Page 1 of 8 Langtoft a History By Richard Platt Langtoft is a small Fen edge village, a crossroad, one pub, one general store and two hairdressers. It has a primary school, village hall, one large playing field, three areas with play equipment and a church. A typical rural South Lincolnshire village, a wonderful place to live and discover; how it came to be, its history, its people and its future. I hope that this short history will interest, inform and perhaps stimulate others to research more deeply into Langtoft’s past. To correct where I have made errors add to where I have missed out and most important of all enjoy Langtoft’s rich past. There has been a settlement here for thousands of years, archaeological evidence definitely showing continuous habitation for the last two thousand years. Further finds would indicate much longer , another five or six thousand years, evidenced by the finds of ancient salt panning works at the edge of Langtoft Fen worked when sea levels were much higher and Langtoft must have been a seaside, flint tools of the Neolithic period and evidence that the weather was much warmer ! Settlement evidence is Iron Age with the remains of round houses being found where Reedman Close and Langtoft Primary School are now. Look at aerial photographs and you can still make out the circles on the school field where a group of round houses stood. On East End Romano British pottery has been found showing a continuous habitation of the site. King Street with its Roman Villas is close by. The Roman period of some 400 years seems to have been a settled one for our village the villagers being occupied in farming, wildfowling, and fishing in the fenlands. At times men would have been occupied in digging and then maintaining the Carr Dike , possibly a navigable “catch drain” from The Witham to The Nene, which can still be seen as a ditch after the houses on East End. Of course we don’t know what the settlement that we know as Langtoft was called except to say it was definitely not Langtoft!! The name we have now is Norse, given in the ninth century. The Angles next settled on the site probably peacefully mixing with the already established community, the pottery record shows a continuous unbroken line of habitation. With the advent of the Danish Viking incursions Langtoft got its name and a new Norse identity when “Mr Lang became the dominant landowner and the settlement became “Lang’s Toft“. I prefer this theory of the origin of Langtoft’s name to that which says it was “Long Toft“ but I could be quite wrong. Page 2 of 8 Interestingly Baston remained an Angle settlement on better agricultural land, richer than Langtoft, showing that the Norse settlement in the area was not a forced aggressive take over as is often assumed, and many even be the origin of the rivalry between the two villages ! Langtoft is first mentioned by name in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle When Earl Edwin recruited men from Deeping, Langtoft and Baston to repel a further Danish incursion into Lindsey with disastrous results; Earl Edwin’s force was defeated and the Danes swept through Kesteven burning as they came. The people of Langtoft would have hidden in the Fen until the danger had past then rebuilt their homes. Meadeshamsted (Peterborough) was destroyed, the Abbey burnt and the monks massacred. Under the rule of the Danish Kings, Cnute and his sons then Edward the Confessor, the area was relatively prosperous. The Villagers would have become mainly Christian and the first church would have been built on its present site which was undoubtedly the sacred place in the village and so the place of worship for the whole time of the village’s existence. An excavation of the site would be very interesting!! The life of the village would have settled in to what would have seemed to the villagers in timeless routine dominated by the seasons, obligations to the local thane and church ritual. 1066 changed all that! King Harold ll marched his army north to meet the threat of the great Norwegian King Harold Hardradder at York on his way up the Great North Road (A1) he would have called out the fryd; half of all able bodied men in the area to fight for him. Men of Langtoft would have been called in to the force. After the victory at Stamford Bridge, where the Norse army was destroyed, the surviving men for the village would have returned home rich with the spoils of victory as Harold went on to London and his defeat and death at the hands of William Duke of Normandy in October near Hastings. The following years were an economic disaster for the village whatever freedoms were enjoyed were swept away as village and land became the property of Crowland Abbey and fell in value as can be seen from the Doomsday Book entry in 1086 : “In Langtoft St Guthlac’s had and has 2 carucates of land taxable. Land for 6 ploughs. Now in lordship 1 plough; 8 villagers, 4 smallholders and 20 Freemen who have 5 ploughs. Meadow, 100 acres; woodland, 2s; marsh2 leagues long and 2 wide; arable land 15 furlongs long and 9 wide. Value before 1066 £4; now 60s (£3). Exactions 10s.” The Conquest brought about great social change new masters, new language (Norman French) new taxes and talk of unrest; Hereward of Bourne, the fighting at Ely, The Harrying of the North, starving refugees from Yorkshire and the execution Page 3 of 8 of Earl Waltheof of Ryhall husband of Countess Judith the kings niece all would have contributed to an uneasiness that would have unsettled everyone. Worse was to come; the power struggle between King Stephen and The Empress Matilda brought anarchy to the land, The Peterborough Chronicle expresses the agony of the country: “Every chieftain made