Talk by Deborah Hayter
“The Lost Villages of Oxfordshire”
Venue : SC Village Hall
Date/Time : Tuesday 25th September 2018 7.30 pm
Drawing on her own and others' archaeological and landscape historiographical research, Deborah Hayter’s illustrated talk explored the reasons for the decline and death of the more than 120 “lost” villages in old Oxfordshire and their distribution elsewhere in Britain, including in the area of Abingdon and Sutton Courtenay originally in Berkshire.
She showed a number of striking aerial views of areas revealing the trace evidence of former settlements/villages, now no longer extant or at most partially so.
Reasons for the decline and death of these settlements include, but evidently are not limited to, disease (notably the Black Death), manorial expansion, enclosure, changing patterns of climate and agriculture in the middle ages and later and the natural demise over time of small unviable settlements.
About the Speaker
Deborah Hayter did her MA in Local History at the Centre for English Local History at Leicester University. She is a tutor at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education and has taught many courses on rural and landscape history.
