Medieval Villages Were Planned, Not Accidental
The idyllic image of a medieval English village, with its houses arranged conveniently around a church and plots of arable land stretching out from it like spokes from a wheel, is at least partially a construction of modern archaeologists. Contrary to what we might expect, many such villages were actually laid out in a very orderly grid pattern by ambitious medieval landlords.
At Wharram Percy in Yorkshire, the house plots are arranged in two remarkably regular lines along the frontage, facing the main street, suggesting that they were laid out in a single exercise of orderly, if utilitarian, town planning, probably between the tenth and the twelfth century. Further evidence of planning can be found in a number of villages in the county of Buckinghamshire, on the border with Northamptonshire, where medieval landowners decided to clear away some of the older peasant plots and lay out more up-to-date rectangular plots in the same area. This took place at the same time as landowners were attempting to group their peasants into more intensively farmed holdings as part of a process that began in the eleventh century of the breakup of large multiple estates.
Peasant houses too, it appears, were not the rudimentary constructions of medieval stereotype but were substantial timber-framed buildings designed to last for generations. There were two main regional variations in medieval peasant housing, one the other throughout the country. In the pastoral areas of the north and west, people and their livestock lived in longhouses, while in the mainly arable lands of the south and east, the hall-and-courtyard farmhouses were built. These houses were designed in a planned, if pragmatic, manner, centuries before anyone had heard of modern town and country planning.
Uncover medieval intrigue—grab your copy of The Draychester Chronicles.