Medieval farmstead and field system, High Burntoft, Hartlepool (Tees Archaeology)

2. Medieval rural settlements include all habitations from the 5th to the 16th century, from the temporary shielings occupied by those herding animals, to the residences of great lords. The great majority consist of farms, hamlets and villages, together with associated features such as roads, enclosures, field systems, boundary banks and ditches, ponds, parks and woods, mills, manor houses, moats and churches. A high proportion of settlements occupied by c.1200 are still inhabited, but a proportion have been abandoned and their sites are visible as earthworks. A growing proportion of late medieval settlements, and almost all of those dating from the period before c.1000 have no visible earthworks above the ground, but their sites can be discovered from crop marks and soil marks most clearly recognised from the air, and surface indications such as scatters of pottery and other occupation debris.3. Medieval rural settlements have been the subject of systematic research in this country since the late 1940's, and have been located and investigated in every part of Europe. They must be regarded as sites of the greatest importance. Most medieval people lived in the countryside, and here we can investigate the material culture of the whole range of society, including those who have left the scantiest written evidence. Survey work and excavation can reveal much about the housing, possessions, and environment of the peasants, together with evidence for production, consumption and technology, both in agriculture and in food preparation and in rural crafts and trade. The distribution and layout of the settlements gives insights into social structure and social organisation, and into medieval ideas about order and planning, and the division between public and private space.The constant and often sudden changes affecting rural settlements - shifts of site, coalescence of small settlements into large villages, the replanning, expansion, and shrinkage which affected many villages and hamlets, changes in house form, the addition of elements such as market places, greens and churches, and sometimes their total desertion - demonstrate the dynamic forces at work during the period, not just the general expansion and contraction of population and agriculture, but many developments in lordship, politics, community organisation, commerce and household life.

Research and Survey

1. Research into medieval settlements can cover whole counties or regions, or be concentrated on a single site, but normally a study should take into account the territory attached to farms, hamlets, or villages, and the estate to which the settlements belonged, which could be large and contain many settlements. The inhabitants depended on a particular territory and its resources for their living, and their use and experience of the land should be a dimension of any study, as should their relationship with higher authority. But research should also embrace a wider region, as transhumance, trade, and contacts with centres of government and religion took people out of their immediate neighbourhood, and villages and farms will be better understood if they can be compared with the types of settlement that developed around them. Settlement forms, building techniques and farming methods all help to define the special character and culture of a region, so the study of the wider context of settlements extends understanding of regional frameworks. Recent projects which have shown the value of this broad multidisciplinary 'landscape' approach to the study of rural settlements include those at Wharram Percy (N. Yorks.), Raunds (Northants.) and Shapwick (Somerset). These have all used a nucleated village and its large territory as the main focus of research.

2. Although it is convenient to use a period like the middle ages to define a field of enquiry, and this allows research to achieve a depth of understanding, no period should be studied in isolation. We must be aware that the landscape of the medieval period had usually been settled and cultivated for millennia, and that prehistoric and Roman patterns of land holding and exploitation influenced their medieval successors. There should be a similar awareness of the subsequent development of sites and their surroundings in the post medieval period. Studies of periods of transition are also important.

3. Research should embrace every type of rural settlement. The great variety of settlement forms deserves to be reflected in research, from the farm and hamlet to the large village and incipient market town. (The conventional dividing line between a village and a hamlet is based on a minimum village size of 6 households). In the same way farms, hamlets and villages which are wholly or partly inhabited should not be neglected in favour of abandoned sites. Subsequent occupation will not have always destroyed the earlier below-ground evidence, and the plan of streets and boundaries will preserve the form of much earlier settlements. Local vernacular architecture should also be studied: buildings from the medieval period should be recorded and analysed in their landscape context, as their form and layout is an important part of the medieval landscape; early post-medieval buildings can provide valuable indications of a continuing local building tradition (6).  Churches, guild halls and houses provide invaluable evidence of wealth, social structure and mentality at the community, family and household level.

