Abstract
Agricultural Settlement in Early Britain, Dr. Cyril Fox has recognised ‘areas of primary settlement’ in prehistoric Britain on the porous soils derived from chalk, sand and gravel, and ‘areas of secondary settlement’ on the heavy clays. In Antiquity for September, Messrs. S. W. Wooldridge and D. L. Lint on argue in amplification of Dr. Fox's contention for a distinction of the soils of south-eastern England into two classes, ‘permeable’ and ‘impermeable’, to cover the undoubted fact that there exists an ‘intermediate’ type of soil, not recognised by Dr. Fox, which gives rise to highly distinctive and clearly bounded regions figuring among the more important settlement areas of the country from the Bronze Age onwards and clearly recognisable in the presentday cultural landscape. They correspond to the loess and limon soils recognised by the Continental archologists and geographers. It was these loam regions which figured most prominently as the nuclei of settlement and penetration during the earlier stages of peopling the country. Thus in the Bronze Age there are the settlements of the loam regions of Guildford and Godalming, the Southend loam plateau, and the Norwich region, a conspicuous tract of high density following the Thames Valley and the lower parts of the valleys of the Brent, Lea, Wandle, Medway and Stour, the chalk of Wessex and in the Breckland. There is evidence of considerable occupation on the Essex boulder clay. The distribution of the Iron Age settlements and of the slightly later phase of the Cattuvellaunian dynasty tells the same tale. These settlements were inherited with but little extension by the Romans and finally consolidated and extended as regional nuclei by the Nordic invaders. The recognition of this ‘intermediate’ group of soils renders clearer the very partially true connotation of the ‘valleyward movement’, as a progression to plains and low plateaux of a definite soil constitution.
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Research Items. Nature 132, 519–520 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/132519a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/132519a0