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

• 262 • Paul Stamper
projects (Alexander 1995). Most essential to the
national transport network was the construction and
maintenance of bridges at major river crossings.
Numerous stone examples still survive, of course,
while in the early 1990s dramatic evidence of bridge
building was found at Hemington, Leicestershire,
where gravel digging revealed three bridges that had
succesively spanned the Trent between the eleventh
and thirteenth centuries (Cooper et al. 1994) (Figure
14.8). Each was over 50 m long, the earlier two entirely
of timber and the last supported on massive stone
plinths 9.6 m in length.
At a local level, the study of patterns of
communication in the post-Roman period is being
used in a methodologically innovative study of the
landscape around Yatesbury and Avebury, Wiltshire.
Topographical, cartographic, documentary and
archaeological evidence is here being used to dissect
and date the pattern of Roman, Saxon and later roads,
for once using the study of communications to
provide the chronological and spatial frameworks for
a broader study of the landscape, rather than as a
dissociated or secondary venture.
Figure 14.8 The timber piers of the great bridge built in
OVERVIEW
the 1090s across the Trent at Hemington, Leicestershire.
Source: Leicestershire Museums
Over the last generation, excavation, fieldwork and
documentary research—much, incidentally,
undertaken by amateurs or by professionals in their
holidays—has transformed our understanding of the medieval countryside. What has emerged is
a picture not of a single countryside, fixed and unchanging, but of a landscape that was varied
and dynamic, and at times highly sensitive to changing external circumstances. Population growth
or contraction, expanding or declining market opportunities, climatic change, soil exhaustion,
war, pestilence and famine, all at one time or another had an effect on housing and farming in
Britain. Sometimes one of those things touched much, even if not all, of the country at the same
time. At other times, the effect was more piecemeal, reflecting the wide variety of local farming
and settlement regions that together made up medieval Britain. As work progresses, those regions
will become more clearly defined and better understood; that is the challenge for the next generation
of researchers.
KEY TEXTS
Astill, G. and Grant, A., 1988. The countryside of medieval England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Dyer, C., 1989. Standards of living in the Middle Ages: social change in England c.1200–1520. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Miller, E. and Hatcher, J., 1978. Medieval England: rural society and economic change 1086–1348. London: Longman.
Platt, C., 1978. Medieval England: a social history and archaeology from the Conquest to A.D. 1600. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Taylor, C., 1983. Village and farmstead: a history of rural settlement in England. London: George Philip.