Fig 5  Villa at Brading, Isle of Wight
(For plan with numbered rooms, V.C.H. Hants, i, 313)

built apart to avoid danger of fire. At Mansfield Woodhouse, in Nottinghamshire, two buildings make up the establishment. The one is a small corridor house, with a hypocaust and mosaic pavements, presumably the master’s residence. The other is a specimen of the fourth type described above, less luxurious than the corridor house, but containing some bathrooms, which perhaps belonged to

the conveniences of ‘the family.’ Elsewhere, as at Clanville, we find something simpler. A house of our fourth type provides the residence, and barns and sheds stand round it. In all these types and combinations of types the larger houses seem to contain accommodation both for a resident—or occasionally resident—lord and his family and servants and for the farm labourers and farm work. The smaller could have taken only working farmers or bailiffs.
   Besides these country-houses with their annexes, we find also in the country various villages, or rather hamlets, which stand apart from the houses just described and were inhabited only by peasants. These have not yet been excavated in sufficient numbers to form the basis of any general statement. We are not, however, altogether without evidence. Three hamlets uncovered by General Pitt-Rivers in north-east Dorset tell us the character of the village life in that part of the province. The hamlets are small in size—averaging about 150 yards across—irregular in shape, and encircled, and to some extent divided up internally, by mounds and ditches. The interior is thinly occupied by scattered cottages which represent something far ruder than any of our four types of country houses. Many are mere round huts, sunk slightly into the ground, walled with wattle and daub, and comparable, perhaps, with the ‘mardelles’ of the Romano-Gaulish peoples across the Channel. Others show more civilization—straight sides, regularly timbered walls with painted wall-plaster, roofs of Roman tiles or slates from Purbeck, and even simple attempts at hypocausts, while their furniture includes glass jugs, styli for writing and—most significant feature to anyone who has travelled on the margins of civilization—wooden chests of drawers with bronze ornamental handles and bosses. The dwellers in these hamlets were peaceful agriculturists who grew corn and kept flocks and herds of somewhat undersized cattle and sheep. Extensive traces of their small square fields have in recent years been revealed on the Wiltshire, Dorset, and Sussex downs by air-photography. How many persons went to a hamlet we have no means of judging. But the hamlets themselves seem to have been very numerous. They are now most easily detected on the open downs. But