Tracing the origins of settlement morphology and landscape character within the Hundred of Willey, Bedfordshire

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 territories. The most prominent is in its medieval settlement morphology, which changes abruptly from broadly nucleated in the Northamptonshire and Midlands style in the north, to dispersal with forms based around Ends and Greens in Hertfordshire, Essex and the wider south-east form in the south of the Hundred, across what has been termed in this thesis the Ouse-Kym Line. This transition likewise applies to agriculture, with a similar north-to-south transition away from two- or three-field systems towards more complex forms. Studies on the post-medieval movement of people have demonstrated migrational groupings which overlap the Hundred of Willey and the wider area, and which seem driven more by topography and key economic sites, such as the local markets, than by any obvious social cohesion or shared identity within the Hundred of Willey. These character transitions appear to be substantially driven by topography, with natural features strongly affecting the placement of individual settlement elements (in particular the wooded clay plateau and a band of well-draining limestone in the river valley), but there are also perhaps elements of regional emulation which affect how these challenges were confronted. The pressures of a growing population between the Norman Conquest and the Black Death were addressed by planned agglomeration in strongly nucleated settlements, and by the creation of outlying hamlets in dispersed settlements.

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