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Settlement mobility and the ‘Middle Saxon Shift’: rural settlements and settlement patterns in Anglo-Saxon England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

H. F. Hamerow
Affiliation:
The University of Durham

Extract

The traditional image of the stable Anglo-Saxon village as the direct ancestor of the medieval village is no longer tenable in view of growing evidence for settlement mobility in the early and middle Saxon periods. Indeed, it now appears that most ‘nucleated’ medieval villages are not the direct successors of early, or even middle Saxon settlements, and that nucleation itself appears to be a remarkably late phenomenon.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

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22 An elaborate silver-inlaid bronze belt-set or cingulum, several sword burials and imported glass vessels excavated from the cemeteries are among the grave-goods illustrated in Jones, and Jones, , ‘The Crop-Mark Sites at Mucking, Essex’, pls. xxvii–xxviii and figs. 58–62.Google Scholar

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