The archaeology of English towns is becoming better
understood, writes Simon Denison
How much is known about the archaeology of Kidderminster? Or
Ludlow? Or Evesham? Surprisingly, perhaps, the answer is not very
much. That, however, is about to change.
A basic outline of the archaeology of 64 small towns in the Welsh
Marches has now been drawn by an innovative five-year survey.
Several industrial small towns, such as Kidderminster and
Redditch, have been shown to have unexpected medieval origins,
and the archaeology of some historic market towns and other sites
has been mapped for the first time.
Meanwhile, an intensive survey of the archaeology of Newcastle
upon Tyne has shed new light on the city's Roman origins and
produced detailed maps of its surviving medieval and post-
medieval deposits.
Each of these two projects is the furthest advanced of two series
of urban surveys - one of small towns, the other of major cities
- funded since 1992 by English Heritage. In addition to the Welsh
Marches, small-town surveys are also underway in Somerset, Avon,
Gloucestershire and Hampshire, while 30 cities are taking part
in the intensive survey project.
The Central Marches Towns Survey, now drawing to a close, covered
small towns in Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire,
where the absence of much previous archaeological work had left
the archaeology either little-understood, or assumed to be non-
existent, despite the historical importance of some of the towns.
The survey covered historic market towns, industrial towns, and
shrunken or deserted towns such as the former Marcher boroughs
of Clun and Wigmore on the Welsh border.
The project was intended primarily to produce a `historic
landscape map' of each town, to help guide planners' decisions
on the siting of future building developments. However, the
survey has also produced new information about the history of
some of the towns, by gathering together and mapping the results
of historical research, records of standing buildings, known
sites and monuments, and information taken from maps.
Redditch, for example, has long been considered a 19th century
product of the Industrial Revolution, developed as a centre of
the needle-manufacturing industry, and then largely redeveloped
in the 1960s. It was assumed the town had little surviving pre-
19th century archaeology. The project, however, has mapped the
results of recent research by Prof Chris Dyer of Birmingham
University, which suggested Redditch was a semi-urban trading
centre in the medieval period. Subsequent excavations over the
past couple of years have proved Prof Dyer's predictions correct.
`For the first time ever, we are now finding medieval deposits
in the town centre,' said the survey director, Hal Dalwood of
Hereford and Worcester County Council.
Leominster, on the other hand, was well-known to have medieval
origins, but the extent of its archaeology was little understood,
according to Mr Dalwood. The project has now shown that the
town's suburbs expanded and then retracted in the 12th and 13th
centuries, not to spread out again until the 17th century. The
later expansion, however, was not as intense as in the medieval
period, leaving dense medieval deposits potentially undisturbed.
In Newcastle, the intensive urban survey has emphasised the
city's Roman military origins, suggesting that civilian
settlement may have been less widespread than was previously
thought, according to Dave Heslop, County Archaeologist for Tyne
and Wear. The survey's main contribution, however, has been to
produce the first detailed, computerised map of the town's
archaeology. `Not much synthesis of Newcastles archaeology had
previously been done,' Mr Heslop said.
The survey has established, for example, that although Newcastle
was the fourth largest town in England in the 14th century, no
houses of the period have yet been identified. Remains of the
town's medieval nunnery, however, were found to still
exist. Once its former location was mapped, the nunnerys boundary
was shown to run through the site of a proposed development in
the city centre. As a result, in 1995 an excavation was
recommended, and it produced evidence of the boundary wall, as
well as rubbish pits dating from the nunnery's demolition, with
large amounts of pottery and window glass.
`This was in a part of town where the archaeology would not have
been expected to survive, but we located it precisely with a very
small trench,' Mr Heslop said.
According to Roger Thomas, who supervises both survey projects
at English Heritage, the intention is not to grade towns or parts
of towns into areas that can or cannot be developed, but simply
to give planners advance warning of the likely archaeological
response to any development proposal. The result may be that, as
each survey approaches completion, the prospect of accidental
destruction of archaeological remains in England's towns will
recede.
