"A summary of ten years of trying to figure out how a Surrey village came into being and what/where it was in Domesday Book. Making the most of the limited evidence available (in part as a way of identifying where my research needs to head next), it points to the "village" as having come into being in the post-Domesday period, but with hints that it grew out an earlier, smaller precursor settlement - one of a different name. ***Follow the link below for the paper***"

A partly thematic, partly chronological review -- and most certainly not an exhaustive cataloguing and analysis -- of the evidence for early medieval (5th to 11th centuries CE) buildings and other settlement features known from the aggregated historic and current county area of Surrey in south-east England. This study was inspired by the many important issued raised in Prof John Blair’s monograph Building Anglo-Saxon England (2018) and the Medieval Settlement Research Group 2019 Spring Conference, ‘New Discoveries in the Cambridge Region: Medieval Settlement in the A14 Corridor and its Wider Context’. A slightly amended version of an essay that was first issued as Annexe 1 of Surrey Archaeological Society Medieval Studies Forum Newsletter, 16 (June 2020). Revised July 2020, with some resultant alterations to the original pagination.

The open area excavation of nearly a half of the small deserted medieval hamlet of West Cotton, Raunds, Northamptonshire has revealed the dynamic processes of constant development in a way that has rarely been achieved on other comparable sites in England. Its origins have been seen to lie in the mid tenth-century plantation of a planned settlement based on regular one-acre plots, which occurred within the political context of the reconquest of eastern England by the Saxon kings and the subsequent reorganisation of settlement and society within the Danelaw. The settlement contained a major holding comprising a timber hall with ancillary buildings and an adjacent watermill, with perhaps a second similar holding and dependent peasants nearby. It was established on the edge of the floodplain at the confluence of a tributary stream with the River Nene, on a major valley-bottom route way. The processes of redevelopment which led to the rebuilding in stone in the twelfth century, as a small Norman manor house; the probable relocation of the manor buildings in the thirteenth century; and its final form in the fourteenth to mid-fifteenth century as a hamlet of peasant tenements have been well documented by the archaeological evidence. In particular, it has been vividly shown how the final form of the settlement, preserved in earthwork, was merely a fairly brief episode at the end of this extended process of development, while the historic evidence provides no hint of the higher-status elements that had formed an integral part of the settlement until the final century of its occupation. Desertion appears to have been a gradual process, with the tenements abandoned one-by-one through a century of economic and social disasters, of which the Black Death was the most notable, as families presumably moved to better quality land then readily available elsewhere. The role of the local environment in the processes of change has also been well documented, with the abandonment of the watermill in the twelfth century resulting from a disruption of the water supply caused by a period of intense flooding and alluviation, when the very survival of the settlement was only ensured by the construction of a protective flood bank. The excavated structural evidence is of high quality, and has provided numerous complete building plans ranging from the timber halls of the tenth and eleventh centuries, through the manor house of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries, to the well-preserved tenements of the fourteenth century. This is complemented by substantial artefact assemblages, and the consideration of the local economy and environment is largely dependent on the analysis of the faunal evidence and the environmental evidence derived from an extensive programme of soil sampling.

This list includes books and articles on British rural settlement and landscape between the fifth century and the fifteenth published in 2013, together with books on related subjects and items omitted from previous bibliographies. Any omissions found here should be sent to the Bibliographer for inclusion next year: jcampbell66@qub.ac.uk