Recent Approaches to the Archaeology of Land Allotment 9781407303550, 9781407333823

Table of contents :
Front Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction
Land, landscape and Englishness in the discovery of prehistoric land division
From clearance plots to ‘sustained’ farming: Peak District fields in prehistory
Commons, fields and communities in prehistoric Cornwall
Encounters with place in prehistory: writing a case study for Shipman Head Down, Isles of Scilly
The place and materiality of an upland field system at Cwm Ffrydlas, North Wales
After the axe: ways into the upland landscapes of Cumbria
An empty hole, or a meaningful whole? Approaches to the study of pit alignments
Towards a bounded landscape. Excavations at Gonalston, Nottinghamshire, and the development of the earliest field systems in the Trent Valley
Late prehistoric and Romano-British land division in South and West Yorkshire: an overview of the evidence
Fields for discourse? Towards more self-critical, theoretical and interpretative approaches to the archaeology of field systems and land allotment
‘The pleasant land of counterpane’: linking site-specific archaeological land use to the landscape of prehistoric field systems
Mobile and enclosed landscapes on the Yorkshire Wolds
Stone walls in west Östergötland – their dating and its consequences
Unfamiliar landscapes: infields, outfields, boundaries and landscapes in Iceland
Field-names in reconstructing late Anglo-Saxon agricultural land-use in the Bourn Valley, West Cambridgeshire
Not so common fields: the making of the East Anglian landscape
The co-axial field systems of Pembrokeshire revisited: towards an ekistic explanation
Woodland and Champion: farming, ‘the social’, and the origins of medieval landscapes
Parks and perceptions of parkland
Parliamentary Process: the creation of farming landscapes in eighteenth and nineteenth century Buckinghamshire
The irregularity of fields: historic piecemeal enclosure and dispersed settlement in upland England at the Upper Derwent, Peak District, and Great Langdale, Lake District

Citation preview

BAR S1875 2008

Recent Approaches to the Archaeology of Land Allotment

CHADWICK

Edited by

Adrian M. Chadwick

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

BAR International Series 1875 2008 B A R

Recent Approaches to the Archaeology of Land Allotment Edited by

Adrian M. Chadwick

BAR International Series 1875 2008

Published in 2016 by BAR Publishing, Oxford BAR International Series 1875 Recent Approaches to the Archaeology of Land Allotment © The editors and contributors severally and the Publisher 2008 COVER IMAGE

Dartmoor Boundaries. Source: A. M. Chadwick

The authors' moral rights under the 1988 UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act are hereby expressly asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied, reproduced, stored, sold, distributed, scanned, saved in any form of digital format or transmitted in any form digitally, without the written permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 9781407303550 paperback ISBN 9781407333823 e-format DOI https://doi.org/10.30861/9781407303550 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library BAR Publishing is the trading name of British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd. British Archaeological Reports was first incorporated in 1974 to publish the BAR Series, International and British. In 1992 Hadrian Books Ltd became part of the BAR group. This volume was originally published by Archaeopress in conjunction with British Archaeological Reports (Oxford) Ltd / Hadrian Books Ltd, the Series principal publisher, in 2008. This present volume is published by BAR Publishing, 2016.

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Contents List of Contributors ................................................................................................................................................ iii Adrian M. Chadwick Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................. 1 Helen Wickstead Land, landscape and Englishness in the discovery of prehistoric land division .................................................... 25 John Barnatt From clearance plots to ‘sustained’ farming: Peak District fields in prehistory .................................................... 41 Peter Herring Commons, fields and communities in prehistoric Cornwall .................................................................................. 70 Eleanor Breen Encounters with place in prehistory: writing a case study for Shipman Head Down, Isles of Scilly ...................................................................................................................................................................... 97 Robert Johnston The place and materiality of an upland field system at Cwm Ffrydlas, North Wales .......................................... 111 Helen Evans After the axe: ways into the upland landscapes of Cumbria ................................................................................ 122 John Thomas An empty hole, or a meaningful whole? Approaches to the study of pit alignments........................................... 144 David Knight and Lee Elliott Towards a bounded landscape. Excavations at Gonalston, Nottinghamshire, and the development of the earliest field systems in the Trent Valley ............................................................................. 160 Ian Roberts Late prehistoric and Romano-British land division in South and West Yorkshire: an overview of the evidence ..................................................................................................................................... 185 Adrian M. Chadwick Fields for discourse? Towards more self-critical, theoretical and interpretative approaches to the archaeology of field systems and land allotment ....................................................................................... 205 Helen Lewis ‘The pleasant land of counterpane’: linking site-specific archaeological land use to the landscape of prehistoric field systems ................................................................................................................. 239 Chris Fenton-Thomas Mobile and enclosed landscapes on the Yorkshire Wolds ................................................................................... 252 Maria Petersson Stone walls in west Östergötland – their dating and its consequences ................................................................ 275 Oscar Aldred Unfamiliar landscapes: infields, outfields, boundaries and landscapes in Iceland .............................................. 299 Susan Oosthuizen Field-names in reconstructing late Anglo-Saxon agricultural land-use in the Bourn Valley, West Cambridgeshire........................................................................................................................................... 323 Edward Martin Not so common fields: the making of the East Anglian landscape ...................................................................... 342 i

Jonathan Kissock The co-axial field systems of Pembrokeshire revisited: towards an ekistic explanation ..................................... 373 Tom Williamson Woodland and Champion: farming, ‘the social’, and the origins of medieval landscapes .................................. 383 Richard Muir Parks and perceptions of parkland ....................................................................................................................... 401 Hannah Sackett Parliamentary Process: the creation of farming landscapes in eighteenth and nineteenth century Buckinghamshire .................................................................................................................................... 415 Bill Bevan The irregularity of fields: historic piecemeal enclosure and dispersed settlement in upland England at the Upper Derwent, Peak District, and Great Langdale, Lake District .............................................. 441

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List of Contributors Oscar Aldred is a part-time PhD student at the University of Iceland (Háskola Íslands), and was previously a Project Manager and part-time lecturer in archaeology with the Institute of Archaeology, Iceland (Fornleifastofnun Íslands) and the University of Iceland. After completing his MA in Landscape Studies at the University of Leicester in 1995, he worked for several archaeological units, including the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, and he also worked on the Cambridge Urban Archaeology Database (UAD). Between 1999 and 2002 he worked for Somerset County Council to develop the Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) project for Somerset and Exmoor, as well as the national review of methods used for HLC for English Heritage. Since 2002 he has lived and worked in Iceland with his daughter Unnur. His interests are landscape, landscape continuity, change and creation, boundaries, and maps. Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands, Bárugata 3, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland. E-mail: [email protected] John Barnatt is Senior Survey Archaeologist for the Peak District National Park Authority, where he has worked since 1989. He lectured in Fine Art before making a career change to archaeology, and in 1987 he completed a PhD thesis on the design and distribution of stone circles in Britain. He has had a long-term interest in interpreting prehistoric settlement, agriculture and monuments in the Peak District (and elsewhere). He has carried out extensive survey and excavation in Derbyshire, and has published widely on these topics, including The Peak District. Landscapes Through Time (with K. Smith, 1997). Other research interests developed over the last few years include multi-period landscape archaeology, historic landscape character analysis and industrial archaeology, the latter including survey and excavation at surface and underground, at post-medieval and earlier metal mines in the Peak District. John Barnatt, Cultural Heritage Team, Peak District National Park Authority, Aldern House, Baslow Road, Bakewell, Derbyshire, DE45 1AE. E-mail: [email protected] Bill Bevan currently works as an independent archaeologist, author and photographer with inHeritage. Until recently he was Survey/Conservation Archaeologist with the Peak District National Park. He has been an archaeologist since the late 1980s when he was a surveyor and researcher for the National Trust in the Lake District, before doing an MA in Landscape Archaeology at Sheffield University in 1994. He recently completed a PhD at Sheffield on the landscape archaeology of the Upper Derwent Valley in the Peak District. He was a co-director of the Gardom’s Edge Landscape Research Project, and in addition to writing many research articles, he is the editor of Northern Exposure: Interpretative Devolution in the British Iron Ages (1999), and the author of The Upper Derwent: 10 000 Years in a Peak District Valley (2004). His research interests include landscape archaeology, the British Iron Age, Roman rural settlement, the archaeology of Derbyshire and public archaeology. Bill Bevan, Cultural Heritage Team, Peak District National Park Authority, Aldern House, Baslow Road, Bakewell, Derbyshire, DE45 1AE. E-mail: Eleanor Breen is Assistant Planning Officer (Conservation) and Field Monument Warden for the Council of the Isles of Scilly. She is also completing a part-time PhD with the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Wales, Lampeter, where her doctoral research focuses on the prehistoric landscapes of the Isles of Scilly. Prior to this, and following completion of an MA in Landscape Archaeology at Lampeter, she worked for several years with Cambria Archaeology in the Sites and Monuments Record, and was also involved with the inception and management of the Tir Gofal agro-environment scheme. During her undergraduate years at Trinity College, Carmarthen, she worked on excavations in Wales and abroad. Her research interests include experiences of place, the impact of writing and language on interpretations of the past, and the politics of archaeological and heritage interpretation. Eleanor Breen, Assistant Planning Officer, Council of the Isles of Scilly, Old Wesleyan Chapel, Garrison Lane, St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly TR21 0JD. E-mail: [email protected] Adrian Chadwick is a Project Officer for Archaeological Services WYAS, and from 2000-2005 was a Lecturer in Archaeology, University of Wales Newport. After graduating from Sheffield University’s Department of Archaeology and Prehistory in 1990 he worked for many British archaeological field units and also on projects in France, Germany, Lebanon, Turkey and Iceland. In 1999 he completed a part-time MA in Landscape Archaeology at Sheffield, and went on to work for Wessex Archaeology in a joint post with UWN. His part-time PhD on Iron Age and Romano-British field systems and settlement in South and West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire was submitted in 2007. His research interests include landscape and upland archaeology, Iron Age and Roman Britain, field systems and archaeological theory and practice. He directed the Gray Hill Landscape Research Project, and edited Stories from the Landscape: Archaeologies of Inhabitation (2004). Adrian Chadwick, Archaeological Services WYAS, PO Box 30, Nepshaw Lane South, Morley, Leeds LS 27 0UG. E-mail: [email protected] Helen Evans now works as a freelance archaeologist, and as a buildings conservator and craftsperson using traditional techniques such as cob and drystone walling, hedge laying and osier weaving. She gained her PhD at the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, Sheffield University in 2007, and her thesis focused on the prehistoric landscapes of Cumbria from the later Mesolithic to the Bronze Age. After graduating from Sheffield University’s Department of Archaeology and Prehistory in 1996, she undertook a part-time MA in Landscape Archaeology, and then worked for iii

several British archaeological field units. She co-directs several archaeological field projects in Cumbria, and also served as an editor of assemblage, the Sheffield Graduate Journal of Archaeology. Her research interests include landscape archaeology, the archaeology and history of Cumbria, and the Neolithic and Bronze Age of western Britain. Helen Evans, Church Cottage, Puddington, Devon EX16 8LW. E-mail: [email protected] Lee Elliott is a Project Manager with Trent & Peak Archaeology, University of Nottingham. He has worked professionally in archaeology since graduating from the University of Lancaster in 1989, with time out to study Scientific Methods in Archaeology at the University of Bradford (1991). He has been involved with the Hoveringham Quarry project since its inception in 1992, with a monograph on all work there planned in the near future, to be written jointly with David Knight. He has conducted numerous excavations, both urban and rural, largely within Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. His particular interests include Romano-British rural settlement and Christianity, church archaeology, palaeopathology and the medieval landscape of the Trent Valley and its neighbouring areas. He has published sixteen articles, including a contribution to the medieval chapter of Trent Valley Landscapes (2004), as well as over forty lesser notes in local journals. Lee Elliott, Trent & Peak Archaeology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD. E-mail: [email protected] Chris Fenton-Thomas is a Project Archaeologist with On-Site Archaeology in York, but has spent the last four years living in Sheffield. He has spent the time watching Sheffield Wednesday slip down the divisions, but has also overseen excavations at Sewerby Cottage Farm, Bridlington (Neolithic, Iron Age and Roman) and Sprotbrough Gardens near Doncaster (Anglo-Saxon and medieval). He worked as a lecturer for Trinity College, Carmarthen in the mid 1990s, after undergraduate studies at Durham University in the late 1980s. In 1999 he was awarded a PhD by Sheffield University, subsequently published as Late Prehistoric and Early Historic Landscapes on the Yorkshire Chalk (2003), and he has also written Forgotten Landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds (2005). His research interests lie in landscape archaeology and landscape history. Chris Fenton-Thomas, On-Site Archaeology, 25a Milton Street, York, YO10 3EP. Email: [email protected] Peter Herring currently works for English Heritage as a Characterisation Inspector. Prior to that he was Principal Archaeologist with Cornwall County Council and has spent most of his life in Cornwall. He works a small coastal farm with his family, and is sorry that they have no common rights. He developed a close interest in all aspects of Cornwall’s landscape in the early 1980s when Andrew Fleming supervised his postgraduate research at Sheffield University, on medieval Bodmin Moor. This interest has driven all his subsequent work in Cornwall, first for the National Trust, but mainly for the Cornwall Archaeological Unit. He has undertaken and published numerous historic landscape surveys, and he managed the pilot Historic Landscape Characterisation in Cornwall in 1994, preparing the method report which has influenced much subsequent HLC work. Peter Herring, Penhale, Portloe, Truro, Cornwall TR2 5PS. E-mail: [email protected] Robert Johnston is a Lecturer in Landscape Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on the social and cultural conditions of land allotment and enclosure in north-west Europe during later prehistory, and the settlement of upland landscapes in Britain. He is currently co-directing field projects at Dyfryn Ardudwy in North Wales and on Shoveldown, Dartmoor, south-west England. Robert Johnston, Research School of Archaeology, West Court, Mappin Street, Sheffield S1 4DT. Email: [email protected] Jonathan Kissock is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Wales, Newport where he is programme director of the MA in Historical Landscape studies. He was educated at Olchfa Comprehensive School, Swansea, before going on to read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge. He then took his PhD in the University of Leicester’s Department of English Local History. He was a research associate in the Amerindian and Inuit Maps and Mapping Programme in the Department of Geography at Sheffield, and subsequently Projects Officer with the Dyfed Archaeological Trust. His main research interests lie in the field of medieval settlement and land holding. Jonathan Kissock, University of Wales Newport, Caerleon Campus, PO Box 179, Newport, South Wales, NP18 3YG. E-mail: [email protected] David Knight is Director of Trent & Peak Archaeology, University of Nottingham. He studied geography at the University of Durham and in 1993 completed a DPhil at the University of Oxford on the subject of late Bronze Age and Iron Age settlement in the Nene and Great Ouse river basins. He has a particular interest in the later prehistoric landscape of the Trent Valley, and has directed excavations on a wide variety of prehistoric and Romano-British sites in this and neighbouring areas. His publications include Trent Valley Landscapes: the Archaeology of 500, 000 Years of Change (2004, with Andy Howard). David Knight, Trent & Peak Archaeology, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD. E-mail: [email protected] Helen Lewis is a Lecturer in the School of Archaeology, University College Dublin, and previously worked at Oxford University as a researcher and a Fellow in Applied Landscape Archaeology. She received her PhD from Cambridge University in 1998, and then worked as a post-doctoral researcher there on the Wyke Down Project. Prior to this she completed an MSc in Environmental Archaeology from the University of Sheffield, and a double specialist BA in iv

Archaeology and Russian Language and Literature from the University of Toronto. Helen has carried out field excavations and specialist archaeological analyses in Britain, Canada, Ireland, France, Denmark, Belgium, India, Malaysia, Japan and Laos. She is currently co-directing the Ille Cave Project, Palawan, Philippines. Her research interests are extensive but include landscape archaeology, geoarchaeology and cave archaeology, focusing on prehistory (Palaeolithic to Bronze Age) and the links between land-use, landscape and environmental change. Helen Lewis, College of Arts and Celtic Studies, School of Archaeology, Newman Building, Belfield, Dublin 4. E-mail: [email protected] Edward Martin is an Archaeological Officer with Suffolk County Council. He worked initially on a range of prehistoric sites but in recent years has been more involved with historic landscape work. In 1998 he drew up the initial project design for the East of England Historic Landscape Characterisation Project, followed in 1999 by that for the Historic Field Systems in East Anglia Project. His research interests include the historic landscape, moats, castles, vernacular architecture and garden archaeology. Edward Martin, Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service, Shire Hall, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, IP33 2AR. E-mail: [email protected] Richard Muir is the editor of Landscapes, a journal he co-founded in 2000, and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Geography and Environment, University of Aberdeen. Originally from a rural background in the Yorkshire Dales, he gained his MA and PhD as a geographer at Aberdeen, and was awarded the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s silver medal. He subsequently lectured at Trinity College Dublin and Anglia University, before becoming a writer on the British landscape and its history. He is the author of around fifty books and research articles, and his writing covers both academic and more popular works. His books include The Shell Guide to Reading the Landscape (1981), History from the Air (1983), Fields (1989, with Nina Muir), The Dales of Yorkshire (1991), Approaches to Landscape (1999), The New Reading the Landscape: Fieldwork in Landscape History (2000), Landscape Detective: Discovering a Countryside (2001), and Landscape Encyclopaedia: a Reference to the Historic Landscape (2004). Richard Muir, 20 Stray Walk, Harrogate, HG2 8HU. E-mail: [email protected] Susan Oosthuizen is Staff Tutor in Landscape History and Field Archaeology at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. She is also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and Co-Director of the Centre for Regional Studies, Anglia Polytechnic University. With Nicholas James, she directs the South-West Cambridgeshire Project, a university and community research project focused on the medieval landscape of five parishes in south-west Cambridgeshire. She is a Council Member of the Medieval Settlement Research Group and the Cambridge Antiquarian Society. Her research interests centre on the origins and development of the Anglo-Saxon rural landscape, including settlement planning, the organisation of grazing, and the origins of open fields. Susan Oosthuizen, Institute of Continuing Education, Madingley Hall, Madingley, Cambridge, CB3 8AQ. E-mail: [email protected] Maria Petersson is an archaeologist at the Swedish Heritage Board, working in the Linköping office. She has worked for many of the regional Swedish museums, as well as for the Swedish National Survey. She recently successfully completed her PhD at the University of Uppsala. Her research interests include landscape archaeology, ancient fields and field systems, the early Iron Age economy, and the formation processes involved in the creation of archaeological remains. Maria Petersson, National Heritage Board, Archaeological Excavations Department, Riksantikvarieämbetet, Roxengaten 7, SE-582 73, Linköping, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected] Ian Roberts is the Principal Archaeologist of Archaeological Services WYAS in Leeds. He graduated in Archaeological Sciences at the University of Bradford in 1981 and has been a Member if the Institute of Field Archaeologists since 1985. He has additional roles as archaeological advisor to the Diocese of Wakefield and Wakefield cathedral’s Fabric Advisory Committee. His publications include monographs on Wrenthorpe Potteries (1992, with S. Moorhouse), A New Link to the Past: the Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road (2001, co-edited with A. Burgess and D. Berg), Pontefract Castle (2002) and Ferrybridge Henge: the Ritual Landscape (2005). In recent years his work has increasingly been oriented towards the cropmark landscapes of South and West Yorkshire, resulting in a number of smaller publications of Iron Age and Romano-British settlement sites. He is the director of the Magnesian Limestone ALSF Project, collating and synthesising crop mark, geophysical and excavation data for a broad study area covering the eastern parts of South and West Yorkshire. Ian Roberts, Archaeological Services WYAS, PO Box 30, Nepshaw Lane South, Morley, Leeds LS27 0UG. E-mail: [email protected] Hannah Sackett currently works as a freelance writer and researcher. She completed her PhD thesis at the University of Leicester in 2004. Entitled The Remaking of the English Landscape: an Archaeology of Enclosure, it examined the relationship between documents and the shaping of the rural landscape over time, through exploring the idea of documents as material culture. Her recent research interests have focused on the representation of archaeology in literature, and explore the connections between place, temporality, representation, documentation and landscape, as for example in the writing of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. Hannah Sackett, 27a Park Road, Widcombe, Bath BA2 4NG. E-mail: [email protected]

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John Thomas is a Field Officer for the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, and has over fifteen years experience in British contract field archaeology. His interest in field systems was fostered whilst working for the Warwickshire Field Archaeology Section where he spent many windswept days in quarries recording ditch and pit alignment boundaries. He completed a study of pit alignment boundaries as part of his undergraduate degree at Leicester University in 1998. As well as PPG16 fieldwork, his research interests include landscape and social archaeology, Iron Age and early Roman Britain, the formation of medieval villages and the application of theoretical approaches within the limitations of PPG16. John Thomas, University of Leicester Archaeological Services, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH. E-mail: [email protected] Helen Wickstead recently completed her doctorate at University College London in 2007, entitled Fragmented Antiquities: Dartmoor and the Middle Bronze Age Transition. She currently runs a collaborative project exploring visual arts and archaeology at the Stonehenge Riverside excavations, and has curated art/archaeology exhibitions in Devon and Beijing. She is co-director of the Shovel Down project, a landscape survey and excavation project taking place on Dartmoor, and director of the Discovering Damerham remote-sensing project in Hampshire. Her research interests lie in land tenure, mapping and geospatial technologies, landscape archaeology and the later prehistory of Europe. Helen Wickstead, Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London WC1H 0PY. E-mail: [email protected] Tom Williamson is Lecturer in Landscape History at the University of East Anglia. He has written widely on landscape archaeology, agricultural history, and the history of landscape design. His books include The Origins of Norfolk (1993); Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1995); The Norfolk Broads: a Landscape History (1997); The Archaeology of the Landscape Park (1998); Roots of Change: Farming and the Landscape in East Anglia, c.1700-1870 (with Susanna Wade Martins, 1999); The Origins of Hertfordshire (2000); The Transformation of Rural England: Farming and Landscape 1700-1870 (2002); and Shaping Medieval Landscapes (2003). Tom Williamson, School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ. E-mail: [email protected]

vi

Between land and sky. Drystone walls in North Yorkshire. Source: B. McCluskey.

vii

Introduction Adrian M. Chadwick Preface

in Swindon and Manchester. In addition, we wrote to many other archaeologists in Britain, Ireland and Europe who were academics, curators, contractors in commercial field units, working for county councils or national parks, and especially colleagues working in the aerial photography and field survey departments of Cadw, RCAHMW, Historic Scotland and English Heritage. The volume aimed to both generate and reflect current discussion and debate concerning approaches to the archaeology of land allotment and land division from a variety of archaeological periods and from a range of geographical regions. Not only would this book attempt to give a broad overview of contemporary field system and linear boundary studies in Britain, Ireland and Europe from prehistory through to the post-medieval period and to assess current methodologies, but it would also explore conservation and management issues, and new ways of approaching and interpreting the past.

The idea of this volume came out of two research gatherings that focused on land allotment and field systems. The first was a day seminar on Ancient Fields, held at the National Monuments Record centre at Swindon in June 2002, and organised by Dave Field and Dave McOmish of English Heritage. The second was the session on Land Allotment at the 24th annual conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, held at Manchester University in December 2002 and organised by Adrian Chadwick and Helen Wickstead. Both the Swindon and Manchester sessions generated much interest within the archaeological community, and inevitably many people who submitted proposals for papers had to be turned down. On both days too, the discussion after the papers and other comments suggested that there was great potential for a new, multi-period volume on land allotment.

Unfortunately, some of those who spoke at Swindon and Manchester were unable to provide papers for this volume, and many others who initially agreed to write papers subsequently withdrew due to work and/or family commitments. These ‘lost’ papers included a contextual study of Middle Bronze Age field systems along the Rivers Ouse, Nene and Welland in Cambridgeshire; the links between fields and placed deposits in the Bronze Age Thames Valley; the irregular and nucleated plots surrounding late prehistoric upland settlements in northern England; two papers examining Iron Age fields and land allotment in Denmark and the Netherlands respectively; a detailed social history of particular medieval and post-medieval boundaries in one Derbyshire parish; an examination of early modern ‘squatter’ settlements and fields in Wales; and an ethnography of tenure, land reform and land division in modern Sicily.

The title of this book refers in part to the classic 1978 Early Land Allotment in the British Isles BAR volume edited by Colin Bowen and Peter Fowler. Along with earlier works by W.G. Hoskins such as The Making of the English Landscape (1955) and Fieldwork in Local History (1967), Bowen’s Ancient Fields (1961) and Christopher Taylor’s Fields in the English Landscape (1975), this is now rightly regarded as a seminal volume in the development of discussions concerning land allotment and field systems within archaeology, history and historical geography. In the same way that the 1978 Early Land Allotment edited volume looked back to Bowen’s 1961 study, this collection of papers is also a respectful homage to the earlier work; and at the same time likewise aims to consciously build upon the previous work. This new volume would similarly seek to reflect the ‘state of the art’ in current approaches to land allotment within archaeology. How had the evidence expanded over the past twenty-eight years since its publication, and how (if at all) had debates and discussions changed? Have some of the original questions posed by that volume now been answered, or have they merely been replaced by new sets of questions? Rather ironically, Early Land Allotment met with initial resistance and suspicion from its intended publishers (the Council for British Archaeology), who felt that there would not be enough interest in the subject (P. Fowler pers. comm.), and this was why it appeared as a British Archaeological Report. The continued research and discussion concerning past land allotment, and the development of landscape archaeology as a whole, are testimony as to how incorrect this original viewpoint was.

It is also disappointing that this volume does not now include any contributors from Ireland, as initially it appeared that papers on Neolithic and Bronze Age fields and land allotment might be forthcoming, along with a paper on cartography and English colonial expansion in post-medieval Ireland, and another on the work of the Ordnance Survey in Ireland during the nineteenth century. It was also very frustrating that, despite repeated invitations to contribute papers we also did not receive a single response from anyone then working at Cadw, RCAHMW, Historic Scotland and English Heritage. This presumably can be explained by the demands of work, and in the case of English Heritage also the insecurity and instability caused by ‘reorganisation’ and redundancies. Because of the pressures of their own work and research commitments, both Dave McOmish and Helen Wickstead were unfortunately forced to withdraw as co-editors. At the insistence of many contributors, however, I have

Initially, Dave McOmish and Helen Wickstead were to be the co-editors of this volume with me, and we invited contributions from all of those who had presented papers 1

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 1. An ornate stone gateway and part of the Hafod Estate wall in the Ystwyth Valley near Aberystwyth, Wales, designed by Thomas Johnes (1748-1816) in the Picturesque style. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

continued as sole editor. This all too familiar tale highlights the increasing pressures that archaeologists in Britain today are working under, and how little time and resources are available to allow them to publish their work outside of the ‘grey’ literature of unpublished survey reports or client reports for developers. Inevitably, my own pressures of being made redundant from a teaching post, having to return to working full-time in commercial archaeological fieldwork whilst completing a part-time PhD and becoming a father have all considerably limited the amount of time that I could spend on this volume. This all delayed publication by at least two years, and I apologise to the contributors for this hiatus.

Particularly in British prehistory, discussions have been dominated by data from south-central England for far too long. In addition, two papers examine European land allotment evidence – from prehistoric Sweden (Petersson this volume) and medieval Iceland (Aldred this volume), so introducing a wider readership to the fascinating archaeology from these countries, and also to the two authors’ thought-provoking methodological and theoretical approaches to the evidence. The papers in this book also span a wide chronological range, from the early Bronze Age through to the early modern period. This was an important aspect of the volume, as all too often archaeologists working on prehistoric or Romano-British fields have been isolated from those examining medieval and post-medieval fields, and vice versa. Despite many differences in the evidence from these periods and the methodological approaches to it, having a multi-period volume offers much greater opportunities for the sharing of ideas and techniques between archaeologists. I hope that the many, varied papers presented here will themselves generate much further discussion and debate in the future. And hopefully, this volume will itself be worthy enough for referencing in another twenty or thirty year’s time.

Despite these problems, however, I believe that this volume has succeeded in achieving a great breadth of chronological, geographical, methodological and theoretical coverage. It contains twenty-two papers from twenty-one different contributors drawn from a range of archaeological backgrounds encompassing commercial contract field units, curatorial services and university departments; the latter including both teaching staff and postgraduate researchers. Although unfortunately there are no studies relating to Scotland, this book contains contributions examining south-west, eastern and northern England and Wales, thereby going some way to redressing the regional biases evident in most general period studies. It is high time that the important archaeology from these other areas of Britain achieved greater prominence, and became part of wider debates.

Now what’s my definition? My definition My definition is this…1 1

Dream Warriors. 1990. My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style (Lyrics and music King Lou and Capital Q). Fourth & Broadway (Island Records).

2

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION

Figure 2. Panoramic view of Gallax Hill, Exmoor, Devon, viewed from the late prehistoric enclosure of Bat’s Castle. The edges of the open moorland (much of it once deer park) were enclosed by sinuous post-medieval stone-walled fields and trackways, and then by straight-edged Parliamentary enclosure fields. Fields were cleared of stone and improved. Prehistoric cairns and boundaries survive on the unenclosed and/or unimproved land, marking past systems of tenure and allotment. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

As part of this introduction, it is important to establish some first principles. In particular, there remains a problem with terminology within archaeology. In some publications, terms such as tenure, territoriality, land allotment, land division and land use are employed relatively uncritically, in some cases as if they are almost interchangeable (e.g. Cunliffe 2005; Dark and Dark 1997; Fowler 2002). Even authors who normally take a more critical approach have sometimes been guilty of this. In an otherwise cogent article, Timothy Earle used the terms property rights and land tenure as if they were synonymous with one another (Earle 2000). Despite his considered discussions of land allotment and land holding (Fleming 1988, 1989), even Andrew Fleming has at times appeared to conflate tenure with occupancy and territoriality (e.g. Fleming 1998a: 45). But they are not. This has led to some confusion in the past, and many of the contributors to this volume have been at pains to stress some of these differences (e.g. Lewis this volume). Following the example of Robert Johnston (2001: 100103) and Willy Kitchen (2001: 109-110) therefore, it is pertinent at this point to discuss more precise definitions.

…an aspect of the means through which these purposes are put into effect under given environmental circumstances (Ingold 1986: 130-131). So in other words, tenure is about social relations, engaging with ‘nature’, land and the landscape, and it is also how people view the relationships between themselves, and between themselves and the land. Tenure may take many different forms in communities across the world today, which presupposes that it was extremely variable in the past too (see discussions in Adler 1996; Casimir and Rao 1992; Croll and Parkin 1992; Ellen and Fukui 1996; Ingold 1986, 2000; Kelly 1992; Ward and Kingdom 1995). Tenure is not the same as property and ownership, although these may both form aspects of tenure. Property and ownership may determine the exclusive rights to things, and of individuals, families or communities to possess, use and/or dispose of things or land, to make these material objects or areas of land alienable rather than inalienable. But although property has come to mean ownership, particularly in the capitalist West from the early modern period onwards, this is not and has not always been the case in other cultures (Hunt 1998; Lowie 1921; Neale 1998). Nonetheless, the core of pan-cultural notions of property might thus be considered the right to exclude or deny others (Neale 1998; Netting 1993). Sometimes linked to the idea of property therefore is territoriality. Territoriality is another outcome of tenure, and is the product of these social relations. In other words, territoriality usually involves specific individuals or groups claiming alienable rights over particular areas of land, with the power (or at least the desire) to exclude other individuals and groups from it, and/or the wish to claim it or appropriate it from others.

