Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 131

This is a stimulating and ambitious edited collection on forms of open-field systems in Europe and beyond. It sets out to examine the chronology of the development of open fields, situate them within their socio-economic context, explain their rationale, consider how they changed and adapted in their long history, and address the reasons for their demise. Ten substantive chapters tackle these questions for England (two chapters), Scandinavia, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium (two chapters), Bolivia, and Japan. The main findings of these chapters are brought together by the editors in a concluding eleventh chapter. The chronological scope of the volume is as broad as its geography: the sub-title indicates coverage from 700 to 1800, but the book extends well into the twentieth century by virtue of the chapters on Bolivia and Japan.

The volume begins with a broad definition of open fields as ‘areas of cultivated land in which the intermingled plots of different cultivators, without upstanding physical boundaries, were subject to some degree of communal management in terms of cropping and grazing’ (p.1). Such a broad definition is merited by the findings of the subsequent chapters, which amply demonstrate that, while open-field systems functioned in many areas, there were substantial local, regional, and national differences in their operation. These variations and their causes are not always elucidated because chapters mix explanations of technical differences between types of open-field systems with explanations for why open-field farming developed in some areas and not others. In either case, the editors conclude that a range of factors were at play (environmental, agrarian, societal, economic) but that the timing and nature of the development of open-field systems depended on the precise confluence of these factors in certain localities or regions. Individual chapters place varying degrees of emphasis on one or more factors: in chapter 1, Tom Williamson argues for the centrality of environmental factors for explaining regional field systems in England; whereas Erik Thoen, in chapter 7, argues for the crucial part played by power, property, and labour relations in shaping five different types of field systems in Flanders. In chapter 5, Petri Talvitie demonstrates that agrarian differences played a key role in the development of open fields in Finland. Areas dominated by burn-beating and animal husbandry in eastern and northern Finland did not see the emergence of open-field systems, which developed in districts more reliant on arable agriculture. Of course, these agrarian differences are also fundamentally related to the environment.

The volume contains a wide range of approaches drawing on an extensive source base to reconstruct the history of open-field agriculture. The editors acknowledge key obstacles to recovering the history of open-field systems, not least because practices were often rooted in oral custom. The ‘retrogressive’ approach is applied in many chapters, with authors working backwards from early modern or nineteenth-century sources to recover landscape use and field management practices in earlier times. Alternative approaches are identified by the editors, such as pollen analysis, archaeological field surveys, and geo-archaeology. The inclusion of chapters employing these methods may have led to new and decisive pronouncements on the chronology of open-field development in Europe that cannot otherwise be made from archival evidence.

In general, the individual chapters make convincing and important contributions to our understanding of the development and operation of open-field agriculture. The volume is, however, less successful in organizing these into a cohesive whole. Rather than an overview of the well-known English case, the volume would have benefited from an introduction that clearly set out a) the known forms of various open-field systems and b) where and at what times these have been observed across Europe. Not until chapter 6 is there a direct comparison of criteria for different types of farming system in table 6.1 (this is largely predicated on Joan Thirsk, ‘The common fields’, Past and Present 29 [1964]) and maps of field systems across Europe in figures 6.3 and 6.14 (taken from studies by Rosemary Hopcroft, René Lebeau, and H. D. Clout). Placed in an introduction alongside extended discussion of the history of European open-field systems, these would have gone some way to provide the necessary context to situate the detailed discussions of case studies in individual chapters.

Furthermore, the inclusion of two non-European twentieth-century case-study chapters provide exciting and meaningful comparisons to the volume but render it somewhat unwieldy and unbalanced given the remaining eight chapters are European case studies. Greater consistency between chapters could also have been achieved. For example, chapter conclusions varied between four sentences and two pages. The editors and publishers should be commended for supplying large numbers of illustrations and maps to complement discussion and analysis but there was scope to deploy these even more effectively. In many cases, these were reprints of previously published figures, which are consequently of lower fidelity. Lastly, more care might have been taken with the selection of contributors, as the book contains only one chapter by a female author. These limitations notwithstanding, this volume contains many important contributions that will repay close reading and should prompt further research into this vital topic.