Landscapes, Documents and Maps
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Landscapes, Documents and Maps

Villages in Northern England and Beyond, AD 900-1250

Brian K. Roberts

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eBook - ePub

Landscapes, Documents and Maps

Villages in Northern England and Beyond, AD 900-1250

Brian K. Roberts

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About This Book

The last half century has seen many studies of the origin of the English village. As a cross-disciplinary enquiry this book integrates materials from geography, history, economic history, archaeology, place-name studies, anthropology and even church architecture. These provide varied foundations, but the underlying subject matter always engages with landscape studies. Beginning with a rigorous examination of evidence hidden within the surviving village and hamlet plans seen on eighteenth and nineteenth century maps, the first half of the book shows how these can be classified, mapped, analysed and then interpreted as important parts of former medieval landscapes. Many specific case-studies are built into the argument, all being drawn from the author's lifetime work on northern England, and accessible language is employed. From this base, the argument develops, with the objective of integrating landscape studies with the descriptive and analytical practices of history, and drawing these together by using the cartographic methods of historical geography. This foundation leads gently into deeper waters; to the landed estates in which all settlements developed and the farming and social systems of which they were a part; to the land holding arrangements that were integrated into the physical plans, providing methods of sharing out the agricultural resources of arable, meadow, woodland and common grazings; and finally to the social divisions present within a changing society. A wholly new theme is found in the argument that certain types of land tenure were associated with a class of officer, land agent or dreng, who in northern England was often linked with the provision of tenants for new villages. It is clear from the evidence amassed that the deliberate founding of new villages and the establishment of new plans on older sites was taking place in the centuries between about AD 900 and 1250. Finally, the study moves beyond the North of England to review the European roots of planned villages and hamlets, and concludes with a challenging hypothesis about their origin in the whole of England. This provides pointers towards future enquiry.

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Publisher
Oxbow Books
Year
2008
ISBN
9781782974277

CHAPTER ONE

The Nature of Rural Settlement

One of the characteristic features of rural settlement throughout the whole of the north of England is the presence of ‘green villages’, hamlets, villages, or even market towns, whose interior is, or was once, dominated by a large open space. Sometimes, particularly in those rather larger places that have crossed the threshold to become a town, the open area is now surfaced, cobbled or paved, to provide a hard stand for markets or car parking. In the large majority of rural cases, in the damp climate of Britain, the surviving open spaces are now given over to grass with some surfaced roadways and many unsurfaced, muddy and potholed tracks. Nevertheless, once an ‘eye’ for plan analysis has been cultivated, the presence of long-destroyed open spaces can often be detected. Perhaps most villages and hamlets once possessed interior greens, but in the north the greens are often strikingly rectangular and formal. Of course, some rural greens have been wholly enclosed, with gardens pushed forwards onto the former open area, while in others buildings, cottages, public houses, a school, almshouses and even the village church, have been intruded into the former space, resulting in a network of small lanes, garden plots, dwellings and outbuildings. Nevertheless, this internal irregularity is often edged by the shadowy survivals of more structured arrangements of houses, farms and cottages, marking the limits of a former open space.
It is the large numbers of such greens throughout the north of England that raise questions. Although the green is undoubtedly important, varying in size, shape and function, the real issue lies in the character of the boundaries that limit and contain the open area. In practice standard units of building land, compartments, each comprising six, eight, ten or more standard house plots, tofts or garths, are–in settlement after settlement–assembled to create a variety of plans. These important configurations are the basic blocks of the ‘Lego’ system noted in the introduction to this study. Each settlement is unique, yet plan families can be identified, all possessing an underlying unity, inviting comparison with others of similar form. There can be little doubt that at root, somewhere, there is a ‘village idea’, a concept that in some way defines a ‘normal’ layout. Indeed, there are powerful parallels here with the architectural elements of churches, in which chancel, nave, transepts, tower and porch, represent elements that can be variously combined to give a multitude of plans. Much of the author’s early work was concerned with discovering, defining and providing the terms for this ‘grammar’ of settlement construction. Of course, classification and terminology should never be ends in themselves, but they do create valuable tools, ways of grasping and manipulating the immense complexity of the observable features of the real world. For this reason classification, the means of handling a very large sample and moving towards general concepts, will be discussed below. In the case of churches we are indebted to nineteenth century scholars such as Rickman for providing modern scholarship with both a fundamental terminology and a basic chronology. Later work has modified the original definitions and concepts, but a contemporary paper discussing a fine adjustment in chronology, such as the precise date of the west front of the Norman Leominster priory, builds upon earlier studies (Hillaby 1993). In fact, while a great deal of foundation work has been done upon rural settlement, terminology remains rather rudimentary, while the deeper questions of developmental chronology have only been tackled during the last thirty or so years. This book is a contribution to an exploration of settlement forms and patterns that aims to provide explanation rather than mere description. In this it is a contribution to both historical geography and economic history.

