Saxon Summering on Dartmoor – Part 1: The Journey from Hurdwick to the Tavy

Inspired by the work of Harold Fox and his book ‘Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands – Transhumance and Pastoral Management in the Middle Ages’ I have become beguiled by the dairying history of Dartmoor, an exploration I have already made a start on in my ‘Landscape and Mammary‘ themed blogs. To appreciate this ‘summering and dairying history of Dartmoor and how it links the moor to the ‘downlands’ that surround it, I have been focusing on landscapes near to me – Cudlipp and Smeardon – places whose very names give away their Anglo Saxon dairy use. Whilst dairy cows don’t really feature much in the British uplands now, until a millennia ago places like Dartmoor supported a great deal of dairying, and so understanding this is key to appreciating Dartmoor’s pastoral past.

In particular in this summering story, I have been keen to find out more about female roles, because it was women who were responsible for dairying and yet, when we think of Dartmoor, we tend to imagine it as a mainly manly world; a place of tinners, peat cutters and farmers – not communities of women, living within its wilderness. In this series of blogs I therefore want to examine in more detail how dairying operated within a system of summering known academically as ‘transhumance’; what the life of a transhumant dairy maid might have been like; and how it left its mark on the settlements, enclosures, and the tracks we see today.

To bring this story to life I thought it might be fun to develop it, not purely academically, but through the eyes of a young 9^th century Anglo Saxon woman who I have called Madwen. In this series of blogs I want to follow her on a journey up to summer pastures across Smeardon to the flanks of White Tor, where she will summer amongst the tors, and then return back home to her downland farmstead. I am going to be interspersing this Saxon story with academic research to explain what is known about transhumance, dairying, dairy folklore and the like.

1.     What is Summering?

My name is Madwen. I am thirteen years old and I am excited because tomorrow is the first day of Þrimilce-mōnaþ [three-milkings month – Anglo Saxon May; the letter 'þ' is called thorn and makes a 'th' sound, Videen, 2021]. I set out early with four cows from my homestead, heading for Derwā Mór [Dartmoor - from the proto-Celtic word for oak and the Old English word for high, unenclosed ground]. I am heading for our sumer sett [summering place] where I will stay until the end of summer, which comes at the close of the winter-fyllep [winter full moon - Anglo Saxon October]. Only at the festival at the beginning of winter, which marks the start our new year, will I return to my downland home. This is a time we call blōt-mōnaþ [blood month / sacrifice-month - Anglo Saxon November] when we kill our excess cattle in readiness for the barren darkness and hunger of winter. 

I chose the name Madwen for the protagonist in this dairy maid tale because it was a real name recorded in Devon in 1554 and yet it is of Celtic origin (www.behindthename.com). The West Saxon’s had taken control of what we think of as Devon by the 8^th Century, and Cornwall by the 9^th. However, this was not an invasion in the sense of Saxon’s ousting the local population. In this peninsula fringe of Wessex it would more likely resemble political subjugation of mostly native people to Saxon in-comers with whom the former became saxon-ised (Higham, 2008, p2). ‘Celtic’ memories may therefore have persisted and blended into the new Wessex ‘normal’. I therefore thought a name like Madwen, [mat meaning “good, fortunate” and gwen meaning “fair, white; blessed”] would be useful in representing this fresh and raw Celtic/Saxon borderland history.

What Madwen is describing – heading up to summer pastures with stock – is a system of farming known as transhumance. Farming in regions with abundant uplands is not simply a matter of letting herds graze the same patch of land all year, wherever you may have a land-holding. Stock was carefully managed to make best use of the grazing as part of a regional, not solely farm-based, landscape system. This was to maximise the head of livestock the land would support (Fox, 2012, p29). In the summer, typically around the start of May (linked to May Day traditions), herds of cattle would be taken to graze on the uplands, at a time when the marginal moorland grass was finally growing, and the weather was benign. In the summer, valuable lowlands, where productivity was far higher, would be used to grow fodder crops and hay to allow stock to return from the uplands and be fed through the winter.