Tim Ingold has drawn a clear distinction between ‘tenure’ and ‘territoriality’, which offers archaeologists useful definitions. In his 1986 book The Appropriation of Nature he stated that: …tenure is an aspect of that system of relations which constitutes persons as productive agents and directs their purposes (Ingold 1986: 130, original emphasis). Whereas territoriality is:

3

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT In some social and economic systems, particularly modern capitalism, this may mean that areas of land can be bought and sold as commodities. Property, ownership and territoriality are effectively sub-categories of tenure, but it is important to remember that tenure need not necessarily include them.

England (though there is of course much more complexity and variation to this coarse pattern, e.g. Williamson 2002). Such differences may also apply at a more localised level – separate dales in Yorkshire and Cumbria for example, often had slightly different patterns of drystone walling, partly a product of the local variations in raw material, but also partly the result of social custom (q.v. Edmonds 2004: 112). Individuals or communities were judged on the appearance and maintenance of their walls, fences, and hedges, and the quality and management of their land (Bevan this volume; Phillips 1984). In a very real way, social notions of identity, status and pride may thus be caught up and incorporated within the physical fabrics of the boundaries themselves. Other variations in boundaries reflect historical changes, the ebb and flow of agricultural expansion and contraction, the intake of new areas, its clearance and cultivation or grazing, and then perhaps its later abandonment. Success or failure, feast or famine – generations of human striving or struggle can all be visible through the lines of well-maintained walls, fences and hedges; or crumbling, disused or overgrown boundaries.

Notions of tenure, property and territoriality can also be powerful components of individual or group identity. In a stimulating ethnographic study, Paul Sillitoe has outlined some of the land tenure systems of Highland New Guinea, and has shown how kin relationships determine complex and shifting rights of access to cultivatable land. These are vital to the constitution of social life and its continuity over time (Sillitoe 1999). In Highland New Guinea who you are is intimately entangled with where you are cultivating. When Highland people look out across their landscapes they not only see paths, fences and fields; but the many networks of social relations connecting them to people in the present, and also remember those ancestors who occupied the land in the past. In the case of land disputes therefore, these threaten not only people’s access and rights of tenure, but are a more fundamental challenge to their very identities. If boundaries become blurred, then identity itself may become problematic (ibid.: 350). In Fiji, for members of one clan of mixed European and Fijian ancestry, the freehold land available to them in each generation is finite and bounded, but capable of much internal division (Riles 1998: 409-410). For them, kinship is thus very much defined in spatial and numerical terms, and people within the group share a ‘landscape geometry’ defined by a series of land allotments acquired by an ancestor, with land divided into parallel plots of equal length in each successive generation. Similarly, in parts of Romania and East and North Africa, the width and arrangement of plots of land effectively ‘maps’ the numbers of generations and their kin relationships (e.g. Bessis et al. 1956; Shipton 1984; Stahl 1980).

Land allotment on the other hand, concerns how people actually go about establishing rights of tenure, access and ownership, cultivation and grazing. Is land apportioned equally or unevenly within a community, is it allocated by social elites or discussed, negotiated and divided up communally, is it passed down through patrilineal or matrilineal descent groups, and do individuals or groups have different tenurial rights to the same area of land? Land allotment is thus also an outcome of tenure, and may be informed and influenced by notions of territoriality. It is therefore both a physical process, and an outcome of social relations. Land division refers more specifically to the physical means by which people divide up the land with fences, walls, ditches and hedges, although this may of course be a reflection of tenure, land allotment and territoriality. It is both a process, and the outcome of other processes.

How people actually go about allocating land and constructing land divisions may also be further mediums for the expression of identity. The visual and experiential character of landscapes is often affected by the nature of fields, field systems and land boundaries. In contemporary Britain, this still applies at a regional level. There are the differences between the smaller enclosed fields still remaining in the south-west, west and northern uplands, and the extensive ‘prairie’ fields that have come to dominate areas of southern and eastern England since the 1960s, although ironically the latter in some respects may reflect something of the appearance of the large ‘open’ fields of pre-Enclosure champion landscapes. There are the aesthetic, land-use, textural and tenurial differences between the hedge banks of south-west England and south Wales, the leats, reens, rhynes, gripes and dykes of the Somerset and Gwent Levels and East Anglian Fens, the hedgerows of central Wales, southern England and the midlands, and the drystone walls of much of upland north Wales, Scotland and northern

But some land allotment may not involve any land division at all, and some land division may not involve any physical markers or boundaries. In parts of southern France and Sicily, for example, there are often no obvious boundaries or physical markers between different arable fields. Here, land allotment must be implicitly rather than explicitly expressed, and the actual land division may be based either on lines between trees and boulders, on less tangible features or far-off landmarks such as hills or church towers, or on altogether intangible (to the outsider) boundaries maintained largely through individual and communal memory and social practice. This has resonances with medieval English open-field systems and the different strips that were set out within them, usually without permanent boundaries. They were maintained (and often disputed) through discussion and debate, and sometimes the judgement of village elders and manorial courts who checked the edges of the strips

4

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION

Figure 3. A post-medieval enclosure stone wall and associated trees on Shovel Down, Dartmoor, marking the edge of the improved and cleared land. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

with temporary markers of pegs and rope, sometimes on an anuual basis. In Highland New Guinea, the boundaries around garden plots are often unclear, and are again subject to much discussion and negotiation. These boundaries may be based as much on differences in vegetation as on the remains of old fences or ditches. Older people know many of the landscape markers used to establish the location of previously cultivated areas, and remember when the location was last used. The establishment of tenurial rights and continuity of possession may thus often depend on social memory and narrative history (Sillitoe 1999: 340).

Britain would be the practice of gleaning, whereby any grain left in the field after harvesting would be collected before the stubble was ploughed in, usually by women and children. These were the wives and children of farm servants, or the poorest people in the parish. This grain was either taken to the mill to be ground into flour, or was used to feed chickens and other animals in the crofts. Different communities might even claim tenure over the same area at different times of the year. Once again, Johnston (2001: 101) and Kitchen (2001: 117-118) have both cogently outlined some of the varied possibilities of fluctuating rhythms of tenure, access and land rights, and the extent to which these could be affected by seasonal, annual or generational cycles.

Land use constitutes the activities that people carry out in areas of the landscape, whilst agriculture is the subsistence or economic practices undertaken by individuals or communities. And agriculture may of course span a wide range of activities, from arable cultivation for crops, through to the utilisation of pasture for livestock, the cropping of grass for hay, and the use of unimproved land or unenclosed land for rough grazing. Land use may also include the digging for soil or quarrying of stone for boundary or building construction, or of clay for pottery production. It might involve the management of woodland and trees in general through coppicing or pollarding for timber, fuel, grazing and nuts and fruits, or the collection of gorse, bracken, seaweed, driftwood and other resources. All these different practices may involve issues of land allotment, tenure and/or land division. Different groups within the same community, or even different communities, might claim tenure and rights of access to these areas or resources. Robert Johnston (2001: 101) noted that in some smallscale communities living within or near to forests and woodland, rights over different parts or products of the trees might be split between men and women (Rocheleau and Edmunds 1997). Tenure and access may also differ according to temporality, as at certain times of the year, certain areas might be claimed or used by individual household groups, but at others might be used by the community as a whole. An historical example from

Figure 4. Late medieval/early post-medieval ridge and furrow surviving in post-Parliamentary enclosure pasture fields south of Swindon, Wiltshire. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Land use is therefore not the same as land allotment or land division. Societies that might be undertaking similar agricultural practices may nevertheless have very different ideas about tenure, property and land allotment to one another. Two different communities with apparently similar systems of land division might have very dissimilar concepts of tenure and land allotment. Two groups with very different forms of boundaries and 5

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 5. Sunset behind post-medieval enclosure stone walls and hawthorn trees near Dyffryn Ardudwy, Dyfed. In the foreground are the low earthworks of later prehistoric field systems and enclosures, preserved on unimproved lowland heathland underneath the more recent boundaries. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

land division might have similar attitudes towards tenure and property. One area of land might be occupied by different communities, or by different sections of the community, at different times. Tenure, land allotment, property, ownership and land use may all be affected in many varying ways by age, status and gender. The further back in time we go therefore, the less certain we should be that people in the past had understandings of tenure, ownership or land allotment that in any way resembled those in the contemporary capitalist West (see Chadwick this volume b). And we must always remember that whatever its functional importance once was, any boundary we survey or excavate as archaeologists is actually a physical manifestation of tenurial beliefs, ideas of identity, property and ownership, land allotment practices, systems of land division, and patterns of land use.

authors. This has sometimes been made explicit though, as in Curwen’s diagram illustrating ‘Celtic’ fields of south-east Britain, which also featured an illustration of changes in cultivation technologies (Curwen 1927: 276). The idea that there may be ‘relicts’ in landscapes also has resonances with another common analogy or metaphor, that of landscapes as ‘palimpsests’, or surfaces that have been repeatedly re-inscribed by different phases of human activity. F.W. Maitland, W.G. Hoskins and O.G.S. Crawford all used this term, and it continues to appear in modern publications. In this analogy, the material traces of people’s past activities are ‘written’ onto the land. Landscapes with surviving earlier field systems might thus be regarded as somehow fixing in time episodes from the past. I believe that this is symptomatic of how field systems have often been described and understood by many landscape historians and archaeologists, at least until recent years. Historical geography approaches in particular have tended to regard landscapes as a series of ‘time slices’ or palimpsests, with different surviving field systems the ‘type fossils’ for each major chronological period. Different types of fields and boundaries are thus regarded as separate time slices of land allotment superimposed upon one another. Middle Bronze Age ‘Celtic’ fields are overlain by later Bronze Age linear boundaries, then by Iron Age fields, Romano-British fields, then by Saxon boundaries, medieval ridge and furrow, and so on. We should

Many authors have used the expression ‘relict fields’ when describing past field systems, often in the sense of a more recent field system created on top of an older, ‘relict’ field system (e.g. Fowler 2002: 137; Muir 2000: 201; Percival and Williamson 2005: 3). This is a most unhelpful term, however. It suggests that such fields are ‘fossilised’ remnants of the past, and rather static entities. Indeed, fossilisation is itself often used as a metaphor. Both terms have the effect of implying that such fields were primitive, earlier stages in a progressive evolutionary sequence of land allotment and agricultural development, even if this was not the intention of the 6

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION abandon such ideas, even as analogies or metaphors, for landscape changes can rarely be slotted into such a series of neat, compartmentalised episodes (Chadwick 2004: 4-5). Landscapes are not merely simple, sedimented accumulations of the past, and the features we see surviving in them were the product of very dynamic processes and histories. It is often impossible to separate out distinct ‘time slices’ – some boundaries belonging to earlier occupation may have become disused, but others might have been incorporated into later land allotment. The remains of earlier features in the landscape might themselves have had social meanings to later people, in the form of memories, myths or stories associated with them. Indeed, the dilapidation and decay of walls, banks and buildings and overgrown hedges or scrub in previously cultivated or intensively grazed areas may have been actively drawn upon by later communities in conscious engagements with the past (q.v. Evans 2003: 35-36). These earlier remains may have signified the passage of time, tradition, tenure and other links to the land. Relic

1. an object interesting because of its age or association…3. a surviving custom or belief from a past age…5. (in pl.) what has survived destruction or wasting or use

Relict

1a. a geological or other object surviving in its primitive form 1b. an animal or plant known to have existed in the same form in previous geological ages

Iron Age and Romano-British periods, this may not be mentioned in any great detail, other than where later lynchets or boundaries overlie or cut across earlier features. They are also often described according to the personal period proclivities of the individual researcher concerned. So a prehistorian interested in the Bronze Age might stress that particular period of land allotment and land use in the life of a landscape, whereas a Romano-British specialist might be more concerned with the later evidence. Once again, the sense of mutability and of changing landscapes and practices is lost. These are issues that the many varied papers in this collection have tried to address. The papers in this volume In her paper, Helen Wickstead places the history of the study of land allotment, fields and field systems within its wider social context. In particular, she examines the links between notions of land, fields and agriculture, and the development of various predominant social and intellectual discourses in England and Germany during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England, a perception developed that rural people were somehow more ‘authentic’ than people in towns. From the seventeenth century onwards the inhabitants of rural areas in Cornwall, Wales, the Scottish Highlands and islands and Ireland were also viewed as surviving remnants of a pre-Roman ‘Celtic’ culture (Collis 2003: 49-52). Some echoes of this can still be seen in early twentieth century work where Ireland and Scotland often served as case studies (e.g. Curwen 1927, 1938), the implication being that these simple country folk were relatively unchanged in their lifestyles since prehistory. There was also a particular fascination for the tools and techniques used in small-scale agriculture in those places. Ethnohistorical approaches are still apparent in more recent studies (e.g. Fowler 2002). As with ethnographic studies, when used critically such approaches can provide many valuable insights into past agricultural practices, although there is a danger when concentrating on functional aspects alone that we might obfuscate the very real differences between the past and the present.

(Concise Oxford English Dictionary 1990 Ninth edition). It is therefore pertinent to consider the dictionary definitions of the words ‘relic’ and ‘relict’. Is ‘relic’ a better term than ‘relict’? Past field systems are definitely interesting, and drawing in notions of customs and beliefs and the fact that these are only partial, surviving fragments are useful ideas. Perhaps then, ‘relic’ should be substituted for ‘relict’ to provide a subtly different intellectual point of departure with which to consider ideas that reflect the dynamic, mutable and socially meaningful nature of land allotment and fields. For example, some landscape historians and archaeologists still talk about ‘classic’ ridge and furrow as reflecting medieval agricultural and social practices. But they know full well that in many cases, surviving ridge and furrow reflects post-medieval abandonment and disuse, at the end point of the histories of such field systems that lasted for several centuries or more. These field systems changed over these periods of use, never remaining static – new areas were taken in and new headlands were created, whilst old headlands were ploughed through, or some fields abandoned. Although this may be mentioned in terms of landscape stratigraphy where it is suggested by earthwork or aerial photographic evidence, it is rarely explicitly commented upon in terms of social processes and human agency.

In this historiography Wickstead also critically examines the role of gender in discussions of land, farming and property ownership; and the development of nationalist ideologies and how ideas concerning land, ethnic identity and the past have been used to include or exclude various groups. Although National Socialist Germany is an obvious and relatively well-known example, Wickstead also shows how dominant ideologies of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Britishness’ were also constructed, and how many of the legacies of these views are still with us today. For example, in contemporary Britain black people and minority ethnic groups are almost always associated with urban areas, whilst they themselves often feel excluded from and unwelcome in the rural countryside – ideas which the artist Ingrid Pollard has explored in her work for example (Kinsman 1995). Current debates in politics and the media over what it means to be ‘British’

Similarly, although archaeologists recognise that Bronze Age ‘Celtic’ fields were often re-used and altered in the 7

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 6. A modern ‘prairie’ field and hay bales just north of Salisbury, Wiltshire, situated on rolling chalk downlands. Such a quintessentially ‘English’ image is nevertheless a product of very particular landscapes and long-term palaeo-environmental, land use and tenurial changes. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

demonstrate how important such issues are. It is also important that when we examine archaeologies of land allotment we do not fall into the trap of projecting romanticised and/or nationalised notions back into the past.

Gow 1995; Harley 1988; Ingold 1997; Smith 2003; Sparke 1998; Strang 2000). In India for example, the Great Trigonometric Survey was very much part of British attempts to map and control the country, coupled with a desire to establish a known (and defensible) frontier with the expanding Russian Empire (Edney 1999; Kalpagam 1995; Keay 2000).

Another paper that was initially submitted for inclusion as part of this volume, but subsequently withdrawn suddenly without warning, examined observations made by the Irish Ordnance Survey in what was then County Londonderry, Ireland during the mid-nineteenth century. These surveyors recorded many stone walls and plough marks, wooden fences and other structures, burnt trees and tree stumps beneath peat deposits. Although of course most of these recorded features cannot now be dated, from work elsewhere in Ireland it is highly likely that many might have dated to the Neolithic and Bronze Age periods. The map-making process itself is of increasing interest to historians and archaeologists, and several accounts of the establishment of the Ordnance Survey in Britain and Ireland have now been published (Andrews 1975, 1997; Close 1969; Seymour 1980). In colonial contexts such as Africa, India, and Australia, the early modern Western map-making tradition was often heavily implicated in colonial power, propaganda and oppression, and frequently contradicted or ignored morelocal traditions of naming and way-finding (e.g.

In Ireland, it has been shown how the maps produced as a result of the British occupation were similar tools of colonial control and administration, at a time when the British military were still very anxious about potential Irish rebellions (Hamer 1989; Smith 1998, 2003). Although some surveyors had an empathy with the landscape, language and the people, many of the maps emphasised in detail castles and estates of the Anglo-Irish gentry and Anglo-Norman churches. They Anglicised Irish place names and spellings, yet often failed to record in any detail some Irish-held estates or old Irish castles, and ignored some Irish place-names altogether. However, as Angèle Smith has commented (2003: 80-81), when significant landscape features such as mountains were left unnamed by the Ordnance Survey, this quasi-deliberate omission had the unintended consequence of actually drawing attention to their Irish identity and social meanings.

8

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION Two papers both outline and discuss the evidence for land allotment, land use, fields and field boundaries during prehistory in two key regions of England, though these are regions often ignored in some archaeological publications. John Barnatt examines the Bronze Age and Iron Age periods in the Peak District of Derbyshire and Yorkshire, whilst Peter Herring looks at Cornwall and Devon from the Bronze Age through to the postRoman period. Much of this evidence has been obtained from upland sites, and both authors have considerable experience of archaeological investigations within these two regions. The result is two very detailed studies that consider the palaeo-environmental and artefactual evidence in addition to the remains of fields and settlements themselves.

land was taken into arable cultivation, and when there was an increase in upland grazing through transhumance. In the late Iron Age there was further change, with the appearance of enclosed settlements or rounds, and there was considerable continuity during the Romano-British period. In the sixth and seventh centuries AD however, the political and ideological influence of the Christian church caused further change. In contrast, Eleanor Breen and Robert Johnston both examine smaller study areas, in the Scilly Isles and north Wales respectively, but they look at this archaeology from a highly detailed perspective. They both take experiential approaches to the earthwork evidence, and are perhaps more concerned with the materialities of the boundaries, cairns and settlements that they are studying. Their methodologies are more experimental too. For Breen, her embodied experiences moving around Shipman Head Down are a means of exploring both her own contemporary engagements with that landscape and the lived, sensory experiences of those people in the past. At Cwm Ffrydlas, Johnston wishes to consider fields, cairns and settlements as inhabited places, and is also concerned with notions of tenure, mobility, and the scale and identity of communities. He thus argues for much greater use of informal but detailed annotated plans in order to explore some of these themes ‘on the ground’. Both Breen and Johnston are also interested in how writing influences interpretations of the past, and they have both treated their papers as exercises in the use of language within archaeology. The approaches taken by these two researchers challenge some of the broaderscale, reifying tendencies of conventional measured surveys, and offer interesting methodological and theoretical possibilities for other fieldworkers to consider.

Barnatt advances the notion of ‘sustained’ tenure in later prehistory, whereby particular communities had claims to particular parts of the landscape, but some or all members of these communities might still have engaged in seasonal movements. He argues for the presence of hedges and/or fences in the past that are now only hinted at by the earthworks of irregular, sinuous stone and earth boundary banks. Rather than being boundaries in their own right, it may be that these banks are only the visible surviving result of linear clearance against more ephemeral features. He also suggests that some smaller cairn fields may reflect early clearance in the region during the third millennium BC, and that in later periods careful management of the land through manuring and other practices was necessary in order to maintain soil fertility, for both pasture and arable fields. He also tries to identify specific local communities through ‘nested’ groups of settlements, fields and the monuments associated with them.

The later prehistoric cairnfields of Cumbria are the focus of the paper by Helen Evans. She argues against the use of overly reductive typologies of cairn form, in which distinctive regional traditions of monument form have often been subsumed into wider national discourses of social processes and change. In contrast, her more subtle and detailed description of the fells and becks provides a much more landscape-specific framework in which she outlines the different settings and contextual associations of some basic cairn forms. The distribution of ring cairns, funerary cairns and cairnfields across the Cumbrian uplands suggests that during the late Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age there was a major shift in occupation practices and monument use in Cumbria around the beginning of the early Bronze Age. The location of ring cairns and round funerary cairns in particular seems to have been closely associated with becks and springs, and the line of these watercourses and the watersheds between them might have formed important social boundaries. Helen Evans then suggests ways in which daily and seasonal occupational practices might have led to cairn formation, linked explicitly to the movements of people and livestock through the Cumbrian landscapes.

Peter Herring’s paper is even more ambitious in scope. In prehistory, he suggests a far higher human population in Cornwall than has previously been supposed, with livestock numbers possibly exceeding those in the contemporary south-west, and with some very fluid seasonal movements of people and animals. This was a sophisticated and complex society, not merely a ‘marginal’ one. In examining the patterns of settlements and fields he argues for a marked degree of conscious design in the landscape regarding where settlements, fields and monuments were situated and how they were orientated. He thus examines the interplay between anthropogenic and ‘natural’ features in the landscape. In this, he has been influenced by more recent contextual and phenomenological studies of the Leskernick area of Bodmin Moor (e.g. Bender, Hamilton and Tilley 1997; Tilley, Hamilton and Bender 2000; Tilley, Hamilton, Harrison and Anderson 2000). Herring identifies a series of key reorganisations of the landscape, linked to social changes. The first occurred during the mid-second millennium BC, when he suggests there was a relatively rapid ‘event horizon’ of the adoption of field systems and land boundaries within years or at the most decades, and extending over a very wide area including Dartmoor and south-central England. In Cornwall there was another reorganisation around or just after 1000 BC, when more

John Thomas re-examines prehistoric pit alignments using the evidence from developer-funded excavations, 9

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 7. Gary Robinson standing on a large late prehistoric cairn in the valley at Mynydd y Garn, Brecon Beacons, Powys. This may have been a funerary structure, but also had clearance added to it. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

including several recent developer-funded projects from the English midlands. He sees the majority of pit alignments as originating in the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age, though there are some interesting earlier and later exceptions to this. They were often associated with lowland river floodplains, and may have been ‘permeable’ boundaries that defined rights of tenure to grazing and access to water. They often had close links with ‘natural’ features in the landscape, running across bends or loops in rivers, whilst in other areas they ran between or along the lines of escarpments. They also sometimes seem to have delineated areas that had been used for ritual and/or burial monuments. Thomas also advocates the integration of functional and social or symbolic approaches, noting that pit alignments were frequently part of complex landscape histories, and often respected or were respected by other archaeological features, including ‘functional’ boundaries and ‘ritual’ monuments. These seem to have been deliberate and careful acts of referencing and incorporation. And although finds of artefacts and faunal remains from pit alignments are often rare, when they do occur this often seems to have been as placed deposits of pottery, metalwork and human and animal remains.

still relatively open and unbounded during the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age, but then in the middle Iron Age a series of large linear ditch and bank boundaries were constructed which divided up the floodplain. Later Iron Age settlements and enclosures were inserted into this basic framework of land division, and in some parts of the Trent Valley remarkably regular co-axial field systems had appeared by the late Iron Age, which were further developed during the Romano-British period. Some of this Romano-British reorganisation of the landscape may have been in response to increasingly wet environmental conditions, with higher incidences of flooding. In the post-Roman period, there appears to have been a marked lack of inhabitation, and it is likely that these field systems were abandoned. Settlement and farming may have moved to higher river terraces, perhaps in some cases to the sites of medieval and modern villages. Ian Roberts concentrates on a few sites from South and West Yorkshire in order to illustrate some of his ideas about landscape changes across the region. Although extensive systems of land allotment had been identified in the region through the aerial photographic work of Derrick Riley, Keith St Joseph and others, up until 1990 very little was known about the origins, date and purpose of these. The few small-scale excavations that had been undertaken had largely produced ubiquitous RomanoBritish pottery of second or third century AD date. In South Yorkshire, only one settlement site investigated seemed to be Iron Age in origin (Sydes 1993; Sydes and Symonds 1985). Referring particularly to prehistory, this prompted a well-known Roman archaeologist based at Sheffield University to fatuously remark ‘there is no archaeology in South Yorkshire’! Various workers disputed this (e.g. Chadwick 1995b; Cumberpatch and Robbins n.d.; Merrony 1993), but apart from a few landscape stratigraphic relationships there was little conclusive dating evidence to go on. As Ian Roberts shows, developer-funded excavation work across South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire since the mid-1990s has

The results of developer-funded archaeological fieldwork in Britain, through the introduction of PPG 16 in England in 1990 and its related guidelines in Wales and Scotland, are clearly transforming understandings of past land allotment in many regions. This can also be seen in the papers by David Knight and Lee Elliott, and by Ian Roberts, who consider the Trent Valley of Nottinghamshire, and South and West Yorkshire respectively. Through the work of their field units, much greater samples of these landscapes have been investigated, and these papers again demonstrate the value of close integration with palaeo-environmental analyses. Knight and Elliott use the example of the multiperiod site at Hoveringham Quarry near Gonalston as a starting point for a wider discussion about the developing landscape of the River Trent floodplain. This area was 10

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION transformed this picture, and it is now clear that many fields, including some of the extensive co-axial ‘brickwork’ systems described by Derrick Riley, did indeed have their origins in the mid to late Iron Age. More small rural settlements have now been excavated revealing mixed farming, albeit probably with an emphasis on pastoralism. Daily life and taskscapes were probably not radically altered by the Roman occupation of the north. However, there was an increase in the use, amount and variety of material culture, and in some parts of the region there appears to have been an expansion and/or intensification of agriculture from the second century AD onwards. Once again however, many of these field systems appear to have gone out of use in the postRoman period.

palaeochannels, Lewis and her colleagues have been able to propose the existence of a largely stable, open grassland landscape in the area throughout much of prehistory. In her other case study of Jutland, Denmark, full excavation of the Skelhøj barrow in Denmark and land use and barrow preservation studies have revealed that the people who constructed prehistoric barrows had a detailed knowledge of soil processes and local soil characteristics. The high chalk Wolds of eastern Yorkshire form the study area for Chris Fenton-Thomas, from the late Bronze Age through to the medieval period. Once again, a particular feature in the landscape is used as an elegant demonstration of more widespread changes over time, in this case the Sledmere Green Lane, which was first built as a late Bronze Age linear boundary, and which was later used as a medieval township boundary and then an access road for a large early modern elite estate. He sees the high Wolds as fluctuating between open landscapes with relatively sparse or mobile inhabitation, and more ‘closed’ landscapes with more fixed settlements. In the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age there were large linear boundaries and enclosed settlements, but during the middle Iron Age the Wolds were used largely for pasture, with large settlements and square barrow cemeteries on the Wold edges and down in the vales. In the late Iron Age and Romano-British period this settlement spread up and onto the Wolds, and was accompanied by an increase in arable farming and the creation of ditched field systems. In the Anglian period much land reverted back to open pasture, whilst some areas and earlier monuments were used for burials. Anglo-Scandinavian settlement saw the foundation of the first villages and townships on the Wolds, and the creation of large open fields, with the higher Wolds used for large-scale sheep grazing during the medieval period. Fenton-Thomas is thus able to show that there was no neat linear, evolutionary sequence of landscape development; and that at any given period some of the features from the past remaining in the landscape were reincorporated, re-appropriated and reinterpreted by later generations.

Adrian Chadwick also seeks to move away from purely quantitative analyses of land allotment. In the first part of his paper he addresses some methodological issues, and argues that traditional survey techniques are more subjective than some fieldworkers will admit. Archaeologists must thus not only seek to make as accurate a record as possible, but should explicitly acknowledge and explore this subjectivity in order to think about how people moved around and experienced their landscapes in the past. He also critiques some aspects of Historic Landscape Characterisation, and believes it should be a much more research orientated, interpretative exercise than has sometimes been the case. As a move towards social archaeologies of land allotment, fields and field systems, Chadwick also makes a plea for researchers of all periods to consider issues of tenure, identity and status, power, cosmology and belief. These should not be separate social or ritual spheres tacked on to functional or economic studies, but part of more integrated approaches which acknowledge that in small-scale societies such divisions are often meaningless (q.v. Brück 1999). He illustrates some of these points by discussing two of his own research projects – the later prehistoric land allotment and field systems on Gray Hill or Mynydd Llwydd in south Wales, and Iron Age and Romano-British field systems in the English north midlands.

Maria Petersson and her colleagues have carried out extensive investigations of stonewalled land allotment systems in west Östergötland in southern Sweden, as part of fieldwork ahead of road construction. These stensträngar or stonewalled boundaries were traditionally thought to have been built and used during the Roman Iron Age and Migration periods in AD 120-550. Through using techniques of map regression, spatial association, landscape stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating, however, and with the contextual information obtained from excavation, Petersson and her colleagues have been able to challenge these previous assumptions, and show that some of these stone walls were associated with late Iron Age and medieval settlement. In some cases, these stone walls were in use for many centuries, and were re-used and reincorporated into later constructions within the landscape. They now have a much longer chronology, from the first century BC to the sixth century AD. There are several other noteworthy features of her paper.

Helen Lewis outlines the potential of palaeoenvironmental analyses and soil micromorphology studies in considerations of land use and land allotment in the past. Rather than taking a purely ‘scientific’ approach, itself still something of a stereotype amongst many archaeologists, Lewis shows how palaeo-environmental studies should be closely integrated with other forms of fieldwork and archaeological theory in order to understand what past people were doing in the landscape. One of her case studies concerns the later prehistoric field systems and monuments on Wyke Down on Cranborne Chase in Dorset, where analyses indicated that there was no major change in land use or significant intensification of cultivation following the construction of field systems in the Bronze Age. This might in turn suggest that the appearance of field systems reflected social changes rather than new agricultural practices. Through studies of molluscs, sediments and valley erosion and pollen from 11

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Firstly, it is important to recognise from the perspective of land allotment, tenure and land use that these stonewalled systems were not the actual cultivated fields themselves – these were smaller plots within them, often defined by less visible features such as clearance, lynchets or traces of fencing. This has important implications for British archaeology, especially for those field systems surviving as earthworks. Secondly, Petersson and her colleagues stripped entire areas of topsoil, excavating within the land divisions, and were also able to identify such features as waterholes, and flattened clearance cairns from earlier phases of activity. It would be interesting to see this methodology used more in Britain, particularly in upland areas.

rhythms of the agricultural year and Christian cosmology were closely interdigitated during the Anglo-Saxon period. Parishes which depended heavily on their flocks and herds were more likely to choose a saint for the parish church whose feast fell in the spring or autumn, when flocks left for or returned from their summer pastures. Herding thus still appears to have been an important part of the local economy in the tenth or eleventh century. Her paper thus demonstrates that even for the medieval period, archaeologists cannot ignore the influence of cosmology and belief, and it also illustrates the potential for the considered use of field and placename analyses when combined with archaeological evidence.

