INTRODUCTION
My great grandfather George Ascough left home in 1870 at the age of nineteen, to seek employment in the coalfields of Rotherham. All his male ancestors lived off the land around the two small Lincolnshire villages of Toynton St Peter and Toynton All Saints that are situated on the northern edge of the East Fen, just where it meets the higher ground of the Lincolnshire Wolds. The villages are only a mile apart.
So what I wanted to know was what happened to prompt George to make this move after so many generations had made their lives on the edge of fenland.
Joan Thirsk, in her book “English Peasant Farming – The Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times”, summarises the changes that affected those who lived and worked next to the fen.
In the fenlands of Lincolnshire, more perhaps than in any of part of the country, the agricultural revolution transformed the landscape and began a complete re-orientation of the fen economy. The original inhabitants of the fen villages had specialised in rearing livestock and catching fish and wildfowl, but it was their children and grandchildren who gained their living as labourers on the newly rich corn lands. New parishes were carved out of East West and Wildmore Fens. The fenlander, who had been accustomed to making many journeys by water, now became a land lubber.
This was particularly true for those living close to East Fen as this was the place where stood the Deeps, a network of meres and shallow lakes.
I find it hard to be precise about the lives of my ancestors in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, their villages, especially Toynton All Saints, were situated on fertile higher ground that was the start of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Before the enclosure of 1773, there was still common land within the parish in the form of open fields. This would have been available to the commoners for cultivating crops and the grazing of livestock. However, there were other fields that had been enclosed over previous centuries. Were the Ascoughs employed as farm labourers for the landowners or their tenants? Possibly part time. But I am convinced that the rights of common that they enjoyed on the fen was always a large part of their livelihood.
My researches have taken me back to the lives of the Ascough family as they took advantage of the natural landscape of East Fen to the south and the higher ground of the Wolds to the north. But all this was to change dramatically when enclosure and drainage of the fens took away their rights of common and which eventually led to them becoming full time agricultural labourers in the employ of the new landowners and their tenants. That is until George decided this wasn’t for him.
But this is not just a story of the family. It has become more of a history of East Fen itself. Very different today to what my ancestors knew hundreds of years ago.
My great grandfather George Ascough left home in 1870 at the age of nineteen, to seek employment in the coalfields of Rotherham. All his male ancestors lived off the land around the two small Lincolnshire villages of Toynton St Peter and Toynton All Saints that are situated on the northern edge of the East Fen, just where it meets the higher ground of the Lincolnshire Wolds. The villages are only a mile apart.
So what I wanted to know was what happened to prompt George to make this move after so many generations had made their lives on the edge of fenland.
Joan Thirsk, in her book “English Peasant Farming – The Agrarian History of Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times”, summarises the changes that affected those who lived and worked next to the fen.
In the fenlands of Lincolnshire, more perhaps than in any of part of the country, the agricultural revolution transformed the landscape and began a complete re-orientation of the fen economy. The original inhabitants of the fen villages had specialised in rearing livestock and catching fish and wildfowl, but it was their children and grandchildren who gained their living as labourers on the newly rich corn lands. New parishes were carved out of East West and Wildmore Fens. The fenlander, who had been accustomed to making many journeys by water, now became a land lubber.
This was particularly true for those living close to East Fen as this was the place where stood the Deeps, a network of meres and shallow lakes.
I find it hard to be precise about the lives of my ancestors in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, their villages, especially Toynton All Saints, were situated on fertile higher ground that was the start of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Before the enclosure of 1773, there was still common land within the parish in the form of open fields. This would have been available to the commoners for cultivating crops and the grazing of livestock. However, there were other fields that had been enclosed over previous centuries. Were the Ascoughs employed as farm labourers for the landowners or their tenants? Possibly part time. But I am convinced that the rights of common that they enjoyed on the fen was always a large part of their livelihood.
My researches have taken me back to the lives of the Ascough family as they took advantage of the natural landscape of East Fen to the south and the higher ground of the Wolds to the north. But all this was to change dramatically when enclosure and drainage of the fens took away their rights of common and which eventually led to them becoming full time agricultural labourers in the employ of the new landowners and their tenants. That is until George decided this wasn’t for him.
But this is not just a story of the family. It has become more of a history of East Fen itself. Very different today to what my ancestors knew hundreds of years ago.