This survey examines a relatively small area of the Norfolk countryside to discover, as far as possible, how settlement patterns have evolved from Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval through to recent times. The area chosen, the Launditch Hundred in west central Norfolk, contains forty-one medieval villages. Research involved a combination of detailed fieldwork around those villages where conditions were suitable, the excavation of a deserted village at Grenstein, the excavation of a Middle and Late Saxon settlement near the ruins of the pre-Conquest cathedral at North Elmham (Wade-Martins 1980) and a study of maps, both printed and manuscript, as well as other documentary sources. A study of three deserted village sites in the Launditch Hundred, Godwick, Pudding Norton and Bittering is to be published in a forthcoming volume of East Anglian Archaeology.
An appraisal of the four Dark Age linear earthworks in west Norfolk including the Launditch involved a re-interpretation of their plan and function (Wade-Martins 1974). The overall pattern of these monuments was considered in relation to the expansion of Anglo-Saxon settlement in Norfolk.