"Villages are an integral part of the rural landscapes of the British Isles: they form the core of an idealised view of what rural life should be.

"They result from small groups of people living together, and they were once a community of effort, based on the land, and demonstrably close to the cycle of birth, procreation and death seen in vegetation, beasts and man himself.

"Nevertheless, the fascination of villages derives from the fact that we know them to be old. A. A. Milne expressed this vividly:

The study of village morphology is about learning "to understand village plans, how the varied parts of villages, farmsteads, cottages, great houses and churches, property divides, open greens, roads and footways, fit together and interrelate.

"While the last two or three decades have indeed seen significant advances in our understanding of the origins and development of plans, much truth remains in Maitland's view, expressed in 1897, that 'the science of village morphology is still very young'.

"Individual plans can be classified and studied, demonstrat[ing] how different parts of Britain possess different types of plans and assess[ing] some of the processes which have generated, altered and destroyed these."

He states that "The function of most villages was to serve as home bases for mixed farming communities." but that "when writing about settlement it is difficult to strike a happy mean between general everyday terms, town, village, hamlet or farmstead, and more precise usages.

"Not only are there size variations which give a rough and ready way of distinguishing between them, there are also legal and functional differences between a village and a town and between a hamlet and a village. Nevertheless, in practical terms all grade imperceptibly into each other!

"Even at a single point in time it is difficult to be absolutely precise, while within the context of 1000 years no single definition can ever be wholly satisfactory.

"In a context in which single farmsteads can expand to become villages and then contract to hamlet size it is wise to avoid the spurious accuracy of contrived definitions.

Professor Roberts expands upon the problems faced when attempting to pin down specific definitions of terms spanning several centuries. 'Farm' for example "usually means the farmstead (i.e. the house and buildings) and the associated lands, however the word farm, used in a seventeenth-century Northumberland context, implies a fiscal taxable, unit.

"In any study of settlement interest extends from the individual dwelling-house and associated outbuildings and the clusters created by larger groupings, to the patterns, the overall distribution of individual forms within the landscape, be these farmsteads, hamlets, villages or, of course, towns.

"At each scale of study different problems appear although the broad objectives of enquiry remain the same: to determine what combinations of natural, cultural and economic factors create each particular state of affairs."

Some initial questions worth consideration are: Why are some patterns regular and others random or linear? Why are some patterns dominated by single farmsteads while other regions are dominated by villages with dwellings in streets or lanes?

"[A] large size might indicate success, a small size an absence of opportunities: the appearance of similar plans in widely separated regions might suggest the presence of 'village ideas', generalised views of what a 'village ought to be'.

"Settlement has experienced continuous development over thousands of years, and our ability to disentangle what actually occurred is inevitably inseparable from the nature of the evidence itself.

"Domesday Book, the great survey of the realm compiled in 1085-86 on the orders of William the Conqueror, contains brief word pictures of many thousands of places.

But, as he points out "we are faced with problems of the meanings of words, and the nature of our expectations concerning what ought to be present.

With regard to tracing the development of a settlement he shows that there are four separate chronologies that should be investigated:

• 1. Absolute chronology
  ...[I]f we could completely excavate every village throughout a region, date the earliest occupation of each and every site, we could identify an "absolute chronology". Of course, this is impossible, so that the concept is only a useful baseline from which to think about developments. Each excavation gives a small window through which to glimpse this real sequence, and the more we dig the more complex this chronology becomes.

• 2. Place-names
  Place names have been commonly used as indicators of settlement development, and it is true that relatively early and relatively late names can be identified. Nevertheless, it must be remembered that the documents which tell us of the earliest-place names are often largely concerned with the most important places, indeed the act of documentation may have helped name fixation. There is in practice no reason why the oldest name type should necessarily be attached to the oldest settlement. It often is, there is no doubt, but time changes all, and we must be careful in our assumptions.

• 3. Chronology of the visible landscape
  The objects found in the landscape, be these living villages, fossil fields, roads or archaeological sites undoubtedly do date from various periods: thus, one village plan may be new, created by the landowner in the eighteenth century, while another plan may be of medieval origin. The oldest visible i.e. surviving, plan may belong to a type that was founded very late, perhaps in a marginal area and have thus experienced less change than the settlements in more favoured parts, where replanning has taken place.

• 4. Tenurial/Fiscal chronology
  This introduces complex ideas: the rents and services found in early records normally vary in character from place to place, and often some are clearly older than others. The general lesson here is that apparent simplicity of settlement development should always be treated with caution, for complexity is indisputably the most normal condition!

