© Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com TEN YEARS GONE: SUMMARISING A DECADE OF RESEARCH INTO THE DEVELOPMENT OF PRE-HISTORICAL AND EARLY HISTORICAL LAND USE AND SETTLEMENT PATTERNS IN THE PARISH OF PUTTENHAM, SURREY Rob Briggs The parish of Puttenham covers a little under 2000 acres (800 hectares) of south-west Surrey. Its documented history, though never of national importance, has many interesting facets. One of the most noteworthy is that, unlike many neighbouring villages and towns, Puttenham is not named as a manorial or sub-manorial entity in Domesday Book. The month of July 2013 will mark ten years (the exact date escapes me) since I frst hit upon a possible explanation for why this should be. It quickly led me to set down my ideas on paper, only in doing so I could not help but look at the bigger picture, and consider what the parish’s rich archaeological record can tell us about pre-historical and proto-historical land use and settlement patterns within its boundaries. So began a period of research that has continued (albeit not continuously) to the present day. The project (if it can be called such a thing given its sporadic conduct by a solitary researcher) has, to appropriate a piece of modern military/political parlance, undergone considerable mission creep over the past decade, although I feel I have settled on what will be its fnal format; a report that will not be published but printed, bound and copies lodged with the main public and institutional libraries and archives I have used in the course of my research (a few additional copies will be produced for private sale).1 The primary aim of the project as it continues today is to collate all relevant local archaeological, historical and geographical data (in the case of the frst, beginning with a Lower Palaeolithic hand axe from the Church Croft area - HER 1503) and assess it with reference to relevant local, regional and national analyses. This includes the reappraisal of research conducted within the parish by amateur antiquarians (notably the Rev. Charles Kerry; see Bierton 1990), historians (Dugmore 1972) and professional archaeologists (Currie 2001). My attitude has been to treat all sources, whether a brief reference to the discovery of an artefact or a monograph written by a leading scholar, with a healthy scepticism, thereby permitting something found in Puttenham parish to act as a modifer to existing supra-parochial interpretations where the indications support making such a case. A preliminary account of the results of my work to date is presented in the paragraphs below. Initially, I set the temporal end point of the project as the early years of the thirteenth century, for this marks a stage by which there is solid evidence for the existence of a manor, church, village and parish of Puttenham. The more research I did, the more I came to realise that extending the chronological limit to the midpoint of the thirteenth century would allow for a much more fne-grained understanding of both the emergence and early operation of the key medieval institutions. Here, however, I take the story into the fourteenth century to illustrate quite how far Puttenham had come by that time. Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic The evidence from these eras consists entirely of worked fints which have been collected in from all corners of the parish. A similar concentration of lithics from Crooksbury Common and environs, west of Puttenham, has been explained as the residue of hunting activity (Hunt 2002, 47), though there may be mileage in developing this point to posit a connection with itinerant shepherding (as per Hodges 1991, 68). Until other forms of contemporary evidence (e.g. Neolithic pottery) are found, there is potential to reassess the considerable corpus of lithics from the parish in terms of characteristics such as fint sources and patination. At a more micro level, greater consideration should be given to the extent to which the situation of particular fnd-spots can tell us something about the nature of the activity they derive from, for instance the preponderance of Mesolithic fints to come from dry, high level sites or lower level ones close to water (cf. Gabel 1976). Bronze Age From this period comes the earliest surviving monument in Puttenham parish, the socalled Frowsbury Mound on Puttenham Heath, one of the largest - if not the largest by diameter - bowl barrow in Surrey (Grinsell 1934, 26). Though never excavated, following a 1 The working title of this report is From palæoliths to parchment: The development of pre-historical land-use and settlement in the parish of Puttenham. 1 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com study of heathland-situated barrows in southern England (Bradley & Fraser 2010), a Middle Bronze Age date for its construction seems most credible. The same probably applied to a round barrow on the Hog’s Back above the present village gradually obliterated by a series of destructive episodes between the eighteenth century and 1945 (Dugmore 1972, 4). To the east, a destroyed bell barrow in Wanborough parish was more likely a high-status monument of Early Bronze Age date (Drew 1993, 4; Hunt 2002, 74). This loose cluster of barrows (which would be augmented in number if it could be proved that a round barrow capped Bury Hill due east of Puttenham church, as some have posited) may warrant phenomenological landscape study (Tilley 2012). Was the grouping to represent a reserved funerary area, it raises questions at to the location(s) of the associated settlement(s), for which there is not one scrap of evidence at the present time. Iron Age Not atypically for a Surrey parish (at least one set largely away from one of the main river valleys), Puttenham lacks much material evidence of Iron Age date (but see PAS, ‘Brooch | SUR-AB9114’). What it does boast is Hillbury, the presumed Iron Age hillfort on Puttenham Common. Its earthworks did not attract antiquarian interest until late (see Long 1836, 7072, for a little-known early account and plan) and the ramparts and interior have so far failed to be excavated to any great extent or effect (Lasham 1895, 148-49; a full contour survey of the earthworks was made in 2001 - Graham & Graham 2001). The lack of dating evidence has prompted some to query if Hillbury is Iron Age in date (Bird 2006, 37; cf. its classifcation as ‘undated’ by Hamilton & Manley 2001) and, set well to the north of the line of Weald-edge hillforts (Seager Thomas 2010), it does look to be a case apart. In view of the lack of Iron Age material from Puttenham and adjacent parishes, but its noted prodigiousness for cremation burials and other material of the frst century AD (see Hanworth 1987, 162), one way of interpreting Hillbury is as a “pioneer” settlement-cumcentral place marking the instigation of a spread of population out of the densely-settled Tongham-Runfold stretch of the Blackwater valley. Ditched land divisions to the north of the earthworks may be coeval (see Briggs 2012a). This hypothesis makes Hillbury closer in date to what might be termed “post-hillfort enclosures” at Westcott and Felday (see Poulton 2004, 55, 56). Of course this does not help to reveal function or functions of Hillbury; such proof can be found, and hypotheses proved or disproved, only by means of archaeology. Roman Subsequent to the aforementioned nineteenth-century interest in the Hillbury earthworks, rudimentary excavations were undertaken at a pottery-rich Roman site not far to the east, frst by Henry Lawes Long, owner of Hampton Lodge, in 1844 and subsequently by Rev. Charles Kerry, curate of Puttenham, between 1869 and 1874 (Bierton 1990). Remarkably, Kerry’s excavations failed to fnd any structural evidence beyond a series of “rude pavements” (which might have been the rubble from collapsed/demolished walls). However, comparison of Kerry’s notes with the analysis of material collected following ploughing in the 1940s (Clark & Nichols 1960) allows a fairly detailed picture to be built up. A number of facets suggest it could be classifed as a villa, not least its probable southeasterly aspect, melding the predominant southerly or easterly orientations of most Surrey villas (Bird 2004, 108). Occupation is believed to have stretched from the fnal third of the frst century AD to the early years of the third century, following which activity seems to have been relocated, either to a lower location close by (Clark & Nichols 1960, 62) or away from the ridge to a new site in the centre of Puttenham parish where third/fourth-century pottery in association with tile fragments and possibly iron slag was identifed by George Inwood in 1992 (HER 3802 - it failed to yield equivalent evidence when reexamined in recent years; Edward Walker, pers comm). The ubiquity of Roman pottery scatters has been one of the recurrent traits of landscapecentric research projects involving large-scale feld walking, e.g. Maddle Farm in Berkshire (Gaffney & Tingle 1989), Pendock in Worcestershire (Dyer 1990) and Whittlewood on the Buckinghamshire/Northamptonshire border (Jones & Page 2006). Low densities suggest feld manuring; higher densities, by contrast, are more likely to attest to sites of settlement or some other form of prolonged activity. Such fndings have perhaps not been given enough acknowledgement in Surrey, where there remains a tendency to view ceramic fnd2 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com spots in isolation and risk misinterpreting them as a result (e.g. Williams 2007, 154 Fig. 1, which marks a number of ‘Occupation’ sites that represent low-density scatters of small, abraded sherds found by Kerry). Some of the above projects have also identifed remarkable dense dispersed settlement patterns. The fndings of the Whittlewood Project, for instance, indicated a density in that area of one settlement per 1.25 sq km (Jones & Page 2006, 50-52) which, applied to Puttenham parish, would suggest at least six settlement sites should exist within its bounds. It is hoped that future feldwalking and/or excavation in Puttenham parish may add to the limited number of probable Roman-period settlement sites of any date known at present (Hillbury, Lascombe, Puttenham church and possibly a site on the Hog’s Back north-west of the village, if a seventeenth-century feld/furlong name Blacklands indicates a locus of occupation). Moreover, the present dearth of material from the third and fourth centuries AD needs to be tested by any available means to ascertain whether it is a genuine phenomenon or a trick of the current dataset, which was mostly assembled (and lost) in the nineteenth century. Post-Roman and Anglo-Saxon Precisely what took place in the period immediately following the collapse of Roman rule in Britain remains obscure and hotly contested across the relevant disciplines. Typifying this are the debates around the extent to which arable farming carried on much as before or contracted in scale, letting woodland overtake formerly cultivated land (e.g. Rippon 2000). Though this is often referred to in terms of the “post-Roman” period, we would do well to consider it in terms of the effect of the abandonment of villas during the fourth century (for which see Bird 1987, 175 Fig. 7.5) as the circumstances which prevailed in the year 380 would have been little or no different to those of half a century or a century (or more) later. In Puttenham parish, the coincidence of fnd-spots of Roman pottery with historic feldnames connoting woodland (Woodhorn at Lascombe, Cockardwood near Shoelands and, if derived from Old English *spearr-leah - “(spear) shaft woodland-resource” - Sparle south of Puttenham village) suggests tree cover had spread to cover former arable land, though this could have occurred during the later Roman period given the present body of evidence. Della Hooke (2011) contends woodland regeneration was often a phenomenon of the later Anglo-Saxon period, a product of the expansion of elite hunting activity. One hint that the Puttenham parochial area was the setting for hunting is the lost place-name Lupe, known through fourteenth-century surnames, which looks to represent Old English hlīep(e), hlȳp, signifying something along the lines of an “obstacle for deer to leap over” (cf. Watts 2004, 370). Puttenham parish has no proven archaeological evidence from the Anglo-Saxon period. It does, however, have records of a number of inhumation burials being found at three different locations along its northern boundary atop the Hog's Back ridge. The westernmost sets of human remains, from a site known since the tenth century as "seven ditches", almost certainly represented execution burials. 