Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 226

This book is an ambitious enterprise, which, in effect, aims to supersede volume II (i) of CUP’s Agrarian history of England and Wales edited by H.P.R. Finberg and published in 1972. The main differences are that Scotland is included, chronological treatment is largely eschewed, the approach is predominantly archaeological rather than historical – and the whole is written by one person. Mostly, the book is organized as a series of thematic chapters on farms, ploughs, livestock and so on, illustrated by a selection of archaeological discoveries mostly made in the (post-Finberg) era of much more intensive archaeological work. Additional insights are derived from ‘traditional’ farming practices, medieval literature and manuscript illustrations, as well as Fowler’s own fieldwork on Overton Down in north Wiltshire, consultative roles at Butser Ancient Farm (and, I presume, Bede’s World), and observations of recent farming practice in Galicia and the Causse Méjean in the Cévennes. The book is intended in part as a textbook, and it certainly contains a great deal of information and thoughtful comment, as well as a 38-page bibliography. It will be especially useful for those whose specialism is document-based history, and who wish to develop an understanding of what archaeologists have contributed to knowledge of first millennium farming in recent years.

A survey of British agriculture which aims to run in time from Cunobelin to Cnut and in space from Marazion to Muckle Flugga involves hard choices. Fowler has rejected a framework of region-based chapters which would have encouraged more even spatial coverage. Rightly out of sympathy with ‘ethnic’ categories such as ‘Romano- British agriculture’, ‘Anglo-Saxon agriculture’ and so on, he has also refrained from telling the story chronologically. In the short and seemingly belated historical overview which turns up in the final chapter, eight phases of agrarian history are described in fourteen pages, within a framework defined by ‘political’ events. (And in this context, the book has largely lost interest in anywhere more than a hundred miles from Oxford.) It seems that first millennium agrarian history cannot be put into self-defined phases, even those fuzzy and regionally-varying phases which last a couple of centuries or so and are markedly different from those which precede and succeed them despite the fact that their boundaries are transgressed by quite a few general trends. I appreciate that this book is not intended as an agrarian history; yet someone, some day, will have to provide such a history for the first millennium ad – and he or she will be using much the same sort of data as Fowler presents here.

The thematic treatment carries the risk that the reader will rarely gain a sense of the holistic, experiential, landscape-centred nature of farming. To some extent a corrective is provided by local case studies, though as these are quite frequently not illustrated by site plans or photographs, it is sometimes hard to visualize the agrarian landscape being described. I suggest that a second edition might contain illustrations more closely linked to what is after all quite a closely-focused text. Some of the photos are atmospheric, but they don’t do much work; most readers will already know what muck heaps, flocks of sheep, and coppice stools look like.

What are Fowler’s first millennium farmers like? Mostly, they resemble the figures in Alan Sorrell’s well-known illustrations of the archaeologically-oriented past – working their butts off for an oppressive master, with some very nasty weather on the way. They are portrayed as conservative, pragmatic characters, whose common sense was much like ours, so it is not surprising that what they did is often described as ‘unsurprising’. They were ‘not democratic’, their spirituality (although ‘sincere’) was very much an epiphenomenon, and they worked land which was almost always ‘owned’ by somebody else. They were in other words essentially passive, their cultural competence and social agency fenced in by certain given factors whose complexity, variability, mutability and internal tensions are largely unexplored. They are stereotypical ‘farmers’, only allowed roles as social beings in other branches of history. They are characterized as exploited, for instance, but this does not lead to an interesting (Marxian?) analysis. The research agenda mostly involves farming practice in its narrower sense and the recommended strategy seems to be simply to wait and see what archaeology will throw up next. Don’t we also need a wider, more intellectually demanding agenda, in which farming practice is socially, politically, and economically contextualized, and archaeology makes its contribution to some wider debates? We might, for instance, set a knowledgeable concern for the pinchpoints of farming practice, in terms of soils and weather and labour bottlenecks, alongside closer and wider social and economic understandings, and a good sense of regional landscapes, rather as Tom Williamson has attempted to do in his excellent Shaping medieval landscapes (Windgather Press, 2003). Farming in the first millennium is indeed authoritative, as its publisher’s blurb maintains, and it is often illuminating; but it is also a distinctly personal view.