As winter approached, at the end of October (linked to our Halloween traditions) herds would be brought off the uplands and set to graze in lowland meadows and housed in byres, with their diet supplemented by the hay and fodder harvested from these lowland fields in the summer months. As such, this pastoral way of life was a symbiotic one, governed by an oscillation between uplands and lowlands in rhythm with the seasons. It is this movement of people with their herds, often over substantial distances, to upland summer pastures, which is known academically as transhumance (OED)[1] but vernacularly as ‘summering’ (Fox, 2012, p30).

2. The Home Farmstead

I started out just after sunrise from my home at a place we call Heordewic, part of the Gesith’s estate [Gesith - 9th C equivalent of a thegn], and so called because our settlement has the best quality herd in the region, and is renowned for its cattle market.

In telling this imagined tale I have conjured Madwen as coming from a place called Hurdwick (Heordewic) , a farm situated just north of Tavistock. Heordewic has an Old English ‘wic’ name which indicates that this settlement was important in the Anglo Saxon period, serving a particular market/trade function (Reynolds, 1999, p162). In the case of Hurdwick, heorde means ‘herd’, so this was probably a cattle and/or sheep market, perhaps in addition to it also being a notable farmstead, central to the Manor of Hurdwick.

Later, during the lifetime of Tavistock Abbey (which received its charter in AD 981), Hurdwick became the demense farm of the Abbot of Tavistock (Finberg, 1969, p17). On the basis that this place has a recorded history linked to elites, I have speculated that Heordewic might have been a possession of a Gesith rather than just an ‘ordinary’ Wessex farmstead. Gesith’s were military companions to the king who were rewarded with land for their service in battle (see Higham, 2008, p156 on Gesiths). I am therefore pretending that the leader of Madwen’s community was a Saxon who served his king well in battle and was rewarded with this manorial land.

3. Who is Summering?

It is not my first time summering. I went last year so I know what to expect. I am not alone with the cý [OE plural, cows]. Virtually everyone is going. The elders who cannot make the journey are staying with a few men to keep guard and some of the young mothers, but everyone else has set out excitedly for the mór where we will celebrate tonight.

Historical accounts of pastoral communities from more recent times suggest that the whole, or at least the greater part of a community might initially journey to the summer pastures with the dairy maids, with celebratory, ceremonial, and practical intent (Costello, 2018, p168).

“In the Outer Hebrides, young female herders are said to have been accompanied to summer pastures in early June by their families in an event known as Feisd na h-imrig – the ‘removal”

(Costello, 2018, p174 ,citing Skene 1880, 385–388).

4. Setting out

We headed off in line with Cuthwulf [the Gesith] at the head, high on his horse. The men and boys, some also on horseback, and who are also to spend the summer on the moor as herders, are near the front with the meat feoh [Cattle]. Us women are last with the meolc [milk] cows. The men went ahead and didn’t wait for us, speeding off to make-ready the summering places and prepare for the feast. We know where we are going, and the cows do too; the experienced animals know their way to their heft. 

I have chosen the name of Cuthwulf for the leader/gesith as this was a popular Saxon name amongst the elite classes and means ‘famous wolf’ (www.behindthename.com). Many Saxon’s had wolf in their name with wolf having a totemic significance, certainly across Germanic/Norse cultures (Thompson 2012).

In this transhumant fiction we can see both men and girls heading out for a summer on the moor with the men handling the beef stock (dry stock) and the maids with the dairy cattle (wet stock). This system of summering with one’s cattle is called ‘personal transhumance’, and according to Fox (p37), probably took place at least from the 6^th to the 11^th centuries. It is a movement – pulsing between lowland and uplands that may well go back millennia, with origins in when we were pastoral nomads in the Neolithic. Transhumance in the early medieval, was the prime way in which Dartmoor was agriculturally managed. As we will see in the next blog, people came for miles, from all over Devon and East Cornwall, to summer herds on the moor.