2 At the top of Puttenham Hill, skeletal remains (including those of a child) were found on at least three separate occasions in the early nineteenth century but local oral remembrance of these discoveries as recorded by Kerry several decades later failed to mention any artefacts found with the bodies. This makes it impossible to determine the period in which the burials were made; even a general Anglo-Saxon dating is not certain. Between these two sites, the leveling of the previously-mentioned round barrow in 1817 revealed the following objects, known only through idiosyncratically-worded lists compiled by Charles Kerry based upon the testimony of others: bones (including a jawbone), coins, fragments of pottery and iron, including one resembling an 'oven-peel'. Grinsell (1963) made the reasonable suggestion that these derived from an Early Anglo-Saxon secondary interment in the Bronze Age barrow, but mistook the last for a shield boss. Kerry's 'oven-peel' does not sound like a weapon, rather a fat, handled object such as a mirror or fattened skillet (White 1988; Geake 1997, 87). If so, the absence of weaponry coupled with the report of coins from the barrow might give grounds for proposing the burial to be that of a high-status woman of the seventh or eighth century (cf. Semple 2003). On the other hand, Russell's casual mention of ‘helmets and other parts of armour, pikes, &c.’ being found in 1757 in the vicinity of two barrows known 2 I have had a lengthy consideration of their provenance) published previously - Briggs 2010; an updated and expanded version of this paper is available from http://surreymedieval.fles.wordpress.com/2011/05/sixskeletons-at-seven-ditches-december-2011.pdf. 3 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com as ‘Robin Hood's butts’ situated on the Hog's Back midway between Guildford and Farnham (i.e. in the Puttenham/Wanborough area - Russell 1801, 31) may point to more distinguished grave goods having already been removed from the burial more than half a century earlier. Supposing some or all of the above-mentioned skeletal remains did represent interments made during the post-Roman/Anglo-Saxon centuries, were any of them the bones of people who lived within the parochial area? Detailed examination of its place-names and feld-names reveals comparatively few Old English habitative-type names, supporting the idea that it was sparsely settled in the period. Totford, “Otta’s ford”, occurs in a tenthcentury boundary description, albeit from several decades later than the source charter's purported date of 909 (Sawyer 382; Finberg 1964, 238, suggests a post-964 date). Puttenham and Redessolham (from which Rodsall is descended; see below for an account of the rather complicated circumstances of their connection) have been claimed to contain the early habitative element hām (Dodgson 1973, 32), only things may not be as they seem. The latter is more likely to contain the Old English topographical term hamm, potentially as a reference to a defned "arable core" in an area of wood pasture and/or heath which acted as a focus for settlement (Roberts & Wrathmell 2002, 83-117). Puttenham’s remarkably late debut on record in 1199, meanwhile, might be explicable as the then-recent attribution of the name of the individual (presumably a member of the family who held the Hertfordshire manor of the same name; Graham 1957) tasked by the lordship of Bramley with the establishment of a new manor/estate centre as a successor to one at Redessolham around the start of the twelfth century (this is discussed in greater detail below and in Briggs forthcoming). One other facet of the parish’s place-names is worth highlighting. Gatwick in the far south of the parish is from Old English gat-wic, “farm specialising in goats” (cf. Fox 2008, 360) and bears comparison with Tigden (a feld-name frst recorded in the sixteenth century and now attached to a farm south of Puttenham village) which is probably from Old English *ticce-denu, “kid-goat valley”. Such names are usually seen in the context of “multiple estates”, interpreted as denoting settlements rendering particular products to an elitecontrolled estate centre. The Puttenham area could easily be seen as an outlying portion of such a polity centred on Eashing or Godalming, both recorded in the will of King Alfred (Sawyer 1507), but there is far more evidence for productive specialism being connected to developments in the economy and exchange in the mid-Anglo-Saxon centuries (e.g. Naylor 2004). Their relationship with a central place may hence have been to access a market, not to render tribute. Again, the place-name evidence points to the parochial area being neither heavily populated nor extensively cultivated in this period, instead playing host to a light scatter of dispersed settlements geared more towards pastoral farming and mixed grazing regimes. These may have given way to one geared around sheep from the twelfth century, transforming the wood pastures of the Puttenham Common area into the open heathland of historical records (parallel to this was the creation of the manorial sheep pasture recorded in three medieval inquisitions post mortem, equivalent to later felds named Sheephouse Close to the east of the Common: Currie 2001, 1, 26; note too Bird 2004, 77, for a specifc reference to the villa site at Hillbury in a discussion of Romanperiod heathland). Norman Conquest and Domesday Survey As mentioned already, I have come to believe Puttenham's failure to make an appearance by name in the Domesday Survey may well stem from its name being a later attribution to a new demesne centre of the early twelfth century, the successor to one whose name is spelled as Redessolham and Reddesolham in Domesday Book (Morris 1975, 5,2 and 5,3 respectively). The frst two elements of the place-name betray its connection to Rodsall. They come from Old English read-sol(h), “red muddy-place”, and may denote the proximity of the previously-mentioned hamm to iron oxide-stained pools and streams within the area of