This is the second blog of my ‘Madwen‘ series – a succession of blogs that experiment with a fictional narrative, combined with more academic analysis, that help to explore and understand the world of an Anglo-Saxon transhumant dairy maid on Dartmoor.
Transhumance – a form of agriculture by which people went with their animals to spend the summer on the moor – was a major part of the agricultural management of the Dartmoor landscape in the past, but one that is not well-understood (see Fox, 2012). Additionally, in relation to dairy cattle, the story of transhumance opens up a different history in which women, under-represented in Dartmoor narratives, feature strongly. It was women who were responsible for tending dairy cows, milking them, and making butter. It is a prime intention of these blogs to explore transhumance and the Dartmoor landscape in relation to this female history.
Irish Moiled cow, a rare ancient Irish breed. Image by Caroline Ford. 10 April 2007. CC-BY-SA, GFDL www.commons.wikimedia.org
Not mentioned when I introduced the first blog in this series, I also think this transhumance tale allows Anglo-Saxon Dartmoor to have a light shone on it. This is a time period that, because of the lack of physical structures, is probably the most neglected of all of Dartmoor’s layers of history. If I reflect on what I am hoping to achieve in these blogs, then I think bringing Anglo-Saxon Dartmoor to life is also important to me.
In the first blog of this series we saw Madwen, my protagonist, beginning her ‘transhumant’ summering journey from Hurdwick to Dartmoor. The route I chose for her saw her crossing the Tavy near to where Peter Tavy is today. For this blog I have slightly modified her route, and I have her crossing the Tavy a little further north of Peter Tavy than I placed her in Blog 1. In this second part she carries on her short journey, up over Smeardon, to climb past the flanks of White Tor, close to where she will spend her summer.
Surveyed: 1883, Published: 1884. www.maps.nls.uk/Re-use: CC-BY (NLS)
1. Resting by the Tavy
We let the cows linger a while in the wet meadows beside the Tavy before moving them onwards to climb to our summer place. We pass close to the old fields of the farmstead at Tawiworðig to our south [Tavyworthy - a name I have invented], and other farmsteads nearby. Beyond us rise the slopes of Smeardon. The cows walk, with no haste, carrying our things, which knock together on the straddles over their backs. We need many items for our milking and butter-making, and to be able to survive the somer-tíd [Summertime] in the wésten [wasteland – uncultivated land].
Madwen is more than halfway to her summering place and is about to start the climb with her cows towards Smeardon and Cudlip Down. She is passing through the place we know today as Peter Tavy, but in the 9th C this would not have been a village. Apart from a very limited number of commercial centres, there were no villages in England at this time. Villages would not take shape as ‘nucleated places’ until after AD 1000 (Blair, 2018, p282). Instead, as Blair says, they were more like loose clusters of farmsteads, not so distant as to be isolated, but not so close as to be considered a ‘settlement core’. Madwen therefore experiences the landscape where Peter Tavy formed as a few dispersed farms, possibly in occupation since the Iron Age, with old and irregular fields in patterns that seem to have accreted organically (Historic England, 2011).
Between the 9th C and the Domesday survey of 1086, the village of Peter Tavy must have started the process of becoming a village. It would have grown, perhaps, from these earlier ‘worthy’ farmsteads – like the one I have invented called Tawiworðig. By 1086 the village of Peter Tavy was significant enough to be recorded as ‘Tawi‘ in the Domesday survey and was, by then, of moderate size for the time (Powell-Smith, n.d).