Questions of Terminology

Further discussion must use technical terms and these need to be defined. First, throughout this discussion traditional, ‘historical’, pre-1974 county boundaries and names have been used. There is no easy answer to this question because, while the post-1974 administrative counties are now embedded and widely used, the older counties, with some minor changes, persisted for over a thousand years, and all surviving historical materials, both governmental and local, relate to the framework they provide. For this reason they have been used here, and to assist the reader a final map of this study (Appendix III), shows ‘traditional’ and modern northern counties superimposed within a framework of the National Grid. More particularly, there are no simple definitions of villages and hamlets, although even though most of us, indeed well over eight out of every ten live in towns, we all have an idea of what is meant when the term ‘village’ is used. Villages are ‘a self-contained group of houses and associated buildings, usually in a country area… larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town’ (Oxford English Dictionary): a neatly circumlocuitous definition that begs many questions. A church is usually, but by no means invariably, present. Certainly when compared with towns villages tend to cover less ground, have fewer people, and today have few public buildings, no banks, no large stores and generally no markets. In short, at present villages differ from towns in their physical extent, their population and their function, but drawing a line between the two is never easy and will depend upon where and when the observations are being made (Roberts 1996b, 15–19). In historical terms definitions are even more difficult, for a place that today is no more than a village may, two hundred or so years ago, have been a thriving if small market town. Similarly, at the other end of the scale there are problems of distinguishing between a village and a hamlet. This lower threshold can be arbitrarily set in terms of the number of people, the number of houses, or the presence of a church, a shop or a garage but once again the passage of time may result in growth or contraction (Thorpe in Watson and Sissons 1964, 359; Everson et al. 1991, 28–41; Roberts 1987, 10.9). Without labouring definition, a village in this study comprises a cluster of dwellings, mainly inhabited by farmers. By way of qualification the terms ‘small’ and ‘large’ will be applied where appropriate. Where a place subsidiary to a village is definitely involved, or there is a need to portray the concept of a smaller, simpler, cluster, the term ‘hamlet’ will be used. The word ‘town’ is applied to a settlement sufficiently large to possess urban characteristics, i.e. a significantly more complex plan, larger area and more buildings, generally a settlement in possession of market rights (Beresford and Finberg 1973). To complicate matters further it is necessary to point out that Pevsner was wholly correct when he created the elegant term ‘townish villages’ to describe some settlements of north-eastern England. These are settlements sufficiently large to embrace the area of a small town, and indeed may once have had market rights, but for much of their history they have been of no more than very local administrative importance. Similar questions of definition also occur at the level of the individual farmstead. While it is not proposed to reiterate arguments presented elsewhere about the nature of ‘linked farmstead clusters’, ‘linked hamlet clusters’, ‘shrunken settlements’ and the like, these are all part of any complex and deeply rooted settlement pattern (Roberts 1987). This diversity reflects two powerful forces. On one hand the creation and growth of differing types of settlements at different periods of time, in response to local or regional economic needs, and on the other the break-down of earlier settlement forms and patterns as depopulation, desertion and adjustment take place. Nevertheless, the use of such terms as settlement pattern and settlement form shows that when thinking on the broader scale, county or national levels, other concepts concerning the relationships between individual settlements and others within a given local area become important. We must now turn to these more general definitions.