Oscar Aldred and his colleagues at the Fornleifastofnun Íslands (Institute of Archaeology, Iceland) have carried out extensive surveys of Viking, medieval and postmedieval boundaries, fields and settlements in Iceland; including walkover and detailed topographic surveys, and GIS-mapping using aerial photographs and satellite imagery. In Iceland there has been comprehensive vertical aerial photography, but many areas have still not been covered with oblique photographs. Sometimes boundaries may be very difficult to spot, as they are often constructed of turf and earth, and have eroded or been flattened over the centuries. They are also sometimes obscured by the hummocks produced by soil freeze-thaw processes. False colour infrared satellite imagery can be a way of identifying these more ephemeral features. Aldred outlines the different types of boundaries, land allotment and land use surviving from these periods in Icelandic landscapes, and in particular he examines the large linear boundaries identified in the valley-plain areas of northeast Iceland. These earthworks, which occur as both cross contour and contour sensitive linear banks, may have been a relatively early form of land allotment in particularly open and relatively flat areas. Aldred’s paper is not only a useful introduction to considerations of land allotment in Iceland’s archaeology, but demonstrates the great potential in that country for integrated landscape studies, where ‘high-tech’ and more traditional archaeological survey methods can be combined with critical use of Iceland’s numerous documentary sources and with place-name, folklore and oral history research.

Edward Martin was part of a team involved in the Historic Field Systems of East Anglia Project that took place between 2000-2004, and which was commissioned by English Heritage as part of its Monument Protection Programme. This project aimed to examine the origin, form and development of the historic field systems of East Anglia, and to establish effective management strategies for them. It also sought to understand issues of past land allotment and land use. In East Anglia, medieval stetch or stitch ploughing was different to the ‘classic’ ridge and furrow found in the English midlands, and it usually left few earthworks that are visible today. Nevertheless, by using archaeological and documentary evidence, Martin and his colleagues were able to examine in detail key areas of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, northeastern Hertfordshire and south-eastern Cambridgeshire. They used a form of Historic Landscape Characterisation to categorise land holdings and land use, similar to the national settlement mapping work of Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell (Roberts and Wrathmell 2001, 2002), and other HLC studies being carried out in the East Anglia region. Martin also re-examines the question of the origins of block holdings and common fields. He presents compelling evidence for a correlation in Suffolk between an emphasis on common fields and Scandinavian placenames, whilst in Essex and in south-central Suffolk, where there are few Scandinavian place-names, block holdings were far more numerous. In Essex it is likely that the prime agricultural land developed relatively continuously from Iron Age and Romano-British farming practices into early medieval block holdings. These communities might have had rather hierarchical social structures that allowed chieftains or lords to have the greatest share of the best land; hence block demesnes were more common in this area. In Scandinavian settled areas however, the established social order may have been disrupted, making block demesnes available for reallocation on a more equal basis. The best land in north Suffolk and Norfolk was shared out between wider groups of peasant farmers, both those of Scandinavian and of Anglo-Saxon descent.

Susan Oosthuizen makes excellent use of documentary sources in her study of the late Anglo-Saxon agricultural land use in the Bourn Valley, West Cambridgeshire. A relatively abundant series of post-medieval documentary sources including charters, terriers, accounts, maps, enclosure awards have been used by her to identify field and furlong-names, which themselves provide evidence for Anglo-Saxon land allotment and land use. Her paper proposes that there were large areas of intensive grazing and rough pasture in the valley in the later Anglo-Saxon period, just before or at the time that open field farming was introduced. Most arable cultivation appears to have been restricted to the lower slopes and valley sides. Woodland seems to have been more limited in extent, although it continued to be assarted into the medieval period. Interestingly, she also shows how the seasonal

Another key aspect of his work with extremely important ramifications for research elsewhere in Britain and in many different periods is the demonstration that 12

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION apparently uniform areas of co-axial fields were much more complex in their development than has often been supposed. His detailed analyses indicate that different blocks of fields and boundaries may have had very varied historical and social trajectories.

questions of medieval taste and aesthetics, drawing on ideas from cognitive psychology such as Appleton’s prospect-refuge theory. He also looks at the postmedieval legacy of deer parks, seeing in many the origins of the more formal landscape parks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Jonathan Kissock considers field systems in Pembrokeshire that he first described in 1988, and outlines the notion of ekistics proposed by Doxiadis and its ‘laws’ or precepts for the creation and development of settlement systems. In this part of Wales, fragments of co-axial systems might have been incorporated into later land allotment and settlement. Kissock suggests that these had their origins before the Norman and Flemish settlement of the region in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries AD, and subsequent changes need not have reflected planned Norman or Flemish landscape remodelling, but rather the response and social and tenurial reorganisation of indigenous Welsh communities following the loss of their own ruling elite who had been murdered, imprisoned or stripped of their land rights. Kissock argues that in Pembrokeshire, co-axial principles of land allotment were implemented by a largely leaderless society.

Hannah Sackett has studied the processes of eighteenth and nineteenth century enclosure in the Vale of Aylesbury and the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, using Enclosure Acts, Awards and maps. Much of this was as a result of formal Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure. She describes how many commissioners were often physically and socially distanced from the landscape itself, as they were presented with maps and sketches drawn up by surveyors with little local topographic information or details of existing lanes or open field strips. The significant rearrangements of the landscape that followed were a result of this ‘blank slate’ approach, and Sackett outlines the social and experiential impact this had on local communities. Nevertheless, even Parliamentary enclosure was far from uniform. Sackett argues that the very generalised, Midlands-style Parliamentary enclosure outlined in many landscape histories cannot be used to describe the enclosure carried out in the Chilterns, scarp-edges and the Vale. Through detailed consideration of individual parishes, she has been able to draw out their different trajectories of change. For example, some scarp-edge parishes in Buckinghamshire seem to have been more resistant to radical change, and underwent more piecemeal enclosure, while simultaneously holding onto common lands and hilltop woods and wastes. Some attempts to enclose common land and waste were strongly contested. In contrast, Vale parishes which had not been subject to early enclosure and which lay on gently undulating ground were much easier to divide into regular blocks and new formations than the complex, hilly, hedge, bank and tree laden parishes of the scarpedge and the hills. Her work clearly demonstrates the importance of detailed landscape research at a parish level, and the need to recognise and explain local variation and to avoid over-generalising models.

Tom Williamson examines the origins and development of medieval agricultural land allotment in its two ‘classic’ forms – that of open field, ‘champion’ landscapes with more nucleated settlement; and of more dispersed patterns of settlement, associated with multiple and irregular open field systems – so-called ‘woodland’ landscapes. Many previous authors have drawn this apparent dichotomy in different ways, but Williamson stresses that there was considerable variation within the areas so broadly designated. Outlining many of the previous explanations for regional variations in medieval land allotment and land use, he argues that, unlike these earlier theories, the distinctions between ‘woodland’ and ‘champion’ regions were not directly related to population density and/or strong lordship. Re-asserting the importance of considerations of soils, slope, aspect and drainage in archaeological and historical studies, Williamson suggests that the variations in land allotment reflected differences in social organisation and particular types of agricultural technology that developed during the middle and later Saxon period as a response to aspects of the natural environment. In some areas but not others, the use of heavier ploughs allowed the cultivation of specific plots of land, and this encouraged a nucleated pattern of settlement. Lords and peasants alike made rational choices about the most efficient ways of organising their farms and fields.

Last but by no means least; Bill Bevan examines the dispersed upland settlement, piecemeal enclosure and irregular field systems of the Upper Derwent in the Peak District, and Great Langdale in the Cumbrian Lake District, particularly during the post-medieval and early modern periods. This sort of dispersed settlement dominated extensive areas of Britain, including most of northern and south-west England, the Scottish and Welsh Marches, much of Wales, and the south-west peninsula. Despite this and in contrast to the open field champion landscapes and even wood pasture landscapes of lowland England; these areas have not been subject to the same degree of scrutiny by historians and archaeologists. Some areas appear to have had a settlement history embedded in post-Roman or earlier landscapes, while others originated later, in some cases contemporary with or even later than villages that were created in the same region.

The subject of medieval deer parks forms the basis of the paper by Richard Muir. Outlining some of the archaeological and documentary evidence for deer parks, concentrating particularly on northern England, he sees deer parks as symbolic of medieval aristocratic ideas concerning the harmony of an ordered and rigidly stratified society. Seeking to understand deer parks from the experiential perspectives of medieval people, especially the elite who owned them, Muir examines 13

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 8. A panorama of part of Great Langdale in the Lake District of Cumbria. The differences between unimproved, open fells and improved, enclosed fields can be clearly seen, as well as different phases of enclosure. Some of the stone walls have been built on extremely steep slopes. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Like Sackett, Bevan looks at parishes and even individual farmsteads in detail, and is concerned with showing how the variable patterns of small, irregular enclosed fields that developed in the Upper Derwent and Great Langdale were embedded in the social relations and practices of people living and working in those two areas. He discusses how classic upland drystone boundary walls were more than mere functional boundaries, but also presented statements about land tenure, the craft of wall building and the quality of agricultural practice to others. Competence and ownership were being signalled to a wider audience.

respect for John, I have decided not to publish what was only a rough first draft, but this volume is the poorer for the absence of his paper. Nevertheless, I think the following section of his draft is highly pertinent to this introduction, and so I have reproduced it here. John G. Evans Fields and boundaries can be formed for several reasons.

The late John G. Evans was also meant to have a paper included in this volume, in addition to those contributors who subsequently had to withdraw because of time pressures. Unfortunately, I had only received the first draft of his paper before his sudden deterioration and then untimely death from cancer in June 2005. Entitled Fields and the unconscious, this was a typically idiosyncratic and eclectic Evans exploration of the engagements between environmental archaeology, the human unconscious and early land allotment; using theoretical ideas derived from Freud, Jung, Lacan and psychology and psychotherapy. It ranged across prehistoric, RomanoBritish and medieval field systems from north Wales to southern England, and revisited John’s earlier valuable work on prehistoric boundaries and land allotment on Skomer and the Isles of Scilly (Evans 1983, 1990). Out of 14

1.

They can be an understanding by a community of its situation in the world, and perhaps specifically an organisation of group unconscious against chaos, a request for order – such as Puritanism – by a society in disarray; similarly, they can be a way of enclosing something formally and physically that has been felt and curated unconsciously in society for a long time – like a system of granting in relation to social class. They can be both a metaphor and an actuality of enclosure; as Jung (1968: 10) puts it “...the mandala is the traditional antidote for chaotic states of mind.”

2.

They can be a memorial or monument, a record of a history or legend, but of a specific kind that sees monumentality in the same arena as subsistence. Unlike other monuments that are often separate from, even if involved in, subsistence (causewayed camps) and technology

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION (axe factories), fields as monuments are in precisely the same space as fields as areas of social symbolism or agricultural production – firmly embedded physically and functionally in public and everyday lives. In this, they are taken in by successive generations (or else they are abandoned or totally reorganised), so they elicit a sense of permanence (for example, in opposition to ‘wandering’ farms or ‘moving’ villages) and history; and in this permanence, this altering of the physical world, they influence its reading by future generations (Bradley 1993). 3.

as a powerful psychoanalyst. The relations of prehistoric fields to the landscape of natural features and other monuments, as in the Kennet valley and Marlborough Downs (Evans 2003), and on Dartmoor and Bodmin (e.g. Bender, Hamilton and Tilley 1997), strengthens such a role; medieval strip lynchets are often arranged so that they are visible close to villages, often occurring along slopes on either side above the access roads with relationships to towns and transhumance routes (O’Connor and Evans 2005). At the same time, varying degrees of permanence in construction techniques and management allow different styles of social and psychological engagements to be played out: walls are easier to dismantle and remodel than banks and ditches (a somewhat functionalist point of view), and so are suitable for short-term and individual actions.

Fields may have been constructed in order to bring people together in an environment of psychotherapy. Their agricultural role is very suitable for this in eliciting groupings of individuals who might be less familiar with each other in other walks of life. In the past it is unlikely that formal therapy groups existed, especially with a leader. The twelve-step meetings of addiction groups like Alcoholics Anonymous where there is no leader but where there is a common purpose (or at least a common illness) may be a better parallel for some of the gatherings that went on in fields at certain times of the agricultural cycle, although with less explicit therapeutic direction. A similar concept pertains to islands where relationships with the outside world are critical to the island psyche:

John’s contributions to British archaeology will be sorely missed. Some questions and ideas for current and future research Since the Early Land Allotment volume was published in 1978, there have been many welcome developments in such studies. Foremost amongst these must be the massive quantitative increase in both research projects and developer-funded investigations, including extensive field survey and aerial photographic mapping work. This has provided much more data for archaeologists to consider. Although many of the papers in Early Land Allotment reported on on-going investigations, many syntheses of these and later projects have now been published or are in preparation (e.g. Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds in prep.; Bradley, Entwistle and Raymond 1994; Brown, Field and McOmish 2005; Butler 1998; Fleming 1988, 1998b; Gingell 1992; Knight and Howard 2004; Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer 1997; McOmish, Field and Brown 2002; RCAHMW 1997; Riley 1980; Riley and Wilson-North 2001; Roberts and Wrathmell 2001, 2002; Spratt 1989; Stoertz 1997; Yates 2001, 2007).

The island and its people can only be studied in relation to the outside world. Moving between the local scale and the global, between the specific and the general, between institutions and individual acts, is at the heart of the enterprise (Parker Pearson 2004: 129). Islands are especially relevant in that field systems are often prominently and extensively developed across them as in the prehistoric fields on Skomer, some Greek islands like Keos where 70-80% of the island is terraced (Frederick and Krahtopoulou 2000), and the Arran Islands off the coast of western Ireland which are almost entirely covered in walled fields. 4.

Many of the research questions from that period still remain unanswered though. Many relate to issues of chronology. Despite decades of research and rescue excavations, for example, including numerous investigations of alluviated river valley areas, no convincing examples of Neolithic fields have been found in lowland Britain. Although the extent, intensity and subsistence significance of Neolithic cultivation continues to be debated (e.g. Allen 2002; Austin 2000; Barrett 1994; Brown 1997, 2000; Fairbairn 1999; Jones 2000; Moffett, Robinson and Straker 1989; Thomas 1999), there seems little doubt now that however Neolithic land allotment and concepts of tenure were formulated, this did not involve the construction of archaeologically identifiable boundaries such as field

Fields provide a variety of contexts for the creation and elicitation of the unconscious, both at the group and individual levels. From their first appearance in Britain c. 1500 BC, they assume a strongly visual and monumental form (Parker Pearson 2004: 133f.) and continue to do so, in the form of constructed boundaries or cultivation ridges (spade-dug lazy beds, narrow rig of the Scottish uplands or the ridge and furrow of lowland England). Such permanence and inevitable links with ideology present them 15

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT system walls, ditches or fences. This is unlike the situation in Ireland, where several large-scale stone walled field systems have been excavated that originated in the Neolithic (Caulfield 1978; Caulfield, O’Donnell and Mitchell 1998; Cooney 2000). Yet with some exceptions, even recent discussions of Neolithic Britain have not discussed the many interesting implications of this in any great detail.

caused both by the practices and preferences of different individuals and kinship groups or clans, and by variations over time. There would probably also be more subtle and sympathetic relationships with local landscape features. Social agency and structure, inheritance and tenure, patterns of use and disuse, and changing environmental conditions such as rainfall and soil fertility would have a much greater influence over all systems of land allotment over time. Nevertheless, in field systems planned by a relative few, one would expect much greater uniformity during the earliest periods of use compared to more communal and/or piecemeal developments.

In Britain, with the possible exception of some Scottish examples (Halliday et al. 1981), no extensive systems of bounded land allotment have been found of Neolithic date (contra Bayliss and Pryor 2001: 390-399; Pryor 1998: 76; cf. Evans and Pollard 2001). Although signs of stone clearance, ard marks and spade marks indicating possible late Neolithic or Beaker-period cultivation have been recorded at sites as geographically diverse as Rosinish in the Outer Hebrides (Shepherd and Tuckwell 1977), Martin Down and Hambledon Hill in Dorset (Barrett, Bradley and Green 1991; Mercer 1988), South Street and Easton Down, Wiltshire (Ashbee, Smith and Evans 1979; Stone 1931), at Southwark (DrummondMurray, Saxby and Watson 1994; Ridgeway 1999) and perhaps, though not uncontroversially, at Gwithian in Cornwall (Simpson 1971); this is only evidence of land use rather than land allotment and land division. The widespread adoption of more permanent boundaries marking land division now appears to be generally a phenomenon of the middle Bronze Age, circa 1700-1200 BC, although some earlier dates have been suggested in some areas. For instance, early Bronze Age dates of around 2000 BC, together with pollen evidence for hedges, have been posited for parts of the co-axial field system recently excavated at Terminal 5, Heathrow (Framework Archaeology 2003), and early dates were suggested for field plots recorded at the Scord of Brouster on Shetland (Whittle et al. 1986). But exactly why largerscale, often co-axial field systems were adopted widely across many parts of Britain at this time, how this was undertaken and why the idea persisted for so long or was re-appropriated in later periods, are questions that are still the subject of much debate (e.g. Brück 2000; Fleming 1987, 1989; Peterson 1990).

Figure 9. Part of the surviving earthwork of the massive Roman fossa or defensive ditch associated with Hadrian’s Wall near Birdoswald, Northumbria. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Work in the past couple of decades has transformed our understandings of Iron Age and Romano-British land allotment and land use. What happened in the postRoman period is still unclear, however, and research on this has only just begun in many parts of Britain. In some regions the extensive areas of Iron Age and RomanoBritish field systems appear to have been abandoned, yet in places there seems to have been a measure of continuity with some principal boundaries at least remaining in the landscape (e.g. Herring this volume; Holbrey and Burgess 2001; Oosthuizen 2003, this volume; Percival and Williamson 2005; Williamson 1987). Although knowledge of early medieval landscapes across Britain has improved much since 1978, again largely through developer-funded investigations, the origins of later medieval patterns of land allotment and land use are still contentious (Williamson this volume).

One major question, particularly with regard to co-axial field systems, is whether or not they were the result of communal planning and co-operation over time, or whether they were imposed upon communities, perhaps by social elites (q.v. Fleming 1987: 197). In principle, if a new field system of land allotment and land division was imposed upon a community from above, one might expect the boundaries and fields to be very regular and similar in size, shape and form, and perhaps also to have been constructed within a relatively short period of time. Such systems might also be more ‘terrain oblivious’, paying less attention to localised variations in topography, vegetation and the positions of watercourses. The boundaries and fields around different settlements or occupation areas would be similar. If a community had themselves developed a system of land division over time, however, then one might expect much greater variety within the boundaries and fields of the system,

Compared to colleagues who have been engaged with land allotment studies for many decades, I am a relative newcomer to the field (pun intended). But without seeming too presumptuous, I would nevertheless like to propose some questions and ideas for current and future research, including some of those that were originally drawn up with Helen Wickstead for our TAG session abstract. I am making no claim to any originality with these, and am well aware that researchers and fieldworkers are already working towards addressing many of them. 16

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION

Figure 10. A probable medieval bank and ditch, curving around an earlier Bronze Age earthen round barrow on Ridding Down, Dartmoor, Devon. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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there is usually less material culture than in the lowlands, and this is one of the principal frustrations of working in upland archaeology. But advances in radiocarbon AMS dating techniques and Bayesian statistical modelling, together with the development of Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating, may offer some means of addressing such problems.

Chronology. The first appearance and development of different forms of land allotment, land divisions and field systems has been the subject of much discussion in Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Romano-British and medieval studies. How can we improve our knowledge of the inception of these features? Key questions remain, such as when widespread field systems became adopted in Britain, or when open field systems appeared. Furthermore, at what date did many of these systems of land allotment fall out of use? What is the evidence for the persistence of these boundaries in later periods? How and why do some later boundaries incorporate earlier ones, and rather than somewhat static palimpsests should such processes be seen as much more dynamic transformations?

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In addition, how can we improve our knowledge of how landscapes and land allotment developed over time in particular areas? Up until now, although it has often been possible through survey and excavation to establish the relative chronology of different boundaries, through looking at ditch, bank or wall junctions, it is often very difficult to obtain absolute dates for these landscape stratigraphies. Whole generations of human lives, social practice and long sequences of changes in land allotment and land division have to be described in such broad terms as ‘Iron Age’, ‘Romano-British’ or ‘medieval’. This is especially the case in upland areas, where 17

Scale and methodology. Many methodologies such as aerial survey, geophysical survey, GIS and LiDAR are now able to assist with the mapping and description of patterns of land allotment over very broad areas, and should be valuable tools for interpretative analysis. Developer-funded archaeology has provided some enormous excavated samples of entire landscapes. At the same time however, contextual excavation, palaeoenvironmental and micromorphological techniques are providing ever more fine-grained information about specific locales. How are we to reconcile or negotiate such differences in the scale of our investigations? The current use and future potential of palaeo-environmental and micromorphological investigations of land allotment appear to offer great possibilities. What are the tensions between ‘academic’ and ‘rescue’ approaches to investigations of past land allotment and land use, and can these be transformed or overcome?

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT •

other critical social studies, can we write more nuanced considerations of land allotment? Why do different communities construct systems of land allotment, and what are the social meanings of these boundaries and field systems? What about ideas of landscape and taskscape, identity, power and community? Do phenomenological approaches or ideas of viewsheds and visualities have any part to play in future studies of land allotment? And what of recent notions concerning human and non-human agency? Can we weave the lives of people, plants and animals together with self-critical and more explicitly theoretical narratives? How can recent theoretical ideas concerning the nature of archaeological practice and understandings of space and place inform our fieldwork, including routine, developer-funded archaeology?

Representation. Aerial photography and geophysical survey transcripts, survey plans and GIS maps provide us with a very privileged, ‘bird’s-eye’ view of entire landscapes. And traditionally, field systems have been presented in archaeological publications as conventional plans and maps, perhaps with a few sections through individual boundaries, or selected photographs to illustrate their surviving character or excavated form. The use of maps and plans to show patterns of land allotment often has the unintended effect of giving the impression that field systems were laid out all in one phase. But often these field systems had very complex histories. Some attempts have been made to show stratigraphic sequences of boundary construction in plan (e.g. Chadwick 1995a, figs. 15-18; Percival and Williamson 2005: plate 1), and some idea of complexity can of course be illustrated through sections, but many conventional representations cannot convey such temporality adequately. For example, in RCHME plans produced through measured field survey of Shovel Down on Dartmoor, some idea of landscape stratigraphy can be deduced through the relationship of boundaries and roundhouses to one another (Johnston 2005). Certain co-axial elements of the Bronze Age field systems appeared to have been laid out at once, or with particular major boundaries first. Recent excavation work has demonstrated, however, that an apparently primary main boundary reave was in fact composed of several different phases of construction (Brück, Johnston and Wickstead 2003: 12), and that some of the rectangular fields were in fact laid out sequentially to one another.

Figure 11. A slate fence near the summit of Gyrn, Bethesda in North Wales, part of a complex of upland sheep pens used for sorting livestock. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

•

Of course, for the people who constructed and inhabited these field systems and other areas of the landscape, such all-encompassing views were impossible in any case. Instead, their experiences of boundaries were based on their own embodied movements and physical endeavours, and were influenced by their own customs and social practices. How can archaeology hope to represent these more experiential and partial encounters? Is there a need for the use of more photography, photomontage, or computer-based 3-D modelling and Virtual Reality? And what are the format and financial implications of this on publication? Does the Internet have a significant role to play? •

Conservation, management and future research. What are the implications for the future management of boundaries and field systems as an archaeological resource? What mitigation strategies can be adopted to best protect them from intensive ploughing or other on-going damage? Is block Scheduling of large areas the answer, or is a more flexible approach required? How can funds from the Aggregates Levy be most productively invested in future research? How can such approaches be accommodated within existing agro-environmental schemes such as Tir Gofal, Countryside Stewarship agreements and Set Aside, and with the future conservation of areas of woodland, meadow and hedgerows? What methodologies can be employed to assess and monitor these frequently extensive areas? Should archaeological curators be insisting on more intensive sampling and more research and interpretation driven project designs and briefs? How can contract field units respond to these challenging ideas? Is there scope for new large-scale, multidisciplinary and cross-institutional research programmes in some areas? Can we identify areas of Britain, Ireland and Europe where such work should be undertaken?

Theory. Since Early Land Allotment was published in 1978, there have been many exciting (and sometimes controversial) developments in archaeological theory. Hopefully archaeology has now moved beyond the rather tired processual versus postprocessual debates that dominated the 1980s and early 1990s. Through the use of recent approaches to space and place, landscape, embodiment, identity and material culture that have been developed in archaeology, anthropology, social geography and 18

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION Fields of dreams?

section drawings it is clear that greater stratigraphic and temporal depth probably existed than was originally noted on site. Even when I eventually ended up running projects myself, there was often pressure from project managers, and especially consultants working for developers, to only pay lip service to the adequate sampling and recording of boundary features.

Until recently, issues such as chronology, complexity, scale and planning have been difficult to address, largely as a result of the problems of dating boundaries, particularly in upland areas, and because of the often small samples of them excavated on any one project. One methodological means of addressing this problem, at least in part, would be to carry out much more extensive and intensive excavation of field boundaries, in order to try and ascertain their relative stratigraphy and similarity to one another. I therefore believe that the number and size of excavated areas over these features should be increased, particularly within developer-funded contract archaeology (q.v. Chadwick 1999). AMS dating, Bayesian modelling and OSL analyses also offer the potential to establish much better relative and absolute chronologies for such features, and palaeo-environmental sampling and analyses have become ever more sophisticated and fine-grained. Curators should begin to insist that, where appropriate, such techniques should be routinely used as a matter of course.

Figure 12. Kathy Speight and Bess by a grouse butt on Moscar Moor, near Ladybower Reservoir, Derbyshire. Large tracts of moorland in Britain were kept in this state for game shooting, usually by private landowners, but without regular management through controlled burning and grazing such areas would soon revert to scrub. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Such intensive sampling and dating would have obvious cost implications, however, and would require much greater funding. In Britain at least, although probably also true of world archaeology as a whole, this is rarely possible on cash-strapped research projects. In my experience, there also remains a reluctance to do this within developer-funded contract archaeology (often termed CRM archaeology in the United States and elsewhere), where developers have to pay for the work and many are at best uninterested or even overtly hostile towards archaeology. At the same time, some curatorial archaeologists, archaeological consultants and contract unit managers often seem very reluctant to press developers for additional funding. Field systems often continue to be investigated by utterly inadequate 2% or 4% samples, which do not allow the complexities of landscape stratigraphy and temporality to be satisfactorily established, and significantly reduce the potential to meaningfully assess patterns of artefact and refuse distribution and deposition. It is therefore promising that in parts of Britain such as West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire for example, curatorial archaeologists now insist upon the hand excavation and sampling of at least 20-25% of all linear ditches; and the total excavation of enclosure ditches in controlled machine-dug spits after 25-50% of the ditches have been excavated by hand (A. Burgess pers. comm., A. Lines pers. comm.).

Yet by ignoring such features, or by focusing too narrowly on the evidence for one particular period within a landscape, archaeologists are in danger of neglecting the complexities of how people inhabited their world and what would have been a fundamental part of everyday life. For agrarian communities in the past, fields, field systems and other aspects of land allotment and tenure were the repositories of much of their conscious efforts and labour, as well as perhaps more unconscious ideas concerning identity, community, tenure, tradition, history and memory. It was they who built the walls, fences and banks, dug the ditches, laid the hedges and who ploughed the cord-rig and the ridge and furrow. They worked hard to construct and maintain such features, and have left their enduring legacy in these traces of themselves and their ways of life in the landscape. The study of land allotment within archaeology must therefore involve far more than the mapping of boundaries, or the investigation of past agricultural techniques and technologies. Archaeologists and historians must treat these endeavours with the respect that they deserve. It is a form of ethical contract between us and the dead.

