{"id":5794,"date":"2024-01-13T15:47:22","date_gmt":"2024-01-13T15:47:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.englishlocalhistory.org\/wp\/?page_id=5794"},"modified":"2024-01-13T15:47:25","modified_gmt":"2024-01-13T15:47:25","slug":"the-w-g-hoskins-lecture-2018","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.englishlocalhistory.org\/wp\/w-g-hoskins\/w-g-hoskins-lectures\/the-w-g-hoskins-lecture-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"The W G Hoskins Lecture 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

‘Wharram Percy and its Landscape Contents’ presented by Dr Stuart Wrathmell.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The twenty-ninth Hoskins lecture<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

23 June 2018<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Dr Wrathmell opened his talk by explaining that the Wharram project had focused primarily on the forty-year programme of archaeological excavations at the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy. Post- excavation and publication work was centred on the hundred trenches and areas excavated across the settlement, and on the 300,000 objects recovered from them. Preparation of the thirteenth and final volume of excavation reports, however, demanded some consideration of Wharram\u2019s wider landscape contexts, and it would be this aspect which would be explored during the talk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the Wharram Percy field project began, in 1950, exploration of the deserted medieval village\u2019s \u2018landscape context\u2019 \u2013 its position on the Yorkshire Wolds, close to the northern scarp of the chalk plateau and the Vale of Pickering beyond \u2013 did not figure prominently in the work programme. The project\u2019s initial aims were focused on site-specific questions such as the date of the village\u2019s depopulation, and the material conditions of its peasant farmers. By the end of excavations in 1990, some wider studies had been carried out, notably David Hall\u2019s recording of the physical remains open fields in the Wharram area and beyond, but these were additional pieces of work, not part of the core project. A parish survey, covering Wharram Percy and the four other townships within its medieval ecclesiastical parish, was begun by Maurice Beresford and Colin Hayfield, but by the end of the excavations this had generated only one publication volume, covering the parish in Iron Age and Roman times. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Preparation of the last of the thirteen definitive volumes on the Wharram project therefore provided an opportunity to rethink Wharram\u2019s \u2018landscape context\u2019. It might have been feasible to revive the parish survey, but David Roffe\u2019s assessment of Wharram\u2019s earliest records had suggested that this ecclesiastical unit had been created relatively late in the process of parish formation, pulling together townships which, though contiguous, were not the remnants of an earlier, single territorial unit. Indeed, there seemed no reason to try to accommodate all aspects of Wharram\u2019s history within any one territorial entity, whether ecclesiastical, tenurial or administrative. Instead, varying landscape contexts were explored to understand the significance of marked changes in the settlement\u2019s history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, the location of a Roman period farmstead, possibly a villa, within the area subsequently occupied by the medieval North Manor was at one time seen, when considering the site alone, as an indicator of \u2018high-status continuity\u2019 in settlement. The wider context, however, suggested something very different. In the 3rd-century AD, high status Roman farmsteads were established in close proximity across this part of the Wolds, indicating a change in land use which was probably linked to a need for new sources of grain to feed the Roman army. The site at Wharram was one of three in the immediate area, all sited beside tracks which led between the main routeways across the Wolds. The track at Wharram continued in use into medieval times, and it was probably this aspect of \u2018continuity\u2019 \u2013 the continued use of the trackway \u2013 that led the medieval lords of Wharram to erect their manorial homestead on the site of the Roman farmstead. Both were attracted to the edge of the chalk plateau above the beck and close to the trackway which crossed the stream; but the relationship of the medieval and Roman farmsteads was indirect rather than direct. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A much wider context was created to understand the significance of Wharram\u2019s Middle Saxon settlement, which took the form of a group of conjoined curvilinear enclosures, accompanied by Grubenh\u00e4user<\/em>, settlement. Such settlements had previously been recognised at about half a dozen other locations on the Wolds, and so that particular landscape context was clearly relevant. But a more fundamental question then arose: were Butterwick-type settlements peculiar to the Wolds, perhaps a product of the relatively late occupation of the chalk plateaux by permanent farming communities? To answer this question, our landscape context had to be extended to include lowland areas around the Wolds, where settled communities are likely to have been established earlier in the Anglo-Saxon period. The result was that here, too, Butterwick-type settlements could be found, including the excavated Middle Saxon settlement enclosures at West Heslerton, just below the Wolds scarp. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To take a much later example, documentary evidence indicates that Wharram Percy was finally depopulated in the 1520s, to make way for sheep farming \u2013 a classic example of the kind of village desertion identified by Maurice Beresford in the 1940s, and one that brought him to Wharram in the first place. The high, dry pastures of the Wolds seem eminently suitable for conversion from arable to sheep farming in a period when market conditions favoured wool over corn. In one sense, the landscape context for late medieval depopulation for sheep farming is as wide as the \u2018champion\u2019 regions of England. But a key question, not asked at Wharram until the preparation of the final volume, is whether the experience of Wharram Percy was replicated elsewhere on the northern Yorkshire Wolds. The rather surprising answer, drawing heavily on Susan Neave\u2019s analysis of rural settlement contraction in the East Riding during the 17th and 18th centuries, is that it was not. Most village communities continued to plough their open fields until the late 17th and 18th centuries; Wharram\u2019s experience was unusual, if not unique. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wharram project (unlike its successor in Whittlewood) was not a \u2018landscape\u2019 project; there was no attempt at the outset to define the excavation\u2019s landscape context. Though its failure to do so, and its subsequent failure to complete a parish survey would today be regarded as methodological weaknesses, it also meant that the final volume was not constrained by fixed landscape boundaries: topics could be discussed within whatever landscape contexts seemed to offer the best understanding of the significance of changes in settlement and farming at Wharram itself. Flexibility, resulting from a lack of prior planning and definition, was in some ways a strength as well as a weakness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dr Wrathmell concluded his Hoskins Lecture with some thoughts on his more recent landscape research which had its origins in the Wharram project. This involved an attempt to reconstruct the territories of rural communities, founded broadly between the 7th and 9th centuries, and identify the impact upon them of Scandinavian settlement during the 10th and 11th centuries. He has been using township boundaries mapped systematically in the mid-19th century to identify \u2018disruption\u2019 in the pattern of Middle Saxon township areas, disruption often signified by detached portions of one township set in the territory of another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Significant disruption could be identified in the Vale of Pickering, most notably in the extremely intermixed parcels of Thornton Dale and Farmanby townships, to the east of Pickering, and also in evidence for the insertion of Aislaby township between Middleton and Wrelton townships, to the west. On the adjacent Wolds, there is far less evidence of disruption, probably because the Wolds plateaux had not been fully divided into townships by the time of the Scandinavian settlement \u2013 the new communities, signified by place-names ending in -by, taking up two large blocks of land. He will be exploring these differences in detail over the next few years. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\n‘Wharram Percy and its Landscape Contents’ presented by Dr Stuart Wrathmell. The twenty-ninth Hoskins lecture 23 June 2018 Dr Wrathmell…\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “The W G Hoskins Lecture 2018”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4802,"parent":4463,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5794","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","entry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":5838,"url":"https:\/\/www.englishlocalhistory.org\/wp\/w-g-hoskins\/w-g-hoskins-lectures\/the-w-g-hoskins-lecture-1996\/","url_meta":{"origin":5794,"position":0},"title":"The W G Hoskins Lecture 1996","author":"John Parker","date":"13 January 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"'Over the Hedge or Chance in Research' presented by Maurice Beresford. The seventh Hoskins lecture 18 May 1996 The seventh W.G. Hoskins lecture was given in the hall of St Crispin's School on Saturday, 18th May 1996, to a record audience. 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