Chapter 12
Rural Industries
The middle centuries of the period was when industry was developing in a country where growing population and the gradual acculumation of surpluses was providing wealth alongside demands for more manufactured or processed goods. These activities were rurally based, labour intensive and probably not excessively profitable but they did not suffer the ups and downs of a purely agricultural life-style and were promoting a more active role for local markets.
Alfred was succeeded by his son, Edward the Elder, who inherited a thriving kingdom whose economy from about 880 had begun to improve markedly. The purity of the silver coinage, which had been gradually corrupted, was restored. Edward was concerned to retrieve English lands that had been taken by the Danes and he and his sister Ǽthelflęd, widow of Ǽthelred, the Mercian ealdorman who had been entrusted with the defence of London, operated in the east and north-east of Mercia, gradually pushing forward by stages and consolidating their advances by extending the burh system. Ǽthelflęd was by no means a sleeping partner in the enterprise. We hear in the Chronicle in 917 and 918 that the ‘lady of the Mercians, with God’s help, before Lammas (the first day of August, celebrated as Harvest Festival) obtained the borough that is called Derby with all that belonged to it. There also were killed four of her thanes, who were dear to her, inside the gates. She took the borough of Leicester under her rule, peacefully, early in the year and the greatest part of the force that belonged to it became subject to her. The people of York had also promised her – some gave pledges, and some fastened it with oaths – that they would be under her rule.’
Edward moved northward into Hertfordshire and thence into Cambridge and Huntingdonshire while his sister threatened the Danes east of Watling Street. By the end of the year 918 Edward’s authority extended to the River Humber and in 920 he received the submission of Northumbria and Strathclyde. Eight of his new burhs were given mints: Chester, Tamworth, Stafford, Hertford, Warwick, Buckingham, Maldon and probably Bridgnorth. Edward also encouraged Englishmen to buy property in Danelaw thus increasing English influence in areas only recently brought back into the king’s hands.
Danelaw at this time was the area north and east of Watling Street as far up as the southern border of the kingdom of York which ran from the Humber across to the mouth of the Mersey but so far a good number of archaeological investigations in that area have not provided much evidence that is specifically Danish. In the Park opposite to the ruins of Elmham cathedral in Norfolk, excavations (Wade-Martins) have revealed a sequence of features that started around 700 and ran through to the end of the Saxon and into the medieval periods. The buildings included halls, smaller houses, latrines and other buildings of indeterminate function. Two timber-lined wells, a lime kiln, perhaps used in the building of the latest cathedral, and boundary ditches were found while animal bones included many pig, large sheep, roe deer and birds. In the cathedral cemetery, separated from the manorial centre by a fence, some 200 contemporary graves were examined
At Raunds in Northampton (Boddington) a site has been excavated that also suggests continuity from the seventh century to the medieval period. During this long period there were two successive churches, the earlier built over the graveyard in the tenth century and then a rebuilt version on a larger scale in the eleventh together with an aisled hall in an enclosure along with various other buildings that suggest a manorial headquarters.
A residence of a thegn (a nobleman) like the owner of the Hardwell estate in 903 (see below), has been excavated at Goltho near Lincoln (Beresford), It was surrounded by a bank and ditch and the buildings inside included a weaving-shed, a kitchen and a hall that was divided into a number of compartments with a kitchen tacked on to one end, all postholed timber structures. A similar site has been investigated at Sulgrave (Davison) in Northamptonshire where a timber hall and an ancillary building were put up during the latter part of the tenth century. Some parts of this building were later reconstructed in stone.
Springfield Lyons (Buckley and Hedges) in Essex has been mentioned earlier. In its pre-Conquest levels it contained thirteen buildings demonstrating a sequence of building methods dating from the tenth and eleventh centuries. Eight were post-built and three had foundation trenches and another two used a combination of these techniques. The largest structure contained a hearth and it may represent a hall, like Goltho, surrounded by various ancillary buildings. Excavations at Hinxton Hall (Leith) in Hertfordshire produced several halls, the largest fifteen metres long in an enclosure with ovens, wells and rubbish pits. All these sites could have residences of thegns.