Return to Table of Contents
Return to CBA Homepage
New evidence suggests how the Dover Boat was
built and used. Peter Clark reports
When a large Bronze Age boat was discovered in Dover in 1992,
about one-and-a-half times as long as a double-decker bus and
substantially complete, it was immediately regarded as one of the
most spectacular prehistoric finds of recent times. About two
thirds of the boat was recovered, and since then it has been
studied in detail by the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, and a
part of it reconstructed, in order to answer questions about how
the boat was built and where it sailed.
The boat (tentatively dated to around 1300BC in the Middle Bronze
Age) consists, in essence, of four oak planks: two flat bottom
planks and two curved side planks - although additional side
planks had been removed in antiquity. The bottom planks were
fixed together without nails or carpentry joints, but by ramming
wedges and cross-timbers through a pair of upstanding ridges on
either side of the main joint and through a series of cleats (or
semi-circular wooden hoops). This technique seems strange, as the
main joint appears to be a line of weakness where we would expect
a strong keel. We know from other Bronze Age boats that carpentry
jointing was known at the time, but for some reason it was not
used here.
The side planks were stitched to the base by yew withies, and the
seams made watertight by compressed moss. It seems, also, that
the boat, some 15m long, was made out of single lengths of oak
timber, requiring the use of massive trees with long, straight
sections of trunk uninterrupted by branches.
This much was clear from studying the boat itself. However, only
through reconstruction of a 3m section, using replicas of Bronze
Age tools, did we begin to understand how the boat was built.
First, two logs about 1m in diameter were split into four half-
logs, and these were sculpted into the four base and side planks
by hammering in wooden wedges to split off sections of timber.
The roughly shaped planks achieved through this process were then
finished off with metal tools - palstaves (bronze heads that can
be socketed to form either axes or adzes), a socketed axe, a
chisel and gouges.
Although the process was largely trial-and-error, the tool-marks
on the reconstructed boat matched those on the original
precisely, including parallel grooves running along the base of
the boat, which had originally been thought to be possibly deco
rative. This suggested that we had correctly identified the
stages of construction and the toolkit used by the original boat-
builders. Furthermore, we actually produced a better finish than
on the original boat, suggesting the original builders were more
interested in getting the boat completed quickly than in
producing a fine finish.
The sheer scale of the boat suggests that it was a sea-going
vessel, though this question is still hotly disputed. We know
that boats did cross the channel in this period, because part of
the cargo of a Bronze Age boat - mainly broken metalwork - was
found on the seabed off Dover in 1974. Some, however, believe the
Dover Boat was used only on rivers, as the contemporary boats
from North Ferriby on the Humber are thought to have been. Yet
the river Dour today is a small stream, flanked by steep hills,
and it is difficult to imagine it being a broad tidal estuary
like the Humber, where a sizeable boat was needed simply to cross
from side to side.
The grooves on the bottom of the boat had been worn away in
places, suggesting either that the boat had been beached -
evidence for use at sea - or that it had rubbed against the
bottom in shallow water. Preliminary study of environmental
evidence surrounding the boat indicates it was abandoned in fresh
water, but if the boat had been beached, its great weight
(particularly when loaded with cargo) would have required the
assistance of the tide to refloat it. A scrap of unworked shale
found in the boat has been proved to come from Kimmeridge Bay in
Dorset, which may suggest the boat was plying along the south
coast 3,000 years ago. The waters below the high cliffs at Dover
are little different from those out to sea, so even if the boat
had hugged the shoreline, it would have needed to have had sea-
going capabilities on all but the calmest days.
The sight of the finished reconstruction itself, however, was
perhaps more evocative than all the lessons the boat has taught
us about the past. The sturdy timbers, golden brown in colour and
with the distinct odour of fresh green oak, could not fail to
fire the imagination of even the most cynical onlooker or
archaeologist. Eventually, we hope the finished piece will be
displayed alongside the original boat in its new gallery in Dover
Museum.
