Medieval Villages in an English Landscape: beginnings and ends.
By RICHARD JONES and MARK PAGE. Published by Windgather Press in 2006.
Reviewed by LAWRENCE BUTLER in The Antiquaries Journal / Volume 87 / September 2007
The five-year research project based on Whittlewood Forest was initiated to address one of the vexed problems of English landscape history – how and when did the nucleated village develop. Under the academic leadership of CHRIS DYER a team covering many disciplines concentrated on twelve parishes within the medieval forest, straddling the Northamptonshire/ Buckinghamshire border, a few miles north of Buckingham. The area was chosen because it included both nucleated and dispersed settlement of villages, hamlets and farmsteads. By a careful combination of documentary evidence and different types of fieldwork it was hoped that an answer could be given to this basic research question.
This book is the distillation of that project.
The various stages in the exercise are clearly enunciated and the reasons for choosing the study area are placed within the wider context of settlement studies, particularly their recent ramifications. There has been a concern for classifying and mapping regional development and for identifying episodes of change. Was there a ‘village moment’ when the dispersed landscape of hamlets was swept away by nucleation and open fields? Can these changes be isolated by intensive research? The choice of the study area is well rehearsed: its geological characteristics and geomorphology are described; the documentary evidence included forest and estate maps of the early seventeenth century.
The field survey methods were based largely on pottery collection over 10 per cent of available arable and on an extensive programme of test pits within settlement centres.
The authors distinguish between the inherited landscapes and authoritative ones. The former are the pre-forest situation, assembling the evidence of prehistoric, Roman and early medieval settlement and features that persist into the fully historic period. One is the ‘central place’ of Iron Age Whittlebury camp, supplanted by Roman Towcester and then by the pre-Conquest royal manor of Greens Norton. Another feature was the evidence that Romano-British settlements of varied size and status extended widely over Whittlewood, including locations that later became afforested. The authoritative landscapes broke the tribal divisions into smaller territorial units for secular, religious or agrarian purposes. These units were the backcloth for later, mainly post- Conquest, developments.
However, the deceptively simple subtitle ‘Beginnings’ was difficult to pin down. All the authors can suggest is that village origins lay in the period 800–1100 but the process of nucleation continued until at least the thirteenth century. The other subtitle ‘Ends’ is intentionally ambiguous. Although deserted and shrunken settlement is examined; so too are the secondary settlements. These ‘ends’ are on the fringes of large villages, such as Silverstone and Potterspury, but also include the four constituent hamlets of Leckhampstead. The peripheral ‘ends’ are either named ‘greens’ or have distinctive names, such as Boycott or Puxley. It might be thought that forest status exacerbated this diversity. The advantages or otherwise of living in a royal forest and sharing in its economy are explored as a determinant of settlement size and form, but without reaching any firm conclusions. Indeed, within the ‘villagescapes’ the predominant feature is the variety and unpredictability of the several components.
In their conclusion the authors seek to isolate the principal factors, whether culture or economy, stability or instability, the influence of the lord or of the community, of nucleation or dispersion. Only stability emerges as a preferred feature. All the others were possible positive choices with their advantages to be assessed by the local residents. Diversity and individual circumstance permeated the landscape of Whittlewood.
The whole research project is well presented in considerable detail. The index and bibliography is reliable. The maps are nearly always clear and the photographs complement the text well. Only the four photographs of The Forest Map are difficult to read – they are far clearer in colour on the book’s back cover. The paperback binding was poor and pages soon came loose. There was a dichotomy between the parish of Wicken and the twin settlements of Wick Dive with Wick Hamon: their chronology was not explained. It was also not made clear whether Luffield was a true parish or an extra-parochial enclave; here the pre-priory situation was not explored. Moated homesteads received no specific mention. Nevertheless, this book clearly shows how difficult it is to generalize about villages in the English landscape.
LAWRENCE BUTLER