A very wealthy settlement has been investigated at Flixborough (Loveluck). It is described as royal by the excavator because it is thought to have been one of the courts used by kings on their peripatetic journeys which in this case would have been part of the circuit travelled by sub-kings of the kingdom of Lindsey and perhaps first used in the mid-seventh century. Between five and seven large halls stood at any one time, the largest about twenty metres long, used as living quarters. One building seems to have served as a mortuary chapel for about a hundred years from the mid eighth-century – five Christian burials were found inside. As a manorial centre like North Elmham Park the site would have housed craftsmen providing estate equipment such as working clothes, wooden objects like ploughs, leather gloves and boots and iron tools. Those found included a set of carpentry tools with T-shaped adzes and axes of the sort that are illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry. A large collection of animal bones were the remains of cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens and geese while fowling had produced the bones of ducks, cranes and other wading birds ande hunting was responsible for the presence of the bones of roe deer, hare, and woodcock while hazel shells, oyster shells and the bones of freshwater and marine fish suggest other activities.
Interestingly enough, styli were found, suggesting that manorial records were kept and there were a great many expensive objects illustrating the typical tastes of the aristocracy of the period. These included a filigree gold ring, silver and gilded copper alloy brooches and pins, a hanging bowl mount, bronze vessels and silver pennies. Evidence of copper working on the site raises the possibility that some of these objects could have been made there. Imported goods included pottery from the Seine valley in France, wheel-thrown black and red burnished ware and ‘Badorf’ ware from Germany Local pottery was in the form of a large collection of Ipswich ware. Other exotic goods like glass vessels, quernstones and silver coins from the Rhineland perhaps help to suggest some sort of trading relationship. When the Danes settled and made ‘Danelaw’, the inhabitants of Flixborough seemed to have taken it in their stride. Life went on as before and trade continued with the south as shown by the appearance of regular issues of coins from the London area.
Unaffected also by the settlement of the Danes, as one might expect, was the production of pottery in the Midlands, the North and East Anglia. Types of pot are named from its find-spot or more often a place where evidence of its manufacture has been found. But this does not mean that it was made in only one place. In the Midlands there is Maxey ware, in the North, Whitby ware, while earlier, from the beginning of the eighth century in East Anglia was Ipswich ware which, as we have seen above, could travel some distance north and as far south as Barking in Essex. Ipswich ware is usually nowadays thought of as an earlier hand-made (or made on a slow wheel) version of Thetford ware. It first appears as Ipswich ware when it was was produced in a variety of forms including jars with upright rims and bowls with lugs for hanging. From the late ninth century it is usually referred to as Thetford ware and was made as tall cooking pots, jars with rouletted decoration, bowls, spouted pitchers with tubular or U-shaped spouts, very large decorated storage jars with multiple handles which were too big to be revolved on a potter’s wheel and stood three feet tall, costrels (flat, pear-shaped drinking vessels with ‘ears’ for attaching to a belt), crucibles, dishes and lamps. This range of ware was still being marketed at the time of the Norman Conquest.
The earliest Stamford ware is remarkable for its quality. It has a creamy-white, light grey or buff fabric, turned on a fast wheel as spouted pitchers, bowls and cooking pots with spouted bowls, jugs, lamps, storage vessels, conical cups and crucibles and appears initially about 850. It was glazed with and appears in a variety of shades – blue, pale green, yellow and orange - distributed in a patchy manner. Where this knowledge of the glazing process came from is uncertain. It may have been introduced from the Rhineland but there is no evidence of it there earlier than about 850. Glazed spouted pitchers and bowls and fine-quality tableware were traded far beyond the East Midlands to York, Oxford, London, Norwich and westwards towards Bristol. The later Stamford ware developed from the pre-medieval type about a century after the Norman Conquest and continued in production into the thirteenth century.
By the tenth century the economy of eastern England was beginning to accelerate and a number of other types of pottery made their appearance. Chester-type ware is a hard sandy brown ware, made on a wheel and fired in a kiln. Pots have flanged rims, rouletted shoulders and sagging bases (not flat but as though they had been pushed out in the middle of the base from the inside). Leicester ware again is hard and sandy, wheel-turned and well-fired and distributed as cooking pots, pitchers and storage vessels. Lincoln is similar to Thetford ware but fired at a higher temperature so that the exterior has a metallic appearance in shades varying from grey to orange. Potters placed rouletting around straight-sided bowls and there are the inevitable cooking pots... Torksey ware is sandy grey tempered with quartz fragments and fires black. Cooking pot, bowls with down-turned outer-thumbed flange, lamps, ring vases, storage vessels and spouted pitchers were its commonest products and were still being made during the earlier twelfth century. York pottery is very hard, gritted, with a pimply appearance and fired hard.
