by Tom Fort
That summer I played a few games of cricket for the village team. My eldest brother had started playing the year before, and soon the second eldest was playing as well when home from university. For the first time I met and consorted with people from the village, my village. One or two of them were true Berkshire, with the rustic burr that has long since vanished utterly. But most were incomers from elsewhere, white-collar types, united in very little other than their enthusiasm for cricket.
Nearly half a century later I am still playing cricket for the village. I have not lived there since 1972 but until last year I was still chairman of the club. Most weeks during the summer I go over to work on the square, as well as playing Sunday matches. My spiritual commitment to the club remains as strong as ever, preserving my link to the village itself.
Twyford has continued to expand, and now has a population of almost 10,000. But it is still classified as a village, with a parish rather than a town council, and it clearly still is a village, albeit one enclosed by tracts of housing estates. Its character has not changed significantly since Waitrose opened. Its great transformation, which took place in front of my largely unseeing eyes, was effected over four decades, from the 1960s to the end of the millennium.
Its home owners still commute to London on the train or drive out to the business parks around Reading. Its children go the local schools. Its people eat in the Indian, Thai and Italian restaurants and pick up takeaways from the chippy and the Chinese. The surviving pubs – the Waggon and Horses, the Duke of Wellington and the Golden Cross – show football, put on quiz nights, stage live music. Food shopping is done at Waitrose; there is nowhere else. But there are other shops to cover other needs, and an excellent independent café, recently (and quite unnecessarily) joined by a Costa coffee house. The football club thrives, the cricket club survives, the Scouts march on and there is a host of ‘village activities’.
Twyford has changed entirely since the Forts moved there in 1952. The form of the village we knew then is still there, but the life we knew has long vanished. Old Twyford is concealed within New Twyford, with a new life. But it is very evidently not dead or dying or even in precarious health.
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There are, however, plenty of English villages which have been slowly drained of their vitality. The shop has gone, the pub has gone, the school has been converted into a second home, the old cottages have been sold to weekenders and the new houses, if there are any, to commuters from elsewhere. The church is part of a group parish of eight and gets communion once a month if it’s lucky. The cricket club is a fading memory and the grass on the recreation field is two feet long. The peace is the peace of the graveyard.
This village tends to be small and distant from any major centre of population. It is rural and picturesque, richly endowed with cob, old stone, thatched roofs, crooked tiles, leaning chimneys, clambering roses, bee-humming cottage gardens; heavy with what the social historian and archaeologist Richard Muir scornfully characterised as ‘the sweet and cloying lavender odour found in National Trust shops’. The local yokels have long gone, displaced by the same economic forces that have shaped the wider society we have today. The fabric of the village – the cottages and fine stone houses – has probably never been in better condition than it is now, because of the wealth of the new owners. But this village will have very little in the way of new, cheaper housing; therefore very little in the way of infusion of new blood. It is in the hands of retirees and second-homers and the reclusive, security-anxious rich, all very protective of its picturesqueness and quiet, not much bothered by the matter of its vitality.
For a village to thrive, it must have the capacity to renew itself, and that means making room for new families. The chances are that it will be comparatively big – say, three or four hundred homes and a population of a thousand or more – and with manageable connections to towns and cities where there is well-paid work. It will have a primary school, with a secondary school close by, which are much more important than those pillars of village life in times past, the church and pub (although it will have those). There will be a recreation ground and sports clubs, a library, allotments. There will be clubs, groups, activities, causes.
The price these villages pay for renewal is to forfeit something of their good looks. They will have had to accept new housing, accretions of banal and homogeneous dwellings, arranged by the dead hand and impoverished vision of developers around copses and closes and views and pightles and glebes and other meaningless harkings back to bygone days; tacked on to the irregular diversity that comes with organic growth over centuries. But if the village lives, it is a price worth paying.
I have never been a city-dweller, and although I have lived for extended periods in towns, I have never felt myself to be a natural townie. I am by nature and inclination a village kind of person, and I have spent a little over half of my life in two villages: the one where I was brought up, and the one where I live now. Neither is in the least scenic nor possessed of obvious charms. But they survive, even thrive. They are not typical of villages elsewhere because each village is particular to itself. But their stories, and the stories of other villages, together make a bigger story. And this bigger story is itself a fundamental part of the story of our nation.
2
LONG AGO
Goltho, Lincolnshire
A few miles east of Lincoln on the A158 is a signpost on the right for Goltho. The place itself is insignificant, just a scattering of houses hardly even amounting to hamlet status. But there is an arresting sight off the narrow, rough lane leading to it: a tiny red-brick church standing on its own in a broad, open cornfield.
