Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 351

This book joins a series of recent studies that have sought to explore the origins of landscapes characterized by open fields, and in particular asked why they became the dominant form of land management in England’s ‘central province’ but not elsewhere. In the past, archaeologists and historians have tried to explain this in terms of a variety of factors, such as population density, the nature of lordship, the natural environment, and the character of landscape and society in the early medieval period (just before the villages and open fields were created).

Oosthuizen’s study is a development of the latter approach, setting out to explore the possibility that there was long-term continuity from prehistory through to the early medieval period in the collective structures of managing grazing in what she refers to as a ‘common pool resource’. The book begins cautiously. Having made the simple observation that there are similarities in the physical characteristics of areas of permanent pasture in the late prehistoric and Romano-British periods and areas that in the later medieval period are known to have been commons, Oosthuizen correctly notes that ‘[t]his is a long way … from establishing the proposition that prehistoric and Romano-British cultivators utilised and managed their grazing lands in the same ways as their medieval successors’ (p. 29).

Unfortunately it is not long before this caution is abandoned and it is suggested that ‘the collective management of pastoral landscapes under common rights may represent a continuous tradition from prehistoric into early medieval England and after’ (p. 42) and that ‘it follows, then, that if at least some prehistoric and Roman arable was laid out in open fields subdivided between a number of cultivators, then they were probably managed within a CPrR [common property regime, i.e. a collective institution that governed common pasture and open fields]’ (p. 78). These are bold claims, that both pasture and arable were managed collectively in the late prehistoric and Roman periods, and that the collective arrangements in the medieval period show continuity from the late prehistoric and Roman periods. A closer inspection of the evidence presented does not convince this reviewer.

It certainly was true that there were extensive areas of permanent pasture during the late prehistoric and Roman periods – this is well known – but that these pastures were grazed communally in a continuous tradition from the prehistoric through to the medieval period is to my mind unproven. There is simply no evidence that the complex customary arrangements documented in the medieval period existed in these undocumented prehistoric times, and the potentially important alternative of hefting – that does not even appear in the index – is considered in just a single line (p. 34). Then on p. 77 we are told that there is evidence for Roman strip fields, but without sufficient critical assessment of the primary data for what is only a small number of sites. Indeed, a closer examination of detailed published reports reveals that what are indeed long, narrow Romano-British fields cannot have been open fields with the regulated common grazing that was so characteristic of the Midland system (at Royston Grange, for example, the fields are defined by substantial walls, and on the Gwent Levels by wide and deep water-filled ditches). There are other cases where details are simply incorrect, and the referencing wrong. In Figure 4, for example, we are told that a sub-circular open field at South Brent in Somerset is documented in a late seventh-century charter but this is simply not true: the estate is indeed documented at that date, but not the open field (to compound this error, the reference given in the caption is incorrect, and is for an interim note on excavations at a totally different place in Somerset that makes no reference to South Brent). On p. 76 we are told that there were ‘sizeable curvilinear Roman fields on the Gwent Levels … subdivided by narrow ditches into long narrow strips’: the reference (‘Rippon 1996’), however, does not appear in the bibliography, but this reviewer can be confident in saying that curvilinear fields on the Gwent Levels (a reclaimed coastal marshland) are in fact medieval and are separated from the Romano-British landscape below by a thick layer of sterile alluvium (as is clearly explained in my Gwent Levels [1996]).

In summary, the idea that there were extensive permanent pastures in Roman Britain is well known. How these pastures were managed is, however, impossible to say without documentary records but communal regulation is one possibility. That there was a ‘continuous tradition’ from the prehistoric through to the medieval period is, in the mind of this reviewer, unproven (and unprovable), and the idea that there were open arable fields in Roman Britain is simply not supported by the extensive published evidence, which instead suggests that fields in this period were small enclosures defined by banks, walls and ditches. Overall, this book presents a novel hypothesis, but has not marshalled sufficient convincing evidence.