ABANDONMENT · People under Pressure: Settlement Abandonment and Human Responses to Environmental and Socio-Economic Stress during the Medieval and Post-Medieval Periods

People under Pressure: Settlement Abandonment and Human Responses to Environmental and Socio-Economic Stress during the Medieval and Post-Medieval Periods

The ABANDONMENT project explored the pan-European phenomenon of settlement desertion and shrinkage, which occurred especially during the 14th and 17th centuries. Despite considerable attention being paid to this phenomenon, the process of abandonment still remains poorly understood. However, new procedures of landscape research emerged in recent decades enable us to look again at this phenomenon from different points of view and consider newly formulated questions within this traditional theme. The project aimed to explore how rural communities and the settlements they lived in responded to socio-economic and environmental stress. Are some communities more vulnerable than others? Which factors had the strongest impact in shaping their existence? Answering these questions and testing broader geographical applicability of the outcomes have extended current knowledge about settlement abandonment and landscape evolution in general. An integral part of the research programme has been to explore whether environmental constrains affected people’s actions in the past. The research objectives were laid out as follows: (a) To determine the processes of settlement shrinkage and abandonment across England. (b) To contextualise changes in settlement patterns within wider transformations of land-use in distinct regions from the longue durée perspective. (c) To explore the cultural and environmental context of settlement evolution (and extinction) across Northern and Central Europe to determine the impact of these factors on communities. Main conclusions: 1. The process of settlement abandonment falls within a long period ranging from the 12th to the 19th century, the peak of abandonment was in the 14th century. Intensive abandonment is not directly connected with a specific type of landscape (marginal areas) neither crisis events. 2. Most settlements went through a very complicated history with various transformations in the whole settlement territory; instead of abandonment, continuity has been revealed, albeit with an extensive change in land use. 3. Environmental characteristics and a relationship to elements of cultural landscape caused vulnerability of some settlements as well as prevention against abandonment. The impact of natural environment on human communities is not as significant as previously assumed – cultural factors are very important in the shaping of human communities.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union