Peter Clark is Deputy Director of the Canterbury
Archaeological Trust. The reconstruction project was funded by
English Heritage.
Return to Table of Contents
Return to CBA Homepage
England's towns were first planned at the
same time as its villages, explains David Palliser
The origin of the towns and villages of England is one of the
most disputed subjects of medieval history and archaeology. The
traditional view is that most villages were created in the early
Anglo-Saxon period and most towns - at least, most towns
`planted' at one time - after the Norman Conquest. Increasingly,
however, research is showing that this needs to be revised. It
now seems that many towns and villages were created broadly at
the same time, with the earliest towns actually preceding the
earliest villages.
Earlier this century, the pioneer landscape historian WG Hoskins
suggested that most villages were created from the 5th century
onwards, but recent work in the East Midlands by the historian
Christopher Dyer (see BA, June 1995) is finding the 10th
and 11th centuries the most likely period for village formation.
Similar conclusions are being provided by the archaeologist Mick
Aston's ongoing project at Shapwick in Somerset.
No one believes any longer that villages were all created by the
Anglo-Saxon invaders, but older views about the origin of towns
are proving more tenacious. That is a pity, because towns had a
key role to play in the commercialisation that made England so
wealthy and such a tempting prize for the Norman invaders of
1066. Furthermore, since England was the first country in the
world to become fully urbanised - with more than half its
population living in towns - in the 19th century, it is important
to understand the origins of English towns aright.
Medieval towns and villages were often similar in their form and
fabric, but the similarities have often escaped comment, because
they are usually considered by separate specialists on urban and
rural settlement. The similarities did not, however, escape
Christopher Taylor, who wrote in Village and Farmstead
that the period from the 9th to the 13th century was one `when
both towns and villages were being planned, perhaps for the
same reasons' (my italics).
The creation of many towns between the Conquest and the Black
Death is well enough known, with hundreds of places acquiring
trading privileges and borough status, and in some cases with the
laying out of new towns on virgin sites. The process, however,
was well under way when the Normans arrived: `The decisive phase
in early urban history came in the time of the Vikings and the
West Saxon reconquest of England', as Edward Miller and John
Hatcher put it in their recent book on towns and commerce,
Medieval England. The period included not only the
fortified towns (burhs) of King Alfred and his successors,
and the trading towns of the Danelaw like York and Lincoln, but
also the more numerous towns which were established next to major
churches, the so-called minster towns.
Furthermore, as the historical geographer Brian Roberts has
observed, many villages `adopt the same planning principles' as
towns, and `belong to the same planning phase'. This is often
overlooked, because villages seem often to have started with a
simple plan (often a single or double row, a green, or a
cluster), whereas towns tend to be divided between a majority
with no very obvious planning, and a minority with regular
layouts, usually discussed in terms of examples with a gridded
layout. The two groups are often distinguished as `organic' and
`planned', which is misleading, since towns do not `grow', they
are planned - whether piecemeal or as a whole.
Many villages are now categorised as either simple in plan, or
polyfocal (with several originally separate nuclei balling
together), or composite (with later units added to an original
core). The same is true of towns. Some, chiefly the smaller
market towns, are of simple plan, but many seem superficially
irregular because they are either polyfocal or composite.
Large cities like London or Coventry did not `grow' (the false
biological analogy again) but were composite in plan. Careful
analysis shows that they were planned in phases, sometimes of one
or two streets, sometimes with a whole new quarter or suburb.
Other towns were polyfocal in origin, including Cambridge,
Shrewsbury and York (though Norwich, which has been claimed as
polyfocal, is now reinterpreted as composite). The most striking
example is Durham, where five or six separate communities (three
of them called `boroughs') grew up at the same time as, or even
before, the central `borough' on the Wear peninsula.
