Kati’s settlement
In September 2023, the Bosworth Links project brought together residents, volunteers, and archaeologists to explore Cadeby’s deep past through the excavation of fifteen small test pits scattered across gardens, paddocks and green spaces. These one-metre square windows into the ground recovered over 3,300 artefacts ranging from Mesolithic flints to fragments of 20th‑century pottery. Although each pit was small, together they revealed a remarkably rich and layered history, one that tells a story of shifting settlement, changing fortunes, and long‑forgotten activity in the landscape.
Before the Village
Long before Cadeby became a village, people were already moving across its ridge-top landscape. Two thirds of the test pits produced Mesolithic flint, including bladelets, flakes and fragments of cores. These were the by‑products of making and maintaining stone tools. Some pieces show signs of having been burnt or reworked, and although only a thin scatter of finds, their distribution hints at possible flint-working close to the modern junction of Main Street, Wood Lane, Church Lane and Rectory Lane. This early activity was not settled occupation, but it shows that people were here thousands of years before the medieval village emerged.
While no Iron Age or Roman features were uncovered within the test pits, the wider landscape shows clear evidence of both periods. To the south‑east and east of the village, investigations have revealed Iron Age settlement enclosures, livestock structures and even a pottery kiln, indicating organised occupation and craft activity close by. Nearby finds of a hoard of 32 Roman coins and a small rotary quern further show that the area continued to be used during the Roman period. Although the village itself appears not to have been a focus of settlement in these eras, Cadeby lay within a well‑used and productive prehistoric and Roman landscape.
Early Settlement
Cadeby first appears in written records in AD 1086, listed in the Domesday Book as Catebi – a name formed from the Scandinavian personal name “Kati” and the Old Norse “by”, meaning farmstead or village. This suggests a settlement with Anglo‑Scandinavian roots, settled in the late 9th or early 10th century, long before Norman control. By the late 11th century, Cadeby was already established as a small agricultural community, one with a priest, woodland, ploughland and several households.
Archaeology supports this early origin. Several test pits produced Saxo‑Norman pottery, including Stamford ware and St Neots ware (9th–12th century). Two, one on Main Street and another on Wood Lane, might be activity sites during this period and suggest that settlement in the village was originally quite dispersed.
Growth and Change
The 12th to 14th centuries mark a period of significant growth in Cadeby’s history, arguably the village’s medieval high point. During this era, the settlement expanded in both size and complexity, leaving behind an archaeological footprint richer here than many other Bosworth Links study village. More than 230 sherds of High Medieval pottery were recovered from the 2023 excavations, a quantity that speaks to sustained domestic occupation and a thriving rural community.
Much of this pottery came from the well‑established local industries at Potters Marston and Chilvers Coton and the distribution of these sherds across the test pits reveals the shape and spread of the medieval village. Cadeby did not develop as a nucleated settlement clustered tightly around the church, as later maps suggest. Instead, it stretched linearly along Main Street, forming a ribbon-like settlement. Further clusters of medieval pottery along Wood Lane and Rectory Lane indicate small but meaningful extensions of the village, perhaps consisting of dispersed farm plots, cottages and small agricultural enclosures.
This era is also the first in which structural traces survive. On Wood Lane, excavators uncovered a medieval posthole with stone packing, dug deep into the natural clay. This modest but significant feature may once have supported the upright timber of a house, barn, fence line, or yard boundary. Its presence hints at timber‑framed buildings standing nearby; structures long vanished but recorded in the soil by the stones that once steadied their posts.
In many test pits the medieval material was large, fresh, and only lightly abraded, suggesting that households once stood very close to where these objects were found. This contrasts sharply with the smaller, more worn sherds found in peripheral areas, which likely arrived via manure spread on medieval fields. Collectively, the evidence paints a vivid picture of a lively, lived‑in settlement: smoke rising from hearths, animals moving through yard spaces, and villagers discarding broken pots and household waste that centuries later would form the clearest archaeological signature of everyday medieval life in Cadeby.
Decline and Dispersal
From the mid‑14th century onward, Cadeby entered a period of marked contraction that mirrored wide‑ranging changes seen across rural Leicestershire. The archaeological signal of this shift is striking; late medieval pottery becomes scarce, and in many areas that had once been dense with 12th–14th‑century occupation debris, the soil falls quiet, suggesting that houses were abandoned, plots left empty, and daily life retreated from formerly settled spaces.
This retreat aligns closely with the aftermath of the Black Death of 1349, an event that reshaped the population landscape of England. Although the plague itself lasted months, its demographic impacts unfolded over generations. Entire families vanished; others migrated; labour shortages altered landholding and farming practices; marginal plots were left fallow. Cadeby’s archaeological record reflects this broader pattern. As settlement activity dwindled, the once vibrant northern end of Main Street, so well represented in earlier pottery, appears to have thinned out dramatically by the 15th century, with material culture indicating that people were no longer living or working close by. A similar pattern of depopulation can also be seen on Rectory Lane.
