Qualla: Laxton, Nottinghamshire

Laxton, Nottinghamshire: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. A 1635 manuscript map sits in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. It was drawn by Mark Pierce, who walked the parish of Laxton in Nottinghamshire and recorded every strip of arable land in every open field, every furlong, every headland and balk. If you took that map to Laxton today and stood in the South Field with it in your hand, you would still be able to find your way. The Mill Field, the South Field, and the West Field still exist. They are still divided into strips. The strips are still worked in common by the farmers of the village, who still answer to a Court Leet that meets each year to enforce the boundaries. Nowhere else in England does this happen.

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Laxton, Nottinghamshire: What Medieval Farming Actually Looked Like

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Patterson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Before the enclosures of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries swept the English countryside into the neat hedged fields we now think of as timeless, most villages farmed their arable in common. The land was divided into two or three or four great unhedged fields. Each field was spl...

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Image: Michael Patterson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Laxton, Nottinghamshire: The Last One Working

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robert Goulden, CC BY-SA 2.0. Three open fields remain at Laxton - Mill Field, South Field, and West Field. A fourth, the East Field, was enclosed in earlier centuries and is now a patchwork of small holdings. The strips themselves have changed over time: in the Middle Ages a single strip represented roughly ...

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Image: Robert Goulden | CC BY-SA 2.0

Laxton, Nottinghamshire: Not a Museum

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit whichwould, Public domain. It is tempting, when you read about Laxton, to imagine a heritage exhibit - a village preserved in aspic, like one of those reconstructed Iron Age roundhouses school groups visit. Laxton is the opposite of that. The farmers here own land outside the open fields as well, and they ...

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Image: whichwould | Public domain

Laxton, Nottinghamshire: The Court Still Meets

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit R J Higginson, CC BY 3.0. Once a year the Court Leet still sits, examines the state of the boundaries, hears the complaints of farmers whose neighbours have ploughed an inch too far, and makes its rulings. Television has come twice to film the spectacle - Terry Jones' Medieval Lives in 2004, Michael Wood'...

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Image: R J Higginson | CC BY 3.0