Perhaps even more curious is there are actual Medieval desertions in there too. Oddly some have been rebuilt and should you go in there you will see bits of Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan in the Norfolk countryside. One area that is of special interest is STANTA, also known as The Stanford Training Area These are modern desertions, so villages like Stanford and Tottington just stopped being villages during the war and have never returned to their previous role. Others like Catton or Hellesdon retain their character, they just become encircled. Another reason is the suburbs of other settlements sucking out the population or occasionally eating them, this is particularly true of Bowthorpe and Earlham where the city being so close just left them empty. Hence the loss of Eccles, Shipden, Ness and Whimpwell and so on. When a community had already become weakened by bad weather, crop failure or disease it often hastened their demise.Īnother factor in a county with a long coast is loss to the sea, particularly on the soft east coast when we had no protection from storms or surges instead of little protection which we have now. While Holkham, Gunton and Anmer are examples of emparkment or engrossment, or a bit of both. Godwick is one example of this and Pudding Norton another.

Soils also play a part, this is particularly true of the area around Fakenham where growing things on the ridge of heavy poorly-drained soils was a struggle until the advent of more modern farming techniques and more modern crops like spuds which actually make this stuff more friable. This unsurprisingly is the main reason that a lot of villages ceased to exist, landowners farm massive flocks, the farmers become weavers elsewhere. Locally wool powered the East Anglian economy for many years even giving names to types of cloth, such as Walsham and Worsted which live on.

People farming vegetables make money slowly. Because sheep make wool and meat, and make money. The shift in farming from feudal agriculture to flockmasters and sheep farming, particularly on the big estates would have been a bigger factor, a simple case of ‘get orf moy laand’ to the people that lived there who had been raking the master’s bean harvest until recently. Norfolk seems to be particularly susceptible to various sets of circumstances emparkment, enclosure, erosion, engrossment and economics, contrary to popular belief and I suspect our instinctive inner darkness having a giggle, most weren’t really much to do with the Great Plagues or Black Death which were such a feature of the early to late middle second millennia although these would have been factors in the interplay between the landscape, economics, weather, food supply and the people living in it. There’s an oddly romantic notion about Medieval Desertion, pictures of lonely churches stood in the middle of nowhere, or grand churches that outweigh their modern population conjuring images in your head.įacts are rather different, and factors at play are many. A good few years ago Cameron Self and I were discussing DMVs or Deserted medieval Villages on Flickr, we’d both visited a few to take photos, thus began an obsession with them, not just the Medieval ones, actually all of them.

Lost medieval villages