As households disappeared, their former crofts and tofts began returning to pasture, absorbed back into the agricultural landscape that surrounded the village. Test pits in the depopulated areas show only the faintest traces of later medieval activity, often limited to single worn sherds likely carried in with manured soil rather than produced by any ongoing occupation. This suggests not just a reduction in population, but a deliberate reshaping of land use, as buildings decayed and landowners consolidated holdings for grazing rather than arable cultivation.
Meanwhile, the centre of gravity within the village shifted subtly but noticeably southwards, closer to the church and what would become the later post‑medieval focus of settlement. Cadeby did not disappear – far from it – but the archaeological record shows a village retracting, reorganising, and adapting in the face of profound demographic and economic pressures.
Reorganisation and Reuse
In the 16th and 17th centuries the village quietly reshaped itself, adapting to new economic circumstances, shifting land ownership, and evolving patterns of rural life. The archaeological footprint of this period is subtle but significant. Test pits produced only small quantities of 16th‑ and 17th‑century pottery, yet the presence of these sherds shows that some plots saw renewed or continued occupation even as others remained empty pasture. These fragments suggest small households, scattered across what had once been a denser medieval village, re‑establishing themselves within a transformed landscape.
During this same period, several of Cadeby’s landmarks began to take shape. The Old House on Wood Lane, with its timber-framed core, and Church Farm, dating to the late 16th or early 17th century, belong to this wave of rebuilding. Their construction marks a moment when local families invested once again in substantial homes – structures designed to endure – after a century of contraction. These buildings were complemented by yards, orchards, paddocks, and outbuildings that gradually reorganised the settlement into a looser, more farm‑based arrangement than its medieval predecessor.
There are also hints of a modest industrial dimension to Cadeby’s post‑medieval life. Several test pits – particularly those near Main Street -contained iron‑working residues, including slag, furnace debris and glassy industrial waste. These finds point to small‑scale smithing or metalworking, likely servicing agricultural tools, household repairs, or minor local trade. While not industrial in scale, this activity reveals a community that maintained practical craft skills essential for rural self‑sufficiency.
By the 18th century, Cadeby’s architectural character had become recognisably rooted in the form we see today. Many surviving buildings acquired – or were rebuilt with – brick, tiled roofs, and functional outbuildings suitable for mixed farming. The village’s layout stabilised into a pattern of dispersed farmsteads, cottages and gardens, stitched together by lanes rather than clustered tightly around a medieval core. In this era, Cadeby looked less like a contracting village and more like a practical agricultural community, adapting its older footprint to the needs of a new age.
A Modern Village
The 2023 excavations captured the modern era in the sheer density of material recovered. Test pits overflowed with red brick fragments, roof tiles, glass bottles, domestic ceramics, clay pipe stems, and building debris – the unmistakable byproducts of a village that had once again become busy and closely inhabited. Some pits produced more modern finds than from all earlier centuries combined, reflecting both the expansion of household waste in the 19th and 20th centuries and the deeper reworking of soils as gardens, pipes, outbuildings and pathways were laid out and relaid over the last two hundred years.
Amidst this tide of modern debris, certain finds stand out for the way they capture the texture of everyday life. At Jasmine Cottage – formerly the village school – volunteers uncovered fragments of slate pencils, broken writing slates, and other faint relics of 19th‑century classroom life, reminders of the children who once sat tracing letters under the watchful eye of the schoolmaster. Elsewhere, test pits yielded animal bones, broken tableware, and discarded household items mixed into old garden soils, evoking the rhythms of cooking, butchery, and waste disposal in Victorian and Edwardian cottages. From 20th‑century layers came bottle glass, jar lids, shotgun cartridges, batteries, buttons, iron fittings and melted fragments of plastic, each a tiny clue to the daily habits, repairs, meals, accidents and renovations of modern households.
This domestic material culture tells a story not just of occupation, but of transformation. As the agricultural landscape shifted and farmsteads adapted, new cottages and farm buildings appeared, replacing or absorbing earlier structures. Wells were filled, orchards replanted, sheds erected and demolished; the land itself was reworked many times over. The village school closed, properties changed hands, and modern utilities – water pipes, drains, services – cut through earlier layers, leaving ceramic pipes and brick footings as archaeological signatures of 19th‑ and 20th‑century improvement.
By the early 20th century, Cadeby had fully re‑centred itself, with its main concentration of homes, gardens and community buildings focused around the church and once again stretching along Main Street. It was a settlement no longer defined by medieval expansion or post‑medieval reorganisation, but by a modern rural identity – one shaped by evolving farming practices, modern housing, and the everyday lives of its residents. The archaeology of this period, abundant and varied, testifies to a village that, far from declining, continued to adapt and redefine itself right into the present day.