Glenn Foard

Systematic fieldwalking and the investigation of Saxon settlement in Northamptonshire

Abstract The full potential of fieldwalking survey has not generally been realized. There are many limitations in the use of this survey method, but a series of systematic techniques is suggested which may significantly increase the quantity and quality of information collected by field‐walking. The application of such techniques to the study of Saxon settlement in Northamptonshire is discussed. The results obtained cast doubt on the generally accepted ideas of modern settlement originating with nucleated Saxon villages.

Medieval Woodland, Agriculture and Industry in Rockingham Forest, Northamptonshire

Abstract Rockingham Forest is the most intensively studied of Northamptonshires medieval forests. It saw extensive clearance for agriculture in the medieval period but large tracts of woodland survived and these were increasingly intensively managed. Though primarily nucleated, a dispersed component to the settlement pattern did develop in the forest which was not seen in the champion landscapes of the county. The area supported a range if industrial production, in particular an important iron industry, based upon the local ores, and fuelled, at least in the medieval period, by a substantial charcoal industry. Geology was the primary determinant of the distribution of woodland in the Saxon period, but at the local level survival of woodland in the post-Conquest period was influenced by a range of tenurial and other factors, including management for deer and the presence of large scale iron and charcoal production.

Rockingham Forest, Northamptonshire: The Evolution of a Landscape

Abstract The Rockingham Forest Project created detailed digital mapping, from archaeological fieldwork, historic map, and aerial photographic evidence, to chart the evolution over the last millennium of the landscape of the greater part of the medieval Forest of Rockingham, Northamptonshire. It has revealed a landscape where the physical geography, especially the geology acting via the soils, was the primary determinant of land use, but where the administrative units, particularly the townships, controlled how land-use change was structured. The townships were typically self-contained units combining a balance of resources, with adjacent townships often following quite different trajectories, sometimes for hundreds of years. This landscape appears to have been extensively replanned in the late Anglo-Saxon and early medieval periods; saw continuing settlement expansion and sometimes extensive woodland clearance until the early fourteenth century; then in the late medieval and post-medieval periods experienced a growing rate of reorganisation through enclosure, reaching its height during Parliamentary enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Throughout this period woodland was in decline, though at greatly varying rates, until by the twentieth century it had been totally destroyed as a distinctive landscape zone. The process has been one of the progressive decoupling of land use from physical geography, most intensively during the last 150 years with processes such as rapid urbanisation and mineral extraction, creating a wholly new landscape.