This is the third of my Madwen blogs – an 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). With respect to dairy cattle, the story of transhumance reveals an even lesser-known history; that of communities of ‘maids’ summering on the moor. This is because it was women (typically slaves) who were responsible for tending dairy cows, milking them, and making butter. It is the intention of these blogs to explore transhumance and the Dartmoor landscape in relation to this female history.
In the first and second blogs of this series, we saw Madwen, my protagonist, beginning her ‘transhumant’ summering journey from Hurdwick to Cudlip on Dartmoor, taking a short journey, over Smeardon, past the flanks of White Tor. We left her, close to her sumer sett, where she will spend the summer with her dairy cows.
In this third blog we find out exactly where her sumer sett is, see how others in the community are helping to prepare the ‘sett’ for the celebration, and hear Madwen tell us a bit about her milk cows and milking.
1. Reaching the Longstone
It hasn't taken us long to get to our summer grounds. I come from Heordewick, from where my community set off shortly after dawn. Even though we stopped in the valley of the Tawi to let the cattle rest, eat and drink, it is still only mid-morning. Although the weather was fine when we set off, up here I can't see my sumer-sett because, as is often the case on the mór, the fog is still dense. I can sense the spring sun's warmth behind the fog and so I do not think it will not be long before the mist has gone. We have been following the highway between our land and the boc-land to the south. Now we have got to the long stone of the ancients, and their row of stones, at the end of which is a pool. Even though I cannot see it in the mist, I know that if I follow the line of stones, it will lead me to my summering place.
Madwen has nearly reached the place where she will spend the summer. She is heading for a now abandoned farmstead northeast of White Tor. Her most direct route is across White Tor, but that means climbing up and over the rocky ground of the tor and straying into a spiritual place. In the last blog I left Madwen explaining why White Tor was to be feared and revered, and in the next blog it will start to feature at the centre of their fire festival to mark the start of summer. In imagining Madwen’s route I have therefore plotted her course, circumventing White Tor.
The dairy maids have followed the path that borders the southern edge of their people’s territory. This is an ancient track that was possibly the boundary between land that later we know belonged to the Hundred of Roborough (containing Buckland), and land that belonged to the Hundred of Tavistock (formerly part of the Hundred of Lifton). The group stays on this track until they reach the Langstone (probably meaning ‘the long stone’) and its joining stone row.
In the fog, and without map or compass, this track, the standing stone, and the stone row, are important landmarks for Madwen, helping to point her the short distance to her summer sett. How weather might impact on Madwen and her work as a dairy maid will be a theme I return to in future blogs.
2. Preparing for the Feast
The waste is full of activity. On Wítetorre men are busy pulling bundles of felled trús [brushwood] to the tor top, whilst others are piling it up into huge piles on the cairns. Tonight, these will be lit as part of the feast. Some men have already been here at Wítetorre for days, building the pyres with rowan, hazel, hawthorn, and gorse.
To mark the start of the summer season, Madwen and her community, in my story, are going to celebrate at White Tor. I want them to do this to explore the practical, cultural, and spiritual aspects of what is known about this ‘start of summer’ festival (more of which in the next blog). These celebrations are thought to involve cattle and fire, with the burning of huge pyres.
Pyres require large amounts of wood and so need considerable preparation. So, where might this wood have come from? White Tor, as much of Dartmoor, was largely denuded of woodland by 2500 cal BC (Fyfe and Woodbridge, 2012). Generally, in the 9th C, there was still about twice the tree cover of today (see figures given in Royal Forestry Society, 2015). It is likely, based on where broadleaved remnants are still concentrated on Dartmoor, that this woodland was in its steeper valleys.
White Tor though, is not surrounded by steep valleys. The nearest such woodland is a good kilometre away, which is quite a distance to haul firewood. Are there nearer places the men could have harvested wood for the festival pyre? I think so. Wood could have been taken from hedge banks. Dartmoor is not all open, and in places, particularly around the fringes, there are boundary banks, hedges, and walls. Whilst many of the stone walls are late medieval, in the 9th C there would have been banks and enclosures, some Saxon in date, and some still in use from earlier times, topped with hedging.
