The Anglo-Saxon house: a new review

Abstract

The past two decades have witnessed an almost complete revision of ideas about the character of Anglo-Saxon settlements. The advances have come in the main from a series of archaeological excavations in which techniques commonly used in prehistoric archaeology have been applied to sites of the period in the light of results from contemporary settlements on the continent. The excavations have in effect produced entire new categories of evidence about the domestic accommodation, service buildings and general planning of settlements of all levels of Anglo-Saxon society, in most of England and in all parts of the Anglo-Saxon period. In 1950 almost no domestic buildings were known other than the sunken huts found first by Leeds at Sutton Courtenay and subsequently by others in various parts of the country. Leeds‘s conclusions, accepted albeit with reluctance by scholars, were that ‘the bulk of the people, we can now be assured, were content with something that hardly deserves a better title than hovel, only varying in its greater or lesser simplicity’. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Such buildings stood in stark and suspect contrast to the relatively sophisticated stone churches from the earliest days of Christianity found in various parts of the country. Radford, moreover, in a seminal paper in the first volume ofMedieval Archaeologydemonstrated that they stood in some considerable contrast to the settlements and to the standards of domestic accommodation enjoyed by the ancestors and contemporaries of the Anglo-Saxons on the continent.