The settlement of the Free Peasants
In 2022, the Bosworth Links project brought together residents, volunteers, and archaeologists to explore the hidden history beneath the village of Carlton. Over one September weekend, twenty carefully excavated one-metre square test pits were dug in gardens, paddocks, and greens, uncovering over 6,000 artefacts spanning from the Bronze Age to the 21st century. These fragments revealed a remarkably detailed story of how Carlton expanded, contracted, and reshaped itself over time.
A Landscape Shaped Across Millennia
Long before Carlton was a village, the land it now occupies was part of a quietly busy prehistoric landscape. Although no prehistoric settlement has yet been identified beneath the village itself, the small collection of flint flakes uncovered during the test‑pitting suggests that Bronze Age people used the area, leaving behind only the lightest archaeological footprint. These tiny flakes, some barely larger than a fingernail, represent tool creation, perhaps, or the casual maintenance of hunting equipment, and yet they hint at a landscape already woven into human movement thousands of years before the first cottages stood along Main Street.
Roman pottery appears just as subtly. Small, abraded sherds dating from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD found in several pits are not the remains of Roman homes but rather the residue of farming practices. Roman farmers frequently collected soil, waste, and midden material to enrich their fields, spreading their rubbish far from their original homes. Nevertheless, these pieces echo the presence of a Roman farmstead known to have existed just east of St Andrew’s Church, showing that Carlton’s landscape was once absorbed into a wider agricultural system, perhaps associated with the villa at Market Bosworth.
The Free Peasants’ Village Emerges
The village of Carlton enters the historical record in the early 13th century, long after the prehistoric and Roman traces had faded into the soil. Its name, first recorded as Karlintone and derived from the Old English ceorl – meaning a free peasant – reveals something remarkable about its origins: this was not a settlement built around a manor, monastery, or aristocratic estate, but one shaped by independent farmers. These free peasants held modest parcels of land, cultivating them for their own benefit while paying dues to larger estates centred at nearby Market Bosworth.
Archaeology reinforces this picture. The earliest substantial concentrations of medieval pottery, dating from the 12th to 14th centuries, cluster around St Andrew’s Church (St Michael’s chapel in the medieval period, served from the mother church at Market Bosworth). Their presence marks the emergence of Carlton’s earliest nucleated settlement: a linear cluster of homes and fields stretching east along Main Street from the chapel, which served as the spiritual and social anchor for the medieval community.
As the 13th century progressed, the village also expanded westwards with new settlement around Carlton Green. Here, pottery appears in scattered pockets, showing how new households likely established themselves around the shared common land. Interestingly, some parts of the green yielded no medieval finds at all, revealing that the space once extended more broadly than the present neat area of grass. This suggests a medieval village that was more open and fluid than its modern form – a place where houses did not solely follow the roadside but also emerged around fields and commons that residents collectively shaped.
Crisis and Change in the Later Middle Ages
By the late 14th and 15th centuries, the fabric of rural life across England was transformed. The Black Death, which swept through the country beginning in 1348, triggered labour shortages, shifts in land ownership, and the widespread conversion of arable land to pasture. Carlton was no exception. Test pits revealed a 40% decline in later medieval pottery, particularly in areas marked by ridge‑and‑furrow earthworks where open‑field agriculture once thrived. This pattern suggests that much of Carlton’s farmland was reorganised, perhaps consolidated, and in some cases taken out of cultivation altogether.
Yet the settlement’s core around the chapel and around the green appears to have endured. On Main Street, medieval activity continues steadily into the later medieval period; and whilst the absence of late medieval pottery on the north side of the village green might indicate some depopulation, a new occupation site has developed to the west. This persistence would eventually guide the village’s shape in centuries to come.
Domestic Life and Quiet Resilience in the 16th to 18th Centuries
The post‑medieval period ushers Carlton into sharper focus. From the 1500s onward, pottery becomes more plentiful, more varied, and more telling. Everyday ceramics from Ticknall, Staffordshire, and the wider Midlands appear in abundance: iron‑glazed kitchenwares, slip‑decorated bowls, salt‑glazed stoneware, and bright, refined Creamware of the 18th century. Coupled with fragments of clay tobacco pipes – including pipe bowls datable to the early 1600s – these finds evoke the domestic rhythms of early modern village life: meals cooked in earthenware pots, mugs raised in local alehouses, and new habits like smoking weaving their way into Carlton’s homes and yards.
In several places, particularly near Manor House Farm, post‑medieval layers lie directly above medieval ones without interruption, suggesting centuries of continuous occupation on the same plots. These quiet continuities hint at inherited tenancies, family attachments to land, and long‑lived homesteads evolving generation by generation.
A Village Takes Its Modern Shape
The 18th and 19th centuries are vividly present in the test pits. Red ceramic brick, handmade tiles, fragments of windows and bottles, and a wealth of domestic refuse show a village increasingly shaped by new materials, new buildings, and new lifestyles. Several pits revealed built features – stone and brick surfaces, farmyard layers, and a cobbled trackway behind Main Street – that speak to Carlton’s role as a working rural settlement. The trackway in particular, supported by pottery found within its compacted surface, appears to have been in use from at least the 18th or 19th centuries, guiding carts and livestock from the village toward the fields beyond.
One of the most intriguing developments in this era is the emergence of Carlton Gate. The distribution of pottery shows that this eastern part of the village was not settled until the 18th century, marking it as the final significant expansion of Carlton before its modern form stabilised. This growth, around the toll gate and inn, accompanied changes in transport, agriculture, and domestic architecture, visible in the rising abundance of mass‑produced objects – bottle glass, machine‑made nails, drainage pipes, and decorative ceramics – that speak to increasing connectivity with wider markets.
Layers of Everyday Life
Modern finds – plastic toys, plant labels, battery rods, and the accidental debris of gardens and sheds – tell the most recent chapter of Carlton’s story. These items might seem mundane, but together they mirror the same pattern observed across all earlier centuries: the land keeps a record of the daily lives of those who use it. Whether it is a medieval pot fragment churned into the soil by ploughing or a plastic sweet wrapper lost during an afternoon in the garden, every object caught in the earth carries a trace of the people who once stood above it.
What the Soil Remembers
Taken together, the results of the test‑pitting project show a village defined not by grand events but by the slow, steady rhythms of rural life. Carlton began as a settlement of free peasants cultivating small strips of land. It expanded unevenly as families established new homes around shared greens, contracted during later medieval upheavals, and reshaped itself through post‑medieval rebuilding and modern development. At every stage, the people of Carlton left small, ordinary objects behind – fragments which, centuries later, allow us to reconstruct the contours of their world.