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

Middle Ages: rural settlement and manors
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with uniform properties clearly laid to a predetermined plan to settlements that sprawl in disorder
and where there has apparently never been a seigneurial or communal attempt to control the use
of space.
The main research exercise of the 1990s that centred on a single village and its territory was
the Shapwick Project, set up in 1988 to examine a 1,284 ha parish in the centre of Somerset that
runs up from the wetlands of the Somerset Levels to the Polden Hills 3 or 4 km away. The
principal hypothesis that the Project set out to test was that the present village and its medieval
open field system originated in the late Saxon period, and replaced an earlier pattern of dispersed
farmsteads each with its own individual fields. As with the Wharram Project, with the last two
years of which it overlapped, Shapwick has been a largely voluntary exercise conducted by
academics including Mick Aston and Chris Gerrard assisted by large numbers of specialists,
students and voluntary helpers. A wide range of techniques has been employed, some, like
excavation, field walking (on a heroic scale), earthwork survey, documentary research, air
photography and hedgerow dating, well established, others quite innovative, certainly in a British
medieval context (see e.g. Selkirk 1997). Shovel pit testing—the sieving of samples of topsoil
where the landscape is predominantly pasture for pottery, flints and other finds—has proved
remarkably effective in locating sites. Also being tested in the mid-1990s was the possibility of
locating aceramic settlements through geophysical and geochemical survey methods, including
the identification of heavy metals in the soil.
The continuing population growth seen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries inevitably led
to changes in the pattern of rural settlement. Individual properties were sub-divided, most
frequently to accommodate sons unable to find or afford their own holdings or to accommodate
retired parents from whom the holding had been taken over. The ‘newlands’ found in some
village plans indicate that, presumably with the initiative or at least acquiescence of the lord, it
was sometimes possible for a settlement to expand, although unless new arable land could be
added to the village’s fields, the result would be a reduction in average farm size. Especially in
areas of dispersed settlement, secondary or ‘daughter’ settlements were sometimes established in
areas until then considered as of only marginal use. In the Fenlands of East Anglia, for instance,
linear villages were established along drove roads, and comparable developments can be seen in
the Somerset Levels wetlands. The most developed studies of dispersed and secondary settlements,
however, have been those undertaken in ‘wood-pasture’ areas, such as those of the Weald of
Kent and the West Midlands. At Hanbury, Worcestershire, much of the parish was farmed in the
early Middle Ages from houses clustered around hamlets called ‘Ends’, such as Morweysend and
Brookend, tenanted by customary tenants required to do labour services for the lord. However,
in the two centuries after the Norman Conquest, a large acreage of woodland was felled in the
parish —some 1,000 acres, an eighth of its total area, in the thirteenth century alone—and brought
into cultivation. Many of the new cultivators, it has been argued, stood apart from the older
inhabitants of Hanbury both in being freemen and in that they lived in ‘Green’ hamlets such as
Gallows Green and Mere Green.
For all this better understanding and more accurate description of settlement types, the most
fundamental questions remain how, when and why villages emerged as perhaps the most
quintessential (although not ubiquitous) element of the countryside. Archaeology has played a
major part here, field walking being used to establish, for instance, the very dispersed nature of
settlement in the mid-Saxon period, even within areas later dominated by nucleated villages, and
thereby establishing a terminus post quem for village formation. Much of the most important work
has been undertaken as a part of the Raunds Project, focused on a series of excavations in and
around a small Northamptonshire town and the field survey of 40 km 2 of the surrounding area.
The excavations have shown how in the early and middle Saxon periods, the settlement was