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

• 252 • Paul Stamper
Astill 1988). Partly by design, and
partly through the accidental
pressures of rescue work, these were
in many different parts of the
country, and most usefully in areas
with very different geophysical
characteristics. Longhouses—
structures with one or more living
rooms, separated from a byre for
animals by a cross-passage —were
long thought to be the ubiquitous
peasant house type, and certainly
they were more widespread in the
Middle Ages than later, when they
came to be almost wholly associated
with the upland farms of western and
northern Britain. In lowland Britain,
for instance, medieval examples have
been found by excavation in
Northamptonshire at Lyveden, in
Gloucestershire at Upton, in
Wiltshire at Gomeldon and in Sussex
at Hangleton. Documentary evidence
provides further occasional examples,
for instance from Worcestershire,
where in 1440 at Northfield a tenant
agreed to build ‘a hall…and a
chamber at the front end of the hall
Figure 14.2 Daily life in a late medieval cruck-built longhouse of the type with a byre at the rear end’ (Dyer
excavated at Wharram Percy. One or more rooms provided living 1986, 25). In upland Britain sites
accommodation, the main room an open hall heated by an open fire on a include highland ‘fermtouns’, or
central hearth. Lofts may have provided storage space, and perhaps a sleeping
space for children. At the other end of the house, and divided from it by a
hamlets (Figure 14.3), such as at Rosal
cross-passage that ran between the house’s main doors, was a byre where in Sutherland and Lix in Perthshire,
animals were stalled in the winter, and a central drain carrying slurry through where survey combined with
a hole in the end wall. A screen along the cross-passage would normally have excavation identified a number of
divided off the byre end.
cruck-roofed long-houses (Yeoman
Source: Beresford and Hurst 1990, 40. Drawing by Peter Dunn
1991). Hound Tor, Devon, a granitebuilt
hamlet sited high (335 m) on
Dartmoor, was abandoned in the fourteenth century. Here the settlement latterly comprised an
irregular group of farms, each with a longhouse at its centre and with substantial grain-drying kilns
among the associated structures. An equally inhospitable site was West Whelpington,
Northumberland, sited on a dolerite outcrop 40 km north-west of Newcastle. This, however, was a
large settlement, probably established as a planned village around a green c.1100, and in the later
thirteenth century with as many as 35 bondage (servile) tenancies, each with an average of 20 acres of
land and 2 acres of meadow. At that time, the houses were of a type described by the excavators as
‘proto-longhouses’, but after the village was burnt, probably by the Scots in the wake of Bannockburn
in 1314, it was rebuilt with houses of a new type. These were probably laid out through the initiative
of the lord, and comprised four main terraces of longhouses, in all c.28 dwellings, facing onto the