Further south, Michelmersh pottery is a smooth, brown, sandy ware made on a wheel and produced as spouted pitchers, upright-sided and sloping-sided dishes and cooking pots. Portchester ware again is hard-fired, sandy in texture with temper of fine grit and red or brown. Wide cooking pots with sagging bases and horizontal line decoration and rouletting, bowls and flat dishes were the usual products. Winchester ware was made from the later tenth century and produced as spouted pitchers, cups, bowls, globular bottles, small pots and sprinklers, lids, tall narrow jugs and tripod (three-footed) pitchers. The glaze on some vessels varies from red to yellowish or dark green and they are sometimes decorated with applied notched strips, cross and circle stamps and rouletting.
Developing in response to increasing demand for ceramic products was the use of the fast pottery wheel. The fast wheel itself is nothing new, being common in the Romano-British period and the concept was probably kept alive in Britain by the continued use of the turntable or slow wheel which allows the potter to sit in one place and rotate the pot when necessary. But the re-adoption of the fast wheel which, using the evidence of Thetford ware, around 900, seems to have taken place at the same time as the use of multiple kilns as at Thetford where a kilnyard was excavated with six kilns. This increased production is probably one of the most reliable indicators of economic acceleration since it relates to increasing demand both in the surrounding countryside and in the town itself which was one of the largest in England at the time.
One of the important factors in the development of economic activity in Britain both in Wesssex and Mercia was the foundation of burhs both in Wessex and Mercia, Many of the reasons that made the sites desirable defensive positions, like good communications, access to rivers and substantial defences, made them also useful urban settlements and the addition of a mint and an administration turned them into regional centres of demand for manufactured products.
We are gradually learning more about industries in middle and later Saxon England. They were found in both countryside and town but only a few of them were operating on a considerable scale. An example is the fishing industry. Some 500 sea-fish weirs perhaps survive around the coasts, most medieval in date, but some are earlier. Fish weirs were large structures, V-shaped with arms up to 100m long. They were built where the incoming tide would bring the fish in up a gradually shelving sea-bed and allow them to be caught in baskets or nets placed at the point of the V when the tide receded. In the estuaries of the Essex rivers, for example, fishing was well-established and miles of posts for fish-weirs have been discovered in the estuary of the Blackwater. They date from around 600 to 950 and they are the earliest such remains in the country. It might be that such large-scale production was for the London dried-fish market. ‘Fish-days’, Fridays and the practise of Lenten fasting became commonplace in Christian times and the demand for fish rocketed and accounts for the extraordinary development of the fishing industry in the post-Roman period. It is not clear who owned these weirs earlier on but we can say, on the evidence of documentary records, that, from the tenth century onwards, they belonged to monasteries or large manors.
Evidence for the use of machinery in industrial contexts in post-Roman times is provided by the discovery of water mills developed by the milling and textile trades. Most grain milling must have been done by hand since in most households only a relatively small amount of flour would be needed for the days’ baking and only monasteries where larger quantities of bread were baked for home consumption and for dispensing to the indigent; royal or noble residencess where large quantities would be required at short notice when the lord arrived with his retunue; and entrepreneurs in towns where people would rely on millers and town bakers for their daily bread would contemplate the relatively large investment that a mill entailed. So it is likely that some rural mills were fulling mills which multiplied during the period to contribute to the number recorded in Domesday and are a useful yardstick of the burgeoning textile industry.
We see the earliest appearance of post-Roman mills in the south east, the first known at Ebbsfleet dating from around 700 - a horizontal mill with two timber inlets. This is possibly rivalled in date by a triple vertical-wheeled mill at Old Windsor in Berkshire on the royal estate. Another is associated with a monastery near Dover dating from 762. In a sizable monastic community the building of a mill became a sensible investment and this was also true of secular estates as shown by the discovery of a multiple watermill complex on the River Tyne at Corbridge in use from the eighth to the tenth century with a mill pond connected to the mills by an inlet chute 4.5m long. (Tyne and Wear Museums). This may have used a system similar to that of the undershot mill that has been excavated at Tamworth dating from the mid-eighth century (Rahtz and Meeson). From that time the number of mills grew to 5,624 as noticed in Domesday.
