Sherwood Forest: Settlement, Industry and Social Dynamics from 400 to 1500

Principal investigator: Liam
Level: Masters degree

I am a postgraduate student of Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. My project is entitled 'Sherwood Forest: Settlement, Industry and Social Dynamics from 400 to 1500'.

My research looks to present a reinterpreted view of royal hunting forests in England, using the area that Sherwood Forest covered in 1232 as a case study. Royal forests are commonly perceived as simply large areas of woodland, when actually they were dynamic landscapes which had heavy agricultural and industrial use, and contained large areas of settlement.

This project will adopt an innovative multi-disciplinary series of techniques which look at aspects of medieval society in Sherwood Forest using a multi-scalar methodology; from a macroscale perspective the project will research general themes such as forest boundary movement, the development of regions of settlement, the ownership of land, and social dynamics; from a microscale perspective it focuses on the morphology of individual settlements and selected case studies of parishes which perfectly illustrate a variation in landscape character, such as Edwinstowe, Blidworth, Calverton and Greasley.

The wide array of sources to be utilised in this project include material finds, such as those recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme, as well as maps, fieldwalking, place names, parish churches, sculpture, and documentary sources, bringing these together in a detailed reconstruction of the medieval landscape, displaying the industry, settlement and social dynamics within Sherwood Forest.

The general themes and research questions will include:

- What activities and industries took place within the forest landscape?

- Can patterns of material culture and potential social and political boundaries be distinguished?

- What is the physical and historical evidence for Forest Law and its application in Sherwood Forest?

- What was the nature of a royal forest's internal landscape? How varied could it be?

- How did the landscape and settlements within the forest evolve through the medieval period? When did villages and open fields emerge?

- Can the sizes and organisation of the medieval manors be mapped out and then deconstructed? This includes areas of settlement, arable and pastoral farming, and woodland.

This project will fill a major gap in our understanding of how medieval society operated, as forests were key elite and ritual landscapes yet also supported a wide range of settlement and economic activities, the evidence for which this project will showcase. This project will provide new avenues for our understanding of forests and landscapes within wider north-western European medieval society.

This project will end in October 2013, at which point I have funding from the University of Nottingham to begin a PhD project using the same methodology to study the wider area of land that Sherwood Forest covered in the 12th century, and to compare it with the Forest of High Peak, the Forest of Dean, and the New Forest.

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• Created: 11 years ago
• Created by: D P