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History
- Early History of Castlemorton
- Establishing Malvern Forest
- What is Common Land?
- Life in Medieval Forest
- Disafforestation in the 17th Century
- Malvern Hills Conservators
- Castlemorton Common in the 20th Century
Early History of Castlemorton
Castlemorton is overlooked by two sites of great significance - the Herefordshire Beacon and Midsummer Hill, both of which were Iron Age camps built by the ancient British tribe living in the area from about 400 B.C. Many different tribes inhabited the island which the Romans called Britannia, the tribe in this region being the Dobunni. 
Excavations at Midsummer Hill in the 1960s indicated that the Malvern camps were occupied for many generations by people who disappeared at about the time that the Romans came to Britain , though whether the Romans drove them out is a moot point. There are also debates about the number of people living in the camps and the nature of the camps - were they permanently occupied or were they refuges in times of danger? Dr.S.C.Stanford , who led excavations in the 1960s, concluded that the original population of about 500-700 swelled to about 1500-2000 people living on the Herefordshire Beacon. This occupation explains the Beacon's alternative name - British Camp. He concluded that comparable numbers (1300-1900) lived on Midsummer Hill, so both camps were significant settlements. There has, however, been controversy as to the accuracy of these figures.
Such large villages would have needed substantial numbers of huts in which people could live. Nineteenth century archaeological findings suggest that over 200 round or semi-circular huts were built at Midsummer Hill. Some of their foundations were identified and examined. The Herefordshire Beacon also has very many such sites, which are particularly apparent when snow has fallen or the light is low, thus showing up the disturbed ground and the shallow scoops removed from it.
It is clear from the size of the camps - and the fact that they were so well built that the ramparts of the Herefordshire Beacon have survived 2000 years of exposure to extremes of weather - that the large number of ancient Britons living here would have needed large quantities of food. This will have come from the surrounding areas, either from growing crops or from hunting wild animals. It is not yet clear how the ancient Britons got their food supplies, but archaeological evidence points to a diet including grain and some animal products, with the suggestion of an Iron Age sheep dip on the northern edge of the common, dating back to about 400 B.C.
The important saltworks at Droitwich were operative from Anglo-Saxon or possibly Roman times, and there is oral tradition that the roads from Droitwich included a route across Castlemorton Common and through the Hollybush pass. Across the common there must also have been tracks used by local people. The Domesday Book provides documentary evidence that the forest area around the Malvern Hills was used for hunting by the pre-Norman Conquest bishops of Worcester, who also had rights to the honey produced by bees in the adjacent parish of Upton-upon-Severn.
Until the 14 th century Castlemorton was known as Morton Folliott and was part of the manor of Longdon. The Folliott family owned considerable land and was probably responsible in the troubled 12 th century reign of King Stephen for building the small castle near Castlemorton Church.
By this time Castlemorton had been incorporated into Malvern Forest by William the Conqueror, whose decision to create a royal forest in this region was to prevent almost all legitimate land clearance for nearly six centuries.
Ancient features include a water-mill near Hollybed Common, worked by a brook running through Longdon into the River Severn. Many generations of Castlemorton inhabitants had their corn ground here throughout the middle ages.
Establishing Malvern Forest
Being incorporated into Malvern Forest was to have upon Castlemorton an impact which has lasted to the present day.
William the Conqueror established Malvern Forest in the early 1080s, but the land was used for hunting from at least Anglo-Saxon times, when ecclesiastical lords enjoyed hunting rights. The Domesday Book states that the Bishop of Worcester had formerly hunted in what became known as the King's Forest of Malvern , which lay adjacent to other hunting grounds at Corse and Eldersfield as well as to the Bishop of Hereford's hunting ground on the other side of the Malvern Hills .
The boundary between Worcestershire and Herefordshire is marked on the Malvern Hills by the Shire Ditch, which may well have originated in the Bronze Age, long before shires and their boundaries had been defined. Disputes often occurred between landowners, one of the most remarkable being that between the Bishop of Hereford and the Earl of Gloucester to whom hunting rights in Malvern Forest had been granted. The Earl made clear what he claimed by digging out in 1287 the so-called Red Earl's Dyke, emphasising the importance of the ancient shire boundary.
William the Conqueror's official designation of Malvern Forest meant that special laws were imposed to protect both the deer and their habitat (the "venison and the vert"). These forest laws, drawn up to ensure that the king and his favourites could enjoy good hunting, made many aspects of life difficult for the medieval peasants of Castlemorton and the other villages within the boundaries of the forest. No forest clearance was permitted without permission from the king. If the king vested his hunting rights in a favoured subject (as successive medieval kings did) that subject, known as the lord of the chase, would give or withhold permission to clear land. Such official permission for clearance, known as assarting, was not given lightly. Perhaps the most frustrating part of forest law was the fact that farmers, striving to eke out a precarious living from soil which was not easy to work, were not even allowed to erect hedges that were high enough to keep deer from trampling and eating their crops.
