The Roman Countryside: Settlement and Agriculture in N. W. Essex

Abstract

Over the past decade most historians and archaeologists have come to accept that the landscape of Roman Britain was an extensively farmed and settled one. Fieldwork has consistently revealed evidence of Romano-British settlement in areas of heavy soils once thought to have been first extensively cleared and colonized only in the Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods. This is particularly true of the areas of southern and eastern England which have an ‘Ancient Countryside’. In the medieval period these lacked a strong tradition of open-field agriculture and had a settlement pattern which included large numbers of hamlets and isolated farmsteads. Both these features have often been directly related to the chronology of settlement in these areas, on the assumption that early and pre-Saxon settlement was limited to restricted areas of more favourable soils. The dispersed pattern of settlement and the complex pattern of small open-fields and irregular hedged closes are normally interpreted as the result, therefore, of a gradual expansion of settlement in the later Saxon and medieval periods at the expense of formerly uncleared woodland and waste. Compared with the Midland counties, where settlement was more strongly nucleated in the medieval period, such areas were relatively well-wooded at the time of Domesday and often still carry extensive areas of Ancient Woodland. In such areas place-names indicative of Saxon woodland clearance, especially those containing the O.E. element leak (modernley, leigh etc: usually in place names translated ‘a clearing in a wood’) are common, and this has been used to support the conventional model. Various aspects of the appearance of such landscapes, for example the irregular pattern of fields and woods, are also often thought to reflect their origin in late and piecemeal colonization.