Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 2 (2015), p. 321

Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith’s long-awaited book on Anglo-Saxon farming fills – as the authors point out – a crucial gap in the economic and social history of the period, for which there has until now been no textbook, despite the central role of agricultural production in that period. Their volume covers the practicalities and technological development of arable cultivation and pastoral husbandry, and the practical implications for farming of landscapes with widely varying combinations of topography, drainage and soils. The authors are satisfyingly eclectic in the plurality of their sources. Documentary evidence of laws, charters and (eventually) farming handbooks and calendars tends to become available only from about the middle of their period and it is even then often sparse and ambiguous. It has properly been augmented with archaeological evidence from pollen, seeds and bones, artefacts and earthworks, as well as with the evidence of place-names and the practical experience of farmers, both modern and historical.

The book is made up of two interrelated, independently authored sections. In the four chapters of Part I Debby Banham undertakes an authoritative and wide-ranging review across the Anglo-Saxon period of evidence for older and new species of crops; the tools and techniques for their production; different species of livestock, poultry and bees; and of animal products and methods for their production. Part II, by Rosamond Faith, is largely devoted to exploring the demands made on early medieval farmers in attempting the exploitation of different environmental and ecological contexts by focusing, in individual chapters, on coasts, woodland, downland, moorland and wolds. It ends with an overview of the implications of agricultural change for writing the social and economic history of the period.

Of the two parts, the second is, perhaps, the less complete. The focus on landscape variation offers an important perspective. Yet that vision is largely one of environmental determinism, which needs a more critical approach given current debates about the relative influences of environment, lordship and community on landscape change and the emergence of pays. The landscape-specific chapters in Part II might also be set within an overarching vision of chronological development in agricultural organization and its social implications across the period, despite the difficulties of regional variability in both the pace and the direction of agricultural change. That vision is hinted at in the brief concluding chapter which, for example, includes the suggestion that collective organization in the form of the tunscipe (township or vill) emerged in the later Anglo-Saxon period because, the authors argue, collective organization and the moral economy gained social significance. This is one of the most innovative arguments in the book and needs much more than the two paragraphs allotted to it (pp. 296–7). There needs to be more detail supporting the ascription of such change to the tenth and eleventh centuries, and more explanation. Was this because resources were now under more pressure? Or was it a response to increasing social and/or economic complexity?

Banham and Faith accept the shift to a more pastoral economy in the fifth and sixth centuries – a process they call ‘abatement’ – and the intensification of agricultural production in the middle Anglo-Saxon period with the introduction of new cereal crops, the extension of arable cultivation and specialist centres for the production of livestock. They accept that early Anglo-Saxon changes in agricultural focus were likely to have had little impact on landscape layout since grazing by growing herds of cattle and sheep inhibited widespread woodland regeneration on fields no longer being ploughed. It is an acknowledged puzzle that the innovations in agricultural production of the middle Anglo-Saxon period do not appear to have had very much impact on landscape layout. Instead, Faith argues that the two most significant changes to layout seem to have been later Anglo-Saxon: the introduction of small-scale strip fields, communally worked by small groups of farmers; and the emergence of dispersed farmsteads in single ownership whose land was enclosed within a substantial curvilinear boundary, and located near large areas of open grazing; for example, wereds on the salt marshes of the Thames estuary and worthys on Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin uplands.

This is an exceptional volume which will retain its freshness for many years. It seems likely, too, that it will in years to come be seen as a marker stimulating entirely new directions for research on economy and society in Anglo-Saxon England.