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By Root 913 0

went to church, paid fines, had children in and out of wedlock, borrowed and lent money, tools, and grain, quarreled and fought, and got sick and died. Together they formed an integrated whole, a permanent community organized for agricultural production. Their sense of common enterprise was expressed in their records by special terms: communitas villae, the community of the vill or village, or tota villata, the body of all the villagers. The terminology was new. The English words “vill” and “village” derive from the Roman villa, the estate that was often the center of settlement in early medieval Europe. The closest Latin equivalent to “village” is vicus, used to designate a rural district or area.

A distinctive and in its time an advanced form of community, the medieval village represented a new stage of the world’s oldest civilized society, the peasant economy. The first Neolithic agriculturists formed a peasant economy, as did their successors of the Bronze and Iron Ages and of the classical civilizations, but none of their societies was based so uniquely on the village. Individual homesteads, temporary camps, slave-manned plantations, hamlets of a few (probably related) families, fortresses, walled cities—people lived in all of these, but rarely in what might be defined as a village.

True, the village has not proved easy to define. Historians, archeologists, and sociologists have had trouble separating it satisfactorily from hamlet or settlement. Edward Miller and John Hatcher (Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086-1343) acknowledge that “as soon as we ask what a village is we run into difficulties.” They conclude by asserting that the village differs from the mere hamlet in that “hamlets were often simply pioneering settlements established in the course of agricultural expansion,” their organization “simpler and more embryonic” than that of the true village.1 Trevor Rowley and John Wood (Deserted Villages) offer a “broad definition” of the village as “a group of families living in a collection of houses and having a sense of community.”2 Jean Chapelot and Robert Fossier (The Village and House in the Middle Ages) identify the “characteristics that define village settlement” as “concentration of population, organization of land settlement within a confined area, communal buildings such as the church and the castle, permanent settlement based on buildings that continue in use, and…the presence of craftsmen.”3 Permanence, diversification, organization, and community—these are key words and ideas that distinguish the village from more fleeting and less purposeful agricultural settlements.

Archeology has uncovered the sites of many prehistoric settlements in Northern Europe and the British Isles. Relics of the Bronze Age (roughly 3000 B.C. to 600 B.C.) include the remains of stone-walled enclosures surrounding clusters of huts. From the Iron Age (600 B.C. to the first century A.D.), circles of postholes mark the places where stood houses and sheds. Stones and

Circle of megaliths at Avebury (Wiltshire), relic of Neolithic Britain.

Reconstruction of Iron Age house on site of settlement of c. 300 B.C., Butser Ancient Farm Project, Petersfield (Hampshire).

ditches define the fields. Here we can first detect the presence of a “field system,” a historic advance over the old “slash and burn” agriculture that cleared, cultivated, then abandoned and moved on. The fields, delineated by their borders or barriers, were cultivated in a recognized pattern of crops and possibly fallow.4 The so-called Celtic fields, irregular squares of often less than an acre, were cultivated with the ard, a sharpened bough of wood with an iron tip, drawn by one or two oxen, which scratched the surface of light soil enough to allow sowing. Other Iron Age tools included hoes, small sickles, and spades. The rotary quern or hand mill (a disklike upper stone turning around a central spindle over a stationary lower stone) was used to grind grain. Crops included different kinds of wheat (spelt, emmer), barley, rye, oats, vetch,