First settled in late Saxon times, it was inhabited until the 17th Century and remained a separate parish until the early 19th Century when it was eventually incorporated in the parish if Tittleshall. Following a series of bad harvests, the difficulty of cultivating the heavy boulder clay soil eventually proved too much for the dwindling population. Its final stages of decay were recorded in an estate map of 1596 when only 3 or houses remained and the church tower had collapsed.

Godwick Manor
In 1585, in the middle of the deserted village, Sir Edward Coke, Chief Justice and Attorney General to Elizabeth I, built a fine brick manor house, having purchased the estate in 1580. The ruins of the house, which was E shaped with an impressive 2 storey porch and windows similar to those on the barn were pulled down in 1962. Its square outline can just be picked out as slight humps in the grass. It had a walled yard and entrance to the north, and around the hall a pattern of formal gardens and enclosures was laid out.

Together with his wife Bridget (d.1598), he is buried in TITTLESHALL CHURCH in the brick mausoleum where there is a remarkable series of monuments to the Coke family, including those to Robert Coke (d.1629); Thomas Coke, first Earl of Leicester (d.1759) who built Holkham Hall in north Norfolk; and Thomas Coke known as "Coke of Norfolk" as a result of his famous agricultural improvements. He died in 1842 and was the last Coke to be buried in Tittleshall.

A deserted village excavation in Yorkshire transformed our understanding of medieval peasant life, writes James Bond

Until about 50 years ago, we knew next to nothing about how most people lived their lives in the Middle Ages. Medieval history focused on the documents of the lords and masters. The bulk of the population, the rural peasantry, were regarded as beneath serious scholarly consideration - perhaps even historically unreachable, the evidence of their lives being lost for good.

The physical remains that survive in England of deserted medieval villages and abandoned `ridge and furrow' strip fields were simply unrecognised for what they were.

Numerous assumptions were nonetheless made about medieval rural life. Among them was the idea that village existence was relentlessly grim for most peasants, lived out in meagre hovels at barely a subsistence level.

Another assumption was that the basic geography of rural England - a network of nucleated villages surrounded by open fields - had remained more or less fixed since early Anglo-Saxon times. New village foundations were rare, as were reorganisations and desertions. Oh, how little we then knew.

The one excavation that, above all others, transformed our understanding of this period was the work which began in 1950 at Wharram Percy, a deserted village in the Yorkshire Wolds. Wharram was then little more than a field of humps and bumps surrounding a decaying church in a remote valley about a mile from the nearest metalled road. Few scholars paid it any attention.

There was one man, however, who saw its potential. Maurice Beresford had already begun his pioneering work on medieval landscape remains, identifying deserted villages and fields in the Midlands. He came to Wharram to prove his case once and for all. In 1952 he was joined as co-director by John Hurst. And so began a great research project that lasted 40 years in the field and revolutionised medieval and landscape archaeology.

One of John Hurst's catch-phrases during the excavations was `It's bound to rain' - regardless of how sunny and optimistic the weather forecast had been. A second catch-phrase was `Another first for Wharram'. With this phrase, at least, he was accurate. Wharram saw the first ever excavation of a medieval peasant house; the first complete excavation of a parish church; the first recovery of a large medieval population from a cemetery. So important are these remains that they are still the subject of study.

Clean living

Far from living in hovels, Wharram showed that peasants in a remote Yorkshire village in the high Middle Ages lived in long, spacious, well-built houses. These were kept meticulously clean - so clean that the floors became dished from regular sweeping. A level of sophistication in the detailing of these houses was implied by the discovery of latches and locks for doors, windows and furniture.

The excavations recovered numerous items of dress adornment - bronze buckles, strap ends and the like - and large numbers of coins. We learned, therefore, that the medieval countryside was not a subsistence economy but a monetary economy, in which the wealthier peasants had plenty of money to take to market to buy goods for the home.

Towards the end of the village's life in the early 16th century, houses had stone footings. Previously they were built of wood. The ephemeral nature of these timber remains, consisting of small post-holes and the delicate traces of wattle-and-daub walls, required an excavation record at an unprecedented level of detail. Every feature was mapped stone by stone, with the 3-D recording in situ of every find including pottery. Today this approach is commonplace; then it was new.

The effect of this detailed record was that early interpretations could be challenged decades later. At first, the constant replacement of wattle panels was interpreted to mean that earlier medieval houses were flimsy, and in need of constant rebuilding. Recent work by Stuart Wrathmell, however, has established that Wharram's houses were cruck buildings. The walls were not structural supports, and replacement of wattle panels implies repair rather than rebuilding. Wharram's timber houses, it seemed, were substantial and stood for two centuries or more.

It had been thought that early Saxon villages were planted in `virgin' landscape, and that plans changed little over subsequent centuries other than by outward expansion. Wharram showed this was not the case. Originally it was a dispersed settlement of Saxon farmsteads, at least three of which showed some continuity of occupation since Romano-British times. Wharram became a nucleated `village' only around the time of the Norman Conquest, with two parallel rows of tofts and crofts flanking a street-green.

At roughly the same time the ancient fields were reorganised into a regular open-field system. This pattern of late nucleation has since been identified, or postulated, for hundreds of English villages elsewhere.