This growth in the main must be associated with commercial production of cloth. but it may also related also to an increase in population and food production throughout the grain-producing areas of the country or in some cases to alternative milling purposes like grinding of malt for ale-brewing. Many grain/malt mills were very small and constructed on minor rivers or large streams by the landlords of estates.
In Domesday, in the counties of Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk about one settlement in three had a mill but there were substantially fewer further to the west so Somerset had 371, neighbouring Devon had 96 and Cornwall only six (Hoskins). These figures perhaps reflect the variation in the importance of grain production in the different regions which, roughly speaking, diminished farther west and and also perhaps suggests a diminution in the scale of cloth production.
English woollen cloth and embroidery had been renowned throughout Europe for hundreds of years. But apart from exports, the commercial production of woollen cloth was the backbone of the domestic clothing industry but there was also a sizable input from linen fabrics and knitwear. Perhaps we shall always be better informed regarding the dress of the major classes and figures of the period but we are beginning to get more information from cess-pits, grave finds and waterlogged sites about the garb of the common people. People of substance left descriptions of garments in their wills and drawing and carvings provide us with further information.
Women, as far as we know, did not wear underclothing although sanitary napkins were probably created out of linen pads and woollen fleece. The usual first garment was a shift which served as both vest and pants while knitted or woven stockings were held up by garters. Over the shift came the gown, made of wool and reaching almost to the ground in the case of women. Earlier on, it was enlivened by a pair of brooches but the gown itself could be dyed blue with woad, violet with lichen, green with certain mosses or yellow with weld. A girdle, also brightly coloured, went found the waist and from it were suspended the sorts of things that modern women would have in their handbags.
Frankish fashions made their way into Kent from the late-seventh century onwards and women raised the hem of the gown to above the ankles while the fussy hangings from the girdle became less evident. Sleeves and hems were edged with contrasting colours. Later, coloured cuffs collars and fuller sleeves gave more shape to the garment. Over the gown, early cloaks were used for outdoors and made of wool, and triangular or square in shape, and pinned with chained pins or brooches. Later also, warmer cloaks were produced at knee-length with an opening so that they could be slipped on over the head. and they became the palettes for advertising your position in society. Gold, silver and copper trimmings were sewed on and fur edging added. Hoods were either separate articles or attached to the cloak.
By the seventh-century female heads were commonly covered, either with a simple cap or with some sort of veil, in Kent usually held in place with brooches and pins and this arrangement develops by the end of the period into a headdress that covered both head and neck. On their feet women wore leather ankle-height boots fastened with toggles and laces.
Men could be less fashion conscious. Legging-like trousers were worn over a linen loincloth or briefs and these were held up by a linen or leather belt. Those who could afford it wore an under shirt of linen and over that an outer woollen tunic. At first, this was short and usually sleeveless but by the seventh century it had sleeves of various lengths with contrasting coloured cuffs and collar bands. A leather belt completed the outfit. Tenth and eleventh-century tunics were longer, some reaching to the mid-calf. Furred caps in winter for those who could afford them and by the pre-Conquest period, tall, pointed caps became fashionable worn over long hair that might be shoulder-length. Men wore much the same kind of boots as women and we know from wills that expensive, embroidered gloves were in fashion. Children wore simplified versions of their parents’ clothing while babies were swaddled in modern-style nappies.
In the countryside, workers wore clothes in imitation of their betters and probably in much the same colours but no doubt it would be coarser cloth and probably made at home rather than purchased from a merchant at the market. Amongst the urban retailers, there is no reason to believe that tailors and shoemakers were uncommon. In London and perhaps elsewhere, silks were used to line hoods and outer garments that were even adorned with gold and silver embroidery and gemstones while leather in a variety of shades, either painted or stained, could be decorated with pokerwork.