4. Lists of deserted medieval villages and moated sites have been prepared by the Groups which preceded the MSRG, and much good work has been done in listing settlement sites in general in the Sites and Monuments Records (SMRs) maintained by local authorities. However, some types of site (particularly farmsteads and hamlets) are less well recorded than others, and a clear distinction is not always made between different types of site, so a long-term aim must be to enhance the data in the SMRs.

5. Survey programmes provide an important means of discovering new sites, and for increasing our understanding of known sites. Survey techniques include aerial photography, the planning of earthworks, geophysical investigation, fieldwalking, soil sampling and documentary research. Each of these methods is valuable in itself, but they produce the best results if carried out in combination, and if they are applied to the surrounding territory as well as to the settlement sites themselves. Survey is essential fbr the preparation of site management plans. It is also a necessary part of any excavation programme. And in the event that a threatened landscape cannot be saved by statutory protection a full survey should be made for the benefit of future research.

Excavated Medieval Building, Hound Tor, Dartmoor (S Coleman)

6. Interdisciplinary research is likely to yield the most satisfying results. The material evidence should be investigated through field survey, excavation and analysis of environmental samples. Documentary evidence should be studied alongside the material culture. Significant advances in knowledge are likely, on the basis of past experience, to proceed from dialogues between archaeologists, historians, geographers, place-name scholars, students of vernacular architecture and those who work on bone and plant remains. New thinking will be informed by theoretical perspectives in archaeology, such as recent work on space, and on the role of exchange and social organisation in buildings and settlements.

Conservation

1. The purpose of conservation is partly to maintain the storehouse of information about the past that is contained within undisturbed settlement sites for the benefit of future generations who will wield much more sophisticated methods of research than are available to us.

2. After a long period in which many sites have been damaged or destroyed by agriculture, road building and housing development, there has been a welcome move towards the preservation of medieval settlements, in part due to changes in agricultural policy and reduced pressure for development. Also a representative sample of the most important sites has been selected under English Heritage's Monuments Protection Programme for consideration for scheduling. These have been chosen on the basis that the countryside is varied in its terrain and land use, and that settlement sites take on sufficient importance to merit preservation if they are characteristic of a defined region. The MPP programme has devised a scoring system which selects important sites by virtue of the condition of their remains, their potential and diversity, associated features, documentation and amenity value. This is to be applauded, and we will press for the speedy implementation of the MPP with the scheduling of the selected sites.

3. The selection of sites under MPP should not be regarded as a single act, but as the beginning of a series of reviews. After MPP new sites will be found and new information about known sites will enhance their importance. Advances in interpretation will lead to revisions of the assessment criteria. We expect to see scheduling as a continuous process, in which there will be a constant dialogue between those implementing it and specialist groups such as MSRG. To take one pressing example, this Group has long argued that preserving a site should not mean drawing a line round the edge of a village, and allowing the destruction of the field system on which the villagers depended for their living, and which we need to appreciate their way of life. English Heritage is now considering the problem of ridge and furrow and this should result in a programme for the preservation of areas that still survive. Medieval settlements are not 'monuments' confined within a fenced enclosure of a few acres, but were the focal points of large living landscapes, and we must grasp methods by which at least representative examples of whole townships and parishes can be saved for posterity.

4. Another extension of MPP must involve scheduling more dispersed settlements. One type of isolated settlement, moated sites, have been systematically researched and a number scheduled, but not enough other farms and hamlets have been identified and planned for them to be assessed for preservation. If we confine our attention to abandoned sites, there must be 30,000 deserted farms and hamlets compared with the 3,000 or so deserted villages. If our conservation policy is to reflect the balance of numbers, many more must firstly be identified, and then recommended for preservation, together with such associated features as roads, field boundaries, and ponds.

5. Perhaps the most difficult problem for those seeking to preserve medieval settlements concerns policy towards existing settlements. We all know that the great majority of the settlements of c.1300 are partly or wholly inhabited at the present time. Many of the boundaries and house sites of 20th century villages had their origins in the early middle ages. There is still a quantity of features and artefacts buried beneath modem houses and gardens, and even more in the occasional deserted house sites still visible as gaps in an inhabited settlement. Every effort should be made to retain the framework of boundaries, routeways, frontages and related features which reflect the medieval structure of a settlement.

