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

• 250 • Paul Stamper
The first point that can be made is that, traditionally, few historians exhibited any interest
whatsoever in material culture, whether it be the layout of a village’s fields, the design of its
houses or the range of their contents. That was especially so with regard to peasant society, which
was assumed to be (in every sense) rude, crude and unworthy of scholarly investigation. In fairness
to historians (and this is the second point), medieval documentary sources tend anyway to touch
only indirectly on these matters. Even after the making of written records proliferated in the
thirteenth century, narrative and descriptive passages of ordinary life are few and far between,
and most documents are terse, factual memoranda: of the transfer of property, of misdemeanours
and punishments, and of grants of permissions. If these do mention, say, a house, a mill, or a pig,
it is rare for there to be any descriptive gloss given.
Furthermore, although the mention or otherwise of items in documents can indicate the date
of change—when windmills first appeared or when large-scale goat keeping declined—they rarely
offer direct explanation. Archaeology’s ultimate access to a much larger dataset, and to one with
a degree of detail denied the historian, makes the investigation of explanation far more feasible.
That such an approach is now possible owes much to a small number of scholars who, between
the early 1950s and the 1980s, not only established the techniques for studying the medieval
countryside but also gathered much of the evidence and formed many of the interpretations that
underpin our understanding of it (Hurst 1986). Although as early as the 1840s John Wilson had
excavated a medieval village, Woodperry, Oxfordshire, recording foundations, pottery and small
finds, his lead was not followed up; only in the 1930s, when Martyn Jope excavated a peasant
house at Great Beere, Devon, and Rupert Bruce-Mitford began to dig at the deserted village of
Seacourt, Oxfordshire, was there a renewed interest in the possibilities such excavations offered.
With survey, a similar pattern can be seen, of early landmarks not pursued. From the 1850s,
Ordnance Survey surveyors were occasionally mapping in some detail medieval settlement remains,
although these aroused little comment, while in 1924, O.G.S. Crawford published the first air
photograph of a deserted medieval village, Gainsthorpe, Lincolnshire. In terms of more holistic
landscape work, there was very little, although John Hurst has drawn attention to the work of
amateurs such as Ethel Rudkin in Lincolnshire, Helen O’Neil in Gloucestershire and Tony Brewster
in Yorkshire, who brought to bear techniques including fieldwalking, air photography, experimental
archaeology, and excavation in pioneering individual studies.
Although it is to simplify matters, the publication of three books in the mid-1950s provided a
vital catalyst for medieval landscape studies. In the 1940s, two economic historians, Maurice
Beresford and William Hoskins, had independently begun to seek out on the ground and on air
photos (the available number of which expanded hugely as systematic post-war surveys were
released) medieval and later landscapes which they had encountered in documents and, in particular,
on hand-drawn estate maps. Beresford’s Lost Villages of England appeared in 1954 and his History
on the Ground in 1957, and Hoskins’ Making of the English Landscape in 1955.
VILLAGES, HAMLETS AND HOUSES
Among the most important points those books established, despite the scepticism of some senior
colleagues, was that not only were large numbers of villages deserted in the Middle Ages but that
their remains, readily identifiable as earthwork house platforms, hollow ways and banks and
ditches, were to be seen in many parts of the country, sometimes in profusion. However, when
the historians attempted to excavate individual houses, the results were disappointing, not least
because of the primitive methods used. In one celebrated instance, Beresford searched for walls
with a gargantuan coke shovel borrowed from the local railway stationmaster.