As for Madwen’s belongings, being slung on the backs of the cows, if I go camping for just one night on Dartmoor, I require a large and heavy rucksack. If I was spending six months, from May to the end of October, and I needed to milk cows and make butter, I would surely need to bring far more than I could manage to carry on my back. Madwen would almost certainly need items such as knives, a cooking pot, a water carrier, a milk pail, a churn, a rug/skin to keep warm at night and perhaps a change of clothes. How would she carry these things to Cudlip?
by Sakthiramu, 22 September 2013, www.commons.wikimedia.org/
We normally think of ponies and donkeys as beasts of burden, but I wonder if the cows were similarly made use of on transhumant journeys? Why not let them do the carrying when they were also along for the journey? It would seem a practical solution. Yaks, also members of the bovine family, are routinely used to carry items. I therefore think it is reasonable, in my imagining of Madwen’s trek, to see her community using cattle in this way, to lug their belongings up onto the moor.
2. The Climb to Smeardon
We tread slowly upwards, across the ground we call Smeordún [Smeardon]. Smeordún is steep and rocky and so we will take our dairy cows a little further, to the lush and broad valley meadows beyond.
The name Smeardon comes from the Old English word smeor (Bosworth Toller) which meant ‘fat, grease, tallow, suet’, from which we get our modern verb ‘to smear’. According to Fox (2012, p148-150) Smeardon is thought to be so named because it was a place where dairy maids, tending pasturing animals, would churn milk into butter. There are other places on Dartmoor where vestiges of the female dairying profession echo in place names, such as Butterdon Hill, and possibly in Maiden Hill and Maiden Tor.
Even though Smeardon clearly relates to butter, I have chosen that Madwen does not linger here, but passes through Smeardon, heading higher into Cudlip. Smeardon is a rocky hill. It has some springs around its edge and, whilst it offers grazing, that grazing is not lush. I cannot imagine dairy cows grazing here, only dry stock.
Dairy cattle (wet stock), in producing milk, require two to three times as much water as beef stock (dry stock)(Northern Ireland DAERA ). Whilst we might not think of water as a limiting factor on Dartmoor, in terms of where best to graze wet stock, it makes sense to manage herds so that the dairy animals graze wet meadow in wide valley bottoms, with the dry stock ranging on the higher and dryer ground. I have therefore decided that Smeardon, even though it is named after butter, may not have been where the dairy maids were based.
Today, Smeardon is an unenclosed area of about 40 hectares but in the 9th century it was possibly bigger. Smeardon is flanked on its south and western sides by medieval strip fields with their characteristic narrow shape and curved ends, formed as a result of the ox team turning to plough the next row. On Bodmin moor Herring has dated similar strip fields to the 10th and 11th centuries (Herring 2006 cited in Banham and Faith, 2014, p273). In today’s landscape the village of Peter Tavy is buffered from the moorland by these cultivated, improved and enclosed parcels of land, but in Madwen’s time it is possible that the unenclosed moor of Smeardon descended right down into the combe of the Colly Brook.
3. Smeardon
On Smeardon a few meat cows will be grazed, looked after by some herding boys. Hroðgar, an experienced geneat [a high ranking peasant] will also stay here. Smeardon is on the edge of the moor so it is important to have an experienced and trusted man here who knows how to manage ærendes [errands, messages], mete [food] and the feoh [cattle/money] between the moor and the downland. The butter we make from our summer pastures will be brought here so it can be taken back to Hurdwick and the surplus sold.
In this next part of Madwen’s narrative I have considered that Smeardon might have got its name because it was the place at the boundary between the moor and the downland, where the dairy maids brought their butter, rather than the place where the dairy cattle themselves were grazed. Being on the edge of the moor, Smeardon would seem to be a useful place where the butter could be collected at regular intervals throughout the summer and taken back to the downland farmsteads, with perhaps any surplus being sold. I will say more about the value of butter and the butter economy in a later blog.
As well as butter being moved off the moor, I have also pondered here if Smeardon may also have acted as a gateway for communications, errands, meat and money. If it did serve a gateway function then perhaps an experienced and responsible man would be needed; a gatekeeper between the summering people and the summering economy, with that of the lowland manor. I have given the name of Hroðgar to the man entrusted to manage things on Smeardon. Hroðgar is an Anglo Saxon name, the precursor to the Norman name Roger. I have imagined him as a geneat. A geneat was a high ranking vassal who might own land but who also did various jobs for his lord including non-labouring work (Gray, 2013).
