Introduction

Since prehistoric times, banks and ditches have been built to divide land, defend settlements or surround sacred sites, so we know that the Anglo-Saxons did not enter or leave a wild and empty landscape. Indeed, England in 1066 was a well-ordered kingdom with boundaries dividing fields from each other, towns from the countryside, religious sites from the profane world outside and one man's estate from another's. What percentage of these boundaries the Anglo-Saxons made themselves and which were older units of land is a matter of speculation. Unfortunately, dry stone walls are hard to date and wooden fences leave only the most ephemeral of traces. Luckily, the Anglo-Saxons also dug earthworks that include huge monumental dykes that still run for many kilometres across the landscape, small ditches designed to delimit estates, large banks that surrounded towns and religious enclosures and agricultural and woodland boundaries. This chapter will look at these various types of boundaries and their impact on the Anglo-Saxon landscape.

Dykes

The early medieval period witnessed the building of some of the most famous earthworks in England, including Offa's Dyke, Wat's Dyke, the Cambridgeshire Dykes (Devil's Ditch, Bran Ditch and Fleam Dyke), Bokerley Dyke and Wansdyke. The terms ‘dykes’ and ‘ditches’ seem to have been used interchangeably for banks and ditches of different sizes and lengths, ranging from those many kilometres long with ditches two metres deep and banks up to four metres high, to short earthworks that have a shallow ditch and low bank. The dykes of the Anglo-Saxon period are quite distinct from prehistoric and later medieval earthworks. Prehistoric examples often have multiple banks and ditches while Anglo-Saxon dykes generally have a single bank and ditch, sometimes with a small counterscarp bank beyond the ditch. They invariably ‘face’ downhill (that is the ditch is lower than the bank), a deliberate design feature possibly indicating the direction from which attack was expected (Figure 8.1). One of the authors (Erik Grigg) has recently completed a doctoral thesis on early medieval dykes that identified 118 potentially early medieval dykes in Britain.