Richard Densley
(1715-)
Mary Salmon
(1710-)
William Densley
(1735-)
Elizabeth Holbrook
(Cir 1740-)
Martha Densley
(1759-1801)

 

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Martha Densley

  • Born: 4 Nov 1759, Priston, Avon England
  • Died: 5 Feb 1801, Priston, Avon England at age 41

  Noted events in her life were:

• source. Matthew Anderson @ genes who states:
[Full Credit to David Densley for this part of the tree.ftw] The Dobunni were one of the Celtic tribes living in the British Islands prior to the Roman invasion of Britain. The tribe was spread out over a wide area of north Somerset, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and the western parts of Oxfordshire. Their capital acquired the Roman name of Corinium Dobunnorum, known today as Cirencester. The Dobunni were a large group of farmers and craftsmen, living in small villages concentrated in fertile valleys. They were one of the few tribes to issue coins before Roman arrival. They were not a warlike people and submitted to the Romans even before they reached their lands. Afterwards they adopted the Roman lifestyle. In the second century the geographer Ptolemy wrote of the tribe of the Dobuni or Dobunni, and gave them the tribal centre of Corinium. Diocassius writing about the Roman invasion talked about a part of the tribe of the Bodunni who surrendered to Claudius. The sixth century writer from Ravenna mentioned Cironium Dobunnorum. There is a military diploma of AD 105 of Lucco son of Trenus, a Dobunnian who was serving with the First Britannic Cohort in Pannonia, modern West Hungary. The concept of territory may well be important, but the concept of home in the sense of this few tens of square feet of land with a permanent dwelling on it just does not work in the context of earth fast wooden houses and basic farming. Posts in post-holes rot quite quickly, and land can quickly become worn out. Numismatic evidence suggests that the Dobunni kings subdivided their land between a north and south zone, sometimes becoming unified in a single ruler. Which has not mentioned archaeology; for the simple reason that you cannot study historical concepts through excavated material unless you have the adapter. What then is the Iron Age and early Roman material of the area to which an adapter could be fitted if the right one were ever found? Because this involves some hard work I leave that to Tom Moore in the second part of this article. The middle Iron Age (c400 BC-1st century BC) appears to have comprised apparently of densely settled landscape with a variety of settlement types including; enclosed farmsteads, such as at Frocester (Price 2000) and Birdlip (Parry 1998), open villages in the upper Thames valley, and hillforts such as Uley (Saville 1983), Bredon (Henecken 1938) and Conderton. Recent studies of this period have suggested that the traditional view of the hillforts as elite residences supported by smaller settlements may not have been accurate. Morris' analysis of pottery assemblages (1994) has shown there was apparently little difference in status between smaller enclosures and hillforts. In addition, it seems that both types of settlements were involved in similar farming and industrial activities and it seems unlikely that hillforts acted as consumers with smaller settlements as producers. This suggests that there may not have been chiefs ruling from the hillforts but that a more diverse society existed of independent groups co-operating at some levels of trade and exchange. Around the 1st century BC a number of new settlements appeared at, for example, Ditches (Trow 1988) and Salmonsbury (Dunning 1976). Some earlier hillforts, such as Conderton, appear to have gone out of use, although others, such as Uley, may have continued to be occupied. Elsewhere similar shifts in settlement appear to have been taking place. At The Bowsings a new enclosure was built, seemingly replacing the more open settlement at The Park (Marshall 1995). In some cases there is no evidence of a shift and the earlier settlement continued to be occupied in the late Iron Age. This can be seen at Frocester where the settlement appears to have continued in use into the early Roman period. Slightly later, in the early 1st century AD, a new type of settlement, often referred to as 'oppida', seems to have emerged comprised of massive discontinuous dyke systems at Bagendon and possibly Grims Ditch (Oxfordshire). These sites, like Ditches, appear to have represented an early development in a move to new types and locations of settlement, which were then developed in the final phase of the Iron Age. Bagendon appear to have been occupied until around AD 60 and then abandoned whil other sites, such as Ditches and Frocester, developed further into Roman villas. It is apparent that there were major changes taking place in the settlement patterns of the 1st century BC and 1st century AD. Dating of the changes from many sites suggest that these changes were not uniform but that sites and regions adapted differently and that these changes were not all contemporary. For example, the shift seen from The Park to the more ostentatious enclosure at The Bowsings (Marshall 1995) seems to take place earlier than most, in the late 2nd century BC, whereas sites like the Duntisbourne enclosure seem to emerge late, in the 1st century AD (Mudd 1999). In other cases, some sites, such as Stokeleigh, near Bristol (Haldane 1975), do not show this shift and occupation seems to continue from the middle Iron Age into the Roman period. Settlement evidence suggests that society in the later Iron Age was in a state of flux, and that settlement changes were not uniform. This late uniformity may suggest that settlement changes were not simply ascribab to influences of external trade, marking a sudden shift to a new settlement pattern. Instead it appears to show that whilst changes were taking place it was over a long time frame and that changes were region with even individual sites reacting differently to new circumstances. Therefore, if we can see that these changes were different on a local level and at different times, this means that the texts may only be referring to a very localised and short time frame in this changing and fluid picture. It may be that these texts refer only to the last few decades before the conquest when the latest sites, such as Bagendon and Duntisbourne emerged, and perhaps just to the situation in the southern Cotswolds. It also suggests that, contrary to the orthodox opinion, society may not have already coalesced into hillfort dominated small 'tribal' groups in the middle Iron Age which were then subsumed into a larger tribal unit in the 1st century BC. Instead, settlements appear to have been relatively independent or dealt with each other on more or less equal terms. Thus the idea of a central king may have been anathema to people for most of the later Iron Age.


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