Hedges need to be managed, just as we do today. Branches are cut back, and trunks are semi-severed then laid on their side to encourage new growth and a thickening of the hedge barrier. Hedge laying locally is variously called ‘plishing‘ and ‘plashing‘ (see Dearson, 2023 and Alford, pers. com.).
In contemplating the gathering of festival firewood, if such a thing happened at White Tor at this date, I think the wood might have come from hedges in the nearby landscape. The taking of the wood might therefore be seen, not just as a ceremonial in purpose, but with a dual practical function, in symbiosis with land management.
3. Higher Butterworthy
Even though it is foggy I have found my sumer-sett. We call this place buteresett heáh (which translates to the higher butter place).
When Dartmoor was being used for summering, there must have been many a sumer-sett dotted about the hillsides. Setts or Sǽtes of Saxon age are invisible in the Dartmoor landscape, and as mentioned in a previous blog, it might be that some of these lie buried below and over-written by the places of today. I have therefore imagined Madwen’s summer place as a predecessor to the ruined farmstead called Higher Butterworthy on the basis that if it was a great place for butter-making in the late medieval, it was probably a great place for butter-making when Madwen was there.
Higher Butterworthy is a remarkable medieval farmstead consisting of six buildings and yards on wet marshy pasture (HER, undated). Along with the nearby Lower Butterworthy, these two farmsteads were granted out as a tenement in 1252 by the abbot of Tavistock, it being land owned by Tavistock Abbey since the Norman conquest, as part of the ‘demesne waste of Cudlipptown’ (Finberg, 1969, p33). There are other mentions in documents as Boterworthi (1330) and Butreworthy (1342) cited by Gover, et al (1931, p232). The name unambiguously shows that these farms were associated with butter-making.
Being a possession of Tavistock Abbey, these were not just any old farms, but farms of an elite and wealthy organisation. This is evident in the size of the agricultural ruins. Principal of these is the footprint of a substantial longhouse measuring an impressive 19.3 m long by 3.2 m wide at the centre, with entrances on each side of 2 m wide, and with the south-easterly door protected by a large porch of 3 x 4 m. The rubble walls in places extend to 1.9m width and internally have traces of good facing. Internally the building has two partition walls, creating rooms at either end. The lower one, at the north-west end, appears to contain a fireplace, and if so, it was not the shippon. This is not typical. For reasons to drain away cattle excrement, the shippon would normally be at the lower end. This suggests that the long house was not used for cattle. Given how many other sizeable buildings there are at this medieval dairy farm, this need not be a surprise; there was ample room for the cows in the other, also large buildings.
Margetts (2021, p244), in a book on the medieval cattle economy of the south-east, discusses the specialised dairy farms of elite landowners. Using examples from across England, he illustrates that these dairy farms, which appear to be part of ‘vaccaries’ (Specialised cattle farms – see previous blog), were characterised by having: much larger residential buildings than was typical of ordinary farmsteads; other large, compartmentalised structures (cow sheds?); and additional buildings (for milking?). All of these are features evident at the Cudlip Butterworthy farms. Margetts suggests that the capacious buildings, of these later medieval farms allowed dairy cattle to be brought inside and over-wintered. The Butterworthies, it would appear, evidence a shift to permanently based dairy agriculture on Dartmoor. They therefore seem to mark the end of dairy transhumance on Dartmoor.
4. The ‘Sett’ Roof
The men, some of whom have been at the summering grounds for days, have been making good our sumer-sett for the season. They have taken off the old turf roof and used some of these turfs to lay for the bottom of our beds. They have piled up the remaining turfs for us to use for our fire and are busy putting on the new roof to make it waterproof.
Whilst dairy-related transhumance in England seems to have died out around the 11th C, it continued in some parts of Ireland and Scotland right up until the early twentieth century, providing valuable glimpses into transhumance practice. Records from the Outer Hebrides tell of the menfolk carrying kit such as ‘burdens of sticks, heather, ropes, spades, and other things’ to repair shieling huts (cited in Costello 2018, p174). Oral histories from Donegal and Connemara in the West of Ireland recall ‘brothers and fathers’ travelling to the ‘booley’ in April to make ready and re-build the shelter before the arrival of ‘daughters and sisters’ (ibid).
