family-history – The Mosborough One-Place Study

Mosborough’s Open Fields – A Glimpse into Our Medieval Landscape

Long before today’s neat hedgerows and housing estates, Mosborough’s landscape was shaped by a very different system of farming — the open fields. The earliest permanent buildings were probably clustered around the site of Mosborough Hall, perched on the 127m contour line — the highest point locally — overlooking Mosborough Moor to the west. This commanding spot may even have been the site of the early English “fort of the moor”, from which Mosborough gets its name.

From here, the surrounding slopes were divided into great open fields, their layout still traceable in the shape of later enclosures and in the place-names recorded in manor court rolls and 18th-century maps. These fields weren’t hedged or fenced like modern ones. Instead, they were divided into long narrow strips, cultivated by different families under a shared, carefully regulated system. Each villager farmed scattered strips across different fields, sharing ploughing schedules, crop rotations and grazing rights.

Three main fields surrounded Mosborough (see image attached):

Street Field lay west of Mosborough Hall, bounded by Station Road, Street Field Lane, Hollow Lane and Beighton Road. By 1795 it covered around 67 acres, divided between 18 occupiers. Parts of this land, including Swainhouse Field and Knowle Hill Field, had earlier been divided into smaller plots, hinting at centuries of cultivation. It has been suggested that the Streetfield name is associated with the Roman road, Rykneld Street.

Church Field stretched south towards St Peter and St Paul’s parish church. By the late 18th century, it was bisected by Sheffield Road and enclosed by Beighton and Park Mill (now Gashouse Lane) Roads, covering about 95 acres worked by 12 occupiers.

Street Field and Church Field were separated by a group of long strip-like fields running east to west, named Green Balk; “balk” in Middle English meaning an unploughed ridge of land separating fields. In a manorial survey dated 1480 Green Balk was occupied by Robert Rotherham of Mosborough.

Lee Field lay north of Mosborough Moor. In 1795, just two men – the Earl Fitzwilliam of Wentworth Woodhouse and Thomas Staniforth of Mosborough – held its 32 acres. Nearby “Harbour Friths” fields to the north, with their irregular shapes and woodland names, point to early assarts – clearings cut from the medieval woods.

Plumley had its own open field, St John’s Field, lying south of Plumley Lane and stretching down towards Lady Bank Wood. This 12-acre field was shared between four occupiers, and may correspond to “The Singels Field” mentioned in manor records of 1634.

Under the old open field system, each of these great fields would have been divided into strips and cultivated according to a communal crop rotation. One field might lie fallow while another grew winter wheat and a third spring barley or oats. After harvest, the fields were thrown open for common grazing, and livestock wandered over the stubble, manuring the land for the next year’s crop. It was a cooperative way of farming that tied the whole village together in a shared rhythm of work, decision-making, and landscape.

This ancient system survived here for centuries, gradually giving way to enclosure in the late 18th century, when hedges were planted, boundaries fixed, and strips consolidated into larger fields. But the names of Street Field, Church Field, Lee Field, and St John’s Field still echo the medieval past — reminders that beneath our roads and housing estates lies a landscape once ruled by communal plough and shared pasture.

“The Malthouse”, Station Road, Mosborough

The story of the Malthouse on Station Road begins in 1818, on land that had only recently been transformed. For centuries, Mosborough Green had been open ground, where villagers grazed their animals in the old communal way. But the Enclosure Act of 1796 changed all that, carving the Green into private plots. One of these, a modest parcel beside Station Road, was allotted to Thomas Lindley. On it, new buildings soon rose—the beginnings of the Malthouse.

By 1826 the property had taken shape: a house with its garden, a stable and cowhouse, and, most importantly, the maltings that gave the site its name. Its first known occupant was Jonathan Oates, a maltster born in 1762, whose trade was essential to brewing and village life. Just a year later, however, Jonathan decided to sell up, advertising the property in the Sheffield Independent as “newly built within the last nine years.” His name then fades from local records. George Foster, writing years later, recalled that Oates had emigrated to America, and indeed his widow Hannah died in Marietta, Ohio in 1867. Jonathan himself disappeared into the wide unknown of the New World.

Ownership next passed to Harvey Slagg, eldest son of William Slagg of Mosborough Hall. Harvey had married well—Eliza Lowe of Unstone in 1829—but life was not kind to him. Eliza died young in 1836, and before long Harvey’s finances crumbled. He tried to sell the malthouse, kiln and dwelling in 1847, but within two years he was bankrupt.

The timing was unfortunate. Across England, the malting trade was in decline, caught between changing tastes, new technologies, and tightening regulations. By 1853, when the property went under the hammer again, it was in the hands of a Mrs Billam—likely the widow of Samuel Billam, a maltster and innkeeper at the Fox and Hounds in Marsh Lane. Samuel had briefly operated the Malthouse before his death in 1852, leaving his widow to manage what she could.