The young men and the maids in this story have different roles though. The boys looked after the dry stock. They could monitor the cattle in their charge in a ranch-like style (perhaps working from horseback? ). The beef cattle did not need much day-to-day management.  For the maids though, they were more ‘hands on’. As we have seen, the month of May was known as the month of three-milkings, but even by later summer the maids would be milking twice a day. This wasn’t the end of their work as they would then have to churn the milk into butter, or possibly make cheese, although goat and sheep were favoured for this (Banham and Faith, 2020, p111). Maids were therefore more tied to their cattle and had a much more intimate relationship with them than the male herders did with their cattle.

It was about 1000 years ago that personal transhumance practices in the south-west were dying out, replaced by an agricultural system known as convertible husbandry (Herring, 2021, p99). This was a system based on a seven-year rotation between arable, pasture and meadow in lowland strip fields. Dairy cattle, and the maids that looked after them, rather than summering on moorland, instead stayed on the farmstead. Beef livestock continued to be sent for summer grazing, but no longer overseen by herders from where the cattle came from. They were passed over, with payment, to Dartmoor herders, who looked after them until the end of summer.

Whilst transhumance in England long ago withered, historical and ethnographic accounts from Ireland and Scotland show that young women were still summering with their cattle until into the early 20^th century (Herring, 2021). It is therefore about a millennium ago that marks the demise of a relationship between women travelling and working on the moors of the south west. With its passing, women’s lives would have become more limited, with there geographical sphere both closed-in and closed-off. The 11^th century therefore marks the approximate time when the uplands might be viewed as becoming a more masculine dominated environment.

5. Crossing the Downland

The first part of our journey is across the downland, before we get to the moor. We head in the direction of the rising sun, to Cyleworthi [Kilworthy – OE did not use the letter K] where we cross the Weales-broc [Wallabrook - brook of the native British]. From there we will travel over the súþdún [OE for south down] and then on to Weringheorda [the Domesday spelling of Wringworthy]. 

For their journey from Hurdwick this band of people would have to head east to Dartmoor. As we will see from the next blog, I want them to make for Smeardon and Cudlip on the western flank of the moor. This is not a long journey and would only have taken a few hours. Today, if we wanted to make this journey, we would have to negotiate private land exclusions and fields boundaries. We would have to look for roads or footpaths and to cross the rivers, find a bridge. In the 9^th C, the landscape would have been quite different. Many of the fields we see around us are from the later medieval onwards. However, there were fields before this time. Some of these we still see fossilised in the Devon landscape where they have not been replaced with newer boundaries. What is uncertain is quite how much of the land was enclosed by the 9^th C, but it is probably safe to say that it was considerably less than we see now (Highham, 2008, p216). Furthermore, our modern concepts of private property and trespass did not apply in the same way in the 9^th C and people had freedom to go almost anywhere they wanted.

If then, we want to imagine a route from Hurdwick to Dartmoor we cannot let what we see today constrain what might have been a good route for a 9^th C dairy maid. I decided that to take Madwen on her journey first over the Wallabrook at Kilworthy and then on Wringworthy before crossing the Tavy. This is a fairly direct route, and these places have Old English names which suggests they probably existed at the time of this story. However, many former drove ways, at a far greater density than we see today, would have converged towards Dartmoor and so I could just as easily have chosen a number of other routes to get Madwen to the moor.

6. Appeasing the Pixies

At Kilworthy, where we cross the Wallabrook, is the púcel-pol [Pixie Pool in OE]. This place scares me. Here we made an offering of some butergeþweor (butter curd)to protect us from harm by the púcel that live in the water. I don't want them putting a curse on my cows or milk for the summer. I will fear them again on our return journey, when we hold our feast for blōt-mōnaþ. Their power for ill-deeds is strong when winter turns to summer and again when summer turns to winter.

