Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England Book

Available for the first time in paperback, this volume is one of the most important and controversial studies of medieval settlement and landscape to have been published in the last ten years. The authors address a question that has fascinated and perplexed landscape historians: when and why did the nucleated village and its associated common field system arise, and why did it emerge in some areas and not in others? Drawing on their detailed study of a group of shires in central England, the authors date the origin of the nucleated village to the period 850-1200. They identify a ?village moment', when, in some areas of extensive arable farming, settlement was reorganized. These villages were planned, the result of a deliberate decision: population pressure, resource depletion, market forces, or the initiative of a lord may all have influenced their builders. Nucleation was invariably associated with the introduction of a common field system, and has to be seen in the context of the wider regularization of law and custom in the medieval world. Villages were created as institutional communities: tofts, tithes, taxes and tenancies were all connected in a new economic system. In other areas a transformation of the landscape along these lines was never deemed necessary or desirable, and though the settlement pattern was changed, its dispersed character persisted and flourished. After 1300, as the famine and Black Death took hold, most villages contracted, and in some cases the internal and external pressures led to their desertion. Carenza Lewis is a Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and a Presenter of Time Team Patrick Mitchell-Fox was a Research Fellow in the School of History, University of Birmingham. Christopher Dyer is Professor of Medieval Social History, University of Birmingham and President of the Society for Medieval Archaeology.Read More