The excavation of field ditches, stone or earth boundaries, pit alignments and fencelines of postholes or stakeholes is still all too often either denigrated as unimportant work, or left as a very low strategic priority. When I was first beginning work in field archaeology, I was told by supervisors on several different projects to ‘ignore the stakeholes’, or to not record ditch recuts even where they were obvious, as ditches only needed ‘one cut, one fill’. There is still often inadequate attention paid on excavations to recording the subtle indications of silting and recutting episodes, so that even on many published

History and tradition are important. In the case of land enclosure, people may use walls and fields to structure relationships among themselves, but they choose these areas because they already relate to them in their social lives, as with age or gender oppositions during the harvest, because they are familiar with them, and because the fields were themselves constructed as a means of social engagement in the first place and so have their own depth of meaning in the social domain. (Evans 2003: 29). 19

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT of Cranborne Chase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baylisss, A. and Pryor, F. 2001. Radiocarbon and absolute chronology. In F. Pryor The Flag Fen Basin: Archaeology and Environment of a Fenland Landscape. London: English Heritage, pp. 390-399. Bender, B., Hamilton, S. and Tilley, C. 1997. Leskernick: Stone worlds; alternative narratives; nested landscapes. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63: 147-178. Bessis, A., Marthelot, P., de Momrety, H. and Pauphilet, D. 1956. Le Territore des Ouled Sidi Ali ben Aoun. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bowen, H.C. 1961. Ancient Fields. A Tentative Analysis of Vanishing Earthworks and Landscapes. British Association of the Advancement of Science. London: BAAS. Bowen, H.C. and Fowler, P.J. (eds.) 1978. Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. A Survey of Recent Work. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: BAR. Bradley, R. 1993. Altering the Earth. Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Monograph Series 8. Edinburgh: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. Bradley, R., Entwistle, R. and Raymond, F. 1994. Prehistoric Land Divisions on Salisbury Plain. The Work of the Wessex Linear Ditches Project. English Heritage Report No. 2. London: English Heritage. Briggs, C.S. 1978. Early observations on early fields. In H.C. Bowen and P.J. Fowler (eds.) Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. A Survey of Recent Work. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, pp. 145-146. Brown, A.G. 1997. Clearances and clearings. Deforestation in Mesolithic/Neolithic Britain. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 16: 133-146. Brown, A.G. 2000. Floodplain vegetational history: Clearings as potential ritual spaces? In A.S. Fairbairn (ed.) Plants in Neolithic Britain and Beyond. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 49-62. Brown, G., Field, D. and McOmish, D. (eds.) 2005. The Avebury Landscape: Aspects of the Field Archaeology of the Marlborough Downs. Oxford: Oxbow. Brück, J. 1999. Ritual and rationality: some problems of interpretation in European archaeology. European Journal of Archaeology 2 (3): 313-344. Brück, J. 2000. Settlement, landscape and social identity: the early-middle Bronze Age transition in Wessex, Sussex and the Thames valley. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 19 (3): 273-300. Brück, J., Johnston, R. and Wickstead, H. 2003. Excavations of Bronze Age field systems on Shovel Down, Dartmoor, 2003. Past 45: 10-12. Butler, J. 1998. Dartmoor Atlas of Antiquities Volume Five: the Second Millennium BC. Tiverton: Devon Books. Casimir, M. and Rao, A. (eds.) 1992. Mobility and Territoriality: Social and Spatial Boundaries among Foragers, Fishers, Pastoralists and Peripatetics. Oxford: Berg. Caulfield, S. 1978. Neolithic fields: the Irish evidence. In H.C. Bowen and P.J. Fowler (eds.) Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. A Survey of Recent

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Bob Johnston, Gary Robinson and Helen Wickstead for reading and commenting on drafts of this introductory paper, although they are not to be held accountable for the final result. I am also very grateful to David Davison and Rajka Makjanić for agreeing to publish this volume and for all of their advice and assistance, and to Dave Field and Dave McOmish for inviting me to present a paper at the seminar in Swindon. Many friends and colleagues have influenced my approaches to land allotment, boundaries, fields and field systems over the years, but I am particularly grateful to Max Adams, Oscar Aldred, Tim Allen, Andrea Burgess, Anwen Cooper, Mark Edmonds, Helen Evans, Duncan Garrow, Melanie Giles, Bob Johnston, Mark Knight, Lesley McFadyen, Joshua Pollard, Rachel Pope, Graham Robbins, Gary Robinson, Bob Sydes, John Thomas and Helen Wickstead. I must also apologise sincerely to my family – Gemma, Kai, Teg and Felix, who had to endure the effects of my PhD and the editing of this volume. I would especially like to thank two people – Anne Leaver for sorting and formatting the illustrations and photographs used in this volume; and Helen Wickstead for the many illuminating, exhilarating, frustrating, fantastic but never boring discussions and arguments concerning land allotment and field systems that we have had over the years. Bibliography Adler, M.A. 1996. Land tenure, archaeology, and the ancestral Pueblo social landscape. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 15: 337-371. Allen, M.J. 2002. The chalkland landscape of Cranborne Chase: a prehistoric human ecology. Landscapes 3 (2): 55-69. Andrews, J.H. 1975. A Paper Landscape: The Ordnance Survey in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Andrews, J.H. 1997. Shapes of Ireland: Maps and their Makers 1564-1839. Dublin: Geography Publications. Ashbee, P., Smith, I.F. and Evans, J.G. 1979. Excavation of three long barrows near Avebury, Wiltshire. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 45: 207-300. Austin, P. 2000. The emperor’s new garden: Woodland, trees and people in the Neolithic of southern Britain. In A.S. Fairbairn (ed.) Plants in Neolithic Britain and Beyond. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 63-78. Barnatt, J., Bevan, B. and Edmonds, M. (in prep.) The Gardom’s Edge Landscape Research Project, Baslow, Derbyshire. Barrett, J.C. 1994. Fragments from Antiquity. An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900-1200 BC. Oxford: Blackwell. Barrett, J.C., Bradley, R. and Green, M. 1991. Landscape, Monuments and Society. The Prehistory 20

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Holbrey, R. and Burgess, A. 2001. Parlington Hollins. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 83-105. Hoskins, W.G. 1955 [1985]. The Making of the English Landscape. London: Hodder and Stoughton (1985 edition Harmondsworth: Penguin). Hoskins, W.G. 1967. Fieldwork in Local History. London: Faber. Hunt, R.C. 1998. Properties of property: conceptual issues. In Hunt, R.C. and Gilman, A. (eds.) Property in Economic Context. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 7-27. Ingold, T. 1986. The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ingold, T. 1997. The painting is not the terrain: maps, pictures and the dwelt-in world. Comment on T. Lemaire’s Archaeology between the invention and the destruction of the landscape. Archaeological Dialogues 4 (1): 29-31. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Johnston, R. 2001. ‘Breaking new ground’: land tenure and fieldstone clearance during the Bronze Age. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 99-109. Johnston, R. 2005. Pattern without a plan: rethinking the Bronze Age coaxial field systems on Dartmoor, South-west England. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 24 (1): 1-21. Jones, G. 2000. Evaluating the importance of cultivation and collecting in Neolithic Britain. In A.S. Fairbairn (ed.) Plants in Neolithic Britain and Beyond. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 79-84. Jung, C.G. 1968. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Kalpagam, U. 1995. Cartography in colonial India. Economic and Political Weekly 30 (30): 87-98. Keay, J. 2000. The Great Arc: the Dramatic tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named. London: HarperCollins. Kelly, R.L. 1992. Mobility/sedentism, concepts, archaeological measures, and effects. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 43-66. Kinsman, P. 1995. Landscape, race and national identity: the photography of Ingrid Pollard. Area 27: 300-310. Kitchen, W. 2001. Tenure and territoriality in the British Bronze Age: a question of varying social and geographic scales? In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 110-120. Knight, D. and Howard, A.J. (eds.) 2004. Trent Valley Landscapes. Kings Lynn: Heritage Marketing and Publications Ltd. Lewis, C., Mitchell-Fox, P. and Dyer, C. 1997. Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Midland England. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Lowie, R. 1921 [1960]. Primitive Society. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul. McOmish, D., Field, D. and Brown, G. 2002. The Field Archaeology of the Salisbury Plain Training Area. Swindon: English Heritage. Mercer, R. 1988. Hambledon Hill, Dorset, England. In C. Burgess, P. Topping, C. Mordant and M. Maddison (eds.) Enclosures and Defences in the Neolithic of Western Europe. BAR (International Series) 403 (i). Oxford: BAR, pp. 89-106. Merrony, C.J.N. 1993. The archaeological assessment in advance of the Dearne towns Link Road (Stage 4) development at Goldthorpe. In M.J. Francis and C.G. Cumberpatch (ed.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1992-1993. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 43-52. Moffett, L., Robinson, M.A. and Straker, V. 1989. Cereals, fruits and nuts: charred plant remains from Neolithic sites in England and Wales and the Neolithic economy. In A. Milles, D. Williams and N. Gardner (eds.) The Beginnings of Agriculture. BAR (International Series) 496. Oxford: BAR, pp. 243-261. Neale, W.C. 1998. Property: law, cotton-pickin’ hands, and implicit cultural imperialism. In Hunt, R.C. and Gilman, A. (eds.) Property in Economic Context. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 4764. Netting, R.M. 1993. Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. O’Connor, T.P. and Evans, J.G. 2005. Environmental Archaeology: Principles and Methods (2nd edition.) Stroud: Sutton. Oosthuizen, S. 2003. The roots of the common fields: linking prehistoric and medieval field systems in West Cambridgeshire. Landscapes 4 (1): 40-64. Parker Pearson, M. 2004. Island prehistories: a view of Orkney from South Uist. In J. Cherry, C. Scarre and S. Shennan (eds.) Explaining Social Change: Studies in Honour of Colin Renfrew. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 127-140. Percival, S. and Williamson, T. 2005. Early fields and medieval furlongs: excavations at Creake Road, Burnham Sutton, Norfolk. Landscapes 6 (1): 1-17. Peterson, J.W.M. 1990. Why did the idea of coaxial field systems last so long? Antiquity 64: 584-591. Phillips, S.K. 1984. Encoded in stone: neighbouring relationships and the organisation of stone walls among Yorkshire Dales farmers. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 15 (3): 235-242. Pryor, F.M.M. 1998. Farmers in Prehistoric Britain. Stroud: Tempus. RCAHMW 1997. Brecknock (Brycheiniog): An Inventory of the Later Prehistoric Monuments and Unenclosed Settlements to 1000 AD. RCAHMW/Sutton. Ridgeway, V. 1999. Prehistoric finds at Hopton Street in Southwark. London Archaeologist 9 (3): 72-76. Riles, A. 1998. Division within the boundaries. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 4: 409424. Riley, D.N. 1980. Early Landscape from the Air. Sheffield: Department of Prehistory and Archaeology. 22

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: INTRODUCTION Riley, H. and Wilson-North, R. 2001. The Field Archaeology of Exmoor. English Heritage/Exmoor National Park. Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S. 2001. An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England. London: English Heritage. Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S. 2002. Region and Place. A Study of English Rural Settlement. London: English Heritage. Rocheleau, D. and Edmunds, D. 1997. Women, men and trees: gender, power and property in forest and agrarian landscapes. World Development 25 (8): 1351-1371. Seymour, W.A. 1980. A History of the Ordnance Survey. Folkestone: Dawson and Sons. Shepherd, I.A.G. and Tuckwell, A.N. 1977. Traces of Beaker period cultivation at Rosinish, Benbecula. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 108: 108-113. Shipton, P.M. 1984. Strips and patches. Man: 616-620. Sillitoe, P. 1999. Beating the boundaries: land tenure and identity in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Journal of Anthropological Research 55 (3): 331-360. Simpson, D.D.A. 1971. Beaker houses and settlements in Britain. In D.D.A. Simpson (ed.) Economy and Settlement in Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Britain and Europe. Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 131-152. Smith, A. 1998. Landscapes of power: the archaeology of 19th century Irish Ordnance maps. Archaeological Dialogues 5 (1): 69-84. Smith, A. 2003. Landscape representation; place and identity in nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland. In P.J. Stewart and A. Strathern (eds.) Landscape, Memory and History. Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press, pp. 71-88. Sparke, M. 1998. Mapped bodies and disembodied maps. (Dis)placing cartographic struggle in colonial Canada. In H.J. Nast and S. Pile (eds.) Places Through the Body. London: Routledge, pp. 305-336. Spratt, D.A. 1989. Linear Earthworks of the Tabular Hills of Northeast Yorkshire. Sheffield: Department of Archaeology and Prehistory. Strang, V. 2000. Showing and telling: Australian land rights and material moralities. Journal of Material Culture 5 (3): 275-299. Stoertz, C. 1997. Ancient Landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds. London: RCHME. Stone, J.F.S. 1931. A settlement site of the Beaker period on Easton Down, Winterslow, South Wiltshire. Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History History Society Magazine 45: 366-372. Sydes, R.E. 1993. Excavations at Pickburn Leys, Adwick-le-Street, Doncaster. In M.J. Francis and C.G. Cumberpatch (eds.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1992-1993. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 36-42. Sydes, R.E. and Symonds, J. 1985. The excavation of an enclosure and field system of Iron Age/RomanoBritish date at Pickburn Leys. South Yorkshire Archaeology Unit: unpublished report. Taylor, C.C. 1975. Fields in the English Landscape. London: J.M. Dent and Sons.

Tilley, C., Hamilton, S. and Bender, B. 2000. Art and the re-presentation of the past. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 6: 35-62. Tilley, C., Hamilton, S., Harrison, S. and Anderson, E. 2000. Nature, culture, clitter. Distinguishing between cultural and geomorphological landscapes; the case of hilltop tors in south-west England. Journal of Material Culture 5 (2): 197-224. Ward, R.G. and Kingdom, E. 1995. Land use and tenure: some comparisons. In R.G. Ward and I. Kingdom (eds.) Land, Custom and Practice in the South Pacific. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 6-35. Whittle, A., Keith-Lucas, M., Millis, A., Noddle, B., Rees, S. and Romans, J.C.C. 1986. Scord of Brouster: an Early Agricultural Settlement on Shetland. Excavations 1977-1979. Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology. Williamson, T. 1987. Early coaxial field systems on the East Anglian boulder clays. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53: 419-431. Williamson, T. 2002. Hedges and Walls. Italy: National Trust. Yates, D.T. 2001. Bronze Age agricultural intensification in the Thames Valley and Estuary. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 65-82. Yates, D.T. 2007. Land, Power and Prestige: Bronze Age Field Systems in Southern England. Oxford: Oxbow.

23

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Medieval or post-medieval holloway surviving in woodland on Ministry of Defence land near Aldershot, Surrey. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

24

Land, landscape and Englishness in the discovery of prehistoric land division Helen Wickstead Introduction

Thomas 1993; Tilley 1994).Whilst this opposition has been helpful in challenging the determinist assumptions of earlier work, and in developing new approaches to landscape archaeology, this distinction may be unhelpful in two ways. Firstly, there is a danger of creating an essentialist, ‘primitive’ and non-Western ‘Other’, and of reifying a world of non-materialistic communal values. Secondly, it dramatically oversimplifies Western attitudes to land, and obscures the connections between land and nationalism in the present.

Land and blood are powerful metaphors for the attachment of people to homeland. The nation has often been imagined as a field; a bounded land, whose people somehow ‘grow’ organically from the earth. This image forms a recurrent motif in English art and literature, from the later medieval period right through to Anthony Gormley’s ‘Field for the British Isles’, populated with a of multitude tiny clay figures. Religious reformers have been fond of envisaging people in this way, as in Langland’s “faire felde ful of folke” (Langland 1995: 1), and also in Milton’s writings (Milton 1953: 553-554). The field represents the abundance of the nation, its fertility and possibilities, and its growth and vitality. In this field there is an architecture that unites people and land; an image that supports the notion of a people rooted in the land, and even the idea of a nation that might be regrown. But this is also a land that is bounded, and which does not admit ‘outsiders’. It is important to recognise that as a subject ‘English fields’ bring with them certain connotations of ethnicity and nationalism, not least of which in their relation or opposition to Welsh or Scottish fields. Fields do not simply derive their ‘Englishness’ from their location inside certain modern administrative boundaries – rather, fields are symbolically important as part of a perceived ‘grounding’ of Englishness (Johnson 1996: 44).

Whereas previous histories of land and landscape in archaeology have stressed the formative influence of the ‘rise of the individual’, I argue that presenting the history of Euro-American perspectives in this way misses the ways in which land has been linked to notions of patriarchal family and nationhood. I suggest that it was the very processes which cemented the individual as a category of Euro-American thought which simultaneously formed an ideal of ‘community’ that has influenced landscape archaeology. Discussions of land as property and land as birthright have dominated the history of ‘land’ in Europe. Historically, land claims have drawn on narratives of origin and models of first premises, including arguments over god-given and ‘natural’ characteristics of humanity and the earth. From the seventeenth century onwards, many writers drew on the Bible to argue that land was originally given to men ‘as a common treasury for all’ (Winstanley 1649, cited in Bradstock 2000: 63). The inheritance of land was used to authenticate claims to male equality and fraternity. Property and land became the grounding upon which debates concerning the relationship between Man and God, the morality of civil government and the liberty of the individual were based (Hann 1998: 23). ‘Possessive individualist’ attitudes to land as property developed as concepts of individual ‘rights’ in law became increasingly significant in seventeenth and eighteenth century social and political philosophy. Euro-American notions of property developed in conjunction with the emergence of capitalism and Cartesian representation, but also with the idea of the ‘individual’, struggles over the rights of Man and Woman, the emergence of liberal economics, and debates over slavery.

This paper considers the milieu and significances of the discovery and early interpretations of prehistoric fields within England. I begin with a brief historiography of ‘land’, before moving on to show how the archaeology of fields related to patriotic forms of landscape appreciation, and a romantic ideal of the ‘organic village community’. The part played by land, soil and fields in constructions of ethnicity and nationhood is explored, and the implications of this for contemporary archaeology are highlighted. Land of our fathers… Whatever else it may be, archaeology, like nationalism is always about ‘land’, and frequently about ‘the land’, the homeland (Smith 2001: 444).

The emphasis on the individual as the subject of property has a long history in Western law. Some writers trace this back to Roman law and its incorporation into canon law via Justinian’s code (e.g. Neale 1998: 53). Others see its origins in the inheritance rules and common law of the early medieval period Macfarlane, 1998. However, the ‘rise of the individual’ has also been linked to the

British writing on landscape has often drawn a distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ attitudes. According to this, Western ideas of landscape are connected to the rise of capitalism and the individual; conversely, non-Western ideas are noncapitalist and non-individualised (Abramson 2000; 25

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 1. Private land. Gate near Gardom’s Edge, Derbyshire. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

loosening of feudal ties that followed the population crash associated with the Black Death and associated calamities of the fourteenth century (Johnson 1996). It was also connected to an increase in the numbers of small land holders and middling gentry after the Tudor dissolution of monastic lands, and a series of changes to the distribution of land and resources taking place from the late medieval to early modern periods, often summarised as ‘enclosure’. These transformations involved the enclosure of commons, reorganisation of field systems, an increasing emphasis on land improvement and land drainage, clearance of woodlands and closing of forests, and changes in how animals, plants and the natural world were perceived (Evans 1997). It has been argued that the British Enclosure Acts involved a ‘revolutionary change’ in laws relating to land, creating the ability to alienate land as a commodity and contributing to the formation of capitalism (Bell 1998: 33). Attitudes to land improvement formed in the later periods of enclosure have been of long lasting significance, and indeed a rather romantic and hostile view of enclosure is today a rallying point for opponents of privatisation (Coombe and Herman 2004).

solely at land held by the nobility and gentry, but applied to even small-scale property ownership in England. Primogeniture ensured that relations within heterogeneous social and political networks and at different scales nevertheless retained key similarities – the family, the estate and the nation all held land according to regulations of patriarchal succession. Landed property was not at the service of individuals or even generations, but instead perpetuated the power of descent groups, where individuals’ lives were within chains of descent. Continuity of occupation was thus a prestigious characteristic, and demonstration of the antiquity of land possession was the pride of many families, from elite or more humble backgrounds alike. Above all other categories of property, land was the foundation of wealth and security in Britain – land was patrimony. Land was more than symbolic of power and permanence though, for it was also a resource for social advancement and a route to political enfranchisement. Furthermore, the large quantities of land in the hands of aristocratic and royal lineages and the tendency for those that had land to retain it at all costs ensured a restricted supply. The result was that there was a tendency for land prices to remain high, and land was the safest form of investment for several hundred years between the late medieval period and the eighteenth centuries (Jamoussi 1999). To challenge the moral authority of relations within the state was to challenge those within the estate and the household, and vice versa.

Inheritance customs and law forged strong attachments, not between an individual owner and land, but between a family or lineage and land. From the late thirteenth century until 1925, British law stated that if a landowner died intestate all the land passed to the first born son, to the exclusion of all other children and the widow (Jamoussi 1999). This law and custom was not directed 26

HELEN WICKSTEAD: LAND, LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS IN THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC LAND DIVISION From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, challenges to primogeniture within the household related to wider arguments over heritable power in general. These arguments often called on the ‘Laws of God’ and/or the ‘Laws of Nature’ to support one side or the other in arguments over the Divine Right of Kings or the Rights of Man. The individual was an important concept in these debates, but the individual was still usually assumed to be the male head of a patriarchal family, estate or state – women were subsumed within and effaced by the ‘household’. Within philosophies of Natural Law the individual became the primary unit, and society a secondary structure constructed from it. For example, Hobbes argued that the original state of nature was a war of each individual against all others (Hobbes 1660).To avoid the personal costs of anarchy, social unity was brought about through a contract between individuals who invested power in the commonwealth or, preferably (and more ‘naturally’) the sovereign. The idea of social contract was later important in utilitarian philosophy and the development of liberal economics. Bentham and later philosophers envisaged a world of individuals acting rationally on their own behalf, who were free to engage in contractual arrangements with others to ensure the greater good.

land was also a way of life. The landowner controlled his local community through exercising judicial, administrative, and (through his ability to bestow livings to clergy) religiously sanctioned authority (Johnson 1996). The landed gentry evoked the past with libraries, ancient trees, parks and architecture, and genealogies to authenticate the attachment of their bloodline to the land. Just as land remained unchanged as it passed from son to son, so hereditary titles constructed a permanent institution based on blood. Individuals might die, but lineages never do; rather, they renew themselves continuously by reproducing the same categories (Carsten 2004; Ingold 2000: chapter 8). Land, title and genealogy were simultaneously constructed as permanent aspects of each other. The past was imagined as a golden age of stable, well-ordered village life. In the nineteenth century theories of primitive societies emerged which emphasised blood ties and communal land holding. These characteristics seemed to explain how society could be maintained in the seeming absence of the rule of law (Carsten 2004: chapter 2). Social solidarity in pre-state societies was located in biological affinities between blood and land. Whereas Hobbes envisaged the state of Nature as an atomistic and selfish struggle of individuals, it was now modern society that began to appear in this light. In Britain the concept of the organic ‘village community’ was developed by Maine, particularly in his Ancient Law (Maine 1891). Maine’s most famous observation was that societies moved from situations in which social standing was based on status within lineages and village communities, to ones in which individuals were paramount and society was based on contract. Amongst the most primitive groups, society grew from ‘natural’ ties of blood between kin, who formed lineages and descent groups. Within the Aryan race, ‘Village Communities’ emerged in which the bond of kinship had yielded to that of communal land. Maine believed that village communities which he recorded in India had existed in England prior to feudalism. It was feudalism which had introduced the notion of the impartible hereditary estate, and only after its collapse was land able to be alienated, or bought and sold as a commodity (Macfarlane 1991).

Whereas Hobbes and others argued that the first born and sovereign had a natural right to heritable power, Locke proposed another source of ‘dominion’. Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government of 1690 argued that the world was originally given by God to all the descendants of Adam in common (Locke 1690). However, although land was a common inheritance, every Man (sic) had his own body as his property, and through the capacities given to him by God was able to appropriate part of nature through the labour of his body and the work of his hands – Locke in effect proposed another God-given source of rights in the land of male cultivators. Through production, part of nature could be annexed and the common right of other men to that portion could be excluded. These ideas were to influence emerging concepts of civil rights and ideas of the equality of individuals. The liberal and utilitarian concepts of the rationally orientated individual exercising ‘rights’ were to influence nineteenth century campaigns for economic and land law reform in Britain, culminating in the repeal of the Corn Laws, greater enfranchisement, and, eventually the Settled Land Acts of 1882 and 1925, which ended the law of primogeniture.

Through the work of Maine and others, a basic distinction emerged between the original peasant society of Europe (which was self sufficient, communal, based on religion and customary law and grew out of ‘natural’ affective bonds of blood and land); and modern society (which was alienated, individualistic, and based on contract and money). Influenced by Maine, Tonnies developed his contrast between Geminschaft und Gesellschaft, and Durkheim his contrast between mechanical and organic solidarity (Shils 1991). The distinction between modern individualism and past communitarianism was also reflected in the popular romantic constructions of traditional village and peasant life, with their simple, ‘organic’ relationships based on kinship and marriage, and pre-capitalist values. This idealised organic village community provided an idiom through which the

At the same time as the individual was becoming a significant literary, political and moral category, so an opposed ideal of feudal and family ties was being constructed. In the 1770s Johnson and Boswell undertook expeditions to the ‘remote’ Hebrides, where they believed the last traces of an earlier feudal patriarchy were to be found. A nostalgic literature evoking the continuity of communities untouched by commerce was developing in reaction to what was thought to be the erosion of ‘historic’ family, moral and political institutions. Land was fundamental to the stability and authentication of these institutions. Much more than a source of wealth, 27

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT impersonal, specialised, alienated, and calculating attitudes of modern urban life could be condemned.

individualised tenure thus came to be contrasted with premodern communal tenure. Land linked the continuity of ‘historic’ and ‘natural’ institutions of the family, community and nation. England’s green and pleasant land The late nineteenth and early twentieth century witnessed rural decline, industrialisation, and urbanisation in England (Marsh 1982). Social unrest grew, culminating in the National Strike in 1926. These forces fed a series of anxieties within certain groups in England, notably fear of Bolshevism and the urban masses, racism towards Jews, Irish and other groups, distain for the upwardly mobile and expanding middle classes, hatred of suffragettes and ‘women’s libbers’, and lamentations over the death of an ‘ancient’ or ‘feudal’ social order. The English Pastoral movement emerged as a reaction against what the aristocracy regarded as unpleasant economic forces (Cannadine 2001), but was also claimed by people who sought freedom from the alienation and oppressions of mass production and capitalism. ‘Back to the land’ groups emerged with both fascist and socialist associations (Corrin 2002; Matless 1998), cementing notions of nationhood in the earth, in the wholesome routines of agricultural labour, and in the tradition and habits of ‘dwelling’ on a small patch of ground.

Figure 2. Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, a quintessentially ‘English’ midlands village next to the River Avon. Its modern picturesque appearance conceals the many historical changes and class differences between the inhabitants, past and present, yet it is readily absorbed into romanticised discourses of stout yeomen farmers and the perceived advantages of village life. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Ironically, at the very same time that this mercenary, objective and calculating attitude to land was supposedly predominant in the West, nationalism was being constructed on the basis of modes of attachment that were very similar to those supposedly felt amongst idealised organic communities. Nationalist sentiment is affective, involuntary, and often based on ties of shared ‘blood’ and inalienable homeland (Anderson 1991). The glorification of primordial attachments to land, combined with scorn of treating land merely as real estate, constructs a polarity that effectively consecrates love of country. Patriotism thus often represents the supposedly selfless values of the past, opposed to modern selfish greed. Just as certain lineages had sought to demonstrate the permanence of their connection to land, history and archaeology were both used to authenticate the national bloodline (Smith 2001). Lowenthal suggests that what he calls the ‘National Past’ simply perpetuates traditional aristocratic preoccupations with genealogical roots and land inheritance (Lowenthal 1994: 23-27).

In England, some people linked archaeology to romantic ideals of English pastoral landscapes, and models of timeless peasant life (Lowenthal 1994). Increasingly it was not ‘backwardness’ that was to be deplored, but rather inauthenticity. The ‘authentic’ person was timeless, traditional, fixed in space, conservative, rural and embedded in a heterosexual family ideal. To be inauthentic was the opposite of this; it was to be nouveau, immigrant, urban and sexually deviant. Certain groups were promoted as quintessentially authentic, particularly English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh countrymen or countrywomen. The inhabitants of rural areas in Cornwall, Wales, the Scottish Highlands and islands, and Ireland were viewed as surviving remnants of a preRoman ‘Celtic’ culture (James 1999). Peasants became a repository of the nation’s hidden and disappearing past, held by them in the form of songs, dances, oral tradition and folklore. The flip side meant that other groups might be reviled for their ‘inauthenticity’ – immigrants, Jews, women who appeared or acted too assertively and ‘masculine’; or homosexuals. Peasant life authenticated ethnic or national pasts by rooting them in land and history. This agrarian past was the original seed from which the nation could be re-germinated, and was used to propagate social and political reform:

Far from being simply an unsentimental and objectified commodity, land has therefore acquired considerable emotional associations, and has been historically perceived as a permanent source of wealth and stability. Two ways of acquiring land and rights in general, have been emphasised – either through inheritance, from God or another male authority, or through morally improving productive labour, as in the Lockean theory of tenure. In Britain, primogeniture encouraged the impression that land and title were unchanging essences that could be transmitted through bloodlines. Land was connected to a sense of continuity, and literature emerged that yearned for a golden age of social order and timeless village communities ‘rooted’ in land. The idea of community was constructed partly in reaction to the perceived rise of the individual and commerce, and private property and

The pulse of the country beats feebly when its lifeblood is drained by the towns; and the time is ripe for its rebirth (Crawford 1928: 179). In the first two decades of the twentieth century, idealised versions of the rural, medieval past were used in the foundation of worldwide political movements. 28

HELEN WICKSTEAD: LAND, LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS IN THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC LAND DIVISION

Figure 3. Fields and crops on the chalk downlands near Avebury, Wiltshire. Such ‘timeless’ postcard landscapes actually reflect considerable physical and social changes over many millennia. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Distributionism and Guild socialism developed in England in response to what were thought to be the dehumanising consequences of mass industrial society under both capitalism and state control. G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both key thinkers in Distributionism, opposed British imperialism on the basis of their English nationalism, for as the Empire quashed the nationalities of others, it therefore could not support English nationalism either. They were emphatically anti-

evolutionary, anti-progress and pro-history, and sought to revive the original Catholic, family-based peasant community. Thus Chesterton called for a renaissance of true love for one’s native land ‘which could only be discovered and cultivated through history’ (Chesterton 1908, cited in Corrin 2002: 99). Distributionists published popular histories of England, focused especially on the pre-enclosure landscape (Belloc 1925; Hammond and Hammond 1911).

Figure 4. Illustrations by Walter Crane exploring themes of labour, land and bounty that formed part of the Guild socialism movement. On the left The Capitalist Vampire (1885), on the right A Posey for Britannia (1910), both from The Justice Journal. Source: Modified from images at www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk.

29

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT David Matless (1998) has identified two related notions of Englishness in the early twentieth century – on the one hand, the ‘back-to-earth’ movement and a backwardlooking Englishness, and on the other a modernity that saw itself as preserving Ruskin’s principles of simplicity inherited from ‘English taste’ (e.g. English Perpendicular). Modernity was thus not opposed to preservationism, but seen as equally embedded in a national past. Crawford’s archaeology, with its emphasis on maps and technical innovation, was linked with modern preservationism as much as an ‘organic’ Englishness. In a relatively new and developing subject, these ‘evidence based’ approaches and scientific methods were a means of drawing strong boundaries around the discipline, and could be seen as useful strategy for maintaining and acquiring intellectual authority. Crawford expressly stated that he founded Antiquity to do away with ‘cranks’, as the review of Massingham’s (1925) classic Downland Man in the first edition makes clear (cf. Chadwick 2004a: 3; Matless 1998).

around English pastoral landscapes became layered with bereavements as fields turned to battlefields. The passing away of a pre-industrial landscape of innocence (as in Larkin’s poem MCMXIV (2001) became symbolic of the decimation of England’s young soldiers. Metaphors linking flesh to earth and grass were already familiar from the Church of England funeral service (Church of England 1815), but during the First World War such metaphors became even more explicit. Fields became sacred through the burial of the war dead, and young men were cut down like the harvest. Rupert Brooke’s 1915 The Soldier depicts the body of a young man (England’s body) becoming the ‘rich dust’ of a field (Brooke 1941). McCrae’s In Flanders Fields (1916) introduced the symbolic poppy, which grew on the disturbed earth of fields in which the dead were interred (McCrae 1919). Scenic nationalism transformed nostalgia into an effective campaigning tool. Archaeologists increasingly sought to protect the ‘last elements’ of indigenous communities from the onslaughts of industrialism and ‘progress’. Cecil Curwen’s Plough and Pasture (1946) charted a progressive technological efficiency in farming from the Neolithic, but stopped short of applauding the latest techniques of industrial farming. Whereas Curwen depicted the Enclosure movement as a scientific and rational step into the future, the combine harvester and industrial corn-mill were presented as ‘abrupt departure[s]’ from the normal course of development (Curwen 1946: 117). The book’s conclusion expressed deep uncertainties about the course of progress and the place of Britain within it (see also his championing of Hebridean architecture and agricultural tools – Curwen 1938). Taylor (2000) associated enthusiasm for archaeology with opposition to hedgerow removal and the ‘prairie-like’ fields of modern agriculture. Archaeologists have found scenic nationalism and the idea of the threatened rural past a powerful ally in campaigning for the preservation of archaeological sites. Archaeologists could portray themselves as saviours of the threatened past; and such sentiments harnessed by the RESCUE movement of the 1970s with considerable success (Rahtz 1974).