Soon afterwards the property passed into the hands of William Lowe, who took it on after his father’s bankruptcy. He let it to William Turner, a prosperous sickle and reaping-hook maker who also farmed thirty acres. Turner, however, had little use for the old maltings, which lay idle and unoccupied for years. By the time he retired in 1875, the industry that had once justified their construction had vanished altogether.

That same year the Ordnance Survey shows the inevitable: the kiln and malthouse were pulled down, and a neat row of cottages rose in their place. They became known as Malthouse Row. The original house and outbuildings survived, though, and by 1881 they were home to Charles Poole, a farmer and carrier who ran a regular service between Mosborough and Sheffield’s Pheasant Inn. His life at the Malthouse was long and steady; he raised his family there and, poignantly, it was from there that he petitioned the Burial Board in 1877 to allow his infant son William to be the first interment in Eckington’s new cemetery.

Charles Poole lived on in the old house until 1923, dying at the remarkable age of 88. He was buried in the same grave as his child, closing a chapter in the life of a building that had witnessed the rise and fall of Mosborough’s malting trade, and then found quieter purpose as a family home.

With thanks to the current owner of the property for assistance and for permission to publish this short summary.

Mosborough Methodist Church, Chapel Street (built 1888)

Mosborough Methodist Church on Chapel Street is the village’s late-Victorian Wesleyan chapel—solidly built in local stone, modest in scale, and still busy with worship and community life today. Its story sits alongside Mosborough’s other nonconformist landmarks, especially the Primitive Methodist chapel on Queen Street, and helps explain how Methodism shaped village life from the 19th century into the present.

Wesleyan Methodists were active locally by the 19th century; in 1888 the congregation raised a new chapel on Chapel Street (later commonly called “Trinity”). Surviving records and centenary material confirm the 1888 date and continuous activity through the 20th century. Leaders’ Meeting minute books survive from 1891 to 1968, and a centenary booklet—Mosborough Methodist Church: a hundred years, 1888–1988—was produced in 1989.

Around 1900 the church expanded its footprint with a substantial two-storey Sunday School/Church Hall just round the corner on Cadman Street. The hall’s materials and detailing were chosen to match the chapel, giving the site a coherent “campus” feel.

Stand at the gates on Chapel Street and the façade tells you almost everything about late-Victorian Wesleyan taste:

A simple gable-front composition in coursed local sandstone, with a centred arched doorway and flanking lancet windows.
Above the door, a prominent wheel (rose) window—a favourite Nonconformist motif of the 1880s–90s—signals the main worship space within.
The side elevation continues the theme with tall lancets and shallow buttressing; the whole is sturdy rather than showy, built for durability and good acoustics.

When the various Methodist streams united nationally in 1932, the Wesleyan chapel on Chapel Street became Mosborough Methodist Church within what is now the Sheffield Circuit—the arrangement you’ll still find today.

‘Ivy House’, 120 High Street, Mosborough

The land upon which 120 High Street is built was formerly part of the common land known as Mosborough Moor. In 1796, Enclosure Commissioners divided the common into allotments that were granted to those with landholdings within the Manor. Allotment No. 152, (edged red on the attached extract from the Enclosure plan) upon which 120 High Street was built was granted to John Pedley (1740-1809) of Plumley Hall, Mosborough. There were no buildings on this allotment in 1796, and George Sanderson’s map “Twenty Miles around Mansfield”, indicates that the land was still clear of buildings in 1835. The 1875 Ordnance Survey map of Mosborough shows the house and garden with a layout very similar to how it looks today. A report of an auction sale in 1890 reveals that John Ibbotson Hayes (1801-1890), the former Schoolmaster of Mosborough School, had been the owner of six properties in High Street, one of which, No. 120, was occupied by a family by the name of Waller. The 1891 Census confirms that this was Thomas Waller, a coal carter, with his wife Annis and sons George and Elijah. Hayes had occupied the neighbouring house and yard (“Hayes Yard”, since demolished). All six of the houses were purchased by Henry Watson, a butcher of Renishaw. Thomas Waller died at 120 High Street in 1900, and it appears that his wife and one of their sons were living there at the time of the 1901 Census. By the Census of 1911, the Hewitt family were in residence and 120 High Street had been newly named as “Ivy House”, comprising of 6 rooms. Kitson Hewitt, 34, a colliery engineer and his wife Mary Hannah had been joined by two young lodgers, Gwendoline Amy Green (27) and Gertrude Amy Greenwood (23), female teachers. Hewitt was Honorary Secretary of the Mosborough Working Men’s Club, treasurer and sidesman at St. Mark’s parish church and a member of the Conservative and Unionist Party, having unsuccessfully contested elections to the Eckington Parish Council. Hugh Rowbotham, farmer, and his family of six children moved into 120 High Street some time before 1921. He died there in 1936.