A 1000-year divide: How England's countryside split in two
Deep Down History
3,988 views
For over a thousand years, England’s countryside has been shaped by a hidden divide that shaped villages, farms and fields into two distinct landscapes. From Anglo-Saxon villages to medieval open fields, this split explains why rural England looks the way it does today. Join Deep Down History as we uncover the origins of planned and ancient countryside, exploring maps, archaeology and place-names to reveal England’s secret divide still visible in the landscape.
#EnglandsSecretSplit #englishlandscape #LandscapeHistory #AngloSaxon #Domesday #OpenFieldSystem #OliverRackham #RuralArchaeology #PlaceNames #MedievalHistory #Enclosure #VillageOrigins
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:59 Mapping the two countrysides
01:53 The settlement divide
03:46 When did villages first become common?
07:17 How to date villages
08:40 The two landscapes
11:25 Open Arable Fields
14:05 Dating the landscape split
17:44 Why and how did the split come about?
19:46 Final Reflections
20:59 The living map
22:04 End credits, sources & further reading
See the end of the video for Video/Image/Sound credits.
Sources and Further Reading
(Online resources are marked * and should be discoverable with a simple search)
On England’s settlement/landscape split:
Roberts, B K and Wrathmell, S (2000) An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England
Roberts, B K and Wrathmell, S (2002) Region and Place: A study of English rural settlement
From an influential study mapping the nucleation/dispersal of settlements using C19th maps.
Rackham, O (1986) The History of the Countryside
Still arguably the best single volume introduction to this subject. This is the source of the two short quotations re: ‘planned’ and ‘ancient’ countryside.
Note that the above studies use slightly different province boundaries (as does this video). Rackham marks some areas as a ‘highland zone’.
See also:
Lambourne, A (2010) Patterning with the Historic Landscape and its Possible Causes
On more specific subjects:
*The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain: an online resource
This database includes 75 entries for ‘villages’, though these equate to about 60 sites. In contrast there are entries for more than 2000 farmsteads, and more than 300 villas.
Wright, D (2015) ‘Middle Saxon’ Settlement and Society
Surveys five counties in southern and central England.
Lewis, C (2020) A thousand years of change: New perspectives on rural settlement development from test pit excavations in eastern England, Medieval Settlement Research 35: 26–46.
This study examined 75 settlements, including some with dispersed patterns. Those plotted in the video and the stats used relate to a subset of 57 of these places that had nucleated plans in the C19th.
On the date of villages, hamlets, and their fields:
Lewis, C, Mitchell-Fox, P and Dyer, C (1997) Village, Hamlet and Field
Jones, R and Page M (2006) Medieval Villages in an English Landscape
On Open Fields:
Hall, D (2014) _The Open Fields of England_.
For two different views on the date of open fields and continuity in the landscape see:
Oosthuizen, S (2016) Recognizing and Moving on from a Failed Paradigm: The Case of Agricultural Landscapes in Anglo-Saxon England c. AD 400–800, Journal of Archaeological Research 24(2): 179–227.
Williamson, T (2016) The Ancient Origins of Medieval Fields: A Reassessment, Archaeological Journal 173: 264-287.
The works of Tom Williamson are useful on the underlying physical factors moulding the change in settlement/farming. See his (2003) Shaping Medieval Landscapes (Mostly on East Anglia) and (2013) Environment, Society and Landscape in early medieval England See also his chapter (pp. 211-34) in McKerracher, M, and Hammerow, H (2022) New Perspectives on the Medieval Agricultural Revolution
For a useful bibliography on Domesday Book see the *Hull Domesday Project
*The Electronic Sawyer is a database of Anglo-Saxon charters, with full texts (in Latin and Old English) including of those with boundary clauses. For the latter try also the *Langscape database.
A useful guide to the most common place-name elements indicating land use is:
Gelling, M and Cole, A (2000) The Landscape of Place-Names
For individual place-names, try the two following websites hosted by Nottingham Uni:
*Key to English Place-Names
*Digital Survey of English Place-Names
Useful for mapping of modern place-names:
*British Placename Mapper by Robin Wilson
But note that names mutate over time, so for any individual place check the original derivation with the county EPNS volume, Key, or Digital Survey.
On the divergence in the French landscape, an image search for ‘French hedgerow density map’ should show a map by the French Office of Biodiversity which makes the contrast very clear.
And lastly:
Hoskins (1955) The Making of the English Landscape
Published 70 years ago and now superseded in some of its thinking, but still a landmark study that deserves a spot on any discerning bookshelf about this subject.