In the inter-war and post-Second World War periods, certain landscapes came to stand for an ideal of nationhood (Lowenthal 1994; Matless 1998). This ‘scenic nationalism’ demanded a deep affinity with the mother country, and was restricted to those who could demonstrate that they were authentically of that landscape, or could speak for it. It enabled those who preferred to disassociate themselves from the vulgar, jingoistic tone of mass national display to engage in a more refined ‘individual’ response. Expressing his dislike for ‘patriotism of the flag waving kind’, O.G.S. Crawford remembered: “I had discounted the patriotic uplift of my public school together with the religious exhortations, and I had entirely escaped inoculation with the virus at home.” Yet he maintained “It would not be correct to say that I was unpatriotic: I had a very deep love of England and of the English countryside” (Crawford 1955: 109). Scenic nationalism did not celebrate just any landscape, but valued particular qualities of artifice, stability and order (Lowenthal 1994). Ordered landscapes of the eighteenth century were the last golden age when “…men had triumphed, the land was theirs, but had not yet been subjected and outraged” (Hawkes 1951: 121). For Hoskins ‘the flowering of rural England’ occurred in the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, when the essential components of the English village were put in place (Hoskins 1992: 125-130). Home and garden were important, and through fields the whole of England became a garden. Thus, in a time of “…mobility and rootlessness... the existence of fields gives this country an aesthetic value which other countries sometimes lack” (Taylor 2000: 162). Fields were seen as the artistic ‘clothing’ of the landscape: “Without fields much of our rural landscape would look as bare and depressing as many of our newer urban areas” (ibid: 17).

Throughout the twentieth century, a range of popular and academic ways of experiencing landscape emerged, some of which were promoted as patriotic experiences of Englishness (Matless 1998). To be a good citizen it was necessary to either be of the landscape or to ‘speak for it’. Expertise in fieldwork such as natural history, geology and landscape archaeology allowed the middle classes to adopt this kind of citizenship. Readers of Bowen’s Ancient Fields (1961) and Taylor’s Fields in the English Landscape (2000) were encouraged to also ‘read’ the landscape; and to identify the ages of fields by comparing their size and shape, draw conclusions about the likely implements used in their cultivation, or unravel the palimpsest of superimposed boundaries. Bowen’s book even supplied a crib sheet directing readers to record salient aspects of the features they might find, in order that threatened landscapes might be saved for posterity.

Affection for the English countryside was thus also love of its past, or an idea of its past, and involved nostalgia for aspects of the countryside that were seen as lost or disappearing. The sense of nostalgia that accumulated 30

HELEN WICKSTEAD: LAND, LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS IN THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC LAND DIVISION We plough the fields and scatter

equipment used (Bowen 1961: 5; Curwen 1927, 1929, 1938; Hatt 1949; Reynolds 1977: 8; Seebohm 1914). Differences in field size and shape were seen as the outcome of the use of different agricultural implements, and were used in the relative dating of types of field system (Bowen 1961; Curwen 1927, 1932, 1938, 1946; Hatt 1949; Hayes 1981). Curwen’s work on field shapes and plough types recalls not just artefact typologies, but also the fashion in this period for collecting and preserving ‘peasant arts’ such as folk songs and dances, agricultural implements and hand produced textiles. Curwen applied his understanding of ‘traditional’ agricultural tools to classify field systems. For example, the use of implements like the Hebridean cashrom was thought to have produced the long rectangular Dartmoor fields (Curwen 1929, 1938).

Cultivation has often been valued as a symbol of greater civilization (Pluciennik 2001), and such values have influenced interpretations of field systems. In the first half of the twentieth century, fields were linked primarily to the practice of cultivation rather than stock-raising. The first known prehistoric fields were recognised through lynchets, thought to be the by-product of tillage. Farming and cultivation were so strongly interconnected that in much literature written before 1950 the word ‘agriculture’ is equivalent to cultivation. Culturehistorical approaches united social evolution with ethnic and national pasts, and fields became important evidence for the form and degree of communal organisation that had characterised particular ethnicities or social groups throughout the past. For example, ‘Celtic’ systems denoted not only an ethnicity but also a more ‘communist’, primitive form of tenure. Seebohm’s The English Village Community (1883) attempted to determine the degree to which the English open field could be considered ‘communist’ by comparing it with the ancient landholding systems of Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In this way, the English open field was shown to be less communist and more ‘advanced’ then the Celtic systems. The book concluded with a strong political message in favour of ‘progress’ in matters of property, and against backward-looking communism. The success of England was attributable to her ancient systems of property having advanced through Roman and AngloSaxon laws. By contrast, Ireland had languished under communism for far longer. This ‘backwardness’ of the Irish was blamed for the catastrophe of the potato famine (Seebohm 1926). The identification of ‘Celtic’ fields appeared to confirm the expectation that:

‘Celtic’ fields and national personality The first interpretations of prehistoric fields attributed them with an ethnicity; they were ‘Celtic’ fields. Their identification came at a time when the secession of the Irish Free State in 1921 was making necessary the reformulation and redefinition of concepts of British and English identity (Douglas 2002). Histories that delineated the characteristics and relations of Saxons to Celts were vital to this process. The discovery of prehistoric fields on the southern chalk of England by Curwen and Curwen (1923) and O.G.S. Crawford (1923) excited much public interest, and pictures and articles in the national press (Crawford 1955). Some recent accounts have implied that Crawford’s use of the term ‘Celtic fields’ merely denoted a pre-Roman date (e.g. Fowler and Blackwell 1998: 32). This is misleading – Crawford made it clear that he decided on the term because it fit with work he had previously published, which postulated “…the arrival in this country of a new race with new social customs at about the middle of the first millennium BC” (1923: 348349). The term ‘Celtic fields’ was not simply a dry chronological classification – it conjured an imaginary people. ‘Celtic’ fields were linked to a racial group called Celts, associated with a distinct Celtic ‘package’ of artefacts and bound up with a Celtic system of agriculture:

…the areas occupied by the [southern] chalk were probably in prehistoric times, and even much later, the most settled and highly civilised parts of Britain (Clement Reid, cited in Curwen and Curwen 1923: 63). Even in the second half of the twentieth century, the rhetoric of evolution still affected studies of fields. Bowen began Ancient Fields by asserting “Agriculture has been a fundamental activity of man since he left the savage stage and became a barbarian” (1961: 1). When co-axial systems were ‘discovered’ in the 1970s, much was made of the accomplishments of prehistoric planners and farmers (Taylor 1972), and the agricultural landscape of prehistory even became a ‘British achievement’ (Fowler 1983: 230).

We may…conclude that one and the same set of invaders, broadly speaking, were responsible for all these innovations – for finger-tip pottery, for new types of bronze implements, for the first introduction of iron, for square camps, and for the Celtic system of lynchets, boundary ditches, and roads. (Curwen and Curwen 1923: 349). Explicit connections were made between ‘Celtic’ fields and ways of life still practised in the ‘Celtic fringe’ of western Britain, Ireland and Brittany (Collis 2003). For example, Crawford produced slides supposedly demonstrating resemblances between Celtic fields in Hampshire and contemporary Irish fields (Crawford 1923: 351).

Historically, ‘man’ and technology have been seen as driving land enclosure, and the plough has been interpreted as a male technology (Childe 1942; Engels 2005; Goody 1976), a tool for the mastery of feminised nature. Male labour was constrained by technology that was thought to determine the size of fields, and it was oftrepeated that field size was determined by the amount that a man could plough in one day, depending on the 31

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 5. E.C. Curwen’s typology of hoes and crook-ards. Source: E.C. Curwen Plough and Pasture (1946), figs. 6, 10.

The evidence used to distinguish prehistoric field systems from the already well known medieval lynchets comprised La Tène ceramics found in overlying deposits, stratigraphic relations with other archaeological features, theories concerning the methods of ploughing used in prehistoric as opposed to medieval times, and comparative analyses of field dimensions (Crawford 1923; Curwen 1927; Curwen and Curwen 1923: 48-50). It was initially thought that agriculture (specifically cultivation) was not practiced in the Neolithic period, and although the existence of Bronze Age cultivation had been established using grain impressions on pottery, little was known about the manner in which these cereals were farmed. This meant that a Neolithic or Bronze Age date seemed less plausible. At the same time, Caesar’s account

of the Belgae (De Bello Gallico v. 12) was taken as good indirect evidence that the lynchets were Iron Age in date (Crawford 1923: 350). As an attribution of origins, ‘Celtic Fields’ was soon shown to be inaccurate. Some remains proved to have origins in the Bronze Age (Holleyman 1935), and evidence for cultivation in the Neolithic was also forthcoming from excavations at Windmill Hill (Crawford and Keiller 1928: 10). Given the rapidity with which it was realised that many field systems were not Iron Age, the longevity of the term ‘Celtic’ fields is interesting. Crawford persisted in using it because he argued ‘no-one has suggested better’ (Crawford 1953: 87). However, a further reason may be because the 32

HELEN WICKSTEAD: LAND, LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS IN THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC LAND DIVISION

Figure 6. Stone-walled narrow droveway and fields near Mynydd y Garn, Brecon Beacons, once thought by many scholars to be part of timeless, ‘Celtic’ practices of agriculture and land allotment. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

ethnicity of the fields was always about more than dating – it fed into much wider and more powerful discourses. It was part of debates surrounding the rural past at the heart of English identity, a debate that was also about Britishness too, an identity built on the hybrid history of Saxon and Celt (Champion 1996; Collis 2003).

and their Historic Importance (1914), which presented evidence for a British-Amorican unit of measurement shared by Celtic peoples, and argued that as civilisation spread and tillage increased the English medieval hide evolved out of an earlier Celtic unit. The links between culture history and nationalism have been well chronicled (Collis 2003; Jones 1997; Sklenar 1983; Trigger 1989), and it has been suggested that archaeology may be used to provide evidence for the continuity of ethnic rootedness which authenticates nations (Smith 2001). However, the culture historical approach in England was paradoxically based in an appreciation of ‘hybrid vigour’. British, and especially English history had long been an account of invasions (the Roman, ‘Saxon’ and Norman conquests), any or all of which could be represented as the original source of national character. Most often therefore, it was ‘hybrid vigour’, not (inbred, weakened, effeminate) racial purity that was celebrated as the essential strength of Englishness. It was a commonly held belief that when Anglo-Saxon and Celtic strains were combined, the ‘stronger’ aspects of each would prevail, benefiting the offspring (Douglas 2002).

There was already a strong historical discourse surrounding the history of the Celts, which suggested that a ‘Celtic’ field system had originally existed in the southeast of England and now survived in modified form in the ‘Celtic fringe’ (Seebohm 1914). According to popular national narratives, the Celts and their system of agriculture were eventually pushed out of the south-east by successive Germanic conquests, but their descendants still lived in the north and west of Britain (Henty 1893). The prior existence and differential survival of a ‘Celtic’ system of infield-outfield agriculture was a thus already a factor used to explain the diversity of English field systems of the historic period when Crawford and the Curwen’s first identified ‘Celtic’ fields on the South Downs. H.L. Gray’s English Field Systems (1915) had shown that the medieval two or three field system was largely confined to the Midlands, and other areas of England followed a different regime centred on hamlets rather than villages. The explanation for this variety seemed to be the differential survival of earlier ‘Celtic’ systems within England. Further evidence that medieval land division grew from Celtic forms was given in Seebohm’s posthumously published Customary Acres

Enthusiasm for the Teutonic, of which the Anglo-Saxons were important signifiers, had been a notable aspect of English nationalism before World War I (Richmond 1997: 192). As Englishness began to emerge from ‘Britishness’ (Champion 1996: 125), the Saxons were 33

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT increasingly promoted as the original English. Writers of children’s historical novels in this period chose AngloSaxons more frequently than other periods, and these proved to be extremely popular and deeply affecting notions of history. Such texts concentrated on “…racial definition, heroic behaviour, chivalric idealism and Christian piety” (Richmond 1997: 173). For many people in the Edwardian period, “...military success in time of need, the ideal of free and equal citizens united through representative organisations (as opposed to the oppressive Norman yoke) and the comfort and power of a strengthening Christianity’ were especially appealing (ibid.: 174).

celebrated ‘Celtic’ parts of Britain (Curwen 1938; Fox 1959). The very ‘backwardness’ for which certain parts of Britain had been stigmatised became a source of value for archaeologists, who attributed greater ‘continuity’ and ‘authenticity’ to Celtic populations. Celtic peoples exhibited traits that were to be celebrated – toughness, conservatism and good sense. They were more authentic and more rooted then the inhabitants of south-east England. Fox’s The Personality of Britain (1933) linked continuity of character to topography and soil – the mountainous highland zone was more difficult to conquer, and because they were hardier the healthy highlander was less easy to displace (Fox 1959: 33). Similar sentiments were expressed by Curwen about the ‘backward’ farmers of the Hebrides:

After the Great War and the Irish Wars of Independence (1919-1921), right-wing commentators, Protestant clergymen and respected members of Royal and Anthropological Societies revived earlier racial theories which had depicted the Irish (Celts) and English (AngloSaxons) as racially distinct (Douglas 2002). Opposing them, left-wing Catholic or Anglo-Catholic intellectuals including Belloc and Chesterton emphasised continuity between the Celtic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon populations. For example, Belloc’s History of England insisted that “The stock of the English, their blood, has been much the same throughout all recorded time” (Belloc 1925: 3). Disruption between Celts and Saxons, not continuity, was the account increasingly favoured by archaeologists of ancient fields. Crawford used the ‘hard facts’ of the distribution of ‘Celtic’ fields to dispute Belloc’s account. He argued there was a hiatus between the Celtic and the Germanic invasions during which “…an area which once teemed with busy Celtic husbandmen” reverted to nature. Whilst the Celts were not completely physically annihilated, there was no “…considerable survival of a Celtic-speaking population” (Crawford 1928: 183). Crawford’s interpretation of ancient fields was thus a commitment to the AngloSaxons as the original English.

…from these despised blackhouses has issued as fine a race of men as ever came from any kind of house in England – men who have distinguished themselves in public life in Scotland and throughout the Empire (Curwen 2000: 50). Blood and soil In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, German archaeology fed into increasingly powerful nationalist ideologies (Arnold 1990; Sklenar 1983; Trigger 1989). Studies of field systems were tied up with ideas of ethnic superiority, first through accounts of the evolution of agriculture and plough technology; and secondly through an idealised and romanticised vision of Germany’s wholesome peasant past. The plough acquired symbolic value as a signifier of civilisation, and was appropriated by the Aryan myth. Scholars proposed that strip field agriculture and the use of the mouldboard plough began in prehistory and was diffused by the Aryans. As one of the Nazi rulers of the conquered Czech protectorate stated, it had been the Germans who gave the primitive Slav newcomers “…their first social values … teaching them to use the plough and thus giving them bread” (K.H. Frank, cited in Sklenar 1983: 163).

It would be incorrect to accuse English archaeologists of producing aggressively nationalist or hibernophobic archaeologies, in contrast to the accounts produced by eminent anthropologists of this era. However, the early investigations of ‘Celtic’ fields occurred at a time when ‘Celticity’ had great political significance, and was bound to resonate with wider social discourses. These accounts of ancient fields reveal the ambiguity at the heart of English and British identities. Englishness could be a hybrid, emphasising its place as the self-styled heartland of Britishness, or it could focus on a particular originating race, but where the Celtic elements could be excised and ‘Celtic’ fields could rendered as ‘dead’ landscapes. This ambiguity was in fact, strength for an imperialist nation. Historically, Englishness was deployed in certain contexts, Britishness in others.

By this time archaeologists had developed a typological understanding of the morphology of fields that related field size and shape to the age of the field system (Curwen 1927, 1929, 1938). The spread of the mouldboard plough was seen as bringing with it the Germanic open field. Direct evidence for ploughs was initially confined to the iron tips of plough shares from Iron Age and Roman contexts, supplemented by depictions of plough teams from Alpine and Swedish rock art. Later, prehistoric ploughs that had been preserved in Scandinavian peat bogs were used (Curwen 1938; Glob 1951). Pliny recorded that the wheeled plough was invented in Rhaetia (modern Bavaria) ‘not long ago’ (Natural History book 18, cited in Curwen 1929: 21) and thus:

For example, immediately before and during the Second World War hibernophobia receded as the British government sought allies for the war effort (Douglas, 2002). At this time archaeological texts appeared which

We can…watch the slow spread of the true ploughshare, eight ox team and strip acre from Rhaetia 34

HELEN WICKSTEAD: LAND, LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS IN THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC LAND DIVISION

Figure 7. Images of blood, soil and sowing the seeds of a new future; as portrayed by totalitarian regimes. Numbers 1-3 are propaganda posters making explicit links between Nazi Party policy and idealised rustic visions of the German Volk, with No. 4 from the cover of the magazine Der Schuhngsbrief in July/August 1942. Number 5 is an Italian Fascist propaganda poster purporting to show how their invasion and occupation of Eritrea was going to be beneficial for the colonised people, whilst No. 6 is a Soviet propaganda poster emphasising productivity and drawing on tropes of Mother Russia. Source: Images at www.calvin.edu/academic; www.st.andrews.ac.uk/~pv/pv/courses/posters.

35

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT in the first century, to England in the sixth, and finally to Wales, Ireland, and parts of Scotland (Curwen 1929: 24).

yet aside from this article few contemporary accounts depicted ancient fields as evidence of a permanent, continuous attachment to homeland. Such ideas remained relatively low key in England (Matless 1998). The concept of ‘hybrid vigour’ had long been important in maintaining the union that comprised Britain (Douglas 2002), and required that unity be rooted in ‘mixed blood’. Thus British unity in this period was grounded in interpretations of the English past. In England the ‘races’ had been mixed; and since England was the main focus of national histories, the past of England represented the ideal of a fusion of elements, reinforcing Union and Empire.

A competing theory was proposed by Barger. He argued that the mouldboard plough had not been invented in Bavaria (Rhaetia) as Pliny had stated, but “...in the Nordic or Aryan parts of Europe. The Aryans spread the mould-board plough and brought the open field system to England” (Barger 1938: 394-396). The social values imparted by the open field system became important to national socialist histories in the 1930s. Images of ‘blood and soil’ as unifying ‘organic’ communities were common to fascist movements in both Germany and England (Matless 1998), but of course were also employed in socialist and Soviet propaganda. In Germany the agricultural community symbolised the sublimation of individual desires to communal will, and was projected as an image of the obedience that citizens should display towards the Party (Farquharson 1976). Under the Third Reich the history of the Germanic open field system was specified as appropriate teaching material in schools, and its significance to the fatherland was expressed in policies such as the Erbhof Law that enforced ‘ancient’ Germanic land tenure and inheritance customs on German peasants (ibid.). For Barger, the significance of the spread of the open field to England was the far reaching social and economic changes this heralded. Henceforth the individual would become obedient to the community through land:

Some corner of a foreign field… An examination of the role of nationalism in constructions of the English past is timely. The celebration of ‘mixed blood’ or ‘hybrid vigour’ that occurred in certain culture-historical accounts is no longer prominent, and some more reactionary social discourses and political rhetoric have turned decidedly against immigration and cultural diversity. At the same time, devolution is reshaping national identities within Britain (Bryant 2003; Jones 2004). It has been suggested that following the ‘death’ of culture history, the reaction against migration and the stress on indigenous development in archaeology could have “…actually served to bolster the ethnic nationalist images of deeprooted, foundational settlement…” (Smith 2001: 446). As one national past has become fragmented between competing nationalisms, there is a danger that these forms of nationalism will resort to pasts based on emotional appeal to blood and land, as seen in recent attempts to revive the Saxons as the original English race (Jones 2004). The sense of who ‘belongs’ where in the English landscape has been constructed by history and archaeology. Positive values attributed to the ‘authenticity’ of past farming communities have contributed to the marginalisation of those who are ‘inauthentic’ from the rural heartlands of Englishness. The legacies of these ideas are contemporary prejudices concerning who belongs where in the landscape.

The heavy plough leads…not only to the strip, but to the open field or Gwannflur, and to the subjection of the individual to the rules of an agricultural community, aptly expressed by the German word Flurzwang (Barger 1938: 396).

It has been pointed out that whilst nationalism has been investigated in the archaeology of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, there has been relatively little critique of English nationalism in archaeology (Cooney 2001, see also Thomas 2001). New work is beginning to change this situation (Edmonds 2004; Johnson 2006). At the same time, archaeology is recovering from what may be considered an excess of ‘anti-migrationism’. In prehistory, interest in migration has been ongoing in artefact studies, and has been rejuvenated in other areas through studies of boats and seafaring (Clark 2004), and the increasing application of oxygen and strontium isotope testing (Fitzpatrick 2002). It is perhaps studies of southern English prehistoric fields that continue to be strongly linked to a sense of a people ‘staying put’ (Barrett 1994; Chadwick 2004b: 233-235), implying an attachment between descent groups or communities and land that was somehow more enduring, genealogically

Figure 8. In this image of ‘Your Britain’, the landscape of the English South Downs is nevertheless used to represent the British Isles as a whole. Source: Image at www.st.andrews.ac.uk/~pv/pv/courses/posters, original held in Imperial War Museum.

The social qualities that Barger attributed to communal farming resonate with Nazi doctrines of Blood and Soil, 36

HELEN WICKSTEAD: LAND, LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS IN THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC LAND DIVISION rooted or stable. Yet it is far from certain that the appearance of fields in the English prehistoric past did mark a period of uniform ‘settling down’. The lifecycles of houses contemporary with many field systems seem to suggest a ‘neolocal’ residence pattern in which houses are abandoned after only a few generations (Brück 1999). It may be that this interpretation of the ancient fields of southern England owes much to the historical construction of ‘land’, and the emotional qualities that surround it. It is only once archaeologists begin to question ‘land’ as well as ‘landscape’ that the relationship between nationalism and land division can be reconsidered.

Bryant, C.G. 2003. These Englands, or where does devolution leave the English? Nations and Nationalism 9: 393-412. Cannadine, D. 2001. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carsten, J. 2004. After Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chadwick, A.M. 2004a. ‘Geographies of sentience’ – an introduction to space, place and time. In A.M. Chadwick (ed.) Stories from the Landscape: Archaeologies of Inhabitation. British Archaeological Reports (International Series) S1238. Oxford: BAR Publishing, pp. 1-33. Chadwick, A.M. 2004b. Footprints in the sands of time. Archaeologies of inhabitation on Cranborne Chase, Dorset. In A.M. Chadwick (ed.) Stories from the Landscape: Archaeologies of Inhabitation. British Archaeological Reports (International Series) S1238. Oxford: BAR Publishing, pp. 179-256. Champion, T. 1996. Three nations or one? Britain and the national use of the past. In M. Diaz-Andreu and T. Champion (eds.) Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe. London: UCL Press, pp. 119-145. Childe, V.G. 1942. What Happened in History. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Church of England 1815. The Book of Common Prayer and administration of the sacraments and other rites and ceremonies of the Church according to the use of the Church of England together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, pointed as they are to be sung or said in the churches, and the form and manner of making, ordaining and consecrating of bishops, priests and deacons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clark, P. 2004. The Dover Bronze Age Boat. London: English Heritage. Collis, J.R. 2003. The Celts. Origins, Myths and Inventions. Stroud: Tempus. Coombe, R.J. and Herman, A. 2004. Rhetorical virtues: property, speech, and the commons on the Worldwide Web. Anthropological Quarterly 77: 559-574. Cooney, G. 2001. Bringing contemporary baggage to Neolithic landscapes. In B. Bender and M. Winer (eds.) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 168-180. Corrin, J.P. 2002. Catholic Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democracy. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame. Crawford, O.G.S. 1923. Air survey and archaeology. The Geographical Journal 61: 342-366. Crawford, O.G.S. 1928. Our debt to Rome? Antiquity 2: 173-187. Crawford, O.G.S. 1953. Archaeology in the Field. London: Phoenix House Ltd. Crawford, O.G.S. 1955. Said and Done: The Autobiography of an Archaeologist. London: Phoenix House. Crawford, O.G.S. and Keiller, A. 1928. Wessex from the Air. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Curwen, E.C. 1946. Plough and Pasture. London: Cobbett Press. Curwen, E.C. 1938 [2000]. The Hebrides: a cultural backwater. In S. Stoddart (ed.) Landscapes from

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Henty, G.A. 1893. Beric the Briton: a Story of the Roman Invasion. London: Blackie and Son. Hobbes, T. 1660 [2004]. Leviathan. http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/hobbes/lev iathan-contents.html (accessed 7th February 2004). Holleyman, G.A. 1935. The Celtic field-system in south Britain: a survey of the Brighton district. Antiquity 9: 443-454. Hoskins, W.G. 1955 [1992]. The Making of the English Landscape (revised edition with an introduction and commentary by Christopher Taylor). London: Hodder and Stoughton. Ingold, T. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. James, S. 1999. The Atlantic Celts: Ancient Peoples or Modern Invention? London: British Museum Press. Jamoussi, Z. 1999. Primogeniture and Entail in England: A Survey of their History and Representation in Literature. Paris: Centre de Publication Universitaire. Johnson, M.H. 1996. An Archaeology of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, M.H. 2006. Ideas of Landscape: an Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Jones, M. 2004. Social Justice and the region: regional movements and the ‘English Question’. Space and Polity 8: 157-189. Jones, S. 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity. Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. London: Routledge. Langland, W. 1995. Vision of Piers Plowman: ‘B’ text (trans. A.V.C. Schmidt). London: Everyman. Larkin, P. 2001. Collected Poems. London: Faber and Faber. Locke, J. 1690. Second Treatise on Government. http://www.swan.ac.uk/poli/texts/locke/locke04.html. Lowenthal, D. 1994. European and English landscape as national symbols. In D. Hooson (ed.) Geography and National Identity. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 15-38. Macfarlane, A.D.J. 1991. Some contributions of Maine to history and anthropology. In A. Diamond (ed.) The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: a Centennial Reappraisal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11-142. Macfarlane, A.D.J. 1998. The mystery of property: inheritance and industrialization in England and Japan. In C.M. Hann (ed.) Property Relations: Renewing the Anthropological Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 104-123. Maine, H.S. 1891. Ancient Law: its Connection with the Early History of Society and its Relation to Modern Ideas (14th edition). London: John Murray. Marsh, J. 1982. Back to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914. London: Quartet Books. Massingham, H.J. 1925. Downland Man. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd. Matless, D. 1998. Landscape and Englishness. London: Reaktion. McCrae, J. 1919. In Flanders Fields and Other Poems. Toronto: William Briggs. 38

HELEN WICKSTEAD: LAND, LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS IN THE DISCOVERY OF PREHISTORIC LAND DIVISION Milton, J. 1953. Complete Prose Works, 1608-1674. Volume 2 (ed. D.M. Wolfe). London: New Haven. Neale, W.C. 1998. Property law, cotton-pickin’ hands, and implicit cultural imperialism. In R.C. Hunt and A. Gilman (eds.) Property in Economic Context. Monographs in Economic Anthropology 14. Lanham, New York: University Press of America, pp. 47-66. Pluciennik, M. 2001. Archaeology, anthropology and subsistence. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 7: 741-758. Rahtz, S.P.Q. 1974. Rescue Archaeology. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Reynolds, P. 1977. Experimental archaeology and the Butser Ancient Farm research project. In J.R. Collis (ed.) The Iron Age in Britain – a Review. Sheffield: Department of Prehistory and Archaeology, pp. 3240. Richmond, V.B. 1997. Historical novels to teach AngloSaxonism. In A.J. Frantzen and J.D. Niles (eds.) Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity. Florida: University Press of Florida, pp. 173201. Seebohm, F. 1914. Customary Acres and their Historical Importance. Being a Series of Unfinished Essays by the Late Frederic Seebohm. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Seebohm, F. 1883 [1926]. The English Village Community Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry: an Essay in Economic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shils, E. 1991. Henry Sumner Maine in the tradition of the analysis of society. In A. Diamond (ed.) The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine: a Centennial Reappraisal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 143-178. Sklenar, K. 1983. Archaeology in Central Europe: The First 500 Years. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Smith, A.D. 2001. Authenticity, antiquity and archaeology. Nations and Nationalism 7: 441-449. Taylor, C.C. 1972. Maps, documents and fieldwork. In E. Fowler (ed.) Field Survey in British Archaeology: Conference Proceedings, 1971. London: Council for British Archaeology, pp. 50-59. Taylor, C.C. 2000. Fields in the English Landscape (revised edition). Stroud: Sutton. Thomas, J. 1993. The politics of vision and the archaeologies of landscape. In B. Bender (ed.) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg, pp. 19-48. Thomas, J. 2001. Comments on Part 1: intersecting landscapes. In B. Bender and M. Winer (eds.) Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg, pp. 181-188. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Trigger, B.G. 1989. A History of Archaeological Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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A sinuous, stone Bronze Age reave near White Tor, Merrivale, Dartmoor, Devon. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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From clearance plots to ‘sustained’ farming: Peak District fields in prehistory John Barnatt Introduction

(Bradley and Hart 1983; Hawke-Smith 1979) have now been largely superseded.

The Peak District has extensive remains of prehistoric fields and cairnfields, with associated ritual monuments, concentrated on the eastern gritstone moorlands flanking the Derwent Valley, termed here the East Moors (Fig. 1). While later farming has destroyed much, survival is so exceptional that it allows interpretations to go beyond individual sites. Thus, excitingly, it is possible to investigate how prehistoric people organised themselves in the landscape and the changing character of farming societies through time. The remains here play a significant part in our more general understanding of the Peak District in later prehistory (Barnatt 1999; Barnatt and Smith 2004; Edmonds and Seaborne 2001).

My first involvement with prehistoric fields in the Peak grew from doctoral research on stone circles that attempted to place these monuments in their settlement and social context (Barnatt 1987b). Systematic field survey in the late 1970s and early 1980s sprung from a realisation that a detailed distribution of different types of field-evidence would be necessary (Barnatt 1986). This aspect of the work, and the interpretation of the results (Barnatt 1987a), drew on seminal works on ancient fields (e.g. Bowen 1961; Bowen and Fowler 1978; Fowler 1983; Taylor 1975). It was inspired by the then ongoing work on Dartmoor (Fleming 1978, 1983), and the obvious contrasts between the archaeological evidence there, and what was to be found in the Peak District.

