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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
The scientific study of rural settlement in Britain was initiated in 1883 when Seebohm published The English Village Community. In this study he argued for a continuity between the Roman villa and the Anglo-Saxon vi1lage. In 1897, however, Maitland published his Domesday Book and Beyond by way of rejoinder to Seebohm’s views. Thereafter it became customary for historians, geographers and archaeologists alike to regard the nucleated settlements of the English lowlands as Anglo-Saxon creations, implanted by groups of free English settlers in a countryside emptied, by force or fear, of its Romano-British occupants. Of late this hypothesis, which lays so much stress on Germanic as distinct from earlier achievements, has come under criticism from several quarters. Archaeologists are increasingly conscious of the survival into the Dark Ages of a British tradition in ornamentation even in England. As a philologist, Jackson has adduced sufficient linguistic evidence to undermine, even for eastern Britain, the old theory of the nearcomplete extermination of the Celts and has argued for a bilingual phase when English settlement was being effected. On a narrow front in the Cotswolds the historian, Finberg, has cogently portrayed various facets of continuity between the Roman villa and the adjoining village at Withington. On a broader front, Aston has demonstrated the limitations of Maitland’s thesis on the origin of the manor; he suggests that the primary Anglo-Saxon penetration of England was carried out not by freemen, each owning one hide of land, but under lordly direction and was therefore organized by large estates. The vacuum created by this sapping of the traditional view of Anglo-Saxon settlement has not been filled by the adoption of a convincing alternative hypothesis. This absence of an alternative is largely due to fundamental misconceptions about the organization of that Celtic society which occupied England before the advent of either Romans or Saxons. The purpose of this article is to remove these misconceptions and, by so doing, to show that the basic patterns of settlement distribution in the English lowlands date from at least Celtic times.
1 F. Seebohm, The English Village Community, 1883.
2 F. W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 1897.
3 D. B. Harden (ed.), Dark-Age Britain, 1956, 16-39, 112-22.
4 K. Jackson, Language and History in Early Britain, 1953, 235.
5 H. P. R. Finberg, Roman and Saxon Withington, 1955.
6 T. H. Aston, ‘The Origins of the Manor in England’, Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., New Series, VIII, 1958, 74-5.
7 Cf. J. N. L. Myres in A Survey and Policy of Field Research in the Archaeology of Great Britain, 1, 1948, 115, ‘We need to know far more than we do about the date at which, and the means by which, the pattern of village distribution in different parts of the country took its historic form’.
8 For example, A. Fox, ‘Celtic Fields and Farms on Dartmoor’, Proc. Prehist. Soc., New Series, XX, 1954, 95.
9 G. Bersu, ‘Excavations at Little Woodbury, Wiltshire’, Proc. Prehist. Soc., New Series, VI, 1940, 30-111. Cf., however, L. Scott, ‘Corn-drying Kilns’, ANTIQUITY, 1951, 205-6, who regards the pits as providing ‘storage for other foodstuffs, notably the quantity of air-dried or salted meat which the farm must have needed to preserve after the Michaelmas slaughter of the beasts which could not be kept alive over the winter’.
10 C. F. C. Hawkes, ‘Britons, Romans and Saxons’, Arch. J., CI, 1947, 36-48.
11 I. A. Richmond (ed.), Roman and Native in North Britain, 1958, 3.
12 A. L. F. Rivet, Town and Country in Roman Britain, 1958, 40. Cf, however, the review by S. S. Frere in Past and Present, No. 16, 1959, 3.
13 K. Jackson, op. cit., 235.
14 G. R. J. Jones, ‘Medieval open fields and associated settlement patterns in North-west Wales’, Géographie et Histoire Agraires, 1959, 313-28; ‘Rural Settlement: Wales’, Advancement of Science, No. 60, 1959, 338-42. It is particularly unfortunate that students of settlement form have tended to classify both isolated farms and small groups of ten or so farmsteads as ‘dispersed settlements’, and only larger groups of farmsteads as ‘nucleated settlements’. The notions of nucleation and communal organization are far more important criteria than mere considerations of size. Since both notions underlay the formation of Welsh hamlets, these are regarded as nucleated settlements in this article.
15 G. R. J. Jones. ‘Some Medieval Rural Settlements in North Wales’, Trans, and Papers 1953, Inst, of Brit. Geogs., 1954, 66-9.
16 G. R. J. Jones, ‘The Pattern of Settlement on the Welsh Border’, Ag. Hist. Review, VIII, 1960, 66-81.
17 H. N. Savory, ‘Excavations at Dinorben Hill Fort, Abergele (Denbs.), 1956-7’, Bull. Board of Celtic Studies, XVII (1958), 296-309; ‘The Excavations at Dinorben Hill Fort, Abergele, 1956-9’, Denbighshire Hist. Soc., VIII, 1959, 18-39.
18 F. G. Payne, ‘The British Plough: Some Stages in its Development’, Ag. Hist. Review, V, 1957, 77-9.
19 G. R. J. Jones, ‘Basic Patterns of Settlement Distribution in Northern England’, Advancement of Science, No. 72, 1961, 192-200.
