Game Design Ideas History England Exploring British Villages

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by Dr Greg Stevenson


History of the English/British village, origins etc.


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What is a Village?

It is estimated that there are over ten thousand villages in Britain, yet defining the term 'village' isn't as simple as it may at first sound. When does a hamlet become a village? And when does a village become a town?


Strictly speaking the term 'village' comes from the Latin 'villaticus', which roughly translates as 'a group of houses outside a villa farmstead'. Today a village is understood as a collection of buildings (usually at least 20) that is larger than a hamlet, yet smaller than a town, and which contains at least one communal or public building. This is most commonly the parish church, though it can be a chapel, school, public house, shop, post-office, smithy or mill. Villagers will share communal resources such as access roads, a water supply, and usually a place of worship.


A hamlet is a smaller grouping of buildings that doesn't necessarily have any public or service buildings to support it. A significant difference is that it won't have a parish church like a village does, and most hamlets contain only between three and twenty buildings.


The point at which a village becomes a town is difficult to determine, and is probably best defined by those who live there. However, since the Middle Ages the term 'town' has been a legal term that refers to the fact that the community has a borough charter. The situation is confused by the fact that there are many town-like suburban communities calling themselves villages (for example, Oxton Village in Birkenhead), as well as designed suburban 'villages' such as those built under the Garden Village Movement.


The 2001 census shows us that approx 80% of people in England live in an urban environment, with under 7% living in rural villages (the remainder live in rural towns or outside concentrated settlements). This is the exact opposite of the situation two centuries ago, when under 20% of the population lived in the town, and the majority lived in rural villages. As late as 1851 agriculture remained the largest single source of employment in Britain, yet today under 3% of us work on the land.


It is essential to remember is that villages were created and have evolved because of particular combinations of geographical, commercial, economic and social factors. They expand, decline, move and fluctuate with the times. This article introduces some of the common forms of village to be found in Britain.


Find out more

Books

  • Village Buildings of Britain Handbook by Matthew Rice (Time Warner Books, 2003)
  • Old English Villages by Laurence Fleming (Weidenfeld Nicolson, 2001)
  • Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England by Carenza Lewis (Windgather Press, 2001)
  • The Most Beautiful Villages of Scotland by Hugh Palmer (Thames & Hudson, 2004)
  • Yesterday's Country Village by Henry Buckton (David & Charles, 2005)

Links


The Medieval Village

When we think of a British village we probably imagine a settlement of traditional cottages around a village green with a church and ancient manor house as backdrop. This common form of village has its roots in the medieval period when many villages started out as a cluster of agricultural dwellings.


Today farmsteads tend to be scattered about the landscape, but back in the medieval period those working on the land tended to live in small nucleated settlements (villages) and worked 'open-field' agriculture where land the wasn't enclosed. In fact, over much of Britain in the period up to 1800 it would have been unusual to have seen a farm or cottage outside of a settlement boundary.


By the time that the Domesday Book was written in 1086 most of the good agricultural land in Britain was already under cultivation, and England was a densely populated country. Two centuries later nucleated settlements were to be found over much of Britain, typically consisting of well-organised village settlements sitting within open fields.


Over lowland Britain on good soil you would typically find a settlement every couple of miles, and the communities would use the open agricultural land around where they lived. The average village would have its church, manor house, and cottage tenements all clustered together, and the open land around would usually be divided into thin strips. In some villages you can still see the remnants of medieval strip field systems around the periphery of the settlement. There would often be meadows, pasture and woodland held 'in common', and only the lord of the manor would have his own, private land or 'demesne'. In the medieval village virtually everyone would have earned their living on the territory, hence the community had to be relatively self sufficient.


'Green Villages' were a common village form, where houses clustered around a central green of common land. They are often the remnants of planned settlements introduced after the Norman Conquest in the 11th century. It is suggested that this arrangement allowed for easier defence, especially compared to the village form most common before the Normans, which was simple clusters of farms. However there is also evidence of 'village' greens in Anglo-Saxon settlements, and even at Romano-British sites.