Up to the early 1980s, little detailed interpretative analysis of prehistoric fields and cairnfields in the Peak had been undertaken. They were regarded as early Bronze Age in date, and a dichotomy was perceived between areas of bounded fields and funerary cairnfields (Hart 1981: 56-63). Today’s interpretations are very different. These are summarised in the subsequent sections of this paper, based on work presented in more detail elsewhere (Barnatt 1999, 2000), but first a brief summary is given of the history of research that has led to current thinking.

Subsequent work on the East Moors has included much detailed metrical survey, to supplement the measured sketch plots first produced and Butcher’s earlier surveys. This has been led both by this author and staff of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, in two cases in partnership (Ainsworth 2001; Ainsworth and Barnatt 1998a, 1998b; Barnatt 1991; Everson 1989; RCHME 1986, 1987a-d, 1990; RCHME and PPJPB 1993; Wilson and Barnatt 2004). Survey has been complemented by several excavations at sites under threat or recently damaged (Barnatt 1991, 1994, 2001; Wilson and Barnatt 2004). There has also been palaeoenvironmental research on pollen deposits (Long 1994; Long, Chambers and Barnatt 1998), and recent doctoral research on soils by Ann-Marie Heath (Heath 2003).

Developing interpretations over the last twenty-five years By the early 1980s extensive survey work of prehistoric fields and cairnfield had been undertaken in the Peak District, largely by Leslie Butcher, but most remained unpublished until after his death (Beswick and Merrills 1983; Hart 1981). The only settlement that had been partially excavated was at Swine Sty on Big Moor (Machin 1971; Machin and Beswick 1975; Richardson and Preston 1969), while two small cairns had been excavated nearby (Henderson 1963, 1979). The remains at Swine Sty were interpreted as Early Bronze Age in date, but a subsequent review of the lithics and pottery has demonstrated that these cover a significantly broader temporal range than initially thought (Garton and Beswick in prep.). Extensive excavations had also taken place at the cairnfield on Stanton Moor (Heathcote 1930, 1936, 1939, 1954). Many small cairns here contained burials, and this led to other unexcavated cairnfields being assumed to be potentially similar. However, Stanton Moor is now interpreted as atypical (Barnatt 1999). Some palaeo-environmental context had been provided by the analysis of deep peat deposits on the East Moors (Hicks 1971, 1972). Interpretative overviews of the region in later prehistory that have been presented

It was partly in order to test many of the interpretations raised by all the above work that a major six-year program of excavations was launched in 1995 at Gardom’s Edge, near Baslow. While interims and summaries have been produced (Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds 1995-2000, 2001, 2002), the final publication report is still in preparation. Details of the findings are not given in this paper, as I do not want to pre-empt full publication, but inevitably the results have influenced what is outlined below. One critical realisation made early on was that both the sites with visible field boundaries and clearance cairns, and most others with only cairns, were likely to be agricultural in basic character (Barnatt 1986, 1987a) – these are termed here ‘field areas’. Prehistoric field boundaries were argued to have originally been hedges and fences and the differences in definition today, sometimes comprising stony and earthen banks or lynchets but often without visible indicators of their former existence, was interpreted as reflecting the 41

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 1. The distribution of surviving later prehistoric settlements, fields, cairnfields and ritual monuments on the East Moors of the Peak District (after Barnatt 1999).

42

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY longevity or otherwise of individual sites, the amount of stone that needed to be cleared, and the propensity for soil loss in different topographic situations. This basic interpretation still stands.

Throughout the time I have been attempting to interpret the Peak in later prehistory, myself and other archaeologists have worked within paradigms current at the time, and these have changed radically over the last twenty-five years. In the 1980s it was commonly assumed that prehistoric agriculture in Britain was sedentary. Now it is often argued that in the Neolithic and early Bronze Age agriculture was part of a seasonallymobile round, and that ‘permanent’ land division did not take place until later in the Bronze Age (e.g. Barrett 1994; Brück 1999a, 2000; Kitchen 2000, 2001; Pollard 1999). This dichotomy is undoubtedly over-simplistic. Ways of farming and changes in lifestyle no doubt varied from region to region, both in what was practised and how this changed through time. In many instances, over much of later prehistory there was probably a complex inter-relationship between mobile and more sedentary aspects to peoples’ lives (Barnatt 1996a, 1999, 2000). For such reasons, I have changed how I refer to the farming remains on the East Moors. The term ‘sedentary’ now seems anachronistic, and I now prefer ‘sustained’, for this allows for possibilities such as seasonal use or ‘permanent’ occupancy by only part of any given local community.

Other aspects of interpretation have gradually evolved. In the mid-1980s, dating was largely based on the close spatial relationship of fields with early Bronze Age barrows and stone circles. While it was suggested that the date range of the fields might have been greater, a protracted search for data has been necessary to confirm this (Barnatt 1994, 1995; Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds 2002; Barnatt and Smith 1991; Long, Chambers and Barnatt 1998; Wilson and Barnatt 2004). It can now be demonstrated that field clearance and associated agriculture has taken place from the Early Bronze Age, if not before, through to the end of the Iron Age. Similarly, while settlement earthworks on the limestone plateau at the centre of the Peak District have traditionally been interpreted as Romano-British in date, the possibilities of earlier origins are now being explored (Bevan 1999, 2000a, 2000b). In the early 1980s it was argued that Neolithic people largely ignored the East Moors (Bradley and Hart 1983), but this view has now been challenged, and it may be that they were used extensively for seasonal grazing (Barnatt 1996a).

The whole Peak District landscape was no doubt a complex mosaic of settlement, with fields for arable and pasture, open grazing, managed woodland, and hunting areas. It seems likely that whilst these were all used by people for what we would regard as functional reasons, they were also imbued with social and ritual meaning that is reflected in their buildings, fields and monuments. This is well illustrated by the discovery of several small platforms of presumed ritual significance set against clearance cairns (Fig. 2) and burials placed in association with field boundaries (Fig. 3). Sometimes the character of the clearance features themselves indicates ‘nonfunctional’ concerns, as at one boundary cairn on Gardom’s Edge where two large blocks had been lifted onto the cairn top to form a highly visible statement at the point where the boundary crossed from stony ground with associated clearance along it, to a relatively stone-free area, where presumably all that marked it was a fence of hedge (Fig. 4). In other cases there are more obvious ritual structures such as stone circles and barrows, but from the builders perspective the ritual acts carried out here may well have been seen as having practical application. Monuments were (and still are) sited and built for many different reasons, and sometimes they could have been both set apart and integrated within the farming landscape at the same time – it is all a matter of perspective (Barnatt 1998a). As our archaeological interpretations have become more sophisticated, and ethnocentric and simplistic past explanations have been challenged over the last few years, this has allowed more wide-reaching and challenging stories to be told. It is often the asking of radically new questions that change our perspectives. However, there is also growing awareness that in some respects the available data do not allow differentiation between different visions of the past. While once interpretation naively allowed for a single likely explanation, now we often are faced with multiple

The importance of the spatial association of the many barrows and stone circles on the East Moors to the prehistoric fields and cairnfields was also recognised at an early stage in my investigations (Barnatt 1990, 1996b, 1996c, 1999). All small stone circles lie within or close to fields, whilst many barrows are similarly sited. However, three critical realisations have subsequently taken place. Firstly, the people buried in round barrows in the Peak need not be interpreted as a social elite, but rather barrows appear better interpreted as built by local farming ‘families’ (Barnatt 1996c). Secondly, barrows built away from the fields were purposefully sited to overlook specific pastures, and thus again may well have been associated with individual farming communities. Thirdly, there were also significant numbers of isolated small cairns sited away from cairnfields, some of which may well be ritual monuments (Barnatt 1998b, 2000). Another departure has been an exploration of what we mean by ‘local farming community’, and the problems of defining what may well have been multi-layered social relations. On the gritstone moorlands, as is often the case in British uplands elsewhere, there are limitations to the archaeological data. For instance, the acid soils do not preserve animal bone, therefore even potentially simple questions such as the degree to which animal husbandry was important can only be guessed at. Similarly, proving the presence of hedges, or the possibility that fields were used as hay meadows, cannot be achieved by direct means. However, I have always taken the view that informed speculation, explicitly stated, is more productive than confining our interpretations to what we know. The latter can be strongly misleading. 43

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 2. A small, low, rectangular platform (front) added to a clearance cairn (behind) at Highlow Bank (Barnatt 1991). Source: J. Barnatt.

Figure 3. Excavations at Eaglestone Flat revealed that the linear clearance features were the focus for a cremation cemetery, with burials both under small cairns incorporated into the bank and in unmarked pits to either side (Barnatt 1994). Source: J. Barnatt.

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JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY

Figure 4. At one excavated boundary feature at Gardom’s Edge the clearance features terminated at a small cairn with two highly visible placed-boulders that had been lifted high onto its end. Source: J. Barnatt.

interpretations, especially when we allow ourselves to see beyond currently-fashionable dogma. A major ongoing challenge is to find ways of evaluating which are the more likely, and the integration of such multifaceted interpretation into coherent explanation.

small cairns (Fig. 6). They favour bands of what before podzolisation were relatively fertile sandy soils. These were light and easily tilled, if often stony, and are found on shelves immediately above scarps of gritstone and sandstone. Heavy clays covering the intervening beds of shale were normally avoided. The regularity of the topography and the predictable siting allow the overall distribution of prehistoric settlement to be estimated, by ‘filling the gaps’ between extensive surviving remains where medieval and later enclosure exists on favourable shelves.

In recent years the challenge of interpreting the later prehistoric settlement and agriculture in the Peak has been taken up by others (Edmonds and Seaborne 2001; Heath 2003; Kitchen 2000, 2001, this volume). Whilst these are sometimes at odds with the interpretations given here, this is all to the good, for these differences of opinion enhance debate on all sides. What follows is a brief review of some of my current thoughts on how the evidence for prehistoric farming in the Peak can be interpreted. Those who want to explore these and other interpretations further should turn to the detailed works referenced above.

It has become clear that interpretation of the character of the remains has to be taken beyond face value. Prehistoric ‘field boundaries’ on the East Moors are usually low, sinuous, stony banks where visible today. When examined in detail during survey and excavation, they comprise linear heaps of clearance stone. These have often always been discontinuous, but were sometimes added too in complex sequences of discrete heaps that eventually merged into semi-continuous lines (Fig. 7). They are not collapsed boundary walls (Figs. 2, 4). In strong contrast, there were also straighter, more continuous boundary lines that now comprise very low earthen banks and lynchets (Figs. 5, 8). Excavations have shown that there were no associated ditches, and it may well be that the visible features mark the lines of hedges or fences, or boundaries that were more ephemerally defined, and it was episodic cultivation up to the

Many small piles of stone – taking interpretation beyond face value Surface evidence for prehistoric farming in the Peak District survives mainly on the region’s East Moors, in a band about 20km long. Over seventy sites are known (Barnatt 1986, 1999), ranging from those with extensive fields, numerous clearance cairns, house sites and ritual monuments (Fig. 5), to others with only a handful of 45

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Figure 5. Example of a complex ‘field area’ on Big Moor, distinguishing between earthen and stone features (after Ainsworth and Barnatt 1998b).

46

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY

Figure 6. Example of a simple cairnfield at Sir William’s Hill (after Wilson and Barnatt 2004).

boundary which has led to their current definition. For many of these features, small-scale soil loss in the cultivation areas, and/or soil entrapment and deposition at the boundary line seems the best explanation for their generation. In other cases the banks may perhaps have been built from turf stripped prior to episodic cultivation, but no confirmation by archaeological excavation has yet been found. Very occasionally, well-made but low stony banks are found (Figs. 7, 9). However, these are always short and link much more irregular features in the same boundary rather than defining whole boundaries. While not stock proof in themselves, the character of associated tumble suggests they may have been surmounted by

earthen banks with occasional stones; thus, they could have supported hedges. Similarly, given the heavy podzolisation of the East Moors soils, proving the presence of hedges and fences by excavation has to date proved an impossible task, but this does not mean they did not exist. Once the presence of now-invisible boundaries is postulated, then this also offers explanation of the stony ‘boundaries’, as agricultural clearance heaps against pre-existing boundary lines. The bounded fields generally have stony soils, and often contain large earthfast boulders. These ‘islands’ of dead ground often form the focus for clearance heaps. Often the choice of site for a cairn is 47

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 7. The same boundary at Gardom’s Edge as in Fig. 4, showing its irregular make up, with a well-made low bank in the foreground, linked to a small irregular cairn, followed by a line of placed boulders (see Fig. 15) and then linear clearance to a terminal cairn. Source: J. Barnatt.

Figure 8. A junction of low earthen banks prior to excavation on Big Moor, with one crossing left to right and an even lower one joining at right angles from behind (Barnatt 2001). Source: J. Barnatt.

48

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY Figure 9. A well made but low stone bank at Eaglestone Flat that rides over a small clearance cairn in the foreground (Barnatt 1994). Source: J. Barnatt.

now immediately obvious (Fig. 10), but sometimes this only becomes clear upon excavation (Fig. 11). When clearing stone near the field boundaries, there would be a trend to dump stone at the nearest convenient place along the edge, hence these clearance heaps tend to be linear, whereas further into the field they tend to be roughly circular as stone is brought from random directions. As noted above, whether a cultivation area now has welldefined boundaries or only clearance cairns probably does not reflect fundamental differences in the character of prehistoric agricultural practices. Rather, it reflects the longevity of use, variability in the stoniness of individual sites, and whether soil loss occurred, dependant on slope and/or the degree to which the fields were exposed to wind erosion. All this said, an important factor in boundary definition may well be the extent to which arable was practised at each site. Not all clearance necessarily related to arable, for improvement of pasture can be achieved by the removal of surface stone. Two or possibly three basic phases of clearance can be envisaged, some evidence for which has been provided at the Gardom’s Edge excavations (Fig. 13). Whether for arable or pasture, initial work would comprise the removal of larger stones visible at the surface. Any subsequent cultivation would lead to the removal of further stone, often somewhat smaller in size. Towards the end of a

Figure 10. A small unexcavated clearance cairn on a large earthfast boulder on Gibbet Moor above Chatsworth. Source: J. Barnatt.

49

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT field’s life, if soil deterioration and loss was taking place, further larger stones may have been removed that previously lay beneath the shallow, cultivated topsoil. Many of the fields and clearance heaps that we can identify today on the East Moors were undoubtedly the collective product of farming over a period of at least two millennia, and changes in farming practice are to be anticipated. However, once large piles of stone were created at the edges of or within fields, they were likely to have often been accommodated rather than moved. Similarly, any well-established hedges would have been respected, unless they had grown-out or been grazed to a point where large gaps were present. Thus, we can anticipate gradual rather than radical changes to field layout, with individual boundaries moved or new areas enclosed by each generation of farmers as and when time allowed. What we see today is undoubtedly a palimpsest of many generations of work. It is unclear when the farmers on the East Moors first laid out fields with ‘formal boundaries’. There may have been an initial phase of unknown duration, comprising clearance for ‘unbounded’ arable plots and for improving selected pastures, with bounded fields only coming later with more ‘sustained’ farming. Furthermore, many of the fields in the form identifiable today may perhaps be of first millennium BC rather than earlier date, though still possibly reworkings of earlier fields. Whether boundaries were commonly employed or not during the second millennium BC is still a matter for debate. However, a strong case can be made for the cultivation areas across the East Moors having ‘sustained’ use at this date (see below). Thus, well-defined fields may have existed, but

Figure 11. An excavated cairn at Gardom’s Edge that overlies small earthfast boulders, with cleared ground to the left and more stony ground to the right. Source: J. Barnatt.

Figure 12. Excavated linear clearance features at Gardom’s Edge and Eaglestone Flat (after Barnatt 1999).

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JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY

Figure 13. An excavated cairn on a large earthfast boulder at Gardom’s Edge. There are moderate-sized stones in the foreground and larger ones behind where the soil in the interstices was different, being more peaty than that between the foreground stones. Source: J. Barnatt.

these are archaeologically unidentifiable for the reasons discussed.

design (Barnatt 2000: fig. 7). In only rare instances, as on Big Moor (Fig. 14), are there are clear signs of redefinition of layout, with earlier boundaries sitting uncomfortably alongside adjacent replacements. For the most part, the visible field layouts give the impression that at any given site additions or changes made reference to what went before. The fields were thus in some senses ‘integrated’, rather than representing a palimpsest of individual bounded plots that were superimposed upon each other over time. In some instances fields were larger and more regular than the norm, with regularly-spaced clearance cairns within them. While the irregular character of most prehistoric fields on the East Moors suggests that they were best suited for hand cultivation, it has been postulated that the larger regular field were designed for ard cultivation (Barnatt 2000: 23). However, at what was previously regarded as a ‘classic’ example of this on Gardom’s Edge, recent excavations showed that those parts of the field investigated had numerous earthfast boulders just below the surface. These would probably have inhibited anything but hand cultivation.

Another complication with interpreting the field evidence is that not all linear stone features lie on true field boundaries. In particularly stony areas such as those on Gardom’s Edge, there were many natural barriers to cultivation within fields and these attracted field clearance. Thus, a distinction has to be drawn between cultivation plots within fields, the shape of which is governed by the character of the land; and fields proper, which tended to be larger, with boundaries that sometimes cross-cut barriers to cultivation. The fundamental difference was that the fields were consciously designed, with a shape and size that reflected the farmers’ cognitive perceptions of what a field should be, whereas plots were naturally constrained. It may well be that the plots were never regarded as bounded by the farmers, but only as areas within fields where cultivation was viable. However, to date, it has proved impossible to determine archaeologically whether these same plots were also used prior to the creation of bounded fields.

Given their character, altitude and the sparse pollen data for cereals, it seems unlikely that these prehistoric fields were extensively cultivated on a regular basis. A mixed farming regime seems more likely. However, the character of prehistoric stock management is unclear (see below). It should not be assumed that the field boundaries were always stock proof. At one excavated example on

The prehistoric fields on the East Moors were all relatively small in size, rectangular to irregular in shape, and most appear to have been created as organic aggregations. In a few examples there is evidence of planning, in the form of small narrow fields that are coaxial, usually within broader areas of less-regular field 51

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Figure 14. Detail of the Big Moor field area, illustrating the changes and mismatches in field layout orientation (after Barnatt 2000).

Gardom’s Edge, the boundary crossed an area of protruding earthfast boulders where it was defined only by a line of five large placed-rocks with gaps between each (see Fig. 4, Plate 10).

settlement within any given ‘field area’ remains impossible. Farming through time – from ‘seasonal round’ to ‘sustained’ settlement

The identification of the distribution of farmsteads amongst the fields is also fraught with problems. Excavations at Gardom’s Edge recorded timber buildings with no stone footings and this is argued from the field evidence to be the norm at unexcavated sites across the East Moors (Ainsworth 2001). In some instances, their presence can be anticipated from recognisable atypical ‘yards’ and ‘garden plots’. In other cases, circular platforms are visible on slopes, while others have distinctive semi-circular arcs of stone respecting the sides of buildings, added after they had been built. However, it is undoubtedly true that many buildings remain undetected on flatter ground, and one such example was found by chance during excavations at Gardom’s Edge. Thus, studying the overall pattern and density of

In attempting to talk about the nature of Peak District farming communities in later prehistory, general terms such as ‘sedentary’, ‘sustained’ and ‘mobile’ have been used here. These do not fully address the detailed character of land-use or the communities who lived in the region. We must question our preconceptions, based on our own more recent past, about the nature of societies and their ways of life. For example, we must query to what extent farming in later prehistory was ‘sedentary’. Did practices change seasonally? Did individual communities live in one place or several? What was the nature of tenure? And did communities define themselves, and was this based on locale, kinship and/or 52

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY

Figure 15. Excavations of a boundary at Gardom’s Edge revealed a line of placed boulders, where it crossed an outcrop of earthfast slabs; linking clearance features to either side (see Figure 7). Source: J. Barnatt.

task groups (e.g. Brück and Goodman 1999; Edmonds and Seaborne 2001; Johnston 2000, 2001)?

changes in ways of life and farming practices involved lengthy periods of transition. Similarly, the communities themselves were likely to have been constantly changing, with relations between them being relatively fluid. Finally, it is perhaps inherently unlikely that all people in any given region and at any moment in time were living in exactly the same way. As our explanations become more considered and self-critical, it seems inevitable that sometimes the partial character of archaeological evidence limits our ability to fine-tune our understandings by distinguishing between alternate hypotheses. In the end, perhaps all we can meaningfully talk about with certainty are general underlying trends, and how these will be reflected in the archaeological evidence. If so, then simplified and broad models of explanation are the most appropriate. Thus, a distinction between what are termed ‘mobile’ and ‘sustained’ farming ways of life is retained here as the basis for discussion.

In Britain, current explanations have recognised that some Neolithic peoples may well have had a ‘mobile’ way of life very different from those of later periods. There is also growing awareness of significant regional variation, with more ‘sustained’ structures built in parts of Ireland and Scotland when compared with parts of England (Armit, Murphy, Nelis and Simpson 2003; Bradley 2003; Caulfield 1998; Caulfield, O’Donnell and Mitchell 1998; Cooney 2000). Some recent discussions have placed the adoption of ‘sustained’ farming practices across Britain in the middle Bronze Age (e.g. Barrett 1994; Brück 1999a, 2000; Richmond 1999), but this is probably no longer tenable for many regions and may apply mainly to parts of southern England. It seems likely that there was regional divergence in when people turned from a relatively ‘mobile’ way of life, with a seasonal round between optimal locales for the harvesting of both natural and managed resources, to adopting more ‘sedentary’ lives.

In recent papers I have argued that much of the archaeological evidence from the Peak District for the second millennia BC, including settlements and monuments, is best interpreted in a local or ‘farming family’ context, with ‘sustained’ mixed farming being the norm (Barnatt 1996c, 1999, 2000). This is contrasted with much of the Neolithic, where the evidence points to communal monument building, probably in the context of seasonally moving agricultural populations (Barnatt 1996a, 1999; Hind 2000, 2004). It was only later, probably in the late second and early first millennium

Within each of the two basic subsistence strategies there is a wide variety of ways in which people could have potentially lived, and a range of options combining elements of both ‘mobile’ and ‘sedentary’ practices. This and further potential complexity inhibits our ability to recognise and explain the detailed character of later prehistoric farming. In addition, it is likely that long-term 53

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT BC, that large communal monuments were again built alongside ‘sustained’ farms, this time in the form of large enclosures such as that on Gardom’s Edge, and also ‘hillforts’ elsewhere (Coombs and Thompson 1979; Stanley 1954). The Gardom’s Edge enclosure, previously tentatively identified as Neolithic in date (Ainsworth and Barnatt 1998a), has now been radiocarbon dated to the late Bronze Age.

the East Moors, and the siting characteristics of monuments with regard to particular locales, appears to more comfortably fit into a model of ‘sustained’ rather than ‘mobile’ communities (Barnatt 1999, 2000). All that said a final differentiation between the two models, distinguished here for simplicity’s sake, is probably inherently beyond proof. Irrespective of exactly when in later prehistory ‘sustained’ farming developed and became common, it is unlikely that these Peak District farmers were even remotely similar to those of post-medieval times, with their nuclear families, patriarchal inheritance structure and strong emphasis on private ownership. Cosmologies and world views would have been radically different, nor would the ways farming tasks were organised and carried out have been the same. The social, political and historical conditions were radically different. It may be that the prehistoric farmers placed emphasis on kin group and wider communal ties, on communal tenure over land, and on more fluid co-operation in carrying out tasks. While sustained investment of effort into particular areas of land may well have re-enforced a sense of identity, private or individual ownership might have been an alien concept. Different farming activities, such as cereal growing, herding and craft production may have been carried out by separate task groups based on choice, age, gender, kin or clan. While prehistoric farmers were very different from those of more recent times, undoubtedly there were just as many (if different) social inequalities and conflicts as today, with some individuals, kin or task groups having greater prestige, while others were subservient or the victims of prejudice. Similarly, gender roles and their relative prestige are not well understood.

In functionalist terms, the change from one basic way of life to the other may well have been by matter of degree. Thus for the Bronze and Iron Ages, the term ‘sustained farming’ is preferred here to ‘sedentary farming’. The latter is a term that carries with it a lot of intellectual baggage, resulting from our previous preconceptions that later prehistoric farming was much like that practised in Britain in post-medieval times. The term ‘sustained farming’ allows for the possibility that people may still have used the land in a relatively fluid way, with specific task groups moving through the landscape seasonally, while particular areas became locales where farming effort and time was committed through the creation and maintenance of fields. In cognitive terms, the change from more ‘mobile’ ways of life to ‘sustained’ farming will eventually have radically altered peoples’ views of the world. In ‘mobile’ societies people often claim tenure of paths and places, and of their physical and spiritual resources (Ingold 1986). As individual groups travelled from place to place, they may well have shared resource areas with others in overlapping ways, either in the same season, or by visiting any one place at different times. With ‘sustained’ farming there would have been an increased emphasis on the identification of individuals with specific places, creating a more bounded sense of being. With such investment the importance of lineal history probably developed, defining inheritors of ‘family’ wealth, social position and obligation that could accumulate over generations.

My use of a simplistic distinction between a ‘mobile’ Neolithic and a ‘sustained’ Bronze Age in relation to chronology and ways of life is a shorthand convention. Clearly there was a period of ‘transition’ between the two postulated ‘extremes’, both of which probably included highly variable social structures and subsistence strategies. In the Peak District, I would argue that this transition took place within the later Neolithic and/or earlier Bronze Age and it seems likely that this would have spanned several hundred years.

Much of the interpretation of the East Moors developed below relies on the premise that ‘sustained’ farming had become common in the Peak District at a relatively early date, probably in the early Bronze Age. However, if people still practised a predominantly more ‘mobile’ way of life until the late second or first millennium BC, then the relationships between settlement, fields and monuments would have to be explained using different frames of reference (Brück 1999a; Kitchen 2000, 2001). I believe though that the Peak District evidence for much of the Bronze Age supports an interpretation of ‘sustained’ farming better than it does a significantly more ‘mobile’ model. Cogent reasons why ‘sustained’ farming would be adopted in upland regions at an early date can be proposed, based on the relative environmental fragility of these areas and the need for careful maintenance of land (see below). The changes in social attitudes resulting from ‘sustained’ farming sit well with a general model that explains the differences in the character of monuments built in the Neolithic and the early Bronze Age, which transferred emphasis from the communal to the local (Barnatt 1996a, 1999). The nature of much of the field evidence for agricultural practice on

The exact timing of this transition and its duration are not well understood, as the field remains cannot be precisely dated. This is partly due to the absence of extensive excavations at a variety of sites, but even if these were to take place, many features may be inherently undateable except in broad terms, given the in-exactitude of radiocarbon dating and comparative artefact and palaeoenvironmental analyses. Much of the evidence used to discuss Neolithic ‘mobile’ patterning probably relates to the period c. 3500-2500 Cal. BC. Similarly, with the later fields and cairnfields all that can be said is that they appear to have dates starting sometime in the early Bronze Age, and in some cases they continued in use into the late first millennium BC. Relevant radiocarbon dates from Big Moor and Eaglestone Flat field boundary features focus around c. 1700-1300 BC, while structured 54

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY spatial relationships with early Bronze Age monuments suggest many ‘field areas’ had origins dating to c. 20001500 BC (Barnatt 1994; 1999, 2000, 2001). All stone circles and many barrows were placed either in close association with ‘field areas’ or at their opposite topographic extreme.

An important issue is whether there are some cairnfields that today have no visible boundary indicators that either mainly or exclusively resulted from early activity. However, with the majority of the medium to large-sized cairnfields, there are patterned relationships with Early Bronze Age monuments identical in character to those where developed field layouts are visible. Thus, these cairnfields should be considered within a ‘sustained’ context. It is only with some of the small cairnfields where significant uncertainty exists. These may be of a variety of dates and some at least, particularly in inhospitable locations, could date exclusively to a period before the sustainable potential of particular places had been established.

There are no monuments on the East Moors that clearly contradict these structured spatial patterns and which stand out as candidates belonging within a ‘mobile’ context, built before the establishment of ‘sustained’ farming with its emphasis on particular locales. The argument that bounded fields had been established at the time stone circles and barrows were being built, rather than being later additions in the same areas of land, is supported by the significant number of monuments placed at the edges of ‘field areas’, and often sited in particular locales such as at the ends of linear bands of fields. Thus, while these areas may well have been used in an earlier ‘mobile’ context (as well as later), it seems likely that any monuments built before the structuring of the land for ‘sustained’ use would have been more randomly sited within such areas.

A more fundamental question is to what extent did patterns of tenure change between the Neolithic and Bronze Age? The simple answer is that we do not know. If ways of living had changed from ‘mobile’ to ‘sustained’, then people were clearly using land differently in important ways. However, given that Neolithic people were probably moving through the landscape in small extended family or kinship groups for much of the year, then each group may well have had relatively restricted (if fluid) areas which they traditionally grazed or cultivated at particular times. Local tenure of land at the time people established ‘sustained’ farms may in some ways have been legitimised by many preceding generations, but also at the same time might have been transformed by a different view of the world and how land could be used.

In broader social terms, the building and continued use of ‘local’ monuments such as the stone circles and barrows of the East Moors that are sited adjacent to or within bounded fields, may be seen as part of the transitional process. Throughout the earlier Bronze Age (and perhaps the later Neolithic), spirits and ancestors were overtly referenced to help legitimise the new ‘sustained’ ways here. Only after generations of using the land in this way when ‘sustained’ farming was long established did monuments stop being built, by the later Bronze Age. This may well have resulted in part at least from this way of life no longer being contested, with people who practised more mobile ways of life presumably subsumed or integrated into the new social orderings.

Wherever ‘sustained’ farming had become the norm, it is now clear from archaeological investigation that this continued, in the more favourable locales at least, though to around the end of the first millennium BC (Barnatt 1999; Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds 1995-2000, 2002; Garton and Beswick in prep.; Long 1994; Long, Chambers and Barnatt 1998). Thus, ‘sustained’ farming was the norm on the East Moors for between one and two millennia, although it seems highly likely that this apparent continuity masked significant changes in farming practice and social order. The reasons for the severe contraction of settlement and fields on the East Moors around the time of arrival of the Romans are presently unresolved.

It may well be that some clearance features within the many cairnfields and fields on the East Moors were early in date, made at a time before ‘sustained’ farming was established. Clearance cairns were certainly being created at a relatively early date, as shown by recent excavations at Sir William’s Hill (see Fig. 6). Here, an initial cairn was built before being enlarged over three pits with structured ritual deposits dug beyond the edge of the primary cairn around the end of the third millennium BC (Wilson and Barnatt 2004). However, there is a fundamental interpretative problem in that even when excavated, such cairns cannot easily be placed with confidence into one or other of the postulated farming regimes. Unexcavated early cairns cannot be recognised from their form. It may well be that ‘mobile’ and more ‘sustained’ agriculturalists often used the same limited number of suitable areas of light soils on the East Moors. Many of the places where there are extensive visible prehistoric field layouts today have characteristics that indicate ‘sustained’ farming took place. Determining the proportion of clearance cairns that relate to land use at an earlier date is impossible, as stone clearance undoubtedly took place throughout the agricultural life of these areas.

