rights that were claimed at the time. John Hall, aged 63, ‘saith that about 45 or 46 years agoe when he was 18 He kept 300 Sheep for Wm Greaves of Hatherzidge parish for 2 Summers’. Other witnesses spoke of the grazing of cattle, and Joseph Halgreave, aged 63, remembered ‘Burning Brackin upon Moscarr’. George Brownehill said that about 20 years ago he had looked after Hathersage cattle at Moscar for a couple of years and that ‘they made him a Cabbin’ to live in, and Lawrence Green, aged 72, recalled the digging of turves about 60 years previously.⁹ When Upper and Nether Hallam and neighbouring parts of the Chapelry of Bradfield were enclosed in a long-drawn out process between 1791 and 1805, allotments were made to those farmers who had rights of herbage, but seventy others had their claims for compensation dismissed. An agent acting on their behalf claimed that 1,000 acres on the ‘Black Moors’ were ‘Rocks where the Poor burn Fearne and raise £120 by the Ashes’. He also claimed that poor people kept flocks of geese and ‘many Galloways for Grinders to carry goods’. The claimants, including thirty-five cutlers, eighteen grinders, seven husbandmen, two shoemakers, a gentleman, a schoolmaster, a tailor and a wheelwright, were dismissed as being ‘most of them Wheelfellows—probably not many Inhabitants’.¹⁰ The grazing of geese and galloways were not customary rights. These practices had arisen with laxer manorial control after the removal of the deer in the late seventeenth century and because of the spread of cutlers’ grinding wheels up the Rivelin Valley as trade and population increased.

This same enclosure provoked South Yorkshire’s sole example of violent opposition because it included the township of Nether Hallam’s share of Crookesmoor. The violence took place against a background of radical political activity in Sheffield, but the grievance at the loss of a common in a rural township may have had more to do with the demolition of the popular racecourse there. On 23rd July 1791, the Revd James Wilkinson (Vicar and Magistrate), Mr Joseph Ward (Master Cutler) and Mr Vincent Eyre (agent to the Duke of Norfolk and a Town Trustee) requested military aid when the enclosure commissioners were driven away by a mob that ‘menaced them with the greatest personal danger’ and which proceeded to burn farming property, to break the windows of several houses, and to menace the lives and property of the freeholders friendly to enclosure; they ‘openly avowed their intention of laying open the enclosures in the neighbourhood already made … and burning the houses of all the freeholders who have countenanced the late enclosures’, that is of the Ecclesall part of Crookesmoor. Four days later, Light Dragoons arrived from Nottingham. By 9 p.m. a crowd of ‘many hundreds’ freed the prisoners in the town gaol and marched on Broom Hall, the home of the Vicar, where they broke all his windows, destroyed much of his furniture and library, and set his haystacks on fire before they were dispersed by the dragoons. The mob then returned to the town and broke Vincent Eyre’s windows. Next day, more soldiers arrived from York and the leaders of the mob were arrested. One of them, John Bennett, was convicted of arson and hanged at York. The authorities prevailed, but for a long time afterwards Vicar Wilkinson was taunted by children chanting ‘They burnt his books/ And scared his rooks/ And set his stacks on fire.’ (Stevenson 1989) Further enclosures proceeded with little opposition. When the enclosure award for Attercliffe-cum-Darnall was approved in 1819 the last of the commons of the ancient parish of Sheffield disappeared from view.

7 Conclusions

The enclosed commons of the rapidly growing urban part of Sheffield parish were soon covered with domestic and industrial buildings. In the west, the moorland fringes were converted into large, rectangular fields which can still be recognised as green pastures, though some have since been sub-divided and others have reverted to moorland. One of these fields took the name of Rape Piece because rape was the first crop to be grown there, followed by black oats, turnips and potatoes. (Sheffield Clarion Ramblers’ Handbook 1950) A more significant and permanent change to the moorland landscape came between 1830 and 1854 with the construction by the Sheffield Waterworks Company of three reservoirs at Redmires and two in the Rivelin Valley to supply the needs of the rapidly expanding town. But the present appearance of the greater part of the moorland of Sheffield parish dates from the 1860s onwards, when improved gun technology and the technique of driving the grouse towards the shooters in specially constructed butts transformed the sport. (Hey 2007) Gamekeepers ensured that this former common land became the exclusive preserve of the grouse shooters until, after a long and bitter campaign ramblers received the ‘right to roam’ with the passing of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in the year 2000.