The ‘Scole-Dickleburgh field system’ examined

Abstract

ABSTRACT In some areas of eastern England, ‘semi-regular grid systems’ of field boundaries have been claimed as Roman or earlier. This paper examines in detail an example in south Norfolk, and questions the hypothesis that the Venta to Londinium Roman road is an intrusion into a co-axial pattern of fields and lanes. It is suggested instead that the earliest routes followed the local topography, and that they and other features such as the edges of greens and commons were only in occasional and coincidental conformity with the postulated early Roman or pre-Roman grid system, nor are non-conforming road-lines clearly explicable as diversions around subsequent medieval settlements. Parish boundaries do not relate consistently to any single dominant landscape pattern. Encroachments on the commons show late creation of several new field boundaries, with many others resulting from enclosure of medieval open fields. Consequently it is suggested that most of the field shapes shown on early nineteenth-century maps were post-medieval, not relics of a pre-medieval farmscape.