20 F. Seebohm, op. cit., 1-13, 424-35, 443-53.
21 Domesday Book, I, f. 132b. J. E. B. Gover, A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place Names of Hertfordshire, 1938, 10-11.
22 R. G. Collingwood and J. N. L. Myres, Roman Britain and the English Settlements, 1936, 441.
23 G. J. Copley, An Archaeology of South-East England, 1958, 152-176.
24 A. H. Smith, English Place-Name Elements, 1, 1956, 300.
25 J. W. Birch (ed.), Cartularium Saxonicum, I, 1885, 99; J. M. Kemble, Codex diplomaticus aevi Saxonici, II, 1840, 341.
26 Domesday Book, 1, f. 28.
27 A Survey and Policy of Field Research in the Archaeology of Great Britain, I, 1948, 73 ; V. G. Childe, Prehistoric Communities of the British Isles, 1947, 198-9.
28 F. G. Payne, ‘The Plough in Ancient Britain’, Arch. J., CI, 1947, 82-111; Yr Aradr Gymreig, 1954, 13-40.
29 For the distribution of these soils see S. W. Wooldridge and D. L. Linton, ‘The Loam Terrains of Southeast England and their relation to its Early History’, ANTIQUITY, 1933, 297-310.
30 T. H. Aston, op. cit., 75.
31 H. M. Cam, Liberties and Communities in Medieval England, 1944, 64-90.
32 F. Seebohm, op. cit., 17.
33 Brokenborough, in North-West Wiltshire, is a particularly interesting example of a large discrete manor associated with a fortification. This place was once known by the Celtic name for the fortification, to which a Saxon suffix was added. In due course the hybrid name Kairdurberg was replaced by Brokenberg. See J. E. B. Gover, A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Wiltshire, 1939, 53-4; and Victoria County History, Wiltshire, 1, 1957, 50, 68.
34 G. Bersu, op. cit., 99-107.
35 Ibid., 106.
36 See, for example, F. Morgan and P. Vinogradoff (eds.), Survey of the Honour of Denbigh, 1914.
37 G. Bersu, ‘Excavations at Woodbury, near Salisbury, Wiltshire (1938)’, Proc. Prehist. Soc., New Series, VI, 1938, 313. I am indebted to Mr. B. R. S. Megaw for drawing my attention to a subsequent paper by Dr Bersu (‘Celtic Homsteads in the Isle of Man’, Journal of the Manx Museum, V, Nos. 72-3, 1945-6, 177-182), in which he identifies structures of the Little Woodbury type as the dwellings of the aristrocrats of Celtic society.
38 J. W. Birch, op. cit. 47. See also G. B. Grundy, ‘The Saxon Land Charters of Wiltshire’, Arch. J., LXXVI, 1919, 143-50. A further hint of continuity is provided by the Roman bricks used in the construction of Britford Church, a structure in which work possibly of the 8th century A.D. is still preserved. See Victoria County History, Wiltshire, 11, 1955, 25-6.
39 Domesday Book, I, f. 64b, 74.
40 Ibid., f. 52, 64b.
41 Ibid., f. 38b.
42 Ibid., f 38b, 39 44. I am indebted to Professor H. C. Darby for information concerning the number of such manors.
43 Victoria County History, ibid., 60-1 ; Victoria County History. Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, 1, 1900, 408.
44 The Knowlton Circles, sanctuaries of the Bronze Age which have been well described as the Stonehenge of Cranborne Chase, similarly stand in what appears to be a significant relationship to Knowlton, caput of the hundred of the same name. This settlement has disappeared apart from the church, which stands within one of the circles, and one farm. See M. W. Beresford and J. K. S. St. Joseph, Medieval England, 1958, 50-2. Oddly enough, one of the barrows bore the Welsh-sounding name venellys in a survey of the 16th century.
45 R. J. C. Atkinson, Stonehenge, 1956, 103-4.
46 It is possible that some of the more favoured sites in our lowlands have been in agricultural use, with intermissions probably only for fallowing, for a time span of no less than fifty centuries. Clegyr Boia, near St. David’s, Pembrokeshire, one of the few Neolithic homesteads recognized in Southern Britain, stands at an altitude of but 350 ft. in an area where nucleated hamlets of the traditional Celtic type are still the characteristic forms of settlement. A similar view is advanced in A Matter of Time, 1960, a survey summarizing a great deal of recent archaeological research on the river gravels of England, which appeared after this paper was written.
47 H. L. Gray, English Field Systems, 1915; M. W. Beresford, op. cit., 21-49, 125-51.
48 As, for example, in Morfe Forest, Shropshire, the Forest of the Peak, Derbyshire, and the Forest of Galtres, Yorkshire. Even here, however, these traces have been blurred by assarting and the creation of severalties.
49 Other uniformities in field system in different parts of England may well have been imposed from above as part of the taxation policies of the component Dark Age Kingdoms of England. See S. Goransson, ‘The regular open-field pattern in England as a counterpart to, or possible model for, Scandinavian ‘solskifte’, Geografiska Annaler (forthcoming).
50 H. Thorpe, ‘The Green Villages of County Durham’, Trans, and Papers 1949, Inst. Brit. Geogs., 1950, 158, 161, 176-7; A. E. Smailes, North England, 1960, pl. 22.
