The Settlement on the Sence
In 2024, the Bosworth Links project brought its unique brand of community archaeology to the village of Shenton. Over one spring weekend, volunteers from across the community took part in twenty‑three small-scale test pit excavations in gardens, orchards, pastures and woodland throughout the village. During the dig, participants recovered more than 8,600 artefacts spanning nearly ten millennia. These test pits, though only a metre square, created windows into Shenton’s buried past. Together, their findings reveal a long history of human presence in the valley of the Sence Brook, from the earliest prehistoric visitors to the formation of a medieval village and the shaping of the estate landscape we see today.
A Landscape of Early Footsteps
The earliest hints of life around Shenton come from a small assemblage of worked flint discovered in several test pits across the village. These artefacts include two Mesolithic scrapers more than 9,000 years old as well as Neolithic and Bronze Age flakes and cores. Although few in number and widely dispersed, they paint a picture of a landscape visited time and again by early communities. Rather than permanent settlement, the pattern suggests brief, repeated episodes of activity, perhaps hunting game and gathering plant resources along the Sence Brook, or pausing during seasonal movements across the wider region.
Roman‑period finds continue this theme of light-touch human presence. Only a scatter of pottery sherds dating from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD emerged from the excavations, all small, abraded and clearly long churned through the soil. Their condition suggests they were introduced not by settlement activity but by agricultural practices. Metal‑detected finds from fields surrounding Shenton, along with a known Roman temple site near the Bosworth Battlefield Visitor Centre, indicate that Shenton lay within a wider network of farms, shrines and trackways during the Roman occupation. Yet within the village itself there is no archaeological trace of a Roman dwelling, enclosure or industrial activity. Instead, the evidence points to Shenton’s valley landscape functioning much as it had in prehistory – a place on the margins, shaped by the movement of people and the rhythms of farming rather than by concentrated settlement.
Emergence of a Village
The documentary story of Shenton begins in the Domesday Book of 1086, where it appears as Scenctun – a name meaning “the farmstead or settlement on the Sence.” At this time, it was a place divided between three lords, each holding parcels of land worked by villagers and smallholders. The Domesday entry paints a picture of a modest rural community with plough teams, meadow and arable fields, and a landscape already shaped by centuries of cultivation. It is our earliest firm glimpse of Shenton, yet it hints at earlier origins that lie just beyond the reach of surviving records.
Archaeologically, however, the earliest phases of Shenton are almost silent. Despite extensive test pitting across the village, only a single sherd of Saxo‑Norman pottery came to light from a test pit close to the church. This absence does not contradict the Domesday account; instead, it suggests that the earliest settlement at Shenton may have been small or loosely organised, and therefore has left little trace in the soil.
A clearer picture of Shenton begins to take shape in the centuries following Domesday. By the 12th century, the settlement had assumed a linear layout extending along what is now Pump Street. Pottery recovered from excavations points to activity here from at least this period, indicating that the street was already established and occupied by the High Medieval era. This archaeological evidence aligns with documentary records showing that by around 1220 Shenton possessed its own church and functioned as a chapelry of Market Bosworth, confirming its status as an organised and recognised community within the wider manorial landscape.
A Village in Multiple Parts
It is this High Medieval period that Shenton’s archaeology becomes particularly rich and informative. Test pits across the village yielded large quantities of 12th–14th-century pottery – significantly more than from earlier periods – pointing to a thriving and continuously occupied settlement. When these finds are plotted across the modern landscape, they reveal a pattern of occupation more intricate than previously understood.
The surviving earthworks of former houses and gardens at the end of Pump Street show that the Shenton has shrunk since the medieval period
Along Pump Street, the concentration and quality of this material underline its role as the main focus of activity. Traces of this earlier landscape are still visible today: to the north of the church, earthworks include a hollow way aligned with Pump Street and a series of rectangular platforms marking former dwellings. The discovery of a cobbled surface in one test pit provides a rare glimpse of built features, possibly representing a yard, pathway, or the frontage of a lost structure. These remains suggest a densely occupied zone of medieval plots – small rectangular tofts (the homestead) with long, narrow adjacent crofts (enclosed land used as a small vegetable garden, orchard, or a safe paddock) – extending back from the street and bordered by the ridge-and-furrow of the arable fields that still surround the village.
Yet Pump Street was not the whole story. The excavations also revealed a second focus of medieval occupation on the western side of the Sence Brook. Test pits at Ivy House Farm on Main Street produced a large quantity of High Medieval pottery, suggesting settlement here from at least the 12th century and continuing into the later medieval period. Their condition – larger, less abraded than plough‑soil sherds – indicates activity close by, rather than refuse carried in from surrounding fields. This cluster suggests a small but meaningful medieval presence west of the brook, forming an additional node of settlement apart from Pump Street.