The village green was soon got adopted as the main social space within a village, as well as its focal point alongside the church or chapel. Village greens often take a triangular form, usually reflecting the fact that the village was at the meeting of three roads. The continuing importance of the village green to modern day communities is reflected in the fact that this is usually where the war memorial is seen, as well as village notice boards, where local cricket matches are played, and where public benches are placed. The Open Spaces Society states that in 2005 there were about 3,650 registered greens in England and about 220 in Wales.


Find out more

Books

  • Life in a Medieval Village by Frances Gies ( HarperPerennial, 1991)
  • The Interior of the Medieval Village Church by Justin Kroesen (Peeters Publishers, 2005)
  • Medieval Villages in an English Landscape: Beginnings and Ends by Richard Jones (Windgather Press, 2006)

Links

Examples of villages with well-preserved greens:


Village Change in the Post-Medieval Period

It is easy to assume that village life was stable and unchanging, but this has never been the case. Villages are constantly changing, and this is why many of them have developed complex settlement patterns such as 'polyfocal' or 'composite' villages. Villages change as their communities shrink and grow, and as their relationships with the surrounding land change. These changes can be seen in the morphology or plan of the settlement.


As the name suggests, 'polyfocal' villages have more than one focus, or centre. Most commonly this will be the church/chapel and one other public building or space. It can be difficult to define where the centre of the village is, usually because it has shifted over time. The planned villages of the medieval period were often considered to be the 'heyday' of village Britain, but it is changes after 1600 that have most commonly formed the character that is seen today. It is this change that has often created polyfocal and composite villages.


The term 'polyfocal' was coined in the 1970s by academics who were trying to categorise the various types of village, and this commonly found category covers a multitude of different types of village form. Most polyfocal villages started life with a single focus (often the church), but over time other public spaces have developed. Some villages have two churches, two village greens etc. Others may have three or more foci or 'cells'.


Modern day villages can also be formed from groupings of ancient settlements that have become aggregated over time, hence the term 'composite' villages that are composed of several distinct parts which have become joined by development. Some villages today are actually linked clusters of what were once hamlets or individual farmsteads. Examples of this can be seen at Paston in Norfolk, Rodhuish in Somerset and Carlton in Cumbria. One way of investigating the origins of such communities is to refer back to the Domesday Book from 1086 which contained records for 13,418 settlements in the English counties south of the rivers Ribble and Tees (the border with Scotland at the time). See domesdaybook


One of the major changes that led to the increased complexity in the form of the British village was the movement away from communal open-field farming (common in medieval times) to the enclosure of land into regular fields which occurred in most of Britain between 1600 and 1800. This had a huge effect on settlements as new patterns of farm holdings developed away from the village centre. In many cases the village structure was weakened as the farming population moved away from the centres of population.


Many villages started to decline, and some disappeared, but with the changes in the 18th and 19th centuries such as the introduction of turnpike roads, canals, and railways, villages often found new focal points. Despite the decline in some villages, the 17th and 18th century also saw massive rebuilding – prompted by a percolation of wealth down to the middle stratum of society. There was much village re-planning and rebuilding, and virtually every settlement in Britain was affected. Sometimes villages disappeared completely, such as West Burton in Nottinghamshire, which had 12 households and a church in 1750, but had disappeared by 1900 due to rent increases in the 19th century.


There were also changes in village plans caused by the fact that medieval lords and their later counterparts had very different ideas about how closely they wanted to live with their tenants. The medieval lord had his manor in the village centre, living 'cheek by jowl' with his fellow men and women. From the 17th century we see increased building of new manors and 'great' houses away from village centres, and in some cases whole villages (such as at Fawsley in Northants or Great Sandon in Staffordshire) were obliterated. Today there is no road to the church at Fawsley, and it sits like an island among the earthworks where its village once stood.