former common land known as The Marsh. It could be argued that Redessolham/Rodsall was not the most obvious location for the late Anglo-Saxon estate centre; medieval and post-medieval evidence shows that this land was far from being the only cultivatable land in the parochial area (and arguably nor was it the best). Indeed, there is no record of Romano-British pottery from the proposed area of the hamm, but the 4 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com random nature of the surface collection of ceramics from pretty much every fnd-spot in Puttenham parish means this cannot be taken to be conclusive of a post-Roman origin. One possibility is that Redessolham derived its seniority from comparative proximity to the Roman villa site at Hillbury, itself perhaps infuenced to remain on the ridge until the third century AD at least through association with the adjacent ramparted Late Iron Age settlement. Moreover, it seems a reasonable assumption that the hamm was the largest area of cultivated ground within the parish area in the mid to late Anglo-Saxon periods, making it an obvious, advantageous focus for settlement. An absence of topographical indicators to the contrary suggests that the demesne centre must be coincident with that of the present manor house. The exact age of Redessolham as an independent manorial entity is unknown, though a date in the Late Anglo-Saxon period (i.e. tenth or early eleventh century) would be consistent with what is known from elsewhere (e.g. Baxter & Blair 2005). Before considering its Domesday Book entry, it is necessary to look northwards to another possible pre-1066 estate within the parochial area, namely Shoelands. It emerges in historical record as a clearly-defned estate, implicitly not one of new creation. The placename is of considerable interest in this respect, being from the Old English compound scohland. Hart (1972, 11) proposed this identifed an estate geared towards the production of leather for footwear but the early record of arable farming in the southern half of the estate (SHC 2609/11/5/35 – see below), in conjunction with feld-name evidence, gives succor to the argument that it was a mixed arable-pastoral holding, the revenues from which were reserved for the procurement of footwear. Following Hart, the name is best explained as being connected to an ecclesiastical institution with an ongoing communal requirement to be shod. The most credible candidate for this is Winchester Cathedral, owner of the giant neighbouring estate of Farnham, to which a ten-hide holding at Bentley in Hampshire was appended at some point during the tenth century (Sawyer 1274; 382; 823). Here, too, a Late Anglo-Saxon origin arguably would seem most appropriate, despite Shoelands not being identifable among the three hidated holdings distinguished from the main Farnham estate in Domesday Book (Morris 1975, 3,1). Returning to Redessolham, its Domesday Book entry affords us our frst substantive view of the topography of the parochial area, though its quantifcations of the estate's arable, meadow and woodland resources are anything but straightforward (Morris 1975, 5,2). The assessed areas of land for one plough and two acres of meadow suggest a very modest arable component to the estate economy (the latter perhaps located in the foor of the Flashes valley rather than on the Wey foodplain, as the southernmost portion of the parish looks as if it was gained from Farnham/Elstead at some point after the tenth century, most probably in the twelfth – for a more detailed evaluation of the reasons for this change, see Briggs 2013). The measure of its woodland "at four pigs", representing an unspecifed proportion of the total herd, does little more than record the existence and setting of such pastoral activity. This is frustrating since woodland, wood pasture and heath pasture probably covered the majority of the estate, surrounding islands of cultivated land and settlements. The recorded population of three villan and four cottar families in 1086 is so small as to tempt their assignment to the handful of settlements within the later parish area with suitable Old English place-names, but that would be purely speculative exercise. A more solid connection can be made between the lower-ranking cottars and the medieval property name Cutte or, less frequently but more diagnostically, Cotte. This persists in the names Cutt Mill and Cutt Corner west of present-day Rodsall. It most likely represents Old English cot, “cottage”, in either a singular or plural form; it is unlikely to stem from the artifcial “cut” or channel associated with Cutt Mill as it does not feed the mill and hence there must be a question mark over its ability to infuence the coinage of the place-name (contra PNS, 210). Cotte/Cutte may represent a property on the site of one or more cottage inhabited by persons of cottar status, whose heavy demesne obligations would support the idea that they lived close to the estate centre. It site is unlikely to have been coterminous with Druids (earlier Cut Croft), for it is described in a deed of c1590 as ‘then newly builded’ (SHC LM/351/98/1) and blocks the lines of the routes that were contained by a series of hollow-ways immediately south-west of the property. Instead, the property 5 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com might be placed at Overponds Cottage, of unknown date (cf. Currie 2001, 2, 65-66) but in a suitable position at the edge of the hamm, which could well be equivalent to the inland of the pre-Conquest manor. In Surrey at least, Domesday Book entries have rarely been the subject of rigorous analysis to look beyond the obvious statements of fact. When this is undertaken in regards to Redessolham, it reveals telltale signs of lordly neglect that can be extrapolated to construct an explanation for the shift in primacy from Redessolham to Puttenham. The frst indicator is the absence of any demesne plough team. Redessolham may not have been a large or valuable property, but the absence of any testament of "in-house" demesne cultivation capability runs counter to the situation recorded in local manors of similar size and value. This correlates with the valuation of the estate at a static 40s., in contrast