The History of British village

Villages are rooted in the soil. Open field agriculture in late Saxon England went hand in hand with the development of villages clustered around a nucleus of church and manor house . Why? A village creates a community. Across the world we see people living in villages when it is helpful to farm or work communally for one reason or another. Open field agriculture is just one example. In this system large fields were cultivated communally by allotting strips in each field to each villager. Common land was used for grazing.

This settlement pattern gradually spread over a swathe of England from Dorset to Northumberland. Outlying farmhouses were abandoned as their land was incorporated into the great communal fields. Open-field farming never completely took over England though. Devon, Cornwall and parts of Essex, Kent and the Welsh borders largely retained the earlier pattern of scattered farms and hamlets. Nonetheless the development of villages dramatically changed the English countryside.

This was not the first time villages had sprung up in the British Isles. We can see how Neolithic villagers huddled together at sakra brae, perhaps partly for mutual defense and partly because many hands were needed for heavy haulage before the days of wagons. Romano-British villages supported the villa economy. But these earlier manifestations of the village had vanished with the societies that created them.

Some villages grew organically, but others show evidence of planning, perhaps in a ladder pattern of evenly sized plots either side of a road. Some, especially in Durham and the Home Counties, were created around a village green. Similar villages in south-east Scotlandwere perhaps the work of Anglian settlers.

In Wales royal estate centres had a similar nucleus of hall and church, with the houses of estate workers nearby. (See medieval land-holding in Wales). After the Norman conquest many villages in the Welsh borders grew up around a Norman castle. Similarly in Ireland, after the Anglo-Norman invasion in the 12th century, villages were planted in eastern Ireland, often close to a castle.

Throughout the Middle Ages the basic administrative unit was the manor. It was run from the manor house, while the workers lived in cottages nearby and a mill ground their corn. Since manors could be divided up, or lands sold off, the picture of land ownership frequently grew complex. However entire manors could still be in a single pair of hands long after the Middle Ages.

Manorial lords might seek royal grants to hold markets and fairs, which would bring in revenue, but few village markets really prospered and many died out before the end of the Middle Ages. They have sometimes left their mark in the form of a simple market cross.