This article reports on a new field project exploring the pattern of Roman settlement in the landscape of Suffolk. It presents the results of the first season of fieldwork at the site of Alpheton.

This paper presents a new Geographic Information Systems database of travel and communications routes in England and Wales derived from medieval cartographic evidence. We argue on the basis of archaeological, physical landscape, onomastic, documentary, cartographic and other historical evidence that the network of red distance lines on the Gough Map of Great Britain, dated c. fifteenth century, represents travel routes and roads connecting medieval settlements. As such it constitutes the earliest depiction of a British network of medieval overland routes at a reasonable level of complexity and geographical extent. Taking this as a very partial, but important, sample of the fuller medieval travel networks, we investigate which elements were carried over from the road network of Roman Britain. Using a selection of computational and qualitative methods and approaches, we thereby evaluate the character, regionality and relative quantity of Roman routeway survival, shedding light into the complex transformations of human landscapes that occurred both at macro (national) and micro (regional, local) scales across approximately one thousand years.

This article presents an overview of recent fieldwork by the Institute of Archaeology at St Andrew's Church and the Old Rectory, Norton, Suffolk.The investigations identified the foundations of a previously unrecorded Anglo-Saxon church tower, which probably forms part of a tenth or eleventh-century elite residence associated with Eadgifu the Fair, wife of Harold Godwinsson.Trace evidence relating to a probable Roman villa was also recorded on the site, together with a significant quantity of finds and environmental remains associated with the documented medieval and later church and rectory sites.The excavations have also provided an important venue for undergraduate fieldwork training and public engagement, and will continue into 2025.

The period after the Black Death saw a dramatic demographic reversal and significant structural economic change, including the withdrawal of lords from direct farming. Vale and Chilterns remained distinctive, but in some links were strengthened and experiential differences were reduced. This chapter examines how perceptions of village space were affected by a steepening of village hierarchy and by increased geographical mobility. Great divergence between settlements is revealed in terms of forms and possibly strength of engagement and attachment. The character of social space in villages is examined in part through an innovative study of the reach of church bells, based on fieldwork carried out during the project. Field names are used to uncover shared stories and local traditions, which may have been cultivated and used especially by senior tenants.

The final main chapter looks at the early modern period, assessing how far it saw a ‘Reformation of the landscape’ and a secularization and commodification of the way land was valued as a resource. It is argued that, as earlier, a group sense of attachment to place was strongest in vibrant, socially ‘open’ settlements with considerable shared spaces, the kind of settlements found mainly in the vale part of the hundred. Village social space is examined in detail through an archaeological analysis of standing buildings and their relationship to the wider streetscape. Court depositions supply data about inhabitants’ attitudes to different social spaces and the ways in which they were used.

This chapter, covering the late Anglo-Saxon and Norman Conquest period, outlines the major changes in land use which accompanied the creation of small local manors and the establishment of collaborative open-field farming. Those changes reflected the shift in relations from ones predominantly organized around social networks to ones of property ownership. Domesday Book supplies a crucial piece of evidence, in light of which fragmentary earlier evidence for the structure of the royal estate of Benson can be better understood. The strong implications of the period’s developments for inhabitants’ perceptions are examined, including through the boundary clauses accompanying royal land charters and the evidence for more structured settlements and systems of administration, including the hundred and its moot.

This is the first book about peasant perceptions of landscape. It marks a step-change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This book provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. It takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants’ spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialized, the book supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

The second chapter describes the physical character of the study area in detail as a framework for understanding the analysis supplied in the chapters to follow. It also sets out the main sources drawn upon in the book, notably the physical remains of archaeology and the fabric of the historic landscape itself, as well as documentary sources such as Anglo-Saxon charter bounds, manorial records, deeds, legal records, and maps, which yield data about the use of space and about inhabitants’ perceptions, the latter particularly revealed by the field names and bynames coined by local people themselves, and by legal depositions dealing with contested ownerships and customary practices. Key archaeological sources include village earthworks, excavated and standing buildings, and botanical and zooarchaeological remains. Archaeological fieldwork carried out as part of the project is described, including fieldwalking, test pit and trial trench excavation, extensive buildings survey, and measuring the soundmarks of church bells.

This chapter examines the poorly documented centuries in the middle of the first millennium AD. It recovers economic structures and daily interactions from archaeological evidence, as well as from mainly later documents. The nature and impact of the Roman to Anglo-Saxon transition within the study area is considered, and demographic and agrarian trends are set out. The character of early royal involvement in the area is assessed, looking in particular at the evidence for a possible great hall complex at Benson. It is argued that princes and kings had a visible impact on the land and on landscape memorialization, but that the strongest driver of perceptions were the localized territorial farming units to which inhabitants belonged. In this period of poor crop storage facilities, hunger and the threat of starvation had a particularly acute impact on the way the landscape was experienced.

This chapter deals with the richly documented high medieval period, in which we can trace the landscape and economy of the hundred in very considerable detail. The nature of settlements and agriculture is set out, including the strong contrast between vale and Chiltern communities. The chapter includes a map of the hundred’s landscape in 1300, as well as the first of a series of maps of parish fields and field names. The chapter argues that this period saw an increasing divergence between the vale and the Chiltern parts of the hundred in terms of population, settlement patterns, and everyday life. The implications for perceptions are explored through an analysis of open and closed space in different settlements, and the period’s many and rich field names and peasant bynames.

