Thaxted

Thaxted is a town and civil parish in the Uttlesford district of north-west Essex, England. The town is in the valley of the River Chelmer, not far from its source in the nearby village of Debden, and is 97 metres (318 feet) above sea level (where the parish church stands). The town is north from the county town of Chelmsford and east from the M11 motorway. The parish contains the hamlets of Cutlers Green, Bardfield End Green, Sibleys Green, Monk Street and Richmond's Green. Much of its status as a "town" rests on its prominent late medieval guildhall, a place where guilds of skilled tradesmen regulated their trading practices, and its English Perpendicular parish church. According to A Dictionary of British Place Names, Thaxted derives from the Old English thoec or þæc combined with stede, being a "place where thatching materials are got". In the 1086 Domesday Book, the settlement is referred to as 'Tachesteda' and in subsequent official records variously as "Thacstede", "Thaxstede", "Thackestede" and "Thakstede", amongst other spellings. As late as the nineteenth century, the spelling "Thackstead" was still in use. Thaxted developed as a Saxon settlement on a Roman road. There was a Roman villa to the east of the current town and Roman artefacts have been discovered in the area. The British Museum holds a Roman bronze head of Bacchus found at Thaxted in the nineteenth century. The first documented record of Thaxted, including a church, is in the Liber Eliensis, describes a gift of land in "Thacstede" by a woman named Æthelgifu at some time between 881 and 1016. Archeological research of the area by Oxford Archaeology in 2007 produced finds showing Bronze Age, late Iron Age, Roman, late medieval and post-medieval occupation, including flint fragments, floor and roof tiles, pottery sherds, ditch enclosures, graves, and skeletal remains. A further archeological excavation in the centre of the town by the Colchester Archeological Trust in 2015 found a large medieval ditch which may have been a part of the town's defences, 15th- to 16th-century artifacts, and fragments of animal bone waste, mainly from cattle.