Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 119

Most multi-authored collections are to a degree like the curate’s egg, allowing reviewers to savour and discard, but not this one which is wholesome in all of its parts. Richard Bradley discusses prehistoric landscapes and stresses that very often the interpretation of ritual monuments and rural features needs to be integrated (e.g. disused Iron-Age granary pits were used for ritual deposits, including human burial). Mark Corney reviews Roman Britain, painting a picture of a highly-cultivated and well-settled rural landscape from the North to the wetlands, to what we now call the downlands of Wessex (the location of his own expert researches). Stephen Rippon, surveying the later Roman and early medieval landscape, makes a convincing case for survival of the old alongside new ‘Anglo-Saxon’ settlements and fields – continuity not everywhere but in places and with marked regional variation in the relationship between the two. Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell, spanning the periods covered by Corney and Rippon and concentrating largely on the Midlands, conclude from their innovative maps that the boundaries between open land (the ‘champion’ of later ages) and woodland were generally ‘already well marked by the time of the Roman conquest’, although of course we know of local exceptions to this generalization. There is no general chapter on the high middle ages but Tom Williamson takes up the story with a study entitled ‘The rural landscape, 1500–1900, the neglected centuries’. He is absolutely correct when he says that the creation of around sixty per cent of the walled or hedged landscape of England post-dates 1450, and when he asks why the ‘open lands’ of Roberts and Wrathmell (above) were in arable cultivation in Roman, Anglo-Saxon and early medieval times despite the views of all later commentators as to their greater suitability for grazing.

There are chapters on more localized and nonagrarian themes, including those by Kevin Edwards (with Y. Mulder, T. Lomax, G. Whittington and K. Hirons) on the Outer Hebrides where long sediment sequences stretching back to the Mesolithic reveal changes in land use which may be compared with distributions of settlements and find sites; by Angus Winchester on the hills of northern England, in which he makes the useful distinction between ‘closed’ upland strongly controlled by lords and ‘open’ tracts where peasant settlement was allowed and encouraged; and by James Bond who surveys ‘Landscapes of monasticism’ in a novel and interesting way. Terry Slater writes an extremely useful historiographical review of progress in our understanding of urban landscapes, pointing out, for example, that the plan of the very early (if not the earliest) English post-Conquest town with streets intersecting at right angles, Bury St Edmunds, may have been influenced by the geometrical works of Adelard of Bath, kept in the monastic library there. Marilyn Palmer also discusses historiography, in her case that of the study of post-medieval industrial landscapes, and she is one of the few authors here to include a formal discussion of methodology. John Chandler writes on ‘The discovery of landscape’ in a learned and novel way and considers that, in part, rapid changes in society and landscape were often the stimulus which led men in the past, from Leland to Hoskins, to go out and explore. Della Hooke, in a timely chapter, writes of the practical implications of the discipline, discussing the historical landscape characterization maps (a description almost designed to be off-putting) now being produced by English county councils, and the future European dimension. Christopher Taylor engagingly rounds off the collection with a wealth of reflections, that which struck me most being his comment that landscape history is not simply economic or agrarian or urban history with the difficult bits missed out and a few pictures substituted.

This collection of papers (and their excellent bibliographies which, collectively, provide a good survey of the literature up to 2000) prompts many thoughts. One is that landscape history is the most difficult and taxing of subjects. Another, and related one, is that we can only succeed by juggling together all of the different types of evidence, including the palynological, and including the documentary, which is highly important (I disagree with Robert Dodgshon’s comment on this in his preface). 120 the agricultural Multi-disciplinary is a term which usually makes me wish to reach for a gun and I would like to think that the discipline is now mature enough to take that approach for granted. Third, the influence of W.G. Hoskins on the subject is profound. His name, with a great variety of spellings in the genitive form, and his ideas appear everywhere in this collection, from his views on the great woodlands of Anglo-Saxon England to his comment on Leicestershire’s industrial landscapes: ‘profoundly dull, as one might expect from factories producing such prosaic things as vests and pants ... biscuits and bricks’. The hare which he set running from the Department of English Local History in the early 1950s still has a good running ahead of it.