Practically all clothes were made locally, some in the home from locally-grown wool or in a local town where a small-time cloth-maker would supply the material. Wool was always the most important rural product from the exchequer’s point of view and attempts were always made to control its price. In King Edgar’s time a wey of wool was to cost no more than 120 shillings and no-one was to try to undercut this figure so as to protect the interests of the farmer. Actually, the producer who was thus protected would be one in a large way of business. As far as the small producer and his customers were concerned wool would have been traded in much smaller quantities. But large estates seem to have specialised both in wool production and also the manufacture of cloth, not only woollen but also flaxen, so fixing all processes of the industry firmly into the rural world. One such in the West Country, either in Gloucestershire or Somerset, has bequeathed to posterity a list of tools used in its production sheds. The list includes linen flax, a spindle, a reel, a yarn-winder, a weaver’s beam, a press, a weaver’s comb, a tool for carding wool, a warp and weft (?), a wool comb, a weaver’s stock, a reel for winding thread, a weaver’s rod, a seam-stock, shears, a needle and a hammer amongst a list of more objects that cannot be identified. On such an estate the labour force would have been divided into industrial and agricultural workers with a number concerned with cloth production and the rest split between those herding and tending sheep and others concerned with the growing of flax and the production of the food required to support the workers.
Trade in other agricultural goods is not easy to discern but we expect that most were bought and sold directly off their places of origin. To some extent the type of product would have constrained its wide sale – fresh milk because of its short shelf life - and grain because of its bulk and the expense of carrying it far. Fresh milk would usually have been made into butter, the buttermilk left behind from this process being drunk before it became sour and flat; or perhaps the milk was turned into curds and junkets, again the residue, the whey, being drunk. Creams and custards would only have been made in the richer households although perhaps celebratory occasions lower down the social scale would call for a special effort. But products such as butter and cheese and produce that had a longer shelf-life and could be carried to market seem to have been frequently traded, however none of the traditional English cheeses can be traced back as far as the pre-Conquest period, indeed none of the famous names date much further back than about 1600 although there is a fourteenth-century reference to toasted cheese, variety unrecorded.
Regulations dating from the time of Alfred suggest that internal trade was growing so fast that some sort of supervision was required. There was concern over merchants who travelled from district to district with bands of servants and whose trading methods were not always very praiseworthy. Laws relate, too, to warranty whereby a trader would have to vouch that the goods in his possession had been bought in good faith from the vendor. The greatest concern was with livestock and cattle-rustling. Almost all of the goods that these prelambutory traders were concerned with were agricultural, dealing with surpluses off farms, particularly cattle, but also butter and cheese, wheat, barley and rye.
Salt was usually associated with the coast because most salt was used for preserving fish that was required for fish days in places many miles inland. Practically all salters were in a small way of business merely supplying their local fishermen and to do this they would have rented salt-pans at suitable locations on gently-sloping beaches. In Domesday there are many mentions of salt production. In Sussex, for example, in the river Ouse, a site not far from Lewes, in those days a fishing port, was credited with one hundred salt-pans compared with only sixty-one in the whole of Norfolk. This discrepancy is probably accounted for by the readier accession to the London markets from the Sussex coast for the salted fish. At Lyme in Dorset, salt production shared the labour force with fishing and agriculture.
But, of course, there was salt production in Cheshire and Worcestershire catering, probably, for what we might call the domestic market – salt used in households for preservation and flavouring. Droitwich was the centre of a vigorous industry, bringing firewood for its furnaces from great distances. From Bromsgrove came three hundreds carts full of wood and they returned home with three hundred loads of salt. The demand for scarce firewood is one of the features of rural industry for hundreds of years that was only alleviated later on by the increasing use of coal. Salt from Droitwich was carried far, mainly by packhorse. Places in Shropshire, Warwickshire, Oxford and Buckinghamshire all got their salt from Droitwich and many place-names throughout the country recall the packhorse salt routes. Names like Saltford, Salford, Saltridge Hill, Saltways and Salterby are all examples. Brine was boiled in leaden pans and after evaporation was scraped out and packed in ‘barrows’ made of twigs and willow, each holding two bushels of salt. One was slung each side of a packhorse Processions of packhorses were a familiar sight in early centuries, illustrated in manuscripts and, with drover, in a medieval bench-end in the church of St Michael, North Cadbury in Somerset.
