Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 109

Set within one of the most intensively excavated landscapes in the country, recent excavations at Fengate, Peterborough discovered significant prehistoric activity. Amongst a series of Neolithic and Early Bronze Age pits, one example yielded a substantial dump of burnt grain indicative of large scale cereal cultivation with major implications for the agrarian economy. Further elements of Fengate’s renowned Middle Bronze Age field system were also revealed, together with dispersed features of the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age. This paper considers the findings in relation to those from neighbouring sites, providing a fuller picture of the Bronze Age landscape and offering a perspective on the nature of activity pre- and post-dating the field system.

The construction of a new lift shaft in Shire Hall, Cambridge in 2015 afforded an opportunity to excavate within the precinct of the Roman town of Duroliponte. Although the excavation area was small, the associated finds and environmental assemblages recovered from the well-stratified sequence provide an important insight into the nature of occupation in this area around the time of the Roman Conquest.

Hemingford Grey Manor House and the School of Pythagoras are two rare surviving examples of Norman domestic buildings. Stone-built and of two storeys, such buildings were once identified as first-floor halls, but in recent decades have generally been recognised as chamber blocks. Detailed investigation and analysis of each building has been undertaken to put forward a new reconstruction of its original form. The Manor House at Hemingford Grey is a classic rural Norman chamber block of c. 1150, set at the edge of the village on a moated site. With the relatively complete evidence of its first-floor plan, it provides a good example of a small chamber block, one of the earliest survivals in England. It would have been accompanied by a ground-floor hall, though no evidence survives. The School of Pythagoras, dated here to c. 1200–1220, is a larger and more complex building in an urban context, the subject of considerable previous research, including recent archaeological excavation. Although much altered, its main features can be reconstructed with reasonable confidence. The ground floor had a fine, vaulted undercroft, and external steps led up to a principal chamber, with an inner chamber beyond, both with fireplaces. A key finding of the recent archaeological work (by others) was that the building stood alongside the ‘Cambridge Watercourse’, at the centre of a busy mercantile zone. It is therefore suggested that the closer comparable buildings are Norman townhouses, rather than rural chamber blocks. Built for Hervey Dunning, a leading burgess and Cambridge’s first mayor, the School of Pythagoras may have been a self-contained chamber block, without the ground-floor hall needed by a manorial lord.

Archaeological excavations in advance of the redevelopment of the Eastfield neighbourhood of Chesterton provided an opportunity to investigate the environs of a site known as Coven’s Moat, on land once held by Barnwell Priory. Analysis of the archaeological sequence, combined with documentary research, has provided new insights into the development of medieval Chesterton and the relationship of this moated site to the historic core of the settlement, its surrounding fields and routeways.

Excavations by Headland Archaeology ahead of the construction of an eight-turbine windfarm at Cotton Farm, Graveley, revealed evidence of an early Roman farmstead and medieval to modern agriculture. The farmstead was established in the 1st century AD in the hinterland of Godmanchester and in direct reference to the surrounding road network. It was occupied for around 150 years before being abandoned in the later 2nd/3rd century, possibly as part of the consolidation of landholdings into larger agricultural estates and the establishment of a villa estate at the nearby A14 site TEA 20. 

Excavations at Little Thetford have provided the first archaeological information on this medieval rural settlement, indicating that it originated in the Middle Anglo-Saxon period and had ditched plots from the 10th–12th centuries onwards. Medieval Little Thetford was a dependent outlying estate rather than a village and the implications of this are considered.