Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 137

Over the last thirty years or so landscape historians and archaeologists have transformed our understanding of many aspects of Anglo-Saxon rural society. Thousands of developer-funded excavations – not all are great set-piece digs; rather, the great majority are evaluations, that is multiple trial trenches in advance of development – have gathered data not only about settlements and fieldscapes, but also stock and crops. However, relatively few sites have been formally published. Most reports languish in often hard to find grey literature, whose ever-expanding scale deters all but the most determined – and time-rich – from exploring it. Accordingly, overviews such as this, based on a PhD thesis, are to be warmly welcomed.

This is not the first recent work of synthesis on the subject, and Banham and Faith’s ambitious Anglo-Saxon farms and farming (2014; reviewed in AgHR 63.2) merits special mention. Where McKerracher’s study differs is through its extensive use of archaeologically recovered ‘pollen, sediments, charred seeds, animal bones, watermills, corn-drying ovens, granaries and stockyards’ from between the later seventh and early ninth centuries. This, the ‘long eighth century’, is increasingly identified as a period which saw profound political, social and economic change as the underpinnings of medieval England emerged. Jumping ahead, McKerracher concludes that it was agricultural innovation and intensification that powered these changes.

The study is based on two large study areas: the first greater East Anglia (essentially Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Essex), and the second based on the upper and middle Thames valley (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire). As is noted, these include a wide variety of contrasting landscape types including the uplands of the Chilterns and the Cotswolds, which allows examination of the influence of soils and topography. The country’s harsher zones such as the moorlands of the South West, the Pennines and the Dales lie beyond the scope of the book; here different trajectories and narratives can be assumed.

McKerracher aligns himself with the Tom Williamson ‘cow and plough’ school of landscape and agricultural history, which allows for a strong degree of environmental determinism. He begins by examining the small but growing evidence (including finds of coulters and shares) for the introduction and spread of the heavy mouldboard plough, which he speculates was familiar on at least high-status estates by the tenth and eleventh centuries. Heavy ploughs allowed arable expansion onto claylands and especially clay watersheds, which in turn started to reduce the available pasture and wood-pasture, requiring the closer management of stock (including oxen) via closes and droveways as well as the active management and modification of hay meadows for winter feedstuffs.

Taken together the evidence, including that of animal bones, indicates that in, or by, the long eighth century farmers were over-wintering much of their livestock. At the same time, as noted above, for the first time since perhaps the fifth century all the study regions began to produce a cereal surplus. The archaeological and palynological evidence from crops and especially weeds suggests that this growth was achieved by farmers growing crops best suited to land often newly brought into – or back into – cultivation. Hulled barley (notably on saline silts) and free-threshing wheat (in clay vales) remained most important, although oats and rye (on droughty sands) were increasingly grown. And as the volume of the cereal crop expanded so did the need for specialist structures such as granaries, helms (both tricky to identify archaeologically although examples are known) and barns to store it as well as ovens to dry and malt grain. Mills, too, started to be constructed in the seventh century, after a three-century hiatus. At much the same time flax, grapes and hemp re-appear in the farming record, possibly evidence for the demands of the expanding monastic church, or more probably for a generally more buoyant, less localized, economy.

A concluding chapter flags some key sites and discoveries beyond the study areas, which generally support the book’s earlier conclusions, for instance showing how watermills and large grain ovens are found primarily on high-status sites, both lay and ecclesiastical (points set in a wider context – with acknowledgement to McKerracher’s work – in John Blair’s magisterial Building in Anglo-Saxon England, 2018). The conclusion seems inescapable, that agricultural intensification went hand-in-hand with the emergence of powerful and clearly defined and powerful local lordship. Which was the more powerful driver is a moot point.

If drab by Windgather’s normal standards, the book is well and engagingly written – the source PhD must have been wholly rewritten and only a few buzzwords like paradigm and agency pop up – and with a large number of figures locating sites, quantifying data and bringing together elements of site plans from excavations. It is also mercifully concise, with the main text running to just 125 pages. Would that all authors were so continent.