Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 130

This impressive monograph describes the results of one of the largest-scale excavations to have taken place within an English medieval village. Today, the settlement at Caldecote comprises just a manor house and six labourers’ cottages next to the medieval church, though this was once the site of a small village that in the fourteenth century had fourteen households. In total 6.5 acres (2.63 ha) were excavated including a series of peasant crofts, the rectory, and a large part of the moated manorial enclosure that was laid across a series of other former peasant tenements in the thirteenth century. The excavations were carried out between 1973 and 1977, but a lack of funding at the time meant delays in the post-excavation analysis of the finds, and the preparation of a report for publication. Both the author and the Society for Medieval Archaeology’s monograph editor Christopher Gerrard are therefore to be congratulated on bringing into print this important piece of work.

The volume begins with an excellent introduction (by Christopher Gerrard) that sets this excavation in its wider context of the history of research into deserted medieval villages and current debates such as the development of peasant houses and the origins of village-based settlement (as opposed to the more dispersed settlement patterns that preceded them). The site was excavated because it was threatened by ploughing, and the discussion of the destructive impact that the Common Agricultural Policy had on both archaeological sites and the wider landscape will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. The rest of the volume follows the traditional structure of an excavation report with chapters on the documentary evidence (including the text of a survey of 1321), the methods of excavation and recording, a description of the archaeological evidence period by period, and then specialist reports on the various finds (such as the pottery, household utensils or tools) and environmental material (plant and animal remains). The final chapter provides both an excellent synthesis of the evidence, and a discussion of their significance.

There is much in this report for anyone interested in rural history including the animal bone assemblage (which shows a decline in cattle, and an increase in pigs and sheep over the course of the medieval period) and charred cereal assemblages (dominated by bread/ club wheat, but with some barley, and a very small amount of rye). The sequence of peasant houses shows that relatively simple structures with roofs supported by earth-fast posts and cob walls, which may have housed both humans and animals, were replaced in the late medieval period by more substantial timber-framed houses with separate barns for the livestock. As well as this below-ground archaeology, the report also embraces a study of the standing buildings, with both the church and manor house containing medieval fabric. The artefactual evidence suggests that the village of Caldecote was created in the tenth century although several strands of evidence – including its ‘cot’ place-name and the way that the peasant crofts appear to have been laid out over the strips of an existing open field – suggest that this was a secondary phase of village creation in the region. In the later medieval period blocks of three crofts were each replaced by six more substantial farmsteads that probably represent the amalgamation of tenements that is well documented across fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.

Overall, this is an important report that provides an excellent introduction to the study of deserted medieval settlements, and presents the results of a particularly large-scale excavation. The report is extremely well structured and presented with a wide range of illustrations to aid the reader and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the origins and development of the medieval village.