At Kilworthy is a place called Pixie’s Pool, named as such on the Victorian OS 25″ map. It is a natural feature , supposedly below the causeway bridge, and was enjoyed as a beauty spot (Evans, 1875). But what have pixie’s got to do with dairy maids and transhumance? I couldn’t have my character Madwen passing through Kilworthy and not acknowledging the mystical Pixie’s Pool.

Púca (and the diminutive form Púcel) were goblins, or as we know them more commonly in the south-west, pixies. There was a widespread belief in pixies across the south of England, certainly through to the early 19th century, but from beliefs that were probably alive in the early medieval and maybe earlier (Sebo, 2017).

Part of the mischief attributed to pixies was their propensity to delude and lead people astray on journeys. They also, as well as doing good and helpful deeds, could be malicious or capricious. Madwen, being ‘on the road’, would have been aware of the danger of pixies tricking people (or animals) to deviate and lose their way. She was living in a world where the ontology was a magical one – belief in magic and spirits was pervasive. Because milk and milk products were of central importance to the existence of earlier people, fear-based protective practice was widely engaged in to make sure that agricultural products came to no harm (Lysaught, 1994). For these reasons I could not have Madwen passing the Pixie’s Pool without comment because, if it was a place known for pixies in the 9^th Century, Madwen would have been very aware of it.

We will not know how long the Pixie’s Pool has been known by this name. Was it a modern name given to this favoured spot in the Victorian era, commented on by writers such as Rachel Evans (1875, p40), or was it known by this name because it had, through all the annual layers of history, always been a púcel-cwylla or púcel-pol (pixie well or pixie pool)?

In trying to understand ‘pixie’ place names better, Sebo (2017) states there are five places, all in southern England, that have toponyms thought to derive from púca; this would fit because pixie’s are a ‘southern thing’ (they were known as goblins in the north). Of these, four are place-names that once meant ‘Púca’s Well’ (p5). Semple (2013, p182) lists twenty nine ‘púca‘ related place names, with the majority connected to water – wells, bridges, streams, springs and pools. She notes the debate around an alternative derivation of names that may come from the name for fallow deer or ‘pocca‘. However, fallow deer were only introduced after the Norman conquest and therefore, if it was the case that all such place-names were so derived, then all of the examples would have to date to after this time. In looking at Semple’s list a division can be seen between those with a phonetic ‘pock’ sound (derived from pocca) and those with a ‘puck’ sound (derived from púca); the former being more likely to be associated with land, hills, ridges and woods, and the latter more likely to relate to water or holes. Perhaps then, ‘pixie’ folklore attaches these hobs specifically to watery places?

Pixie’s Pool at Kilworthy is consistent with Púca places and the link with water so, whilst the name may be an Victorian affectation, it could equally have a genuine uncanny toponym of more ancient origin. If it has been known for a millennia as a place of the púca, travellers along this way like Madwen would certainly have experienced a frisson of pixie fear, and made them an offering.

7. Crossing the Tavy

From the púca-pol we shook off our unease and headed over the south down where we graze our sheep, to Weringheorda [the Domesday spelling of Wringworthy] where we joined with the people of that farmstead, also heading for the high ground. Then it was time to cross the river we call the Taui [Tavy], where it spreads wide and runs shallow. As long as the weather has been dry, the river will not be in flod [Flood] so we can cross easily. This is a good place to rest, where the cows can eat the moist grass of the flood meadows. Soon we will begin the climb to the high ground and our people's summering places where I will spend the days most beautiful with sunshine, amongst the tors.

From Kilworthy Madwen heads for Wringworthy over the south down of the Heathfield. Wringworthy is first recorded as Weringheorda in AD 1086. Its place name is also worth comment. In the Place-names of Devon (Gover et al, 1931, p201) the earliest known spellings of the name are ignored by the authors and its AD 1238 spelling of Wringeworthy is used instead. Gover et al decipher the place as the enclosure (worthy) of the of a person called Wringa, or the squeeze/twist enclosure. However, if we take the earlier Domesday spelling then it is clear the name contains the word ‘heorda’, just like Hurdwick. In this case heorda is a suffix to ‘wering‘ (not wring), a word that means a weir/dam in Old English. It is therefore possible that Weringheorda originally meant ‘the hurd that is at the weir’.

