What kind of fencing during ECW?

[mkultra99]

Not fencing.. "en gaurde, have at thee!" kind of fencing.. but fencing for farms, crops, pigs, what have you... I know that the ECW happens during the "enclosure act" where rich landholders were consolidating smaller farms.. as one does. Seems lush hedges are all the rage on ECW wargaming boards tho'...?

[FifteensAway]

Dang it, stole my epee thunder! 

I'm no expert but I've seen lots of photos of enclosures with stone walls.

[Ramirez Noname]

Check out John Speed's maps - he was a cartographer of the early 17th century. Many of his town maps show larger enclosures (town walls, etc).

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=john+speed+town+maps&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwj0_N3ukdTiAhUK9hQKHXPQAgwQ2-cCegQIABAC&oq=john+speed+town+maps&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-img.3...71151.82875..83691...1.0..0.317.3419.20j5j3j1......0....1.......5..35i39j0j0i5i30j0i67j0i10j0i8i30j0i24.v9HmDFAl6g8&ei=tqb4XPTJI4rsU_Ogi2A&bih=672&biw=1024&client=safari&prmd=misvn&hl=en-gb

In the countryside, laid hedges would form enclosures to fields. However, fields around manors could be quite sizeable.

Within towns, villages and hamlets, local materials would be used - for example some of the fighting in Cirencester took place between gardens divided by high dry stone walls.

Hope this helps.

RMZ

[Friends of General Haig]

An interesting thread.  If I may add a related query; what did a 17th century field gate look like?  If you have hedged fields then you need a way to get in and out.

[OSHIROmodels]

A lot of fields were open and either had a few stones or a small ditch/mound to mark the size/boundary.

The games that have a lot of hedges, whilst looking very impressive, aren’t quite right. 

[Cubs]

Something a little different is slate fencing. Literally dirty great slabs of slate pieces, jammed into the ground in a line. I'm guessing this happens only areas with lots of cheap (free) slate ready to hand, not one where the landowner has to buy in a huge shipment.

[olicana]

Hedges were quite common and feature in a lot of battles but probably didn't feature as the small enclosed fields we see in certain parts of the country today. They seem to have bounded larger areas, lining roads and tracks and were a serious impediment to troops - even at places like Marston Moor where tracks lined with 'furze' hampered the Royalist cavalry to its disaster.

In the north, dry stone walling may have been more common but again, I doubt it was as extensive as later.

This is from wiki - the Enclosures Acts (the first not enacted until 1604) - it shows that land wasn't really owned or portioned out as fields as we know them today and consequently, larger enclosed areas (very big fields) were probably the norm the smaller unenclosed fields within probably marked out by narrow pathways so that the 'owners' could get to them.

"Prior to the enclosures in England, a portion of the land was categorized as "common" or "waste" or not in use. "Common" land was under the control of the lord of the manor, but a number of rights on the land (such as pasture, pannage, or estovers) were variously held by certain nearby properties, or (occasionally) held in gross by all manorial tenants. "Waste" was land without value as a farm strip – often very narrow areas (typically less than a yard wide) in awkward locations (like cliff edges, or inconveniently shaped manorial borders), but also bare rock, and so forth; "waste" was not officially used by anyone, and thus was often cultivated by landless peasants[3].

The remainder of the land was organised into a large number of narrow strips, with each tenant possessing a number of disparate strips throughout the manor, as would the manorial lord. Called the open field system, it was administered by manorial courts, which exercised some kind of collective control[3]. Thus what might now be considered a single field, would under this system have been divided among the lord and his tenants; poorer peasants (serfs or copyholders, depending on the era) would be allowed to live on the strips owned by the lord, in return for cultivating his land.[4] This system facilitated common grazing and crop rotation.[4]

Any particular individual might possess several strips of land within the manor, often separated by some distance from one another. In search of better financial returns, landowners looked for more efficient farming techniques[5]; enclosure Acts for small areas had been passed sporadically since the 12th century, but with the rise of new agricultural knowledge and technology in the 18th century, they became more commonplace. Because tenants (even copyholders) had legally enforcable rights on the land, substantial compensation was provided to extinguish them; as a result, many tenants were active supporters of enclosure, but the Acts enabled landlords to force reluctant tenants to comply with the process."

[SteveBurt]

Depending on the ground scale, what looks like a small field on the table is probably a big field in real life.
If you can fit a complete Pike & Shot unit in line in the field, it is not that small.

[olicana]

Hi SB, agreed, but the misconception of the British countryside at this time is that it looked like some sort of British 'bocage' country - some of which still exists in the South West for example. But this is a later feature following the enclosures act when fields ceased to be under multiple ownership. Once they came under single ownership the big fields tended to be divided into smaller fields by enclosing them so that they could be sold more easily or divided by inheritance. Earlier fields would probably stretch from one road to the next, or be bounded by a stream or some such natural feature, without other internal 'sub-dividing' boundaries.

Also, virtually all grazing land was completely unbounded, it being referred to as 'open heath' or something similar. Animals, at this time, were not grazed 'field to field'. Cowherds or shepherds, not field boundaries, were employed to keep animals under control 24 - 7.

[Silent Invader]

This is an interesting article about the hedges of Exmoor, which explains why in the 17thC their prevalence was very different to now.

https://www.exmoormagazine.co.uk/hedgerows-the-story-of-our-landscape/

[Ramirez Noname]

Although not British (and a bit earlier than the ECW) this detail from a Dutch painting of village life shows an enclosure fence, possibly made of cleft timber or rough sawn timber planks.





As for 17th Century field gates ... I haven't a pic unfortunately.

RMZ

[tin shed gamer]

It may sound counter intuitive But look at living history museum's in America . They tend to have a bit of a thing for the 17th century.