Turf wars: conflict and cooperation in the management of Wallingfen (East Yorkshire),1281-1781

摘要

This paper explores the origins and management of Wallingfen, a large tract of waterlogged marshes and carrs near Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Subject to annual flooding throughout much of its history, the area was utilized by the surrounding parishes and townships throughout the medieval and early modern period, providing a range of important resources to the neighbouring communities including fish, fowl, turves and summer grazing. In this it had much in common with wetland commons elsewhere in England and on the Continent. Yet while the East Anglian fens and the Lancashire mosses were being drained and enclosed in the seventeenth century - as too were the wetlands around the southern shore of the North Sea basin in Denmark, Germany andthe Netherlands - Wallingfen remained wet, marshy and entirely unsuitable for arable agriculture long into the eighteenth century. In other ways too, Wallingfen was highly unusual. Not only was a true form of intercommoning practised here until parliamentary enclosure under an act of 1777, but there is also evidence of a cooperative system of wetland management which fell outside the direct authority of the neighbouring manors or any higher form of overlordship.