The genesis of this Group was the Society's Millennium Project and has so far led to the publication of studies on Wimbledon (2000, by the Wimbledon Society), Shere (2001), Thorpe (2002) and Ewell (2004). Work is now well advanced on bringing the studies on Gomshall (including Peaslake and Ewhurst) and on Old Woking towards publication. New evidence has recently come to light regarding the development of Cranleigh and Cobham and work continues in many other villages.
Visit to Send and Ripley - 20 July 2008
The Surrey Local History Committee's Summer Meeting is taking place on 20 July (for details see Events page). Members of the Village Studies Group are warmyl invited to join this interesting visit.
The next Workshop - 20 September 2008
Please provisionally reserve this date in your diary for the next Workshop. We are hoping to have updates on Cranleigh, Esher and Hambledon at this meeting and are currently considering what general topics might be of most interest. Please let us know what would most interest you - be it a general or specific topic in documentary research, archaeological techniques or digital manipulation of maps, text and illustrations - or indeed any other subject (email: medforum@hotmail.co.uk).
Identification and Dating of Medieval Pottery
A full day training workshop is currently being arranged on the identification and dating of medieval pottery in Surrey, to be led by Surrey's acknowledged pottery expert, Phil Jones, and to be held at the SCC Heritage Enterprises (SCAU) unit at the Surrey History Centre in Woking. The day will enable participants to learn to recognise pre-Conquest pottery as well as identify and date the main types of later medieval wares produced in Surrey. Training will cover form and fabric, and will include much hands-on work. Numbers will be limited to twenty participants and the indicative cost of the day will be £20 per person (depending on final numbers interested). The date is not yet finally fixed but is likely to be Saturday 18 October. As the training day will only go ahead if there is sufficient demand, would all those interested please let us know in order that a place may be reserved for them (email: medforum@hotmail.co.uk)
This training day will also be offered in the first instance to members of the Medieval Studies Forum and to members of the Artefacts and Archives Research Group, before being offered more widely to other members of the Society. It is hoped that the knowledge gained will prove useful in the proposed resumption of test-pitting.
The Victoria County History Seminars 2008
A number of members attended one or more of the seminars held in February and March to mark 75 years of the Victoria County History at the Institute of Historical Research. Three were of particular relevance to the medieval period. Firstly, Dr Carenza Lewis talked on ‘Historic village investigation at the dawn of the 21st century - new opportunities, new directions and new knowledge'. Those of us of an archaeological bent were enthused by the work being carried out in East Anglian villages over the past three years on an extensive programme of test-pitting which is indicating forms of settlement development in the medieval period rather different from those found in the Whittlewood project in the Midlands. In some of the East Anglian villages studied, it was found that ‘gaps' within villages did not necessarily imply contraction in the fourteenth century but rather that the plots had never been occupied. In other words, these particular East Anglian villages seemed more polyfocal in origin than those in the Whittlewood study.
Carenza described the innovative funding of the project (based heavily on monies from the EU to encourage more teenagers to consider tertiary education) and also the archaeological techniques and statistical analysis that produces the results. We hope to be able to recommence test-pitting in suitable locations in the Society's Village Studies Project.
A fortnight later, Professor Chris Dyer spoke on ‘Medieval villages: new approaches' in a talk which majored on archaeological aspects, including the social inferences that could be drawn from individual house plans as well as from analyses of the patterns of buildings within settlements.
The final seminar was given by Professor Tom Williamson on ‘Regional landscapes and regional societies: the environmental dimension'. This reminded us (if we had forgotten) that archaeologists and medieval historians ought to pay much more attention to soil types (and the very rapid changes in soil types, sometimes even within a single field) and geomorphological features, such as river catchment areas and watersheds. His examples were, perhaps not surprisingly, largely drawn from East Anglia but we were struck by how little work has been published along these lines for Surrey.
