![]() ![]() Overend centers around the church, with its school and rectory nearby. Near the river here the construction of a floodbank in 1977 uncovered the foundations of the medieval manor house. ![]() Nether End contains the green, with a Methodist chapel adjoining. The two sections have long been known as Overend and Nether End. Smaller streets and lanes intersect these two thoroughfares. Its presentday gray stone houses cluster along two axes: one the main road from Peterborough to the old market town of Oundle the other, at right angles to it, a street that ends in a triangular village green, beyond which stands an eighteenth-century mill on the banks of the River Nene. † seventy miles north of London, where it has stood for more than a thousand years. But Elton, a dependency of wealthy Ramsey Abbey, located in the East Midlands, in the region of England where villages abounded and the open field agriculture associated with them flourished, illustrates many of the characteristics common to villages at the high point of their development.Įlton stands today, a village of about six hundred people, in northwest Cambridgeshire. Medieval villages varied in population, area, configuration, and social and economic details. ![]() Because England has preserved the earliest and most complete documentation of the medieval village, in the form of surveys, accounts, and the rolls of manorial courts, this book will focus on an English village. Many of these peasant settlements were mere hamlets or scattered homesteads, but in certain large areas of England and Continental Europe people lived in true villages, where they practiced a distinctive system of agriculture. The village that the Anglo-Saxons called Aethelintone (or Aethelington, or Adelintune), known in the thirteenth century, with further spelling variations, as Aylington, and today as Elton, was one of the thousands of peasant communities scattered over the face of Europe and the British Isles in the high Middle Ages, sheltering more than 90 percent of the total population, the ancestors of most Europeans and North Americans alive today. IN THE DISTRICT OF HUNTINGDON THERE IS A CERtain village to which far-distant antiquity gave the name of Aethelintone, wrote the twelfth-century monk who chronicled the history of Ramsey Abbey, on a most beautiful site, provided with a course of waters, in a pleasant plain of meadows with abundant grazing for cattle, and rich in fertile fields." ¹ ![]()
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