Farms and Farming

As in most rural villages, farming was for centuries the beating heart of life in Tasburgh, providing not only a living for the farmers and employment for many labourers, but also directly supporting trades such as milling and malting, the blacksmith and the wheelwright, and indirectly the shops and pubs used by village residents. However, not all the money that farming generated stayed in the village because much of the land was owned not by the farmers but by landlords, many of whom were outside investors. Indeed Tasburgh's Tithe Apportionment Award of 1840 shows that Alexander Campbell who lived in Great Plumstead owned and rented out a total of 411 acres to five different tenants, and that the only farms in the village which were not then tenanted were Elms Farm and Hall Farm, belonging to Commander William Gwyn of Tasburgh Hall, and he could hardly be described as a working farmer! Between the two of them they owned well over half of all the land in the parish but there were also smaller, resident investors such as Henry Buck who built The Firs and subsequently purchased the tenanted Lime Tree Farm and Cottage Farm, and whose father had owned a small farm, now White Horse Cottage, which was also rented out.

However, in early medieval times almost all of the land would have been owned by the Lords of the Manor, and under the feudal system of farming villagers would have rented strips of land in the open fields and grazed their livestock on the common lands, which in Tasburgh lay mainly along the flood plain between Low Road and the River Tas. In those days the type of agriculture being practised was much more influenced by soil types than it is today. In the north and west of the county the light soils were easily tilled for corn, while the extensive heaths favoured wool production; great landowners made fortunes from exploiting such natural resources and they tended to inhibit the rise of any middle ranking or yeoman farmer class. By contrast the heavy clay lands of South Norfolk were more difficult to cultivate, and as a result villages here tended to have weaker or absentee lords because mixed farming with much dairying rarely led to accumulations of any great wealth or power. It did however enable the emergence of a yeoman farming class who were able with the lord's permission to consolidate and enclose strips in the open fields and thereby enjoy a reasonably prosperous standard of living.

In Tasburgh the clay lands are concentrated in the north and east of the parish whilst the better drained and more easily cultivated land lay along the sides of the river valley. It was by no accident therefore that from the 16th century onwards yeomen began to build their distinctive timber framed farmhouses along Saxlingham Lane and Low Road, being the boundary between access to water, and grazing for their livestock along the river, and their land holdings in the former open fields on the side of the valley, such as Burrfeld, the Borough Field, which ran up to the plateau of the hill fort.

Over the next three hundred years there was little change, and in the 1950s there were still eight farms spread along the lower part of the village, with another six in upper Tasburgh. Some, such as Bridge End Farm with just six acres or Lime Tree Farm, had shrunk to little more than market gardens, whilst Cottage Farm and Rookery Farm, with less than twenty acres each were hardly much bigger, and a number of farmers also operated as butchers. Historically, the two largest farms were Old Hall Farm and White Horse Farm but by the end of the 20th century changes in agricultural practices and farming subsidies meant that even they had ceased to be viable; their lands were sold off, barns were converted to residential use and farmhouses became private residences. Most of the undeveloped land in the village is now farmed or used by businesses based outside the village, and one of the largest land holdings belongs to the Redwings Horse Sanctuary, with its headquarters at nearby Hapton Hall. Indeed Hill Farm at the junction of Fairstead Lane and the main road is now Tasburgh's only remaining traditional family farm.