Landscape and Mammary – A Quest to Understand the Dairying History of Cudlip

My absorption with Cudlip and its dairying history started, not through walking this edge of Dartmoor, but with reading about it. In 2012 a book was posthumously published on the work of the landscape historian Harold Fox called ‘Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands – Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages’. A couple of years ago I read this book and found it transformative in how I understood Dartmoor’s landscape and significant ways in which it functioned in the past.

Transhumance is the name given to the practice of moving stock between summer and winter grazing grounds. Sometimes stock was moved to summer grazing grounds and then handed over, with payment, into the charge of locals to look after the cattle. This is called ‘impersonal transhumance’. ‘Personal transhumance’ is slightly different and describes stock being accompanied by herders, who then stay with their animals on summer pastures to look after them until the autumn. In the north, the summer dwellings where people tending their cattle would live, are known as shielings.

Transhumance is a practice known in many parts of the world, and to a certain extent is one that still operates today, including on Dartmoor. Cattle are still brought up onto the moor from May onwards from downland locations; the difference is that, today, cattle will typically be transported by vehicle, rather than walked long distances along lanes in what used to be known as red tides (Coaker, 2021).

In Harold Fox’s book, which focuses on cattle (not sheep), both the practice of personal and impersonal transhumance in the Middle Ages on Dartmoor is examined. Fox also makes distinctions between the transhumance of dry stock (beef) and wet stock (dairy). However, it was the evidence of impersonal transhumance and dairying that Fox discusses that I kept being drawn back to.

There are many great books on Dartmoor that cover aspects of its landscape and history. These works talk of tinning and quarrying, farming and peat cutting, and many other professions (see Crossing’s Dartmoor Worker – Le Mesurier, 1992). Whilst some women feature in histories of the moor (for example Hemery’s inclusion of a number of hardy Dartmoor women farmers such as Granny Ware of Distworthy Warren – Hemery, 1983), for the most part, women feel absent or bit-part players in the wider Dartmoor landscape. What was different in what I was reading in Fox was how it opened up a female-centric history of Dartmoor that I had hitherto been unaware of.

Personal transhumance, according to Fox, diminished towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon. Up until this time it would have been common for people to move with their cattle onto the moor for the summer. In the case of dairy stock, it was not men summering with the dairy cows on Dartmoor but ‘maids’. Dairying was women’s work, and so it was maids (mostly girls with some spinsters and widows – Costello, 2018, p170) who would have lived on the moor between May and sometime in autumn. This history, from a time for which there are scant written records, is a largely hidden history, but place names provide clues to a few locations where we can be confident that dairying and women left their mark. Fox cites a number of Dartmoor place names that include the name ‘maid’ (such as Maiden Hill and Maiden Tor), and others that include names relating to dairy products including butter (there are many Dartmoor places with Butter in the name), and the Old English word for butter – smeoru; notably Smeardon near Peter Tavy.

The idea that there were place names on Dartmoor that linked specifically to women working in this landscape was something that I found compelling. Often women are diminished by history, in many ways, not least through their domestic sphere physically restricting their scope. Here was a story of women at large in the landscape; women away from home communities and all the baggage (both good and bad) that that entails. These women worked hard and had to sustain themselves for months on end on Dartmoor, milking their cows and keeping them safe – let us not forget that wolves still prowled the landscape in the Middle Ages. Whilst women in the last thousand years became confined to home, before this time, here were women travelling hours away from home. Yes, they were facing fears and hardships, but they were also experiencing wider vistas and certain freedoms, by virtue of their location and female-only company (Costello, 2018).

So, what has all of this got to do with Cudlip? Today Cudlip is comprised of the hamlet of Cudliptown and Cudliptown Down. In the Middle Ages Cudlip was, what Fox describes as a ‘detached’ demesne of Tavistock Abbey, i.e. it was abbey land not contiguous with their other holdings, but an outlying sub-manor. This demesne covered an area that included Smeardon, White Tor, Cudlipdown and Cudlipptown (although how far north this demesne covered I am not sure). As we have seen, the name Smeardon comes from the OE word smeoru for butter, and therefore indicating that during the Anglo-Saxon, Smeardon was notable for butter-making. Within this Cudlip demesne there were other butter-related places. Lying in ruins, but known from monastic records, are two farms called Higher and Lower Butterworthy. These farms lie on enclosed farmland just to the north of White Tor. These farms come from a later era than the Saxon transhumant dairy maids, but they are none-the-less, an indicator that this landscape continued to be valued for butter-making into the high medieval.

