Making a living on the Severn Vale: the invisible potters of Domesday

When Domesday Book was compiled in 1086 following the Norman Conquest, it was to assess the value of William the Conqueror’s new kingdom. Land holdings were listed, but of the potters who produced the ceramics used across England only three groups were recorded, one of which was at Haresfield, Gloucestershire, a parish spanning the Cotswold uplands and the Severn Vale clays. In 2019, the construction of a business park on the Vale afforded the opportunity to excavate a small part of this historic parish, where researchers have long sought evidence for the medieval kilns. The developers (St Modwen Ltd) funded a multi-disciplinary approach, combining archaeology, radiocarbon dating, and detailed study of finds and environmental evidence, with documentary and landscape research, allowing us to imagine what life might have been like in ancient Haresfield.

The results indicate that occupation at the site began when a farmstead was established c. AD 1000. This was probably one of several farms dispersed around Haresfield beyond the village main street, occupying a wood-pasture landscape, with grazing for cattle interspersed with valuable woodland where pigs foraged and cattle fed on beech leaves. Sheep were grazed on the Cotswolds above, adding manure to arable fields. Previously unrecorded, this is one of only a handful of late pre-Conquest dispersed settlements to have been excavated nationally. Its significance is enhanced because close study of the pottery assemblage has revealed that almost every sherd is in a locally produced ware with few having been used, indicating that this was close to the site of one of the kilns mentioned in Domesday. Although no kiln structure was found, this may be because clamp kilns had been used: essentially above-ground bonfires, which leave little trace archaeologically.

The farmstead was probably a family-run farm with parents and two or three children, and perhaps grandparents in a separate dwelling. They were probably villani: peasants who were legally free and held land as tenants of a manor, to whom they owed dues. Here, it seems that they supplemented their farming income by making pottery, no doubt with other commodities such as wool, cheese and beer, all of which could have been sold at nearby Gloucester.

Selling at markets or to traders would have generated cash to pay labourers and to purchase necessities, such as building timber and clothing, and luxuries such as fish; also to attend entertainments in the village or city, and to pay dues including, for potters, a clay rent to the local lord. Their diet included cereals, some meat, and fruit and vegetables from a kitchen garden. Rather than being the downtrodden peasants of popular imagination, villans were the middling rung of peasant society, engaging in village life which would have revolved around the church, festivals, fundraising ales (where villagers raised money for the poor, for church building, etc), and the resolution of disputes in the courts.

Not all of Haresfield’s peasants were so fortunate: the Domesday entry lists four servi; landless slaves. These probably worked the lord’s demesne farm, but some villans used servi, who were relatively numerous in Gloucestershire, slavery continuing as a legal concept in England until the 12th century.

The farmers here survived the Conquest, adapting the style of their pottery to the tastes of their colonisers. The farm was to last another century or so but was abandoned around 1150–1200, after which the site lay within open (arable) fields, one of which contained a windmill. The ditch surrounding this mill survived and lay within a field later mapped as ‘Windmill Leaze’. The windmill was built at around the same time that major changes were occurring within Haresfield: within the village centre a manor house was built for one of the lords, and much of the church dates to this time too. Like the manor house, the windmill was surrounded by a moat, which provided security but was also medieval shorthand for an elite lifestyle. Elsewhere, parts of the parish were imparked, allowing deer hunting for the lords. Together with the church, the windmill would have been the tallest building in this low-lying part of the parish, but in contrast to churches, mills were often located  (as here) on the fringes of villages within open fields, and sometimes attracted anti-social behaviour including prostitution and violence, the latter arising from suspicions over the integrity of millers such as the one in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

It is tempting to see the abandonment of the farmstead as a forcible eviction by a lord seeking to maximise returns on the land. However, peasants were dynamic, adaptable and, certainly by the High Middle Ages, capable of taking on lords in court cases where their peasant neighbours were amongst the jurors. It is possible that the last occupants saw an opportunity, selling the land for redevelopment before moving elsewhere within the village or beyond. Either way, the remains of their farm lay buried and forgotten beneath the soil until new landowners selected the site for its latest redevelopment.

A full report is available at https://reports.cotswoldarchaeology.co.uk/ (report CR0297_1) and a summary will be published in the journal Medieval Archaeology.

Jon Hart