hters, Margaret and Isabel, and their respective husbands, between whom the estate was partitioned. The Wicken portion was assigned to Isabel and Robert Pigott. (fn. 227)
The Medieval Estates.
In 1086 there was land for 10 ploughs on Robert d'Oyley's manor at Wicken. There were three ploughs in demesne, with seven serfs, and seven villeins and three bordars had four ploughs. There were 10 acres of meadow and wood 11 furlongs in length and six in breadth. The value of the estate had risen from 40s. to 100s. since 1066. (fn. 228) Maine's manor was much smaller, with land for three ploughs, although there were two in demesne (with one serf) and two farmed by five villeins and a bordar. The estate included six acres of meadow and wood 10 furlongs in length and three in breadth. Its value was unchanged since 1066 at 40s. (fn. 229)
John Dive's lands at Wicken in 1272 included four carucates of land in demesne and eight virgates in villeinage, together with 60s. rent from free tenants. (fn. 230) In 1427 there were three carucates of arable and four of pasture in demesne on the same manor, as well as a dovecote, worth 2s. yearly beyond charges. The tenanted land included nine messuages, each with one virgate; there were also 18 a. of meadow and 60 a. of wood, cropped as coppice on a twenty-year cycle. Rents of assize amounted to 37s. yearly. (fn. 231)
Hamon son of Hamon's estate at Wicken was said to be worth £4 10s. yearly in 1185, when stocked with two ploughs, 50 sheep, four cows, four sows and a boar; because there was no stock, it was worth only 37s. (fn. 232) In 1247 there were three carucates of arable worth £8 in demesne on William FitzHamon's manor, his customary tenants had 4½ virgates, and there was pasture worth 4s. (fn. 233)
Wick Dive and Wick Hamon each had their own open fields in the Middle Ages, as, it seems, did the hamlet of Dagnall which later shrank to a single farmstead. The best evidence for this is the survival of an unusually large number of separate fields in 1717, when the Wicken Park estate was thoroughly surveyed and (presumably for the first time) mapped. (fn. 234) At that date there was an extensive area of open-field arable on the south-eastern side of the parish, occupying all the ground between the modern Buckingham road and the Ouse, apart from a strip of meadow alongside the river itself. The open field continued to the north of the main road, taking up most of the land to the south-east and north-east of the village as far as the parish boundary at Kings Brook, apart from some small closes near Dagnall and another block of old inclosure to the east of Wicken Park. Most of the land to the south-west of the village was either wooded in 1717 or was perhaps formerly included in the Spencers' park; the small amount of land between the village and Wicken Wood in the north of the parish seems likely to have been cleared piecemeal from earlier woodland and never cultivated in common. Much of this land was laid down as leys in 1717. The open-field land to the south and east of the Buckingham road is mostly described as the 'Out Field', apart from a small area near the mill called Mount Field. Great and Little Dagnall fields lay on either side of the main road, while to the north of Dagnall itself were Kingdom Field, the Great Field and Wood Furlong Field. Adjoining the village to the south were several smaller pieces of open field, named Hale Hole Fields, Penn Bush Fields, Culver Field and Park Corner Field, of which the two latter may have occupied land which had previously formed part of the park. (fn. 235) The survey groups the larger areas of arable further away from the village together as the 'Out Field' (683 a.), and lists separately another 250 a. made up of Kingdom Field, Stocking Field next Kingdom, Park Corner Field next Culver, and Culver Field. The two fields to the north-east of the village (Wood Furlong Field and Great Field) contained 114 and 127 acres respectively, of which 38 a. in the former and 32 a. in the latter were then laid down to pasture. Elsewhere the Out Field is described