Settlements and their Inhabitants

Over the past thirty years much work of great interest has been done on the landscape archaeology and settlement history of England in the five centuries before the Norman Conquest: investigation of individual places, the in-depth study of a limited region and, recently, work moving towards establishing a general pattern of development, of which John Blair's Building Anglo-Saxon England is the latest and most impressively thorough. This general pattern is harder to detect than one might suppose. The early-eleventh-century recension of the document known as the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum (henceforth RSP) is our only detailed account of an estate's personnel before the Norman Conquest. The text, which we know from a single manuscript, is thought to have been originally composed as a manual for running a large estate in south-west England, very likely that of St Peter's Abbey at Bath; it dates probably from the mid-tenth century, but may be significantly older. At least one of its clauses was added, and probably others, too, when the text was copied for some other estate a little later. Later still, in the early eleventh century, it was copied with significant revisions that Dorothy Bethurum, after some hesitation, identified in 1963 from their prose style as the work of Wulfstan, archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023 and, until 1016, bishop of Worcester as well. This revision annexed to it Gerefa, a quite different text on the work of a rural reeve, and some phrases are common to both texts. The copy that we have of them both was written probably at St Paul's Cathedral in London in the late eleventh century; again, changes were made on copying, but only in bringing it up to date, not wholly consistently, in grammar and spelling. There was no less variation in the form of individual settlements, of the places they lived in, and of the surrounding countryside reflected there. While in 1992 Christopher Taylor found that work over thirty years had made the picture ‘increasingly complex and confused’, subsequent research has given this complexity greater definition, revealing great variety not just between different parts of the country but between different places, even neighbouring places, in a single region.