Housing of Dark Ages Britain

[Prince Richard]

Does anyone have any idea (or better yet, references and reference pictures!) to what Celtic villages, towns, houses, castles and forts looked like (inside and exterior if possible), and the same structures for Anglo-Saxons?

Thanks,
Prince Richard

[Copperknickers II]

Celtic settlements consisted largely of roundhouses, some enclosed inside earth or wooden walls. In Scotland, many people still lived in and around crannogs (Iron age lake houses) like this:



They would also have had churches, wood or stone. Here's an example of a Dark Age Irish church:



Anglo-Saxon settlements would have been similar, but perhaps with more square-shaped buildings and less use of the old drystone masonry.



And some Anglo-Saxon settlements would have been very large, much larger than the largest Celtic settlements:



This is London in the mid-Dark ages, although it was actually a newly founded city and not the same as Roman Londinium. It was only linked up with the older Roman ruins later.

[Prince Richard]

I see! Would both of these be around 600 AD?

[Aymer de Valence]

There's an open air museum in Suffolk which has a few Anglo-Saxon buildings:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

And inside:








https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_S...-Saxon_Village

[Prince Richard]

Thanks! That helps a lot!

[Sir Adrian]

Romanian lived in mud-brick houses like this one, particularly in Moldavia

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

They have the advantage of being thermo isolated, and very cheap and easy to re-build after the nomads move on to pillage other places (all you need is straw, mud and some 6 wood beams, 4 days work and a bit of sun to help dry the bricks)

[Roma_Victrix]

Although not a place for living, I had the pleasure of recently viewing an Anglo-Saxon church in Cambridge, England, St Bene't's Parish Church to be precise. It is apparently one of the oldest surviving stone structures in Cambridgeshire.

[Prince Richard]

So essentially Saxons had stone brickwork for important buildings, thatched wooden plank or mud paste houses, and stuck to high stone walls to protect things.

Celts had round houses made of mud, more roman-inspired mud houses and primitive brick structures which were made with bricks made of clay, mud and horse dung. They, for some reason, seemed to know how to make stone walls (perhaps they just rebuilt the roman walls?), though globally it seems they did not see the need of walls.

[Roma_Victrix]

So essentially Saxons had stone brickwork for important buildings, thatched wooden plank or mud paste houses, and stuck to high stone walls to protect things.

Celts had round houses made of mud, more roman-inspired mud houses and primitive brick structures which were made with bricks made of clay, mud and horse dung. They, for some reason, seemed to know how to make stone walls (perhaps they just rebuilt the roman walls?), though globally it seems they did not see the need of walls.

Really? There are substantially large and famous pre-Roman Celtic ruins in countries like Spain and France with defensive stone walls.

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Doctor Shuu is right, although that one is a little late for Dark Ages, the Slavs lived in what could be seen as the equivalent of the sod houses in the American prairie. They were partially underground and made of well... dirt. And wood too, but mostly dirt.

AS for Britain, this is a pretty typical Saxon house:

[Andreius Pretorianus]

Doctor Shuu is right, although that one is a little late for Dark Ages, the Slavs lived in what could be seen as the equivalent of the sod houses in the American prairie. They were partially underground and made of well... dirt. And wood too, but mostly dirt.

AS for Britain, this is a pretty typical Saxon house:

]


he s talking about romanians , not slavs

[Enros]

There's an open air museum in Suffolk which has a few Anglo-Saxon buildings:

People in rural Britain lived in buildings like that in the late 20th century. There are still buildings like that in some parts of eastern Europe, never mind the world.

[Aymer de Valence]

People in rural Britain lived in buildings like that in the late 20th century.

Really? The 1980s and 90s? Nope

[Prince Richard]

No one's lived in those for a few centuries.

[Enros]

Really? The 1980s and 90s? Nope

Electricity didn't become universal until the 1960s. Concrete houses with cavity walls like most of us now live in weren't common until the 1960s either.

No one's lived in those for a few centuries.

Thatched wooden or stone houses were what poor (i.e. most) rural people in the 19th century UK lived in. Maybe there were some architectural differences from anglo-saxon houses, but they were the same materials.

Here's an example: "This type of construction is typical of vernacular architecture in the Broads"

[Aru]

And here is a zemunica built in 1947 in Serbia.

[andrew881thebest]

Basically hats. World went back from Rome to villages of hats. Can you imagine how the world would look like withouth barbarian invasions? We would be 1000 years forward (since society took 1000 years to reach same level of civilization).

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Andrew that's not true. The whole "dark ages" concept is a misnomer because there were plenty of scientific advances in that period. Most of the roman administration and infrastructure was maintained by the Barbarian successor states.

[Aymer de Valence]

Can you imagine how the world would look like withouth barbarian invasions?

And where would we be if religion didn't exist? Technology and philosophy wise, the world stood still in the Middle Ages because everyone was so wound up about religion and being exploited by the church with fire & brimstone. After the Romans, the world went backwards until the Renaissance, when people started to apply their brains a bit more.....

This is the West I'm talking about. The East has stood still for 1500 years and counting

[Prince Richard]

Arguably we've barely evolved or advanced in the past 60,000 years.