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

Middle Ages: rural settlement and manors
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Figure 14.3 Home Farm, Wardhouse, Aberdeenshire. A Scottish fermtoun, or farming hamlet, surrounded
by ridge and furrow, sometimes in Scotland called runrig.
Source: Aberdeen Archaeological Surveys
green (Figure 14.4). Encroaching on the green were simpler, cottage dwellings and, added in the
sixteenth century, a defensive pele tower. In Scotland, a terraced row of three cruck-built longhouses
of the mid-thirteenth century, again argued by the excavator to represent seigneurial investment,
was found at Springwood Park, about 35 miles south-east of Edinburgh (Yeoman 1995, 115) (Figure
14.5). Longhouses arranged end-to-end make the point that medieval building types do not fall
conveniently into hard and fast types, and that the known range is likely to extend still further with
excavations in the future. Terraced rows, although not of true longhouses, have also been found in
village excavations at Thrislington, Durham, and Burton Dassett, Warwickshire.
A move away from longhouses in the later Middle Ages has sometimes been demonstrated by
excavation. At Gomeldon, the twelfth-century longhouse was later replaced by a courtyard farm
with separate buildings for people, animals and other farming activities. The same transition may
also have been glimpsed at Hangleton, where, in the thirteenth century, both longhouses and
farms were in use at the same time. Elsewhere, animals seem never to have been accommodated
in the main house, and during the later Middle Ages this tradition, of functionally discrete buildings
set around a courtyard, seems to have become established even in areas where earlier longhouses
may have been common. Within this general courtyard, layout differences reflected variations in
local building materials and farming systems. In Hampshire, on the clay-with-flints soil at
Popham, the fourteenth-century structures were built on flint sleeper walls, with the houses
ranging in size from 7.2×4.4 m to a three roomed structure of 15×5 m, with a hearth in the
central room. Most were aligned on the village street, with post-built barns and byres behind.
At Greynston (or Grenstein), Norfolk clay lump (sun dried clay and straw blocks) was used as the
main building material in a farm complex of a house with two yards, both set about with barns,
a cattle shed and outbuildings. Houses were also clay walled in the villages of Goltho, Lincolnshire,