Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 131

Planned villages form a key character-defining feature of the landscape of northern England, and have attracted the attention of historical geographers for many years. In the past, there has been a strong tradition of studying the morphology of village plans – seen most notably in the work of Brian Roberts – and a key question for this reviewer as he embarked upon reading this latest book on the subject was whether the debate has moved on. It has.

The focus of this study is County Durham where around 80 per cent of villages have a regular or part-regular plan (compared to just 30 per cent in Warwickshire, for example). Other parts of northern England receive rather briefer treatment, but in many ways this book is of far wider significance, not least for its discussion of planned villages across England and mainland north-west Europe in the later chapters. The opening chapters are also of great methodological value to anyone interested in landscape history. Chapter one discusses the nature of rural settlement in general, and specifically ways that it can be studied morphologically and mapped against other datasets such as a characterization of natural topography into a series of terrains. Chapter two starts to focus in on northern England with a case study of the North Yorkshire Moors that identifies a series of ‘preferred settlement zones’. The discussion of settlement form embraces dispersed as well as nucleated forms, but while some illustrations extend to include their associated field systems, this aspect of the landscape is sadly neglected. The emphasis is also very much on examining settlement plans as recorded on nineteenth-century maps, and makes little reference to archaeological remains such as earthworks that could indicate that a post-medieval plan was significantly different to that in the medieval period.

Chapters three to five provide a detailed discussion of plan analysis. The problem of dating is discussed, and this remains a key problem, such is the lack of archaeological excavation of northern English villages. The following three chapters use documentary sources to try and find a way forward, and, in doing so, provide the book with its wider focus. In chapter six Roberts discusses ancient territorial divisions of the landscape that are larger than a parish but smaller than a county: contemporary sources refer to them as ‘shires’, although the term ‘small shires’ has been developed by historians to distinguish them from modern shires. They appear to have been similar to the ‘multiple estates’ that Glanville Jones has studied in Wales, and it was their fragmentation that led to the formation of the parishes and townships into which the landscape was divided in the later medieval period.

These ‘small shires’ provide the context for a discussion of the tenurial relationships of people and settlements within the landscape, such as a small group of places that were described in 1183 as being ‘in drengage’, that is to say that they were held by an individual tenant who rendered to the Bishop of Durham particular and specified services. It is suggested that the ‘drengs’ acted in a similar way to locators on the continent, that is as land agents who acted on behalf of a superior lord in supervising the plantation of new villages. This section of the book culminates with a discussion of the context in which this replanning could have taken place: the series of occasions when documents tell us that rampaging armies devastated the landscape. The best known of these is the ‘harrying of the north’ in 1067–70, although there are others recorded as far back as the early tenth century. Indeed, the conclusion that Roberts arrives at – something he confesses was contrary to his original expectations – is that while some planned villages were almost certainly created after the Norman Conquest, ‘there are ambiguous hints that amid the large numbers of plans there could be significant numbers of pre- Conquest settlement plantations’.

Much of the detail of this book is about County Durham, and there is a lot about village plans. As I said earlier, there is, however, much in this book that is of far wider interest including Roberts’s methodology and the way that local case-studies in the northeast of England are placed in their wider regional, national, and in the final chapter, international context. The hypothesis that many planned villages are pre-Conquest, and that ‘drengs’ may have acted as locators, is a fascinating one, that certainly needs to be tested through further research across Britain.