Although forest law was actually imposed in a somewhat haphazard fashion, its provisions had the effect of freezing development over a considerable area for as long as forest law operated - and it was in operation for nearly 600 years. Even when Charles I disafforested Malvern Chase in the 17 th century there were limits to the amount of development permitted.
What is Common Land?
The most fertile land in the medieval parish was used as large arable fields in which farmers worked together to grow crops such as wheat and barley, each individual usually working on his share of the strips into which the fields were divided. In addition, in common with his neighbours, he enjoyed rights on the inferior land - the wasteland. In the case of Castlemorton and its neighbours, the underlying geology explains why the wasteland was so poor and unsuited to arable farming. Rights on this inferior land, often simply called common rights, originated many hundreds of years ago, and were for the benefit of inhabitants of a specific parish - certainly not for anybody who happened to come along.
Agricultural changes, especially in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, meant that arable farming ceased to be practised in fields that were communally cultivated, though shared rights on the wasteland lasted for much longer. Hence, though less than 200 years ago enclosure acts described the arable lands as the common fields , modern usage applies the word common only to the wasteland.
Whilst the waste was not worth using for arable crops it was very valuable for numerous ways of relieving the monotony of the medieval diet. Even quite poor families might put on the waste a cow or a couple of sheep to provide milk, cheese and occasional meat. Pannage rights enabled pigs to be left at certain times of the year among the forest oaks, where acorns provided their favourite autumn treat and helped to fatten them for slaughter. In the autumn people could gather nuts, berries and edible fungi from the trees, bushes and undergrowth. The wasteland also offered the chance to collect windfall wood for repairing the family hut, and for gathering wild flowers.
All these rights were highly prized in the rural economy, and any threat to them led to great anxiety or even to riots, as happened in the 17 th and 18 th centuries.
Life in Medieval Forest
Life was hard for the medieval peasant, whose life expectancy was about half that of modern societies. Farming - like that in undeveloped countries today - was back-breaking manual labour with results so uncertain that hunger and disease regularly distressed and depleted the population. In Malvern Chase, as in all land subject to forest law, the difficulties of farming were exacerbated by the requirement to allow deer to roam freely. Hedges were deliberately kept low, enabling the deer to trample and devour crops. Further damage was likely from other wild creatures, including pigeons and rabbits, the latter introduced by the Normans who built warrens to protect this at first vulnerable species. Warrens were to be found in several areas on both sides of the Malverns. Delicacies for the tables of the rich, the pigeons were always a serious pest to farmers and rabbits eventually became so.
William Langland wrote his Piers Plowman in the last half of the 14 th century, deriving much of its imagery from the area around the Malvern Hills . It portrays not only the hardships of cold winter nights, rising at dawn to start the day's long, hard labour, but also the joys of beautiful scented flowers and the mysteries of how the birds knew how to build nests in which to lay their eggs and breed their young.
Much of what we today find interesting, mysterious or beautiful was here in medieval times - medieval people lived hard lives but were not brutes. The universal human characteristics of kindness and cooperation were to be found in forest settlements, as elsewhere, reinforced by the teaching of priests, representing at parish level the influence of the very powerful and all pervasive Catholic church.
In 1628, when Charles I ordered a survey to be made of Malvern Chase, the Dean of Westminster held 1563 acres of Castlemorton Common, Westminster Abbey having been given extensive estates in Worcestershire several hundred years earlier. An assart or clearing had been made at Holly Bed and some unspecified parts had been cultivated, but the common was described as having No tymber but much underwood.
Disafforestation in the 17th Century
The political problems of Charles I led him to give up his rights in Malvern Forest in return for one-third of the wasteland of the parishes in the medieval forest. The disafforestation decree clearly required that the other two-thirds should remain "open and free" for local residents to exercise in perpetuity the grazing and other rights that they had exercised in common since time immemorial.
This decree did much to protect the remaining wasteland, but surreptitious, fairly small scale, encroachments sometimes occurred. Local folklore points to illegal squatting on the common, but little documentary evidence for this has come to light, and it was not a very serious threat to the common land when the population was small. Encroachments were actually permitted, if not encouraged, by parish officials provided that a rent was paid: records show that the parish would "cut up all encroachments that are not paid."
A much greater threat came with agricultural developments which caused larger landowners to seek legal parliamentary enclosure of the common land to bring it into private ownership. They wanted to facilitate the use of more efficient farming methods to increase and improve yields in order to profit from the increased demands of a rising population in the 18 th century. Even so, protection was to be had from the intercommoning between Castlemorton and other parishes of Malvern Chase. Intercommoning was an unusual special arrangement between named and known settlements within a particular area, and it had long been agreed that the Chase parishes would permit all constituent parishes to share their common rights. So if any one of the intercommoning parishes enclosed its wasteland it deprived the other parishes of part of their traditionally common area. Thus, when Leigh and Hanley Castle sought enclosure acts in the late 18 th century lively - and expensive - legal argument delayed the process, and seems to have been a factor in discouraging other chase parishes from enclosure of their own wastelands.