to the fuctuating but in general increasing values of the likes of Compton and Peper Harow across the Conquest period. Neither of these features may be an index of rapid decay, but they do infer stasis. This may be explained as the negative consequences of the post1066 limbo in ownership being perpetuated rather than reversed following the transfer of Redessolham and nearby Farncombe ‘to the Bramley revenue’ circa 1082 (Morris 1975, 5,3 and note 5,3). This seigneurial inaction (or even deliberate neglect) sealed Redessolham's fate, and sets the scene for the momentous changes of the following decades. “The Long Twelfth Century” The "long century" is a common period-defning device used in history and related felds, including the medieval period (notably Hansen & Wickham 2000; also Dyer 1992, 141, for a ‘long thirteenth century’ of c1180-1330). I have adopted this approach to can be used to defne a “long twelfth century” during which the Puttenham area underwent profoundly important but entirely undocumented developments. This can be established from two historical sources: Domesday Book, in view of the situation set out above, and a charter of the early thirteenth century (SHC 2609/11/5/35 - see Currie 2003, 273-74, for partial translation), a uniquely-insightful deed which names Puttenham as a parish (as well as hinting at it being a village) and Shoelands as a distinct estate. These sources set the temporal limits of the "long twelfth century" as 1087 and circa 1210 (to derive a median from the dating by Blair 1991, 60; Currie 2001, 1, 28, adopted virtually the same timeframe and for the same reasons in his suggested dating of Puttenham as a village). The key developments of this period – the formation of the manor, church and village of Puttenham – are topics covered in greater depth elsewhere (Briggs forthcoming) but a summary is necessary for the purposes of this review. The best dating evidence comes in the form of long, narrow ground-plan of the nave of Puttenham church. It is comparable with a group of structurally single-celled churches centred on the dip-slope of the North Downs in mid-Surrey of the later eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries (notably Ashtead, an identically-dimensioned building dateable to the years 1107x29: Blair 1991, 124-25). Three sherds of pottery known from the churchyard and its environs are of the same approximate date. Taken together, they might point to a foundation date of church and by extension manor in the very late eleventh or more credibly early twelfth century. There is, however, a complicating factor that potentially pushes the story further back into the eleventh century and earlier. This involves reading a 1442 reference to “the common feld called le Hyde” abutting the south-eastern portion of the medieval village as testimony to the former existence of a ‘hide farm’, an obscure type of holding often found in peripheral locations (Woods, 17, 247-48; Faith 1998). It may have existed as a (villan-occupied?) severalty within the Redessolham estate in 1086 and thereafter came to form an advantageously-sited pre-village - or more accurately premanorial - nucleus (cf. Jones & Page 2006, 87-89; the proposition is moreover a further reason to doubt the place-name Puttenham is of great local antiquity). Unfortunately, the combined body of evidence as it stands does not offer anything more than the slightest of suggestions for a nucleation of tenant homesteads coming into being during the twelfth century. An elliptical early thirteenth-century reference to "messuages… on the way out of Puttenham" (SHC 2609/11/5/35) can be interpreted as meaning the houses were at the edge of a nucleated cluster, but other interpretations are just as 6 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com convincing. The addition of the nave north aisle and south door during the second half of the twelfth century (McDowall 1968, 105) shows that the parish was willing and able to invest in the church building but does not prove that some of the congregation lived in an adjacent nucleated village. There is early evidence from the parish area for dispersed settlements, notably at “Wood” north of Shoelands (in existence by 1199; VCH, 55 note 53) and south-east of Puttenham village at “Hook”/Frollebury (frst recorded in 1235 - see below). Furthermore, there is reason to believe Church Croft, the name now attached to an area of recent woodland east of Puttenham Common but earlier that of a feld, was the site of the medieval parsonage and glebe prior to its relocation to due east of the church at the start of the sixteenth century. The histories of these properties, so far as they can be pieced together, indicate isolated settlements existed in Puttenham parish before as well as after the frst solid documentary evidence for nucleation at Puttenham village in the frst half of the ffteenth century (Briggs forthcoming). Nevertheless, there does seem to have been a reduction in the number of dispersed settlement sites in the later medieval period, which may not be inconsistent with the idea – as yet unsubstantiated by archaeology – of the growth of the nucleated village and the manors of Shoelands and Rodsall. One hitherto-unmentioned element that was part and parcel of the developments wrought during Puttenham's "long twelfth century", not to mention one of the most unexpected and important discoveries I have made over the past decade, was the inception of a second township or tithing within the medieval parish, centred on what had become known as Rodsall (identifed as such in 1310; Close Rolls, 333). Its association with the Anglo-Saxon estate centre was no accident; if the morphological clues preserved in a 1758 estate map (SHC 5294/23/1) are to be believed, a nucleated hamlet of three or four equally-sized tofts, arguably indicative of a planned grouping, was laid out over the site of the pre-Conquest manor. The township took in other properties, too: Purie (just to the south of the Rodsall hamlet), the above-mentioned Cutte/Cotte, and the watermill of which it was once part (Currie 2003, 278). The last is especially interesting in having no known direct connection with the manor of Puttenham until the seventeenth