Britain's lost villages

A time there was, ere England's griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life required, but gave no more:
His best companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.
But times are altered; trade's unfeeling train
Usurp the land and dispossess the swain;
Along the lawn, where scattered hamlets rose,
Unwieldy wealth and cumbrous pomp repose,
And every want to opulence allied,
And every pang that folly pays to pride.
Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,
Those calm desires that asked but little room,
Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,
Lived in each look, and brightened all the green –
These, far departing, seek a kinder shore,
And rural mirth and manners are no more.
– from 'The Deserted Village', by Oliver Goldsmith, first published in 1710

DMVs – Deserted Medieval Villages
'I like DMVs,' says Time Team's Mick Aston. 'I have spent a great deal of my life looking for them and recording them on the ground and from the air.' Some of that effort has involved Time Team – at High Worsall, in Yorkshire, during the 1998 series; and at Castle Howard, also in Yorkshire, for the 2003 series. Time Team also uncovered an abandoned early medieval/Norman settlement at Skipsea, Humberside, during the 2005 series as well as investigating the abandoned settlement of Roxburgh, in the Scottish Borders, once one of the richest and most powerful cities in Scotland, during the 2004 series. The first programme in 2006 featured the search for the lost village and church at Glendon Hall, in Northamptonshire.

DMVs – deserted medieval villages – litter the British landscape. From the Scottish highlands to the English lowlands, and just about everywhere in between, there lies the evidence of once thriving, but now deserted settlements – ghosts of communities that have passed away. The homes of those who once lived there, if they have left any trace at all, are often visible now only as 'lumps and bumps' in the landscape or crop- or parch-marks best seen from the air.

Within living memory
Mick Aston's particular interest is in the medieval period, but deserted villages span the entire history of these islands. The most recent examples were still occupied within living memory. For example, some villages taken over by the armed forces during the second world war – such as Tyneham, in Dorset, whose inhabitants were promised by Winston Churchill that they could return as soon as the war was over – were never handed back to their former inhabitants. They still stand deserted today, used only for military exercises.

Other villages were deserted when the military moved away; when local industries or other sources of employment declined; or simply when the massive population shifts between the country and the city exhausted the capacity of some rural populations to replace themselves.

Wholly or partially 'waste'
Different periods have seen different reasons for once-thriving communities to be deserted. In the Domesday Book of 1086, for example, over a third of the vills (feudal townships) in Yorkshire are listed as wholly or partially 'waste'. This was possibly a result of decades of Viking and pirate raids, but more likely because of William the Conqueror's 'harrying of the north' in 1069-70. Imposing his iron rule on a still rebellious north, William burned houses and crops and slayed animals and people in large numbers.

As well as war, settlements in all periods have been deserted for natural causes. These include rivers changing course or silting up, flooding (likely to have been a special problem during the wetter-than-average 13th and 14th centuries), coastal erosion and many other reasons.

DMVs in England
No one has calculated how many deserted villages there are from all periods and throughout Britain. But systematic research begun in the 1940s has identified some 3,000 DMVs in England.

That research, headed by two professors, Maurice Beresford and William Hoskins, gained impetus from a growing interest in the lives of ordinary people in the past. The 600th anniversary of the Black Death in 1949, in particular, prompted special interest in DMVs, many of which were thought to have been abandoned as a result of the deaths of their inhabitants from plague. The research into these deserted villages provided the opportunity to unearth and examine physical evidence of the hidden world of ordinary people from past eras.

Not just plague
In fact, most villages were not deserted as a result of the 'great plague' of 1348-49. It certainly greatly accelerated the population decline that had already set in by the early 14th century in England as a result of soil exhaustion and disease, affecting both people and animals. But most DMVs actually date from the 15th century, when fields previously subdivided among many villagers were turned into large pastures to graze sheep. This transformation of the landscape to serve the highly profitable wool trade – there were three times as many sheep as people in England by the end of the century – led to hundreds of villages being deserted. The village of Glendon, in Northamptonshire, for example, disappeared in 1514, when the landowner evicted its 62 occupants, built himself a new hall and turned the land over to sheep farming.

Further pressure came with the dissolution of the monasteries; and then with the upper class craze for grand country mansions, exclusive parks and landscaped gardens. This reached its zenith in the 18th century, when, as at Castle Howard, whole villages were moved or simply destroyed to enable the lords of the manor to achieve their desired impression.

Changing economy
Even more important than the whims of these rich men, however, was the changing nature of the rural economy. The 18th- and 19th-century enclosures of common land, and the incorporation of small plots into bigger, more efficient farms, drove countless thousands from the land in England. In Scotland, the Clearances had a similar, even more devastating, effect. Most of these displaced rural poor were forced to seek work in the mines, factories and other industries emerging as the industrial revolution gathered pace. The demand for labour in these new industries was an important motivating factor in securing government and ruling class support for the enclosure of common land and rural clearances.

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