6. Apart from scheduling much good work in conservation has been done by organisations other than the statutory heritage agencies, including local authorities, National Parks, the National Trust and the Countryside Commission. Progress has also been made by bodies such as the Forestry Authority. These initiatives deserve encouragement.

7. One important use of sites is for educational purposes, though at present these visits tend to be confined to specialist groups who can best appreciate the sites if they are guided by an expert. It is a long term aim of the Group to make these sites more readily understood and appreciated by a wider public.

Medieval Village with continuing settlement, Cowpen Bewley, Stockton-on-Tees (Tees Archaeology)

Excavation

1. The programme of excavation of c.1952 - 1970 vastly extended our understanding of every aspect of the period. Before settlements were excavated we were almost entirely ignorant of such basic issues as the size and shape of peasant houses, and the chronology of village development. The few major excavations in the last few years cannot be said to show that returns from this type of work is diminishing - such sites as West Cotton, Burton Dassett, and Wood Hall have all produced new types of evidence, such as major deposits of environmental material, and indeed new types of settlement, like the failed market village of Dassett Southend. There are still major categories of settlement sites, such as villages or hamlets of the 10th and 11th centuries, deserted dispersed settlements of the later middle ages; or sites in under researched counties such as Lancashire or Kent, which have not been excavated in adequate numbers.

Excavation of a medieval farmstead at Carscliffe near Cheddar, Somerset (S Coleman)

2. At present only a small number of large scale field evaluations or excavations are taking place on medieval settlement sites. To some extent this is to be welcomed as it marks a move away from the destruction of sites by new developments and a greater emphasis on preservation. Large numbers of limited evaluations and small excavations are taking place under PPG 16 (7). The results from this work can make a significant contribution to archaeological research. They can characterise boundary types and dates, the types of structural materials and techniques used and the distribution of activities within tofts. In the case of the latter, opportunities should be taken to examine their yards and gardens about which too little is known. Small scale work can also provide an opportunity for obtaining environmental material.3. Quite apart from these gaps in our knowledge, there is a case for research excavation, because it both adds to our knowledge, serves as a training ground for another generation of settlement archaeologists, and provides a focus for further advances in interpretation. But the research excavations must be conceived as part of a wider research programme of field work and documentary research, and treated as problem solving sorties, often focussed as much on boundaries, or the peripheral areas of settlements, as on the houses.

Strategy

1. The information on settlements in Sites and Monuments Records must be improved. The work that has gone into the SMRs is of the greatest value, but there is much unevenness between counties. All of them recognise a category of "deserted medieval villages", but many make no clear distinction between different types of site, and have not attempted a systematic listing of deserted farmsteads and hamlets, nor of shrunken villages. Each county should assemble details of all such sites, defined by agreed criteria. This programme of enhancement would require extensive survey work in many counties. But the problem of the still inhabited villages, hamlets and farms must also be addressed: those settlements with evidence (often documentary) for medieval occupation must be included in SMRs. They represent a high proportion of medieval settlements, and must be regarded as archaeological sites, as worthy of recording, survey, management, preservation or excavation as any deserted or shrunken site.

2. The still-inhabited settlements are subject to constant and repeated threats as there is often pressure for infilling, the addition of modem estates, and absorption into suburbs. We need to devise urgently, as well as the programme for identification and listing of sites (see above), a method for judging how much archaeological evidence these places contain, and a strategy for influencing planning decisions concerning new development. Input to District-wide Local Plans, which often deal with specific settlements, may be one means; another may be the use of Conservation Areas for protection. Full advantage should also be taken of PPG 16 work, including the systematic dissemination of information resulting from it, and ensuring that Sites and Monuments Records receive reports.

