![]() Perhaps it was so depopulated by the plague that it was no longer viable. We have no written sources of information as to why this village, like many others in Herefordshire, was abandoned. There is a Domesday Book reference to the manor of Hampton Wafer which confirms that the village was in existence in 1086. Pottery finds from an excavation at the deserted village of Hampton Wafer suggest that the village was established around the time of Edward the Confessor (first half of the 11th century) and was abandoned in the early 14th century. These photos can tell the archaeologist where to look for a medieval village, but they don't tell us why a village was abandoned. We can see the outline of many abandoned villages in aerial photographs. Some areas which previously had been used for farming were turned into an ornamental park for the lord of the manor or a hunting ground. In fact by 1500 there were approximately three sheep to every human being. The wool industry therefore expanded greatly. The difficulty in finding enough men to work the fields encouraged sheep farming. People starved or moved away.ĭuring the period of the plague, around 1348, many villages were either left entirely empty because everyone had died or those few inhabitants who survived couldn't do all the work themselves. Sometimes the weather was terrible for several years in a row and there were many bad harvests. Sometimes the lord of that village decided to use the fields to raise sheep or deer and the peasants had to move somewhere else. Between 13 over 3000 settlements disappeared in England. (Nigel Saul, "A Prosperous People", in Nigel Saul (ed.), Historical Atlas of Britain, Prehistoric to Medieval, The National Trust and Sutton Publishing, 1997, p. However, most deserted villages were abandoned for economic reasons, perhaps sometimes related to depopulation caused by the plague but more likely related to slow, economic and climatic deterioration which made the continued existence of the village unsustainable. ![]() There are more than 130 known deserted medieval villages listed on the Lincolnshire Historic Environment Record of archaeological sites and historic buildings collated by Lincolnshire County Council.When we think of deserted villages, we think of the Black Death and the ravages it caused in the medieval landscape. Or in many other cases villages shrunk in size, for example an area of land to the south west of modern Nettleton, near Caistor, has gone forever. The countryside was once brimming with farms, monasteries, wealthy estates, hamlets, villages, manors houses as recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.īut places with wonderful sounding names like Beasthorpe (near modern-day Owersby, Market Rasen), Helethorpe (near Fulnetby), Tatebi (near Ulceby in East Lindsey) and Wolmersty (near Friskney) have quite literally disappeared off the face of the Earth. ![]() However, up until about the 1300s, parts of rural Lincolnshire, particularly the Wolds, were among the most densely-populated areas of medieval England. Out in the countryside, away from Lincoln and the major towns and villages, it can seem like an endless succession of fields, a few houses, and winding roads. Modern-day Lincolnshire is the sort of sparsely-populated place where you can travel for miles without meeting a single soul.
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