The fate of the village green

Dear Tim,

This morning I borrowed some books from Southend Library. As I was checking them out, the librarian told me that, for every four books I borrowed, I was entitled to one additional loan, which he would select from a pile of books on a trolley behind the counter.

This is part of an initiative by the local council to encourage a diversity of reading interests. Apparently some sections of Southend library (such as Biology and Poetry) haven’t been reaching their reader targets, so now there is a drive to increase the popularity of these under-read subjects.

The title of the book that I was given was:

“Till Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane”
The migration of village greens in rural England.

It was written in 1913 by two elderly sisters - Elizabeth & Rosemary Church.

I have mentioned the book here, because I think that it may help to explain the confusion over Oldton’s location.

In the past it was common for the name of a village, to apply, not to the village itself, but to the green at its heart, or occasionally to the tree in the centre of the green.

For example, if a traveller asked for directions to the nearest inn, he might be told that he would find it in the village at Melmerby, meaning that the inn was among the buildings in the vicinity of the green of Melmerby.

A common punishment for a village that had angered the Crown, was to have its green levelled and then ploughed, thus removing the name of the village by proxy.

After a period of time, during which the inhabitants of the village would serve a penance, the village would be granted a new name by the reigning King or Queen. At this juncture, permission was usually granted to restore the green, although always in reduced circumstances. Generally a reinstated green was limited to a small area of grassland and on the condition that: ”No flower shall grow there, nor any tree spread its roots.”

The punishment of levelling and ploughing caused more than just humiliation. It could also lead to severe economic hardship. Servants of the crown were not permitted to stop-over in unnamed villages and the inns were only permitted to accept foot traffic and were forbidden to stable horses or coaches. Nameless villages often had problems trading their produce in nearby towns and were generally shunned by their neighbours.

Queen Elizabeth I, took the idea of levelling and ploughing a step further. She ransomed village greens and later used them as a currency to show her favour.

Instead of destroying the greens of villages that had angered her, she had the turf dug up, the trees uprooted from the ground, while still alive, and the whole lot transported, by cart or by river, to her patchwork gardens, located on what is now Mitcham Common in South London. According to the Church sisters, you could still see evidence of the patchwork gardens on the common when they were young girls.

However, the patchwork gardens were only a temporary home; eventually the greens were either restored to their original villages or they were given to another village as a reward for service or loyalty.

In the latter case, the village would either take the name of its new green or combine it with their existing name. A good example is the village of Colton Ashby in Essex which possesses two greens, one of which was removed from the village of Ashby in Devon, after the local farmers refused to pay their taxes.

Undoubtedly this renaming caused terrible confusion. Villages who had their greens taken away, and had been renamed, would often still be known locally by their traditional names. Villages, who had received new greens as a favour from the crown, often had two names, which were used interchangeably.

In 1889, following a national census, it was decided that every human habitation above the size of a hamlet would be given an official name that would be used in local and national records from then on. During the naming ceremonies, that took place up and down the country, villages generally had their traditional names reinstated.

It is possible that the village of your birth may have been known locally as Oldton, but officially it may have another name that appears on maps and in the records of the local authority.

Perhaps the fine green that we see in the photograph originated from another village called Oldton, and was transplanted to your village by Royal favour. In the naming of Britain ceremonies of 1889, it is possible that your childhood village might have officially reverted to its original name. Meanwhile the village that had once been Oldton, before its green was taken away, may well have been formally re-christened as Oldton once more.

As a young boy, you recall Oldton – the local name for the village – a name that brought to mind a service done to the Crown that was recognised and rewarded. However your Oldton might have only ever existed on a royal whim - A whim that was swept away by the political machinery of a democratic government.

I may well be wrong. The history of our country often appears implausible and convoluted. Who knows? Maybe there is another equally convincing explanation as to why you can no longer locate the place of your birth.

----------------
Jonathan Kepple

Comments

[timw]

Jonathan

I can't thank you enough for this. It reminds me of a book I found in my local library recently which is about the search for Nonsuch Palace - Henry VIII's great folly that disappeared sometime at the end of the Stuart era and has only recently been relocated (not that far from Mitcham Common, in fact).

I am pursuing several theories about how or why Oldton disappeared:

Is the town now buried under six lanes of motorway, or submerged under a lake created by the building of a new dam?

Was there an economic disaster that caused everyone to move to the city looking for work? Or is it just the natural attrition of young people leaving and old people dying that we see happening in small rural communities across the UK?

Were the inhabitants deliberately moved out and re-housed as part of secret social experiment?

Was the town the home of a Waco-like cult that then decided en masse to take its leave of this world?

Was there perhaps a virulent and rare disease or plague at work? A parasite in the brain? Or perhaps through in-breeding, a lemming-like gene has suddenly bloomed causing the population to metaphorically and literally throw itself off a cliff?

Is the town in fact a deliberate online hoax, a digital smokescreen that allows terrorists to communicate with secret codes embedded in the texts, pictures and videos?

If you're happy for me to do it, I would like to include your ideas into my investigation and pursue your leads.

Cheers

timw