Summary
The earthwork and buried remains of the medieval village of Stutchbury.
Reasons for Designation
The medieval village site at Stutchbury, Helmdon, Northamptonshire, is a scheduled monument for the following principal reasons:
* Survival: for the exceptional earthworks and waterlogged deposits depicting the form and plan of the settlement and the fish ponds to the south of it;
* Potential: for the stratified archaeological deposits which retain considerable potential to increase our understanding of the physical characteristics of the buildings and settlement. Buried artefacts will also have the potential to increase our knowledge and understanding of the social and economic functioning of the settlement within the wider medieval landscape;
* Documentation: for the high level of historical and archaeological documentation pertaining to the settlement’s evolution;
* Diversity: for the range and complexity of features such as building platforms, crofts, trackways, evidence for the parish church and the fish ponds which, taken as a whole, provide a clear plan of the settlement and retain significant stratified deposits which serve to provide details of the continuity and change in the evolution of the settlement and status of its inhabitants.
History
The village, comprising a small group of houses (tofts), gardens (crofts), yards, streets, paddocks, often with a green, a manor and a church, and with a community devoted primarily to agriculture, was a significant component of the rural landscape in most areas of medieval England, much as it is today. The Introduction to Heritage Assets on Medieval Settlements (English Heritage, May 2011) explains that most villages were established in the C9 and C10, but sometimes modified following the Norman invasion to have planned layouts comprising tofts and crofts running back from a main road, often linked with a back lane around the rear of the crofts, and typically having a church and manor house in larger compartments at the end of the village. In recognising the great regional diversity of medieval rural settlements in England, Roberts and Wrathmell (2003) divided the country into three broad Provinces on the basis of each area's distinctive mixture of nucleated and dispersed settlements; these were further divided into sub-Provinces. The Northamptonshire settlements lie in the East Midlands sub-Province of the Central Province, an area characterised in the medieval period by large numbers of nucleated settlements. The southern part of the sub-Province has greater variety of settlement, with dispersed farmsteads and hamlets intermixed with the villages. Whilst some of the dispersed settlements are post-medieval, others may represent much older farming landscapes.
Although many villages continue to be occupied to the present day, some 2000 nationally were abandoned in the medieval and post-medieval periods and others have shrunk. In the second half of the C20, research focussed on when and why this occurred. Current orthodoxy sees settlements of all periods as fluid entities, being created and disappearing, expanding and contracting and sometimes shifting often over a long period of time. Abandonment may have occurred as early as the C11 or continued into the C20, although it seems to have peaked during the C14 and C15. In the East Midlands sub-Province, Roberts and Wrathmell identified that the sites of many settlements, most of which were first documented in Domesday Book of 1086, are still occupied by modern villages, but others have been partially or wholly deserted and are marked by earthwork remains. Research into Northamptonshire medieval villages highlights two prevalent causes of settlement change namely the shift from arable farming to sheep pasture in the C15 and C16 (requiring larger tracts of land to be made available for grazing) and the enclosure of open fields from the late C16 through to the mid C19 for emparkment or agricultural improvement. Despite the commonly held view that plague caused the abandonment of many villages, the documentary evidence available confirms only one such case in Northamptonshire, the former settlement of Hale in Apethorpe.
Recent attention on the evidence for medieval agricultural practices, typically found in the hinterland of the settlements, has highlighted the survival of the earthwork remains of ‘ridge and furrow’. The Introduction to Heritage Assets on Field Systems explains that the origins of ridge and furrow cultivation can be traced to the C10 or before. By the C13, the countryside had acquired a widespread corrugated appearance as settlement developed into a pattern of ‘townships’ (basic units of community life and farming activity). The cultivated ridges, individual strips known as ‘lands’, were incorporated into similarly aligned blocks known as ‘furlongs’, separated from each other by raised ridges known as ‘headlands’ which, in turn, were grouped into two, three or sometimes four large unenclosed ‘Great Fields’. These fields occupied much of the available land in each township but around the fringes lay areas of meadow, pasture (normally unploughable land on steep slopes or near water) and woodland. The characteristic pattern of ridge and furrow was created by ploughing clockwise and anti-clockwise to create lines of flanking furrows interspersed with ridges of ploughed soil. The action of the plough, pulled by oxen, takes the form of a reversed ‘S’-shape when seen in plan. The furrows enabled the land to drain and demarcated individual farmer’s plots of land within the Great Fields. The open-field system ensured that furlongs and strips were fairly distributed through different parts of the township and that one of the Great Fields was left fallow each year.
