Proceedings of the Hampshire Field Club & Archaeological Society

The excavation at Weston Down Cottages, just north of Weston Colley, formed part of a mitigation strategy for construction of a gas pipeline and revealed the presence of an Iron Age settlement. This comprised a large concentration of bell-shaped and other pits, associated with roundhouses, and a series of ditches, predominantly aligned northeast--southwest. Geophysical survey showed that the site formed part of an extensive Iron Age complex that included a D-shaped, banjo and rectangular enclosure with associated trackways and field systems. The site was predominantly occupied during the Middle Iron Age. The features and finds suggest small-scale rural settlement and associated industrial activities. Some of the pits contained exceptionally high quantities of burnt flint, associated with daub and small quantities of slag, relating to a number of different activities, including pot-making. Over sixty bell-shaped or beehive storage pits were revealed, implying storage of grain. Several pits contained articulated animal remains, including a legless horse and a complete dog, concurring with patterns noted at other Iron Age sites where storage features become repositories for structured deposits. The site was probably occupied by one or two households and may have been relatively long-lived. A cremation burial was radiocarbon dated to the Middle Bronze Age. Two inhumation burials were revealed adjacent to an Iron Age boundary ditch, and both were radiocarbon dated to the Middle Iron Age. After the Middle Iron Age, the site was abandoned for several hundred years. In the early Romano-British period, elements of the Iron Age landscape were reused and adapted. Later Romano-British features identified include a corn-drier placed centrally within an Iron Age trackway. The Romano-British features and finds are indicative of predominantly rural activities of agricultural nature, with settlement in the vicinity.

Excavations and survey recording at St John's Rooms provided valuable insights into the structural history of the only surviving parts of the medieval and later Hospital of St John the Baptist. A complex sequence stretching over more than nine centuries was revealed and an attempt is made to fit this structural history to the written record.

The paper explains one of the more complete early Tudor Renaissance monuments of Hampshire, describes its connection with the Renaissance-styled presbytery screens in Winchester Cathedral and other monuments of this group, and shows that they can all be dated to the period of c. 1520--35. The overall homogeneity of style that can be seen in the execution of the decorative carving on all of these works suggests a single workshop produced them, and that an individual mason, identified here as Thomas Bertie, was responsible for the running of this workshop during this period. The stylistic quality of this work has been compared to contemporaneous work in France, but doubts are cast by the author on this ascription.

The parish church of St Michael, Basingstoke, was rebuilt on a grand scale in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth century. This lavish rebuilding reflected the increasing wealth of the town and the growth of the cloth industry of the town and surrounding area, particularly in the later-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. Includes

Study in three parts, which aims to investigate the extent to which the cultural, economic and social revival which followed the Restoration was evident in the small towns of north Hampshire (Alton, Andover, Basingstoke, Kingsclere, New Alresford, Odiham, Overton, Stockbridge and Whitchurch) from 1660 to c. 1800. The first paper explores the economic background to the revival.