2 Comments
A 1000-year divide: How England's countryside split in two
Deep Down History
3,988 views
For over a thousand years, England’s countryside has been shaped by a hidden divide that shaped villages, farms and fields into two distinct landscapes. From Anglo-Saxon villages to medieval open fields, this split explains why rural England looks the way it does today. Join Deep Down History as we uncover the origins of planned and ancient countryside, exploring maps, archaeology and place-names to reveal England’s secret divide still visible in the landscape.
#EnglandsSecretSplit #englishlandscape #LandscapeHistory #AngloSaxon #Domesday #OpenFieldSystem #OliverRackham #RuralArchaeology #PlaceNames #MedievalHistory #Enclosure #VillageOrigins
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:59 Mapping the two countrysides
01:53 The settlement divide
03:46 When did villages first become common?
07:17 How to date villages
08:40 The two landscapes
11:25 Open Arable Fields
14:05 Dating the landscape split
17:44 Why and how did the split come about?
19:46 Final Reflections
20:59 The living map
22:04 End credits, sources & further reading
See the end of the video for Video/Image/Sound credits.
Sources and Further Reading
(Online resources are marked * and should be discoverable with a simple search)
On England’s settlement/landscape split:
Roberts, B K and Wrathmell, S (2000) An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England
Roberts, B K and Wrathmell, S (2002) Region and Place: A study of English rural settlement
From an influential study mapping the nucleation/dispersal of settlements using C19th maps.
Rackham, O (1986) The History of the Countryside
Still arguably the best single volume introduction to this subject. This is the source of the two short quotations re: ‘planned’ and ‘ancient’ countryside.
Note that the above studies use slightly different province boundaries (as does this video). Rackham marks some areas as a ‘highland zone’.
See also:
Lambourne, A (2010) Patterning with the Historic Landscape and its Possible Causes
On more specific subjects:
*The Rural Settlement of Roman Britain: an online resource
This database includes 75 entries for ‘villages’, though these equate to about 60 sites. In contrast there are entries for more than 2000 farmsteads, and more than 300 villas.
Wright, D (2015) ‘Middle Saxon’ Settlement and Society
Surveys five counties in southern and central England.
Lewis, C (2020) A thousand years of change: New perspectives on rural settlement development from test pit excavations in eastern England, Medieval Settlement Research 35: 26–46.
This study examined 75 settlements, including some with dispersed patterns. Those plotted in the video and the stats used relate to a subset of 57 of these places that had nucleated plans in the C19th.
On the date of villages, hamlets, and their fields:
Lewis, C, Mitchell-Fox, P and Dyer, C (1997) Village, Hamlet and Field
Jones, R and Page M (2006) Medieval Villages in an English Landscape
On Open Fields:
Hall, D (2014) _The Open Fields of England_.
For two different views on the date of open fields and continuity in the landscape see:
Oosthuizen, S (2016) Recognizing and Moving on from a Failed Paradigm: The Case of Agricultural Landscapes in Anglo-Saxon England c. AD 400–800, Journal of Archaeological Research 24(2): 179–227.
Williamson, T (2016) The Ancient Origins of Medieval Fields: A Reassessment, Archaeological Journal 173: 264-287.
The works of Tom Williamson are useful on the underlying physical factors moulding the change in settlement/farming. See his (2003) Shaping Medieval Landscapes (Mostly on East Anglia) and (2013) Environment, Society and Landscape in early medieval England See also his chapter (pp. 211-34) in McKerracher, M, and Hammerow, H (2022) New Perspectives on the Medieval Agricultural Revolution
For a useful bibliography on Domesday Book see the *Hull Domesday Project
*The Electronic Sawyer is a database of Anglo-Saxon charters, with full texts (in Latin and Old English) including of those with boundary clauses. For the latter try also the *Langscape database.
A useful guide to the most common place-name elements indicating land use is:
Gelling, M and Cole, A (2000) The Landscape of Place-Names
For individual place-names, try the two following websites hosted by Nottingham Uni:
*Key to English Place-Names
*Digital Survey of English Place-Names
Useful for mapping of modern place-names:
*British Placename Mapper by Robin Wilson
But note that names mutate over time, so for any individual place check the original derivation with the county EPNS volume, Key, or Digital Survey.
On the divergence in the French landscape, an image search for ‘French hedgerow density map’ should show a map by the French Office of Biodiversity which makes the contrast very clear.
And lastly:
Hoskins (1955) The Making of the English Landscape
Published 70 years ago and now superseded in some of its thinking, but still a landmark study that deserves a spot on any discerning bookshelf about this subject.
I also wonder about place names. There are very few Celtic ones in England. If most villages originated long after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, that's hardly surprising.