Summary
Remains of the medieval village of Little Oxendon and associated ridge and furrow.
Reasons for Designation
The medieval village site at Little Oxendon and associated ridge and furrow is scheduled for the following principal reasons:
* Survival: for the exceptional earthworks and ridge and furrow depicting the form and plan of the settlement and its associated agricultural practices;
* Diversity: for the range and complexity of well preserved features, such as the hollow way, crofts and tofts with building platforms, fishponds, and ridge and furrow, which provide a clear plan of the settlement and retain significant stratified deposits providing details of the continuity and change in the evolution of the settlement;
* 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 historical and archaeological documentation pertaining to the settlement’s evolution, and the invaluable wider archaeological, topographical and historical research which has given Northamptonshire particular prominence in broader discussions of the medieval landscape and prompted key ideas in our understanding of medieval settlement in England;
* Group value: for its association with well-preserved samples of ridge and furrow contiguous with Little Oxendon which have interlocking furlongs going in different directions with surviving headlands, thus providing important evidence of the agricultural practices upon which the settlement relied.
History
The village was a significant component of the rural landscape in most areas of medieval England 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. 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.
Little Oxendon was formerly in the parish of Little Bowden and was also a chapelry of Little Bowden. It is not mentioned specifically in Domesday Book but there are two entries under Oxendon: one is for a manor of one hide and one virgate held by the king as part of Rothwell with no population recorded; and the other, of one hide, was held by Ulf under Countess Judith, and had a population of eleven. One of these is likely to be Little Oxendon. In 1377 Poll Tax was paid by fifty people over the age of fourteen, and in 1405 there were at least eight people in the village as they complained about the chapel which was described in 1398 as ‘not yet consecrated’. The manor was bought by Andrew Palmer in 1515 and when he died ten years later there was apparently only one house and 300 acres of pasture there. In the early-C18, Bridges wrote that there were ‘formerly several houses as appears from the many square building stones and burnt hearth-stones which have been dug up’ (History of Northants, II, 1791). The RCHM (North-West Northants, p.159) states that documentary evidence suggests that the village was deliberately cleared for sheep farming in the C14, but in the light of the eight families recorded in 1405 this looks like misprint. Rather, enclosure and depopulation looks likely to have happened in the C15, or perhaps early C16, before 1525.
In 1898 Market Harborough Golf Course was established on land, owned by the Paget family and farmed by Frank Underwood, lying to the north and north-east of Little Oxendon. The original nine-hole course, designed by David Duncan, was laid out over two fields. The majority of the course occupied the larger c.60 acre field of ridge and furrow, but one green and one tee were sited over the ravine (through which the Rookwell Brook flows) in the field containing the abandoned village. When the layout of the course was changed in 1932 all the holes were redesigned to fall wholly within the larger field. In 1993 the course was expanded to eighteen holes over two fields of ridge and furrow lying to the east of Little Oxendon.
There have been two excavations on the site of Little Oxendon. A farmer digging for stone in 1863 found ‘roads covered with loose stones and also pavements consisting of stones placed close together edgeways’. He discovered the foundation of many houses with much rubble scattered about but ‘very little or no wrought or squared stones’ which led him to infer that the houses were chiefly built of mud on stone foundations. The farmer also discovered the remains of a building of considerable size, thought to be a church or chapel, and charred wood, a stone-lined well, a spur, part of a bridle, and coins from the age of Elizabeth I and William III (Transactions of the Leicester Archaeological Society, II, 1870). Excavation work carried out between 1926 and 1932 revealed a pottery kiln and slag and pottery, thought to be pre-Roman in origin (Journal of the Northamptonshire Natural History Society and Field Club, 26, 1932). The RCHME carried out a field survey in 1981, and aerial photographs taken by English Heritage in 2013 provide the most recent overview of the earthworks.
Details
PRINCIPAL ELEMENTS
The monument includes the earthworks and buried archaeological remains of the medieval village of Little Oxendon, and associated ridge and furrow to the north-west and south-east. The village site is laid to pasture; a golf course is located on the ridge and furrow.
DESCRIPTION
Little Oxendon is situated on high ground that slopes gently down to the north-east, and falls steeply into a narrow valley on both the north and south-east sides. The remains of the village are preserved under permanent pasture. The earthworks consist of a main hollow way aligned north-east south-west along the spine of the spur, with the sites of former buildings set in rectangular closes on either side. At its north-east end the hollow way fades out and cannot be traced much beyond the village itself. At the south-west end, beyond the area of protection, it continues as a broad, flat, open track between blocks of ridge and furrow. Within the village itself the hollow way is between 1m and 2m deep and is flanked by a number of shallow depressions, presumably building platforms. These depressions are separated by low banks which extend down the hillsides and represent some of the original close boundaries. In two places, low banks mark the ends of the closes towards the north-east end of the village. On the north-west side the closes have been over-ploughed by later ridge and furrow.
On the north side of the hollow way is a large rectangular enclosure measuring c.100m by c.54m, centred at SP7305784684, which is bounded by a ditch up to 1m high with an internal bank on the west and north east sides. The interior of the enclosure contains several shallow depressions and, in the east corner, a large rectangular embanked feature, probably the platform of a stone building. This enclosure may be the site of the manor house or chapel. Just to the east of the enclosure at SP7299584705 is a prominent flat and circular terraced area which was a former golf green.
In the bottom of the valley to the south-east of the village are the remains of two small ponds, cut into the valley sides, which may have been fishponds or millponds or both. The area is now overgrown but, according to the RCHME, the original dams have been almost completely cut away though the ends of both survive.
The village is surrounded by extensive areas of well-preserved ridge and furrow. The scheduling includes a small field to the south-east (but not the south part which has been quarried and landscaped by the golf course) and part of a much larger field to the north-west, providing a representative sample of interlocking furlongs going in different directions with surviving headlands. The ridge and furrow is overlaid with features relating to the golf course, including bunkers, tees and greens, as well as some tree planting.
EXTENT OF SCHEDULING
The area of protection includes the site of the abandoned medieval village, defined on the south-west and north-east by hedges marking field boundaries, and the contiguous areas of ridge and furrow to the north-west and south-east. The following features are excluded from the scheduling: modern paths and track surfaces, fences, signs, and all of the bunkers and equipment pertaining to the golf course although the ground beneath all of these is included.
There is considerable potential for undesignated (but potentially nationally important) remains to survive outside the scheduled monument, particularly relating to the areas of ridge and furrow to the south and north-east.
