733. Sixty Saxon buildings were excavated in Covent Garden, the site of Lundenwic, in the 1990s. They were of timber, with wattle and daub walls, beaten-earth floors and thatch roofs; very few nails were found, showing that these structures were still pegged and jointed. Inside, many had partitions and most had in-built timber benches along their long walls. Most houses had one or more rectangular hearths, some with wattle and daub enclosures.17
The Viking raids, which started in the 840s, brought to an end the age of the undefended coastal wics but led directly to a second type of urban settlement, the burghs – ‘burgh’ meaning ‘defended place’. King Alfred’s defeat and subsequent peace with the Vikings led to the division of England between the West Saxon kingdom and the Danelaw. In the 880s Alfred populated his kingdom with a network of strategically located fortified places containing craftsmen, tradesmen, markets, minster churches and sometimes royal palaces. A minority of these were re-used Roman sites such as Winchester, Bath and Exeter; a few were recycled Iron Age forts such as Hastings or Chisbury; most were fortified settlements set up around existing successful minsters or small trade centres such as Shaftesbury or Oxford (fig. 23). Alfred’s burghs were laid out by highly capable surveyors and engineers expert in road building and the construction of earthwork defences. Some burghs, such as Winchester, had a grid layout, but many developed in a more organic way with winding lanes and alleys. The key feature of these places is that property boundaries were more rigidly defined than in the wics. This was necessary as these towns were owned by landlords in just the same way as the countryside, but with one important difference. In towns it would have been difficult and unnecessary for craftsmen and traders to provide labour services on the landlord’s estate, so there was a special form of land holding known as burgage tenure, which allowed men to pay cash rents to their landlord instead. A ‘burgage plot’ is thus the term for the land owned by a townsman (burgher) for rent and, initially, the term ‘borough’ described a town in which burgage tenure took place. Saxon towns, such as Oxford and Winchester, would be divided into miniature estates, with an aristocratic house belonging to a rural landowner, burgage plots for his tenants and often a church.
Later Saxon boroughs had many distinctive buildings, whose construction techniques and building types suggest a melting pot of architectural influences. A slightly better class of dwelling developed on the street frontages, with suspended timber floors over a basement or cellar indicating, perhaps, a shop with storage below. On the land behind these were commercial buildings designed for storage or warehousing. These were windowless and sunk some feet into the ground. Higher still up the social scale were the houses of some landlords with substantial timber halls and, in some towns, the halls of craft guilds.18
Fig. 24 Anglo-Saxon Oxford showing the principal roads, churches and the area owned by Ealdorman Aethelmaer around the church of St Æbbe.
As well as existing minsters or cathedrals, in most towns new churches were founded by lay landlords for themselves and their burghers. Before 1100 it was relatively easy to found what we would now call a parish church, as church law put few restrictions on the rights and incomes that went with it. As a result three-quarters of all medieval urban parishes were in existence before 1100. So a town such as Stamford, Lincolnshire, which was urban before 925, had fourteen churches, whilst nearby Boston, which only came to prominence in around 1100, had only one. Churches were normally located at the junction of important streets, placing them at the heart of neighbourhood life; they were also frequently associated with marketplaces and, indeed, early churchyards were often used as markets, which were even held on Sundays.19 Saxon Oxford illustrates these points nicely (fig. 24). In 727 the minster of St Frideswide was founded in what is now Oxford. A settlement and a market grew up around this foundation, and the Mercian kings seem to have built a fort. Alfred chose this place to be one of his burghs, surrounding the existing minster and settlement with earth ramparts. Initially these were supported by great timber posts and planks, but after 1000 they were faced with stone. At the north gate was an impressive five-storey stone tower, part lookout, part guard house, part church tower. In the 10th century Oxford was therefore a stone-walled citadel like its Roman predecessors. Inside the ring of defences a grid of metalled streets was laid out round a cross of main roads. The land was probably granted out to noblemen and part was reserved for a royal palace. One aristocratic owner was Ealdorman Aethelmaer, who had an estate in the south-west corner of the burgh. He had a residence, thirteen burgage plots and built a church – St Aebbe’s.20
Fig. 25 Anglo-Saxon Barton-upon-Humber, showing the landlord’s fortified enclosure with the market place and church at its foot and the grid of streets and burgage plots to the left.
Oxford had several such landlords, with their halls and churches, whilst a small town in the Danelaw, such as Barton-upon-Humber, had only one. At the heart of Barton was the Saxon lord’s residence, set in an enclosure fortified by an earth bank and presumably topped with timber ramparts. Located on the Humber estuary, he certainly needed a fortified house – this enclosure might have been the focus of a settlement that was fortified by the Vikings. In any event, next to the manor house the 10th-century occupant of the enclosure constructed St Peter’s church. Subsequently, a street, Southgate, separated the church from the town market place; west of this were three blocks of burgage plots probably 35ft to 40ft wide on the street front and 150ft to 170ft deep (fig. 25). Up to a thousand people would have lived in Barton, engaged in agriculture (the town had three large common fields) and craft work. The market would have been at the heart of its economy.21
By 1066 there were about 100 towns in England, of which perhaps 17 had a population of more than 1,000. They were not evenly spread across the country, nor were they confined to the West Saxon kingdom, for the Danelaw also developed successful towns such as Norwich, Lincoln and York. These places represented a significant shift in economic activity. In a period of perhaps only a century many craft workers moved production from the countryside to towns; so weavers and potters, who had previously been based close to raw materials in the countryside, were working in tightly packed timber houses crowded into streets and alleys in order to be near their markets.22 Yet the character of late Saxon towns, even one as important as Oxford, was distinct. Their social make-up and their links with the countryside made them aristocratic rather than mercantile in nature, very different from what they were to become in the following century.
The Countryside
The economic changes that accompanied the Romans’ departure resulted in much less grain being grown. There were no legions to provision, no towns to feed and no villas to support. Agriculture slipped back to what it had been in the Iron Age, an activity based around livestock, with grain and other crops being grown largely for local consumption. The years either side of 700, however, saw a fundamental reorganisation and intensification of agriculture. A great number of settlements, such as West Stow (p. 31), were located on light, easily cultivated soil on river gravels. Around 700 of these settlements relocated to areas of heavier soil to intensify production and meet the demands of secular landlords, ecclesiastical communities in the monasteries and minsters, and the emerging towns. Settlements that had been occupied in the 5th and 6th centuries were almost all abandoned by this time; new settlements became more permanent and organised, with careful layouts and fenced areas for livestock and, importantly, large halls – the houses of the landlords.