St George’s was built in the sixteenth century by the family who lived nearby at Goltho Hall. It has box pews, carved altar rails, a double-decked pulpit and a handsome stone floor. It also had a mellow tiled roof until October 2013, when it was struck by a bolt of lightning and set on fire. Sheets of corrugated metal now keep out the worst of the Lincolnshire weather.
It is sad in the way ruined churches always are, the more so because the sheets of corrugated iron are ugly and brutal and the rest of the building is lovely; and perhaps because it was brought to this state not by neglect – it had a devoted band of volunteers who looked after it and it was still used for occasional services – but by atrocious bad luck or what one might call an act of God. No one enters it now and there is no one to pay to have the roof restored and the damage put right. Severed from its reason for being, St George’s serves no one except those whose names are faintly, if at all, discernible on the leaning gravestones outside, and their requirements are minimal.
Goltho church before being struck by lightning
Underneath the floor of the church are the remains of another, even more ancient place of worship. And a few yards to the south-west of the churchyard is a slight but perceptible rise in the otherwise flat ground. There are clues here, if you know what you are looking for.
Fortunately the archaeologist Guy Beresford had a good idea of what to look for when he led a celebrated excavation of this Lincolnshire field in the late 1970s. But even Beresford was, I think, surprised by the richness and diversity of the history he and his team uncovered. The resulting book, handsomely published by English Heritage and available online, opens a window on to the often obscure and fragmented story of the English village in pre-medieval and medieval times.
The detailed chronology of the settlement at Goltho is complicated and necessarily speculative. But its broad outline is clear. It came into organised existence during the Roman occupation (although pottery fragments show there was some kind of exploitation of the site before the legions arrived in AD 43). Initially it comprised thatched circular huts, palisades and pounds for animals. Later, perhaps around AD 200, a more substantial Romano-British farmstead replaced the huts, although Beresford was not able to determine the full extent of the property.
Early in the fifth century Britain ceased to be part of the disintegrating Roman
empire. Around then Goltho was abandoned. The reasons are unknown, but it was a time of chronic instability and rapidly declining population, aptly dubbed the Dark Ages. When the darkness thins a few centuries later, it reveals the field at Goltho to have been resettled by a group of Saxon immigrants. Saxon incursions from the Low Countries had begun while the Romans were still in control. After the legions left, Saxons exploited the vacuum to establish pagan kingdoms over much of the more productive land of central and southern England. The scale of colonisation is not clear, and some authorities believe that the numbers involved amounted to no more than a few thousand, and that their success was more linguistic than territorial.
At Goltho several houses built with clay and wattle walls and roofs thatched in sedge, straw or rush appeared in the eighth century arranged beside some sort of street or way, each with its own ditched and fenced paddock. Between 850 and 950 these dwellings were cleared away and replaced by more substantial ones built around three sides of a courtyard, the complex enclosed by ramparts and ditches. A timber hall was added subsequently, eighty feet long and twenty wide, with a floor of trampled clay. This imposing residence was itself then rebuilt with a Romanesque roof and a raised cobbled hearth.
It was evidently a place of wealth and importance. Quite soon – certainly by the end of the tenth century – a new stave-built manor house rose on the site, accompanied by outbuildings which included a weaving shed and kitchens, all within a strengthened enclosure. But construction at Goltho was by no means finished. Soon after the Norman invasion of 1066 work began to replace the manor house with a motte-and-bailey castle, raised on a mound well above the rest of the settlement and close to where the ruined church now stands. The castle was defended by a moat and wide ramparts, and was subsequently expanded into a proper fortified homestead suitable for the lord of this manor.
And so it remained, together with between thirty and forty humbler dwellings along a road and a side street, with – in time – a church. But at some point Goltho’s fortunes began to wane. The reasons are a matter for supposition; it may be that the clay soil became impoverished or too compacted for satisfactory drainage; or that plague or some other disease struck; or that the village was caught up in some localised conflict; or, perhaps most likely, it fell victim to the well-documented worsening in the climate which meant the fields could no longer feed the people. Whatever the factors, the population diminished in the course of the fourteenth century to the point at which the village became unviable. By the time it was abandoned early in the fifteenth century there were just four homesteads left.
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What happened at Goltho was particular to Goltho, but not atypical of elsewhere across England. It used to be stated that there could be very little known about the pattern of settlement in pre-Roman Britain because of the thoroughness with which those settlements – whether extended homesteads or groups of houses forming the earliest villages – had been erased from the landscape. But the steady advance in techniques of archaeology and in the interpretation of evidence has redrawn the picture entirely. It is now clear that, long before the Romans forged their empire, much of England had achieved remarkable progress both in food production and social organisation.
Bronze Age farmers cleared much of the original forest, and their Iron Age successors continued and extended the process, bringing great tracts of land under the plough and creating grazing for very considerable herds of livestock, mainly cattle. The population in the first century BCE is now estimated to have been not much lower than its level under Roman rule – perhaps as many as four or five million. The evidence suggests strongly that the prime motive for conquest was not to extend the boundaries of empire to include an undeveloped frontier province, but to exploit an existing production source of known value.
