The aerial view plan above is a copy of an ancient manuscript showing the town and port of Hull in the 14th century. The original is classified as ‘Copy of an Ancient Plan of Hull, reduced from a drawing in the British Museum, Cotton MSS, Augustus 1, Vol. 1, fol. 80’. One (of many) interesting features is that it shows the built-up area of the medieval town surrounded by rectangular fields with some apparently being orchards but with most sub-divided internally into oblong or square blocks, these next to the town walls which were in the process of being built in the 14th century (whether this means that the plan was drawn in the very late 14th century or that its dating is inaccurate I couldn’t say).
So were these blocks within the fields early allotments? Certainly the image of the built-up area shows little land available for gardens attached to the properties, so maybe the plots were detached gardens each allocated to a given burgage plot. Given certain circumstances the notion of a detached garden plot is perfectly reasonable, being attached to a property rather than a person and in that sense not, strictly speaking, an ‘allotment’.
(To be continued).