castles and held them against the king; and they filled the land full of castles. They viciously oppressed the poor men of the land with castle-building work; when the castles were made, then they filled the land with devils and evil men. Then they seized those who had any goods, both by night and day, working men and women, and threw them into prison and tortured them for gold and silver with uncountable tortures, for never was there a martyr so tortured as these men were. One they hung by his feet and filled his lungs with smoke. One was hung up by the thumbs and another by the head and had coats of mail hung on his feet. One they put a knotted cord about his head and twisted it so that it went into the brains… I neither can nor may recount all the atrocities nor all the tortures that they did on the wretched men of this land. Christ slept, along with His saints, we suffered 19 winters for our sins." Gradually with the reign of Henry ll life became safer; trade, commerce and farming picked up and prosperity increased. Life in Langtoft would have returned to its routine of regular cycles of seasonality. By the late 1200s the climate was changing, the long warm spell of the last two hundred years was coming to an end, The yields from the wheat and barley fields around Langtoft began to fall and the Abbots of Crowland were not getting enough return and so the fields were turned over to sheep and the village of Stowe was pulled down to make way for sheep!! With colder winters and increased rainfall the harvests failed and people began to go hungry. The Hundred Years War with France began drawing off some of the surplus workers to fight on the continent. In 1348 the Black Death ravaged the country Crowland Abbey was devastated virtually all of the monks dying of the plague, the chronicler wrote just two words: “Magna mortalis” Langtoft must have suffered along with the rest. Recovery, as elsewhere, was slow with many setbacks as plague returned over the years. Crowland Abbey built a small priory where Barn Owl Close now stands. The pond is probably the remains of a carp pool and the “moat” a rabbit warren. Page 4 of 8 Although the church is well built there is no evidence of there ever being any stained glass in the windows demonstrating that Langtoft was a poor village as it always had been. The Abbey was not prepared to invest in its fabric and support the priory as well. But as literacy increased books and church records would have been kept in the church much as they are now; baptisms, marriages and burials, all written in Latin. The upheavals of the Reformation would have impacted on the economic and social scene in Langtoft; the dissolution of Crowland Abbey, the selling off of the little priory, the burning of church books including all records and new landlords. There would have been many unemployed monks begging and looking for work, no longer were the poor and destitute able to go to priory to receive alms and help. The safety net was swept away. New laws were enacted to deal with the problem of “sturdy beggars” who although fit would not get work. They were to be whipped at each town and village as they were returned to their place of birth, where they could be supported by the poor rate. New village officials were instituted; the parish constable, the church warden and the overseer of the poor. Each parish in England was responsible for its own poor, it had to raise a rate with which pay for the relief of the poor of the parish. It’s no wonder that records were scrupulously kept and audited! Anyone not belonging to the village would get relief, no one would be allowed to come and live in the village unless they had proof that their birth place would pay all their costs should they become chargeable on the parish, in effect they had to have a passport to go from place to place. From late Elizabethan times Langtoft as with all other villages records births, deaths and marriages. We know the names of vicars and prominent villagers, those in receipt of parish relief and from the parish registers occupations of the villagers. The Rev. Samuel Gregg was vicar of Langtoft in the 1590s he had a son who he named Hamlet; was Samuel an early fan of Shakespeare I wonder. He later went to London where he worked on the King James edition of the Bible, translating parts of book of Joshua. The new habit of smoking came to Langtoft quite early so much so that by 1620 a clay pipe maker was established on East End next to where the old school now stands. Page 5 of 8 Where the priory had stood the land was bought up and a hall built by the Hyde family with a farm, Hall Farm, and a deer park, where the small estate of that name stands. The Hydes also had a long drive made from King Street, then the main road, to the gates of the Hall. Reading through the parish books gives a fascinating insight into the life of the village through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is sad that these book are now in Lincoln Archives, although safe not easily accessible to the village. One learns that children were paid 1d for a hedgehog; thought of as vermin, that Theophilus Arris, the doctor was paid 7s 6d for the amputation of an arm and cure of the patient, not named! His tomb stone is the only one of slate in the churchyard. There was a school room in 1760 which was reroofed at parish expense, church wardens’ book. In the Parish Chest, now in Lincoln, are other papers of interest; Inventories, bastardy bonds, church terriers and settlement papers. The inventories give a window into the standards of living of the relatively well off in the village as only those worth over five pounds at the time of death needed to have one made up! Judith Hyde