The notion that Roman officials arrived in the wake of the legions to impose the Roman system of administration on a country speckled with extended family farmsteads each operating independently and in isolation has been sabotaged by recent research. Thousands of settlements – ranging from tiny hamlets to a handful of what archaeologists refer to as proto-towns – had sprung up in Iron Age England. Silchester, for example – long identified as a ‘Roman town’ – in fact boasted an urban-style street system almost a century before Aulus Plautius weighed anchor off the Kent coast with his invasion force.
The steady rise in the population through the Bronze and Iron Ages, and the corresponding increases in food production, required people and communities to work together. Laser scanning of a site on a spur of the South Downs near Chichester has revealed traces of a complex and extensive Iron Age field system which could only have been constructed by a considerable labour force, and which was one part of a much more widespread and organised system of crop cultivation.
It is now evident that the Romans did not institute any kind of agricultural or even to any great extent social revolution. They built towns, vastly expanded industrial processes such as lead mining and iron smelting, introduced a full monetary economy and imposed a central government, funded by taxation, on what had previously been a disparate tribal system. But for the great majority of the rural population, working their land as they had before, Roman rule would hardly have impinged on daily life at all. Rather than representing an emergence from prehistoric darkness into the light of civilisation, Roman Britain can now be seen as one significant stage in a long process of organic change.
The traditional sequential version of our history saw Roman occupation give way to Saxon settlement, one phase followed by another. But it was not as tidy as that. In the short term, all that happened was that the protection of the Imperial army was withdrawn, partly in response to trouble on the Continent and partly because the British contingent had been overstretched trying to deal with bands of Saxon raiders – some of whom were actually ex-Roman army soldiers seizing the main chance when they saw it.
Fraternisation and intermarriage between resident Romano-British and Saxon incomers further complicated a complicated situation. What is clear is that, over a remarkably short period, the comparatively ordered society organised by Roman officialdom disintegrated into unstable spheres of influence riven by rivalries between competing lords who were ready at all times to resolve differences by violence.
As the population declined and what had been fertile fields were reclaimed by thorn and brush, many long-standing settlements ceased to exist. Others continued in occupation but at a much reduced level. The Saxon immigrants sometimes built their wooden houses next to an existing settlement, sometimes on new sites. The best known, at Mucking in Essex, included 200 smaller structures and a significant number of more substantial dwellings – one of these, fifty feet long and much bigger than the rest, may have been the hall of a ruling thegn – which were built and rebuilt on various parts of the site from the earliest years of the Saxon incursions onwards.
It was an unstable time in an unstable world, and clear patterns of occupation are difficult to establish. Some settlement sites clearly remained in use over long periods; others were abandoned. Under pressure of war or disease or shortage of food, groups would move on to try somewhere else, fragment, disperse, form new groups; leaving little trace beyond shards of pottery and marks on the ground discernible only from the air. A sense of permanence as we understand it – belonging in a specific location in a familiar, lasting dwelling – would have been unknown. Villages there certainly were, in the sense of groups of dwellings sustaining a communal life. But how they functioned and were organised – what village life was like – remains a matter of guesswork.
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The birth of the English village in its familiar form was bound up with the evolution of the system of agriculture known as open-field agriculture, in which the viable land available to a community was worked communally with each family having its place. That connection is generally accepted by archaeologists and historians. But how open-field farming evolved, where the model came from, where it took hold and
when, whether it was adopted piecemeal or whether there was a pattern, why some parts of England embraced it and others did not, and why variations in its applications are found in some places and not in others – all these are matters for discussion and dispute which will keep the academics and their supporting faculties happily occupied into the indefinite future.
This much is agreed. The old version of the birth of Village England – that much of the country was covered by virgin woodland which was cleared in Anglo-Saxon times, that the open-field system grew from that, and that villages developed to service a new system of agriculture – was wrong. Most of the woodland was gone before the Romans arrived. After the Roman army left, the population plunged and much cultivated land was abandoned, as were its settlements. Resettlement occurred haphazardly in the early Anglo-Saxon period, and in a more organised way later on – say between AD 850 and 1000. Existing farmsteads and hamlets tended to cluster together if close enough, forming what the medieval historians call nucleated settlements, i.e. villages.
The open-field system held sway across much of the north-east, through the Midlands and down through central southern England to the Channel. Much of the north-west, East Anglia, the south-west and the south-east retained the pattern of small fields worked from scattered farmsteads and hamlets. Where open-field farming did take hold, the process was completed by about 1200. The classic pattern, of field division into furlong strips (220 yards, or a fraction over 200 metres) often replaced an earlier one of much longer strips.