![]() ![]() Other Iron Age tools included hoes, small sickles, and spades. Scratch plow, without coulter or mouldboard, from the Utrecht Psalter (c. ![]() ![]() 1 Trevor Rowley and John Wood (Deserted Villages) offer a “broad definition” of the village as “a group of families living in a collection of houses and having a sense of community.” 2 Jean Chapelot and Robert Fossier (The Village and House in the Middle Ages) identify the “characteristics that define village settlement” as “concentration of population, organization of land settlement within a confined area, communal buildings such as the church and the castle, permanent settlement based on buildings that continue in use, and…the presence of craftsmen.” 3 Permanence, diversification, organization, and community-these are key words and ideas that distinguish the village from more fleeting and less purposeful agricultural settlements. ![]() Edward Miller and John Hatcher (Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086-1343) acknowledge that “as soon as we ask what a village is we run into difficulties.” They conclude by asserting that the village differs from the mere hamlet in that “hamlets were often simply pioneering settlements established in the course of agricultural expansion,” their organization “simpler and more embryonic” than that of the true village. Historians, archeologists, and sociologists have had trouble separating it satisfactorily from hamlet or settlement. True, the village has not proved easy to define. Individual homesteads, temporary camps, slave-manned plantations, hamlets of a few (probably related) families, fortresses, walled cities-people lived in all of these, but rarely in what might be defined as a village. The first Neolithic agriculturists formed a peasant economy, as did their successors of the Bronze and Iron Ages and of the classical civilizations, but none of their societies was based so uniquely on the village. The closest Latin equivalent to “village” is vicus, used to designate a rural district or area.Ī distinctive and in its time an advanced form of community, the medieval village represented a new stage of the world’s oldest civilized society, the peasant economy. The English words “vill” and “village” derive from the Roman villa, the estate that was often the center of settlement in early medieval Europe. Their sense of common enterprise was expressed in their records by special terms: communitas villae, the community of the vill or village, or tota villata, the body of all the villagers. Together they formed an integrated whole, a permanent community organized for agricultural production. There they lived, there they labored, there they socialized, loved, married, brewed and drank ale, sinned, went to church, paid fines, had children in and out of wedlock, borrowed and lent money, tools, and grain, quarreled and fought, and got sick and died. The medieval village, in contrast, was the primary community to which its people belonged for all life’s purposes. The modern village is a place where its inhabitants live, but not necessarily or even probably where they work. In medieval Europe, as in most Third World countries today, the village sheltered the over-whelming majority of people. In modern Europe and America the village is home to only a fraction of the population. Socially, economically, and politically, it was a community. Their houses, barns, and sheds clustered at its center, while their plowed fields and grazing pastures and meadows surrounded it. Rather, its population consisted of the farmers themselves, the people who tilled the soil and herded the animals. Only incidentally was it the dwelling place of merchants or craftsmen. The medieval village was something different from either. The “old-fashioned village” of the American nineteenth century was more distinctive in function, supplying services of merchants and craftsmen to a circle of farm homesteads surrounding it. In the modern world the village is merely a very small town, often a metropolitan suburb, always very much a part of the world outside. The ancient and medieval village represented a new stage of the world’s oldest civilized society. Areial View of Chysauster Ancient Village / Photo by Fossick OU, Wikimedia Commons ![]()
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