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As one of the co-authors is Time Team's Mick this is a book that will have received a wider readership than the average Archaeological publication – and if I am honest I am one such reader.
This volume brings us both the account of a long term study or a single English Village and also a model (a text book) for the study of settlements. This is accessible to the general reader but I think the target audience is the Archaeology student, and so the book is heavy on methodology. How they came to their conclusions is as important as the conclusions themselves.
It is a study of an unremarkable English village, and it is the ordinariness that is the reason that it is of interest. This is a part of the turn with in Archaeology away from the Palace and the riches of Treasure Hunters towards the “common man”. Although the study documents the life of the people of Shapwick parish from the depths of prehistory to the modern day the key moment is the formation of the Village.
The Village is such a central characteristic of the English landscape that we find it hard to imagine that it is an innervation. There was a time before folk lived in villages, they were much more shattered across the landscape.
What is found is that at some point in the couple of hundred years prior to the Norman conquest, in Shapwick at least, there was a major reorganisation of the settlement pattern, and the people were brought together into a Village.
That many of our towns and villages were at origin planned settlements is a revelation – partly due to the organic developments that happened in the centuries that followed that have often largely hidden the plan from view.
This gives us an different understanding of the past – that there was the capacity for planning hints are structures of power and control that were far more developed that we normally allow.
Much “popular” history is essential superficial, it depends on the rhetorical skills of the author in order to sweep you along with that argument, and so this is a refreshing change. It is the vigour of the methodological approach to the evidence that makes the conclusion here convincing, and yet they are still able to hold a narrative together that is accessible and intelligible.