A place to live – farmsteads, fields and the wider landscape The moorlands of the East Moors, with their scattered prehistoric fields and cairnfields with extensive areas beyond not cleared of stone, all farmed as rough grazing for the last two millennia, allow assessment of land-use in later prehistory. It is axiomatic that if the whole landscape was utilised in a variety of ways in prehistory, then zonations of use can be explored (Barnatt 1999, 2000). The identified agricultural areas, which also contain evidence for settlement, were surrounded by large swathes of what was undoubtedly open pasture and woodland, while more remote areas might have been 55

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT predominantly used for hunting. Bronze Age monuments included barrows, stone circles, ring cairns, small funerary cairns and stone settings, and while some types were always associated with the agricultural areas, others were also situated in the land beyond.

areas such as the Derwent Valley were more sheltered, they were heavily wooded and commonly had heavy soils. The East Moors (and the region’s central limestone plateau) would be amongst the most attractive places in the Peak District for ‘sustained’ farming.

Palaeo-environmental work on the East Moors in prehistory has sampled both peat bogs (Hicks 1971, 1972; Long 1994; Long, Chambers and Barnatt 1994) and buried soils under structures (e.g. Barnatt 1991, 1994, 1996b; Riley 1981). Taken at face value, the work of Hicks gave a general picture for the East Moors which was tree dominated through much of the Neolithic but with evidence for limited small-scale clearance. Trees and shrubs remained a strong component of the vegetation to the late Iron Age, but clearances gradually increased in scale from the late third millennium BC onwards. In the late first millennium BC or early first millennium AD there was a radical decline in tree cover which has remained the case to today. The prehistoric pollen record should not be taken at face value in the sense that the precise percentage of tree pollen may not be directly related to the amount of wooded land. It is unclear to what extent the results are distorted by ‘pollen rain’ from topographic zones to west and east, particularly in the more open conditions present by the first millennium BC, and also by the relative frequency of pollen entering the palaeo-environmental record from different species. Similarly, more extensive tree cover in the Neolithic could have disrupted the movement and settling of pollen from clearances elsewhere on the East Moors and be biased towards relatively local snapshots which under-represent clearance, especially as this is likely to have occurred on well-drained areas away from the boggy areas sampled. Thus, the data give only very general trends through time. Another problem when trying to reconstruct local zones of land-use in an environment which has a mixture of wooded and cleared ground, is that general pollen sequences do not tell us where in the local landscape the trees and clearances were situated; no detailed palaeo-environmental work sampling a large area in detail has yet been attempted to address this. All this said, it seems likely that trees would have been selectively distributed across any local East Moors landscape. Areas with favourable soils suitable for arable cultivation and good grazing would have been selectively cleared, although even here trees and shrubs may well have been present, particularly along hedge and fence lines. In contrast, poorly-drained areas and steep stony slopes may have continued to support a relatively undisturbed tree cover.

My favoured interpretation is that the many aggregations of later prehistoric fields on the East Moors were the products of a mixed farming regime. Livestock was probably the mainstay, although the latter currently lies beyond proof, as animal bone does not survive here in the acid soils. Animals were probably grazed extensively beyond the fields on the upper or otherwise lessfavourable parts of this upland. These areas would have also been important for a variety of resources such as timber, fuel and wild game. The fields, which were a vital but only relatively small part of the total landscape, were probably used in a variety of ways. Grazing would have played an important part, perhaps largely in winter and/or in those fields not cultivated in any given year. The field boundaries need not necessarily have been stock proof, as herding/shepherding may have been practised. This may be particularly pertinent with winter grazing when close stock control was perhaps not necessary over most of the fields. In other instances small arable plots could have been made temporarily or more-permanently stock proof with hedges or fences. Arable cultivation undoubtedly took place, including the growing of cereals, but in any given year only a small proportion of fields are likely to have been used in this way. When prehistoric pollen sequences from local deep bogs were studied little evidence for cereal cultivation was found (Hicks 1971, 1972). However, all these sites are at a distance from ‘field areas’ and most types of cereal pollen do not travel far. Thus, one of the main aims of the work of Long was to investigate pollen sequences from peat deposits close to ‘field areas’ (Long 1994; Long, Chambers and Barnatt 1994). While the available peat deposits were not as deep as those studied by Hicks, and mainly dated to the first millennium BC onwards, they contained evidence for small-scale and perhaps episodic cereal cultivation in the ‘field areas’. Evidence for second millennium cereal cultivation has been found in buried soils under dated structures associated with ‘field areas’ (Barnatt 1994; 1996b). Whether this arable cultivation is best viewed as horticulture or agriculture is a moot point. Another possible summer use for the fields was as hay meadows, and if so then stock-use may have been restricted in many or all bounded fields at this time of year. This again is difficult to demonstrate archaeologically, but should be considered as a sensible option in this environment.

At locations where prehistoric field boundaries are visible today, and at the majority of cairnfields with few or no linear boundaries, there are many archaeological features that are unambiguously agricultural in character. While the East Moors are seen as marginal land today, this would not have been the case in later prehistory, as with many similar areas in upland Britain (Tipping 2002; Young and Simmonds 1999). Before soil degradation, the light sandy soils were ideal for cultivation and would have supported relatively rich grassland. While adjacent

Amongst the fields there are prehistoric house sites identifiable today, usually found singly or in small groups, which strongly suggests scattered farms rather than nucleated settlements. Each farmstead and its fields may have been the domain of an extended family or kin group. These farmsteads and fields were likely to have 56

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY been part of a ‘sustained’ farming regime, rather than short-lived episodes of activity. However, whether occupation was permanent, seasonal or otherwise periodic is not clear. In some more favourable ‘field areas’, farming may well have been taking place over much of the second and first millennia BC. However, it is not envisaged that specific buildings were occupied over this extended period, and there is growing evidence, in the Peak and elsewhere that houses were probably ‘closed-down’ for a variety of social reasons (e.g. Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds 2002; Brück 1999b; Johnston 2001; Nowakowski 2001). It is assumed here that new dwellings were often built elsewhere on the farm rather than the farmland being abandoned.

to give good quality grazing and for occasional arable use, may well have been regular manuring by maintaining stock levels rather than by resting areas by moving elsewhere. The latter approach would probably have led to rapid deterioration in carrying capacity, because upland rainfall levels would have encouraged growth of unpalatable vegetation due to loss of soil nutrients and podzolisation. The Peak’s gritstone landscapes we are familiar with today, dominated by heather and coarse grasses with few trees, may be the product of the abandonment of many of the later prehistoric farms rather than significant climatic decline. People were still farming, in the more favourable areas of the East Moors at least, centuries after the climate is thought to have deteriorated, postulated as sometime in the late second millennium BC or early first millennium BC (Baillie 1991; Burgess 1985, 1989; Peiser, Palmer and Bailey 1998; Tipping 2002). Continuous input to maintain pasture quality may have kept these areas viable. Similarly, tree cover on the East Moors did not significantly decline until around the end of the first millennium BC (Hicks 1971, 1972; Long 1994; Long, Chambers and Barnatt 1998), and this may indicate woodland management by careful stock control (and other means) prior to this date. Once the farms were abandoned and the areas were used only for untended upland grazing, new saplings would have been browsed out. This interpretation explains the radical loss of tree cover indicated by radical change in the palaeoenvironmental pollen sequences at a time when the archaeological evidence is for significant contraction of farming on the East Moors.

Another potential way of viewing the large areas of the East Moors without later prehistoric fields and cairnfields is that there was never sufficient pressure on agricultural land for them to have been used. This proposal would fit best in a scenario for the East Moors which envisages significantly lower levels of sustained exploitation than proposed here. In this alternate model, many of the ‘field areas’ would not be in use at any one moment in time, but were perhaps used episodically in shifting fashion. People would farm one area of fields for a few years and then move on to another, revisiting the first after an interval of several or many years. While such a suggestion may represent a logical progression from the ‘mobility’ envisaged for the Neolithic, my personal view is that it is an unlikely explanation for the East Moors in later prehistory. The distribution and character of ‘field areas’ appears to have been too structured, with many patterns repeated (Barnatt 2000). Most ‘field areas’ had their own monuments, suggesting that separate family groups used them.

It is possible that deterioration of grazing may have been a problem well before the postulated wetter conditions of the first millennium BC. Environmental sampling at a stone circle and barrow on Big Moor shows that heather growth increased significantly here in the Early Bronze Age (Barnatt 1996b; Riley 1981). On Gardom’s Edge in a section of a massive late Bronze Age enclosure bank excavated near its northern end, an enlargement phase had heavily podzolised soils beneath it, contrasting with those below the primary bank which were less degraded. The lessons of good husbandry for the East Moors may well have been learnt the hard way, and deterioration in the carrying capacity of the land may have been an ongoing and perhaps increasing problem since the start of removal of tree cover from Neolithic times onwards. This may even have been instrumental in persuading people to turn to ‘sustained’ farming in the first instance.

If any group was periodically moving from one area of fields to another, would they have built monuments to go with each? Or would we see a different pattern, with fewer stone circles for example, sited at convenient places that could be easily reached from a number of farming locales? Although people across different parts of the world are known to sometimes have moved around between farming locales, often to rest the soils, given the topography and climate of the East Moors this may not have been a sensible option here. Wherever the tree cover was removed in this upland region, high levels of rainfall would quickly lead to soil and grassland deterioration without careful land management. The mainstay of the economy may well have been livestock rather than arable, therefore the necessity to rest soils may not have been an acute problem. Small-scale arable plots could easily be rotated within a single group of fields. Once ‘sustained’ farms had developed, maintenance of what had been created such as keeping fences and hedges in repair or preventing scrub growth across fields (by grazing them), may well have been easier with regular care and attention. Restoring derelict fields once every few years might have involved significantly more work.

For each monument a place Associated with the farmsteads and fields were a variety of monuments built in the earlier Bronze Age, and in some cases possibly in the later Neolithic (Barnatt 1990, 1996b, 1996c, 1999, 2000). In or adjacent to the ‘field areas’ were stone circles, ring cairns and barrows, in numbers consistent with an interpretation of each farming area having its own ‘family’ monuments. There were also rarer monument forms including small stone settings and

One of the main secrets to farming the East Moors in a ‘sustained’ manner, in terms of maintaining soil fertility 57

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT single standing stones. Beyond the fields there were scattered barrows and other smaller funerary cairns, again sited so as to suggest that the open grazing was divided into a series of areas where tenurial grazing rights were established by tradition. One of the most noticeable characteristics of the stone circles and ring cairns of the East Moors is their distribution within or close to prehistoric ‘field areas’. The small number of exceptions all lie within or close to areas improved in postprehistoric times, where the evidence for prehistoric field boundaries and small cairns may well have been removed.

the fields. Others were built away from agricultural areas, within what can be termed ‘funerary zones’ (see below), not all of which were at watershed locations. Another consideration is whether barrows at ‘field areas’ and elsewhere were built by different task groups, each with different criteria based on a different logic relating to their everyday practices in different parts of the landscape. It may be that many barrows, irrespective of their placing in relation to ‘field areas’, were sited to place them outside ‘the land of the living’ for ritual purposes. This may have reflected their builders’ views of the world, and the relationships between the living, the dead, and their place in the land (Barnatt 1998a). It has sometimes been suggested that large barrows placed in high locations signalled to outsiders that land was ‘owned’ (e.g. Fleming 1983). Examination of the exact siting of such mounds on the East Moors, and their architecture, suggests they were often not particularly visible, despite being sometimes placed at high spots. Here, barrows were often placed just off the watersheds and were thus directional and ‘inwardlooking’ in that one view was given preference. It may be that the siting was designed so that the dead could oversee the pastures of a particular living community; any visual signalling created by the barrow architecture had more to do with people within the community rather than outsiders. Such sitings were ‘territorial’ in that they suggest that individual communities, or task groups within that community, had (or had aspirations towards) long-term tenure over specific areas.

The grave goods and character of burial in the East Moors barrows appears to be comparable to those from barrows on the limestone plateau (Barnatt 1996c). However, the former are not as well understood because of the relative lack of good antiquarian documentation, and because of poor bone and other organic preservation due to the acidity of the soils. Round barrows across Britain have often been seen as places of prestige burial for elite groups, but there is no evidence to support this view in the Peak District. The high numbers and distribution of barrows, the character of the burial deposits, and most importantly the frequency of occurrence of these mounds in association with ‘field areas’ on the East Moors is a strong indicator that every farming ‘family’ had its own barrows. In these, selected representatives of the local community or kin group were buried. The stone circles, together with a significant proportion of the barrows on the East Moors found in similar locations, may well have provided the foci for ceremonies concerned with rites of passage and seasonal festivities practised by individual farming communities. Their association with fields and farmsteads indicates a desire to place these close to the focus of local community life. This may have been for convenience of use, but there is a greater likelihood that the reasons were more to do with ritual beliefs concerned with re-enforcing tenure over these family heartlands, and/or with the well being of this land.

The barrows were not the only later prehistoric ritual structures on the East Moors sited away from the ‘field areas’. There are a small number of funerary cairnfields, which were distinctly different from agricultural cairnfields, both in their architecture and their location (Barnatt 1999, 2000). There also seem to have been what I term ‘funerary zones’ in the landscape. These are defined here as areas where there was a thin scatter of small cairns, sometimes associated with larger barrows, which were usually on higher, less-favourable land than nearby ‘field areas’. This is well illustrated around Harland Edge, where four ‘funerary zones’ can be postulated (see Fig. 17). Although these zones contain funerary monuments but no obvious agricultural features, this does not imply that they were set aside exclusively for ritual activity. There is no reason to believe that this land was not also used for grazing, or other everyday activities.

Although the stone circles and ring cairns were always ‘close to home’, their precise siting also suggests that they were built in relatively hidden or private locations, chosen to set them apart from everyday activity (Barnatt 1998a, 2000). The monuments cannot usually be seen from the known house sites. The peripheral siting of most such monuments at the edges of the fields indicates that the agricultural areas were already extensively used at the time the ritual sites were built.

There are only four extant barrows on the East Moors that were sited at the edge of the main western scarp overlooking the Derwent Valley. This strongly suggests that local communities on the gritstone upland were in some ways ‘inward-looking’ or self-contained. It also suggests that the field remains on the East Moors probably cannot be interpreted as simply a seasonal component of communities based in the Derwent Valley, or at least that they were not a peripheral part of such a settlement pattern, but had an identity of their own. The character of the main western scarp strengthens this

The siting of barrows on the East Moors was more varied than that of stone circles and ring cairns. Taking those located beyond ‘destruction zones’, only about half were within or close to ‘field areas’, while others were placed at a distance. In a significant number of cases they were at the opposite extreme, placed close to watersheds. However, to view these two location types as a straightforward dichotomy would be over-simplistic. As with stone circles, even barrows close to agricultural areas were often hidden away or otherwise set aside from 58

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY impression. This imposing topographical feature, often with cliffs at its crest, drops between about 150 and 200 metres to the base of the Derwent Valley. Its upper slopes were usually too steep and boulder strewn for settlement and fields. Thus, a physical gap must have existed in the settlement pattern. This of course does not mean that people did not travel frequently between the Derwent Valley and the East Moors, nor that there were no strong social ties between the two areas. However, in cognitive terms, the scarp may have influenced how people thought about the two areas, creating a strong sense of separate upland and lowland identities.

Turning now to the problem of time-depth, to what extent did local boundaries change over the last two millennia BC? While there was undoubtedly fluctuation and even radical change, it may be that some boundaries were recognised over long periods of time. More recently, for example, many of the civil parish boundaries in the Peak District today are township boundaries that are at least a thousand years old (not that I am suggesting that these boundaries had prehistoric origins). In later prehistory, it may be that once people became relatively ‘settled’, local cognitive boundaries governed where people lived and worked, which created senses of place that had a tendency towards long-term definition. Over-arching boundaries governed by changing social dynamics and by the ‘control’ of elite groups were perhaps more fluid. The evidence for over-arching social boundaries is often illusive, but some clues exist for the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age in the form of a diverse range of large (and poorly-understood) enclosures such as those on Gardom’s Edge, Mam Tor and Burr Tor. However, exploration of explanations for these sites is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, the discussion below concentrates on a more local perspective.

Defining local communities? While it is obvious that ‘local communities’ must have existed in later prehistory, actually defining them and the boundaries they might have perceived as existing between them is far more problematic (Barnatt 2000). What indirect indicators of spatial boundaries left to us can we trust? More fundamentally, what do we mean by a local community? Community works at different levels, from the extended family and kin group, through people who identify with each other either because they carry out similar tasks or because they live in ‘one place’, to tribal and other overarching socio-political, linguistic or belief-system groupings (Fleming 1998). Even today, in this age of global communication and mobile workforces, different senses of identity still exist. People still frequently have a sense of family (although this may be very different to that which applied in prehistory), and often identify with their own village, parish or city. Rituals such as civic events and games such as football often act as foci for this. These relationships are often fluid. Distinctions can be drawn for example, between people born and bred in a place and incomers who often try harder to forge a sense of belonging than those who take it for granted. Conversely, people who live away from home often cling harder to the identity of their homeland as they once knew it, than those who remained behind and accept change more readily. Despite radical changes in societies during the last two millennia, a sense of belonging may well be a trait that can be applied to later prehistory, and many such ways of relating to place probably stem from the ‘sustained’ use of particular areas of land. A sense of family and kin group had undoubtedly existed since early prehistory. However, while people were still ‘mobile’, a sense of wider community probably revolved around what people did and whom they did it with. While these factors no doubt continued to be important, with the establishment of ‘sustained’ farms a stronger and probably more bounded sense of place evolved. This in turn will have eventually transformed the sense of community, increasing the emphasis on the relationships between people of ‘one place’, neighbours and people from elsewhere. This of course does not deny that some individuals and task groups will have continued to travel widely.

What do the ‘local area’ boundaries, tentatively identified below, represent? They may relate to extended families and/or kin groups, and to peoples’ senses of place. However, can we identify groups who thought of themselves as living in ‘one place’? While this is difficult enough in itself, the evidence examined here is even less conducive to the study of wider socio-political groupings. Thus, issues such as whether ‘the people’ of the East Moors or Peak District had their own identity are not addressed in any detail. Nevertheless, larger monuments such as henges and hillforts hint at such groupings. It must also be recognised that even if local boundaries can be identified, these will always have been more ‘boundaries of the mind’ rather than physical barriers. At a local level, as well as wider socio-political affiliations, there will have been multifarious cross-links, created through inter-marriage, movement of specific task groups and local economic inter-dependence. My own view is that the character of the landscape played an important but not deterministic part. What matters perhaps in moulding local community identity is who the prehistoric farmers met on a regular basis, and the bonds they thus formed. In most landscapes people are to one extent or another unevenly scattered because there are places that are more suitable for settlement than others. Intervening areas of high land, dense forest or marsh can thus play an important part in peoples’ perceptions of where they belong. Many traditional boundaries in historic times followed topographic features such as rivers and watersheds, and might have done so in the more distant past too. Similarly, imposing features such as the prominent scarp cliffs of the East Moors, or distinctive rock formations, may have been important in later prehistory. While they may well have been highly significant to these people as boundary markers, and/or revered places, if such features are used as the starting point for analysis, there is obviously a 59

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 16. Postulated ‘local areas’ on the East Moors (after Barnatt 2000).

60

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY

Figure 17. The evidence for ‘local area’ boundaries around Harland Edge (after Barnatt 2000).

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danger that topographic determinism is employed to reconstruct past boundaries. While topography may help shape identity, as natural barriers influence the extent to which different groups interact on a daily or regular basis, this must not be overstated. There may well have been many cases where topography was transcended or ignored, while other boundaries probably had no obvious topographic basis.

Taking these strands of evidence together, ‘local areas’ can be tentatively proposed for the East Moors (Fig. 16). However, what these represented is open to question.

In the search for prehistoric boundaries to local communities on the East Moors various types of clues can be used:

The area centred on Harland Edge provides particularly clearly visible relationships between ‘field areas’ and the monuments above them (Fig. 17). The Edge forms a watershed, with monuments placed to either side, mostly with views directed to fields at Gibbet Moor to the north and Beeley Warren/Beeley Moor to the west and south. A boundary between the last two areas is suggested by uncultivated area with two barrows (1). However, it is unclear whether the monuments on the Harland Edge shelf above (2) related to both areas, or just Beeley Warren. At a more local scale, the number and placing of monuments on Beeley Warren suggests that each discrete ‘field area’ may have had a separate social identity. Brampton East Moor is more ambiguous; a shelf with a large barrow but no cairnfield strongly suggests that there was a boundary here (3), while two small areas of cultivation on the ridge above superficially contradict this (4, 5). It may be that the latter remains were early in date, and did not develop further once local communities had established traditional grazing boundaries. It is unclear if the small barrow on higher ground (6) was built in association with the southernmost of these early cairnfields (5), or whether it was built by communities to the north-west or east.

•

•

•

There are problems in determining meaningful parameters for defining prehistoric local communities in that nested possibilities in terms of scale exist. Two illustrations are given here.

In a significant number of instances, the siting of monuments seems to have been strongly directional. This is most apparent at watersheds, where barrows were often placed to one side in order to reference particular parts of the landscape, rather than being sited in high places just because these were seen as appropriate locations. In several instances there are areas of land that appear to have been ideally suited for agriculture, but which were not used in a ‘sustained’ way. These all had (and still have) scattered surface stone, which would have been moved into obvious clearance features if they had been used in the same way as the many identified ‘field areas’. One possible explanation of the lack of such features in these areas is that they lay at local boundaries. There was local variation in the architecture of monuments, which potentially reflected the different preferences of specific local communities.

In addition, there were: •

On Bamford Moor (Fig. 18), the siting of monuments to either side of the central watershed (1) suggests that a boundary existed between northern and southern communities. However, further low ridge tops that are aligned roughly north-south (2) divide the moor in such a way that every ‘field area’ had its own monument(s), each placed above the fields. Only the barrow on Bamford Edge (3) is ambiguously sited, in that it is

Topographical barriers that divided agricultural zones, comprising high land, scarps and streams. There was (and is) regularity in the way the East Moors landscapes were partitioned by such features into discrete areas of similar size and character. 62

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY

Figure 18. The evidence for ‘local area’ boundaries around Bamford Moor (after Barnatt 2000).

unclear if it related to cairnfields to the north or southeast. The lack of agricultural remains on the lower shelves at the northern end of Bamford Moor (4) may suggest that the deep valley here was a boundary zone separating people to north and south. The placing of the two barrows on Stanage Edge (5) is such that it is unclear if they related to the Hordron Edge community to the

north, or to Bamford Moor as a whole. Taken together, these relationships illustrate the difficulties in reconstructing boundaries to local communities, in that several nested choices present themselves. Did each small area of fields have its own social identity? Was Bamford Moor divided into northern and southern halves, or did the whole topographic block have a single identity? My 63

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT suspicion is that all nested boundaries may have had some relevance within a hierarchy of social relations, but this is beyond proof.

of early small-scale fields around individual farmsteads (Johnston this volume). Only in exceptional cases, as at Céide Fields in Ireland (Byrne this volume; Caulfield 1988; Caulfield, O’Donnell and Mitchell 1998; Cooney 2000), were large planned field layouts adopted at an early date. During the Bronze Age they were adopted more widely, as on Dartmoor (Fleming 1978, 1983, 1988), in the Fens (Pryor 1998) and in southern England (e.g. Brück 2000; Field 2001; McOmish, Field and Brown 2002; Yates 1999, 2001). However, in some areas such as the Peak District’s East Moors and the North York Moors (Harding and Ostoja-Zagorski 1994; Spratt 1993), large field layouts were never adopted.

In deciding which scale of boundaries to use amongst the nested choices available to define ‘local areas’, I have chosen for Figure 6 an option that defined areas small enough to contain local differences, whilst not being so small that their usefulness has been negated. The very local scale that treats every ‘field area’ as a separate entity is thus ignored for present purposes. Instead, sixteen areas have been identified which rely, where possible, on the boundaries suggested by barrows near watersheds and by unused agricultural areas. In some cases there are topographical barriers within individual ‘local areas’ that suggest each had distinct local subgroupings. At best, the defined ‘local areas’ may well be only part of the picture. Nevertheless, despite obvious limitations, their value is in their usefulness in quantifying the evidence for the local distinctiveness of communities on the East Moors, by documenting the differences and similarities between each identified ‘local area’.

There were further significant regional differences. On the North York Moors for example, cross-ridge dykes were common, while in the Peak District only one minor example on Gardom’s Edge is known. Even where large field layouts existed, as on Dartmoor, there are also many aggregated fields (Butler 1991-97), which are underemphasised in current interpretation, and this trend is more pronounced on Bodmin Moor and further west in Cornwall (Herring this volume; Johnson and Rose 1994). It is now clear that many differences as well as similarities between regions need to be further explored, and regional trajectories must be treated as important in reaching a greater understanding of farming practices and land allotment and tenure throughout prehistoric Britain.

Local patterning can be identified at the scale employed (see Fig. 6). Well-defined field boundaries within agricultural areas were apparently confined to areas B to I (except D), while distinctive larger or coaxial fields were further restricted to areas E to I. Although stone circles and ring cairns were usually in particularly close association with fields, in the north (areas A-D) they were set somewhat apart. Barrows were present within or close to fields in all cases, except areas A and J. Barrows at a distance from fields were present in all cases, except areas E and G. Funerary cairnfields and ‘funerary zones’ occurred where fields tended to be more extensive and where boundary visibility was good. Elsewhere, there was usually a thinner scattering of isolated cairns. Monuments with atypical architecture were concentrated on Gibbet Moor (area H), an area where stone circles, stone settings and standing stones of unusual design (in a Peak District context) were the norm. Similar but not overriding variation could be found in nearby areas (G, J and M), with further examples to the north in areas A and B.

A key issue for future research is the investigation of why these regional differences existed in later prehistory. Some of the key issues must be the consideration of differences in social organisation and kinship structures, and differences in population levels and how settlement was distributed across any given landscape. Perhaps most importantly, we must investigate what options farmers had, and why and how they chose particular ways of living in any given place. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Dave Field and Dave McOmish for inviting me to make a contribution to the Swindon seminar on Ancient Fields; and to Adrian Chadwick for all of his hard work in editing this volume. Over the years many people have discussed prehistoric farming or worked collaboratively with me in the Peak, and have helped shape the ideas presented here. I am grateful for their lively debate, criticisms and information. They include Stewart Ainsworth, Pauline Beswick, Bill Bevan, Richard Bradley, Frank Chambers, Mark Edmonds, Andrew Fleming, Daryl Garton, Graeme Guilbert, AnnMarie Heath, Willy Kitchen, Debbie Long, Frank Robinson and Arthur Wilson.

