Summary
The remains of the medieval village of Horton, Northamptonshire, both north and south of the lake, including possible C18 militia works.
Reasons for Designation
The settlement remains of the medieval village of Horton, overlain by two main phases of C18 parkland landscaping designed for the 1st and 2nd Earls of Halifax, is scheduled for following principal reasons:
* Survival: village earthworks to the south of the river, including ridge and furrow, survive particularly well, depicting the form and plan of the settlement and its associated agricultural practices. Earthworks to the north of the lake also survive, although less well defined;
* Potential: stratified archaeological deposits both within areas where earthworks survive well, under old pasture, and where they have been reduced by ploughing, will retain considerable potential to increase our understanding of the physical characteristics of the buildings and settlement, as well as the local rural economy. The material evidence of both occupation and abandonment may inform our understanding of local, regional and national settlement dynamics, and their underlying social, political and economic forces;
* Documentation: the later development of the landscape, and the final abandonment of the village is well documented, complementing and enhancing the material evidence;
* Group value: the C18 landscaping is related to other contemporary designated monuments;
* Diversity: the range and complexity of features such as building platforms, crofts and trackways, provide a clear plan of the settlement and are overlain by, and have a clear relationship with, features associated with different phases of the C18 parkland landscape, including the mounds to the south of the river said to be associated with the regiment raised by the 2nd Lord Halifax in 1745. These, and the stratified deposits they contain, provide evidence of an evolving economic, social and political landscape.
History
The village, comprising a small group of houses (known as tofts which may include house platforms surviving as earthworks), gardens (crofts or closes which are typically defined by banks and ditches), 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 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 shrunken. 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 seem 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 parish of Horton, six and a half miles south-east of Northampton, is a settlement that originally lay to either side of a stream, widened in the mid-C18 to form a serpentine lake. The population of the village seems always to have been small, and is recorded as 18 in Domesday Book (1086), with 15 people paying taxes in 1524. The first map of the village, 1622, shows a small number of buildings around the church and north of Horton Hall, with further scattered houses to the east, including the present Manor Farm. A map of 1728, apparently representing the first stages of parkland landscaping, also shows buildings on the site of Manor Farm, named here John Brice's House, immediately to the west of which are two closes identified as Warren.
The newly landscaped park, a remodelling of the existing formal gardens shown on the 1622 map, was probably the work of George Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, and required the removal of the remaining dwellings between the Hall and Manor Farm. It appears that in 1728 seven or eight village houses remained in place here. The survival of the ridge and furrow of the common fields is extensive throughout the park, but avenues to north and south of the Hall are shown on the 1728 map overlying hedged fields, enclosure having taken place here before the drafting of estate map of 1622. In Curtis Meadow, to the south of the Hall, these field boundaries cut across the site of the village earthworks, indicating the earlier abandonment of dwellings here.
The 2nd Lord Halifax, George Montagu Dunk (1716-1771), succeeded to the earldom of Halifax in 1739. He was reputed to have spent a great deal of money on the refurbishing the house, and also redesigned the parkland landscape, replacing the formal water features with a serpentine lake. Halifax was a career politician, but in 1745, at the outbreak of the Jacobite rising, he volunteered to raise a regiment; he was made colonel, and although he never saw action, by 1759 he had been promoted to lieutenant-general. In 1769, two years before his death and following a potentially ruinous election campaign in Northamptonshire, his cousin George Montagu wrote to Horace Walpole stating that the Earl had 'turned all his pleasure ground into tillage, which cost so much at Horton'. From 1781 until the late C19 Horton Hall and park were owned by the Gunning family. Historic Ordnance Survey (OS) maps of 1888 and 1900 show an informal, tree scattered parkland landscape, with residual tree lined avenue surviving to the south of Horton Hall, and with boundaries following significant linear parkland features. The park is registered at Grade II.
In 1937, a year after the demolition of Horton Hall, the village consisted of six cottages north of the church and a few scattered farms. In the later part of the C20 new houses and housing estates spread to the west of the site of the hall, to the north of the church and hall drive, and to the west of the Newport Pagnall Road.
The Royal Commission of Historic Monuments of England (1979) survey of the parish records the village earthworks and elements of the designed landscape, and these are also represented on the images compiled by the National Mapping Programme from aerial photographs.
Details
PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS
The scheduled area includes the earthworks and buried archaeological remains of the medieval village of Horton, to the north and south of the stream and C18 serpentine lake, including its most immediately surrounding fields. The site is on limestone and clay, and slopes down to the river from the north.
