ROPSLEY
AND HUMBY: GREAT HUMBY AND LITTLE HUMBY
Great
Humby is now virtually deserted, and the earthworks at Little Humby indicate
that settlement in its vicinity was formerly of somewhat greater extent than at
present (Fig 14). However, little independent early documentation survives to
trace the varying fortunes of either, for throughout much of their history they
were small hamlets which were dependent on neighbouring settlements. Thus, in
the medieval period both were in the twelve-carucate hundred, and then vill, of
Ropsley, and Little Humby belonged to the Albini manor that was situated there,
while Great Humby was a chapelry of Old Somerby and parcel of the Aincurt fee
in the same settlement(1). Nevertheless, there is a separate account of Humby
in Domesday Book, and this seems to refer exclusively to an estate in Great
Humby since the land belonged to the honour of Walter de Aincurt. At that time
there were 15 sokemen, one villein, and one bordar there, indicating a sizeable
population of perhaps 60 souls or so (2). The land probably remained soke until
sometime between 1212 and 1242 when it was subenfeoffed and a manor house was
built, probably on the site of the old hall (3). Little Humby is more difficult
to identify in the sources. It would seem, however, that the settlement was
included in the estate of Ropsley until the thirteenth century, but by 1303
there were two tenants of the fee, said to be situated in Ropsley and Humby,
and it is likely that one of them, possibly Robert de Kirton, had a separate
manor house in Little Humby by that time (4).
In both Great and Little Humby, then,
manorialisation was late and probably never complete, and the fact seems to
reflect the basic nature of society and settlement in the area. Socage tenure
was all but universal in the eleventh century, and dispersed clusters of farms
were probably the predominant form of settlement. Thus, Ropsley itself appears
to be polyfocal with at least two greens, and Little Humby may have had a
similar form. The present hamlet is grouped around a small triangle of ground,
but one of the groups of earthworks surveyed, Fig. known locally as Overton Green (5), is situated a hundred or so
metres to the east. They may therefore represent a discrete nucleus, and it is
not impossible that this was the now lost settlement of Ogarth which was a
member of Ropsley in the fourteenth century (6). Both characteristics are
probably a function of assarting, for, as place-names and Domesday Book
indicate, the area was densely wooded in the early Middle Ages, and
consequently it was not readily amenable to seigneurial exploitation at an
early date. As elsewhere, however, changing economic and climatic conditions
precipitated changes in the fourteenth century and settlement began to
gravitate to the primary centres and peripheral hamlets to shrink and
disappear. By the sixteenth century both Great and Little Humby had attained
their present modest size.
Both earthwork sites were brought to attention as a result of the
Ropsley parish survey carried out by a Manpower Services team for the then
South Lincolnshire Archaeological Unit (7). The Great Humby earthworks had
already been noted as a shrunken village but the Overton Green site was an
entirely new discovery (8). It occupies an area of about 150 by 300 metres,
under grass at the time of survey. The chief feature is an east-west track
across the northern edge of the close, the line of which continues eastwards
towards the township of Sapperton and is still followed by a public footpath
(Fig 15). The remains of a quickthorn hedge separated the track from the rest
of the field. A series of ditched enclosures appears to be house platforms,
although some irregularity in the central area may have been caused by removal
of soil or building material. Less pronounced earthworks can be seen in the
arable field to the east, where stone walls have been ploughed out and where a
quantity of medieval pottery of at least tenth to fourteenth century date has
been recovered (8).
At Great Humby the earthworks fall
into two groups, one north (Fig 16) and one south-west (Fig 17) of the
seventeenth century chapel (9). The area immediately north of this building is
marked as the site of Great Humby Hall, and still contains two large linked
water-filled moats. In the field north of these moats, and south of Overton
Green, a small mound levelled in 1981 was thought to have been a mill mound.
1. Lincs
DB, 18/24; 31/4; FA ii Li, 145,
191; BF, 1037; D. M. Owen, 'Medieval
Chapels in Lincolnshire', LHA 10,
(1975), 20. Before the Conquest Great Humby was probably in the parish of
Ropsley, for in 1086 the customs and tithes of the land were said to belong to
the church of St Peter (Lincs DB,
72/56). The division of the land of Tori, who held both Ropsley and Old Somerby
in 1066, between two tenants-in-chief in the reign of the Conqueror seems to
have also shaped the boundaries of parishes in the area. Great Humby was
administered with Somerby from the sixteenth century as a member of its parish,
and it is possible that it had been in the vill of Somerby at an earlier
period.
2. Lincs
DB, 31/4.
3. BF,
1037.
4. FA
ii Li, 145. Kirton Wood is situated in the south of Ropsley township and may
have originally belonged to Humby.
5. Pers. comm. T. Lane.
6. FA
ii Li, 191; Lincs DB, lxii.
7. 'Archaeological
Notes for 1979', LHA 15, (1980), 78-9.
8. Medieval
Village Research Group Annual Reports 27, 1979, 8 and 28, 1980, 7, Fig. 5,.
9. Pevsner, Lincs, 552-3.