Beresford’s Lost Villages
A website dedicated to deserted medieval villages.
This website is was made possible by a generous legacy bequeathed to the University of Hull by Professor Maurice Beresford and it isdedicated to the study of Deserted Medieval Settlements. It concentrates on those settlements identified as being deserted in the seminal publication of 1971, edited by Maurice Beresford and John Hurst entitled ‘Deserted Medieval Villages’.
In the book, Beresford and Hurst produced a consolidated list of what were then classed as Deserted Medieval Villages (DMV) in 1968, 2,263 in total. These are villages which appear in documentary sources such as the Domesday Book, medieval tax records and maps, but have since seen a dramatic decline in population to the extent that at some point they have been classed as deserted. The reasons for this desertion are varied, whether from land exhaustion, coastal erosion, a change in land use or the whim of wealthy landowners.