4. The Highway to White Barrow
The route to our summering place is well-worn. We are following the hereweg [highway] that leads to wíte-beorg [white-barrow], beyond which we will not go. The 'White Barrow Way' is important to us, not just because it leads into Dartmoor, but because it marks the boundary of our hynden [community of a hundred men - from which we get the name of the territorial division of the 'hundred']. My people live in the hynden of Liwtune [Lifton], but to the south of the White Barrow Way the land belongs to the people of the hynden of Ruggeberge [Roborough]
Just as our landscape is divided into various administrative and political units (county, parish, constituency, ward etc) so was Anglo-Saxon England. It was not until the 10th century that the name ‘hundreds’ appears in records, being a sub-division of shires. However, these hundreds are thought to have earlier origins. According to Higham (2008, p144) ‘hundreds’, which finally ceased to function in 1867, originally grew out of the sub-division of ancient sub-kingdoms and newly annexed Saxon territories.
Madwen, coming from Hurdwick, would have lived within the Hundred of Lifton which, in the 9th century seems to have contained Tavistock, Tavistock not becoming a hundred in its own right until AD 1116 (Gover et al, 1931, p213). The name of Lifton is first recorded as Liwtune in King Alfred’s will (c. 885), and it is here where the centre of the hundred would have been, with a royal ‘vill’ and possibly a minster church (Higham, 2008, p94).
The Hundred of Lifton, in what is now West Devon, was bordered to the south by the Hundred of Roborough. The boundary of these two hundreds in the Peter Tavy/Cudlip has a complicated history and this requires explanation.
Representations of the boundary between the Hundreds of Roborough and Tavitock/Lifton typically show the border, in this zone, following the course of the Tavy. This is a broad-brush representation based on the fact that Peter Tavy lay in the Roborough Hundred. What isn’t shown on these maps are some of the nuances. Cudlip, is known to have been a possession of Tavistock Abbey at the time of the Norman Conquest. It was briefly sold, under murky circumstances, in the late 11th century by Abbot Wymond, but returned to the abbey in AD 1116 by the King, and remained a possession of the abbey until at least the late 14th century (Finberg, 1969, p10; Fox, 2012, p127). For this blog, based on Higham’s comments that hundreds developed from earlier sub-kingdoms, I am going to imagine that Cudlip was already associated with the Lifton Hundred in the 9th century.
Given this Cudlip complexity, and the fact that it has not been taken account of in maps of hundred boundaries for the late medieval period, I am not sure of where the exact boundary between Cudlip/Tavistock and Peter Tavy in Roborough lay. I therefore thought the old trackway east of Peter Tavy, marked by the Langstone standing stone and White Barrow, was a good landscape candidate for the dividing line between these two lands. Using artistic license I have named this trackway after White Barrow, because of the barrow’s prominence on this old routeway. The barrow would have been a place of spiritual significance, which would have been revered (and feared) within Anglo Saxon culture (Semple, 2013; Flight, 2021). In terms of the area of Cudlip, it possibly marked the most easterly extent of the demesne in this part of the moor.
5. Twist
Soon it is time for some maids to separate from us and head for their sumer-sǽte [summer dwelling]. A couple of the old widows will stay here with the young girls who are summering for the first time. We will pass several other sumer-sǽtas before we get to the place where I will dwell until winter comes. We have a name for each sumer-sǽte . This first one we call Twyste because here there is a fork in the road, where the track that runs along side of the moor meets our path that leads back to Heordewic and to Tawistóc [Hurdwick and Tavistock].
Not much is known about the places where Anglo-Saxon transhumants dwelt during the summer months, be they the dairy maids looking after the cows, or the men and boys tending the dry stock. On Dartmoor, the archaeological record of ‘dwellings’ is dominated by hut-circles, most of which are thought to date to the Bronze Age, and later medieval longhouses.
