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Mick Aston with theWorcestershireYoungArchaeologists'Club at Broadway,

villages, and acounty that haddisappearedaltogether

near Evesham.While there hefound manydeserted orshrunken medieval

MICK’S TRAVELS

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Last summer I was invited by theWorcestershire branch of the YoungArchaeologists’ Club to an exhibitionof their field work on a site nearBroadway on the edge of theCotswolds. They had spent many hourswalking a ploughed field, recording theresults and analysing the finds, many ofwhich are Roman and show that theremust be a Roman farmstead in thefield. It is an exemplary project.

This visit took me to a part of thecountry which I find very attractive,not really the Cotswolds (which I don’treally like – too flat and featureless forme) but just off the northern end, onthe edge of the valleys of the Severnand Avon. It is an area of flat fields andsmall isolated hills. On the edge are thetowns and villages of Tewkesbury andBredon to the west, Evesham to thenorth and Winchcombe to the south.There are a number of good iron agehill forts in this area (the camp atBredon Hill for example, and others atNottingham Hill and Knolls Hill), butit is mainly an area of small medievalvillages and hamlets with theircommon fields. Much of the area isnow large fields of crops, the result oflate, post-medieval parliamentary

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Mick Aston recently went to the border area between Worcestershire andGloucestershire. He found himself in another county that was already no more

than a memory by the time of Domesday Book

THE LOST COUNTY OF

Opposite: Bredon,with church andtithe barn on theriver Avon, was acentral place in theearly organisationof the landscape inpre-Normanconquest times

Above: Abandonedmedieval ridge andfurrow fields at thesite of the lostvillage of Frampton

Winchcombeshire

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enclosure, but there are still good fieldsfull of ridge and furrow earthworks,remnants of the medieval open fields,which have somehow survived all thelater ploughing. Air photographs showthat there were formerly further vastareas of ridge and furrow, so that muchof the medieval landscape remained,abandoned but undisturbed, up until50 years ago.

There are many deserted settlementsin the area, the so-called dmvs[deserted medieval villages], thoughmost were never fully-developedvillages with churches and manorhouses. This is really an area of hamletsbelonging to parishes whose villages byand large still survive. But there is a lotof shrinkage of settlement as well – amuch more common phenomenon –with farm site earthworks remainingamong the surviving cottages.

dmvs in the area include Didcot,Wormington Parva, WormingtonDastyn, Little Washbourne, Frampton,Littlecote, Great Naunton and one ormore sites at Prescott. But almostevery surviving settlement hasearthworks of shrinkage, showing thatthey were once larger and that a lot ofdereliction has taken place, with emptyfarm sites being represented byearthwork platforms and patches ofnettles. Examples include GreatWashbourne, Hailes and StanleyPontlarge. At the latter, ChristopherDyer has found that Roger Parvus, thelay lord, “expelled the rustics” in themid-12th century from six yardlands(around 180 acres or 70ha) and“retained and cultivated it”. This is anearly date for evictions and clearly itdid not result in the disappearance ofthe village, which is still there.

Didcot was abandoned in 1491 when30 villagers were evicted by the abbotof Tewkesbury. These evictions werereported in an inquiry of 1517, but it isoften not known when thesesettlements were deserted or why thepeople moved out and the places wereabandoned.

The medieval churches and chapelsof this area are also of interest. Mostseem to have been built or rebuilt inthe Norman period and have elementsof Romanesque architecture in them;often they have simple two-cell (naveand chancel) plans, with no elaboratetowers, aisles or transepts. Little seemsto have been spent on them after theNorman period. Also quite a few seemto have disappeared. At Grafton achapel has been converted into acottage, while at Netherton (also underBredon Hill) a Norman chapel with adecorated tympanum depicting adragon, stands on the lawn of a cottage.At Laverton there are said to befragments of the former Normanchurch, and at Taddington there is thesite of a Norman chapel. StanleyPontlarge, though restored, showswhat one of these simple small Normancountry churches was like; it survivedalmost unchanged. Great and LittleWashbourne both have small Normanchurches, the latter with the ChurchesConservation Trust.

It seems likely that almost all thesesettlements, surviving or deserted, hadchurches and chapels originally in themiddle ages. Some remain, others arederelict or removed and probablyothers could be found under theground or in documents. At Grettonthe present church of 1868 (by Wyatt)replaced a medieval one, the 15thcentury tower of which is now on thelawn of another garden!