century, implying it was a peasant creation, not a lordly one (there being no other watercourse in the manor suitable for a watermill, Puttenham’s milling needs can only have been met by the windmill which once capped Frowsbury Hill on Puttenham Heath, known solely from a reference to the destruction of its foundations in 1817 - see Bierton 1990, 93). With at least six households within the township area, all of which perhaps of free tenure, Rodsall had the ‘critical mass’ of population and resources (Jones & Page 2006, 240) to make a go of operating as an entity distinct from the manor of Puttenham but not necessarily wholly independent from it - in 1340 it was recorded that the lordship received 103s. annually from free tenants, who would have lived in properties such as those in the township (see Dugmore 1972, 23-24; her belief that Rodsall was part of the manor of Puttenham and saw piecemeal encroachment is no longer sustainable). This fts with a growing body of scholarship that emphasizes the benefts of settlement dispersion over nucleation, while noting that the two forms could exist side by side (e.g. Williamson 2004); at Puttenham this is evident on a remarkably micro scale. The solitary unequivocal mention of Rodsall as a township can be understood as an under-representation of the medieval reality (as opposed to a short-lived existence as one) because it shared its name with the earliest-recorded subdivided feld in the parish, frst named in an indenture of 1393 (West Sussex Record Offce, Add Mss 3759). Rodsall Field appears again in the sixteenth century, when other documents reveal further felds in the Rodsall area were subdivided into portions cultivated by different holders (a pattern which was extinguished shortly after 1758, to judge from a note on the Rodsall estate map: SHC 5294/23/1). To judge by its name, Rodsall Field was the largest and/or most important of the subdivided felds, and the nearest thing the township had to a classic open feld (as opposed to “subdivided closes” of the sort noted by Williamson 2004, 106). Puttenham had its own set of open felds, superfcially of more regular arrangement but on closer inspection still a heterogenous group. There seem to have been three main open felds (or areas of open-feld cultivation): South Field, recalled in the name Suffeld Lane; High Field, hence Highfeld Lane, and fnally one on the Hog’s Back without a name common to all parts of it. More than was the case for Rodsall (where the feld-name Sart(s), from Old French assart, suggests small-scale several enclosure: Field 1993, 19), their creation 7 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com would have entailed extensive clearance and enclosure of former wood and heath. However, the 1442 reference to a ‘common feld called le Hyde’ noted earlier cannot be accommodated within the three-feld framework, and further records of the midseventeenth century suggest land in the vicinity of Hook Lane lay in a “Common Field” (e.g. SHC 1649/3/6). Whatever the exact number of subdivided felds, the way in which South Field, High Field and Rodsall Field abutted the main Puttenham demesne bloc, which incorporated Church Croft (the original glebe?), indicates a signifcant element of spatial planning. It is uncertain whether this stems from their being more or less coeval with the manor/church/village at Puttenham and hamlet at Rodsall, or from a later rearrangement, but neither could have been achieved without a dynamic overarching authority of the sort which had a hand in the resumption of demesne activity on a new site in the years after Domesday.3 Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries In the course of researching the above (and all the elements of the study I have been unable to work into this account), I have accumulated a sizeable corpus of documentary references that are later than the institutions they record, often for the frst time. Such termini ante quos are useful in their own right as contemporary records. Between 1199 and 1230, Robert de Barville occurs four times in various legal records which show him to have had both land and houses in Puttenham parish. He was granted the manor of Bramley in 1204 at a time when the lordship of Puttenham is obscure, and it is feasible that he held both around this time. If true, it makes him the most likely patron of the new east end of Puttenham church, generally held to have been erected around this time (McDowall 1968, 105). Two entries in the 1235 Surrey Eyre rolls mark the moment when a property hitherto known as ‘la Hoke’ (remembered in Hook Lane) was bought by the Frollebury family who subsequently leant their name to it (Meekings & Crook 1983, 326, 363-64; Briggs 2012b). The earliest direct references to Puttenham as a manor come from the 1240s, a decade in which the lordship was divided into two parts, one of which was gifted to Newark Priory (from which Puttenham Priory arose - see VCH, 53). Circa 1250, a salvo of fnes of mark the point at which the lords of Puttenham fnally divested themselves of the Shoelands estate, granting it to Selborne Priory (Currie 2003, 275-76; cf. Meekings 1960, 82). As documentary references begin to grow in number - though still are by no means abundant - so we can perceive the reality on the ground in fner detail; this is especially true of a clutch of transcribed thirteenth to ffteenth-century deeds pertaining to the Rodsall area (SHC G51/5/67/1-2). By the late thirteenth century moving into the fourteenth, according to measures ranging from the ecclesiastical Taxatio of 1291 (Astle et al 1802, 206) to the 1332 Lay Subsidy returns (Surrey Record Society 1922, 20), Puttenham looked no different from many other small Surrey parishes which only a little over two centuries had dwarfed it in terms of population and levels of agricultural development. This picture of growth and vitality can also be seen in improvements made to the church building, notably in the construction of the south transept in the frst half of the fourteenth century (McDowall 1968, 105). Conclusions So what has my research over the past decade revealed about both the prehistory and history of Puttenham? Across the centuries, indeed millennia, in question, it has gone beyond