The English Landscape; Villages and their Fields

The Anglo Saxon settlement was spread over a period of about 20 generations, between 450 and 1066 AD.
·       The Anglo Saxon village can be found all over England, and is the predominant form of settlement in many areas.
·       The village is usually accompanied by an open field system.
·       It probably consisted of two large fields, one each side of the village. These grew by accretion by generation.
·       The unit of cultivation was the strip, about ½ to 1/3 of an acre in size. Groups of strips made up a furlong, and the field was made up of groups of furlongs.
·       The villages may have been predated by earlier settlements, and have been constructed upon the site of Romano-British or even Celtic settlements.
·       Many isolated farmsteads remain from Saxon times, and many pasture lands were cleared by fire, their names, e.g. Swithland (place cleared by burning) still hark back to these times.
·       Timber provided a sizeable income, and was used for building of houses, ships and churches, in making farming and household tools and repairing and for domestic fuel.
·       Fire was a desperate expedient, usually employed in a frontier economy. In a settled economy, grazing animals prevented the regeneration of the forest by consumption of the seeds.

The Shape of Villages
The Domesday Book describes accurately the shape and plan of many villages.
There are three types of villages, which are described here
The ‘Green’ Village - a village grouped around a central green, on which there tended to be a primitive water supply (artesian well) and the church. It appears that the villages may have used the green as an enclosure for animals in the evening when the predatory animals were at large, and maintained a perimeter guard and fence around it.
Examples; Thorverton, E. Devon, Finchingfield, Essex.
The ‘Street’ Village - similar to ribbon development. Many developed along a busy road in Medieval times.
Examples; Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire, Long Melford, Suffolk.
The ‘Fragmented’ Village - isolated homesteads loosely connected by a network of paths or roads. These tend to cover a large area.
Examples; Middle Barton, Oxfordshire.

Other influences on the landscape
Large estates - the boundary lines of the larger estates were marked by double ditches, which remain as sunken lanes. These can be found in Cornwall. The larger estates with more money employed armies of slave labour to create rampart walk half way up hills.
Example; Armourwood Lane, near Thorverton. 7^th century boundary between the Silverton Royal Estate and the Exeter Abbey Estate.
Scandinavian influence - was mainly naming influence, e.g. the numerous ‘-thwaites’ of Cumberland and Westmorland. They did not introduce any new farming methods, but imitated the Old English techniques of the area.