New housing

At some time in the 13th century, Wharram was replanned - again, providing the first firm archaeological evidence for such a procedure. The earthworks had suggested a manorial compound at the north end of the village, but excavations revealed a second, abandoned 12th century manor house underneath a sequence of peasant houses - a complete surprise.

From the mid-14th century, when the village population had begun to shrink after the Black Death, some properties were amalgamated, and a new type of courtyard farm was built alongside the older longhouses. Far from being static and immutable, the medieval English village was revealed as having a history of constant change.

Wharram's redundant parish church provided an unprecedented opportunity for the total excavation of a church interior, including its vanished side aisles and former extended chancel, and over 700 burials from the churchyard. Few other churches have been studied in such detail.

It revealed what is now regarded as a classic sequence of English parish church development. A small timber Anglo-Saxon church was replaced in stone in the Norman period. It expanded with side aisles and a longer chancel in the 12th-13th centuries, and contracted again in the 15th century.

At first this growth and contraction was thought to reflect the fluctuating size of the village population. More recently that interpretation has been replaced, or supplemented, by one based on changing liturgical requirements. Side aisles were built to accommodate newly fashionable privately-endowed altars, while the extended chancel was needed for a more elaborate liturgy.

Human remains

The human remains from Wharram remain one of the largest lay medieval skeleton assemblages available for study. Many of the findings have been unsurprising - fractures were not always well set, tooth decay was common, and so on - but other discoveries have been more intriguing. A1995 study found the level of left-handedness at Wharram to be, at 16 per cent, twice the modern world average. This was said to suggest a `natural' level of left-handedness in a society without social pressure to favour the right. A study in 1997 indicated that Wharram's remote rural population may have eaten as much seafish as the citizens of York. That implied more regular contact with the outside world than expected.

Wharram Percy will always be regarded as a classic site for medieval archaeology. Perhaps a measure of the achievement is that the village site itself was taken into state guardianship in 1974, and is now preserved for public enjoyment.

James Bond is a freelance landscape archaeologist based in Somerset. He worked at Wharram Percy in 1968

Taken from British Archaeology ISSN 1357-4442 Editor: Simon Denison Issue no 52, April 2000

Wharram Percy - What Happened To the Village?

He held this land on the second of March 1489 when those messuages were laid waste and thrown down, and lands formerly used for arable he turned over to pasture for animals, so three ploughs are now out of use there, and eighteen people who used to work on that land and earn their living there and who dwelled in the houses have gone away to take to the roads in their misery, and to seek their bread elsewhere and so are led into idleness.

From Cardinal Wolsey's Commission of Inquiry -- 1517

It seems that villages -- and villagers -- have always disappeared in the Middle Ages in England. West Stowe, an Anglo-Saxon village, was abandoned after 250 years of occupancy for no apparent reason. There are other reasons. In the Doomsday Book (c. 1086) over 1/3 of all the villages in Yorkshire are listed as "waste". This was probably the result of constant Viking raids; more likely it was produced by the "Harrowing of the North" by William the Conqueror's armies in 1069 and 1070.

Building New Forest in Hampshire depopulated a number of villages; establishing the Marcher Castles on the Welsh border also destroyed a few villages. In the 12th and 13th c. as the population rose and more land was brought under the plough; many new villages were established but could not survive and were somewhat later abandoned.

In the 14th c. raids by Scottish bands destroyed a number of villages in the North; indeed, Thixendale -- a neighboring village to Wharram Percy -- was burned by Scottish raiders but Wharram was left untouched. Also, in the 14th c. it was long thought that if any villages had been depopulated it was the Black Death that did so. As a matter of fact, very few villages were destroyed by that plague.

So, what was it that depopulated the villages?

In a word --sheep!

By the 15th c. economic conditions had changed to the point where landlords could make more money by turning previously ploughed land into pasture for sheep. Those living on the land were driven from it. It was doubted in the early part of this century that there were any "deserted" villages. Research -- begun at Wharram Percy -- has shown, however, that well over 3000 villages were depopulated!

There are some powerful contemporary statements about what was happening to English peasants driven from their homes to wander the roads looking for shelter and work. One of the most powerful of these statements comes in Book I of Sir Thomas More's Utopia:

"Your sheep which are usually so tame and so cheaply fed, begin now, according to report, to be so greedy and wild that they devour human beings themselves and devastate and depopulate fields, houses, and towns. In all those parts of the realm where the finest and therefore costliest wool is produced, there are noblemen, gentlemen, and even some abbots, though otherwise holy men, who are not satisfied with the annual revenues and profits which their predecessors used to derive from their estates. They are not content, by leading and idle and sumptuous life, to do no good to their country; they must also do it positive harm. They leave no ground to be tilled; they enclose every bit of land for pasture; they pull down houses and destroy towns, leaving only a church to pen the sheep in. And, as if enough English land were not wasted on ranges and preserves of game, those good fellows turn all human habitations and all cultivated land into a wilderness.

