64 ARCHAEOLOGY • July/August 2019
forest upon which they had become
dependent. “At that point the woods
were basically fenced off, so people
lost their economic viability,” Jeffery
says. Suddenly barred from the land
that had sustained them, the villag-
ers had no choice but to pack up and
move elsewhere.
Although the team has uncovered
most of the village’s footprint, there
does not appear to have been a church
or even a manor house. This may indi-
cate that there were no church offi-
cials or local nobles who might have
been able to speak up on the villagers’
behalf and resist the crown’s declara-
tion. “There was nobody here to say,
‘No, I’m not giving you this bit of land,’”
Sherlock says. “It’s just a small hamlet,
so the king could dispossess the people a
lot more easily and move them on.”
The A 14 excavations have eluci-
dated the ebb and flow of thousands
of years of settlement in this small
stretch of southeastern England. They
have shown that people have come
and gone, whether through natural
circumstances, because another group
usurped their territory, or because they
were forced from their land by thesovereign. Soon, all traces of this mas-
sive archaeological undertaking will be
gone—artifacts, monuments, houses,
tombs, streets, and entire settlements
will have been removed from the
ground, reburied, or paved over. In the
coming months and years, millions of
people will speed through this coun-
tryside along the newly built A 14 , most
of them likely oblivious to the 6 , 000
years of human history just outside
their car windows. nJason Urbanus is a contributing editor at
Archaeology.LETTER FROM ENGLAND
Beneath a field outside the village of Brampton, Cambridgeshire, archaeologists have recently excavated the footprint of an
Anglo-Saxon settlement and the remains of the abandoned medieval village of Houghton.