The detail about the old roof turf being used to make the new beds comes from an ethnography of a woman called Kenina Morrison (née MacPhail) who experienced life as a summering dairy maid in the 1930s on the Isle of Lewis (cited in Herring, 2021). She describes her father accompanying her and her sister to their shieling. He would cut new turfs to replace the roof and for supply for the fire and retain the old dry turfs to be used as the bottom layer of the girl’s bed.
5. Making the Bed
I will be summering with two other maids. I help Eanfled unload our things from the cattle before leaving her to watch over them while they graze on the moist grass. Myself and Mildreth un-sheath our knives and set about cutting bundles of reeds for our bed. Once we have done this, we head for dryer ground and gather heather. Then we reap purple moor grass, to form a stréownes [mattress]. We layer these up on top of the old roof turfs - heather then reeds, then moor grass. I love my summer bed. It is so comfortable and sweet smelling.
One of Madwen’s first tasks would be to get the sumer-sett ready. In Kenina’s ethnography from the Isle of Lewis, she places importance on the making of the bed, so I have made this a priority for Madwen. Kenina describes her bed a being a box bed (a wooden frame set against the fall and with a curtain). I am not sure that Madwen would have had a box bed, but I think the plants used to layer up the bed may well have been similar.
Kenina recalls her bed as ‘a springy comfortable mattress of which nobody could complain’ (MacDonald, 1984, p 31 quoted in Herring, 2021, p103), with the comfort confirmed by other ethnographies (Historic England, 2018). Herring draws a parallel in the bedding material with the Bronze Age burial of the young woman found laid to rest at Whitehorse Hill, in which she was found with purple moor grass laid underneath her bear pelt.
For Kenina’s bed, she stuffed the purple moor grass into a sack to form her mattress. I am not sure if a transhumant girl like Madwen would not possess such an item, with woven sheet-type cloth being a more costly item to weave than wool, it being a finer weave. Perhaps Madwen would have used a wool blanket for her bedding? Maybe she used a blanket that doubled up as a cloak on colder days? Perhaps, like the Whitehorse Hill girl, Madwen had an animal pelt to sleep under?
Finally, in imagining the dairy maid’s sleeping arrangements, Madwen, Eanfled and Mildreth would have all cuddled up together for warmth. Communal sleeping was the norm. There would have been no individual bed for these maids.
6. Milking the Cows
The fog has gone and now our bed is made so we must milk our metecýum [literally meat cows. In Old English meat referred to food in general and was not a term specifically used for flesh]. This is, after all, the three-milkings month! We are responsible for twelf [twelve] between us, but one of the herd is our féden cū [feed cow]. As slaves we are given this cow for our food so we might eat and live through the summer, away from our homestead. We milked the cows at dawn and must do so again at dusk, but their udders are bursting and so we must milk at middægtíd [noon]. I find my wooden fildcumb [milk pail] and set to work. Sitting on the ground I start rhythmically pulling on the teats, and the blood-warm milk starts to puddle in my pail.
Based again, on Kenina’s ethnography, Kenina and her sister were responsible for three to four cows, but she says some people had five. Medieval cows had lower milk yields and so I thought that twelve cows between the three maids would be a manageable herd.
Our stereotypical image of a milkmaid is of a woman sitting on a low three-legged milking stool. Such furniture is the stuff of a permanent dairy and would not have been part of the kit of a transhumant dairy maid. Our dairy maids would have just squatted on their haunches.
The cows in Madwen’s dairy herd would be providing their most abundant milk in May, known in the Anglo-Saxon calendar as three-milkings month. The cows would have calved in early spring; roughly equivalent to the start of February (see The Coming of the Milk: Imbolc, St Brigid and milk folklore). The calves would stay with their mothers for about a month but then be weaned, by the dairy maids, and separated from their mothers, ready to graze on their own. The role of the transhumant dairy maid did not, therefore, start with the journey to summer pastures. She would have been intimately involved in the welfare of the dairy cows in pregnancy, childbirth, and weaning.