Consequently, in order that one insatiable glutton and accursed plague of his native land may join field to field and surround many thousand acres with one fence, tenants are evicted. Some of them, either circumvented by fraud or overwhelmed by violence, are stripped even of their own property, or else wearied by unjust acts, are driven to sell. By hook or by crook the poor wretches are compelled to leave their homes -- men and women, husbands and wives, orphans and widows, parents with little children and a household not rich but numerous, since farm work requires many hands. Away they must go, I say, from the only homes familiar and known to them, and they find no shelter to go to. All their household goods which would not fetch a great price if could wait for a purchaser, since they must be thrust out, they sell for a trifle.

After they have soon spent that trifle in wandering from place to place what remains for them but to steal and be hanged -- justly, you may say! -- or to wander and beg. And yet even in the latter case they are cast into prison as vagrants for going about idle when, though they most eagerly offer their labor, there is no one to hire them. For there is no farm work, to which they have been trained, to be had, when there is no land for plowing left. A single shepherd or herdsman is sufficient for grazing livestock on that land for whose cultivation many hands were once required to make it raise crops.

Notice More's concern with the following:

• The increasing importance of sheep to the detriment of humans occupying the land.
• The greed of the landlords.
• What happened to the villages.
• What happened to the villagers particularly the rise in crime.
• The resulting employment of a single shepherd where once dozens labored.

There are other illustrative quotes; they say the same things. For example, Shakespeare includes these lines in Pericles:

Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones: I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as a whale. A' plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all in a mouthful; such whales have I heard on i' the land, who never leave gaping till they've swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells and all. Pericles, Act II, 1, 31-38

An Act of 1489 made it an offense to convert open fields to pasture if it involved the removal of smallholdings over 20 acres. The preamble shows the concern of the government:

Great inconveniencies daily doth increase by desolation and pulling down and wilfull waste of houses and Towns within his [i.e., the King's] realm, and laying to pasture lands which customarily have been used in tillage, whereby idleness -- ground and beginning of all mischiefs -- daily doth increase, for where in some Towns two hundred persons were occupied and lived by their lawful labours, now be there occupied 2 or 3 herdsmen and the residue fallen in idleness; the husbandry, which is one of the greatest commodities of this realm, is greatly decayed; churches destroyed; the service of God withdrawn; the bodies there buried not prayed for; the patron and curate wronged; the defense of this land against our enemies outwards feebled and impaired; to the great displeasure of God, to the subversion of policy and good rule of this land.

The most idealized statement about peasant life and its destruction comes, of course, from Oliver Goldsmith's poem The Deserted Village. In the poem, Goldsmith mourns the loss of peasant values and, as an analog, the loss of those values in England itself.

Goldsmith attacks the landowners as being blind to the poverty they are creating:

The man of wealth and pride, Takes up a space that many poor supplied; Space for his lake, his park's extended bounds, Space for his horses, equipage, and hounds; That robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth Has robbed the neighboring fields of half their growth; His seat, where solitary sports are seen, Indignant spurns the cottage from the green.

Where then, ah where, shall Poverty reside, To 'scape the pressure of contiguous Pride? If to some common's fenceless limits strayed, He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade, Those fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide, And even the bare-worn common is denied. If to the city sped -- What waits him there? To see the profusion that he must not share; To see ten thousand baneful arts combined To pamper luxury, and thin mankind; To see those joys the sons of pleasure know, Extorted from his fellow creature's woe. Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade, There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here, while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign, Here, richly decked admits the gorgeous train; Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no troubles e'er annoy! Sure these denote one universal joy! Are these thy serious thoughts? -- Ah, turn thine eyes Where the poor houseless shivering female lies. She once, perhaps, in village plenty blest, Has wept at tales of innocence distressed; Her modest looks the cottage might adorn, Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn; Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled, Near her betrayer's door she lays her head, And pinced with cold, and shrinking from the shower, With heavy heart deplores the luckless hour, When idly first, ambitious of the town, She left her wheel and robes of country brown.

Notice that Goldsmith creates one of the most powerful symbols in the poem in the peasant woman now forced into the city and a life of sin. While the poem is late -- 1770 -- it tells the old tale: greed and economics care little for people's lives. Finally, to return to Wharram Percy. It was finally depopulated completely in the early decades of the 16th century. What was once a thriving village of 150 people was reduced to a shepherd family living in the valley in a small house just north of the church. The only other person living there would have been the parish priest.

BY Ken Tompkins (ken@odin.stockton.edu)

For more information about Wharram Percy take a look at
History Today - The lost village of Wharram Percy, Yorkshire.
Author: Christopher Dyer Issue: Sept, 1998

Or perhaps the best site on the subject
Wharram Percy, The Lost Medieval Village by Ken Tompkins

Book List:
Allison, K J A 1970 Deserted Villages (Macmillan)
Beresford, M 1984 The Lost Villages of England (Lutterworth)
Beresford, M & Hurst, J 1989 Deserted Medieval Villages (Alan Sutton)
Beresford, M & Hurst, J 1990 Wharram Percy (Batsford/English Heritage)
Davison, Alan, Deserted Villages in Norfolk (Poppyland)

Fryde, Professor E B , 1996 Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England, c. 1380-c. 1525 (chapter 12) (Alan Sutton)