villages

I recently designed a course on genre in film. The theme for the first iteration of the class is folk horror—a genre where villages frequently appear.

A village green, as envisioned by Adobe Text to Image.

What is a village? In the UK, where folk horror came into its own, a village is a compact settlement of houses with a public building like a church, often sited for agriculture. Medieval villages were usually organized around a village green and land would have been farmed communally. This is where the phrase “the commons” comes from.

Unfortunately, after the 1600s, the commons were enclosed and private property became the organizing principle of farming and life:

One of the major changes that led to the increased complexity in the form of the British village was the movement away from communal open-field farming (common in medieval times) to the enclosure of land into regular fields which occurred in most of Britain between 1600 and 1800. This had a huge effect on settlements as new patterns of farm holdings developed away from the village centre. In many cases the village structure was weakened as the farming population moved away from the centres of population. —Greg Stevenson