The W G Hoskins Lecture 2019
‘Kingdom, Civitas and County: The Evolution of Territorial Identity in the English Landscape’ presented by Professor Stephen Rippon.
The thirtieth Hoskins lecture
16 June 2019.
In the footsteps of Hoskins and following the Leicester approach, Stephen Rippon mapped the evolution of large-scale territorial identity and landscapes in the late prehistoric, Roman, and early medieval periods across eastern England in this year’s Hoskins Lecture.
Over the course of the Iron Age, a series of marked regional variations in material culture and landscape character emerged that reflect the development of discrete zones of social and economic interaction. Drawing an analogy with the light-hearted ‘cream tea’ debate between Devon and Cornwall (should the cream go onto the scone before or after the jam?!), Prof Rippon emphasised how strong county identities still exist today. He also noted the controversy faced by the boundary commission over whether parliamentary constituencies should match county boundaries.
Beginning with the Domesday book, it is easy to assume that counties are very ancient, with Sussex for example equating to the South Saxons, Essex with the East Saxons, etc. But the boundary between, for example, the counties of Essex and Suffolk is not straightforward as it slices through earlier parishes. Counties in fact only date back to about the tenth century, and Steven Bassett’s well-known model postulates how territorial arrangements may have evolved before this tenth century reorganisation. Bassett suggests that a large number of relatively small territories gradually reduced in number as more powerful social groups gradually conquered their neighbours, eventually leading to the formation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. But Prof Rippon suggests that there may have been some degree of continuity in large regional-scale identities back into the Roman and late prehistoric periods as the boundaries of some Anglo-Saxon kingdoms appear to have corresponded with those of the kingdoms that emerged during the Late Iron Age. In eastern England at least, these pre-Roman socio-economic territories appear to have survived throughout the Roman period despite a trend towards cultural homogenization brought about by Romanization. Although there is no direct evidence for the relationship between these socio-economic zones and the Roman administrative territories known as civitates, they probably corresponded very closely.
In the early medieval period, these regional-scale territories were sub-divided into a series of smaller-scale ones, documented at the time as pagi and regiones. Bassett has suggested that a prime example of this is the group of Essex parishes called ‘Roding’, but Professor Rippon suggested that the early medieval regio was in fact far larger.
The southern boundary of the ‘Rodings’ parishes is in fact highly irregular, zig zagging through field systems in a way that suggests it is relatively recent (eg the boundary with the Willingale parishes, illustrated here). There was a web of territorial links, such as parishes having detached parcels, and linked place-names), that suggests an early folk terrority that embraced not just the group of parishes called ‘Roding’ but the whole of Ongar Hundred to the south whose boundaries mostly ran along the watersheds of the Roding Valley. Across the later county of Essex many hundreds appear to have had their origins in earlier regiones, although this was not the case in Hertfordshire or Middlesex.
The boundaries between early folk territories almost invariably followed high ground (the watersheds between drainage basins), that in the early medieval period will have been common land covered in wood pasture. The coastal and estuarine areas were fringed with salt-marshes, that also appear to have been grazed in common, before they were divided up between the newly emergent parishes.
The study of archaeological evidence for Anglo-Saxon colonisation across the ‘East Saxon;’ kingdom and adjacent areas suggests it was restricted to certain coastal and estuarine districts. There is plenty of evidence that people were living in the very extensive inland areas – including finds of pottery – but this is suggestive of native British communities. In both areas of Anglo-Saxon and British settlement the landscape was divided up into early folk territories, but it was communities with an Anglo-Saxon identity who eventually achieved political supremacy.
In summary, Prof Rippon emphasised that there is far more potential continuity within landscapes than previously thought, and at different scales. In this region – that was to become the East Saxon kingdom – Anglo- Saxons settled in very restricted parts of the landscape. Elsewhere, a substantial British population appears to have survived and this probably accounts for continuities in the boundaries between zones of social and economic interaction that had started to emerge during the Iron Age and survived throughout the Roman period. While it is understandable that archaeologists and historians study discrete periods, with a common set of source material, this compartmentalisation of the past does have its problems as it can create a false sense of discontinuity at period boundaries that we think were important – based on for example political events – but which may have had relatively little impact on ordinary farming communities. It is by studying the landscape, and using a very wide range of source material, that we get the longer-term perspective.