Abstract

The origins of dispersed settletnent; sotne results fron1 fieldwork in Bedfordshire Anthony E. Brown and Christopher C. Taylor Much of the recent work on medieval settlement continuity from earlier times are certainly two ways patterns by archaeologists, geographers and in which a dispersed pattern of settlement might be historians has for good reasons been largely achieved, it may not be the only .one. There is concentrated on the problems of nucleated v1llages. certainly a third way, that of the adaptation or, Yet while villages are clearly important to the ultimately, reorganisation of an agricultural system. understanding of medieval settlement patterns, it The most obvious example of the latter is in the has to be remembered that, over the greater part of Midlands of England during the eighteenth- and England, villages either never existed or were only nineteenth-century enclosure movement. There, part of the total pattern of settlement Indeed it might compact nucleated villages, surrounded by their be said that the 'normal' settlement of medieval common fields, were usually replaced by villages England was a dispersed one. surrounded by isolated farmsteads within a few The origins of this dispersed pattern of settlement years of formal enclosure. This was achieved by