Chediston, Suffolk (NGR TM 355775)
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Chediston is located c. 2km west of Halesworth in eastern Suffolk, and lies on clay and alluvial deposits between 19m and 46m OD. The settlement today comprises two quite separate elements. One cluster of properties surrounds the church which lies on the north side of the valley of a small tributary of the River Blyth while, half a kilometre to the north-west on higher ground away from the stream valley, Chediston Green consists of a string of properties on the edge of a former green. The present houses are mostly on the north side of the road through the green, and are set well back from it marking the former edge of the green, now bisected along its length by the road. Several outlying farms are located within 500m of these two main settlement foci, with others further away within the parish.
A Roman settlement site, has been excavated immediately beyond the eastern limits of the present settlement around the church and numerous finds of prehistoric and Roman date have been recovered by field-walking and metal detecting in the parish. A late 15th century AD kiln site was excavated in Chediston Green, near the site of HEFA test pit CHE06/10, otherwise little archaeological work has been carried out in the currently inhabited parts of the village.
Local Information Websites
2006
12 test pits were excavated in Chediston by HEFA in 2006, most in the area around the church. Roman pottery, associated with a light industrial waste tip, was found in the easternmost of these (test pit 7): this was unsurprising given the known presence of Roman occupation nearby, but it is perhaps surprising that this was the only test pit excavated in Chediston in 2006 to produce any Roman material. Although only one test pit (CHE06/2) produced any pottery of Anglo-Saxon date, these four sherds of Thetford Ware came from an undisturbed level which also contained burnt daub (tentatively interpreted as part of an oven or possibly a burnt building) and lay directly on top of a floor surface cut by a post hole. This, it seems, was the site of a structure of some sort near the church in the late Anglo-Saxon period. From the post-Conquest period, the evidence from this part of the present settlement is very limited, perhaps indicating 11th-16th century settlement here to have been of limited extent. Only two of the test pits in this part of the present village (CHE06/1 and 4) revealed any mid 11th-mid 14th century pottery, and only one (CHE06/7) produced pottery from c. 1400-1550. At Chediston Green, by way of contrast, three test pits produced 11th-14th century pottery (CHE06/8, 10 and 11), with CHE06/8 and 10 both revealing more of material of this date than any of the pits in the area around the church both (CHE06/8, at Ash Farm, contained 33 sherds of early medieval sandy ware between 0.4m-0.8m below the surface in apparently undisturbed layers containing no later material). This activity predates the production of pottery in this part of the settlement by at least a century or so. CHE06/9, 10 and 11 all produced 15th-16th century pottery, mostly in small amounts, contemporary with production at the nearby kiln site adjacent to CHE06/10, although notably no pottery from this period was recovered from the test pit at Ash Farm.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
2007
Nine test pits were dug in Chediston in 2007, bringing the total excavated over the two years to 21. A single sherd of Romano-British greyare form CHE07/7 was interpreted as most likely to be evidence for low-intensity activity such as manuring. As in 2007, no material dating to the early or middle Anglo-Saxon period was found, and later Anglo-Saxon pottery was restricted to CHE07/2, near the church, supporting the evidence for material of this date from this area found in 2006. Pottery dating to the 12th to early 16th centuries was found in several (but by no means all) of the test pits around the church, and also in Chediston Green, although pottery of 12th to 14th century date was not recovered from any of the three westernmost pits in this part of the village. One particularly notable discovery was an inhumation burial revealed just west of the present graveyard. Supine and oriented facing east, it appears likely to be Christian, but it was not excavated and thus no further information or firm dating evidence has yet been recovered. Its presence does raise a number of interesting questions regarding the possible changing form of the graveyard, which it is hoped to pursue in the future.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
2008
Nine test pits were dug in Chediston in 2008, bringing the total excavated over three years to thirty. As at Coddenham, new areas investigated in 2008 included sites outside the present village at Chediston Hall (CHE/08/1); the moated site of Chediston Grange (CHE/08/2 and CHE/08/3); Bridge Farm (CHE/08/4) and Packway Farm (CHE/08/5). With the exception of CHE/08/1, these all produced small amounts of Thetford ware (850-1100 AD). Although none produced more than a single sherd, at Bridge Farm and Packway Farm these came from low levels with no evidence of disturbance post-1550, likely to represent undisturbed medieval deposits. It is difficult to know how to interpret these data, but they are provisionally considered to hint at the possibility that these elements of the settlement pattern may have been in existence before the Norman Conquest. Less uncertainty relates to their occupation in the post-conquest period which is well-attested by ceramic finds. All three sites also appear to have continued to be occupied throughout the later medieval period, with significant quantities of later medieval transitional ware found. Although it should be noted that a kiln producing such pottery existed in Chediston Green, it is nonetheless unlikely that it would have made its way to these sites in these quantities had they been abandoned at this date.
Further pits excavated in 2008 in the present village core near the church and in Chediston Green supported suggestions based on test pitting in 2006 and 2007 that only Chediston was occupied in the later Anglo-Saxon period, with Chediston Green coming into existence in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, during which time it may have been of a similar size to Chediston. Neither settlement was large, with pits on the sites of the outlying farms producing as much if not more pottery that those in Chediston or Chediston Green. There is here increasingly convincing evidence for a dispersed pattern of settlement existing throughout the medieval period, growing from roots established perhaps as early as the ninth century. The site of Chediston Hall (CHE/08/1) appears to be a new introduction in the sixteenth century.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
2010
Nine test pits were excavated in Chediston in 2010, bringing the total since 2006 to thirty-nine. As in 2008, test pitting in 2010 focussed mostly on dispersed sites away from the present village core around the church and the settlement along the edge of Chediston Green. Most attention in 2010 focussed on present-day farm sites where test pitting had not previously been carried out, with CHE/10/1 CHE/10/2 at Mountpleasent Farm, 2km west of Chediston church; CHE/10/3 and CHE/10/4 at Paradise Farm, c. 0.75km north of the church and CHE/10/8 and CHE/10/9 at Hernehill, some 1km from the church if travelling along existing roads, but less then 05. km distant from it if travelling along a footpath.
With the exception of one test pit at Hernehill which produced a small sherd of Roman pottery (possibly indicating the extent of the Roman arable), none of the 2010 pits around Chediston yielded any material predating c. 1100 AD. At Mountpleasant Farm, medieval sandy wares dating to 1100-1400 AD were produced in sufficient quantities (nine and twelve sherds respectively from four largely undisturbed spits) to indicate settlement in the near vicinity in the high medieval period. Two sherds of the same ware from each of the pits at Hernehill may possibly also be indicative of contemporary settlement, although less securely so. Both pits at Paradise Farm produced a single sherd of medieval sandy ware, which would not normally be considered sufficient to infer settlement, but more likely to indicate manuring associated with arable cultivation. However, excavating to greater depth (neither pit was excavated to natural due to time constraints) might have revealed additional material which would change this interpretation as in both pits the medieval sherds were found in the lowest excavated spits. However, it is also interesting to note that the three sites excavated for the first time in 2010, Paradise Farm was the only one where there was any significant drop in the amount of activity represented by the pottery on the later (post fourteenth century) medieval period. Overall, the picture at Chediston seems to be one of a dispersed landscape, developing in a dynamic manner in the later Anglo-Saxon and high medieval periods, with many new elements of the settlement pattern appearing in these centuries, mostly probably taking the form of farms, with little late medieval contraction.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
2011
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
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Pottery Distribution Map |