Patterns and Forms–Some Definitions

The idea of a ‘pattern of settlement’ is an abstraction. It is only seen clearly on a map or in a low altitude flight across the countryside such as can now be seen in ‘Getmapping’s’ Photographic Atlas of England. Such views have been largely invisible to all but the most recent generations, although hilltops sometimes gave a wide perspective. More familiar are the characteristics of villages as distinct places, made up of roads, dwellings, outbuildings, open spaces and churches, the shop and the pub, seen as living spaces or holiday locations. Further, an individual settlement can take the form of dwellings strung out along a street, arranged around a green or clustered tightly around the junction of several roads. In practice the study of village settlement focuses upon many aspects of its character and must use several scales of investigation. The location (or situation), the ground plan (or form), the character of the site (the land upon which the settlement is placed) and the nature of the buildings–the vernacular architecture–are all concerned with physical aspects. Features of a settlement’s function are seen in its population, demographic structure and the work the inhabitants do, while the degree to which they interact, are related, quarrel, make merry or work together touches social dynamics (Cohen 1982, 1–24). All of these characteristics exist today, but all possess a dimension in deep time, i.e. a village might have existed for many hundreds of years. Of the earlier Norman village, however, little may survive other than a few fragments of stone incorporated into the church, while traces of the people may survive in the churchyard, but also in the genetic make-up of contemporary families (Howell 1976, fig. 1). More pragmatically, the inventory represented by the words site, situation, form, and function, together with architecture form an essential mnemonic when out in the field, and is applicable in any settlement anywhere in the world. To these five words must be added the all-important dimension of time, for as is being stressed, all settlements, occupy locations in time as well as space. Though time they change and within time they are adapted for the use of new generations.
Figure 1.1 provides an illustration of the links between patterns and forms and suggests that several scales of enquiry are possible when dealing with the structural aspects of settlement. First, the top row in the figure represents a generalised model of the distribution of settlements throughout the landscape. These create distinctive and complex patterns on the land, and tell of presence or absence, frequency or scarcity and if this is in a regular distribution or a random scatter. In practice even the most ‘random’ of scatters may have an underlying cause, and in fact is by no means random, being closely related to a particular set of drainage conditions or the existence of a productive soil type. Second (Fig. 1.1, middle row), each pattern is made up of individual units of settlement, towns and single farms as well as villages and hamlets and scattered dwellings. Here they are shown separately as three patterns, which are then combined in the last model. A third level of resolution is to be found in a detailed study of individual plans (Fig. 1.1, bottom row), settlement forms, extending to the examination of individual settlement plans and even the arrangements within individual dwellings and other buildings. These varied levels provide a framework within which the links between settlement characteristics, culture, economy and land can be evaluated. No longer need this be mere exhortation, lacking an accessible context, for the Photographic Atlas of England now provides a direct view of the reality in question, of the substance of this study–the settlement landscape of England. Many approaches are possible. In this study, adopting an historical geographical approach, the broad distinction between patterns and forms is used as a framework for discussion.
Of course, a given settlement does not by any means have a single function. In England, most rural settlements, farmsteads, hamlets, villages and market towns developed to serve the needs of the countryside, as bases from which the land could be farmed, with the market towns forming trading centres for the exchange of both basic and luxury goods. In the last century, however, there was a steady transformation into commuter and dormitory settlements, and as farms change and lands are consolidated, this change is extending to individual farmsteads and cottages, with second homes and holiday conversions pervading all. This is interesting in itself because of the complex processes of change involved. Nevertheless, in historical terms these processes are normally highly destructive, for while buildings are often subject to statutory protection, even during restoration and reconstitution, many subtle details of the surrounding lands, yards and gardens are easily and regularly destroyed. The pace of this destruction is accelerating steadily. Barely visible earthworks are as much a part of a settlement’s history as are Norman stones in the church or seventeenth century probate inventories relating to village farmsteads. Slight platforms or hollows, traces of the continuation of a boundary, the physical qualities of a boundary, or a slight change in level, can all acquire historical meaning when placed within an appropriate context.
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Fig. 1.1 Settlement patterns and forms

Of Space and Place

At this point one tricky problem must be defined. In Figure 1.2 the circle represents a ‘settlement territory’. In the south of England this would often be a parish, an area of land able to support a parish church, but in the north it would normally be a township, land supporting a local unit of settlement, usually comprising a group of farmers. In the south of England the township, or tithing, often corresponds wit...

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