In some cases the cause of the demise of a village is well documented. At Milton Abbas the village was relocated by Lord Milton to improve his estate. Edward I's "New Town" of Newton on Brand's Bay, Poole Harbour, never succeeded. Other cases are far less clear-cut.

The abandonment of many of these villages has been attributed to the Black Death which ravaged the country in the fourteenth century. This may have been a contributory cause, but the plague is unlikely to have have destroyed whole populations and, had the area been attractive enough, it is likely that the villages would have become repopulated in time. What seems certain is that the drastic depopulation caused by the Black Death caused much marginal land to fall out of cultivation. In such cases the survivors would probably have sought better livlihoods elsewhere. This may have been the case at Ringstead and Winterborne Farringdon.

It is possible that the demise of some of the villages in the south was due to their deliberate depopulation by landlords to make way for the more profitable sheep-farming - this was very common in the Midlands during the Tudor Age.