Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [7]
A thirteenth-century European might be hazy about the boundaries of his country, but he was well aware of those of his village.
2
THE ENGLISH VILLAGE:
ELTON
BY THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, THE FERTILE RIVER valleys of Huntingdonshire, along with most of the best farmlands of England, had been continuously inhabited for at least five thousand years. The story of their occupation over these five millennia is the story of a series of incursions of migrating or invading peoples, in varying numbers, affecting the population at different levels and in different degrees.1
Native Paleolithic hunting communities were displaced in about 2000 B.C. by newcomers from the Continent who planted crops, founding the first British agricultural communities. Immigrants in the Bronze and Iron Ages expanded the area of settlement, making inroads into the poorer soils of the uplands and forested areas.
By the first century A.D. a modest agricultural surplus created a trickle of export trade with Roman Gaul, possibly contributing to the somewhat undermotivated Roman decision (A.D. 43) to send an army across the Channel to annex Britain. The network of symmetrical, square-cornered fortifications built by the legionaries provided local security and stimulated economic life, which was further assisted by newly built Roman roads, canals, and towns.
One road, later named Ermine Street, ran north from London to York. At the point where it crossed the River Nene a city called Durobrivae was built. Many kilns from the Roman period found in the area indicate a flourishing pottery industry. Villas dotting the neighboring countryside marketed their produce in the city. At one time it was thought that such villas belonged to Roman officials; now it is established that most belonged to a native class of Romanized nobles. Far more numerous were the farmsteads, mostly isolated, some huddled in small, probably kinship, groupings.2
Further traces of Roman agriculture have been found in Huntingdonshire along the edge of the fens as well as on the River Ouse. Across the border in Bedfordshire, on the River Ivel, aerial photographs show patterns of Roman field systems. The rich farmlands that bordered the fens became chief providers of grain for the legions in the north of England, transported through the fenland rivers and Roman-built canals.3
As multiple problems began to overwhelm the Roman Empire,
Reconstruction of houses on site of Anglo-Saxon settlement (c. A.D. 500) at West Stow (Suffolk). Left background, sunken hut.
West Stow reconstruction. Round structure in foreground is poultry house.
the legions were withdrawn from Britain (A.D. 410). Trade and the towns fostered by it declined, the roads fell into disuse, and the new cities shrank or, like Durobrivae, disappeared.
Later in the fifth century a new set of uninvited foreigners came to stay. In the violent early phase of the invasion, in the south of England, the Anglo-Saxons wiped out native populations and replaced them with their own settlements, creating a complete break with the past, and leaving the old Romano-British sites, as in Wessex and Sussex, “a maze of grass-covered mounds.”4 In the later stages, as the Anglo-Saxons advanced to the north and west, the occupation was more peaceful, with the newcomers tilling the soil alongside their British neighbors.5 Scholars believe that some of the Romano-British agricultural patterns survived into the Middle Ages, particularly in the north of England, where groups of estates administered as a single unit, the “multiple estate,” flourished.6
West Stow reconstruction.
In the seventh century the newly melded “English” population converted to Christianity. In what historians have entitled England’s “Saxon” period, little other change occurred except perhaps a partial loss of Roman technology. The English agriculturalists cultivated the cereal grains and herded the animals