The Hundred of Willey, a medieval landscape unit in north-west Bedfordshire, has been demonstrated to be a zone of transition. It represents a liminal area across a range of different landscape character elements, as well as social and political…
Research for this thesis draws on evidence from manorial surveys of 1189, 1239, 1260, 1317 and 1325 and all extant court and account (compotus) rolls pertaining to the manors of Shapwick with Moorlinch, Ashcott, Walton, Street and Greinton in the…
Small-scale traffic in land was endemic in peasant society and is reflected in the earliest surviving court rolls of the thirteenth century. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a fall in the manorial population and the leasing of demesne…
The debate on the origins of nucleated settlement and their associated open-field agricultural systems is now one of the most frequently encountered in landscape studies. This thesis has explored this debate in a processual framework. A…
From c1035, when Worlingworth was given to the Abbey of St. Edmund, the documentary evidence is both abundant and varied in nature. A map of 1605-6 makes possible, inter alia, a reconstruction of the village plan c1355 or earlier. The court-rolls…
The subject of this thesis is the gentry of Essex during the years 1381-1450, with particular reference to their lifestyle.;The thesis may be divided into seven sections. The first puts the gentry into context; it discusses the history, geology,…
