Travel and Communication in the Early Medieval Landscape of Wessex

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Digimap Case Study:
Travel and Communication in the Early Medieval Landscape of Wessex

Author

Alexander James Langlands

Title

Travel and Communication in the Early Medieval Landscape of Wessex

Date

Research work presently underway

Application Area

History and Landscape Archaeology

Application to other subject areas

Geography, Cultural Studies

Project Type

PhD thesis

Summary

Early Medieval (c.AD 700 to AD 1100) grants of land contain detailed clauses describing the boundaries of Anglo-Saxon estates. These clauses take the form of perambulations and individual landscape points are referred to as forming part of the boundary. Many of these landscape points can be located in the landscape of today and we are thus in a position, where the coverage of documentation is good, to make detailed reconstructions of the Early Medieval landscape. This project sets out to use this information to reconstruct aspects of the Anglo-Saxon network of travel and communication, to explore how the landscape was ‘sign-posted’ and finally, how change in the way differing groups used the communication network may have occurred throughout the period.

Datasets used

Historic Map Series:	County Series
Edition:	First Revision
Scale:	1:10,560
Source:	Digimap

Names of other data used:

Contour Data for digital terrain mapping
The corpus of Anglo-Saxon charters found at (www.aschart.kcl.ac.uk)
Translations of Anglo-Saxon boundary clauses found at: (www.langscape.org.uk)
Boundaryline (potentially)

Aims and Objectives

See summary.

Methodology

Firstly, the Old English boundary clause requires translation. The individual points that make up the boundary (e.g. ‘the hawk lynchet’, ‘the stone bridge’, ‘beggar’s cross’, ‘the old dyke’, ‘the army way’, ‘the meadow gate’, and so on) are then located – as best they can be – in the modern landscape via map analysis and occasional fieldwork. Historic Maps are key to this analysis as they describe the landscape as it was over 100 years ago and are critically thus closer to the landscape of the early medieval period.

Each individual point is assigned a National Grid reference and then entered into a Geographic Information System, along with Historic Map tiles, for analysis and manipulation. Landscape locations to do with travel and communication are extracted (such as ‘the army way’, ‘the stone bridge’ and ‘the meadow gate’), providing co-ordinates through which route ways pass. These routes are then inferred from Historic Map Data and can be drawn in to create a network of Anglo-Saxon lines of communication.

This network of streets, paths, lanes and ways is then explored in relation to the human geography of Anglo-Saxon Wessex to get a better understanding of how towns, cities, villages, manors, churches, assembly sites and other socio-cultural places related and communicated with each other.