Peasant Perceptions of Landscape: Ewelme hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500–1650

The Term II thematic seminar series will be concerned with UK Archaeology in 2023. These will be hybrid events, with in-person attendance in Room 612 of the UCL Institute of Archaeology as well as a livestream (and recording) via MSTeams.

Abstract

How did ordinary medieval and early modern people experience and perceive their material environment and construct their identities in relation to the places where they lived? Taking as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture, the analysis explores these questions by drawing on a range of sources including above and below ground archaeology, legal depositions, and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, an attempt is made to write a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

UCL Institute of Archaeology & Archaeology South-East Research Seminars Programme | Term II, 2022-23

Mondays, 5pm 

• 9 January: Andy Margetts - Medieval Pastoralism: Lessons for our Landscape
• 16 January: Teresa Viera and Jim Stevenson - Drawn swords and the walking dead: the last Iron Age warriors of Britain?
• 23 January: Simon Stevens - The Stiances archaeological project: working with children, animals and the National Archive
• 30 January: Gabriel Moshenska - The Legend of Ea-Nasir: how a Babylonian businessman became an internet meme
• 6 February: Alice Duleba-Dowsett - 13,000 years of natural and human induced landscape change in the Wantsum Valley, Kent

[13 February: UCL Reading Week - no seminar]

• 20 February: Kris Lockyear - Community Geophysics: reflections on the first decade
• 27 February: Kayt Hawkins - A bottle for baby: some aspects of infant care in Roman Britain
• 6 March: Hayley Nicholls - A new lowland hillfort. Presenting the Late Bronze Age enclosed site at Madgwick Lane, Chichester 
• 13 March: Stuart Brookes - Peasant perceptions of landscape: Ewelme hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500–1650 
• 20 March: Anna Doherty - Saltworking at Pococks Field, Eastbourne (title tbc)

Series organisers: Andrew Gardner (andrew.gardner@ucl.ac.uk) and Louise Rayner (louise.rayner@ucl.ac.uk).

Non UCL-IoA/ASE participants should contact Jo Dullaghan (j.dullaghan@ucl.ac.uk) to be added to our events list to receive the MSTeams links.