The South Oxfordshire Project: Perceptions of Landscape, Settlement and Society, c.500-1650

As part of the VCH’s work on Ewelme Hundred, VCH Oxfordshire and Oxford University’s History Faculty are running a one-year pilot project on landscape history in south Oxfordshire, with funding from the John Fell Fund in partnership with the VCH Oxfordshire Trust. The pilot will run from April 2011 to March 2012.

This interdisciplinary history/archaeology project is an exciting opportunity for the Faculty to enhance its outreach in the county, and for the VCH to extend its active involvement in landscape archaeology, building on previous highly successful work with the South Oxfordshire Archaeological Group (SOAG) and Reading University in Bix, near Henley. Partner organisations include the Medieval Settlement Research Group (MSRG) and Oxford Archaeology (OA).

The Pilot

The pilot project, led by Dr Stephen Mileson of the Oxfordshire VCH, will focus on the parish of Ewelme and include neighbouring Benson, which was an important royal estate centre in the later Anglo-Saxon period. It is hoped that the pilot will lead to further funding for a major four-year research programme, investigating how inhabitants perceived and shaped their environment and landscape across Ewelme hundred (fourteen ancient parishes covering over 10,000 hectares) from the early Middle Ages to the seventeenth century. The area spans two distinct landscapes: the clay vale with its villages and open fields north of the scarp, and further south the Chiltern uplands, with their dispersed settlements, small fields and extensive woodland. Ewelme itself provides an excellent starting point, since it is located on the border of these two landscapes and includes elements of both. The parish includes Roman and early Anglo-Saxon settlement, as well as the remains of the nationally important fifteenth-century manor house of William de la Pole and Alice Chaucer.

Follow On

The pilot project will greatly increase our understanding of medieval settlement, economy and society in Ewelme and elsewhere in south Oxfordshire, and widen participation in community archaeology. The proposed follow-on project would build on this work, and has potential to transform our knowledge of the way inhabitants constructed their identities and understood the world in relation to the places in which they lived. It would seek to make a major contribution to landscape history and to medieval social history, in particular by testing recent theories about medieval perceptions of landscape and social space. Study of the area's later development should cast light on settlement desertion, and on the long-term influence of medieval agrarian organisation on more recent periods.

Activities 2011-12

The fieldwork programme for 2011-12 includes archaeological fieldwalking, geophysics and test-pitting. Volunteers are sought for fieldwalking and other activities, and basic training will be provided. There may also be opportunities for local groups and others to become involved in geophysics or small-scale excavation, or for advanced university students and their tutors to organise related fieldwork and theses. Anyone interested in taking part should contact Stephen Mileson at the following address: stephen.mileson@history.ox.ac.uk

Updates on the project and its findings will be posted here at regular intervals.