'Booming times'
Back in the 12th and 13th centuries Lincolnshire was one of the most densely populated regions of England. Today it is amongst the more sparsely populated counties, so clearly much has changed. At the height of the county's popularity during the medieval period the Lincolnshire landscape was studded with villages - many of them now shrunk in size - and hundreds of them now completely deserted and lost.
It seems that Lincolnshire has always been a magnet to settlement from the very earliest days onwards. We know that prehistoric farmers settled in the county around 3000 BC, attracted by the fertile soils and the versatile landscape. Romans, Saxons and Vikings - all exploited the county's agricultural potential, so by the time the Normans arrived in 1066 they took over a booming economy. Almost every piece of cultivatable land was under the plough or used for grazing or forestry and it would have been difficult to walk more than two miles in any direction without finding yourself in a medieval village.
Where did they go?
Well, most of them are still with us today, either buried under the core of our modern villages or shrunk in size to just a farm or scattered hamlet where there was once a thriving village community. In at least 250 cases that we know of, the villages have disappeared altogether - whole settlements lost and decayed so that you would barely know that once, in that field of wheat or rapeseed, a whole village lived, worked, laughed, cried and died over 500 years ago.
Changing land use
Many people think that the Black Death of 1350 was the main cause for the desertion of our medieval villages, but there is no evidence that this is so except in a few special cases. Depopulation and desertion began around 1300 as soil exhaustion and disease began to slow down village growth, but by far the biggest effect was the steady change of land use from the 14th century onwards.
The lure of higher profits led landowners to enclose their land for sheep farming to the detriment of their tenants who relied on their small agricultural holdings for a living. Deprived of their fields, and often of their homes as well, the villagers had little option but to seek a living elsewhere, and many would have made for the towns. The remains of rig and furrow arable strip fields are still visible in parts of Lincolnshire to this day, and bear testimony to the villages which once lay at their centre.
The problem of depopulation of the countryside was so great that conversion of arable fields to pasture was actually made an offence by Act of Parliament in 1489, nevertheless, landowners continued to risk the penalties and they enclosed land and demolished settlements well into the late sixteenth century.
The situation today
Today, these lost villages vary enormously in terms of their actual appearance. Some are truly lost, ploughed flat and only visible, at best, as a faint pattern in the ripening crops. Others leave quite a clear ground plan of their lost streets, houses and gardens as humps and bumps and shapes in pastureland. Some still have their church, now isolated and alone in the middle of a field.
There are fine examples of such marooned churches at Goltho and Rand (near Wragby), Brauncewell (near Sleaford) and Sempringham (more famous as the birthplace of the Gilbertine monks and nuns) (near Billingborough). At some lost villages the church is now reduced to a ruin, as at Calceby in the Wolds. A good many lost villages just retain their manor, often now a modern farm, with perhaps a rectangular moated area nearby (once the site of the Lord's manor house) to remind us of its past glory.
Gainsthorpe
One of the best of the deserted villages in Lincolnshire is at Gainsthorpe just a mile or so to the north of Kirton in Lindsey. This site was photographed from the air in the 1920s as part of an aerial survey of Ermine Street - the Roman Road which runs nearby. Scholars puzzled over this array of humps and bumps which clearly showed the remains of streets and all sorts of buildings. Many thought it a Roman camp, but historians researching documentary records, including the Domesday book, realised it was a lost village dating from medieval times. Once one had been recognised, many more similar sites in the Lincolnshire countryside were identified and the true scale of our medieval landscape became clear.
Evocative ancient monuments to visit
These deserted villages are amongst the most evocative of our ancient monuments to visit. To stand in silence on the main street of a lost village and imagine the generations of people who were born, grew up, married, raised their children, and died, rarely leaving their village, is to grasp the past in a most thrilling way.
Sadly most of our deserted village sites are now on private land, although footpaths run close to many of them. Gainsthorpe (near Kirton in Lindsey) and Brauncewell (near Sleaford) are two fine examples which are accessible. Brauncewell deserted village is well described in the North Kesteven Medieval Trail booklet available from the TIC or local bookshops and has information panels on the site - mind out for the horses if you visit though!.
Dave Start
Director, Heritage Lincolnshire
