Post-Conquest Medieval
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Medieval 12 Post-Conquest Medieval Edited by Stephen Rippon and Bob Croft from contributions by Oliver Creighton, Bob Croft and Stephen Rippon 12.1 Introduction economic transformations reflected, for example, in Note The preparation of this assessment has been the emergence, virtual desertion and then revival of an hampered by a lack of information and input from some urban hierarchy, the post-Conquest Medieval period parts of the region. This will be apparent from the differing was one of relative social, political and economic levels of detail afforded to some areas and topics, and the continuity. Most of the key character defining features almost complete absence of Dorset and Wiltshire from the of the region – the foundations of its urban hier- discussion. archy, its settlement patterns and field systems, its The period covered by this review runs from the industries and its communication systems – actually Norman Conquest in 1066 through to the Dissolu- have their origins in the pre-Conquest period, and tion of the monasteries in the 16th century, and unlike the 11th to 13th centuries simply saw a continua- the pre-Conquest period is rich in both archaeology tion of these developments rather than anything radi- (including a continuous ceramic sequence across the cally new: new towns were created and monas- region) and documentary sources. Like every region teries founded, settlement and field systems spread of England, the South West is rich in Medieval archae- out into the more marginal environments, industrial ology preserved within the fabric of today’s historic production expanded and communication systems landscape, as extensive relict landscapes in areas of were improved, but all of these developments were the countryside that are no longer used as inten- built on pre-Conquest foundations (with the excep- sively as they were in the past, and buried beneath tion of urbanisation in the far south-west). It is our towns, villages, farmsteads and the plough soil. true that the 14th century saw a major demographic In places this Medieval archaeology has seen inten- decline, and resulting adjustments in the economy, sive research, but unfortunately it is sorely lacking in but in contrast to the end of the Roman period the synthesis. In common with the rest of the country, majority of the Medieval rural landscape and its towns the study of the Medieval period in the South West continued in use. has also suffered from a fragmentation of scholarship, with detailed studies of documentary archives, place- 12.2 The Material world names, archaeology and standing buildings all to often being carried out in isolation. A number of important 12.2.1 Rural settlement and field overviews have been published in recent decades both systems on a county basis, for example, Cornwall (Preston- Probably by the 11th century there had emerged, Jones and Rose 1986), Somerset (Aston and Burrow across the South West, rural landscapes of very 1982; Aston 1988), the former Avon area (Aston and different character. The north and east of the region Iles 1986) and Gloucestershire (Finberg 1975), and at formed part of what has been called England’s “central a more regional scale (Aston and Lewis 1994; Kain province”, with large, nucleated, villages surrounded and Ravenhill 1999), though these mostly have a broad by extensive open fields, while in the far south-west landscape focus. (beyond the Blackdown and Quantock Hills) the land- Unlike the preceding millennium, which had seen scape was characterised by far more dispersed settle- the upheavals of the Roman conquest and then ment patterns associated with a mixture of closes growing Anglo-Saxon influence, and the related socio- (enclosed fields) and small-scale open fields. 195 The Archaeology of South West England Some progress has been made in examining the the valley bottoms. The most intensively studied development of these landscapes through a number landscape has been Glastonbury Abbey’s manor at of major projects. These include broad, county- Shapwick on the Polden Hills in central Somerset, wide historic landscape characterisations; a technique where the parish has seen a ten-year programme of pioneered and subsequently developed in Cornwall interdisciplinary research, supported by the Universi- (Herring 1998), which has now been extended to ties of Bristol and Winchester, English Heritage and cover much of the region (see Section 1.2.4 on Somerset County Council (Aston and Gerrard 1999; page 15). Gerrard and Aston forthcoming). It appears that There have also been local landscape studies this planned village was created by (and probably in) carried out as part of development-led projects (for the 10th century, replacing what had been a more example at Roadford Reservoir) and university-based dispersed settlement pattern, some elements of which programmes of research, such as those at Shapwick were recorded by the names of furlongs in the open (Aston and Gerrard 1999; Gerrard and Aston forth- fields surrounding the village. Shapwick is one of a coming), Puxton (Rippon 2000) and on Dartmoor series of planned villages on the estates of Glaston- (Austin 1978; Fleming 1994). The uplands have seen bury, such as those on the Polden Hills together with survey projects conducted by the former RCHME the nearby island at Meare (Rippon 2004a), suggesting and continued by English Heritage, such as Bodmin that the abbots were closely involved in restructuring Moor (Johnson and Rose 1994), Dartmoor (unpub- and managing their estates (Corcos 2002). Similar lished), Exmoor (Riley and Wilson-North 2001) and landscapes of villages and open fields are found else- the Quantock Hills (Riley 2006); survey is currently where in northern, central and eastern Somerset underway on Mendip. The individual site reports from (Ellison 1983; Aston 1988; Rippon 1997a), though all these are available from the National Monuments some areas, notably in the north of the county, Record and local HERs. had more dispersed settlements patterns with little There have been more detailed assessments of evidence in the available documentary sources or the Medieval settlement and landscapes around Brown field boundary patterns to suggest that there were Willy on Bodmin Moor (Herring 1986; 2006a), Holne ever extensive open fields. This can be seen, for Moor (Fleming and Ralph 1982) and Okehampton example, around Backwell, Nailsea and Wraxall in Park (Austin et al. 1980), on Dartmoor together with North Somerset, (Rippon 1997a, 198–200; Ponsford English Heritage survey work around Challacombe 2003). Some areas of the lowlands appear never to which included extensive strip lynchets. have experienced the complete transformation from A number of earlier surveys, based on the transcrip- a dispersed settlement pattern to one of nucleated tion of air photographic evidence and some limited villages and open fields, and this trend towards marked fieldwork, were also carried out and integrated into local difference in Medieval landscape character, here HERs: Exmoor National Park, Quantock Hills AONB, at the margins of England’s “central province”, is also Mendip Hills AONB (Ellis 1992), Blackdown Hills seen on Somerset’s extensive wetlands, which were AONB and the Somerset Claylands. These have been reclaimed at this time. The area around Puxton in augmented by more recent work as part of English North Somerset has seen the most intensive research. Heritage’s National Mapping Programme, principally Here landscapes characterised by both nucleated and in Cornwall, but also in those areas where English dispersed settlement patterns were created in a phys- Heritage field surveys have been undertaken. ically uniform environment that fell within estates Until recently the study of the Medieval landscape held by the same lord of the manor (the bishops of was based primarily around the survey and exca- Bath and Wells). This suggests that, in contrast to vation of deserted Medieval settlements (see Aston the highly interventionist abbots of Glastonbury, the 1988; Allan 1994b; Henderson and Weddell 1994), bishops were less directly involved in physically struc- and early pioneering work on the morphology of turing their estates with local communities playing a extant settlements (Ellison 1983; Roberts 1987b, Fig. far more significant part in shaping the countryside 9.6) has now been followed up as part of a national (Rippon 2006). survey (Roberts and Wrathmell 2000). While Glou- The date when open fields were enclosed also cestershire and most of Somerset lay within England’s varies significantly. In many areas of Gloucestershire “central province”, there was considerable diversity and Somerset the open fields were enclosed by agree- in the character of its Medieval landscape. To the ment, a process starting in the late Medieval period, north-east of the Blackdown and Quantock Hills the though some open fields survived to be enclosed Medieval rural landscape followed the broadly Midland by Act of Parliament in Somerset. Aston (1989) pattern, with a compact nucleated village adjacent to has reviewed the current state of knowledge with the church, surrounded by communally managed open regard to the study of deserted settlements in Glou- field system, with small areas of woodland usually cestershire, Somerset, and Wiltshire. Few deserted restricted to the steeper slopes, and meadow in Medieval farmsteads have been examined in the region 196 Medieval but unpublished work at Carscliffe in Cheddar by ated settlement at Old Town, St Mary’s, enhanced Bristol University has shown that the site was occu- from the 13th century by the construction of a castle pied from the 12th to the 17th century (Mark Horton (C Thomas 1985). The Late Medieval period saw pers. com.). the abandonment of some settlements in the highest In the south-west of the region the Medieval rural upland areas, while hamlets in some places contracted landscape was distinctly different. Historic Landscape to single farmsteads (Beresford 1964; Herring 1986; Characterisation in both Cornwall and Devon (Corn- Fox 1989; Johnson and Rose 1994; Henderson and wall County Council 1996; Turner 2006b) has greatly Weddell 1994).