Anglo-Saxon Yarnton

Our knowledge of the history of Yarnton was transformed when early Saxon remains were discovered unexpectedly on the edge of an Iron Age and Roman settlement which was being dug by Oxford Archaeology in 1990. Subsequent work revealed a middle Saxon settlement immediately to the east, prompting the first excavation of a rural sit of this period in Oxfordshire. Six years of excavations were undertaken investigating the wider landscape and contemporary settlements at Cresswell Field and near the modern hamlet of Worton. This work took place in advance of Hanson Aggregates’s Cassington gravel quarry, and the importance of the site attracted funding from English Heritage. Very little is known about what happened in Britain after the Romans left in around AD 410. The discovery of an early Saxon sunken-featured building (characteristic of the Saxon period and resembling an old-fashioned ridge tent) within a late Roman ditched enclosure caused much excitement. Other domestic features appeared to have been located respecting Roman remains. Could this be the evidence of continuity that so many archaeologists had been looking for? Did early Saxon settlers come to live, peacefully or by force, within Roman villages, or did British people decide to adopt Saxon building methods and artefacts. Scientific dating of remains from the buildings, and careful examination of the finds, revealed, however, that the earliest possible date for the Saxon features is the end of the 5th century AD, nearly 100 years later than our latest evidence of Roman activity. Despite this apparent discontinuity, it was striking how often in this area Saxon settlements and the later townships recorded in Domesday Book (1086) were situated next to earlier settlements. If the Roman settlements had been abandoned, as the finds suggested, why did later settlers choose to live within or adjacent to them? It was only when we began to examine the waterlogged deposits within river channels which used to cross the Thames floodplain that we began to find some answers. Evidence from waterlogged plants, pollen and insects preserved in the streams as they sitlted up, suggested that, although farming became less intensive after the Romans left, people did continue to farm the land around Yarnton. Their animals grazed on these low-lying areas, preventing the regeneration of scrub and trees. It seems probable that British people continued to live in their native settlements, but because trade items were no longer available they used the pottery and tools that they already possessed, or made new items from organic materials that no longer survive. When Saxons settled in the area from the late 5th century, they adopted the existing farming units, retaining the approximate positions of boundaries between them. Saxon settlements, however, were different to the nucleated Roman ones. Small groups of buildings, perhaps representing individual farmsteads, shifted about the gravel terrace, with apparently few constraints on location and no attempt to regularise the layout of buildings. Each settlement had its own small cemetery, although Yarnton’s burial ground seems to have been destroyed during railway building in the mid 1800s. As a story of changing settlement and landscape, the record of Yarnton is truly remarkable with six millennia of human activity starting with the first farmers at around 4,000 BC. From the earliest evidence of permanent settlement on the gravel terrace in the Iron Age (c 750 BC), the village has shifted gradually eastwards, and then Northeast to its modern location. In the late Anglo-Saxon period tofts (medieval house plots) and a smithy were laid out on top of the middle Saxon site. The medieval village of Yarnton appears to have been clustered around the Norman church, but by the 17th century it was centred further north, along the road between Kidlington to Cassington. Today, modern housing is being built over the medieval open fields to the north of the village, between its 17th-century focus and the turnpike road between Oxford and Woodstock (now the A44). (From "Results of Excavations 1990-6", by Gill Hey, published by Oxford Archaeology, available from Oxbow Books at www.oxbowbooks.co.uk)