In between there is a dearth of evidence for Iron Age and early medieval shelters. The climate of the Bronze Age is known to be warmer than succeeding periods and so the lack of ‘homes’ may in part relate to a decline in habitation on Dartmoor. However, just because Dartmoor became a more difficult place to live, it is not the case that it became useless and altogether abandoned. As we can see from this transhumance tale, agricultural value was still extracted from Dartmoor. Some of the absence of dwellings is therefore likely a reflection of the building materials used. Where Bronze Age hut circles, and the later longhouses, used stone to construct the lower walls, it is likely that Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon peoples used turfs and wood, both of which do not leave an easily observable trace, ‘shielings’ being particularly flimsy and impermanent structures (Hooke, 1998, p186).
Anglo-Saxon ‘grubhouse’, based on a a design found all over Northern Europe. Thatched with heather. Image by ‘dun_deagh’ . https://commons.wikimedia.org/
Given that Dartmoor is an internationally important archaeological landscape, peppered in the remains of ancient buildings, it might be surprising to learn just how limited the archaeological investigation of Dartmoor dwellings has been; certainly with modern methods of analysis. From the few sites that have been examined there are hints that sitting below still used farms and abandoned late medieval longhouses there may have been earlier structures. Excavations at the well-known Hound Tor medieval village, deserted in the 14th century, revealed that beneath the granite walls of the ruins are the remains of small sunken floored structures. These have been interpreted as shielings, or ‘seasonal huts’ by Beresford (cited in Fox, 2012, p141).
Twist today is a derelict and atmospheric place, oriented north east, with a view over the wide wet ground of Broadmoor Farm. Twist may have the structural appearance of a 19th century farm but its origins go back much further. According to the Peter Tavy Heritage Group ‘Twyste‘ is mentioned in the Domesday Book as one of the farmsteads within Cudlipptown (2002, cited in the HER). Its location, sandwiched below the brow of the hill on which Boulter’s Tor sits, and just above the wet ground of the ‘broad moor’, is a sweet spot, made more ideal because of the fresh water which issues from the ground here. As was the case with Hound Tor, could Twyste – a name with possible origins related to the number two, a division, or ‘branching’ – conceal below its soils, the remains of the sunken shielings of summering dairy maids?
As well as lying below the ruins of later farms and those still in use, another reason why Anglo-Saxon seasonal dwellings are invisible might be explained by these summer dwellers making use of existing older structures – peat turfing the walls of Bronze Age huts and thatching with heather to make them good for seasonal use would seem like a practical use of existing resources, the organic evidence of which would have decayed away centuries ago.
6. Broadmoor – a vaccary?
The maids at Twyste will dairy their cows on the wet meadow ground of the brad mór [Broadmoor]. Here the valley forms a wide bowl where water issues forth in many places, making the ground reliably sodden and lush. It is excellent ground for grazing our dairy cows which is why it belongs to our Lord Eadwulf, the aeldorman of Lifton and many other lands. Eadwulf calls his cow ground in Cudlip his 'vaccaria'.
Today, the abandoned farmhouse at Twist lies to the south of a lozenge-shaped enclosure, in which Broadmoor Farm sits at its heart, fed by the westerly flowing arteries of its valley streams. Just as was the case with the strip fields surrounding Smeardon, it is unlikely in the 9th century, this oval Broadmoor enclosure existed. To Madwen and her fellow dairy maids ‘brad mór‘ would have been open ground. That isn’t to say there were no enclosures on Dartmoor – it possessed orderly Bronze Age reaves, more random clusters of Romano-British fields, and a variety of animal pounds. But it wasn’t until the later medieval that there was big up-swing in the enclosure of the Dartmoor edgelands.