At Wringeworthy I have made the choice for Madwen’s people to join up with those from Weringheorda , also heading for Dartmoor, because the history and folklore of transhumance linked to the begining of May, suggest these were large gatherings where people came together to celebrate. We will see in the next blog, in a discussion of May Day/Beltane, why mixing of communities at this time may have been important.

Madwen would have had no trouble with her cows getting across the small streams of the Wallabrook at Kilworthy and the Burn at Wringworthy. But, where could Cuthwulf lead his community and cattle to cross the bigger Tavy? I have imagined the party crossing just north of where Harford Bridge is today. It is unlikely there would have been any bridge here in the 9^th C.

In blogs I have previously written about rivers I have noted how much they have changed since the 9^th /10^th Centuries . Rapid medieval sedimentation led them to become narrower, and deeper. For our cattle-band in the 9^th C this river would have been different to the river we see today. It was probably wider and shallower with multiple channels and would have been reasonably straightforward for Madwen to cross.

With all the people and cows safely across the Tavy this is a good place to leave them on the journey to the summer pasture and their May Day celebrations. In the next blog they will journey from the flood meadows of the Tavy, through the land we now know as Peter Tavy, over Smeardon, past a place called Twist and up to White Tor. This next part of the journey will reveal more details about what is known about transhumance on medieval Dartmoor, how we might imagine the places people lived whilst ‘summering’, and examine both the serious and fun aspects of their May Day festivities.

References

Banham, D. and Faith, R. 2020. Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming. Oxford University Press.

Behind the Name. No Date. Medieval Cornish Submitted Names. www.behindthename.com

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

Evans, Rachel. 1875. Home Scenes or Tavistock and its Vicinity. T.W. Greenfield.

Finberg, H.P.R. 1969. Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Devon. Augustus M. Kelley, New York.

Fox, H. 2012. Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands: transhumance and pastoral management in the Middle Ages. University of Exeter Press: Exeter.

Gover, J.E.B., Mawr, . and Stenton, F.M. 1931. The Place-names of Devon. English Place-Name Society. Volume Viii, Cambridge University Press: London.

Hanna, V. 2021. The Word Hord: Daily Life in Old English. Profile Books.

Herring. P. 2021. Extremes of British Transhumance: Bronze Age and Inter War; Dartmoor and Lewis. In: Bowden, M. and Herring, P. (eds.), Transhumance: Papers from the International Association of Landscape Archaeology Conference, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018. Archaeopress Publishing Ltd, pp.

Highham, B. 2008. Making Anglo-Saxon Devon. The Mint Press.

Lysaght, P.  1994. Women, Milk and Magic at the Boundary Festival of May. In Lysaght, P. (ed.). Milk and Milk Products: From Medieval to Modern Times. Proceedings of the ninth International Conference on Ethnological Food Research, held in Ireland in 1992. Edinburgh: Canongate Academic Press, in association with the Department of Irish Folklore, University College Dublin and the European Ethnological Research Centre, Edinburgh, pp. 208-29.

Reynolds, A., 1999. Later Anglo-Saxon England: Life and Landscape. Tempus Publishing.

Sebo, E., 2017. Does OE Puca Have an Irish Origin?. Studia Neophilologica, 89(2), pp.167-175.

Semple, S., 2013. Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England: Religion, ritual, and rulership in the landscape. Oxford University Press.

Thompson, A. 2012. The Wolf. Thegns of Mercia. www.thethegns.org. 4th April 2012.

Videen word hord

[1] The OED states the word comes from French, ‘transhumer’, and Spanish ‘transhumar’ and is itself derived from Latin ‘trans’ (across, over) and ‘humus’ (ground, soil).