Castlemorton retained its common long after other Chase parishes had enclosed. Neighbouring Welland , for example, took the whole of its common land into private ownership in 1852 whilst about the same time Castlemorton, Birtsmorton and Longdon were much more cautious. They clarified ownership and consolidated holdings in arable fields but left intact extensive areas of wasteland looking much as it must have done in medieval times .
This makes Castlemorton Common a most unusual and precious area.
Malvern Hills Conservators
Illegal encroachment threatened common land. A piece of doggerel summed it up:
The law will punish man or woman
Who steals a goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common off the goose.
Legal enclosure was a much more serious threat, because it was on such a very extensive scale. So many Enclosure Acts were passed in the 19 th century that there was consternation among local inhabitants that great tracts of common land - and the rights which locals enjoyed on them - would disappear.
The eventual outcome of this anxiety was the establishment in 1884 of the Malvern Hills Conservators, whose raison d'être was to ensure that no further erosion of the common land would occur. Their foundation marked the end not only of legal enclosure but also of illegal encroachment on the common by individuals surreptitiously stealing bits of common land and assuming ownership of the land thus acquired.
Since 1884 the Conservators have had jurisdiction over an increasing acreage, ensuring that the hills and commons are kept open for the benefit of both commoners exercising grazing rights and the public who were specifically given access to it by the 1884 Act. Balancing the interests of the two groups has not always been easy. For about 70 years there was the further problem of quarrying which, while keeping many men in work at a time of national high unemployment, did much damage to the hills. The highly emotional arguments tore local opinion into two camps, while the Conservators faced an insuperable problem because in 1884 local landowners had been guaranteed ancient mineral rights. The Conservators could neither compulsorily purchase those rights nor stop landowners exercising them.
Castlemorton Common in the 20th Century
One large land acquisition made by the Malvern Hills Conservators was in the early 1960s, when they acquired responsibility for nearly 700 acres of Castlemorton Common. This was the result of the Church Commissioners conveying to them for a nominal sum the area which had belonged to the church since medieval times when it had formed part of the extensive estates of Westminster Abbey. Relations between the residents of Castlemorton and the Malvern Hills Conservators were not at first wholly amicable, and much effort has gone into resolving those early anxieties, which were the result of neither party being sure of the other's intentions.
In the 19 th century Castlemorton was described as "the last remnant of the once extensive Malvern Chase" , and remains so still, despite some 54 acres having been used for potato growing during the desperate food shortages of the Second World War. This ploughed land was in places such as Hurst Bank and Hollybed. The rest of the common has never been cultivated, which makes it a very special area.
The creation in 1959 of the Malvern Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty gave additional protection not only to Castlemorton Common itself but also to the surrounding area. The full benefits of this were not realised until the quarries at Hollybush and the Gullet ceased operations in the 1970s, some years after the cessation of all quarrying elsewhere on the Malverns. For much of the 20th century quarrying on the hills was a dusty, noisy, industrial enterprise, also fraught with dangers. As quarries closed (some had reached the water-table and were uneconomic to work) the Malvern Hills Conservators planted areas scarred by quarrying. In the early 1980s structural work and planting at the Gullet was a major part of the events to celebrate both the centenary of the Conservators and the end of quarrying. For Castlemorton it was a particular relief.
Quite apart from the quarrying, it would be a mistake to imagine that life here has always been peaceable. In 1992 an estimated 20,000 new age travellers illegally camped on the common for several days, shattering its peace and leaving behind large amounts of rubbish. Sometimes, too, balancing the interests of the public and the commoners has led to ill-feeling - uncontrolled dogs worrying sheep are an example of this. For some years in the late 20 th century grazing declined because farmers were unwilling to expose their stock to the hazards of fast-moving traffic, uncontrolled dogs and possible theft. Fortunately grazing is gradually returning to Conservators' land, and they have established their own flocks of sheep and herd of cattle because grazing is vital to the proper maintenance of the land. Nature left entirely to itself will allow rampant vegetation to destroy more vulnerable species, and grazing is the method used since time immemorial of controlling the more invasive species.
Castlemorton Common has for centuries played an important part in the economic and social life of this part of Worcestershire. The protection given by Malvern Hills Conservators and by the Common's inclusion in an A.O.N.B. has been, and will continue to be, crucial to the preservation of the Common and all that it supports.
Much of our environment has already been destroyed by human insensitivity to nature. It is vital to recognise that over hundreds of years nature, common rights and grazing have created a very special landscape which is vulnerable. Castlemorton Common is a precious part of our heritage - which could be lost unless respect is shown for what has happened in this area down the centuries. These bodies need every bit of support they can get.
By Pamela Hurle - 2007
