Abstract

Manure Factories? The post­ enclosure high barns of the Yorkshire Wolds Colin Hayfield which, by the eighteenth century, were also INTRODUCTION increasingly being used as rabbit warrens (Harris The post-enclosure farms of the Chalk Wolds 1971). It was generally a clear, open landscape. In (Fig.l) of the East Riding of Yorkshire are about 1760 Lord Bathurst's agent wrote to him characterised by their large size and by the thinness outlining the nature of his manor at Wetwang, and fragility of their soils. In 1788 the agricultural describing the landscape as 'open, scarce a Bush or commentator, William Marshall, observed that, in Tree appears for several miles' (Maule Cole 1894, East Yorkshire, 'The size of farms vary in different p. 71). The extent of this permanent pasture was parts of the district. On the Wolds they are principally usually a tits greatest within townships of abandoned large; in the Vale and the Moorlands, extremely village sites of which there were many on the small' (1788, Vol. 1, p. 254). He gives the examples Wolds. Even in populated villages, such as Wetwang, of 'Mowthorpe and Coldham (Cowlam), near two Thixendale or Wharram le Street, where open thousand acres each; Crome thirteen