confrming that the parish area saw activity in every period (which was already evident in the entries in the Historic Environment Record, for example) to highlight the wider signifcance of particular monuments and objects. Certain times stand out for the quantity of material (archaeological and later written) deriving from them, notably the Iron Age-Roman transition of the frst century AD and the years 1199-1251, though in neither case is the information so profuse and detailed as to permit anything approaching a comprehensive picture of local life, society and environment from being formed. What is more, as has been demonstrated above, it is often the much less well evidenced years in between that bore witness to the most major changes, requiring the careful teasing out facts or probabilities from the most meagre of information. To answer the question I posed myself a decade ago, Puttenham did not appear in Domesday Book because it was part of 3 The medieval pottery sherds I have collected to date from the areas of the former open felds are slightly later than the equivalent assemblage from the gardens of Puttenham village (Steve Nelson, pers comm.), though this may refect that less time was spent in examining the ground and retrieving the material. 8 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com the estate of the manor of Redessolham at the time of the Survey. However, this statement obscures a much more complex reality – much like brief, functional nature of the Domesday Book entry that is its source – and an ongoing process, far from complete in 1086, that saw the reestablishment of a demesne centre at Puttenham (on the site of an existing settlement conceivably known by a different name) and the associated establishments of a church and parish, village and felds. In essence, the eastern half of the Redessolham estate (and in due course the parish of Puttenham) afforded a nearunique opportunity for lord and peasants to carve out a new “village zone” within an area of light, scattered settlement. All the present indications are that this was largely (and very possibly entirely) effected during the twelfth century, only these are limited in number and open to question. What is needed now is greater quantities of new data to substantiate (or disprove!) some or all of the above. In particular, pottery and other small artefacts may help in the dating of not just settlements but also associated feld systems and other areas of activity. A more complete understanding of the textual sources of the thirteenth century onwards would be helpful for the scope to identify the elements which can then be projected back into pre-historical years, alongside being able to verify whether current understanding of trends at the time they were written – not least the hints that Puttenham parish came through the Black Death and the other major crises of the mid-1300s more or less unscathed – are true or not. All in all, much accomplished but much still to do. Here’s to another decade of discoveries. PRIMARY SOURCES Surrey History Centre SHC 2609/11/5/35 Feoffment by Ralph de Faia to Robert de Barrevillʼ of land called ʻSolandʼ [Shoelands] in Puttenham SHC 1649/3/6 Article of agreement, 1 Feb 1651 SHC G51/5/67/1-2 Book of 'Parochial Papers' with loose enclosure including original court books, 1503-1807 SHC 5294/23/1 Map showing survey of 'Rodsall Manor Farm', Littling Farm, Godalming, and Priors Wood, Compton, for William Wyatt esq of Oxted, by John Ford [Fory] of Peper Harow, 1758 SHC LM/351/98/1 Assignment of terms of years, 28 Mar 1683 West Sussex Record Offce Add Mss 3759 Indenture - Demise, 25 March 1393 PRINTED SOURCES Astle, Thomas, Samuel Ayscough & A. Strahan, eds., Taxatio ecclesiastica Angliae at Walliae, auctoritate P. Nicholai IV, circa A.D. 1291 (London: Record Commission, 1802) Baxter, Stephen, & Blair, John, ‘Land tenure and royal patronage in the early English kingdom: a model and a case study’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 28 (2005), 19-46 Bierton, Graham, ‘to the Great Common...for a little spade exercise’, Surrey Archaeological Collections [SyAC], 80 (1990), 91-103 Bird, D. G., ‘The Romano-British period in Surrey’ in The Archaeology of Surrey to 1540, ed. by Joanna Bird & D. G. Bird (Guildford: SyAS, 1987), 165-96 Bird, David, Roman Surrey (Stroud: Tempus, 2004) Bird, David, Surrey Archaeological Research Framework 2006 (Kingston upon Thames & Guildford: Surrey County Council & Surrey Archaeological Society [SyAS], 2006) Blair, John, Early Medieval Surrey (Stroud & Guildford: Alan Sutton & SyAS, 1991) Bradley, Richard, & Elise Fraser, ‘Bronze Age barrows on the heathlands of southern England: construction, forms and interpretations’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 29.1 (2010), 15-33 Briggs, Rob, ʻSix Skeletons at Seven Ditchesʼ, SyAS Bulletin, 423 (October 2010), 6-10 9 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com Briggs, Rob, ‘“they would come and make a city here”: a decade of research into the origins of the village of Puttenham’, SyAS Bulletin, forthcoming Clark, A. J., & F. Nichols, ‘Romano-British farms south of the Hog’s Back’, SyAC, 57 (1960), 42-71 Currie, Christopher K., An archaeological and historical survey of Puttenham proposed Area of Special Historic Landscape Value (ASHLV), 3 volumes (unpublished report for Surrey County Council, 2001) Currie, Christopher K., ‘Historic fshpond sites at Puttenham, with a provisional discussion of Surrey fshponds’, SyAC, 90 (2003), 273-93 Dodgson, J. McN., ʻPlace-names from hām, distinguished from hamm names, in relation to the settlement of Kent, Surrey and Sussexʼ, Anglo-Saxon England, 2 (1973), 1-50 Drew, Gillian, Wanborough: From White Barrow to World War (Guildford: Peter Knee, 1993) Dugmore, Ruth, Puttenham Under the Hog’s Back (Chichester: Phillimore, 1972) Dyer, Christopher, ‘Dispersed Settlement in Medieval England: A case study of Pendock, Worcestershire’, Medieval Archaeology, 34 (1990), 97-121 Dyer, Christopher, ‘The hidden trade of the Middle Ages: evidence from the West Midlands of England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 18.2 (1992), 141-57 Faith, Rosamond, ‘Hides and Hyde Farms in Central and Southern England: A