Villages in Roman Britain: Some Evidence

Abstract

‘Villages’ of ‘up to a hundred little huts’ and even ‘pit dwellings' passed from history to mythology after Bersu's Little Woodbury excavations, and Professor Hawkes's consequent reinterpretation of the Cranborne Chase ‘village’ of Woodcuts as superimposed successive farmsteads. The ‘villages’ of the old Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain have no place in the scheme of things exemplified in the 1956 edition. But the new orthodoxy of the ‘single farm’ as the dominant, or indeed the exclusive, settlement form in the Roman and immediately pre-Roman countryside has itself been thrown open to doubt as scholars have, on the one hand, accumulated more evidence of the actual abundant variety of Iron Age to Roman settlement types and, on the other, questioned themselves and each other more closely on the origins of the pattern of English settlement, and the probability that it was not imprinted on a countryside devoid of all trace of previous land-use and organization.