Table Of Content

Region and Place A study of English rural settlement To our wives Jan Roberts and Sue Wrathmell Region and Place A study of English rural settlement Brian K Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell a ENGLISH HERITAGE 2002 Contents Figures Vl Tables Vll Acknowledgements V Ill Authors' preface Vlll 1 Rural settlement in space and time 1 2 Land and people 33 3 Farming systems and landscape characteristics 59 4 The characteristics of place: cases and studies 83 5 The Central Province: a reappraisal 119 6 Landscapes of old enclosure: the outer provinces 147 7 A synoptic view 173 Bibliography 193 Index 199 V Figures Fig 1.1 Nucleated settlements in England in the Fig 3.1 Farming regions of England, 1500-1640 60 mid-nineteenth century 5 Fig 3.2 The enclosure of common townfields Fig 1.2 Dispersed settlement scores in England by Act of Parliament in eighteenth and in the mid-nineteenth century 7 nineteenth-century England 61 Fig 1.3 The density of dispersed settlement in Fig 3.3 Summary landscape types in England 64 England in the mid-nineteenth century 9 Fig 3.4 A model of the relationship between Fig 1.4 Mid-nineteenth-century provinces, sub- nucleation, dispersion and field systems 66 provinces and local regions in England 10 Fig 3.5 The presences of plough teams in Fig 1.5 Deserted medieval villages in England England in 1086 69 as recorded in 1968 11 Fig 3.6 The presences of woodland as recorded Fig 1.6 The evolution of settlement patterns: in Domesday Book, 1 086, and royal a general model 13 forest, 1327- 36 71 Fig 1.7 The multiple estate model 15 Fig 3.7 Imported Early Anglo-Saxon grave Fig 1.8 The Yorkshire manors of the Honour goods: amber beads . 73 of Mowbray c 1170 17 Fig 3.8 Burials in England interpreted as Early Fig 1. 9 The presences of woodland as recorded Anglo-Saxon. 74 in Domesday Book, 1086 19 Fig 3.9 Fifth-century Anglo-Saxon burials and Fig 1.10 English place-names indicative of place-names in -ingas 76 woodland in the pre-Conquest period 22 Fig 3.10 Substantial Romanised buildings in Fig 1.11 Cruck buildings in England and Wales 25 England, mapped over the evidence for early woodland 78 Fig 1.12 Timber-framed buildings in England 26 Fig 3.11 Roman villas in England (pre-1969 data), Fig 1.13 Presences ofwoodland in pre-Conquest mapped over the evidence for early England 28 woodland 79 Fig 1.14 Rural settlement in England in the Fig 3.12 The interpretation of English settlement mid-nineteenth century. 29 provinces 81 Fig 2.1 The terrain characteristics of England 32 Fig 4.1 The location of studies integrated into Fig 2.2 The drainage network and watersheds Chapter 4 84 of England 34 Fig 4.2 East Haddon, Northamptonshire 85 Fig 2.3 Aspects of climate and vegetation in Fig 4.3 Halton Shields, Northumberland 87 England 38 Fig 4.4 Thurleigh, Bedfordshire 88 Fig 2.4 General population trends in England between prehistory and the present 41 Fig 4.5 Mirfield and Hartshead, Yorkshire 90 Fig 2.5 The top (fourth) quartile of the Fig 4.6 Haworth, Yorkshire 92 population in England in 1851 45 Fig 4.7 Butterwick, Yorkshire 94 Fig 2.6 The third quartile of the population Fig 4.8 Longton, Lancashire 95 in England in 1851 46 Fig 4.9 Tunley, Lancashire 96 Fig 2.7 The second quartile of the population Fig 4.10 Halewood, Lancashire 97 in England in 1851 47 Fig 2.8 The first quartile of the population Fig 4.11 Hunsterson, Cheshire 98 in England in 1851 48 Fig 4.12 Roystone Grange, Derbyshire 100 Fig 2.9 Deserted villages and parishes mapped over Fig 4.13 \X'heathill, Shropshire 101 the lowest quartile of population in 1851 50 Fig4.14 Rashleigh, Devon 102 Fig 2.10 A record of dispersion in mid-nineteenth- Fig 4.15 Hinton Hall, Suffolk 104 century England 53 Fig4.16 Linstead Parva, Suffolk 105 Fig 2.11 Place-names with the element 'Green' in England 55 Fig 4.17 Scale-Dickleburgh, Norfolk 106 Fig 2.12 .Moated sites in England and Wales 57 Fig4.18 \X'hittlesford, Cambridgeshire 110 vi Fig 4.19 Stanfield, Norfolk 111 Fig 6.1 A diagrammatic summary of enclosed landscapes in England 148 Fig 4.20 Marton, Yorkshire 113 Fig 6.2 A classification of enclosed landscapes 151 Fig 4.21 Puxton, Somerset 1 15 Fig 6.3 A model of landscapes of enclosure in Fig 5.1 The enclosure history of the Central Province of England 118 the South-eastern and ~orthern and Western Provinces 153 Fig 5.2 The sub-provinces and outliers of the Central Province of England 120 Fig 6.4 A model of the development of some enclosure forms 154 Fig 5.3 The sequences of enclosure in north-east England between 1550 and 1850 122 Fig 6.5a Landscapes of enclosure in England .. 158 Fig 5.4 Aspects of field systems in England 124 Fig 6.5b Key to Fig 6.5a 159 Fig 5.5 Fiscal tenements in England: Fig 6.6 Cleared land and woodland in the a summary map .. 125 Welsh border counties . . 167 Fig 5.6 Aspects of Scandinavian settlement Fig 6.7 The parish of Tanw orth, in England 126 Warwickshire 168 Fig 5.7 Types of manor in England. 