In the mid-1990s, one of the largest known early medieval settlements in England was excavated by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) at Eye Kettleby in Leicestershire. In his blog, Dr Gavin Speed, Project Manager at ULAS and co-author of the new book The Anglo-Saxon Settlement at Eye Kettleby, Leicestershire, describes the site as a ‘seemingly unremarkable field on the south-western outskirts of Melton Mowbray’. Yet not only did that field contain more than 50 post-built and sunken-featured structures dating from c.AD 450 to c.AD 650, it had also been a place of significant activity in the prehistoric period, with an early Bronze Age monument complex and a cremation cemetery that was in use periodically over several centuries during the early to middle Bronze Age (these are described in a separate monograph: see ‘Further reading’ below).
A deserted medieval village
Sites of Bronze Age ritual activity are often located close to watercourses and, true to form, this site lies near to a river, on a tongue of land between two small tributary streams. The river changes its name at this point from the upstream Eye (from Old English ea, meaning ‘river’) to the Wreake (Danish in origin, meaning ‘meandering’). The place was well chosen for a settlement, being well-supplied with fresh water, on a mainly flat, well-drained river terrace on gravel and sand, and with good riverine connections.
Later medieval settlement on this land is represented by the well-preserved (but largely unexcavated) remains of a deserted medieval village (DMV). It was the proximity of these earthworks and fishponds that highlighted the archaeological potential of the site when the arable field to the west of the DMV was earmarked for development as a light-industrial estate in the early 1990s (it now produces, among other things, traditional Melton Mowbray pork pies).
The privatisation of objects