A good deal about the mechanics of rural industry can be learnt from the salt-making of Worcestershire and Cheshire. It was not a single industry but like most pre-Conquest undertakings a number of separate initiatives taken by lords on their various estates. They rented out the salt-pans to entrepreneurs who produced the salt which, because of the demand was more than likely to be carried considerable distances, paying tolls at various places en route. The king took two-thirds of the tolls and dues, leaving the lord with the remaining third. Tolls varied but a common rate was fourpence on a cart drawn by four oxen and twopence on a horse-load or on eight men’s loads. Pedlars who operated within a hundred (the local administrative area) got preferential treatment: a penny on a cart or, if they carried their salt on horseback, a penny to be paid at Martinmas (11th November)
Most rural industries appeared to operate in this way. Local, small initiatives were taken by estate owners in an area favourable to the mining/manufacture of a particular product that at this distance in time can give the impression of a homogeneous industry.
When we turn to the iron industry the picture is more complicated for iron is far more common than salt and can be made, using the local ironstone, by local smiths in many parts of the country. Iron is the commonest mineral in our islands and the ores mainly utilised were hematite and limonite. It has a high melting point (1500C) that was difficult to reach in primitive furnaces and the ore was therefore reduced in the sold state and the resulting pure iron remained as small grains embedded in a spongy mass of slag known as bloom. The iron can only extracted from the bloom by repeated hammering and reheating which welds the small iron grains together while the slag and impurities are broken off. Iron-making and smithing were punishingly difficult tasks in early times for the fuel used (charcoal) was really inadequate for the job and the smith much preferred to reheat and reshape broken iron objects. This accounts for the small number of common iron implements that appear in our museums.
In Wiltshire, for example, iron was made at different times from deposits of comparatively low-grade ironstone at Sandy Lane, Seend and Westbury, places, which, on a fine day and from hilltops, are within sight of each other. Such deposits do not need bell-pits or mines, a quarry a couple of metres deep is sufficient and although such work would have been done by arrangement with the landowner, we cannot expect to find records of it. The paucity of ‘iron’ entries in the Domesday Book demonstrate that on the whole it was an activity that fell below the level of business that produced much in the way of profit. As a result, we can say little about areas of production except in those places where there was a concentration of activity as there appears to have been in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire beyond the Severn where Gloucester seems to have been the manufacturing centre. There are also Domesday references to iron-making in Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Obviously, a great deal of iron was used in pre-Conquest England but it was being produced in the same amateur way as every settlement grew its turnips.
Lead was in demand for a variety of purposes from roofing buildings to making salt-pans and a variety of places could provide it - on Mendip, for example, a source used by the Romano-Britons - and in north-eastern Wales and Derbyshire. According to the documents, by far the most important source was Derbyshire. Early references date back to 835 and extend down to Domesday. In the reign of Edward the Confessor, for example, the lead workings on the manors of Bakewell, Ashford and Hope were let out at a rent of £30, five and a half sestiers of honey (a sestier means a sixth, of what?), and fifty slabs of lead.
Silver can be obtained from argentiferous ores which must be roasted before smelting. At the time, electrum and galena in particular were the most important ores from which silver was smelted. Silver became significant during the seventh century in Europe when the currency commonly became silver and soon the production of coins became common. Mendip region mines and those in north-eastern Wales began to be re-exploited. Because of its monetary importance, silver production was particularly subject to royal control.
Copper can be found native but most copper was smelted from ores. It occurs in areas of hydro-thermal activity in north Wales and its main use was to form an alloy with tin, found as oxides, tinstone or casserite, mined in Cornwall. The two metals in the proportions of 10% tin and 90% copper form the common form of bronze. Although we do not have much documentary evidence of tin being exported what we do have indicates that it continued throughout the period and the archaeological evidence of the activity suggests earlier trade with the Mediterranean.