127 Fig 7.1 Provisional map of inheritance customs in England 178 Fig 5.8 Areas of devastation in England between 902 and 1156 140 Fig 7.2 The distribution of place-names in Fig 5.9 The distribution of royal demesne -worth set over the distribution of early in England 1066--86 142 woodland 181 Fig 5.10 The putative extent of open (town) Fig 7.3 A model of the distribution of assessed field lands in England 144 and non-assessed land in England 184 Fig 5.11 A model summarising the development Fig 7.4 A model of the development of settlement of townfields within the Central Province in England between Roman times and of England 145 the nineteenth century 191 Tables Table 2.1 Accumulated recorded tenancies 1086-1300/1350 52 Table 5.1 Nettleton parish, Lincolnshire 137 Table 5.2 Saleby parish, Lincolnshire 137 Table 6.1 Enclosure: a subjective temporal classification 149 Table 6.2 Demesne stock in 1086 171 Table 7.1 Land area, Domesday plought eams and proportion tilled in 1086 in six sample counties (area in thousands of acres) 187 Table 7.2 Land area and late enclosed waste in six sample counties (all in thousands of acres) 188 Table 7.3 A summary of land use in six sample counties (all in thousands of acres) 188 Table 7.4 Estimate of amount of land enclosed piecemeal (all in thousands of acres) 189 vii Acknowledgements Without the support of English Heritage this project, inevitably be present. Here we will mention only those which grew from our work on An Atlas of Rural \vho played an active part in the preparation of this Settlement in England, could not have been sustained. work. Most of the maps are the responsibility of one of Special thanks are due to David Stocker and Graham us (BKR), but the cartographic team in Durham, Fairclough for their continuing encouragement. We are Arthur Corner and his successor David Hume, Chris in considerable debt to Karen Dorn of English Orton and Steven Allan made vital contributions, Heritage's publications department for her editorial especially in solving computing problems. Chris also skills and tact when dealing with our efforts and to drew the maps for Chapter 4. Preparation of the case Christopher Taylor for penetrating comments on the studies in Chapter 4 owed much to the work and original text. From our employers, the West Yorkshire advice of a number of people, especially Paul Everson, Archaeology Service, part of West Yorkshire Joint Stephen Rippon, Keith Stephenson, Christopher Services, and the Geography Department of Durham Taylor and Penny Ward. Chris Philo read the whole University, we have drawn both material and text and suggested a number of improvements to intellectual support. accuracy and consistency. We have quarried the work of other researchers Finally, we acknowledge the forbearance and without shame, and without them this volume could assistance of Jan Roberts and Sue Wrathmell who, not have been brought to completion. Our most through no fault of their own, have had to live with our sincere thanks are due to all of them, scholars past and running debate on rural settlement for almost a present. We are, of course, responsible for the misuse, decade. Our only excuse is that we, too, have been the misinterpretation and misquotations that must victims of our ideas. Authors' preface This book is the result of research that began in the provides few answers to those problems that have early 1990s, research that originally had a rather limited exercised rural settlement scholars and agricultural and specific purpose. The initial objective, encouraged historians over the past fifty years. Indeed, vie have to and funded by English Heritage, was to provide maps of admit that it makes little attempt to do so. The reason England's dispersed and nucleated settlement patterns, is simple and personal. The process of creating the to enable those patterns to inform the identification and maps that appeared in the Atlas, and the many new selection of nationally important medieval settlement ones that illustrate this publication, fundamentally remains in the course of the Monuments Protection changed our way of looking at rural settlement and Programme. In some senses the final product of that agrarian structures, both spatially and chronologically. work was An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England The distribution maps have driven our evolving (Ro berts and Wrathmell 2000a). It is a publication concepts. Thanks to the opportunities now available which attempts not only to provide contexts and through computer mapping, we have been able to frameworks for regional and local settlement studies; it compare widely differing datasets with one another, also offers a series of models which illustrate our and have explored the meaning of their correlations, perception of the diversity of 'agrarian structures' in the negative as well as positive. This is in contrast to many regions we have defined. By 'agrarian structures' we of the national distribution maps supplied by mean not only the way in which habitation sites are archaeologists and historians; maps that frequently distributed across the landscape, but also the way in comprise little more than dots against a coastal outline, which these sites interlock with - indeed, ret1ect - the perhaps with a few major rivers, or at most with a relief decisions made by their occupants with regard to the map as background. Such 'backgrounds' are not exploitation of available agricultural resources: arable neutral statements. They set intellectual parameters for land, meadow, pasture, woodland and so on. Agrarian those who read the maps; they structure the data. And structures are the physical expression of those decisions. if coastline and rivers do nothing more than enable the The Atlas provided only limited opportunities to reader to locate, very roughly, a distribution in relation explore and elaborate such themes: hence this book. It to the overall shape of England, then each symbol will V Ill