DESCRIPTION
To the north of the stream and east of the site of Horton Hall the Royal Commission survey identifies linear features, possible closes, in about the same location as houses shown on the 1728 map, immediately to the east of the Hall. These are no longer visible as earthworks. To the east is a large circular depression, a mid-C18 garden feature, immediately to the east of which is the north end of another parkland feature, a ditch or haha which sweeps south and then east in a wide curve. Parallel to this ditch as it runs east is a shallower, more meandering linear depression, apparently respected by the ridge and furrow on the same alignment immediately to the north, although the relationship is not entirely clear. This appears to be a hollow way, and follows the route of a track or boundary shown on both the 1622 and 1728 maps. These maps also show this road branching to the south and sweeping east in a curve before turning south and east again, where it runs parallel with the surviving hollow way. Between these two routes, the maps show two houses, with a third on the south side of the south road; these are separated by the clean curve of the ditch or haha. The Royal Commission survey indicates the plots of the two dwellings to the north within a coherent rectilinear arrangement of features, apparently overlying ridge and furrow, the latter faintly visible on aerial photographs. The area to the east of the houses is described as 'warren' on the maps of 1622 and 1728, although slightly differently configured; the small close to the east on the 1728 map relates to the present paddock to the west of Manor House, an area of more pronounced earthworks. To the north of the surviving hollow way is an extensive area of ridge and furrow; this remains clearly defined to the south of an C18 parkland avenue, but to the north has been degraded by ploughing at some time in the past. To the south of the paddock are linear features that may relate to the garden landscape.
To the south of the serpentine lake, immediately opposite the site of the hall, a hollow way runs south, curving out slightly to the east where a slighter and narrower lane branches, forming a back lane to two or three closes (crofts) containing house platforms facing east onto the main street. Opposite these, on the east side of the hollow way, are two larger possible closes, the corner of that to the north clipped by the early-C18 avenue as it strikes out to the south, its level surface and slight flanking ditches cutting through ridge and furrow. Immediately to the west of the back lane is a furlong of ridge and furrow, with lands oriented east to west. To the east of the C18 avenue is another extensive area of ridge and furrow. This consists of one large furlong with lands running from west to east, and a second with lands oriented south to north, but with some evidence of change, the most significant of which is a levelled area about 170 metres by 190 metres in the corner of the field where the serpentine lake curves towards he south. Overlying the faint evidence of ridges is a group of narrow, mainly rectilinear mounds, as well as several ditches, These broadly form two groups: to the east is a group of three fairly closely spaced, equidistant parallel banks, diminishing in size, the smallest roughly square in shape; immediately to the east is a group of three more widely spaced parallel ditches, between and to the east of which are several rectilinear banks of different dimensions, but similar in form, on a slightly different alignment. The Royal Commission survey indicates that the ditches may form small enclosures. This group of features is associated by local tradition with exercises undertaken by Lord Halifax's private militia in the C18. There are also scoops and indents in the river bank to the north with paths or drainage channels leading into them.
EXTENT OF SCHEDULING
The scheduled area falls into two, separated by the serpentine lake; both are within the registered park and garden. The area to the north of the lake is bounded to the west by the boundaries of the properties to the west and extends north as far as a small pond, where it turns to follow a straight line as far as The Arches. The line turns south to follow the west side of a band of trees, curving west around a small copse to the west boundary of the Manor House. It turns south to take in the linear features to the south of the Manor House, turning west to meet the bank of the serpentine lake which completes and closes the area.
The serpentine lake also forms the boundary around the north, north-east and east of the scheduled area in Curtis Meadow, from the Lily Pond Bridge to the west (listed at Grade II), all the way to the north side of Icehouse Spinney to the south (the spinney contains an icehouse, listed at Grade II). The boundary curves around Icehouse Spinney before turning south-west and then north-west to follow the field boundary as far as the Newport Pagnall Road. It turns north-east to follow the field boundary as far as the property boundaries to the north, which it follows east to its starting point east of Lily Pond Bridge.
Where the boundary of the scheduling follows field or property boundaries it falls on the inside of those. All fence posts, gate posts and other modern insertions, as well as any fixed modern structures, are excluded from the scheduling, although the ground beneath them is included.
There is considerable potential for undesignated heritage assets to survive within the currently occupied areas of the village of Horton. These may take the form of standing structures or buried deposits but are considered to be most appropriately managed through the National Planning Policy Framework (March 2012) and are not therefore included within the Scheduled area.
