The Asps, Warwick, Warwickshire 

Overview

An excavation carried out between April 2021 and September 2022 was undertaken to record the remains of a deserted medieval village (DMV) known from documentary sources as The Asps (or Nasps) on a hillside in Bishops Tachbrook on the shoulder of the Avon Valley, prior to the development of a large housing estate by Taylor Wimpey (Midlands).

Astonishingly and despite being previously evaluated with a suite of techniques including geophysical survey and trail trenching (not carried out by Archaeology Warwickshire we hasten to add), the Asps were found to overlie important later prehistoric and Roman sites.

The prehistoric activity was extensive and suggestive of a long period of occupation across the hillside in the centuries before the Roman invasion. Several foci of farming settlement were identified from the remains of round houses set within ditched and banked enclosures and several other curvilinear ditched enclosures suggest a complicated settlement morphology. The round houses were represented by penannular ring gullies that would have encircled the cob or turf walls which supported thatched roofs.  The ring gullies and ditches contained charred plant remains derived from ovens and hearths and handmade courseware pottery from which it will be possible to extract more nuanced data regarding the agricultural regime. A long linear ditch on the eastern side of the site near the Tachbrook seems likely to represent the boundary separating the site from a neighbouring contemporary estate. Three cremation burials were excavated.  

The settlement in use in the early Roman period seems likely, but wasn't assuredly, to have been occupied by the descendants of the Iron Age settlement. The introduction of hard-fired ceramics to the site in the Roman period paints a picture of continued development and the adoption of European agricultural improvements, the eventual adoption of Roman forms of construction and tablewares. Ditched enclosures become more elaborate and extensive and there is some evidence for the change to rectangular buildings.

Unusually for sites in Warwickshire there was also evidence the site was occupied in the later Saxon period, although no sign that there was continuous occupation from the end of the Roman period, particularly as the Roman pottery supply seems to have stopped before the 4th century AD.  

The founding of the medieval village is certainly characterised by a rectilinear system of enclosures and boundaries representing settled the core of the DMV. Surfaces, ovens as well as potential robbed out buildings were recorded within the medieval settlement. 

Matt Jones, Archaeology Warwickshire