left monies to establish a charity for the relief of the poor which was later combined with that of Rev. Mossop to form The Hyde and Mossop Charity, which still is in existence. At the end of the 1700s The Hall was sold off room by room and the building reduced to rubble, and after the Napoleonic War a long period of agricultural decline set in and Langtoft became a very poor village noted for its immorality, drug taking and drunkenness! The Church despaired, but the Gang System, low wages, poor health meant that villagers had to work all hours, all weathers and whole families had to work. Five year olds to scare the birds, pick stones and help with gleaning at harvest time. Younger children were drugged with opium, “Godfrey’s Cordial” an opiate drink used to keep infants asleep, many never woke up having died of opium overdose! At five years old the children who survived had to be weaned off the opium often causing great distress as they struggled with the withdrawal symptoms. One chemist in Spalding reckoned to sell one hundred weight of opium a year! (About 56kg). Langtoft is even mentioned in Karl Marx “Das Capital”. To say you were from Langtoft in Communist Russia was worth a lot of free Vodka!! Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Capitalist Production [1867 Langtoft. A man lives here, in Wright's house, with his wife, her mother, and 5 children; the house has a front kitchen, scullery, bedroom over the front kitchen; front kitchen and bedroom, 12 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches; the whole ground floor, 21 feet 2 inches by 9 feet 5 inches. The bedroom is a garret; the walls run together into the roof like a sugar-loaf, a dormer-window opening in front. "Why did he live here? On account of the garden? No; it is very small. Rent? High, 1s. 3d. per week. Near his work? No; 6 miles away, so that he walks daily, to and fro, 12 miles. He lived there, because it was a tenantable cot," and because he wanted to have a cot for himself alone, anywhere, at any price, and in any conditions. The following are the statistics of 12 houses in Langtoft, with 12 bedrooms, 38 adults, and 36 children. There is a family of Wrights listed in the 1861 census : no.72 It would seem that William died and his son and family moved in with his mother when Karl Marx did his survey. At its worst the Gang System meant that children and young adults were gathered together in a gang and worked in the fields the gang master taking the pay and providing board and lodging. There was no regulations; the young people were poorly fed, and given appalling lodgings. In Langtoft mixed gangs slept together in barns or lofts with no supervision you can imagine what immoralities the church men and reformers assumed went on under the cover of darkness. Page 6 of 8 Page 7 of 8 Social reformers had a field day with it all, Karl Marx saw Communism as the answer, Trade Unions tried to form, and Kier Hardy started the Labour Party. Langtoft’s poor have a place in the history of social reform of this country. Perhaps as a reaction to the concerns expressed a school was planned by the church and Baron Willoughby de ERESBY which was built on East End opening in 1859. The school log books dating from1864 are in existence and are held in the new school on Manor Way, these provide another window onto Langtoft life. The behaviour of the children was to say the least appalling! The master thrashed both boys and girls without any noticeable effect on their conduct. Even school inspectors thought this was too much commenting in the log book that there was too much caning by the school master. At this time Langtoft boasted five pubs! The Black Bull (West End), The Royal Oak (The Cross Roads), The Wagon and Horses (The Cross Roads), The Duke of Wellington (East End) and The Blue Bell (Fen Road). It should be remembered that the cross roads did not exist at this time the Deeping road came straight; through where the new cemetery is now, to the church and the doglegged to turn right by The Wagon and Horses on its way to Baston. Langtoft also had a bakers where the village sign is now, a butchers where Amici hairdressers is , a blacksmiths where the car sales is and a general shop which is still there. The census returns show that the population of Langtoft rose to a peak in 1841 then steadily declined. Year Inhabitants 1801 386 1831 606 1841 778 1871 698 1891 533 1911 496 The figures amply demonstrate the drift from country to town typical of England throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Life was very hard for most living in Victorian Langtoft crowded living conditions, poor pay, little sanitation; earth closet at bottom of the garden, no running water just a well or pump. It is no wonder that the five pubs did good trade, drink often being the only relief from the hardships of life. Not all was bleak every year in October Langtoft had the village feast, two weeks of eating, drinking and holiday to celebrate the end of harvest. On May day the young girls of the village went out and gathered; “Garlands” flowers from the hedge rows and fields, and then they went round to each house and gave a Garland. From medieval times Langtoft had three main streets ; West and East Ends, Back Lane and Smiths Road. These ran parallel to each other east to west, Back Lane on the south side ,Smiths Road on the north and West and East End in the centre. The modern A15 did not exist, it was just a track that linked The Deepings and Baston. The main road was King Street the old Roman road to Lincoln. Back Lane Path of old Deeping road Smiths Road On the south side of Back Lane it is possible to make out building marks using aerial photographs. Page 8 of 8