Free The English Village Explained: Britain’s Living History by Trevor Yorke Page B

of the manor or abbot would have fish ponds created, a set of regular shaped pools linked together and fed by a stream. The earthworks of these are still common features on the ground and, like the moats which they were sometimes linked to, can indicate the presence of an important house, castle or abbey.

    FIG 6.15: Impressions in the ground around a village can have distinctive forms which indicate what they formerly were. These examples (not to scale) may give you a clue to some of those you can find (marl is a clay or lime dug out as a fertiliser) .
    Many ponds and waterways were also created as a result of industry dating back to the Middle Ages. The extraction of salt for preserving food, stone for building, clay for bricks and peat for burning in areas where wood was scarce, resulted in pits being left which would often fill with water, creating small ponds or in the most notable case, the Norfolk Broads. In places where the soil was porous the empty pits would remain grassed over and a scattering of them around villages today is the sign of a long since vanished local industry. Lead and coal had been dug out or mined since Roman times and groups or lines of what are known as bell pits, the remains of the top of the shafts dug to reach the seams, can be found mainly on moors and within woods in mining districts.

    FIG 6.16 BRILL, OXON: The pits around this hilltop post mill are the remains of medieval workings. Ponds or small cliffs can indicate where clay or stone was extracted before the 18th century when large-scale operations were dominant. (Local names like Tylers Green or Kiln Cottage can help to confirm what was being extracted). It is also worth looking at parish boundaries. For instance if a number of them converge on a pond, then this records the shared right of all these parishes to allow livestock to drink here and probably means the feature predates the laying down of these boundaries. In this case, as in many others, the ponds and pits could have been formed naturally by erosion or the actions of the last ice age .
GREENS
    Greens, to our modern minds, are an essential ingredient of the English village. These apparently ancient strips of common land are arenas for communal activities, fairs and sport and evoke great passions when their bounds are threatened. Yet the green we see today may only have been laid out in the 19th century for its ascetic value. The origins of a village green can be impossible to establish except in the cases where it was part of a planned extension, perhaps for a market or a completely new village. In other cases the village may have expanded to surround an existing piece of common land, with the settlement often given the name ‘End’ or ‘Green’, although the original village may have later contracted to leave just this isolated cluster of houses around it. Many villages never had a green and instead the churchyard was used for sports and fairs (until the 18th century when gravestones became common) and markets were even held within the church.
    In most 19th-century planned estatevillages, the green was seen as a centrepiece by the creators of the romantic composition, while in industrial settlements it was set out with communal activities and sports in mind. In existing villages a new piece of land may have been purchased or granted to the parish, often rectangular and perhaps more of a sports field than a traditional green. Unfortunately, many ancient greens were not only built upon in past centuries but were lost or greatly reduced in size when the parish was enclosed. Old maps and road names can sometimes help identify where this has happened.

    FIG 6.17: Greens are a quintessential part of our ideal village and a venue for sports. This example at Great Badminton, Glos, like many, though, was created in the 19th century as part of the extension of an estate village .

    FIG 6.18: Ancient greens at Askham, Cumbria (above) and Finchingfield, Essex (below). The buildings in