Openness and Closure in the Later Medieval Village*

Abstract

Abstract There is a growing scholarly interest in the daily life and perceptions of ordinary medieval people, yet there has been little attempt to conceptualise the social space of the rural settlements in which the great majority of the population lived. This article examines how a village or hamlet in England might have been used and perceived in the later Middle Ages (c.1200 to 1500), especially in terms of access and permeability—in other words how open or closed (or, more crudely, ‘public’ or ‘private’) the components of a settlement were, and how the spatial relationships between these components affected their use and social significance. The data are drawn mainly from lowland England, with a special focus on Ewelme hundred in Oxfordshire, an area of mixed countryside including open-field villages and dispersed wood-pasture settlements. It will be argued that differences in openness and closure across space and time supply a guide to rural social interaction as a whole.

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