h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Taken from the English Companions' magazine, Widowinde:

"In BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGY 84
September/October 2005, Sam Turner,
Lecturer in Archaeology in the School of
Historical Studies, University of Newcastle,
discusses the results of recent research into
landscape change in two areas of southern
Britain: Cornwall, which remained
independent British territory until at least the
9th century; and the four western counties of
Anglo-Saxon Wessex - Wiltshire, Somerset,
Dorset and Devon: changes which appear to
have been caused by their conversion to
Christianity. In both areas some of the
earliest churches were built near royal
centres - such as Tintagel and Winchester -
and most of them on river banks or on the
edges of floodplains, close to routes of
communication, in areas of fertile land; the
same type of site on which aristocratic
settlements occur.
In Cornwall, local rulers probably
accepted Christianity in the 5th/6th centuries,
about a century earlier than those of Wessex.
Cornish cultural life appears to have been
relatively stable in the late post Roman
period, unlike that in most of Britain. In
Cornwall, the most common type of Romano-
British settlement - round houses in round
enclosures known as "rounds" - ceased to be
occupied some time in the 6th century, giving
way to unenclosed farmsteads; the basis of
medieval and modern landscapes. Although
there is no archaeological evidence for early
medieval sites, many can be identified by
place-names; names with the prefix "tre-"
(farm; estate) began to formed in the 5th
century. The difference between the
settlement patterns of the late Roman period
and the early Middle Ages can be seen in a
distribution map of an area south of Bodmin
showing Rounds and Tre- place names, which
indicates the desertion of areas of Rounds
occupation - which became rough grazing
land - and the creation of new settlements in
what became the "heartlands" of Cornish
agriculture.
In Wessex the evidence is less easy to
understand, but a similar re-organisation of
the landscape seems to have taken place.
Research by the University of Bristol and
University College, Winchester, suggests that
early medieval settlements were clustered
around churches, on agricultural land, mainly
on the lower hill-slopes of river valleys.
Virtually all the early churches are found in
such places, as if new settlements were
related to newly established aristocratic and
monastic sites.
Another feature that may be relevant to
changing landscape patterns is the siting, in
the late 6th and the 7th centuries, of
cemeteries at a distance from the
contemporary settlements; isolated burials
are also found, of one or two people, buried
in barrows, with rich grave goods, usually on
high downland hill-tops and plateaux, often
near trackways. These may have marked a
route, or a boundary between the territories
of adjacent settlements, or larger political
units (eg early forms of hundreds) or of the
regional kingdoms which were emerging.
In the far west of Britain, equally
conspicuous burials were marked by
inscribed stone monuments; usually rough
stone pillars inscribed with the names of the
deceased and of his father. Most of the
examples in England are in Cornwall, and
their use may overlap the transition from
Rounds settlements to the unenclosed
farmsteads which succeeded them.
The author's argument is that the
conversion to Christianity was the force
behind these changes in landscape and
settlement form, both in Wessex and
Cornwall. Core zones of settled land were
established, with the church at the centre of
cultivated fields, surrounded by boundary
zone of uncultivated land. Elsewhere in
Britain, changes in settlement form have
been associated with the emergence of
regional kingdoms."

Nick,

Many of Sam Turner’s basic tenets are historically inaccurate. In the 5th and 6th centuries, South West Britain did not consist of Cornwall and Wessex, but Dumnonia and Wessex (although whether Wessex came into being as early as the 5th century is doubtful). Celtic Christianity came to the whole of Dumnonia during this period, not just to Cornwall. Perhaps if Turner had consulted “Nicholas Roscarrock’s Lives of the Saints: Cornwall and Devon”, edited by Professor Nicholas Orme of Exeter University, he would not have made such a basic mistake. This error is important because the mechanisms, by which Christianity was established, were very different in core Wessex, arriving as it did via the later Augustine mission to England. To imply that this was the mechanism by which Christianity arrived in Devon is therefore factually incorrect.

Also, although he states that Cornwall “remained independent British territory until at least the 9th century”, he fails to mention that the Saxon conquest/minority settlement of Dumnonia was a gradual process, such that Devon only came under Wessex domination about a century (or less) before Cornwall did. In failing to recognise this distinction between Dumnonian and core Wessex territories, Turner again fails to point out that the burial pattern that he describes as occurring “with rich grave goods” (typical of Anglo-Saxon cemeteries) is virtually non-existent in Dumnonia, but very common in core Wessex.

Like PlymouthExile I am not convinced that Sam Turner has done a lot of the required basic research - at least as evidenced in this posting.

Not only are "rounds" found in Devon, they are often frequently referred to a "Devon rounds" as evidenced in this article.

http://www.aretemagazine.com/print_template.jsp?id=39

"the whole area had been some kind of sacred forest and liked to explain the (extremely good) evidence for this. The 'Nymet' place-name, for example, is common and comes from the Celtic word for sacred grove. River and field names also point to a marked persistence of un-Romanised Celtic populations and culture here - as do 'Devon rounds', a form of small late Iron Age fortification particularly common in the area"

I have better references to "Devon Rounds" elsewhere - but for the moment I cannot recall the source.

I agree with PE and OE that Sam Turner seems to have missed out important elements of Devonian history. Like Cornwall, Ireland and Wales, Devon was certainly a focus of early Celtic Christianity as shown by the large number of surviving Celtic church dedications. These dedications, such as St Petrock and St Brannock, are clearly not English and could not have been brought into Devon from Wessex.

As for “rounds”, as Ozzie Exile suggests, these are also a Devonian feature. More is said about them here in an article from the February 1998 issue of British Archaeology that discusses the Cornish landscape;

“Devon and parts of Ireland have rounds, as also do parts of Wales (where they are known as raths); in Devon, too, there are similarly substantial earthen field boundaries that, once built, are not easy to move. I suspect that future archaeological work in these and other parts of Britain’s ‘highland zone’ will find a similar conservatism, and continuity of location, to that which has now been established for Cornwall.”

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba31/ba31regs.html

Here, in a conservation handbook, other Celtic aspects of the Devonian landscape are discussed;

“Meanwhile in the 'Celtic fringe', the older infield-outfield system persisted, even where the earlier settlements were abandoned. In the granite areas of Cornwall and Devon, in parts of Wales and Scotland, and through much of Ireland, the story is one of continued nibbling away at the open land. Tiny garden-like plots fenced by massive clearance walls surrounded each farmstead, but these islands of cultivation remained virtually swamped in the vast expanse of open moor.”

http://handbooks.btcv.org.uk/handbooks/content/section/1580

I would not deny that the Saxon settlements had an impact on Devon’s culture and landscape, but these sources clearly show the situation to be much less clear-cut than Turner suggests.

I would suggest, in writing his article, Turner relied on evidence from heavily colonised lowland parts of Devon bordering the Wessex counties, and disregarded interior, highland areas in which the patterns of settlement and land use have more in common with Cornwall, Ireland and Wales. The West Saxons had a major effect on Devon, but they were not the whole story, and it is misleading of Turner to group all of Devon in with the Wessex counties when strong Celtic elements clearly persisted in the highlands and north of the region.

To be fair to Turner, I haven't read the article being summarised here, so it may be that the summary doesn't do his article justice. I will try to see if the article itself is posted anywhere online (I know that British Archaeology has a website, but I think they only post articles over so many years old).

Nah, BA84 is online, but not that particular article. Bummer.