Other towns were planned more simply. At the humblest end were
small market towns which were physically almost indistinguishable
from agricultural villages. Towns like Battle or Chipping Campden
were urban equivalents of the two-row or street village. The true
gridiron-plan towns laid out in a single phase, like Salisbury
or New Winchelsea, were always exceptional. Many so-called
smaller grid towns were really nothing but cross-road
settlements, with back lanes parallel to both main roads. And
some larger grid-plan towns were less simple in layout than they
seem. Ludlow and Hedon, both described as single-phase grids in
Professor Beresfords New Towns of the Middle Ages, have
been reinterpreted as complex plans of several successive phases.
In short, many towns and villages were apparently planned on
similar lines and over a similar time-span. It is interesting
that although most towns and most nucleated villages - where
dating evidence of any sort is available - were created between
the 9th and 13th centuries, at least some towns go back
further. By contrast, no planned and nucleated villages (with the
possible exception of West Heslerton in North Yorkshire) do so.
Seventh and 8th century England, therefore, sees already some
cathedral towns like Canterbury, some minster towns or proto-
towns such as Oxford and Reading, possibly some Mercian fortified
towns like Cambridge and Hereford, and earliest of all the
trading emporia of London (the Aldwych/ Strand site),
Hamwic (Southampton), Ipswich and York. Some of these
early `towns' may have been very straggling and scattered, but
regular planning can be attested at Hamwic by about 700,
at Ipswich about 800, and at Winchester and York about 900. The
walled City of London, reoccupied in 886, also seems to have had
a planned street grid originating in King Alfred's time, although
the system as a whole may be 10th century in date. In view of all
these dates of early urban planning, Brian Roberts was surely
right to ask, in The Making of the English Village: `Did regular
town plans precede and form models for the rural village?'
That question may seem absurd to those who still assume that
small, rural settlements must emerge before large, complex towns.
The American writer Jane Jacobs, however, has suggested that in
the ancient world the emergence of cities may have
preceded and helped to produce settled agriculture, rather
than the other way round. Could the same have been true in the
economy of the post-Roman West? The mechanisms might have
included royal initiatives, from the interest of early kings in
ports-of-trade, such as King Ine of Wessex at Hamwic,
through the military and economic interests of the Mercian and
West Saxon kings in creating networks of burhs in the 8th,
9th and 10th centuries.
Christopher Dyer's article in this magazine postulates that `with
the growth of the state from the late 9th century, and the
multiplication of the number of lesser aristocrats . . . there
came an increased demand for taxes, rents and labour', leading
to pressure for more efficient patterns of agriculture and rural
settlement - but before that, we might suggest, leading to
fortified centres for defence, markets and mints. Such a scenario
would almost take us back to the view of TF Tout, the pioneer
interpreter of medieval town planning in England, who wrote in
1917 that `the political necessity for town making arose earlier
than the economic need'.
Admittedly, such a tentative model would fit some regions better
than others. Royal sponsorship of towns is better attested for
Wessex and Mercia than for East Anglia and much of the Danelaw.
Some regions acquired planned towns and planned villages; others
- notably East Anglia again - had few obviously planned towns and
very few nucleated villages at all. James Campbell, in The
Anglo-Saxons, has some fascinating suggestions about the
differences between Winchester's `neat grid' and Norwich's
`sprawling tangle', as part of `a pattern of distinction between
East and West, which owes much to the policies and attitudes of
the kings of the house of Wessex'.
Nevertheless, what has been suggested here would fit very well
with Mick Aston's interpretation of Wessex at the very least,
where the 10th century was a `boom time' for new towns and
growing commercialisation, and where one consequence was that
`go-ahead' lords like Glastonbury Abbey were concentrating
peasants into new nucleated villages like Shapwick, and replacing
their former scattered holdings by `cereal farms' (Current
Archaeology, February 1997). In some regions, then, at least,
new planned villages were preceded and inspired by the
regular plans of newlyplanted towns.
David Palliser is Professor of Medieval History at the
University of Leeds. He is currently writing a book on English
medieval towns, and is editing the forthcoming medieval volume
of the Cambridge Urban History of Britain.
Return to the British Archaeology
homepage
© Council for British Archaeology, 1997
Mapping the forgotten remains in towns
Lessons from Bronze Age boat-building
On the earlier origins of English towns