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

• 266 • Ian Whyte
villages—textile settlements like Styal in Cheshire, mining and quarrying settlements. Settlement
change in post medieval times was related to environmental changes as well as human activity.
Parry’s (1977) work in charting the progressive lowering of cultivation limits in south-east Scotland
from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, and the associated abandonment of field systems
and settlements, linked to climatic deterioration, has yet to be followed up in other parts of
Britain.
In Scotland, medieval or later rural settlements with their field systems form landscapes that
cover extensive areas in the upland fringes and, in parts of the Highlands, at low level. The Royal
Commission has undertaken important field surveys backed up by a limited amount of excavation
(Hingley and Foster 1994). This has allowed some regional and chronological variations in building
types to be established. The extensive nature and complexity of these landscapes make them
highly distinctive within a north-west European context. In the West Highlands, Dodgshon (1993)
has shown that the clachans (hamlet clusters) associated with runrig (open fields in fragmented
occupation), which preceded the nineteenth-century crofting townships, were not the ancient
settlement pattern that was once believed. They were preceded by an earlier dispersed settlement
pattern associated with enclosed fields. The transition to runrig associated with clachans did not
begin until late medieval times and was still incomplete in the eighteenth century.
Roberts and Wrathmell (1994) have mapped rural settlement characteristics for England based
on the first edition of the 1-inch Ordnance Survey Map from the early and mid-nineteenth
century. They have identified three broad settlement provinces: a central one with large numbers
of nucleations; and two others to the south and east, and to the north and west with more
dispersed settlement. These divisions fit broadly the champion/wood-pasture and ancient/planned
countryside distinction that other landscape historians have identified. At a more local scale,
Roberts has sub-divided each region on the basis of settlement, terrain and other variables.
In upland areas of the north and west, the practice of sending livestock to summer hill grazings,
accompanied by part of the community who lived in temporary huts, survived into the seventeenth
century or later. Shieling systems are recorded in Northumberland into the early seventeenth
century, and the foundations of clusters of shieling huts can still be seen. In Wales, shielings in
the Brecon Beacons may date from the same period. In the Scottish Highlands, shielings continued
in widespread use until the later eighteenth century. Documentary sources and landscape evidence
show that some temporary shielings were converted to permanent settlements in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries under pressure of population (Bil 1990). The use of shielings over
much of the Highlands ended with the introduction of commercial sheep farming, but in areas
like Lewis, which were unsuited to sheep farming, shielings continued in use into the early twentieth
century and still survive as upstanding structures rather than as grassed-over foundations (Figure
15.1).
BUILDINGS AND STRUCTURES
Excavation of deserted settlements from late medieval and post medieval times is beginning to
show that, even in northern England, peasant dwellings were often substantially built and longlived.
Impressions gained from Wharram Percy that late medieval and early modern peasant
houses were flimsy affairs, built to last only a generation, may be misleading. The ‘revolution’ in
housing that occurred from the Tudor period was, in some cases at least, more one of layout
rather than construction standards. At West Whelpington, a change from timber-walled houses
to ones with stone walls to eaves level occurred in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, possibly
due to a lack of timber (Evans and Jarrett 1988). Such dwellings were built to last for centuries.
On other sites, ‘rebuilding’ may have involved only repairs to non-load-bearing walls with the