New farmers on the medieval block

The ancient strip-farming methods pioneered in the Middle Ages are alive and kicking–and as effective as ever–in the north Nottinghamshire village of Laxton, as Ivo Dawnay discovers

- Ivo Dawnay

SOMETIMES, if very rarely, history and heritage trump efficiency. Nowhere is that truer than in Laxton, the north Nottinghamshire village that, uniquely, still manages its land in the medieval open-field, strip-farming tradition.

However, it takes people of goodwill to deliver it. When the Crown Estate decided to sell the 1,800-acre estate in 2018, there were widespread doubts as to whether anyone would be willing to take on this historic anachronism with all its complex covenants, undertakings and conditions attached. Whoever acquired the land would have to give guarantees that its 13 tenant farmers and their management by a Manorial Court—the last fully functioning one in the country— would be preserved.

Present-day Laxton, after all, is a historical accident. Located seven miles east of Sherwood Forest, a 15-minute drive north from Newark, it lies in the undulating silvery-black Keuper marl soils that characterise the land that skirts the Dukeries. To the untrained eye, the village of largely 18th-century brick houses looks much like any other, although I noted, with mild surprise, the large number of farms and yards set within the curtilage of the settlement—a feature of medieval farming.