Barbara Yorke's typically incisive work, integrating historical and archaeological approaches, has to me always demonstrated most clearly the value of adopting a multi-disciplinary approach.Her willingness to include archaeological evidence alongside that from written sources has facilitated the analysis of Anglo-Saxon England, and Wessex in particular, in a way that provides insights of equal relevance to those who study the social, cultural, historical, or landscape dimensions of early medieval societies.Barbara's interest in multi-disciplinarity has seen her form a long and fruitful collaboration with archaeologists at ucl, co-investigating on a number of research projects.It is through my work on two of these projects-Landscapes of Governance and Travel and Communication in Anglo-Saxon England1-that I first properly got to known her.Drawing on aspects of research that emerged from these projects, this paper reviews the evidence for the political geography of early Hampshire-an area so well known to Barbara.The recent identification in Hampshire of a number of early territories underlying the later configuration of administrative divisions allows for a more detailed examination of the internal organisation of early medieval kingdoms.2This paper makes observations about the suggested 'small shires' of Hampshire and describes some of the features of these early territories.It is argued that different types of territories can be identified, the comparison of which throws light on the evolution of local districts and of early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. 'Folk' Territories and Meeting-places in Anglo-Saxon England

Archaeologists work with a wealth of mortuary evidence — site-based, artefactual, bioarchaeological and monumental — reflecting the spatial agency of the dead both above and below ground. Necrogeography or the study of ‘deathscapes’, however, relates to a broader spectrum of research that draws on geography, sociology, anthropology, architecture and psychology (Francaviglia 1971, 501) and facilitates exploration of the role of place in human mortality (Muzaini 2017). Places can be changed by the rituals associated with death and burial, but places in turn can influence human experiences of death. As Michel Serres, Edward Casey, Martin Heidegger, and others who have meditated on this topic suggest, the burial of the dead is an essential human institution, instrumental to both the making of places and the imagining of futures (Serres 1987; Casey 1997; Heidegger 1962). The planning and design of cemeteries, graves and grave monuments, thus offers insight into the socio-cultural and political contexts in which they were generated. Such locales, as archaeologists have prominently argued, are invested with meaning literally by those that have come before, and these meanings can be ‘co-opted’ for identity building, territorial and ideological signalling (Tilley 1994; 2004). Deathscapes offer a reflection of the living world and its divisions in terms of gender, equality and exclusion — cemeteries and places of burial ‘are susceptible to cultural politics, and they reveal as much about the living as they do about the dead’ (Muzaini 2017). The ‘spatial turn’ within social sciences and humanities has enabled a growing engagement with research on death, memorialization, commemoration and mourning (Maddrell and Sidaway 2010). ‘Mourning is an inherently spatial as well as temporal phenomenon’ (Maddrell 2010, 123). Within a modern world, we can map the intersections of dying, death, burial and mourning, across public and personal spaces, for example, from the hospital ward to the undertakers, crematoria, cemetery, and even in terms of the domestic space and home (Maddrell and Sidaway 2010, 2). The intentional and structured disposal of the dead by humans in places both within living communities and distinct from them (cemeteries) largely sets us apart from other species, and it is these ‘landscapes of disposal’ that can help archaeologists understand the changing notions of connection to place in scalar terms (Wilkinson 2003, 65; Bradbury and Philip 2017, 87–102). As archaeologists, our ‘deathscapes’ are, at once, more partial and more confined. We are at the mercy of the frail archaeological record: rarely certain if an excavated cemetery is complete or to what degree the taphonomic and decomposition processes have distorted the evidence. Our retrospective gaze also creates distance between us and mourners at the graveside in the past.

Inhumation burials are recorded in Britain and Europe during excavations in a standardized way, especially graves of early medieval date. Just a limited number of attributes are usually foregrounded and these mainly concern skeletal identification, the grave plan and, when a burial is furnished, a list of objects, particularly metalwork, as well as occasional reference to burial structures, if present. In this paper, we argue that concealed within these recorded details are attributes that often receive little attention, but which can provide evidence for community investment in the individual funerary rite. These include grave orientation, grave morphology, the body position and the empty spaces in the grave, as well as categories of material culture. We argue here that these factors enable us to define communal burial profiles and can facilitate the identification of group perceptions and actions in dealing with death. By capitalizing on these additional aspects of funerary ritual, archaeologists can move away from a general dependency on well-furnished burials as the main stepping-off point for discussion of social and cultural issues. This has particular relevance for regions where unfurnished burial rites are the norm and where furnished rites do not rely on a wealth of metalwork.

Las sociedades humanas han concebido su relacion con el espacio fisico en el que habitaban en terminos territoriales. Este concepto dota a la nocion de territorio de una serie de significados sociales y culturales, convirtiendo asi en un instrumento de articulaciones de las complejas y cambiantes relaciones entre grupos sociales y medio natural. Generalmente la territorialidad se examina desde el prismas de los Estados modernos como zonas perfectamente delimitadas, tanto desde un punto de vista topografico como desde una optica del significado politico. Sin embargo, se trata de una vision parcial, que no toma en consideraban la existencia de otras formas de territorialidad existentes en sociedades industriales. La alta edad Media, un periodo que cubrir los siglos VI al XI aproximadamente, fue un autentico laboratorio de territorialidad. Los modelos romanos, fuertemente condicionados por el poder imperial, se diluyeron y surgieron nuevas y muy diversas formas de articulaciones del territorio. Las sociedades locales se convirtieron en protagonistas activas, al crear patrones territoriales que sirvieron de escenario para implementar las relaciones con la autoridad central, al tiempo que se fueron construyendo los espacios episcopales y se crearon “lugares centrales” de nuevo cuno. Esta compleja relacion entre lo local y lo englobante se aborda en este volumen a traves de un conjunto de estudios que cubren la peninsula Iberica, Inglaterra, Irlanda e Italia. La construccion de la territorialidad en la alta edad Media es una obra deliberadamente orientada hacia una historiografia de escala europea que supere las miradas exclusivamente nacionales