In this passage we also learn that one of the herd that Madwen is responsible for is specifically for use by the maids – it is their metecú. Late Saxon documents indicate that male slaves would be given a metecú for their subsistence (Banham and Faith, 2014, p110). Given the maids had to be able to live for six months on the moor, it seemed reasonable to assume that they might have been allowed the milk from one cow. I am planning, in later Madwen blogs, to examine what other food she might have foraged to sustain herself up on Dartmoor until late October.
7. Storing the Milk
Once all the cows are milked, we must store the milk so we can turn it into butter, and perhaps some cheese. We take turns to strain our milk into another wooden pail through a cloth and then we must store it for a few days to sour. We cover it and store it in a hole in the wall of our sett where we can keep it cool.
After milking Madwen would have strained the liquid through a cloth so that any impurities, such as bits of dung from the animal, were removed, for obvious reasons of contamination. The milk would then be stores in a cool place until it went sour. This was probably stored in the wall of the dark hut, where it could be protected. Where stone-built shielings have been examined, some do have recesses in their walls, thought to be for dairy storage (Historic England, 2018, p9).
Accounts vary in how long it would take for the milk to sour, but the temperature is the most important determinant on how long it should stand. Accounts from Scotland and Ireland indicate this might have been up to four or five days at room temperature (Herring, 2021; Videos of Irish Farming, 2019). Madwen and the other dairy maids may have had to learn the skill of adjusting the length of the souring process depending on the weather.
Milk as the raw product does not keep well, and so sweet, fresh milk was not a common drink. Soured milk might have been drunk, but butter was the main product from cow’s milk, because in producing butter, milk was turned into a preserved product, giving longer life to the perishable white fluid (Salomonsson, 1994, p191). However, Madwen and the other dairy maids may have used the milk from their cow to make themselves a soft curd cheese. We will learn more about other dairying processes and products in a future blog.
For now, we will leave Madwen to settle back into her sumer-sett. In the next blog we will re-join her and the rest of her community as they celebrate their fire festival that marks the start of summer and kicks off the transhumant year.
References
Alford, S. 2024. Dialect use of ‘plishing’ in E. Cornwall to describe hedge laying. Text message to S. Gedye. 5th Feb 2024.
Banham, D. and Faith, R. 2014. Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming. Medieval History and Archaeology Series. Oxford University Press.
Costello, E., 2018. Temporary freedoms? Ethnoarchaeology of female herders at seasonal sites in northern Europe. World Archaeology, 50(1), pp.165-184.
Dearson, G. 2023. The Devonshire Dialect Dictionary – The Dictionary. Version 1.02 Feb 2023.
Fox, H. 2012. Dartmoor’s Alluring Uplands: transhumance and pastoral management in the Middle Ages. University of Exeter Press: Exeter.
Finberg, H.P.R. 1969. Tavistock Abbey: A Study in the Social and Economic History of Devon. Augustus M. Kelley, New York.
Fyfe, R.M. and Woodbridge, J., 2012. Differences in time and space in vegetation patterning: analysis of pollen data from Dartmoor, UK. Landscape Ecology, 27, pp.745-760.
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.
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.
Historic England, 2018. Introduction to Heritage Assets: Shielings. Historic England.
Historic Environment Record (HER). Undated. Deserted Medieval Site, Higher Butterbury. MDV4175
Margetts, A., 2021. The Wandering Herd: The Medieval Cattle Economy of South-east England C. 450-1450. Windgather Press.
Royal Forestry Society. 2015. A brief history of British woodlands. www.rfs.org.uk
Salomonsson, A. 1994. Milk and Milk Products: From Medieval to Modern Times, In Lysaght, P. (ed.). 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, pp191-197.
Videos of Irish Farming Life. Uploaded to YouTube 2020. Churning in the Olden Days – Irish Butter Making.
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