Another place name that I am perplexed has gone un-remarked upon and unchallenged is that of Cudlip itself. I am personally convinced that Cudlip also records a dairying history. The Place-Names of Devon book by Gover et al (1931, p232) is a useful resource but, at nearly one hundred years old, their interpretations are long overdue a revision. For Cudlip, first recorded as ‘Cudelipe’ around AD 1114-19, they suggest this means ‘Cud(d)a’s hlype’ and say “as usual in such names it is difficult to say what the ‘leap was. Possibly it is a references to a stream here”. Cudda is a Saxon name but there is no known individual called Cudda at this place on which to base this interpretation. However, just like in modern English, Saxons also used the word cud for ‘that which a cow chews’ (Bosworth Toller, 2014^a). The ‘lipe’ part of the word could be the OE word lípe or lippa (rather than hlype for leap) and mean a lip. In the case of Cudlip I am suggesting that this could relate to the lip-like spur pasture that is Cudlipdown, running north-west of White Tor. However, and given the context, it may be more probable that the lípe/lippa refers to lips of the mouth, and the act of feeding. Bosworth Toller indicates that ‘feeding’ was one of the senses the word was used (Bosworth Toller, 2014^b).  Cudlip may therefore literally mean the feeding of cows on the cud of the rich pasture of this place.

Since getting hooked on this story of dairying, women and Cudlip, I have been regularly visiting this intriguing landscape close to my home. In a cycle of looking, researching and reflecting, I am building questions, ideas and interpretations about this landscape, which I hope to share on my blog over the coming months. In trying to answer questions about dairying and transhumance in this landscape I am being taken down avenues of: goddesses, saints, rituals, festivals and magic; dairying and butter making processes and economy; agricultural divisions and management of the landscape; and ethnographies and social histories of dairying women.

Working with a friend with a background in dance, philosophy and therapy, we are using this research to underpin our own personal interests, to understand and embody the dairying history present in this place. Through our visits we have begun to reflect on our experiences; being open to how this landscape and its history makes us feel and move. For example, we have begun to experiment with the rhythms of the dairy maids in their butter-making, and with the folklore practice around dairying and milk. I have even gone to the lengths of acquiring a whole goat skin hide in order to use it as a bag in which to churn milk, as Saxon dairy maids may have done up on these hillsides over a thousand years ago. This is by far the weirdest purchase I have ever made on ebay, born out of my enthusiasm for this topic and a commitment to experimental archaeology!

So, in wrapping up this introduction to Cudlip and the butter-history it preserves, I hope this has whetted your appetite to find out more with me about this amazing place and its dairying history. In my next blog on this topic I plan to look at the Neolithic; to understand how our transhumant agricultural history started, and to look at the evidence of this very earliest pastoral and dairying imprint on the Cudlip landscape.

References

Bosworth, J., 2014^a. cud. In T. Northcote Toller, C. Sean, & O. Tichy, eds. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Available at: https://bosworthtoller.com/6784

Bosworth, J., 2014^b. lippa. In T. Northcote Toller, C. Sean, & O. Tichy, eds. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University. Available at: https://bosworthtoller.com/54717

Coaker, A. 2021. From a Dartmoor Hill Farm: High Summer on the Moor. Dartmoor Magazine, 142, p10.

Costello, E., 2018. Temporary freedoms? Ethnoarchaeology of female herders at seasonal sites in northern Europe. World Archaeology, 50(1), pp.165-184.

Fox, H. 2012. Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands – Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages. University of Exeter Press, Exeter.

Gover, J.E.B, Mawer, A. and Stenton, F.M. 1931. The Place-Names of Devon, Part I. Cambridge University Press, London.

Hemery, E. 1983. High Dartmoor. Hale, London.

Le Mesurier, B. 1992. Crossing’s Dartmoor Worker. Peninsula Press, Newton Abbot.