HISTORY (MEDIEVAL TO 1898)
The land that forms Eastfield Park now lies entirely within the Headlands Ward of West Northamptonshire Council (and Northampton Town Council) but from medieval times to 1900 it fell within the Parishes of Abington and Weston Favell, the boundary between the two parishes running through the area that is now Eastfield Park Lake.
In medieval England, most of the land within a manor was divided into strips. Each strip was managed by an individual peasant farmer who paid rent and provided labour to the Lord of the Manor. The strips were arranged in large open fields with no fences or hedges. The landscape would have looked vastly different to that seen today.
The medieval strips were cultivated with ploughs that had only one cutting blade, or ploughshare (as above). As the plough moved forward along one side of a strip it turned soil to the right, towards the centre of the strip. At the end of the strip, the plough turned and moved back along the other side of the strip, again turning soil towards the centre. Over time, a ridge formed down the middle of the strip, resulting in the corrugations (‘ridge & furrow’) seen in several parts of Eastfield Park today (as below).
The presence of areas of conspicuous ridge and furrow in the Park is evidence of arable farming in medieval times, but in more recent times it would appear that the land was mainly used as permanent pasture.
In Abington manor, open fields were enclosed in the 17th century. This means that the large open fields were divided into smaller enclosures (‘closes’) separated by fences or hedges. The enclosed fields were generally owned and managed by a single individual. This allowed for greater efficiency but most of the manor’s poorer people lost access to land for farming.
The first enclosed fields in the Abington were much larger than more recent fields. The enclosure known as ‘The Bushie Close’ (later called ‘Great Bushy Close’, shaded green on the above map) stretched all the way from the Kettering Road to where Greenfield Avenue is today. It included almost all the land that now forms the western half of Eastfield Park. (The green line on the map shows the outline of today’s Park.) In a similar way, nearly all the land in the eastern half of today’s Park was part of the enclosure known as ‘Weston Great Close’ (shaded yellow on the map) in the Manor of Weston Favell. These large enclosures were later divided into the smaller fields shown by the finer black lines on the background 19th century Ordnance Survey map.
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Apart from the area adjacent to Booth Lane, there is little agreement between the current park boundaries and the earlier field boundaries.
The above two maps (1671 and 1840) contrast the large enclosures of the late 17th century with the smaller fields of the 19th century. The smaller fields have largely been created by simply dividing the original enclosures. The large wooded enclosure known as ‘The Bushie Close’ (labelled 5 on the 1671 map) has been divided into three smaller fields (76, 77 and 78) without trees, but the Bullring, still present in Easfield Park, is clearly shown in Field 77.