In his book on the cattle economy of in SE England between 450 and 1450, Margetts (2021) provides a number of examples of high-status land, managed for cattle. Such areas were called ‘vaccaria‘, from the Latin for ‘cow’. Using examples from across the Weald, but also drawing on research from elsewhere, Margetts develops the landscape archaeology of vaccaries as being mainly associated with river valleys and low-lying marshy areas, often demarked from the surrounding open ground by an oval shaped enclosure, and in many cases fringing and enclosing land within the royal forest. These vaccaries, he explains, appear to flourish as a late medieval response in specialised regional pastoral economies (Margetts, 2021, p235).
It is easy to see, from maps or aerial images, just how well Broadmoor aligns with the landscape requirements outlined by Margetts, for a vaccary. Given Cudlip’s longstanding link to Tavistock Abbey , Broadmoor also fulfills the historical requirement of being high-status land, which may have been developed with the backing of the wealthy Tavistock Abbey, maximising the gain from this moorland dairy ground.
In the 9th century it is probable that this was unenclosed ground – vaccaries existing before but only became enclosed in the late-medieval. Given that the land of Tavistock Abbey was gifted to the church in the 10th century by Ordulf (Ordwulf), in this story I have envisaged that, a century earlier, this land was already part of an elite estate. I have imagined it being owned by the ancestors of Ordulf; perhaps a great-grandfather , an aeldorman named Eadwulf, from which the family name was passed down.
I am going to expand on this concept of the vaccary in more detail in future blogs, in relation to: the rise of Tavistock Abbey, associations with summer house place names, and in discussion of the two Butterworthy farms, owned by Tavistock Abbey, which lay just north of White Tor. This will allow me to explore in more detail how the demise of dairying transhumance modified the Dartmoor landscape. Importantly it will enable us to see what happened to dairy maids when vaccaries became enclosed, and gained more permanent farms with substantial cow houses, and possible year-round habitation. Exploring this landscape change will show not just how the landscape changed but also how this altered the hard, but possibly emotionally free, life of the transhumant dairy maid for good.
7. White Tor
I am nearly at my summer place now. It lies just beyond Wítetorre. Tonight we will gather on Wítetorre to see in the summer, and once again at summer's end, but I am fearful of this place and its ealdfeónds [old enemies, satans, demons]. I will not set foot here at other times. I will tell you more about this fearful place tonight, when we feast and make charms and prayers to protect our cattle, milk and butter.
White Tor lies at the heart of the demesne of Cudlip and is a special place. It is one of only three definite Neolithic tor enclosures on Dartmoor, and of these is the most substantial. White Tor has recently been the subject of modern archaeological investigation, with publication pending (Bassel and Bray, 2022). However, it is clear from the structures on and around White Tor that this was a place of gathering and presumably ceremony, with evidence of fires being burnt at the huge cairns which punctuate its tumbling dolerite walls.
I have previously written about White Tor – why and how it became a place of spiritual and functional importance moving from the Mesolithic into the Neolithic (Mesolithic White Tor Part 1; Mesolithic White Tor Part 2). What is important here is not White Tor’s Mesolithic and Neolithic history but how it was viewed and used by Anglo-Saxon people.
Just as we have a relationship with objects in our landscape that date to an earlier age, so did the Anglo-Saxons. This topic is synthesized in Sarah Semple’s book ‘Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England’ (2013). Semple explains that prehistoric monuments were important to early medieval people and used ‘intentionally and knowingly, in the articulation and manipulation of their identities‘. They recognized ancient features ‘as human creations from a distant past‘ and used them as landmarks, battle sites, and estate markers, and re-used barrows for the burial of their elite dead (p1-2).
From the eighth century, perhaps because of ‘christianizing forces‘ prehistoric monuments underwent a change in portrayal, featuring in prose and poetry, ecclesiastical literature, and place names as ‘haunted and evil locations‘ or ‘monster inhabited‘ (p236). Barrows went from being places to bury pagan Saxon lords and warriors to places of execution. These places therefore became linked with ‘the damned‘. Consequently many prehistoric features underwent a shift to places that were feared. This was because ‘they were viewed as places where the dead were still living or where the other world (hell) was close and tangible‘.