Workers in the metal trades were those who dealt with the mineral and its extraction, others who processed it and craftsmen who used it for the manufacture of articles. Amongst these last the spectrum of individuals stretched from the tinker or common smith making workaday objects and household utensils to those who were the producers of high grade weapons and armour and high-class gold and silver jewellery of which the Viking jewellers were pastmasters. Both secular and ecclesiastical customers were in the market for the objects that these latter experts produced. While some of the metallurgists worked in the households of great men, others seem to have been independent like one goldsmith, mentioned in Domesday, who held a group of estates south of Southwark and was likely to have been the recipient of ecclesiastical patronage. Silver pennies, the currency of the later post-Roman period, which first appeared in the kingdom of Mercia and later were universal elsewhere in Britain in the same way as they were on the Continent became one of the commonest metal products of the period..
The old Roman city of London revived together with other Roman towns during the ninth century but, unfortunately, this rebirth of trading activity coincided with the Viking attacks on England and other parts of western Europe and trade-routes were disrupted and towns sacked. Curiously enough, a by-product of these attacks on England was the appearance of the burhs destined to be the foundation of nation-wide prosperity later on even though, at the time of their construction, they must have placed considerable strains on local economies.
During these centuries the countryside in its slow and almost invisible evolvement, was moving towards the landscape that we are familiar with since the medieval period. Perhaps the most first important development was the appearance of the open field, defined as the arable land belonging to a particular community lying in large unenclosed expanses in which the holdings of an individual peasant were distributed in scattered strips. There is little proof for this next suggestion but one might see this area of arable land as having its origin in a villa estate of Romano-British times, the land on which the ancestral Romano-British peasants laboured and on which they or their descendants had managed to assert some rights of use so attempts have been made in several places like Withington in Gloucestershire (Finberg) to identify the medieval village lands with the erstwhile Romano-British estate in the area.
Detailed study has been done of a post-Roman area at Rivenhall in Essex (Rodwell) which investigators think may have originated as a Romano-British villa estate of 1150 hectares. They have demonstrated how the villa could have been gradually replaced in succeeding years by domestic buildings in timber and a hall moved from a site on a platform north of the churchyard to its present site without any evidence of discontinuity. Later, the estate became a royal vill. Correlations between the Romano-British villas and medieval settlements in the surrounding area suggest that this Rivenhall sequence may prove not have been unusual.
Rural settlements in the earlier post-Roman period were liable to be ephemeral since they do not appear to have been fixed in one place for a great many years. Part of our problem of identifying them or tracking them relates back to Romano-British period when the workers on the villa estates are well-nigh invisible. We cannot tell whether they were accommodated in the villa complex since we have no fully excavated villa complex and, if accommodated outside it, we have not yet come across a settlement that can be directly related to a particular villa although there are a few villas with possible contemporary native settlements in their vicinity. Such settlements perhaps could be the starting point of an investigation that would allow us to track the movements of the settlement, with the aid of fieldwalking and, perhaps, genetic analysis of its burials if these can be identified.
The argument behind this is that settlements do not usually disappear because every inhabitant has dropped dead. Economic forces make their location no longer viable or, perhaps in a few cases, disease is the cause of the move. Folk pick up their belongings and, as a group, settle somewhere not very far away. Is it possible that cemeteries can be used to track these movements of people? One of the peculiarities of British archaeology is the behaviour of cemeteries. They are common as late-Bronze Age urnfields and they make another good showing during the earlier post-Roman period, again in quantity as urnfields but also as inhumations. Princely graves are relatively common: apart from Sutton Hoo, there are others of lesser magnificence at Benty Grange (Derbys), Broomfield (Essex), Caenby (Lincs), Cuddington (Oxon), Finglesham (Kent), Newark (Notts), Prittlewell (Essex) and Taplow (Bucks) and these can be the focus of common graves which were presumably people of the aristocratic household, but later inhumation graves that are simply those of a settlement are more difficult to find. After this, with some exceptions, before they were routinely placed in a churchyard, burials are simply invisible, and even churchyards seem too small for the number of burials that should have been made in them over the years.
Ancient burials not marked with considerable mounds do not register in the modern landscape. Normal fieldwalking is not likely to turn them up unless they are ploughed over and some bones are brought to the surface and the only real answer is the laborious use of GPR (Ground penetrating radar) which can detect grave pits. Perhaps it is simplistic advice but all discoverers of settlements should routinely look for the associated burials and vice-versa and the settlements can then be genetically linked to predecessors or successors and the significance of their locations in the landscape and a sequence of settlement be identified in a particular area.
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