Cities and towns -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- History, Local; Great Britain -- Social conditions; Villages -- Great Britain
5. Now look at some little sleepy country town, and you will see
much the same arrangement as in the village. The wide open space in
the middle, where the town pump stands, and where the market is held,
answers to the village green. Though this is often spoken of as the
Market Square, it is usually more like a triangle in shape than a
square.
6. The old houses round the market square are built very closely one
into the other, and with queer narrow alleys leading to houses behind
those in front; much in the same way as the houses are clustered round
the village green. Round the outskirts of the town, at the back of the
houses, are small green closes or paddocks. Beyond them are the larger
meadows and pastures; then the wide corn-lands and woods; and, not far
away, the heath or common.
7. The Saxon settlements, the "tuns" or "vills", whether they
afterwards became what we now understand as "towns" or "cities", or
remained what we call villages, had all the same chief features. Just
as ordinary school-rooms are all pretty much alike, because they all
have to serve much the same purpose, so the Saxon settlements were very
similar in their general plan.
8. There was the open place, where people met and the folk-moot was
held, surrounded by the houses of stone or wood, in which the people
lived. Around these lay the grass yards or common homestead; and,
beyond them, the arable and pasture lands, with patches of moorland and
forest.
9. But outside the actual "tun" there would be something connected with
the Saxon settlement which you would be sure to notice. After you had
passed the boundary to the tun, you would see no hedgerows, or walls,
dividing the land into fields. The arable land was one huge field.
Its position would depend, of course, upon the nature of the soil
and the lie of the land. You would not expect to find it down in the
water-meadows, through which the river flowed; it would be higher up,
out of the reach of floods; perhaps on the hillsides.
10. Then, you would see the huge field, ploughed in long strips, about
a furlong in length, that is, a "furrow long", and one or two perches
in breadth. Between the ploughed strips would be narrow unploughed
strips, on which, in places, brambles would grow. The heath-lands and
moorlands were uncultivated tracts, where rough timber and underwood
grew, which was cut and lopped by the people of the vill under certain
conditions. There were no formal spinneys[2], nor wide stretches of
old timber, such as we nowadays expect to see in a forest. In places
the forests contained old timber, and were thick with undergrowth, and
infested with wild animals, such as wolves and boars. The name =forest=
was often given to an uncultivated district, not much differing from a
rough common, where sheep, cattle, and swine could pick up a living.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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