Examples

  • Guilden Morden in Cambridgeshire
  • Napton on the Hill in Warwickshire
  • Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire
  • Great Bircham in Norfolk
  • Padbury in Berkshire
  • Martock-Bower Hinton in Somerset
  • Marnhull in Dorset


Find out more

Books

  • The Making of the English Village Harlow by Roberts B. (Longman, 1987)
  • Polyfocal settlement and the English village by Taylor C (paper published in the journal Medieval Archaeology Volume 25, pages 189-93, 1977)

Links


Planned & Estate Villages

Evidence of village planning goes back to the Romans and was also seen during the Norman Conquest, but most villages that we refer to today as 'planned' were created in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. These are self-conscious places that are deliberately designed to be villages, and tend to be well thought-out and serviced by communal spaces and buildings that reflect the needs of the communities that they were designed for.


Victorian observers categorised villages according to whether they considered them 'open' (when many residents owned their homes) or 'closed' when the majority of property was in the hands of just a couple of individuals. Estate villages were the most 'closed' of all rural communities.


When you consider that approximately a quarter of the land mass in England during the 19th century was part of a large private country estate (there were 363 great estates of over 10, 000 acres each, as well as many smaller estates), it isn't surprising that 'estate villages' were built. For the wealthy land owners that built them, estate villages became an expression of an idealised rural life – they were villages designed to look and feel particularly 'villagey'.


The gentry wanted to see their tenants living 'honest' rural lives, in attractive cottages that reminded the passer-by of the 'olde England' (sometimes even when the estates were built in Wales, Ireland and Scotland). Thus estate villages were designed as the antithesis of the industrialised urban world. Think of the romantic country scenes painted by the artist Constable, and you have an image of the idyllic world the gentry were trying to recreate.


Decorative barge boards were added to steep gables on prettified cottages, fancy brick chimneys were positioned in prominent locations, leaded light casement windows were installed, and social status amongst the tenants would be reflected in the size and detailing of their dwellings. Often the estate would paint all the cottages in the same estate colour – a practice still maintained by the National Trust to this day.


Planned and estate villages were not simply toys for the rich, they were working environments designed to bring in profits and to effectively manage large estates. The fancy architectural detailing seen on the exterior of model houses is rarely continued to the inside, as interiors weren't seen by the wealthy on their carriage drives about the estate.


It was fashionable to be seen to care for the poor, so a 'model' estate village was both an effective way of managing the estate workers and tenants, as well as providing a showpiece to reflect the 'civility' of the landed family. Showing off the estate village to visiting guests would be an essential part of their carriage drives.


In some cases the 'improvement' of estate cottages wasn't to the benefit of the tenants – for example some landlords removed thatched roofs (seen as a reflection of poverty) with 'modern' slates, but tenants later complained that their cottages were colder in winter having lost their straw insulation. In the most remarkable cases existing villages were entirely remodelled – such as Shoreside on Orkney that was half demolished by Thomas Balfour to improve his view from Balfour Castle. He then turned the remains of the village into a formalised estate village.


It wasn't just wealthy landowners who were building planned villages. Moravian missionaries established several new village settlements in the second half of the 18th century. These tended to be built on a square plan in a traditional 18th century urban style with neo-classical architecture. One of the best preserved examples is Fulneck in Yorkshire.


Under the category of planned villages we should also consider the Garden Village Movement of the early 20th century. Established as a way of providing good housing among good services for all classes, Garden Villages followed the same lines as the larger Garden Cities of Welwyn and Letchworth. The difference between Garden Villages and Cities was usually that the 'cities' were designed to have workplaces integrated, whereas the smaller villages tended to be more like well-designed suburban estates with good communal facilities. These estates were a reaction against urbanism, and were designed to look and feel like a village, with parks, village greens and housing heavily influenced by neo-vernacular styles and the Arts and Crafts movement. They remain pleasant places to live to this day, and good examples remain at Rhiwbina and Barry in South Wales.


An interesting modern echo of the ideals of the Garden Village movement is the village of Poundbury in Dorset, designed for the Prince of Wales by architect Leon Krier. This new village is built of neo-vernacular and historical reproduction buildings, and has been carefully designed to provide places of employment and domestic buildings in close proximity, and with everything designed to look traditional and natural. There may be a touch of Disney about its artificial historicism, but residents report that the architecture and planning has made it a vibrant and friendly place to live. The philosophy behind Poundbury is that rather than extending existing villages with new houses, new communities should be built that are self contained and sustainable.