3. While recognising the need to extend the range of settlement sites in need of conservation and research, preserving the deserted and shrunken sites, which contain archaeological material least likely to have been disturbed by subsequent occupation, remains a priority. English Heritage must press ahead with the scheduling of the sites identified under the existing Monuments Protection Programme, and be persuaded to maintain the MPP as a continuing process, embracing a wider range of settlement types, and including landscapes as well as settlements. Conservation measures must continue in other ways: we should look for opportunities through developments in planning and agricultural policy, such as the set-aside scheme and Countryside Stewardship to make sure that medieval settlement sites can benefit. Conservation by agreement with landowners and farmers through management plans based on field survey must also be pursued: for example, farm plans prepared by Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group officers should always contain archaeological and historical information and advice. The aims of the MSRG can often be combined with those of other groups with interests in conservation or amenity value.

4. Public awareness of medieval sites and their meaning must be extended, by improving the facilities at sites now open to the public, notably at Wharram Percy, by putting more sites on display, and by encouraging the use of imaginative methods of exposition, such as the reconstruction of houses and settlements. We are confident that the enthusiasm felt by visitors to deserted villages when the sites are explained and their past existence evoked by a skilful guide can be provided by future display techniques such as audio-visual systems and virtual reality experiences.

Medieval moated site at Hill House, Old Warden, Bedfordshire (S Coleman)

5. The academic research agenda combines the need to address recent preoccupations, and to take into account new questions. We need to extend our understanding of regional difference, and to assess the influence of the natural environment, and define the extent to which people moulded the landscape and settlement pattern to their own need (8). The role of government, or lordship, or market relations in forming regional cultures must be considered. For the study of settlement a central question remains explaining the nucleation of settlement in the period between the ninth and the twelfth century, and the associated contrast in landscapes which has left its mark on all subsequent developments in the countryside. After that formative period, the subsequent changes in settlements, including their shrinkage and desertion, are debated but imperfectly understood. The household is a subject until recently neglected by archaeologists and there is an opportunity to examine the experiences of builders and users of medieval houses by the study of building and settlement plans, and artefacts and their distribution. This field of research has the potential to throw light on such fundamental issues as consumption and the family, including gender relationships.

6. These questions can be addressed partly by applying new approaches and theories to evidence already published, and by constructing new syntheses. There is also a need for new research, and in particular for the type of interdisciplinary, problem oriented, enquiry into a manageable but extensive sample of the countryside - a large parish or manor for example - which has yielded such fruitful results in the past. But now the example should be chosen from a region of dispersed settlement, or one with both nucleated and scattered settlements, as previous work has tended to be based on nucleated villages and their territories. The techniques used in such research, and any site chosen for excavation, must include extensive survey, geophysical investigation, analysis of environmental remains, documentary study, work on standing buildings and the use of every possible source of relevant information.

References

1 Prepared in November 1996.

2 Frameworks for our Past, English Heritage, 1996

3 Preservation and Excavation of Moated Sites, 1983; The Excavation of Medieval Settlement Sites, 1984; The Preservation of Deserted Medieval Village Sites, 1984; Statement of Excavation Policy, 1988

4 e.g Archaeology and the Middle Ages, Society for Medieval Archaeology, 1987; Exploring Our Past: Strategies for the
Archaeology of England, English Heritage, 1991.

5 For example, the Medieval or Later Rural Settlement in Scotland (MOLRS) project in Scotland (Hingley, R., and Foster, S., 1994 'Medieval or Later Rural Settlement in Scotland - Defining, Understanding and Conserving an Archaeological Resource', Medieval Settlement Research Group Annual Report, 9, 7-11).

6 In respect of recording buildings advantage should be taken of the opportunities provided by Planning Policy Guidance 15: Planning And The Historic Environment (September 1994).

7 Planning Policy Guidance 16: Archaeology and Planning (November 1990).

8 "The whole of the landscape to varying degrees and in different ways is an archaeological and historic artefact, the product of complex historic processes and past land-use. It is also a crucial and defining aspect of biodiversity" (PPG 15, Planning and the Historic Environment, (September 1994).

Introduction
Research and Survey
Conservation
Excavation
Strategy
References

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