ABSTRACT
‘If you look at populations in southern England, everyone still lives within four miles of churches which had been planted by the 15th century’ (Batty, 2001, p636). Thus wrote Mike Batty a few years ago, pointing out that some things don’t change much. Things do change of course, often unhurriedly and imperceptibly, but spread over decades and centuries, these changes become profound. This ‘deeper continuity’ as Batty called it (he borrowed the phrase from George Holmes's The Oxford History of Medieval Europe) is crucial to understanding why settlement patterns are the way they are.
