The main purpose of this paper is to illustrate those ways in which a detailed study of what is now a small market town may be illuminated by the resuIts of both historical and archaeoiogical analysis. Either approach, undertaken in isolation, would leave serious gaps in our knowledge. On the historical side, the paucity of written evidence in the two centuries before Domesday would bequeath but a sketchy insight into the nature and topography of the early settlement. In archaeological terms, the physical evidence which has emerged from excavation and topographical analysis would be impossible to interpret taken alone. The integration of both disciplines, however, makes it possible to present a fairly convincing picture of the development of a Scandinavian and pre-Scandinavian settlement into the Norman borough which it became. This is not to say that there are no problems of interpretation, far from it, but that the questions become, by this approach, easier to define, even if the answers remain stubbornly elusive.

Stamford today is a small market town on the north and south banks of the River Welland in South Lincolnshire (Fig. 1). It lies in the promontary formed by the extreme south-western corner of the aptly named extreme south-western wapentake of Ness. Before local government reorganisation it was flanked by Rutland to the north and west, and Northamptonshire and the Soke of Peterborough to the south. The nucleus of the settlement arose, and remained, on the north bank, but there was at least from the tenth century onwards, a subsidiary settlement on the south in the region which later became known as Stamford Baron. These two settlements are now connected by a bridge, the latest successor of one deriving probably from the first half of the tenth century. East and west of the bridge the limestone ridges on which and of which the town is built diverge to give wide watermeadows upstream, and gravel terraces downstream, which in prehistoric and Roman times supported a scatter of rural occupation. Half a mile west of the town bridge Ermine Street crosses the meadows by means of a ford, and it is from this that the placename 'Stanford’ - the stone ford - is derived.'

There is no evidence for any substantial occupation in the middle-Saxon or Roman periods.