Oil Drum Lane

Thursday, September 6th 1666. The King was Charles II, and much of the City of London was a smouldering heap. To the West, saved by the open fields in between, were the palaces, gardens and grander houses of Westminster. Events are events; in this case, you know the story about the fire, so my interest is in the seldom-told story of the rapid redevelopment that followed it, and in particular, what happened in the ‘in-between’.  The organisation of the feeding and rehousing of the population after the fire was commendable. Meanwhile, souls could not be neglected! Sir Christopher Wren got to work on rebuilding St Paul’s Cathedral while also devising one of several plans to use the opportunity to straighten out the winding streets and let a bit of air in. You can see some of them here:  Rationalising London in the 1660s Unfortunately, Charlie wasn't a French-style almighty monarch and had neither the will nor the unchallengeable authority to dictate the necessary reallocation of...

  West Stow. A Recreation of a Saxon village. The period after the Romans left is known as the  Dark Ages, not because they were particularly gloomy, but because we don't know much about them, so we superimpose our current ideas about how things are organised around kings, nations and regular armies. The reality was almost certainly more chaotic.  It  might be better to think of early England as being a bit like the Congo, with weak or non-existent central control and people with strong family and tribal loyalties. There would probably have been frequent informal invasions, many refugees, and a few wandering, plundering warlords. It all started with what appears to have been the takeover of much of the country by a consortium of tribes whose business plan was international expansion.  Procopius, a historian in the embers of the Roman Empire ,  referred to the inhabitants as being 'Angles, Frisians and Britons.  I alluded to this in my previous pos...

The story so far has been of plague, famine and anarchy.  Scroll forward to around 600 AD, and things had improved. Two powerful Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, Wessex and Mercia, had emerged from the fractured mess of southern Britain. Later, they were joined by Danes who arrived as raiders but settled in places. Their respective fortunes and territories waxed and waned. If you are interested, y ou can see the progress in this neat little video.   Link:  Engelond Saxon Subbuteo Team  As things settled down a bit, people took advantage of the empty spaces.  A s the population expanded again, the landscape became one  of dispersed farms and hamlets. M ore fertile land was occupied, woodland clearance restarted, and more difficult land on the higher ground and in the clay vales was brought into use. These people knew what they were doing, rotating the use of their fields and applying natural fertilisers, mostly dung and sometimes chalk or limestone, where the soil...

  At the end of the last post, I described the failing agriculture and the dramatic fall in population in the 1300s.  Recovery was slow. The feudal system was already in decline, but now labour shortages put the peasants and serfs in a position to weaken the ties of servitude and demand better wages from the landowners.  Working for the Man. This had consequences. L andowners who could no longer rely on the peasantry to do their farming for them sought to rent their land out, often to  the same peasants. (The word 'farmer' now appears. It is derived from the medieval Latin 'firmarius', someone who rents, not farms). Many f ound that pastoral farming was less labour-intensive and that sheep bred for wool were more profitable, while the new tenant farmers were incentivised to improve their l ot. All this led to the creation of fenced and hedged boundaries around previously open land to mark ownership and  manage livestock. This  'enclosure' of previously open...