Summary

A clear picture thus emerges of several farm steadings dispersed around a small hamlet nestling within the fort itself. Aside from the reuse of a Roman military site this pattern is fairly typical of upland as opposed to lowland settlement.

The community had a limited amount of arable land for cereal cultivation, but its main wealth was clearly livestock - cattle goats and sheep - as reflected in the larger acreages of pasture and hay meadows.

Between April and August the Halls of Rochester regularly grazed their stock on the higher shieling grounds of Earlside, for in Redesdale it was the custom that "each man knoweth his sheildinge steed, and they sheylde together by surnames" (1604 Survey, 104).