One contd. 3

These were Forests with a capitol 'F', not an area densely overgrown with trees, but a Forest in the ancient legal sense, a place of mixed and carefully managed areas of woodland and coppice with clearings and pastures. Something else which would surprise the modern eye, would be the absence of that familiar tidy patchwork of fields and hedgerows and drystone walls, which has come to be regarded as an essential feature of the English county scene. Tudor England was still largely farmed on the old medieval open-field system, with the land divided into half acre strips separated by narrow unploughed paths known as balks, while everyone's cattle grazed together on a communal pasture. Essex was one of the first counties to adopt the newer system. Enclosures were slowly coming in to make farming more profitable.

In places where enclosure meant no more than parcelling out the village land into small farms by mutual consent, the result was beneficial to all concerned. Unfortunately, however, enclosure could also mean wholesale landgrabbing by the rich at the expense of the poor cottagers. One class who did fairly well out of the rising prices and improved methods of husbandry, were the Yeoman farmers. Happily, many of the "Swans" in our narrative were, during the 16th and 17th centuries came from this fortunate class.

Robert and Isabel raised their six children in Ickleton, a small village on the Cambridgeshire-Essex border. John was born in 1559 followed by William in 1561 and Edward in 1563. Joan was not born until five years later in 1568, then Margaret in 1570 and finally Michael in 1571. Ickleton is an ancient village mentioned in the Domesday Book and its quaint old church has Roman masonry in its foundations. The remains of 12th century wall paintings were discovered after a fire in 1979. There are traces of a fulling-mill at Ickleton, where cloth was thickened with ‘fuller’s earth’. It is one of two built in the village during the Middle Ages, when the wool trade flourished there. The surviving foundations of the mill are near Frogge Hall, a 16th-century house which gets its name from the fact that frogs once infested the damp streets of the village. The oldest house in Ickleton, The Hovells, once belonged to a Cistercian monastery. Many of its houses with handsome Georgian frontages are much older behind. Much of the property in the parish was in monastic hands until the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, and several houses take their names from their old owners. Caidrees Manor, from Calder Abbey in Cumbria; Durhams, from the Canons of Dereham in Norfolk; and Mowbrays, from the Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk who owned it before it passed to Clare College, Cambridge,