Deserted Villages Revisited extract
Table of Contents
1 The origins and development of deserted village studies Christopher Taylor
2 Contrasting patterns of village and hamlet desertion in England Richard Jones
3 Villages in crisis: social dislocation and desertion, 1370–1520 Christopher Dyer
4 Dr Hoskins I presume! Field visits in the footsteps of a pioneer Paul Everson and Graham Brown
5 Houses and communities: archaeological evidence for variation in medieval peasant experience Sally V. Smith
6 Deserted medieval villages and the objects from them David A. Hinton
7 The desertion of Wharram Percy village and its wider context Stuart Wrathmell
8 Understanding village desertion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries John Broad
9 Abandoning the uplands: depopulation among dispersed settlements in western Britain Robert Silvester
10 ‘At Pleasure’s Lordly Call’: the archaeology of emparked settlements Tom Williamson
11 Deserted villages revisited: in the past, the present and the future Richard Jones and Christopher Dyer
Extract from Deserted Villages Revisited
Taken from The Preface
This book began its life in 2006 when one of us (RJ) noticed that June 2008 would see the sixtieth anniversary of the visit by a group of scholars to Leicestershire villages which has come to be viewed by many as a landmark in the study of village desertion and the ‘genesis’ of medieval archaeology in Britain. Marking this occasion offered a good opportunity to ‘revisit’ the subject ourselves in a short conference...
We were very conscious that to revisit the research questions of 1948 – essentially when, how and why were villages deserted? – was deeply old fashioned. Since the 1970s the subject had moved on to other issues and themes. Archaeologists and geographers had developed an interest in village origins, village planning and the smaller settlements that were especially common in the west and south-east of England, and dominant in other parts of Britain. Settlements, as they were now called, were studied in the context of the whole landscape. Mick Aston summed up in 1985 the new approach to Deserted Medieval Villages, or ‘DMVs’ (the term which had become by this stage universally adopted), in his book on landscapes, in which he pointed out that few settlements were deserted totally, but had shrunk in varying degrees, that their decline and abandonment often belonged to the post-medieval period, and that many settlements were not villages. The ‘D’, the ‘M’ and the ‘V’ were all misconceptions. Historians, meanwhile, were exploring the inner life of peasant society, and were preoccupied with families, inheritance, the land market, farming methods, lord–tenant relations and communities.
The original research agenda has not gone away, however, although few recent publications have addressed the subject directly, suggesting that village desertion no longer occupies the place it once did on the academic agenda. The same does not hold true in the public arena, where deserted villages still prompt the same excitement and speculation that made books such as Beresford’s The lost villages of England such runaway successes. Nor has the question of desertion been solved...
Historical causation cannot be reduced to a single phrase or a simple process. When the lecturer has pointed out the flaws in the usual explanations for desertion, the listeners quite reasonably ask ‘what is your explanation then?’ and are frustrated by a long and inconclusive answer. The complexities of village origins provide a similar dilemma, but the fragmentary evidence in the eighth to eleventh centuries creates a formidable obstacle, whereas in the period 1300–1700 we are overwhelmed by a mass of information and still cannot make up our minds. One problem is that the diversity of English regions prevents us from identifying a single universal cause.
In devising the programme for the conference, and therefore the layout of this book, we wanted to reflect the new thinking about desertion, because in spite of its venerable origin we knew that scholars had been quietly considering the question. While only a sample of this work can be offered here, we hope that its contents are representative of the diverse range of approaches that are being taken to this subject. Reflecting the meeting of 1948, historians and archaeologists have once again been brought together. All offer something new here. The historical contributions reveal how alternative stories of desertion can be coaxed from previously unexploited documentary sources. Many of the conclusions drawn from the re-evaluation of village plans and material culture as presented here result directly from new theoretical positions adopted by archaeologists. Where textual and physical evidence for desertion has been brought together, it has proved possible to undermine many of the accepted truths that have developed around the subject – in other words, to sow doubt where once there was only certainty. We are even asked to question whether the earthwork remains of villages are village remains at all! Individual contributors to this book have approached their subject at a number of scales, from national overviews to detailed regional and local case studies. As importantly, they lead us from the traditional desertion grounds of the English lowlands to the upland regions of north and west England, Wales and Scotland, and from villages to a consideration of hamlet desertion.
Together the contributors have been able to show why village desertion should remain an important part of our historical enquiry. For they demonstrate that as we seek to understand why some places failed, so many other aspects of rural life in the past are illuminated.