Langar in Anglo-Saxon times
Go back to The Anglo-Saxons. See also Placenames.
An unepected find
In 1998 workers were digging to replace the sewage pipes in the field near the entrance to Langar Hall. When they discovered pieces of ancient pottery, they sent for the archaeologists.
The archaeologists identified the pottery as Anglo-Saxon. Some of it had come from a kiln in Stamford, Lincolnshire where they made glazed pots. Some of the broken pieces came from cooking pots. After more excavations, the archaeologists also found pits and trenches from the Anglo-Saxon period. Houses may have stood here.
Field walking
The discovery confirmed what was found in November 1979 when archaeologists and volunteers walked across the large field west of Langar Hall. They were looking for objects dug up by the farmer's plough.
Over an area of 2 hectares (the size of two football pitches), the field walkers picked up more than 40 pieces of broken pottery, mostly from the Anglo-Saxon period (though some were earlier from Roman times and some were later from the Middle Ages).
At that time, the Anglo-Saxons did not use much pottery. Cooking pots were made of iron, liquids were carried in containers made of leather, wood or horn and food was eaten off wooden plates. These rot away over time and are rarely found. Pottery survives.
Anglo-Saxon pottery in Langar
The Anglo-Saxons did use some pottery and when the pots broke, they threw them out with the rubbish.
Every house had a rubbish heap (a compost heap) or a pit where household rubbish, vegetable peel, plants, straw floor covering and animal manure were left to rot. They would spread it on the fields in February as fertiliser. The broken pottery in the rubbish heap would be spread far and wide.
In the many years since Anglo-Saxon times, farmers have ploughed the fields year after year and spread the pottery even further. It is impossible to know now where the original Anglo-Saxon house was. However, pottery in the fields is clear evidence that there was an Anglo-Saxon house here, somewhere.
Nobody knows what Langar looked like in Anglo-Saxon times. It may have been an area scattered with small farmhouses each with their own fields around them. Or it may have been a village with the houses close to each other.
Langar may have looked like this in Anglo-Saxon times. ↓
An Anglo-Saxon farm on a Roman site
In 2015 a local community energy group wanted to set up a solar energy farm in fields off Langar Lane near Colston Bassett.
The local council insisted on an archaeological survey to see if there was important history to be discovered here.
A fieldwalking survey was carried out on the ploughed fields and many discoveries were made. The archaeologists found neolithic flints and pottery from Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval times. Lumps of slag were also found showing that iron smelting had been carried out here either by the Romans or the Anglo-Saxons.
The Roman and Anglo-Saxon pottery was found in the same area. After the Romans had left, an Anglo-Saxon farming family had chosen the same good spot for their own farm.
But there's more - Thinghoe!
A map of 1600 gives the name of this field as ‘Thinghoe'. That word comes from the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse languages, thyng haugr, which means ‘meeting hill'.
This was a place where the people of the area came to sort out disagreements and disputes - rather like a town council or court.
Meeting places like this were usually away from the village and close to a local landmark: the Cropwell Road crosses the River Smite here, so there would have been a ford or a bridge.
It is also near the place where four parishes meet - Langar cum Barnestone, Tithby, Colston Bassett and Wiverton.
Anglo-Saxon crime and punishment at Gallows Hill
The name ‘Gallowehill’ is also recorded here at ‘Thinghoe'.
The Anglo-Saxon 'thing' (meeting) also acted as a court of law. The Anglo-Saxons had no prisons, so people found guilty of crimes were dealt with swiftly.
For minor crimes like stealing, you might have your nose or a hand cut off. People were also punished with fines - if you injured someone, you had to pay them for the damage. If a person killed someone, they had to pay money to the dead person's relatives.
It was the Anglo-Saxons who introduced hanging as a method of execution to this country. Hanging was a rare punishment but it was carried out in public at a place such as this where everyone could watch. It was a warning to other people.
Gallows Hill
The bridge where the Cropwell Road crosses the River Smite is where the parishes of Langar cum Barnestone, Colston Bassett, Tithby and Wiverton meet and where the Anglo-Saxon gallows stood. there's not much to see now.
Click to see it on Google maps.
The link takes you out of this website.
Anglo-Saxon Placenames
Almost all English villages, towns and cities have names given them by the Anglo-Saxons over a thousand years ago.
The names all mean something in the Old English language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons.
Langar
First written record: Langare -
1086 in the Domesday Book
Old English (Anglo-Saxon): langa gar
Meaning: the long gore,
the long triangular strip of land
The long gore
The word 'gore' in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) means a spear head, but it was also used to describe a piece of land, a field in the same sort of triangular shape as the head of a spear. Farmers try to make their fields square or rectangular, because they are easier to plough. But if there were hills or woods or streams, they were sometimes left with an unusually-shaped piece of land. Perhaps the long triangular field that gave the village its name lay between the River Smite and Stroom Dyke? - or perhaps not!
Barnstone
First written record: Bernestune -
1086 in the Domesday Book -
Old English (Anglo-Saxon): Beorn's tun
Meaning: Beorn's farm
Barnestone is Beorn's farm. We know nothing at all about Beorn, but he must have been an Anglo-Saxon settler who set up his farm here. Nobody knows exactly where.
Beorn's name comes from an Anglo-Saxon (Old English) word meaning 'brave warrior' or 'hero'.
If you look back at the Iron Age and at Romans in Langar, you will see that people farmed here long before Beorn came. Did Beorn farm the same land as they did? He probably did but nobody knows.
Weblink - Visit an Anglo-Saxon village
West Stow is a Anglo-Saxon village in Suffolk that was excavated by archaeologists between 1956 and 1972. Anglo-Saxon people lived there from the 5th to the 7th century. In 1999 the village was reconstructed and opened as a museum.
Click to watch the introductory video about the village on YouTube.
See also Saxon Life at West Stow from the BBC
and A tour round Bede’s World, a reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village
in Jarrow, north-east England from the BBC
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