Anglo-Saxon villagers cultivated their crops by strip farming. In later years open fields provided the villagers with their sustenance, and also helped to transform the shape of ancient places. Other trades were important in those years. Anglo-Saxon Hallaton, for example, prospered on iron-working; today, Hallaton is Leicestershire's loveliest village, and in the parish church you can see Saxon coffin lids. Religion evidently played its part in the foundation of many an English village: Wherwell in Hampshire grew around a nunnery founded in 986; Mevagissey in Cornwall derives is name from two Cornish saints, Mews and Ida.

Many a Saxon church still stands. The descendants of these first worshippers, as they grew more wealthy, improved what they

With the rise of Methodism, chapels were built to rival the parish church; one of the most interesting is the octagonal chapel of Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. Another example, built in 1839, graces the end of the High Street of Elham in Kent. Other reminiscences of past times in these English villages include tithe barns, such as that at Cerne Abbas in Dorset. They complement remains like the former Benedictine abbey, built in the tenth century at Cerne Abbas, the twelfth-century ruined Torre Abbey at Cockington in Devon, and splendid Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, which was founded by the Countess of Salisbury in 1232.

Historians have identified four major types of English village. The first group centres on a green or square (created often to accommodate the local market). The second comprises vilages which basically stretch along a single street (albeit with a few alleyways sometimes escaping to one or other side). A third group consists of villages which seem to have no plan at all. Finally, there are villages deliberately planned, sometimes by architects whose names we know. Many of these last date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, designed sometimes to house the workers of a great estate.

One more characteristic feature of the English village is the school. These churches and schools sometimes produced geniuses, such as John Bunyan, who was born at Elstow in Bedfordshire. Many village schools were founded out of the munificence of local worthies, such as Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, who in 1585 endowed the local school in his birthplace, Hawkshead. So were charitable almshouses, such as that at Linton-in-Craven, founded by Richard Fountaine for six poor women, and the almshouses of 1684 built by John Brabin in Chipping, Lancashire.

CHESTNUT TREES and a fast-flowing brook lend immediate charm to this village. 'Chipping' in old English means market, and in all probability around a market this village developed. Then in the seventeenth century Chipping began to prosper from the wool trade, maintained by the fleeces of the sheep which grazed on the Bowland Fells. In consequence many of the vilage's finest buildings also date from the seventeenth century.

Undoubtedly, Chipping's most generous benefactor was the seventeenth-century dyer and cloth merchant, John Brabin.

Although the church, dedicated to St. Bartholomew, was founded in 597, its present tower dates from the mid fifteenth century and the rest (restored in 1873) from 1506. It is home to some of the local traditional spindle backed chairs, while stained-glass windows commemorate recent celebrated practitioners of this art. Buried in the chancel is The Rev. John King, who was vicar here from 1622 to 1672 and survived all the religious vicissitudes of that turbulent era.

OCCUPYING a dramatic site in the Lake District, Hawkshead looks out to Esthwaite Water, which laps the southern tip of the village; the hills of Grizedale Forest also run southwards. The village is roughly halfway between Windermere and Coniston Water. Walk the mile-long footpath whih leads west from the village to Hawkshead Hill for magnificent views of the surrounding mountains.