With regard to the practicalities of research he has this to say:

"Ideally the minimum working scale adopted should be the 25 inch to the mile (1 : 2500) Ordnance Survey maps. Even at this scale, however, a single engraved line represents approximately 0.75m on the ground. The 1 : 2500 maps show in great detail the boundaries and buildings within each settlement. One problem is that the number of sheet lines bisecting villages is high at this scale. On the other hand 6 inch to the mile, 1 : 10 560, maps are more widely available and usually contain good detail (often being photo reductions from 1 : 2500 plans). A good working compromise would be to enlarge the 6inch map twice giving a scale of around 1 : 5000."

First Edition 6-inch and 25-inch to the mile maps for England and Wales range in date between 1854 and 1889, Second edition maps fall between 1891 and 1914 Second Revision series (1904-24) are also available.

It is vital not only to keep in mind the scale of the map but also the date at which it was drawn and we are warned that Ordnance Survey maps are not wholly error free such mistakes being simply one of the "inevitable hazards of cartography".

Estate maps (some from as early as the 16th Century) can also be used but as with all comparisons all maps must be should be brought to the same scale.

This usually involves transcription.

Having decided on the scale of the series you wish to compare (based upon one of the maps in that series) first identify primary points where the details of the two maps coincide; then add primary lines and finally insert all the detail into a redrawing at the new scale.

Professor Roberts tells us "All early surveys will contain slight variations in both angular and linear measurements sometimes to such a degree that they could be called errors".

This is why you are advised to transcribe rather than rely on the enlargement/reduction capabilities of a photocopier.

"Inevitably transcription often involves a measure of generalisation: sometimes the detail of an earlier map must be modified. This is no more than normal map-making practice. Buildings pose particular problems, and the splendid perspective sketches of many early maps are reduced to simple block outlines, subjectively scales.

"It is usually unnecessary to undertake a series of careful measurements to fit in detail where there is a non-correspondence between parts of earlier and later maps. In a research enquiry focusing upon one village this would be necessary [but within the limitations of a more wide ranging study encompassing several villages] the skill of hand and eye is judged adequate.

"...[S]cale comparison, the identification of what is large, what is small and what is equal is essential to an understanding of settlements". In this way he was able to distinguish interesting characteristics can be such as the fact that County Durham villages are physically small compared with those of the Midlands or South-west.

"Our perceptions of the succession of landscapes present in the past are not only filtered through our sources, but also through our attitudes and objectives. What are we trying to prove and why? What questions do we feel should be asked?

"Settlements are a by-product of a complex of economic activity involving both rural and industrial and commercial elements: above all the mainspring of population with all that this implies in social and economic diversity must intrude into our attention.

For each map studied the physical aspects of the settlement should be listed: the buildings, farmhouses and their services, cottages and houses, manor-houses and churches, sit upon a site, the area they and their associated enclosures cover.

"With most English villages this occupation seems permanent and certain but settlements can move and of course in many parts of the world this movement can be periodic, with seasonal shifts.

"A group of villages associated within a region constitute a pattern while the relationships each village possesses to both the surrounding settlements and the physical environment are covered by the idea of situation. Size, the number of structures, the dimensions of the settlement and the number of persons present, and the ground plan, the physical layout of the associated features making a village, complete the picture.

"Once again these only represent part of reality, for they are paralleled by socio-economic structures, kin groupings and social arrangements, variations in prosperity and tenure, types of lifestyle and attitudes to the community.

"It is important to understand that in times past there was never any certainty concerning the future, and what we see, looking back, as a logical and continuous evolution is false. At any stage there were a host of possibilities, for expansion and destruction, for success and failure. Decisions by individuals or communities were always taken in the context of a short-term view of what they believed might happen!

"...[E]ach generation inherits a landscape, much as an individual family might inherit a house, and each generation uses that property, changing it, adapting it to new needs, new demands, so passing it through a filter. The inherited landscape, the inherited village, the inherited house, will contain features, some of which are relatively old, some of which are relatively new, and adding some completely new elements and changing or destroying some old ones, each generation bequeaths the present to the future.

"Sometimes change can be catastrophic or cataclysmic, but it is worth reflecting that even the horrors of twentieth-century war fail[ed] to destroy everything which existed before: the new foundations normally grow from the old, indeed, in all human affairs, as lifetimes slowly pass, some continuity is more usual. These two perspectives, continuity and cataclysm, permeate thinking about the development of rural settlements, and as is so often the case, elements of both are invariably present in any situation!

Coming Soon - Part 2: Practical Study Methods