Burgage plots
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In medieval England and Scotland, and some parts of the Welsh Marches, burgage plots or burgage tenements were inclosed fields extending the confines of a medieval town, established by the lord of the manor, as divisions of the 'open' manorial fields. The burgesses (equivalents of "burghers") to whom these tracts were allotted, as tenants of the enclosed lands, paid a cash rent instead of, as previously, occupying land by virtue of having given feudal service. In 1207, for instance, Maurice Paynell, the Lord of the Manor of Leeds, granted a charter to 'his burgesses of Leeds' to build a 'new town', and so created the first borough of Leeds, Briggate, a street running north from the River Aire.[1]
These burgesses had to be freemen: those who were entitled to practise a trade within the town and to participate in electing members of the town’s ruling council.
In the very earliest chartered foundations, predating the Norman Conquest, the burgage plots were simply the ploughland strips of pre-existing agrarian settlements: in towns like Burford and Chipping Campden in Oxford or Cricklade in Wiltshire, the property on the road frontage extends in a very long garden plot behind the dwelling even today, as English property lines have remained very stable.
The basic unit of measurement was the perch which was 5.5 yards (5 m) and the plots can be identified today because they are in multiples of perches: at Cricklade most were 2 by 12 perches (10 by 60 m), while at Charmouth in Dorset, a charter of 1320 provided plots 4 by 20 perches long (20 by 100 m), giving a typical plot size of half an acre (2,000 m²), held at an annual rent of 6d.[2]
