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

• 256 • Paul Stamper
carpenters. Each explanation relies on (and demands) a different explanation of the medieval
economy and society; in the last case, for instance, that a specialized, market economy had
filtered down to the base of rural society, and that there was sufficient money in circulation to
support a range of professional specialists. Another common theme, picked up by Wrathmell
(1989), appears to be the movement of the main hearth in the late Middle Ages from the
centre of the living room to against the cross passage wall. This was presumably to allow a
firehood to be installed, although for what ultimate pupose is as yet unknown; whether it was
to improve the living environment within the house by creating a fire with better (and safer)
‘draw’, or whether it was to allow the space above the living room to be converted into a loft.
At Caldecotte, Hertfordshire, the next and final stage in the process was observed, with the
insertion of wall chimneys before the settlement was deserted in the sixteenth century. It may
also be the case that in the later Middle Ages the standard of fittings and fixtures improved,
and at both Wharram and West Whelpington, lead-camed glass windows began to appear in
the fifteenth century (Wrathmell 1989, 257).
One other development noted on a wide range of sites is the appearance of better defined
boundaries in the early Middle Ages. Hatch, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, was an ‘open’ settlement
in the late Saxon period, largely without internal boundaries between properties, and remained so
until the twelfth century when ditches were dug to define the individual tenements. In a review
of the evidence that demonstrated how widespread this trend towards ever more clearly defined
boundaries was, especially in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Astill remarked that ‘in
chalk areas the tofts must have resembled stockades’ and in general that ‘The impression is that
walking down the village street it would have been difficult to see in to the individual tofts, for
most of the banks, walls or hedges would have been at head height’ (1988, 52–53). This clearer
definition of individual ownership in villages mirrored developments in the wider countryside, as
the rising population increased pressure on resources of all kinds. Woods, moors and heaths that
had previously been intercommoned, available for use by all the surrounding communities, came
to be physically apportioned between them. Ditches and walls, or in woods linear clearings called
trenches, were created to mark these new boundaries in what in many parts of Britain marked the
last chapter in the allocation of the countryside into precisely defined territories.
Thus while it is possible to identify common themes in the vernacular buildings of medieval
Britain, what emerges instead is an impression of great variety. Local, vernacular building styles,
such as that identified by Austin in south-west England (Austin 1985), may have been just as
marked in the early and high Middle Ages (the eleventh to later fourteenth centuries) as later.
Those variations presumably reflect the availability (or otherwise) of local building materials and
skilled carpenters, changing farming systems and differing levels of wealth and social status as
well as innate local traditions.
As well as investigating variety in the plan and form of individual houses, archaeologists and
geographers have also studied the settlements of which they formed a part. Here the work of
Brian Roberts has been especially influential, and has now expanded from early work in the
north-east to encompass all of England, for instance in an ambitious attempt to define for the
whole of England discrete areas of rural settlement types defined in a hierachy of Settlement
Provinces, Sub-Provinces and Local Regions (Roberts 1987). Almost equally ambitious has been an
attempt to map village types in the East Midlands and to investigate their relationship both to
natural factors, such as soil type, and to historic ones, such as the influence of the Scandinavian
settlements (Lewis et al. 1997). The principal classificatory division that is usually applied is between
nucleated and dispersed settlements, that is between, on the one hand, landscapes of villages and
large hamlets and, on the other, those of scattered hamlets and farmsteads. Within each broad
group there are many variants in plan form, which range over the whole scale from large villages