A more tentative third focus may have also existed around the junction of Main Street with Sibson Lane. Here, pottery from the High Medieval period appears in smaller quantities. While not enough to confirm a permanent cluster of homes, it does suggest movement, cultivation or light activity in the area – possibly outlying crofts, smallholdings or temporary occupation linked to the wider village economy.
Taken together, these findings reveal that medieval Shenton was dispersed: a village composed of several small clusters of houses and plots rather than a single compact nucleus. Its homes, yards and fields were strung along the Sence Brook, connected by lanes whose lines still shape the village today. Far from being a tiny, isolated settlement, medieval Shenton was a subtly structured rural community, its form shaped by the landscape, manorial influence and the daily rhythms of medieval agricultural life.
Change and Upheaval
Pottery from the late 14th to mid‑16th century appears across Shenton, but always in noticeably smaller quantities than the rich High Medieval assemblages that precede it; there is a 53% drop in test pits which produced 2 or more sherds of Late Medieval pottery compared to High Medieval pottery. This reduction is not unique to Shenton – it echoes a national pattern of population fluctuation and settlement change following the Black Death of 1348–49 and the waves of epidemic disease that continued for generations. At Shenton, the pottery signals contraction rather than outright abandonment. The key medieval areas – particularly along Pump Street and Main Street – continued to see some activity (including new areas of activity on Main Street) but overall, the density and scale of occupation were clearly diminished. Some house plots may have been left unoccupied, particularly at the north end of Pump Street and the junction with Sibson Lane, and the overall pace of village life seems to have slackened.
While the archaeological record for the later 15th and early 16th centuries is subtle, the documentary evidence for the early 17th century is dramatic. In 1610, Richard Everard, then lord of the manor, was accused before the Court of Star Chamber of depopulating Shenton. The charges claimed that he had pulled down houses of husbandry (farms), seized the land attached to them, and converted arable land into pasture – actions that displaced tenants and dismantled the social fabric of the village. Pasture farming, especially sheep, was considerably more profitable at the time, and Shenton was far from the only village to experience such pressure.
Although the excavation cannot pinpoint where Everard’s demolished dwellings once stood, the archaeology strongly supports this history. Across many test pits, the early post‑medieval period (mid‑16th to mid-17th century) is strikingly underrepresented. Pottery of this date is scarce almost everywhere, suggesting a sharp decline in domestic activity. In some areas – particularly where the medieval settlement had once been most active – the near‑absence of artefacts from this transitional period indicates that parts of Shenton may indeed have been cleared, abandoned, or left to grass.
Shenton in the Post‑Medieval and Modern Era
By the mid‑17th century, Shenton entered a new phase under different ownership. The Wollaston family purchased the estate in 1625 and would shape its landscape for the centuries that followed. Under their tenure, Shenton gradually stabilised. New farms, cottages and outbuildings were introduced or rebuilt; landholdings were reorganised; and the estate centre around Shenton Hall expanded. By the time the tithe map was drawn in 1849, the village had assumed a form recognisably continuous with the one we see today – a quiet, estate‑centred settlement framed by farmland, pasture and the meandering Sence Brook.
In contrast to the sparse early post‑medieval layers, the test pits produced abundant material from the later 17th century through to the modern era. This includes post‑medieval pottery, fragments of handmade brick and tile, bottle glass, and increasing quantities of clay tobacco pipe. By the 18th and especially the 19th century, modern domestic debris becomes plentiful – evidence of a village once again lived‑in, with renewed patterns of habitation and consumption.
Some test pits near the brook contained thick deposits of building rubble. These layers reflect the evolving estate landscape: demolition of old structures, repairs to barns and cottages, and landscaping around Shenton Hall and its farmyards. In the woodland east of Pump Street, modern hardcore was found that relates to the use of this area as a woodyard and working spaces in recent centuries. On Pump Street itself, 18th‑ and 19th‑century deposits show the rebuilding of cottages and the return of more stable settlement after the earlier depopulation.
By the 19th century, Shenton had re‑established itself as a compact but thriving estate village. The construction of the new parish church of St John the Evangelist in 1860, replacing the medieval chapel, signalled a renewed sense of lordship and community identity. Shenton Hall, originally built in 1629 and much enlarged in the 19th century, became an increasingly prominent feature of village life.
Everyday modern finds – shotgun cartridges, slate pencils, buttons, marbles, spark plugs, toys, household metalwork and even a 20th‑century vaseline jar – bring the story to the present day. These small objects mark the routines of rural work, gardening, childhood play, repair and domestic comfort. They show that although the grander patterns of depopulation, estate management and rebuilding shaped Shenton’s structure, it is the long continuity of ordinary people living ordinary lives that has filled the village with story.