Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 128

Raunds, a small town located a little to the east of the Nene Valley in north-east Northamptonshire, has been one of the iconic sites for rural settlement and landscape studies for more than thirty years. Ten years of excavation in the north of the present village started in 1976 in response to threatened development, and gradually expanded to cover thousands of square metres on three main sites on both sides of the valley. Here were uncovered not only the remains of scores of buildings ranging from large halls to minor ancillary structures spanning more than a millennium from AD 450 onwards, but also an otherwise entirely unknown church and associated graveyard of late Anglo-Saxon origin and numerous ditches. In 1985 the investigation expanded to include the surrounding historic landscape, ultimately encompassing forty square kilometres, which included excavation at four major sites in addition to those within Raunds itself, and extensive fieldwalking which allowed the evolution of the surrounding pattern of settlement over thousands of years to be reconstructed. The results of many of these investigations have already been published (A.Boddington, Raunds Furnells, the Anglo-Saxon church and churchyard, Raunds Area Project (English Heritage Arch. Rep. 7, 1996); S.Parry, Raunds Area Survey: An archaeological study of the landscape of Raunds, Northamptonshire 1985–94 (Oxbow books, 2006)). Others, including the excavations at nearby West Cotton, are still awaited. The volume under review here is the first full publication of the excavations within Raunds itself.

The volume is published in two formats, with chapters 1–5 presented in traditional hardback form and chapters 6–9 on CD. Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the history of excavation in the settlement and to its topographical, geological and historical context. This is followed by a summary of the historical background including descents of the two discrete manorial sites, Furnells and Burystead, which were identified during excavation, and a third unexcavated manor, Gages, which lay nearby. An ecclesiastical history identifies Raunds as a possible minster site and outlines the history of the surviving parish church: there is no historical evidence at all for the second church, which is known solely from excavation. Chapter 3, engagingly titled ‘A panorama of settlement development’, provides a broad chronological overview of the development of settlement, synthesizing evidence from the three main sites excavated within Raunds (Furnells, Langham Road and Burystead) and smaller areas to the north and south. These thirty pages represent the distilled essence of current understanding, and are very effectively illustrated with plans at various scales, which allow the reader to appreciate both the detail of features in the individual sites and the overall arrangement of structures and boundaries across the three sites. This is followed by a much shorter (six-page) chapter titled ‘Archaeology and history’ which focuses on specific historical issues for which the authors consider the evidence from Raunds to be particularly pertinent, namely, the impact of the Danish settlement and the subsequent ‘reconquest’ and the origins of ‘metricated’ settlement planning. The remaining 80 pages of the hardback publication (chapter 5) are devoted to presenting detailed evidence of the excavated features, while the CD includes the final four chapters comprising specialist reports (‘Saxon and medieval pottery’, ‘Saxon and medieval finds’, ‘Animal bone’, ‘Plant and invertebrate remains’).

The format may seem a little unconventional, and will no doubt, as the editors suggest, incur disapproval from some for ‘relegating’ specialist reports to CD (although it is clear that this had to be done for reasons of cost, and the volume is indeed very affordable as a result), while chapter 4 sits uncomfortably with the others and should really have been included within chapter 3. It is a pity that the CD simply includes a PDF file containing the rest of the volume, with no use made of the potential of such a medium for including more primary data. The long time lag between completion of fieldwork and formal publication has meant that while much of the evidence has become familiar from interim reports, original interpretations have been extensively revisited and revised. These are not always incorporated effectively in this volume: it is particularly frustrating to discover that the fundamentally important structure-by-structure reappraisals of the ceramic dating (p.170) are included separately on CD rather than being incorporated into the text of chapter 5 where the ceramic evidence from the same structures is discussed.

The importance of this publication lies not just in the presentation of evidence from a major excavation but in its interpretation in chapters 3 and 4, notably in the way this seeks to link the archaeological evidence to historical events. In summary, the reader discovers that, at Raunds, dispersed ‘untidy’ areas of settlement of early Anglo- Saxon date on both sides of the stream were variously reorganized or abandoned in the middle Saxon period before being re-planned over a very short period of time in the early tenth century as a nucleated settlement with regularly laid-out blocks of rectangular plots defined by linear boundary ditches. It is implied by the editors that this re-planning occurred as a consequence of the ‘reconquest’ of the region by the kingdom of Wessex, when ‘the basis of the late Saxon reorganization was the establishment of a coordinated and consistent land allocation to all members of society’ (p.52). They go on to aver that the physical reorganization of the settlements which this required took place ‘as a sudden and dramatic event’, carried out as a rapid, staged process of laying out successive blocks of several plots at a time. In a short section considering the impact of this for the origins of the open-field system (which will, no doubt, be of particular interest for readers of the Review), they say that it is ‘likely that the two processes of settlement and field system reorganization may well have been introduced as a single package’ (p.53), although this theory is not examined in detail. If, on looking at the evidence for regularly laid out plots on the published plans, the reader considers this interpretation to appear somewhat open to question, they may not be surprised to discover that it was only made after excavations at nearby West Cotton revealed similar, better-defined features there which were then identified during re-examination of the Raunds evidence.

Overall, the publication provides a very accessible, well-illustrated account for anyone wanting to get a good understanding of firstly, how these important sites related to each other and changed over time and secondly, how the editors have interpreted the evidence, aspects of which are considered controversial by some. Readers of the Review will be particularly interested in the ideas about the origins of the open-field system as part of a planned nucleated landscape in this area. This has, of course, been the subject of much debate, still ongoing, to which this volume makes a stimulating contribution.