The demolition of a farmhouse near Derby’s Municipal Golf Course could open a window on to the city’s medieval past, for beneath the farm lies a deserted medieval village which had never been excavated – as Maxwell Craven recounts.

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Some readers may have noticed that Cotton’s Farm, near the Municipal Golf Course at Sinfin and long deserted, is now fenced off with notices warning of imminent demolition.

The locally listed building, off the end of Shakespeare Street, is relatively unremarkable, for it is an early Victorian farmhouse with an 18th-century wing to the south west, although there may be an earlier core.

But it lies on one of the most ancient sites in the city and is the only deserted medieval village within our boundaries.

In fact, about 20 years ago, when Derby Museum was asked to name parts of the city to be designated archaeological alert areas for planning purposes, the farm and its immediate environs were suggested for just that reason.

For, although there are a number of deserted medieval villages in Derbyshire, only one – Barton Blount – has ever been properly excavated.

However, for some reason, the planning department decided to omit Cottons Farm.

In the Domesday Book, Cottons is called Codetune, subsequently standardised as Codinton, and, in 1066, before the Conquest, the manorial estate was held by a lord called Osmund, the same man who also held the manors of Osmaston and Denby, losing the latter to the first of the Rosells by 1086.

Codinton means “the place of Ceodda” and Osmaston “the place of Osmund” but, as the formation of the place names is thought to date back at least two centuries before to the Conquest, then Osmund either bore the same name by coincidence as the man from whom Osmaston took its name, or was a direct descendant.

Osmund had about 60 acres of land in Codinton and another 45 or so in the adjacent manor of Osmaston. About 330 further acres in Cottons was held from the King under the manor of Melbourne.

It would seem that Osmund survived the Conquest for, although he is not named after 1066 in the Domesday Book as the manorial lord of Codinton, he is recorded as a King’s lord, holding a manor in Chellaston both in 1066 and 1086, as well as one of four manors in Sandiacre.

The Domesday Book tells us that Henry de Ferrers was lord of Codinton but does not say who was the sub-tenant at Codinton and Osmaston.

However, by the early 12th century, a man called Fulcher is holding both. Despite his Norman name, he could easily be the son or grandson of Osmund, for it was common for Saxon nobleman’s children, born after 1066, to take a Norman name.

Fulcher’s son, Robert de Osmaston, was styled a knight in 1175 and he had a brother, Elias, with land at Stanton-by-Bridge. Sir Robert’s grandson, another Elias, sometimes called himself “son of Thomas” and sometimes “Elias Fulcher”, showing an early example of the emergence of surnames, although he always added “de Osmaston” too.

He had brothers or cousins, Henry and Fulcher, both successively calling themselves “de Codinton”. They probably lived there but may have died childless, for Elias’s son, Thomas de Osmaston, is also sometimes called “Thomas de Codinton” in the surviving deeds, so presumably the two manors were reunited under him.

Later, the family then seems to have split again, for Thomas’s descendants, the Fulchers, held Osmaston and the Codinton estate passed via the two daughters of Engenulph de Codinton into the Dethick family around 1276.

After a mention in a charter of 1357, Codinton vanishes from the records completely.

As the Black Death raged in the late 1340s, the suspicion is that its population was probably wiped out by it.

Survivors probably went off to live in Normanton or Osmaston. Either way, we hear no more of Codinton. Then, about two centuries later, it re-emerges as Cotton’s Farm.

In 1545, with Cottons administratively merged with Normanton and thus part of the parish of St Peter and of Derby itself, the ownership of the land passed from the Dethicks to the Babingtons. Cottons ended up as the patrimony of Michael Babington of Normanton, a younger son.

In 1586, his heirs sold the Normanton estate to the Beaumonts of Grace Dieu, in Leicestershire, but some 285 acres at Cotton’s was sold separately as a freehold farm. By the Restoration, it was owned by George Radford, a Derby maltster, in whose family it continued until sold to Derby Corporation in about 1920 by Edwin Radford, who had removed to Haynford Lodge, Norfolk, in the 1890s.

While the Shakespeare Street estate may cover some of the archaeology of the settlement, much of the hollow ways, lanes, house platforms and vestiges of medieval rural life, must lie beneath the fairways and greens of the Municipal Golf Course, which opened in pouring rain on July 4, 1923.

We must hope that the demolition of the farmhouse might at least open a window on to the history of Derby’s only deserted medieval village.

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