The W G Hoskins Lecture 2023

‘By 1350….nearly every line had been drawn’ – New Light on Devon’s Landscape History, 70 years after Hoskins’s Devon presented by Professor Sam Turner

The thirty-second Hoskins lecture

1 July 2023

The Hoskins Lecture itself was delivered by by Professor Sam Turner who is Co-Director of the Newcastle University Centre for Landscape and a Professor of Archaeology at Newcastle University where his research focusses on historic landscapes since the Roman period.

The aim of Professor Turner’s paper was to shed new light on the history of Devon’s landscape – and particularly on its fieldscapes – some seventy years after Hoskins’s original research. Hoskins published his work ‘Devon’ in 1954, a year before the seminal ‘Making of the English Landscape’. A rereading of the book caused Professor Turner to think that many of the questions that were raised were still highly topical, and in some cases had not really moved on since they were first posed. He also observed that Hoskins’s approach was very different to how the work would be done nowadays.

An evocative aerial photograph showed a patchwork of fields to the North-West of Exeter. When were the bones of this landscape laid down and who by? Was it really true that ‘by 1350, nearly every line was drawn’ as had been asserted by Hoskins? Professor Turner started his consideration of this landscape with the traditional division into large Saxon villages, and hundreds of small hamlets and small farmsteads (that may have been Celtic in origin). These settlement types had been held to have very different field systems. The Saxon villages had large open fields farmed communally, while the small settlements had small fields dedicated to pastoral husbandry.

Some of Hoskins’s ideas about these differing landscapes were rooted in nineteenth-century ideas about races of people and genetic inheritance and its role in shaping both the way people looked and the way they behaved. These were views of a different age to ours, with a different mindset.

Work had been done on the Devon landscape between the time of W.G. Hoskins and the present day. One notable contributor was the Centre for English Local History’s Harold Fox. Harold concentrated on the fieldscapes of Devon from his PhD thesis onwards. He explored the documentary evidence for the construction of strip fields in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and also explored the classification of Saxon versus Celtic fields. When Harold presented his findings that the small Celtic fields of West Cornwall were, in fact, communally farmed he was booed by his Cornish audience, as he had injured their conception of the independent character of their distant forbears.

Hoskins did not think that Dartmoor was farmed until the later medieval period, with piecemeal enclosures being made from the wastes. The historical evidence presents some problems with confirming this. There are very few documentary sources from before the twelfth century, the chronology of place names was uncertain, and it is hard to relate what evidence there is to precise spots in the landscape. Modern lidar images of farms on the edge of Dartmoor clearly showed the divisions of fields into communally farmed strips. Ros Faith (who was present at this lecture) had argued that these were early medieval, Anglo-Saxon features. Could there have been Anglo-Saxons settling on the edge of Dartmoor?

Despite these and other scholars pursuing the study of the Devon fieldscape, not much had really moved on since Hoskins. Due to the limitation imposed by the available evidence there had been an inability to pin down the chronology of the county’s fieldscape features, or how different regions may have been developed and enclosed at different times. There were many archaeological challenges, as well as historic ones. A lack of datable finds, a lack of excavated settlements, especially from the early medieval period, and an inability to date landscape features. It was possible to construct a relative chronology, but not to securely date developments.

One thing that had moved on since Hoskins’s day, however, was scientific methodology, and Professor Turner introduced us to one such method that was being used to cast new light on the field divisions. Hoskins had had much to say about the large earthen banks topped with hedges that separated Devon’s ancient fields, providing shelter and security for livestock, and assigned an early construction date for them (back to the era of Celtic and Saxon farms). A technique known as ‘optimally stimulated luminescence’ (OSL) has the ability to discover dating information on these features. The technique relies on the fact that certain minerals (including the ubiquitous quartz) trap radiation when they are buried and then release it when they are exposed. If you measure the radiation, you can calculate how long the sample has been buried for. The technique as used by archaeologists uses portable equipment employed in the field to create profiles of the relative ages of the samples. Precise dating work is done away from the site in laboratory conditions, and then related back to the chronology of the field samples to give a complete dating profile. OSL is particularly suited to looking at earthworks, and so provides a method for addressing the problem of dating Devon’s field boundaries.

One of the first places that the technique was used was Bosigran, near Zennor, in Cornwall. Here a number of contrasting field types had been identified and some were thought to ancient in origin. The aim was to date the massive earth bank field dividers to see if their chronology supported this interpretation. The project revealed that the boundaries had bronze age origins, with iron age additions on top. The banks then stayed the same size and shape until to 5th to 6th centuries when they started to grow substantially in the early medieval period.

As can be imagined, the OSL process is not cheap and funding for the Devon project surprisingly has come from the French government (as it was carried out in collaboration with a French university). The projected concentrated on the South Hams area, particularly looking at coaxial field boundaries in selected farms. As with the Cornish project, it was found that the banks started small and then grew quite considerably but the absolute dates gave the Devon boundaries much later origins. Dunwell Farm’s boundaries had mid-twelfth century origins. Highlands Farm had some boundaries with eighth century origins, but the rest dated from the eleventh or twelfth centuries. No boundaries were found with bronze age origins: all dated from the tenth to the twelfth centuries with the one eighth century exception. There was a cautionary note that some earlier examples might have been missed because of the concentration on coaxial fields.

Another project was carried out in Roadford in West Devon. There had been archaeological surveys there before construction of the reservoir and a hedge survey concentrating on species, but neither had yielded any conclusive dating evidence, so the question was posed whether OSL could give more conclusive answers. The project concentrated on finding and dating the ends of field boundaries. The conclusions were that field boundary banks were initially built in the seventh and eighth centuries and grew to their current size in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There were several early medieval hedgebanks and some slight evidence for some even earlier features, such as a possible iron age hollow way.

Professor Turner also concluded that Hoskins had been largely right in his work on the Devon fieldscape. But now new technology gave researchers opportunities to explore regionality and new chronologies.

From an original report by Mandy de Belin