Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 214

Susan Oosthuizen’s book is of importance way beyond its local study area – the Bourn Valley of Cambridgeshire – for it offers an interesting and detailed case study for a period that is still imperfectly understood. Although much of this material is already available as journal articles it is here brought together and discussed within this wider setting. Current opinions on the origin and development of field systems are presented and attempts are made to set changes within a chronological time frame.

Oosthuizen recognizes a series of landscape features and examines how parts of older systems may have been fossilized within later arrangements. A regular system of land division involving roughly parallel long boundaries, parts surviving as route ways, can be identified in the Bourn valley, similar to those which formed part of the prehistoric co-axial systems that have been identified elsewhere. Oosthuizen dismisses these as resulting from transhumance and the presence of linear drove ways for moving stock because the distances involved are too short, seeing them rather as the result of ‘the relatively equitable apportionment of the environmental resources … between family groups’ (p.88). This may remain open to question, for the main reason behind the movement of stock was to remove the animals away from crops during the growing season, and the distance covered was immaterial (often only a relatively short distance over a few hundred feet in later historical times in west Wales). More innovative is the recognition of a ‘proto-common field’ laid out across several contiguous parish areas, it is argued, between 700 and 870 – before estate fragmentation – also giving rise to a series of narrow linear commons (or were these ways?) running across the four parishes involved. This seems to indicate that the system was laid out at a time when these parishes were part of a single estate. Although early settlement evidence is not readily available in this area, the theory appears to echo other recent suggestions of settlement nucleation in parts of the East Midlands taking place within composite estates before estate fragmentation (something it is, however, particularly difficult to date in areas devoid of charter evidence). The ‘classic’ common fields confined within each parish area in the Bourn Valley appear to have represented an extension of the arable between the tenth and twelfth centuries. These are interesting theories that demand further studies in other regions, especially as most of this analysis is based upon the technique of topographic or retrogressive map analysis, a technique that can be as dangerous as it is useful.

The emphasis here seems to be upon deliberate planning as the motive behind the apparent regularities observed in the landscape rather than functional factors of land use, such as the need for access ways both across and along the valley for the farming communities who lived and worked the land. Some other suggestions may be open to question and may not be as straightforward as assumed: the nature of Roman field systems, for instance (p.4); the ability to elucidate methods of woodland management in early medieval England from place-names alone (p.35); the identification of areas subject to woodland regeneration in the post-Roman period (p.6): these are taken as fact when they are all open to interpretation and require much more critical analysis than is suggested here. However, in all fairness, there are more critical discussions of more directly relevant matters such as the use of the heavy plough. The development of individual settlement nuclei is also well covered with some detailed examples. By 1300 a pattern of big, nucleated villages, still keeping their offals (former common pastures) and greens under communal control, had appeared.

This is essential reading for all those working in the early medieval or medieval periods; it is original and thought-provoking and, provided one maintains a critical eye, provides an excellent spur to much needed studies elsewhere and to further deliberately structured field analysis and archaeological investigation.