Other churches are larger, and fromthis the hierarchy of the early churchorganisation can be reconstructed.Winchcombe and Deerhurst were earlymonasteries. Tewkesbury only seems tohave appeared as a Benedictinemonastery from 1102, and Hailes was alate Cistercian abbey founded in 1246.But most of the churches mentionedabove were subsidiary to the mainminsters or mother churches of thearea. These include Winchcombe witha halo of dependencies (at Prescott,Dixton, Stanley Pontlarge, Gretton andHailes), Beckford (with GreatWashbourne and Didcot) and Bredon(with Bredon’s Norton, Kemerton and

Above: LittleWashbourne church(now in the care ofthe ChurchesConservation Trust)surrounded byshrunken villageearthworks

Below: The site ofDidcot village,where 30 peasantswere evicted in1491

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Above: Bredonchurch, the site ofan Anglo-Saxonminster

Right: Decoratedtympanumdepicting a dragonin the wall of aruined Normanchapel atNetherton, ElmleyCastle parish,Worcs, standing ona cottage lawn

Below: The mainstreet of the Anglo-Saxon town ofWinchcombe

possibly Eckington). This reflects theearly organisation of the landscape inthe pre-Norman conquest period. Thegeneral story of how all this developedcan now be seen in John Blair’s finebook The Church in Anglo-SaxonSociety (editor’s choice review, Jan/Feb2006).

The early Saxon estates of the areahave been worked out by StevenBassett of Birmingham University in anexemplary article (the 1997 Deerhurstlecture: The origins of the parishes ofthe Deerhurst area). I find itparticularly useful to know which werethe important centres in the landscapeand which places were subsidiary tothem. This hierarchy usually helps toexplain much of what we see eventoday. Many of the churches mentionedhere have hardly any graveyard and noearly font. But this is only to beexpected if they were chapels and themore important church, the minster,was some way away and had reservedburial and baptismal rights to itself.

There is however an additional,administrative complication to thisarea. Today these settlements are partlyin Worcestershire, partly inGloucestershire, and not far away tothe north-east is Warwickshire. But thesituation was even more complicatedup to the 19th century. Then there werefragments of Worcestershire detachedfrom the main county and surroundedby areas of Gloucestershire andWarwickshire. Also Oxfordshire wasnearby, so that a stone called the FourShire Stone could reasonably beerected not far from Moreton in theMarsh.

Why were these counties sofragmented? This situation of coursedoes not exist today. Detached bits ofcounties were all tidied away and put

into their surrounding counties in the19th century boundary changes (by1882). Originally some parishes were inWorcestershire, such as Blockley,Daylesford, Alderminster, Tredingtonand Shipston on Stour (now allWarwickshire) and some which arenow in Worcestershire were part ofGloucestershire –Kemerton, Beckford,Ashton under Hill, Hinton on theGreen, Childswickham and AstonSomerville. Some of this anomaloussituation can be explained by thebishops of Worcester “moving” landwhich came to them into “their county”for administrative convenience. But

there is another altogether moreintriguing reason, and that is theformer existence of another county –Winchcombeshire.

In his fascinating book, A LostEnglish County: Winchcombeshire inthe Tenth and Eleventh centuries(Boydell 1990), Julian Whybra unravelsthe history of the county showing itwas founded by about 1007, as otherMercian shires were being defined,based on boroughs – in this caseWinchcombe. Ultimately this was theresult of Wessex taking over the Danishareas of Mercia. It lasted only a veryshort time: Julian Whybra says it wasdestroyed in 1017, but it was stillremembered by the time of DomesdayBook’s compilation in 1086. Althoughonly a shire for 10 years it probablyrepresented the area dependent on theburh of Winchcombe for at least 100years and probably even longer as arecognisable region within Mercia.

Many of us lamented theannihilation of the traditional Englishcounty system in local governmentchanges in 1974. Apart from anysentimental value the old counties had,it removed the sense of identity manypeople had with their historic county. Iceased to be from Worcestershire andnow came from somewhere calledSandwell in a “county” called “WestMidlands”. But the case ofWinchcombeshire shows that suchchanges had occurred earlier. Perhapsthe medieval peasants felt asdisorientated in the 11th century as Idid in the 20th!

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