Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 353

Academic ideas come in and out of fashion, and this important study by Williamson, Liddiard and Partida represents a major challenge to orthodox thinking with regard to the origins of villages and open fields. In particular it makes the case for a return to environmentally deterministic explanations for past human behaviour. This book is one of a pair resulting from a major AHRC-funded project, which have mapped the landscape of Northamptonshire in remarkable detail in c.1300 and c.1770. The other book – Tracey Partida, David Hall, and Glenn Foard, An Atlas of Northamptonshire: the medieval and early-modern landscape (Oxford, Oxbow Books, 2013) – contains detailed maps that reconstruct the open fields and other land uses at these two dates, and a discussion that broadly adheres to the now established view of how this landscape evolved. Williamson et al.’s Champion. The making and unmaking of the English Midland village, in contrast, presents a radically different hypothesis.

Northamptonshire was chosen due to its excellent source material – archaeological, cartographic, and documentary – but in particular because of the remarkably detailed and extensive research by David Hall, who had reconstructed the layout of the county’s open fields on a series of Ordnance Survey 1:10,560 maps. In the AHRC project those sheets, along with a variety of other source material, were digitized in GIS and this allowed the series of illustrations in these two volumes to be prepared. These landscape reconstructions are a truly outstanding piece of scholarship. The introduction to Champion includes an extremely useful historiography and description of the project’s methodology. In Chapter 2 ‘Structures of Landscape’ one gets a flavour of the underlying philosophy of this book with great emphasis placed upon geology, soils, climate, and topography and the rejection of ‘vague “social” explanations for regional variations in settlement and field systems’ (p. 44). This approach of challenging orthodoxy continues when considering the evidence for landscape character before the creation of open fields. The traditional ‘Northamptonshire model’ is that several scattered farmsteads and hamlets associated with Early to Middle Saxon pottery were replaced around the eighth to tenth centuries by a single nucleated village (i.e. a process of nucleation). Williamson et al. present a series of statistics to challenge this (p. 57), suggesting that in 51 per cent of parishes there are no known sites associated with Early to Middle Saxon pottery, and in 28 per cent of parishes there is just one. This data would indeed appear to suggest that the widely accepted ‘Northamptonshire model’ for settlement nucleation only appears to work in the remaining c.20 per cent of parishes, although to make this case additional information is required, most notably the percentage of each parish that has actually been fieldwalked, and the technique of field-walking that was used (which varies from grid-walking, which should have detected every site, through to widely spaced line-walking, which is bound to have missed some sites). If, for example, only 25 per cent of the parish was walked in a systematic way, and just one site associated with Early to Middle Saxon pottery was found (the remaining areas being pasture, woodland, and under modern settlement, or only walked in an unsystematic way), then statistically there are probably four sites associated with Early to Middle Saxon pottery in each parish. The Williamson et al. hypothesis, that there was no process of settlement nucleation is, therefore, unproven, considering the data presented and the way it is used.

In addition to rejecting nucleation as the process behind village origins, Williamson et al. also set out to shatter various other long-held views about champion landscapes. They argue that in Northamptonshire most open fields only attained their maximum extent and regular form in the post-Conquest period. They reject the idea that large numbers of villages were created through conscious planning, arguing instead that most were created through gradual growth from relatively small Saxon cores, that areas with a regular layout result from the spreading of villages across the strips of earlier open fields, and that elsewhere village plans were shaped by the underlying geology. The assertion that ‘physical geography was thus the principal determinant of settlement form’ will certainly raise eyebrows, but the evidence here is well presented and well argued. Another distinctive contribution of this book is in mapping the likely extent of all the major land use types (arable, permanent pasture, meadow, woodland, and heath) across the whole of Northamptonshire (Plate 38), although to understand the key conclusion – the extent and significance of non-arable land use even in this, one of the most ‘champion’ landscapes in England – one should look through the more detailed maps in the Atlas of Northamptonshire: the medieval and early-modern landscape.

Overall, this is a book that stimulates a huge range of emotions: surprise (as many traditional ideas are challenged), contemplation (as the implications of Williamson et al.’s hypotheses are profound), but also some frustration (as, in places, the evidence base and use of statistics should have been stronger). Champion has to be read alongside the Atlas, but together they form an important and thought-provoking piece of scholarship.