The survey of Northamptonshire by the Royal Commission on the Historic Monuments of England (RCHME) and the Northamptonshire Historic Environment Record (HER) summarise the history of the former village of Stutchbury, and documents the archaeological evidence for its interpretation and survival. The use of aerial photographs (English Heritage, October 2013) further enhances our understanding of the site and its extent.
Stutchbury is first mentioned in Domesday Book of 1086 when it is recorded as a single manor with a recorded population of 13. Twenty-one people paid the Lay Subsidy of 1301 and in 1377 fifty-nine people over the age of 14 paid Poll Tax. The village was held by St. Andrew’s Priory in Northampton until the Dissolution and it is thought likely that the Priory cleared the village for sheep pasture after 1377 causing the depopulation; in 1547, a thousand sheep were being grazed there. The Hearth Tax returns of 1674 record payment by 4 householders and Bridges noted in his ‘History of Northants’ (1791) that there were only four houses left, three of which were probably the farms of Stutchbury Manor, Stutchbury Lodge and Stutchbury Hall. The buildings of the Lodge and Hall remain and are post-medieval in date. Some carved stone fragments, possibly from the former parish church or manor, are incorporated into the Hall’s fabric. The RCHME conducted an earthwork survey of the remains, but there have been no formal archaeological excavations on the site, although it is understood that some small-scale trenching took part on the field formerly known as Weston’s Piece in the mid-C20. Medieval pottery of the C13 and C14, early to late medieval metal artefacts and a fragment of carved stone reredos have been retrieved from the locality.
Details
PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS
The monument includes the earthwork and buried archaeological remains of the medieval village of Stutchbury. The site is situated on the north side of a broad valley cut into the Upper Lias Clay with limestone overlaid with Boulder Clay on higher slopes. As a result, naturally occurring springs form around the site producing areas of marshy ground.
DESCRIPTION
The settlement remains are arranged around a broadly ‘t’ shaped system of principal hollow ways, the main street being the bridleway (with open access to all vehicles) running southwards from Stutchbury Hall which, until recently, had a stone cobbled surface. The earthwork remains of the banks of the hollow ways approaching from the east, west and north are apparent to the north of the main drive to the Hall, in the field to the north-east known as Weston’s Piece and at the north boundary of the field immediately east of the main street. Earthworks of enclosures and building platforms survive up to approximately 1.5m in Weston’s Piece; this field is reputed locally to be the site of the parish Church of St John and it is from near here that the fragment of carved reredos was discovered. However, aerial photographic evidence of buried archaeological deposits apparent as cropmarks indicate a large enclosure with a centrally positioned east-west aligned structure further to the east of house sites on the east side of the main lane; it is possible that these represent the site of the church.
To the east of the main street are slighter earthworks approximately 0.5m high marking the position of tofts (buildings) and crofts (gardens), the archaeological remains of which will also survive below ground. Immediately to the south of Stutchbury Hall and its farmyard, the earthwork of one arm and the return of a possible moat, perhaps associated with the earlier Manor, survive particularly well. To the south lie earthworks of hollow ways, building platforms and ponds on a spring line, linked by possible drainage channels to a sequence of two or possibly three fish ponds which lie further south, adjacent to a small watercourse. It is likely that these are contemporary with the village. The west pond has a dam which consists of a bank 1m high with a shallow ditch on its west side from which the material to construct the dam was obtained. The central pond is better defined with low scarps and a low bank or dam at its east end. Within this pond are two raised platforms joined by low banks; these may have been islands but if so they would have been very close to the water level. There may have been a third pond to the east again bounded by low scarps and a possible dam. The latter is now only a slight limestone-rubble bank and may have been an embanked track rather than a dam. A C20 drainage channel crosses the centre of the fishponds from east to west.
The area of protection includes the field to the north-east of Stutchbury Hall known as Weston's Piece and the field immediately to its south. At the boundary with the ploughed field further to the south, the area of protection heads west to the bridleway, following its eastern side southwards until it meets with the stream. The area of protection then heads west, following the northern bank of the stream so that it includes the fish ponds, before heading north at the western extent of the fishpond earthworks, skirting around the eastern boundary of the former osiery bed until it meets with the southern edge of the farmyard. The area of protection follows the yard's boundary eastwards until it meets with the bridleway, when it heads northwards following the western boundary of the bridleway and continues following the western boundary of the farm track, crossing the track at the southern boundary of the field to the south of Stutchbury Lodge, continuing eastwards until it meets with the south-west boundary of Weston's Piece.
EXCLUSIONS
The surface of the farm track north of Stutchbury Hall and the bridleway, all fences, posts and gates are excluded from the scheduling, but the ground beneath them is included. The garden area at Stutchbury Hall and its farmyard are not included in the scheduling.
