social scale were the houses of some landlords with substantial timber halls and, in some towns, the halls of craft guilds.
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As well as existing minsters or cathedrals, in most towns new churches were founded by lay landlords for themselves and their burghers. Before 1100 it was relatively easy to found what we would now call a parish church, as church law put few restrictions on the rights and incomes that went with it. As a result three-quarters of all medieval urban parishes were in existence before 1100. So a town such as Stamford, Lincolnshire, which was urban before 925, had fourteen churches, whilst nearby Boston, which only came to prominence in around 1100, had only one. Churches were normally located at the junction of important streets, placing them at the heart of neighbourhood life; they were also frequently associated with marketplaces and, indeed, early churchyards were often used as markets, which were even held on Sundays.19 Saxon Oxford illustrates these points nicely (fig. 24). In 727 the minster of St Frideswide was founded in what is now Oxford. A settlement and a market grew up around this foundation, and the Mercian kings seem to have built a fort. Alfred chose this place to be one of his burghs, surrounding the existing minster and settlement with earth ramparts. Initially these were supported by great timber posts and planks, but after 1000 they were faced with stone. At the north gate was an impressive five-storey stone tower, part lookout, part guard house, part church tower. In the 10th century Oxford was therefore a stone-walled citadel like its Roman predecessors. Inside the ring of defences a grid of metalled streets was laid out round a cross of main roads. The land was probably granted out to noblemen and part was reserved for a royal palace. One aristocratic owner was Ealdorman Aethelmaer, who had an estate in the south-west corner of the burgh. He had a residence, thirteen burgage plots and built a church – St Aebbe’s.20
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Fig. 25 Anglo-Saxon Barton-upon-Humber, showing the landlord’s fortified enclosure with the market place and church at its foot and the grid of streets and burgage plots to the left.
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Oxford had several such landlords, with their halls and churches, whilst a small town in the Danelaw, such as Barton-upon-Humber, had only one. At the heart of Barton was the Saxon lord’s residence, set in an enclosure fortified by an earth bank and presumably topped with timber ramparts. Located on the Humber estuary, he certainly needed a fortified house – this enclosure might have been the focus of a settlement that was fortified by the Vikings. In any event, next to the manor house the 10th-century occupant of the enclosure constructed St Peter’s church. Subsequently, a street, Southgate, separated the church from the town market place; west of this were three blocks of burgage plots probably 35ft to 40ft wide on the street front and 150ft to 170ft deep (fig. 25). Up to a thousand people would have lived in Barton, engaged in agriculture (the town had three large common fields) and craft work. The market would have been at the heart of its economy.21
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By 1066 there were about 100 towns in England, of which perhaps 17 had a population of more than 1,000. They were not evenly spread across the country, nor were they confined to the West Saxon kingdom, for the Danelaw also developed successful towns such as Norwich, Lincoln and York. These places represented a significant shift in economic activity. In a period of perhaps only a century many craft workers moved production from the countryside to towns; so weavers and potters, who had previously been based close to raw materials in the countryside, were working in tightly packed timber houses crowded into streets and alleys in order to be near their markets.22 Yet the character of late Saxon towns, even one as important as Oxford, was distinct. Their social make-up and their links with the countryside made them aristocratic rather than mercantile in nature, very different from what they were to become in the following century.
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The Countryside
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The economic changes that accompanied the Romans’ departure resulted in much less grain being grown. There were no legions to provision, no towns to feed and no villas to support. Agriculture slipped back to what it had been in the Iron Age, an activity based around livestock, with grain and other crops being grown largely for local consumption. The years either side of 700, however, saw a fundamental reorganisation and intensification of agriculture. A great number of settlements, such as West Stow (p. 31), were located on light, easily cultivated soil on river gravels. Around 700 of these settlements relocated to areas of heavier soil to intensify production and meet the demands of secular landlords, ecclesiastical communities in the monasteries and minsters, and the emerging towns. Settlements that had been occupied in the 5th and 6th centuries were almost all abandoned by this time; new settlements became more permanent and organised, with careful layouts and fenced areas for livestock and, importantly, large halls – the houses of the landlords.
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Fig. 26 Wharram Percy, Yorkshire. Layout of the 10th–11th-century settlement showing the main street with peasants’ plots running back to the four big common fields behind. The two manors, church, mill and village green are all shown.
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Before the 10th century almost everyone lived in scattered settlements of no more than a score of people. But between the 10th and 12th centuries in the central arable areas of England peasant farmers abandoned their farmsteads and hamlets and moved to create villages. These normally had a church, a main street, and between 12 and 60 houses. Outside this central village belt, in the east, the south-east, the north-west and the far south-west, people lived in various types of hamlets or single farmsteads.
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The now-deserted village at Wharram Percy, Yorkshire, was laid out in the 10th century by its landlords (fig. 26). The peasants lived in houses set on either side of a main street, at one end of which was a timber church and at the other was the village green with a common animal pound. Two manor houses sat hugger-mugger with the houses of their tenants. Each peasant family had a rectangular embanked enclosure or toft. The tofts normally contained a single peasant house. These houses were divided into two: the larger half with a hearth for the family and, on the other side of a cross passage, a byre for their livestock. The buildings were not materially different from earlier Saxon peasant structures.23
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