Clopton, the village that disappeared

Why should a few ridges and bumps in the land have such an effect on you when pointed out to you? Today I visited the site of the former village of Clopton, which disappeared in the 16th century. Clopton is only 15 miles west of Cambridge, but it felt very distant indeed. According to recent estimates, there are thousands of villages in England that have ceased to exist. For the most part, no trace is visible of these village sites. But the very rough and untidy site of Clopton (as the archaeologists say, just “lumps and bumps”), with cows grazing contentedly at the bottom of the hill, and just a few rough tracks made by walkers and mountain bikers, was very moving. In 1377 there had been 104 taxpayers in the village.

I took photos, but to be honest they don’t make much sense without a written account that has been pieced together from reports of digs and articles in obscure journals, as well as the remarkable Archaeology of Cambridgeshire (1997) by Alison Taylor, a remarkably accessible and well illustrated guide that was being sold off for £5 in the rather sad Cambridge Local Studies Library.

The decline of Clopton is particularly sad, because it was avoidable. It was not the result of a natural disaster such as plague, or simple economic recession. It seems to have been the work of one man, John Fisher, and his son, who together between around 1500 and the 1530s used their legal knowledge to enclose the land to convert it from arable to pasture, and thereby gain control of the whole village, forcing all the inhabitants out, including a lawsuit with the rector and imprisoning the lord of the manor and his wife. Not a pretty story. Did those cows realise they were grazing a few feet above the remains of one of the largest villages in the area? Did the mountain bikers, with their fluorescent jackets and fancy kit, notice those lumps and bumps and wonder how they had come about? Would I even have given this side of a hill a second thought if I hadn’t been told about it in advance?