The publication of Guy Beresford’s 1973 excavation of the deserted medieval village of Caldecote (Hertfordshire) is a handsomely produced volume that is a real pleasure to read, and that is copiously illustrated with good line drawings and photographs (including some that show now well-established archaeologists in their early glory). It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the chronology of medieval settlement nucleation and planning, the reliability of earthwork evidence for deserted medieval village interpretation, the origins of medieval field systems and their relationships with settlement nucleation, the development of medieval peasant housing and daily life in the Middle Ages.

The book begins with a sparkling introduction by Christopher Gerrard, placing Caldecote in its historiographical context. The remainder is largely Beresford’s clear and vivid text, covering regional geography, archaeological methodology and the history of the site, and then the five principal phases of its occupation, focusing mainly on the period between the tenth and the late sixteenth centuries (Chapters 7–9). This is well supported by useful chapters on the documentary evidence, as well as specialist reports on human remains, pottery, artefacts, coins, building materials and the environmental evidence. In all, the book provides an extraordinarily detailed and well-integrated interpretation of the founding, development and desertion of a medieval settlement. The evidence ranges from the fascinating minutiae of the plans, materials and structures of substantial late medieval peasant houses, their furnishings and the artefacts used by their owners, to corn-drying and malting ovens, sheep-folds and sheep-houses, crofts, outbuildings and the wider landscape, whose inhabitants are brought alive in well-researched documentary sources. Authors and contributors should be congratulated for the sparsity of typographical glitches (as far as I can tell, the only major fault was the consistent reference to Weepers – a late medieval hall-house which is an important comparator for Caldecote – as ‘Weavers’, even though it is correctly referenced in the bibliography).

In brief, Caldecote is set within a landscape that was fully occupied from at least the Iron Age. By the late ninth century ad, a field system had been laid out, divided into ridged selions following aratral curves. Two settlement foci had appeared by the tenth century: one fairly informal within the grounds of the later manor, another about 150m to the north east, being a planned settlement of eight crofts laid out re-using the alignments of earlier ridge and furrow, possibly extending south west over the site of the later rectory, and perhaps even further, outside the limits of the excavation. By the later eleventh century, the church had been constructed between the two earlier settlement foci, and a moated manor house was added to the plan in the thirteenth century. The settlement flourished until the mid-fourteenth century, when the village was completely reorganized and six new crofts were laid out within re-configured boundaries over the earlier settlement. The site appears to have suffered gradual desertion in the seventeenth century, and by 1698 only the manor, church and rectory remained.

The integration of historical and archaeological evidence makes this a reasonably convincing interpretation. At the same time, there is plenty to debate, founded on very good reporting of detailed evidence. For example, the boundaries of the planned settlement of the tenth and eleventh centuries are believed to lie along the ridges of selions (rather than the furrows, as is more common) and there is little firm evidence for houses within the proposed crofts. In fairness, there is plenty of evidence of domestic occupation in this area, including St Neots and Saxo-Norman pottery together with domestic debris. On the other hand, the area of the crofts was densely pock-marked with pits – 1.5–3m across by 0.76m – whose smooth, rounded sides may have been the result of the excavation of gault clay which was then mixed with water and straw for building material. These holes gradually became filled with domestic rubbish of one sort or another, and it is difficult to believe that people would be prepared to live for periods of any length with fairly big, open pits in such close proximity to their dwellings (even if only one or two were actually in operation at any one time) and in yards which were so uneven. At the other end of the settlement, the contemporary structures on the site of the later manor house do not appear to lie within crofts, and it is tempting to speculate that they may represent earlier activity within a ‘manorial’ complex to which a manor house was later added. The cohesive relationship between the thirteenth-century manor, church and later rectory would be easier to explain if all three originally lay within an earlier demesne.

It is a tribute to the excavator that, after twenty-five years, the evidence reported in Caldecote is as fresh, important and relevant as it was then, making a substantial contribution to the archaeology of medieval settlement, to the extent that even a reviewer could not resist becoming involved in the detail. It deserves to become a classic text for anyone interested in medieval settlement.