Brian K. Roberts

Village Plans in County Durham: A Preliminary Statement

THIS paper examines some facets of rural settlement-morphology within co. Durham and demonstrates the way in which all villages involve particular combinations of universal structural components. These provide grounds for a logical classification and a framework within which to explore the origins of some of the plan-types that can be identified. A close analysis of the most regular series, the two-row plans, indicates that a strong measure of deliberate ordering was involved and evidence is presented to suggest that some villages, which were first mapped in the 19th century, possess a plan-type that developed before 1200. Furthermore there are grounds for arguing that there may be traces of village-regulation, such is as found in Scandinavia and has been described by G. C. Homans. A possible date for the imposition of this regularity would be the years immediately after the widespread devastations in the north at the end of the 11th century.

Woodlands in England: an appreciation of Hilda Annie Wilcox

In 1933 two maps reconstructing the woodlands of England were published by Hilda A. Wilcox: one of these, woodland ‘deduced from early literature’, is re-assessed in this paper. The distribution it shows is compared with a recently constructed map of national woodland, created as part of an English Heritage project, and based on the analysis of the Domesday Book by Sir Clifford Darby and his co-workers, together with the results of investigations by numerous place-name scholars. In spite of differences in detail, the two maps are in remarkably close accord. This conclusion is used as the basis for a brief synoptic analysis of the distribution of cleared land and woodland in the centuries preceding 1086, and touching even the Roman period. The recent computer-based reconstruction, drawing upon published, sound and accepted sources, and supported by the earlier and wholly independent work by scholars such as Rackham and Thirsk, provides a national picture of fundamental importance to the historical geography of the English environment.