Preliminary Report’, Medieval Settlement Research Group Annual Report, 13 (1998), 33-38 Field, John, A History of English Field-Names (London: Longman, 1993) Finberg, H. P. R., The Early Charters of Wessex (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1964) Fox, Harold, ‘Butter place-names and transhumance’ in A Commodity of Good Names: Essays in honour of Margaret Gelling, ed. by O. J. Padel & David N. Parsons (Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2008), 352-64 Gabel, G., ‘St Catherine’s Hill: a Mesolithic Site near Guildford’, Research Volume of the SyAS, 3 (1976), 77-101 Gaffney, V., & M. Tingle, The Maddle Farm Project: An Integrated Survey of Prehistoric and Roman Landscapes on the Berkshire Downs, British Archaeological Reports [BAR] British Series, 200 (Oxford: BAR, 1989) Geake, Helen, The Use of Grave-Goods in Conversion-Period England, c.600 - c.850, BAR British Series, 261 (Oxford: BAR, 1997) Gover, J. E. B., A. Mawer & F. M. Stenton, The Place-Names of Surrey [PNS] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934) Graham, David, & Audrey Graham, ‘A Survey of Hillbury Camp, Puttenham Common’, SyAS Bulletin, 346 (2001), 8-10 Graham, Norman H., ‘The Puttenham family of Puttenham and Long Marston, Co. Herts and of Sherfeld, Co. Hants. Puttnam (and Putnam) of Penn, etc., Co. Bucks. A.D. 1086-1956: Part I’, Notes & Queries, 202 (1957), 185-89 Grinsell, Leslie V., ‘An Analysis and List of Surrey Barrows’, SyAC, 42 (1934), 26-60 Grinsell, L. V., ‘Puttenham - Barrow on the Hog’s Back’, SyAC, 60 (1963), 84 Hamilton, Sue, & John Manley, ‘Hillforts, Monumentality and Place: A Chronological and Topographic Review of First Millennium BC Hillforts of South-East England’, European Journal of Archaeology, 4.7 (2001), 7-42 Hansen, Inge Lyse, & Chris Wickham, eds., The Long Eighth Century: Production, Distribution and Demand (Leiden: Brill, 2000) 10 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com Hanworth, Rosamond, ‘The Iron Age in Surrey’ in The Archaeology of Surrey to 1540, ed. by Joanna Bird & D. G. Bird (Guildford: SyAS, 1987), 139-64 Hart, Cyril, ‘Shoelands’, Journal of the English Place-Name Society, 4 (1972), 6-11 Hodges, Richard, Wall-to-Wall History: The story of Roystone Grange (London: Duckworth, 1991) Hooke, Della, Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010) Hunt, Roger, Hidden Depths: An Archaeological Exploration of Surrey’s Past (Guildford: SyAS, 2002) Jones, Richard, & Mark Page, Medieval Villages in an English Landscape: Beginnings and Ends (Macclesfeld: Windgather, 2006) Lasham, Frank, ‘Camps, Tumuli, Earthworks, etc., in West Surrey’, SyAC, 12 (1895), 145-56 Long, Henry Lawes, Observations upon certain Roman roads and towns in the south of Britain (Farnham: Nichols & Sons, 1836) Maxwell Lyle, H. C., ed., Calendar of the Close Rolls of Edward II, Vol. 1: 1307-1313 [Close Rolls] (London: HMSO, 1892) McDowall, R. W., ‘The Church of St John the Baptist, Puttenham’, SyAC, 65 (1968), 105-110 Meekings, C. A. F., ‘The Early History of Sandon Hospital’, SyAC, 57 (1960), 75-84 Meekings, C. A. F., & David Crook, eds., The 1235 Surrey Eyre Rolls: Volume 2 - Text, Translation and Notes to Text (Guildford: Surrey Record Society, 1983) Morris, John, ed., Domesday Book, 3: Surrey (Chichester: Phillimore, 1975) Naylor, John, An Archaeology of Trade in Middle Saxon England, BAR British Series, 376 (Oxford: BAR, 2004) Poulton, Rob, ʻIron Age Surreyʼ in Aspects of Archaeology & History in Surrey: towards a research framework for the county, ed. by Jonathan Cotton, Glenys Crocker & Audrey Graham (Guildford: SyAS, 2004), 51-64 Redstone, Lilian, & H. E. Malden, ‘Puttenham’ in The Victoria History of the County of Surrey [VCH], 3, ed. by H. E. Malden (London: Constable, 1911), 52-58 Rippon, Stephen, ‘Landscapes in transition: the later Roman and early medieval periods’ in Landscape: the richest historical record, ed. by Della Hooke ([?] Birmingham: The Society for Landscape Studies, 2000), 47-61 Roberts, Brian K., & Stuart Wrathmell, Region and Place: A study of English rural settlement (London: English Heritage, 2002) Russell, J., The history of Guildford, the county-town of Surrey (Guildford: J. & S. Russell, 1801) Seager Thomas, Mike, ‘A re-contextualisation of the prehistoric pottery from the Surrey hillforts of Hascombe, Holmbury and Anstiebury’, SyAC, 95 (2010), 1-33 Semple, Sarah, ‘Burials and Political Boundaries in the Avebury Region, North Wiltshire’, AngloSaxon Studies in Archaeology and History, 12 (2003), 72-91 Surrey Record Society, Surrey Taxation Returns Fifteenths and Tenths: Part (A) - The 1332 Assessment (London: Roworth & Co., 1922) Tilley, Christopher, Interpreting Landscapes: Geologies, Topographies, Identities (Walnut Creek [CA]: Left Coast Press, 2012) 11 © Robert J S Briggs 2013 - http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com - email surreymedieval.blog@gmail.com Watts, Victor, ed., The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) White, Roger, Roman and Celtic Objects from Anglo-Saxon Graves: A catalogue and an interpretation of their use, BAR British Series, 191 (Oxford: BAR, 1988) Williams, David, ‘Green Lane, Wanborough: excavations at the Roman religious site 1999’, SyAC, 93 (2007), 149-265 Williamson, Tom, Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society, Environment (Macclesfeld: Windgather, 2004) Woods, Percy, Godalming Hundred’, unpublished MSS, 17 ONLINE SOURCES Briggs, Rob, ‘Update - Christopher Tilley and the signifcance of cross dykes’, Surrey Medieval [Briggs 2012a] http://surreymedieval.wordpress.com/work/six-skeletons-at-seven-ditches/updatechristopher-tilley-and-the-signifcance-of-cross-dykes/ Briggs, Rob, ‘Crossing boundaries – a request for examples’, Surrey Medieval [Briggs 2013] http://surreymedieval.fles.wordpress.com/2013/08/parochial-extensions-request-august-2013.pdf HER = Exploring Surrey’s Past, http://www.exploringsurreyspast.org.uk/ PAS = Portable Antiquties Scheme Database, http://fnds.org.uk/database Sawyer = The Electronic Sawyer, http://www.esawyer.org.uk/about/index.html TALK Briggs, Rob, ‘The place of Frowsbury in the history of Puttenham’, talk to the Puttenham & Wanborough History Society, 30th March 2012 [Briggs 2012b] 12