How Datchet Lost its Common

‘Datchet Common’ is now just the name for the eastern edge of the village, quite densely built up with Victorian terraces and modern housing estates, but until the early 1800s Datchet had a real Common which played a vital part in the livelihoods of people and particularly of the poor.

Before 1810 the farmland of the village was still organised on the medieval system of large open fields, Westfield, Churchfield, Lynchfield and Marshfield. Within these fields individual landowners held separate strips, sometimes amounting to a great deal of land but not consolidated in a single place and not around their village centre farmsteads. (The exceptions were the two outlying estates of Riding Court and Southlea, where nearby fields had long before been acquired by the owners and ‘enclosed’ to form consolidated farms.)

Under this open fields and strip system, farming was essentially a communal affair. All landowners had to plough, sow and harvest their own land in each open field at the same time, and the maintenance of fences and ditches was a joint responsibility. Dates had to be agreed for staking out the separate strips and for allowing animals to forage in the open fields after harvest. A surprising amount is known about how all this was managed because the written records of the Manor Courts have survived from the 1590s onward, including regulations about keeping animals on the Common, particularly listing the fines for allowing unringed hogs to graze there. So where and what was Datchet Common?

At that time every household needed to keep their own animals and grow their own food to some extent, and the poor had always had ‘rights of common’ included in the tenancy of their cottages. Datchet, along with most other villages, had common land (or wasteland) where a cow or pigs could be grazed, turf cut for fuel or firewood collected. These rights certainly contributed to the survival of the poorest and were closely controlled (or ‘stinted’) to ensure that no one over used the resources. Datchet’s Common was funnel-shaped, stretching out from the eastern end of the village at its narrowest point, along both sides of the Horton Road and then widening towards the parish borders with Wraysbury and Horton. It included the mill (at Mill Place) and the housing estate east of Holmlea Road, while much of its northern area is now occupied by the Queen Mother reservoir.

By the late 1700s the open field farming system had become outdated with the advent of scientific ideas for the improvement of agriculture, by good drainage, new crops or breeds of animal, and better understanding of how to manure and enrich the soil. But no owner of individual strips within communal fields could hope to experiment with these innovations, and that was one of the factors behind the ‘enclosure’ movement of the late 18^th and early 19^th century. Landowners wanted to consolidate their farmland in one place, preferably around their farmstead (or where a new one could be built), and to manage their own affairs in a more businesslike way, rather than aiming to feed the community as had been so important in the past.

To ‘enclose’ the land of a manor (or village), the Lord of the Manor and the other chief landowners had to agree to present a private Act of Parliament. Everybody’s interests would then be legally taken into account, although it was the major landowners who would chiefly benefit. In Datchet, the old open communal fields were divided up in proportion to the land originally held by each owner, plots of land often being exchanged between owners. Everyone who had held even the smallest amount of land in the fields received an ‘allotment’ of his own which was often too small to actually farm, but many were eventually sold for building new houses. The public and private roads in the village were surveyed as part of the enclosure process and one major new one was built, the Ditton Road. This sliced through Linchfield and part of the Common, opening up access on both sides for the new owners as well as connecting through from Horton Road to London Road for the first time. It is also the only absolutely straight road in the village, typical of those made under Enclosure Acts and often called ‘Parliamentary’ roads at the time.

In many places the effect of enclosure on the poorest was taken into account and common or waste land was set aside for them to continue to use, but not in Datchet. The Stoke Poges Enclosure Act (including Ditton) was going through Parliament in the same period as Datchet’s. There the Lord of the Manor had wanted to give £50 a year to be distributed among the poor to compensate for the loss of the Common, but after vigorous protest by the local clergy he was forced to set aside 200 acres of common (of the original 460) for the use of the poor, particularly for turf-cutting. That land survives today as Stoke Common. Here in Datchet no one was championing the ancient rights of the poor so the Common was carved up and redistributed as part of the allotments of private owners. (Allotment here means the plot of land somebody receives, not where he grows his vegetables.) In the years of the actual changes in land ownership and the fencing in of the new fields, enclosure is likely to have contributed to the unrest among the labouring poor, culminating in the Black Datchet riots of 1812.

This is the reason that there is virtually nothing left of the original Datchet Common apart from its name. The Montagu family, as Lords of the Manor, were allocated the major share of the Common, while the Goodwin family and the Dean and Canons of St George’s Chapel (in lieu of the church tithes with which they had been endowed) also received large areas. Small plots along the north side of Horton Road were granted to lesser landowners, where Victorian terraces of cottages were later built, literally on what had been the Common. The 20^th century Linchfield Road development is also on part of the Common, on land allocated at enclosure to the Earl of Harewood who owned the huge Southlea estate. The wide grassed plot at the foot of Ditton Road towards Linchfield Road is the most publicly accessible area on the site of the old Common still left, but it has none of the original functions or privileges once attached to the real Common – don’t try cutting turf for your fire or grazing your pig there, even if it is properly ringed!

One other much larger area survives as rough open ground, hidden
behind the houses on the SW of Horton Road down to Mill Lane,
with a way through to the Willowfields and the recreation ground
as can be seen in the aerial photo from Google Earth. While still
accessible, this triangle is no longer actually Common land, being privately owned and farmed after enclosure, although recent maps and local tradition still describe it as Datchet Common.

Part of it, near Mill Lane, has been used for gravel extraction and then filled with refuse and capped with soil. This part is owned by the Royal Borough and leased to Datchet Parish Council, while the area closer to Horton Road remains in private ownership.

There is no real map of Datchet Common; this one has been reconstructed from
the map and written text that makes up the enclosure ‘Award’, describing the
new and old ownership of each numbered and mapped plot. Those that were
described as ‘formerly Common’ have been identified and amalgamated to
produce this plan. The same process allowed the open fields to be identified as
well; parts of Linchfield and Marshfield can be seen in this detail but the complete
map is in Datchet Past, available in The Bridge.

The long strip marked Forty Common connected the corner of Datchet Common
to Southlea Farm and provided a round route for agricultural workers to reach the
furthest eastern parts of the village’s land. Its name is from Old English (ie Anglo
Saxon), meaning a peninsula of higher ground projecting into a marshy area; exactly
the situation at low-lying Southlea (though it is called the ‘banana field’ by the
Berryman family who farm there now). At enclosure the Forty was absorbed into
the Harewood’s Southlea estate but remains as a distinct separate field, sometimes
cultivated but in part rough open land as it once was.