Examples

  • Ardington and Lockinge in Berkshire
  • Pumpsaint in Carmarthenshire
  • Warter in East Yorkshire
  • Lowther in Cumbria
  • Wilton in Cleveland
  • Southill in Bedfordshire
  • Balfour on Orkney
  • Loughgall in County Armagh
  • Fulneck in Yorkshire


Find out more

Books

  • Estate Villages by M A Havinden (Lund Humphries, 1966)

Links


'Industrial' Villages

Industrial villages are villages in every sense of the word, but are not necessarily rural or agricultural. They are centred on one or other industries such as fishing, mining or quarrying, and tend to have been influenced by the arrival of turnpike roads, canals, or the railway. For example, Etruria in Staffordshire was established by Josiah Wedgwood as the location for his ceramics business and workers village as it was at the junction of the canal and turnpike road for easy delivery of clay and coal.


Even the most rural villages had some industrial units within them (think of the corn mill, the blacksmith's forge, the clog-maker's workshop, the charcoal burners who coppiced the woods), but industrial villages are those that tend to be dominated by one industry, and most developed their essential character in the 19th century with the advent of mass production and mechanised agriculture.


Many industrial villages were developments of existing communities, and a few were newly established villages built specifically for particular mills, factories or mines. These new villages tend to share the characteristics of more 'complex' villages that have developed organically over the centuries, as by the 18th century it was recognised that successful communities were those that had good local communal facilities.


Tiny hamlets blossomed into large villages with the advent of the railway and the ease of transportation of goods. The Industrial Revolution was fuelled by coal, so coal-mining villages sprung up around Britain wherever viable coal seams were found. Slates became the universal roofing material in the late 19th century, and as the hardest slate is found in North Wales, villages grew around the quarries that produced these roof tiles. Sometimes housing was built by speculative developers, but in several cases the mine quarry or factory owners built the accommodation themselves and then rented it to their worker tenants. In these circumstances the industrial entrepreneurs controlled their staff inside and outside the workplace.


Most planned industrial villages had their heyday in the period 1850-1900. A famous example is Saltaire on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors where Sir Titus Salt established a community around a massive mill. This novel village follows a grid pattern and had a church, chapel, almshouses, a communal laundry as well as school and dining rooms for the workers. It didn't have any public houses or pawnshops, and thus Sir Titus Salt (who vainly named the village after himself – it sits on the River Aire) felt he was controlling the physical and moral well-being of his workers. It was Saltaire that inspired the famous model village of Bourneville built by the Cadbury family, and Port Sunlight built by Lever Brothers on Merseyside.


Examples

  • Saltaire in Yorkshire
  • Cwmystwyth (lead mining) in Ceredigion
  • Newlyn (fishing) in Cornwall
  • Rocester in Staffordshire
  • Etruria in Staffordshire


Find out more

Books

  • Villages in the Landscape by Rowley T (JM Dent, 1978)


Become a Village Detective

If you are interested in pursuing the history of your own village, try the following:

  1. Take a look at parish records to calculate things like population structure (age and sex breakdowns, life expectancy, family size, marriageable age, infant mortality)
  2. The Census returns (every decade from 1801) will tell you who lived where as well as their occupation Census returns
  3. Contact your county archives for estate records (e.g. rentals, accounts and surveys), local government archives (e.g. poor law accounts). Other classes of archives such as manorial court rolls, church court records, household wills and inventories and quarter sessions records can offer insights into life within the community.
  4. Don't forget non-documentary sources such as monumental inscriptions.


About the author

Dr Greg Stevenson

by Dr Greg Stevenson, University of Wales, Lampeter


Related Links

This article can be found on the Internet at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/restoration/2006/exploring_brit_villages_01.shtml © British Broadcasting Corporation

For more information on copyright please refer to: copyright and terms

BBC History


Notes

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