What is a deserted medieval village?

What a deserted medieval village is

A village usually consisted of houses on plots called tofts, with gardens or closes called crofts behind them, defined by banks and ditches and laid out along streets that now survive as hollow ways. Historic England's introduction to medieval settlements notes that most villages were established in the 9th and 10th centuries. Desertion had many causes, including population decline from the early 14th century, the conversion of arable land to sheep pasture in the 15th century, and later the clearance of villages to make parks; documentary evidence links few desertions directly to plague. A site with three or fewer inhabited houses is usually counted as deserted, and one with more as a shrunken village. In Wales, abandoned settlements of long huts and house platforms are recorded as deserted rural settlements.

How deserted medieval villages look on LiDAR

A deserted village shows as a pattern of rectangular platforms and banked plots on either side of one or more hollow ways, with the edge of the village marked where the ridge and furrow of its fields stops at headlands. A local relief model is the best view, because the earthworks are usually less than a metre high, and it shows them across a whole parish at once; sky-view factor shows the hollow ways and boundary ditches. Buildings, trees and recent disturbance can hide parts of the plan, and later farms often stand on part of the old village.

See LiDAR visualisations explained for what each method shows.

What can look like one

Post-medieval garden earthworks, paddocks, quarry pits, water-management earthworks and the sites of farms abandoned in recent centuries can look like a deserted village. Shrunken villages, where part of the settlement is still lived in, have the same earthworks on a smaller scale.

Protection

Many deserted medieval villages are scheduled monuments, protected in England by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979 and in Wales by the Historic Environment (Wales) Act 2023, and others are recorded in local Historic Environment Records.

Examples on the LiDAR

Where they are

Counties with the most deserted medieval villages that have a page here.

More examples