The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Chapter Fourteen
Landscapes of the Middle Ages
Rural settlement and manors
Paul Stamper
FRAMEWORKS
To most British archaeologists and historians, the Middle Ages (Middle, that is, between the
Classical world and that of the Renaissance when the term was first used) begins in 1066 with the
Norman Conquest of England. While many would admit that this over-emphasizes the significance
of what was essentially a political coup, the later eleventh century fell anyway in a period of
significant changes sufficient by themselves to define a new age. At various times over the previous
century or so, parish churches had proliferated, fully integrated manorial estates had evolved,
nucleated settlements and open field systems had been established in all parts of lowland England,
and Romanesque (Norman) architecture had arrived. There is less agreement about when the
Middle Ages ended, although historians generally take as their marker the Battle of Bosworth in
1485 which brought to a close the Wars of the Roses. Archaeologists, more attuned to the material
world, tend to see the medieval world continuing until the 1540s, when the Dissolution of the
monasteries not only brought down those key medieval institutions but also saw a redistribution
of something like a third of the land of England, as monastic estates were sold off into lay (nonreligious)
ownership.
Those five centuries pivot about the mid-fourteenth century, and especially the first and most
awful visitation in 1348–9 of bubonic plague, the Black Death, which killed a third of the country’s
population. This accelerated and accentuated changes that were already afoot (Platt 1996). Labour,
until then plentiful and cheap, was no longer so. More importantly, as the land of the dead was
redistributed, far fewer families had to live at bare subsistence level and prey to starvation if their
meagre acreage of crops failed. The greater availability of land similarly enabled the more
enterprising peasants to start to put together larger holdings, and to begin to take on the
characteristics of the modern farmer.
There is one other pivotal development that significantly affects the study of the Middle Ages,
and this is the explosion in written record keeping that occurred in the thirteenth century. Within
the space of a few decades around the middle of that century, title to land, estate accounts, and
legal proceedings all began routinely to be made in writing—a technology previously very restricted
in its application. Before then, little was recorded in writing other than the doings of kings and
their battles, but thereafter for many half-acres we know their full tenurial history and for many
estates their productivity down to the last bushel of grain and piglet. Michael Clanchy has calculated
that in the thirteenth century alone 8 million charters (deeds) may have been produced for England’s