MAPPING BAMPTON: A JOURNEY IN SPACE AND TIME the fields to the SW. Communal grazing relied on commoners to act responsibly and to submit to authority but it was not rare for commons to be subjected to all manner of unsuitable, unsavoury and downright unlawful practices. The practical risks of common grazing were omnipresent: The principal problem was one of over-grazing created by an over-population of substandard animals: a scrawny sheep grazed more than its economic worth. Such animals were difficult to separate from larger, legally sanctioned flocks despite owners’ attempts to cut ears in specific patterns to denote ownership. Other problems included commoners ‘bending’ the rules such as the grazing of ‘jades’ (a term variously used to describe ‘vicious’, ‘dumb’, ‘cracked’ or ‘crazy’ horses- all ultimately therefore worthless on the market) were worse because they took up grazing resource without creating any economic value whatsoever. Geese were a particularly unwelcome presence on the commons because they managed to achieve the spectacularly destructive act of simultaneously eating all the grass while also poisoning what was left with their trails of prolific droppings. ‘Untethered’ (which at this date means without nose rings) pigs would churn up the ‘soil’ as reliably as a modern day mechanical digger. One can readily understand the potential for ill-feeling among commoners as rumours spread
and recriminations made. In Bampton the manor courts seem relatively free of significant cases of dispute (not withstanding that these courts were much denuded institutions in the post-Latin era and soon to be absorbed by the functions of modern local government), but by the mid 19th Century Rev Giles alluded to what was supposedly formal (and largely honorific) roles of bedels and bailiffs of Bampton fulfilling their ancient roles as a “terror to all evil doers, old and young in the town and neighbourhood”. Commons were places of the poor. Inevitably they were often considered by those in authority as synonymous with people on the margins of mainstream society- known by various names in antiquity. Many of the transient, seasonal or semipermanent inhabitants of English commons were firmly described in pejorative terms by modern parlance- they are squatters , pedlars, hawkers, tinkers, runaways, Scots, Irish, Egyptians (Gypsies), itinerants, and ultimately, the catch-all term, vagrants. Bampton Horse Fair was a longstanding and wellknown festival that is known to have attracted visitors and horse traders from across the country. It must surely have attracted itinerant groups also. I have found nothing specific relating to travellers 38
and other itinerant groups’ relationship with Bampton and its commons, but that probably says more about the general scarcity of historic evidence of itinerant groups and their transient role in rural economies than anything else. Either way, there was most probably a lot ‘going on’ in those blank areas of Bampton’s historic maps! Commons were increasingly viewed not only economically inefficient, but hotbeds of lawlessness and immorality, ‘edgy’ places on the edges of parishes, where clandestine or illegal activities took place. In debates about wide scale enclosure in the late 18th Century and early 19th Century the relationship between commons and the poor was central. While most tended to recognise that access to common resources for the poor was a key feature of them sustaining themselves there was a significant point of difference. For those who advocated enclosure this relationship bred a sad dependence and idleness by encouraging the very poor to adopt no more ambitious strategy in life than passively collecting whatever they could from the land around them to sustain life, even unlawful measures. To detractors of enclosure the process threatened to break the link between working the land and having a share in owning it- a system in which even the poorest were inevitably investors in their regional economy.