Early prehsitory
The first people we know about to have lived in the area we now call North Hertfordshire arrived during a warm part of the Ice Age, almost a quarter of a million years ago. They were members of a different species of human, perhaps a type known as Homo heidelbergensis, which were very different from us and left when the temperature became cooler.
Like the rest of Britain, this area has changed enormously since the Ice Age, as glaciers carved out new valleys and rivers changed their course. Plant and animal life have also changed a great deal in the twelve thousand years since the end of the Ice Age. One of those changes was the arrival of modern humans as the ice melted.
Until about six thousand years ago, people in this area survived by hunting animals and gathering food from wild plants. They were partly nomadic, following the herds of animals they hunted and moving to where plants could be gathered in season.
Farmers
The earliest farmers in this area began to clear the forests that had grown up since the Ice Age. They made large changes to the landscape, burying their dead in long mounds of soil and building the first religious monuments. During the second millennium BC, clearance of the forest became more widespread and the land began to be divided up into fields.
By the first century BC, numerous farmsteads and hamlets existed in the district, including a large settlement at Baldock. The Roman conquest opened up opportunities for more people to prosper. The settlement at Baldock grew into a small town, while villages grew up at Hitchin, the High Avenue area of Letchworth and elsewhere. Some farms developed into wealthy Roman villa estates.
The Middle Ages
In the fifth century, the Roman Empire gave up control of Britain, which was left to itself. Shortly afterwards, raiders from north Germany and Scandinavia began to settle. They established new communities across the district and by the Norman Conquest in 1066, the district was a highly productive farming area with an important market town at Hitchin. Castles were built in a number of villages during the twelfth century.
In the High Middle Ages, new towns were built at Baldock and Royston. Many of the village churches that are still used today were built around this time. In the fourteenth century, the Black Death killed a third of the population and some villages, like Chesfield near Graveley, were abandoned. At the same time, people became more prosperous as local lords began to pay wages to keep their workers.
Modern times
In the sixteenth century, the priories at Hitchin and Royston were closed as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when the Church of England was established. The civil wars of the seventeenth century had little impact, on the other hand. By the eighteenth century, Hitchin, Baldock and Royston had become prosperous and established market towns, each with a different character.
North Hertfordshire was hardly affected by the Industrial Revolution, although railways quickly came to the area. It remained a mainly rural area, with clean, health air, which is one of the reasons that Ebenezer Howard's First Garden City Ltd chose the site of Letchworth to build their new town in 1903. But that is a completely different story…