Stowford: an early medieval hundred meeting place
By Stuart Brookes and Alexander Langlands
The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, 2017
Introduction: In the summer of 2015 archaeological excavation sought to examine the location of an early medieval hundred meeting place (‘moot’) in southern Wiltshire. The investigation was planned in the context of recent work to characterise hundred meeting places and to explore the survival of local Roman roads into the medieval period.
Stowford provided an opportunity to bring these different concerns together. The site lies 2km west of Broad Chalke and 200m southwest of the hamlet of Fifield Bavant in the extreme east of Ebbesbourne Wake parish. Excavations centred on NGR SU 016 248 in fields immediately south of the River Ebble which flows west to east from Ebbesbourne Wake to Broad Chalke before joining the River Avon at Bodenham. The valley floor is generally flat at around 92m above Ordnance Datum but rises sharply to the south and to the north of the Ebble. The underlying solid geology is Lewes Nodular Chalk Formation overlain by Alluvium and Head Deposits.
Funding for the fieldwork was generously provided by the Leverhulme Trust as part of the UCL project ‘Travel and Communication in Anglo-Saxon England’, and was carried out by a team from UCL, Swansea University and the University of Nottingham.