In the 16 th Century, pamphleteers claimed that those turfed out of villages by their landlords became beggars, but Professor Dyer said this wasn’t always the case. The mortality rate is estimated to have been as high as 60 per cent. The Black Death reached England in 1348 in Weymouth, Dorset, and outbreaks continued throughout the 14 th and 15 th Centuries. Professor Dyer said it was previously believed the village had become depopulated very slowly. ![]() The discovery completely changed our understanding of the lost Warwickshire village of Radbourne. Records such as these aren’t always easy to track down – he found one set of records from an old Warwickshire village in Chester Record Office simply because the family who owned the records in the 19 th Century were from Chester. ![]() Taxation records are often a good place to start, Professor Dyer said, because these show people paying tax who lived in villages that no longer exist. The process of rediscovering lost villages starts with recognising the landscape features and then moves to investigating old records. Residents baffled by their location on Facebook - a deserted medieval village wiped out by the Black Death.It led him to dedicate his career to the subject, and, decades later, he has now published books and articles of his own. “I realised that even I, as a schoolboy, could find a piece of undiscovered historical information, that I could do it myself and didn’t have to be guided by a teacher or a book – that was an exciting discovery,” he said. I used to cycle over to Alcester and help excavate a Roman site there.”Īged 16 he discovered his own ‘lost village’, Goldicote, around five miles east of Stratford. Professor Dyer, then a schoolboy with a keen interest in history and archaeology, recalled borrowing the book from Stratford-on-Avon library. And so his book, The Lost Villages of England, was published in 1954.Īll that remains of Wolfhampcote is this church, bottom right He realised he had discovered the site of an old, long forgotten, village. ![]() ![]() The art of finding lost villages actually has its roots in right here in Warwickshire.Ī man called Maurice Beresford was mapping ridge and furrow – the remains of old farming systems – in the county when he noticed “lumps and bumps” that weren’t furrows, Professor Dyer said. He spoke to CoventryLive about Warwickshire’s lost villages and what they can tell us. Professor Chris Dyer is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Leicester, with an interest in the social history of medieval England, including lost villages in the West Midlands. In Warwickshire, one famous example is Wolfhampcote which is remembered today only through its surviving church that stands solitary in the middle of a field.īut lost villages are everywhere – there’s an astonishing 128 in Warwickshire alone – and they offer a fascinating insight into the lives of ordinary people alive hundreds of years ago. You may even have heard of some of these ‘lost’ villages. However that’s not always the case, and, down the centuries, many villages have been abandoned as people move on, forcibly or voluntarily. The span of a human life doesn’t seem like much in the course of history, but you may feel that the villages, towns and cities we inhabit have longer memories.
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