AVON COUNTY PLANNING DEPARTMENT

ARCHAEOLOGICAL GUIDANCE NOTE 2

ARCHAEOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT IN SMALL MEDIEVAL TOWNS AND HISTORIC VILLAGE CENTRES

SUMMARY

The small medieval towns and medieval village centres of Avon currently present difficulties in the management and protection of the archaeological resource that they contain. It is clear that many of these areas preserve archaeological information and material which is vital to the understanding of the origins and development of these settlements. This fragile and unrenewable resource is threatened by development, especially in areas where development outside of villages is discouraged. Because of this, PPG16 and County Structure Plan Policy BE4A indicate that, unless there is good evidence of the absence of archaeological deposits and structures at the site, all groundbreaking developments in the area of the levels will require archaeological assessment prior to determination of applications.

1 INTRODUCTION

2 SMALL MEDIEVAL TOWNS

2.1 The small medieval towns of Avon (Wickwar, Chipping Sodbury, Thornbury, Marshfield, Keynsham, and Pensford) all present special archaeological and historical problems, in a similar fashion to those of small medieval towns all over the United Kingdom.

1.2 Historically, the majority of these towns have their origin in the formation of a market (after grant of a royal charter) to an individual or organisational landowner who sought revenue from the exploitation of trade in the area.

1.3 This led to the development of specialised town plans, with continuous rows of houses alongside the main roads through the settlement, each having a long and narrow backplot (for gardens, workshops, storage etc), maximising the number of houses fronting the roads (and thus income from charging their inhabitants for the right to put out stalls on market days) while giving each sufficient area of property.

1.4 The town often developed at a bend or dog-leg in a major road, funnelling traffic through the market place, and usually became a centre of industrial development, of which the products were disposed in the adjacent market place.

1.5 Any pre-existing settlement usually contained a manor house complex and church together with a number of dwellings. These usually shrank or disappeared, with the exception of the church.

1.6 Often, specialised buildings such as market houses, lock-ups, market crosses, and other structures such as stocks, tumbrils etc connected with law and order were constructed for the use of the town on market days.

1.7 Other buildings, such as opulent churches and chapels, mills (if a source of power were available) and bridges (if necessary) were constructed, and of course, the inhabitants of the urban area frequently possessed the means to build more costly and varied houses than found in the surrounding countryside. In the rear areas of the plots, other structures related to industry, horticulture and other activities were built, and waste was usually disposed of in pits dug into the garden area.

1.8 The market towns thus produced richer and more varied structures than other contemporary settlements (such as the villages and hamlets that they served), and this is reflected in their surviving buildings and archaeological deposits and structures.

1.9 In common with other small towns in the rest of the country, those in Avon are frequently threatened with destructive development, on a scale relatively as great or greater than that occurring in cities such as Bristol, but in general, do not command the same level of resources as the larger settlements. It is thus not possible to make archaeological provision as easily in the smaller towns, and especially not to plan the proactive studies frequently undertaken in the larger towns.

3 HISTORIC VILLAGE CENTRES

3.1 Avon possesses more than 130 parishes at the present day, and formerly there were more than this, including many now within the areas of Bristol and Bath. The majority of these parishes possessed at least one village settlement, although these varied widely in size and type.

3.2 Most of the villages currently existing in Avon are known to have been there at least nine hundred years ago, and almost certainly, many of them were in existence hundreds of years before that. The reasons for their position and development are far more complex and less well understood than those of the small towns, and the majority were largely agricultural settlements until the twentieth century.

3.3 The core of the village usually contained a church and burial ground, together with the manor house (which often possessed such elements as a farm, barns, dovecot, fishponds and other manorial trappings), and frequently smaller village buildings, in earlier times a pound for straying animals and perhaps a village cross or similar point of assembly. Other specialist buildings within the manor or parish (such as mills) may occur in the village centre where it is near the source of water power.

3.4 Also an important element of the village were the farms and dwellings of the villagers. These were often clustered in a tight group around the church (such as Compton Dando in Wansdyke), although they could also be arranged around a green (as at Tockington in Northavon), along a road (as in Old Sodbury in Northavon), in a planned arrangement around a market place, like a small town (such as Wrington in Woodspring), or even dispersed around the parish, with only a small settlement around the church (as at Norton Malreward in Wansdyke). On the whole, the areas around churches tend to have been the earliest settled parts of the village.

3.5 By their very nature, the plots of land within village centres have been redeveloped many times, and often preserve a long and complex sequence of archaeological structures and deposits reflecting those changes, although these tend to be more fragmentary and physically slighter than those in towns.

3.6 It is increasingly being realised, however, that village plans can alter over centuries, and even churches, the most stable element of the village, may be replaced on other sites within the village. These changes, with all they imply for social and economic history, can frequently only be detected in the archaeological record.

3.6 Village centres, especially in view of the large areas of green belt in Avon where development outside of villages is actively discouraged, are also frequently threatened with destructive development, and in a more piecemeal way, with smaller application plots and resources than in the medieval towns. Archaeological studies of villages in Avon have not yet achieved more than to demonstrate the scale of the resource, and the potential threat to it through modern development.

4 MEDIEVAL SETTLEMENTS IN AVON AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT

4.1 It is now standard policy guidance that in cases where there may be an effect on the archaeological resource, applicants may reasonably be required to provide an archaeological assessment of the impact of their proposals, as laid down in Planning Policy Guidance Note 16 (1990).

4.2 The same PPG lays down guidelines setting out the importance of preservation of the archaeological resource in situ where possible, and where not, the sequence of archaeological assessment and subsequent procedure to be followed. The procedure is explained more fully in the Explanatory Memorandum to the Third Alteration of the Avon County Structure Plan.

4.3 Modern construction practices tend to be far more destructive than any previously known, involving larger structures, deeper foundations, more extensive service trenching, and increasingly, large scale landscaping and levelling, and thus pose a far greater threat to the archaeological resource in the towns and villages than at any previous time.

4.4 Because of the sensitive nature of the archaeology of medieval settlements and their settings, and the fact that large areas of this resource have been destroyed during the twentieth century (nearly 50% of the historic core of Keynsham has been removed, for example), any proposed development within these areas should be subject to archaeological assessment before the determination of any planning application, as this is the only realistic way that information regarding the effect of the proposals can be obtained.

4.5 Geotechnical trial pitting and other site investigation works such as boreholes should not occur without prior approach to the appropriate local authority for consultation regarding the archaeological implications: the trial pitting may need to be resited to avoid known areas of archaeological sensitivity; frequently, the archaeological recording of such pitting will form part of the necessary archaeological evaluation.

4.6 The archaeologically sensitive medieval core areas of the towns and villages which are the subject of this note are mapped and recorded in the Avon County Sites and Monuments Record.

Contacts: Vince Russett (County Archaeological Officer) Planning Dept. X530 : Mary Stacey (Conservation Officer) Planning Dept. X530

13 January 1994 580-4.wri

DoE 1990 Department of the Environment, Archaeology and Planning, Planning Policy Guidance number 16 November 1990