ABSTRACT
When trying to understand the medieval countryside there are several basic questions to tackle. The first is the location of settlements. Where did the Anglo-Saxon and medieval farmers live? Did they favour individual farms, hamlets or villages? Did the locations of these settlements remain stable or did they shift and change over the generations? Was an increase of population accommodated by enlarging original sites - or by founding new offshoot settlements? Another group of problems concerns their exploitation of the rural environment. Did they find an orderly landscape already cleared, already split into estates, or did they create a new one hewing it out from primeval forest and fen? How did they gain a living from the fields, woodlands, marshes and moors?l
Archaeology has made two major contributions to the problems of the location and planforms of early settlements. With the new dimension of aerial photography whole panoramas have been delineated for the first time (Plates 5.3, 5.5).2 Villages and farms are now seen in the context of their fields, woods and waste. Features which had escaped earlier map makers are now recognised. The corrugations of ancient and obsolescent field systems, the earthworks of abandoned settlements, the network of hollow route-ways, display the fact that these Saxon and medieval landscapes were in a constant state of flux, as the economy expanded and then contracted. Archaeologists have also recorded and analysed the complex history of individual rural settlements in a series of major village excavations. The most valuable of these have been in
places as widely separated as West Whelpington in Northumberland, (Plate 5.1), Faxton and Raunds in Northamptonshire, Thaxton in Norfolk, Upton in Gloucestershire, Gomeldon in Wiltshire, Hound Tor in Devon (Figure 5.1), Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, (Figure 5.2) and Tresmorn in Cornwall. For generalisations, however, we stiE have to rely on the geographers. They are fortunately no longer content with simplistic classification of plan-types of villages. Roberts has put the problem well. He sees all settlements developing within a 'matrix composed of two distinct but interlocking frameworks, on the one hand there is the physical environment, with the limitations and possibilities inherent in variations in location, altitude, soil quality, local climate and biological response, on the other, there are the man-imposed organisational frameworks of kingdom and honour, estate and manor, parish and township'. 3
As practical farmers Anglo-Saxons were quite capable of recognising the type of site most useful to them. Water supply was of prime importance to animals and men. Banks of rivers were, however, not necessarily desirable locations because of the difficulty of control and drainage. Springs and places where shallow wells and ponds could be dug were sought after. In north-west Berkshire, for instance, many of the major Saxon placenames are connected with drainage, water supply, water-control and crossing places.4 Very small streams are used as names of Baulking, Ginge, Lockinge, Wantage,
Hendred and Hagbourne. Crossing places are referred to at Garford, Lyford, Shellingford, Wallingford, and so on. In many areas of the country we find lines of settlements strung out like beads along spring-lines, where water gushed out at the junction between permeable sands, chalk or limestones, and impermeable clays. This helped to create a linear distribution of settlements, each with long strip parishes such as are seen in the remarkable series on Lincoln Edge, the South Downs in Sussex, or along the Vale of the White Horse, Oxfordshire. The dense mesh of Iron Age and Romano-British field-systems to be seen over the Downs above these settlements implies that these linear strings of settlements in the vales below cannot possibly be primary. In the chalky regions of Wiltshire and Dorset, where
water was scarce, settlements are found along valley bottoms near the permanent streams. In lowland Staffordshire only a third of the nucleated settlements were on a stream or river and another quarter near them.5 Too close a contact with water was avoided where water was a hazard, however, and well drained sites were at a premium. The Fenland villages are built on the silt lands along the rim of the Fen or are perched on drier 'island' sites. It has been noticed in Yorkshire that early settlements favoured the high terraces along major rivers, or were built on isolated hillocks and banks of better drained material in the Vale of York itself. 6 In the Vale of the White Horse dry sites gave rise to village names in 'ey' (from O.E. - ieg - island, dry ground in a marsh), e.g. Charney, Goosey and Hanney.7