White Tor may seem like an innocuous and pleasant name to us, white being a colour we associate with purity and peace, but this tor’s name may hide a more sinister history. In Old English the word wíte is defined as ‘pain, punishment, pain inflicted as punishment, torment, the punishment of hell and evil’ (Bosworth Toller).
Combining what is known about Anglo-Saxon attitudes to prehistoric sites, with the possible etymology of its name, I have made, in this story, White Tor a place that Madwen fears. This is not unreasonable. Even today, despite the separation of history and our modern-day rational ontologies, I have heard of people who treat White Tor with great dread, and who will not set foot there.
In conclusion …
We leave Madwen, close to her summer house and therefore nearly at the end of her short journey. It is probably only about midday and Madwen and her community will have plenty of time to ready their dwelling and fit in a milking, before the celebration to bring in the summer. In the next blog, amongst other things, we will see where Madwen is going to live until October, have a think about the protective folklore that might attach to the start of summer, and find out a bit more about Madwen’s background.
| The Landscape and Mammary Approach For the Landscape and Mammary series, I am working with Sarah Boreham. Sarah uses a creative embodied processes of movement and sound as a tool for research and self-development. She works with ecological embodied phenomenology as a methodology to understand the hidden voices and movements of marginalised individuals, groups and species. She brings her ‘Eco Sound Movement’ approach which uses a multi-modal method including: dance/movement; improvisation; sound/song; film/photography; creative writing: and composition/decomposition. I approach the subject differently. I come from an academic science background. I draw on landscape, archaeological, historical literature and place-names to develop my understandings. I spend time within landscapes to develop my experiential conceptions and complement this with an obsessive love of map and aerial imagery data. Between Sarah’s embodied and creative approach and my natural and social sciences approach there is a place where we can help inform and be informed by each other’s way of experiencing, researching and discovering. |
References
Banham, D. and Faith, R., 2014. Anglo-Saxon farms and farming. OUP Oxford.
Basell, L. and Bray, L., 2022. Dartmoor Tor Enclosures Survey: ‘DATES’. Dartmoor Magazine. Issue 146, pp23-24.
Blair, J. 2018. Building Anglo-Saxon England. Princeton University Press.
Bosworth Toller’s Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online. www.bosworthtoller.com
Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA), Northern Ireland. Water advice for livestock farmers. www.daera-ni.gov.uk, Accessed 18th Sept 2023.
Flight, T., 2021. Basilisks and Beowulf: Monsters in the Anglo-Saxon World. Reaktion Books.
Fox, H. 2012. Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands: transhumance and pastoral management in the Middle Ages. University of Exeter Press: Exeter.
Gill, C. 1968. Buckland Abbey. Underhill Ltd.
Gover, J.E.B., Mawr, . and Stenton, F.M. 1931. The Place-names of Devon, Part 1. English Place-Name Society. Volume Viii, Cambridge University Press: London.
Gray, 2013. Anglo-Saxon social ladder, from kings to slaves. www. ahgray.wordpress.com. Accessed 18th Sept 2023.
Hooke, D. 1998. The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England. Leicester University Press.
Historic Environment Record (HER). No date. Smallholding known as Twist, north-east of Boulters Tor. MDV108041.
Higham, R., 2008. Making Anglo-Saxon Devon: emergence of a shire. The Mint Press.
Historic England, 2011. Field Systems. Introductions to Heritage Assets series. www.historicengland.org.uk
Margetts, A., 2021. The Wandering Herd: The Medieval Cattle Economy of South-east England C. 450-1450. Windgather Press.
Powell-Smith. A. No Date. [Peter] Tavy. Open Domesday. www.opendomesday.org
Semple, S., 2013. Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England: Religion, ritual, and rulership in the landscape. Oxford University Press.
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