Clothall is a parish lying on the north slope of the chalk hills of Hertfordshire, just off the Great North Road, which passes through the adjoining parish of Baldock. Approaching it from the south, one gradually ascends the long slope from Hertford, and suddenly at the summit has before one a far-stretching view over the flat country of Bedfordshire and adjoining counties. The road descends steeply and passes through the Clothall common fields. At the time of my visit the harvest (of barley) was being gathered in; the arrangement of the field was clearly visible. The long, narrow strips of stubble, never quite straight, and never quite of uniform width, were divided by “balks” of grass, grown tall and gone to seed. Each balk was reduced to as narrow dimensions as it could be, without endangering its continued existence, for the sake of separating one strip from another. A view of this field is shown in Mr. Seebohm’s “English Village Community.”
But there is in Clothall the husk only, and no surviving kernel of the English village community. The whole of the field, estimated at about 600 acres, is let to a single farmer, who cultivates it on modern principles, but who is bound to preserve the balks. There are but three owners of land in the field. Fifty-six acres are glebe, the remainder belongs in alternate strips to the lord of the manor (the Marquis of Salisbury) and to a gentleman to whom possession passed by marriage, from a family which had been engaged in brewing. The land is famous for barley, and the owner of a local brewery in the early or middle part of the nineteenth century gradually bought up nearly all the land in the common field that did not belong to the lord of the manor. Application was made in 1885 to the Board of Agriculture for enclosure, the manorial authorities and the vicar both desiring it, but the other owner objected.
It is interesting to find that the villagers still hold to the tradition that they have rights of common upon the balks, a tradition which is probably well founded. But they dare not attempt to exercise those rights. An enclosure here, accompanied by the provision of ground for allotments and recreation, would be a boon for the villagers; and it would probably pay the landowners to get rid of those balks, which are as great a nuisance agriculturally as they are interesting from an antiquarian point of view.