These boundaries have helped define local differences, but should be viewed as a starting point for thinking about local similarities and differences, rather than defining local communities that necessarily had any cognitive reality in prehistory. Regional distinctiveness – Peakland farmers and farming communities across Britain There has been growing awareness in recent years that general overviews of British prehistory (e.g. Barrett 1994; Parker Pearson 1993) have often oversimplified the character of farming, and not allowed for different trajectories in different regions. In upland areas, many places including the East Moors had organic aggregations

Bibliography Ainsworth, S. 2001. Prehistoric settlement remains on the Derbyshire gritstone moors. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 121: 19-69. 64

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY Ainsworth, S. and Barnatt, J. 1998a. A scarp-edge enclosure at Gardom’s Edge, Baslow, Derbyshire. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 118: 5-23. Ainsworth, S. and Barnatt, J. 1998b. An Archaeological Survey of the Scheduled Landscape on Big Moor and Ramsley Moor, Baslow and Holmesfield, Derbyshire. NMR record nos. SK27 NE 1, 13, 18, 19, 28, 35, 41, 53, 54, 78-98. Unpublished report: Peak District National Park Archaeological Service/RCHME. Armit, I., Murphy, E., Nelis, E. and Simpson, D. (eds.) 2003. Neolithic Settlement in Ireland and Western Britain. Oxford: Oxbow. Baillie, M.G. 1991. Marking in marker dates: towards an archaeology with historical precision. World Archaeology 23: 233-243. Barnatt, J. 1986. Bronze Age remains on the East Moors of the Peak District. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 106: 18-100. Barnatt, J. 1987a. Bronze Age settlement on the gritstone East Moors of the Peak District of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53: 393-418. Barnatt, J. 1987b. The Design and Distribution of Stone Circles in Britain: a Reflection of Socio-Political Organisation in the Second and Third Millennia BC. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Sheffield. Barnatt, J. 1990. The Henges, Stone Circles and Ring Cairns of the Peak District. Sheffield Archaeological Monographs 1. Sheffield: University of Sheffield. Barnatt, J. 1991. The prehistoric cairnfield at Highlow Bank, Derbyshire: a survey of all remains and excavation of one of the cairns, 1988. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 111: 5-30. Barnatt, J. 1994. Excavation of a Bronze Age unenclosed cemetery, cairns and field boundaries at Eaglestone Flat, Curbar, Derbyshire, 1984, 1989-90. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 60: 287-370. Barnatt, J. 1995. Neolithic and Bronze Age radiocarbon dates from the Peak District: a review. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 115: 5-19. Barnatt, J. 1996a. Moving between the monuments: Neolithic land use in the Peak District. In P. Frodsham (ed.) Neolithic Studies in No-Man's Land: Papers on the Neolithic of Northern England, from the Trent to the Tweed. Northern Archaeology 13/14, pp. 45-62. Barnatt, J. 1996b. Recent research at Peak District stone circles; including restoration work at Barbrook II and Hordron Edge and new fieldwork elsewhere. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 116: 27-48. Barnatt, J. 1996c. Barrows in the Peak District: A review and interpretation of extant sites and past excavations. In J. Barnatt and J. Collis (eds.) Barrows in the Peak District: Recent Research. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, pp. 1-94. Barnatt, J. 1998a. Monuments in the landscape: thoughts from the Peak. In A. Gibson (ed.) Prehistoric Ritual and Religion: Essays in Honour of Aubrey Burl. Stroud: Sutton, pp. 92-105. Barnatt, J. 1998b. The Chatsworth Estate Historic Landscape Survey – Chatsworth Moorlands; Archaeological Survey 1997-8. Unpublished report:

Peak District National Park Authority Cultural Heritage Team. Barnatt, J. 1999. Taming the land: Peak District farming and ritual in the Bronze Age. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 119: 19-78. Barnatt, J. 2000. To each their own: later prehistoric farming communities and their monuments in the Peak. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 120: 1-86. Barnatt, J. 2001. Trial excavations of prehistoric field boundaries on Big Moor, Baslow, Derbyshire, 1983. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 21: 63-77. Barnatt, J., Bevan, W. and Edmonds, M. 1995-2000. A Prehistoric Landscape at Gardom's Edge, Baslow, Derbyshire: Excavations. Five unpublished interim reports. Peak District National Park Authority Cultural Heritage Team/University of Sheffield. Barnatt, J, Bevan, B. and Edmonds, M. 2001. A time and place for enclosure: Gardom’s Edge, Derbyshire. In T. Darvill and J. Thomas (eds.) Neolithic Enclosures in Atlantic Northwest Europe. Neolithic Studies Group Seminar Papers 6. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 111132. Barnatt, J., Bevan, B. and Edmonds, M. 2002. Gardom’s Edge: a landscape through time. Antiquity 76: 50-56. Barnatt, J. and Smith, K. 1991. The Peak District in the Bronze Age: recent research and changes in interpretation. In R. Hodges and K. Smith (eds.) Recent Developments in the Archaeology of the Peak District. Sheffield Archaeological Monographs 2. Sheffield: University of Sheffield, pp. 23-36. Barnatt, J. and Smith, K. 2004. Peak District: Landscapes Through Time (2nd edition). Bollington: Windgather. Barrett, J.C. 1994. Fragments from Antiquity. An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900-1200 BC. Oxford: Blackwell. Beswick, P. and Merrills, D. 1983. L.H. Butcher’s survey of early settlements and fields in the Southern Pennines. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 12: 16-50. Bevan, B. 1999. Northern Exposure: interpretative devolution and the Iron Ages in Britain. In B. Bevan (ed.) Northern Exposure: Interpretative Devolution and the Iron Ages in Britain.. Leicester Archaeological Monographs 4. Leicester: University of Leicester, pp. 1-20. Bevan, B. 2000a. Peak District Romano-British Rural Upland Settlement Survey 1998-2000. Unpublished report: Peak District National Park Authority Cultural Heritage Team archive. Bevan, B. 2000b. Peak practice: whatever happened o the Iron Age in the southern Pennines? In J. Harding and R. Johnston (eds.) Northern Pasts. Interpretations of the Later Prehistory of Northern England and Southern Scotland. BAR (British Series) 302. Oxford: BAR Publishing, pp. 141-155. Bowen, H.C. 1961. Ancient Fields. A Tentative Analysis of Vanishing Earthworks and Landscapes. British Association of the Advancement of Science. London: BAAS. 65

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Fleming, A. 1978. The prehistoric landscape of Dartmoor. Part 1: South Dartmoor. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 44: 97-123. Fleming, A. 1983. The prehistoric landscape of Dartmoor. Part 2: North and East Dartmoor. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 49: 195-242. Fleming, A. 1988. The Dartmoor Reaves; Investigating Prehistoric Land Divisions. London: Batsford. Fleming, A. 1998. Prehistoric landscapes and the quest for territorial pattern. In P. Everson and T. Williamson (eds.) The Archaeology of Landscape: Studies Presented to Christopher Taylor. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 42-66. Fowler, P.J. 1983. The Farming of Prehistoric Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Garton, D. and Beswick, P. in prep. A reassessment of the artefacts from the excavations within the enclosure at Swine Sty, Big Moor, Baslow, with special reference to the pottery and flintwork. Harding, A.F. and Ostoja-Zagorski, J. 1994. Prehistoric and medieval activity on Danby Rigg, North Yorkshire. Archaeological Journal 151: 16-97. Hart, C.R. 1981. The North Derbyshire Archaeological Survey. Chesterfield: North Derbyshire Archaeological Trust. Hawke-Smith, C.F. 1979. Man-Land Relations in Prehistoric Britain: the Dove-Derwent Interfluve, Derbyshire. BAR (British Series) 64. Oxford: BAR. Heath, A.M. 2003. Prehistoric Settlement and Agriculture on the Eastern Moors of the Peak District. PhD thesis: University of Sheffield. Heathcote, J.P. 1930. Excavations at barrows on Stanton Moor. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 51: 1-44. Heathcote, J.P. 1936. Further excavations on Stanton Moor. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 57: 21-42. Heathcote, J.P. 1939. Excavations on Stanton Moor. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 60: 105-115. Heathcote, J.P. 1954. Excavations on Stanton Moor. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 74: 128-133. Henderson, A.M. 1963. Barrow no 9, Ramsley Moor. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 8: 71-76. Henderson, A.H. 1979. Mound No 7, Ramsley Moor, north-east Derbyshire. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, 10: 370-373. Hicks, S.P. 1971. Pollen analytical evidence for the effect of prehistoric agriculture on the vegetation of N. Derbyshire. New Phytologist 70: 647-667. Hicks, S.P. 1972. The impact of man on the East Moors of Derbyshire from Mesolithic times. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 129: 1-21. Hind, D. 2000. Landscape and Technology in the Peak District of Derbyshire: the Fifth and Fourth Millennia BC. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Sheffield. Hind, D. 2004. Picking up the trail: People, landscapes and technology in the Peak District of Derbyshire during the fifth and fourth millennia BC. In A.M. Chadwick (ed.) Stories from the Landscape: Archaeologies of Inhabitation. BAR (International Series) S1238. Oxford: BAR Publishing, pp. 130-176.

Bowen, H.C. and Fowler, P.J. (eds.) 1978. Early Land Allotment in the British Isles: A Survey of Recent Work. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: BAR. Bradley, R. 2003. Neolithic expectations. In I. Armit, E. Murphy, E. Nelis and D. Simpson (eds.) Neolithic Settlement in Ireland and Western Britain. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 218-222. Bradley, R. and Hart, C.R. 1983. Prehistoric settlement in the Peak District during the third and second millennia BC; a preliminary analysis in the light of recent fieldwork. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 49: 177-194. Brück, J. 1999a. What’s in a settlement? Domestic practice and residential mobility in Early Bronze Age southern England. In J. Brück and M. Goodman (eds.) Making Places in the Prehistoric World. London: UCL Press, pp. 52-75. Brück, J. 1999b. Houses, lifecycles and deposition on Middle Bronze Age settlements in southern England. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 65: 145-166. Brück, J. 2000. Settlement, landscape and social identity: the early-middle Bronze Age transition in Wessex, Sussex and the Thames valley. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 19 (3): 273-300. Brück, J and Goodman, M. 1999. Themes for a critical archaeology of prehistoric settlement. In J. Brück and M, Goodman (eds.) Making Places in the Prehistoric World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-19. Burgess, C.B. 1985. Population, climate and upland settlement. In D. Spratt and C. Burgess (eds.) Upland Settlement in Britain: the Second Millennium BC and After. BAR (British Series) 143: 195-230. Burgess, C.B. 1989.Volcanoes, catastrophes and the global crisis of the late second millennium. Current Archaeology 10: 325-329. Butler, J. 1991-1997. Dartmoor: Atlas of Antiquities (5 volumes). Tiverton: Devon Books. Caulfield, S. 1988. Céide Fields and Belderrig Guide. Killala: Morrigan Book Company. Caulfield, S., O’Donnell, R.G. and Mitchell, P.I. 1998. Radiocarbon dating of a Neolithic field system at Céide Fields, County Mayo, Ireland. Radiocarbon 40: 629-640. Coombs, D.G. and Thompson, F.H. 1979. Excavations of the hill fort of Mam Tor, Derbyshire 1965-69. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 99: 7-51. Cooney, G. 2000. Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland. London: Routledge. Edmonds, M. and Seaborne, T. 2001. Prehistory in the Peak. Stroud: Tempus. Everson, P. 1989. Field survey by RCHME on the gritstone moorlands of the Derbyshire Peak District: Stanton Moor. In A. Gibson (ed.) Midlands Prehistory: Some Recent and Current Researches into the Prehistory of Central England. BAR (British Series) 204. Oxford: BAR, pp. 14-26. Field, D. 2001. Place and memory in Bronze Age Wessex. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 57-64. 66

JOHN BARNATT: FROM CLEARANCE PLOTS TO ‘SUSTAINED’ FARMING: PEAK DISTRICT FIELDS IN PREHISTORY Ingold, T. 1986. The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Johnson, N. and Rose, P. 1994. Bodmin Moor: An Archaeological Survey. Volume 1: The Human Landscape to c. 1800. London: English Heritage and RCHME. Johnston, R. 2000. Dying, becoming and being the field: prehistoric cairnfields in Northumberland. In J. Harding and R. Johnston (eds.) Northern Pasts: Interpretations of the Later Prehistory of Northern England and Southern Scotland. BAR (British Series) 302. Oxford: BAR Publishing, pp. 57-70. Johnston, R. 2001. Breaking new ground: land tenure and fieldstone clearance during the Bronze Age. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes: Traditions and Transformations. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 99-109. Kitchen, W. 2000. Later Neolithic and Bronze Age Land Use and Settlement in the Peak District: Cairnfields in Context. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Sheffield. Kitchen, W. 2001. Tenure and territoriality in the British Bronze Age: a question of varying social and geographical scales? In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes: Traditions and Transformations. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 110-120. Long, D.J. 1994. Prehistoric Field Systems and the Vegetational Development of the Gritstone Uplands of the Peak District. Unpublished PhD thesis: Keele University. Long, D.J., Chambers, F.M. and Barnatt, J. 1998. The palaeoenvironment and the vegetation history of a later prehistoric field system at Stoke Flat on the gritstone uplands of the Peak District. Journal of Archaeological Science 25: 505-519. McOmish, D., Field, D. and Brown, G. 2002. The Field Archaeology of the Salisbury Plain Training Area. Swindon: English Heritage. Machin, M.L. 1971. Further excavations of the enclosure at Swine Sty, Big Moor, Baslow. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 10: 5-13. Machin, M.L. and Beswick, P. 1975. Further excavations of the enclosure at Swine Sty, Big Moor, Baslow, and report on the shale industry at Swine Sty. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 10: 204-211. Nowakowski, J.A. 2001. Leaving home in the Cornish Bronze Age: insights into planned abandonment processes. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 139-160. Parker-Pearson, M. 1993. Bronze Age Britain. London: Batsford/English Heritage. Peiser, B.J., Palmer, T. and Bailey, M.E. 1998. Natural Catastrophes During Bronze Age Civilisations. Archaeological, Geological, Astronomical and Cultural Perspectives. BAR (International Series) S728. Oxford: BAR Publishing. Pollard, J. 1999. ‘These places have their moments’: thoughts on settlement practices in the British Neolithic. In J. Brück and M. Goodman (eds.)

Making Places in the Prehistoric World. London: UCL Press, pp. 76-93. Pryor, F. 1998. Farmers in Prehistoric Britain. Stroud: Tempus. RCHME 1986. Stanton Moor, Derbyshire. National Monuments Record NMR no: SK 26 SW 12. Unpublished report: RCHME. RCHME 1987a. Gardom’s Edge South, Derbyshire. National Monuments Record NMR nos.: SK 27 SE 29, 161-66, 175. Unpublished report: RCHME. RCHME 1987b. Stoke Flat, Derbyshire. National Monuments Record NMR nos.: SK 27 NW 38, 60, 61. Unpublished report: RCHME. RCHME 1987c. Callow, Derbyshire. National Monuments Record NMR nos.: SK 28 SW 63, 74-76. Unpublished report: RCHME. RCHME 1987d. Dennis Knoll, Derbyshire. National Monuments Record NMR nos.: SK 28 SW 1, 68-73. Unpublished report: RCHME. RCHME 1990. Gibbet Moor, Derbyshire. National Monuments Record NMR no: SK 27 SE 22. Unpublished report: RCHME. RCHME and PPJPB 1993. An Archaeological Survey of the Northern Halves of Gardom's and Birchen Edges, Baslow, Derbyshire. National Monuments Record NMR no; SK 27 SE 98. Unpublished report: RCHME/PPJPB. Richardson, G.G.S. and Preston, F.L. 1969. Excavations at Swine Sty, Big Moor, Baslow 1967-8. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 9: 261-263. Richmond, A. 1999. Preferred Economies. The Nature of the Subsistence Base Throughout Mainland Britain during Prehistory. BAR (British Series) 290. Oxford: BAR Publishing. Riley, D.N. 1981. Barrow no. 1 on Ramsley Moor, Holmesfield, North-East Derbyshire. Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society 11, 1-13. Spratt, D.A. (ed.) 1993. Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology of North-East Yorkshire. CBA Research Report 87. London: CBA. Stahl, H.H. 1980. Traditional Romanian Village Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stanley, J. 1954. An Iron Age fort at Ball Cross Farm, Bakewell. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 74: 8599. Taylor, C. 1975. Fields in the English Landscape. London: Dent. Tipping, R. 2002. Climatic variability and ‘marginal’ settlement in upland British landscapes: a reevaluation. Landscapes 3 (2): 10-29. Wilson, A and Barnatt, J. 2004. Excavation of a prehistoric clearance cairn and ritual pits on Sir William’s Hill, Eyam Moor, Derbyshire, 2000. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 124: 13-63. Yates, D.T. 1999. Bronze Age field systems in the Thames valley. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 18 (2): 157-170. Yates, D.T. 2001. Bronze Age agricultural intensification in the Thames Valley and Estuary. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 65-82. 67

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Young, R. and Simmonds, T. 1999. Debating marginality: archaeologists on the edge? In J. Brück and M. Goodman (eds.) Making Places in the Prehistoric World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 198-212.

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Two probable Bronze Age cairns just below Catstones Rocks, Gardom’s Edge, near Baslow in Derbyshire. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Commons, fields and communities in prehistoric Cornwall Peter Herring Introduction

subdivided field systems were enclosed several hundred years earlier than in much of the rest of England (Herring 1998). The downs have been areas of common land for much longer than this.

It may still be supposed that field and boundary systems are rural societies made concrete. It does not unreasonably limit or distort our interpretations to assume that each component of a field system had a reason, meaning or function, and every field system an agricultural logic bound by economic, social, cultural, ritual and customary constraints. If prehistorians maintain an interest in the long-term development of economy, society, culture, ritual and custom then the mass of archaeological recording and analysis of fields and landscapes, mainly undertaken since Early Land Allotment appeared, is our richest source. In Cornwall this material has largely been discussed at the local level, in reports on either individual estates (e.g. Herring 1986b), or of areas like Bodmin Moor (Johnson and Rose 1994). The invitation to contribute to a conference on south-western fields, and now to this volume, has stimulated the following overview of the development of early Cornish economy and society as revealed by changes in fields and pastures.

The HLC Type of Anciently Enclosed Land comprises nearly 60% of Cornwall’s total area. This has been cleared and farmed since at least the early medieval period, and in large part since the later second millennium BC (Cornwall County Council 1996; Herring 1998). It is now a land of scattered farmsteads, churchtowns and fields enclosed by hedgebanks, with narrow and deeply cut lanes, and copses and meadows. Long, thin ancient semi-natural woodlands lie in the steep-sided valleys that dissect such areas (Fig. 2). The Anciently Enclosed Land is not just the agricultural heart of modern Cornwall, but also for the rural Cornish their apparently timeless and spiritual core landscape. Attempting to understand its genesis and layered meanings is not just a pleasurable academic exercise, but also a means of understanding one of the key elements that define modern Cornish identity. By raising awareness of the stories embedded in the Anciently Enclosed Land, we increase its value and help ensure its continued good management in a period of agricultural unease and depression.

Assumptions and generalisations cannot be avoided in the construction of such a narrative, although some are grosser than others. The underlying model suggests that from the early Neolithic period onwards there were higher levels of human and livestock population in Cornwall (and probably also Devon and west Somerset and Dorset) than normally supposed. The sophistication visible in monument and artefact design and execution also reflected a complex society. This complexity developed partly through concerted, mutually supportive and environmentally aware attempts to guide a rural population through stresses caused by its own exploitation of resources. Control of access to areas of common grazing and enclosure of it became increasingly critical through later prehistory.

The south-west contains many well-known relict prehistoric field and boundary complexes, mainly in the upland rough ground in downland areas such as Dartmoor, Exmoor, Bodmin Moor, the Lizard, West Penwith, and the Isles of Scilly. It is principally on the downlands that we find complexes of banks, lanes and enclosures, many demonstrating clear relationships with earlier ritual and ceremonial monuments, socially important natural features, and also with territorial and agricultural monuments and remains. Here too we find extensive open spaces of upland rough ground, used for summer grazing and as a source of furze and ferns for fuel and bedding (Cornwall County Council 1996).

An ancient landscape

The boundaries of these prehistoric field systems are still visible as low, stony banks with occasional upright stones (Fig. 3). The systems are usually well-defined and susceptible to analytical study (although of course we must bear in mind that excavations have shown that the stony features we survey were sometimes supplemented or preceded by wooden or turf features now invisible at the surface). Large-scale analytical surveys of most (but still not all) of these complexes have been undertaken since the appearance of Early Land Allotment, in which Charles Thomas urged historic landscape surveyors to begin their work (Thomas 1978: 15). Outline economic and social prehistories have been constructed using some of the results (e.g. Fleming 1984, 1988; Johnson and Rose 1994; Riley and Wilson-North 2001). Furthermore,

A generalised Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) of the south-west peninsula from Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Dorset westwards was undertaken in 2001 by the author, Nicholas Johnson and Ian Morrison, with help from the region’s County Archaeologists. This study confirmed that the present-day rural areas of Cornwall and Devon, and the western parts of Somerset and Dorset, form a fairly coherent ancient landscape. Here, downlands are scattered like large, medium and small yellow, brown and grey islands of molinia, furze and granite across a green sea of more closely managed lowlands (Figure 1). This pattern has existed since at least the later medieval period, when small-scale open or 70

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Figure 1. Historic Landscape Characterisation of the South-west of England. Although the simplified mapping under-represents the extent of open rough ground (a key element of the prehistoric landscape), it is clear from settlement and field patterns that the country west of Bristol is fundamentally ancient; see Fig. 2 for a more fine-grained characterisation of Cornwall. Source: Cornwall County Council.

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Figure 2. A simplified representation of the later prehistoric Cornish landscape as derived from the 1994 Historic Landscape Characterisation (for which see Cornwall County Council 1996). This shows the extents of Anciently Enclosed Land (which recent and ongoing work throughout Cornwall is confirming was extensively if not wholly occupied and cleared by the early first millennium BC), Rough Ground (where most relict prehistoric fields survive and which became the main areas of common grazing in later prehistory), and the Steep-Sided Valleys that would have held most of Cornwall’s woodland. Source: Cornwall County Council.

Figure 3. Typical surviving form of a prehistoric field boundary on the granite uplands; the perimeter of the East Moor coaxial field system. Excavations confirmed that this post-dated the early Bronze Age Clitters Cairn, visible in the foreground (Brisbane and Clews 1979; see also Fig. 14). Excavations on Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor suggest that such boundaries were often originally built with good battered faces; surviving orthostats suggest minimum heights exceeded 1.1 metres. Source: Graeme Kirkham.

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PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL (Johnson and Rose 1994, map 1 and figs. 30 and 42), probably reveal the presence and movement of livestock. It probably also implies the use of rough land in common, and the growing of crops or hay in fields from which animals had to be seasonally excluded. Funnel shapes and swellings in the lanes appear to have been carefully designed, and their simplest interpretation is as stock handling areas. Long, stock-proof boundaries on downlands and cliff tops also suggest managed pastoralism.

Figure 4. Later prehistoric lynchet at Rosemergy, Morvah in west Cornwall. A later (medieval) boundary rides onto the lynchet from the centre left (ranging pole 2.0 metres high). Source: P. Herring.

archaeological interventions in lowland Cornwall and Devon have produced more fragmentary but nevertheless equally important evidence of fields, boundaries and land use. They enable us to place the better surviving upland evidence in a wider context.

Although mindful of geographical determinism, we can examine a topographically diverse landscape like the coastal strip between St Ives and St Just in west Cornwall, and observe the range of resources that were available to the inhabitants of later prehistoric settlements during the first millennium BC. The ‘hamlets’ here each worked long and carefully laid-out ribbons of land, running from the sea to the heights of an inland ridge. These ribbons incorporated fertile coastal plateau land (where most of the fields that still survive were laid out), and above and below this segments of the downlands and cliff tops, where animals could have been turned out. Other resources would have been obtained from the foreshore, cliffs and shallow valleys (Fig. 5).

Prehistoric landscape archaeology has moved towards generally more subjective approaches than the largely functional ones of the 1970s and 1980s. Particularly rewarding is the search for what could be termed ‘landscape design’, deliberately referring to the use of clever visual devices similar to those employed by eighteenth and early nineteenth century AD landscape artists like Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphrey Repton. Although the social, economic, political and cultural contexts of the early second millennium BC are wildly different from those of the late second millennium AD, some types of landscape design employed in the two worlds are strikingly similar. And both sent messages to the whole of an area’s population, not just elites, and so drew on more universal (or communal) meanings in the landscapes they remodelled. As such they were multilayered in their meanings. Bronze Age landscape design usually involved the careful and meaningful positioning of monuments, including fields and roundhouses. It also included manipulating ways of moving around, usually in relation to earlier monuments or culturally significant natural features, like springs, rivers, lakes and tors. This might have been intended in some instances to control sight, revelation and access for visitors and initiates, and to convey special knowledge about the natural and inherited cultural landscape in order to establish or confirm status and territoriality (e.g. Tilley 1994).

Sense and sensibility – drawing the stories out Lacking the documentation we have to inform and guide our understanding of medieval and post-medieval field systems, it might be considered that we could only interpret the economic practices and social structures that created prehistoric fields in the most circumspect manner. Land-use systems and husbandry practices can be inferred from field and boundary systems, though of course we must be cautious when applying modern perceptions of function and economy to remains left by societies whose motivations may be modelled but not definitively reconstructed (q.v. Quinnell 1994). Nevertheless, south-western prehistoric field systems do contain features that suggest basic husbandry practices. Positive and negative lynchets (Fig. 4), and stone clearance heaps probably indicate the breaking and working of the soil, and the growing of crops. Lanes running from settlements and through groups of enclosures to reach undivided open ground beyond, as at East Moor and Craddock Moor on Bodmin Moor 73

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Figure 5. Looking west across Towednack and Zennor parishes in west Cornwall. Detailed analytical survey has confirmed that later prehistoric ribbon-shaped ‘townlands’ ran perpendicularly from the coast and its cliff pastures, across the coastal plateau where modern farmers still reuse the prehistoric fields, and onto the downlands at the left. Townland boundaries were often the shallow valleys, but were sometimes built walls, still fossilised in the present field pattern. Source: Steve Hartgroves, Historic Environment Service, Cornwall County Council.

The first two of three simplified examples of early prehistoric landscape design identified on Bodmin Moor presented here involve both long chronologies indicating continued or evolving meaning and relevance, and also the involvement of fields and settlements in later stages of the design.

(Fig. 7). Two of these tors were later incorporated into Bronze Age cairns. A ring cairn encircled the fantastic pile of large, weathered slabs making up Showery Tor, and Little Roughtor was submerged and effectively lost within a massive cairn. The third tor, another pile of weathered natural slabs, was unfortunately partially dismantled by post-medieval stone splitters. Any possible archaeological remains there have thus been lost. The bank cairn later served as some sort of symbolic divide between the northern part of Roughtor where there were numerous cairns, and the southern part where scores of probable middle Bronze Age houses and enclosures were constructed. It has been suggested that the bank cairn itself might have been created as a metaphorical continuation along the north edge of the better-drained western slopes of Roughtor of the rocky skyline of the hill itself (Cathy Parkes pers. comm.). Each of the 107 roundhouses was carefully positioned so that the bank cairn formed a long stony skylined feature to the north.

On Leskernick Hill, a simple quoit through whose chamber the midsummer sunset could be observed was built on a low tor sometime before the early fourth millennium BC. This was when an early Neolithic long mound was built nearly a kilometre away on the lower slopes of Beacon Hill. The long mound was aligned on the earlier quoit so that the midsummer sun set behind it, and was sited so that the topmost stones of Showery Tor (see below) were also visible above the distant skyline of High Moor. The quoit–long mound alignment was still relevant to local people two thousand years later, when first a stone circle recently dated to the early second millennium BC (Barbara Bender pers. comm.) and then a barrow were built along it. Finally, two inter-related middle Bronze Age settlements on the southern and western slopes were constructed to respect the stone circle and quoit respectively (Fig. 6). The fields of the southern settlement were carefully kept a certain distance from the circle, and the houses of the western settlement were positioned so that the quoit formed the dominant landscape feature above them (see Herring 1997a for details).

On a slope where numerous undulations close off many views of the bank cairn, this relationship between houses and cairn appears to be deliberate and significant. It transforms our appreciation of a well-known settlement, which previously appeared to be a fairly casual scattering of houses and enclosures along a favoured slope. Now we realise that each house was nicely sited in relation to a still important monument (Herring and Kirkham forthcoming).

On the lower western slopes of Roughtor, a bank cairn of presumed later Neolithic date comprised three straight lengths, each carefully aligned on a different one of three separate prominent tors spaced along the ridge of the hill

In a ground-breaking paper, Chris Tilley has drawn attention to the careful placing of the southern cairn on Brown Gelly’s wide summit plateau. It was positioned at the point where people progressing up from the hill’s 74

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Figure 6. Leskernick and Beacon Hills, Altarnun. A 1.8m tall person would see the midsummer sun set behind the quoit when standing immediately uphill of the long mound in or around 3687 BC. The northern stone circle was built on this alignment around two thousand years later, in the early second millennium BC. People in the eastern settlement would have been able to look down on to this circle and their spreading fields appear to have been kept at a respectful distance from it. Source: Herring 1997a: fig. 1.

Figure 7. The lowest, northwestern length of the bank cairn on Roughtor, St Breward, possibly terminated here with a trapezoidal long cairn. It is aligned on the sky-lined ‘cheesewring’ of Showery Tor, a natural pile of weathered granite slabs that was later encircled by a massive ring cairn. The Scottish Blackface sheep provide a useful scale for the bank cairn, which in its spread form reaches 7.0m wide. Source: Graeme Kirkham.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 8. The summit of Brown Gelly, St Neot, a flat plateau on which the builders could have arranged the four large Bronze Age cairns as they wished, but chose to lay them out so that when the southern one (whose lower stones are visible in the foreground) was reached when walking up from a small tor the other three both framed and mimicked the forms of Bodmin Moor’s two principal hills, or mountains, Roughtor (left) and Brown Willy. Roughtor’s complex profile was represented by two rimmed-platform cairns and Brown Willy’s more massive bulk by the simpler mound. From the top of the ‘Brown Willy’ cairn the centre of the western ‘Roughtor’ cairn is on approximately the same alignment as the summits of the two hills they mimic. Source: P. Herring.

only tor, located partway up the south side, obtain their first glimpse of Roughtor some nine kilometres to the north (Tilley 1995: 44). While displaying this relationship to members of the Devon Archaeological Society during a field trip, one of their number, Brian Tugwell, pointed out that the arrangement of the other cairns on the plateau when seen from this southern cairn not only framed the view of Bodmin Moor’s two great mountains, Brown Willy and Roughtor, but the shapes of the cairns mimicked the profiles of the hills themselves (Fig. 8). Furthermore, it has since been noticed that the orientation of the ‘Roughtor’ cairn from the ‘Brown Willy’ cairn echoes that of the summits of the real hills. So at Brown Gelly there was framing of a significant view, representation of that view in the form of the cairns, and perhaps even a form of mapping of the relationship of the view’s principal components. A similar framing and mimicking of Brown Willy and Roughtor by large hilltop cairns has also been noticed on Carburrow Tor, Warleggan.

unencumbered by walls or hedges, and through which their movement had been unrestricted. We should examine a field system like that at Leskernick not just for its possible agricultural economy, but also for landscape design and responses to either earlier created or natural features. We must seek out and record the remains of the interplay between what we might call mundane and ritual behaviour, and confirm that little was (and is) entirely mundane, or indeed entirely sacred (Bender, Hamilton and Tilley 1995). We should speculate about how people may have viewed themselves as growing and gradually ageing individuals, and as members of intersecting and ever-changing communities. What did the respect shown for the physical remains left by former people represent? Was this their younger selves, former members of their families or communities, or people they knew only through consideration of those remains? Did this reflect a linear rather than a cyclical view of time, and thus a surprisingly positivist or progressive view of their own place in history?

Using such observations we can develop the confidence to model the way prehistoric people moved through the landscape, and by pondering past perceptions we may try to empathise with past communities and individuals. We can for example, imagine what the construction of enclosures or excluding boundaries might have meant to people who had not previously either created or encountered the deliberate physical division of space – space that had perhaps previously always been open and

These approaches all bring richness to our understanding of prehistoric landscapes and the people who created them, but do tend to be quite particular, celebrating prehistoric responses to certain places. Andrew Fleming, in two important papers, has insisted that for prehistoric landscape design to be incorporated into wider archaeological model building, there is a need to ensure that its presentation, while remaining necessarily subjective, does not fail on the basis that it can be easily 76

PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL dismissed as unprovable personal opinion. High standards of phenomenological recording are required, as well as clear presentation of observations, analytical transparency and proper critical consideration of all alternative explanations (see Fleming 1999, 2005). Each of the three examples given above has been presented to critical audiences in the course of open archaeological field visits, one of the most vivid and powerful forms of publication and peer review of such experiential matters.

2.

Also, we should not lose sight of the agricultural, economic and social aspects of prehistoric life, and field and boundary systems provide probably the clearest way of observing these. The growing of crops and management of livestock would always have entailed the following, however loosely, of daily routines, seasonal calendars and life cycles, and thus would have always involved a degree of extra-cultural determinism of behaviour. We may believe that field and boundary patterns were closer to being monuments than was previously thought, and so can search for the evidence and meanings of careful design, but we should also take the opportunity to reconstruct and deconstruct economies and societies from them. Effective agriculture would have involved the construction of a physical infrastructure to control animals, and to set out the units of either separately held (or owned) plots, and shared land.

3.

We can recognise the products of social organisation from the early Neolithic period onwards, most obviously through the communal labour used in the construction of quoits, long cairns, stone circles and other monuments. We also suspect from artefacts and burial practices that prehistoric British society was not egalitarian. When we try to focus on the details of social structure, however, we find it difficult to use barrows or artefacts to say more than that some people appear to have had greater status, wealth or power.

4.

However, because in order to be viable prehistoric farmers both co-operated and shared certain resources, they created patterns of boundaries to organise access to, and use of land. Analysis of those patterns of boundaries and field systems allows us to identify the key elements of that organisation, and so obtain as clear and complex a view of prehistoric social structure as it is possible to get. As such, field systems really are social structures made concrete. This has been most vividly demonstrated by Andrew Fleming’s interpretation of the Dartmoor reaves, the extensive boundary patterns laid out in the midsecond millennium BC. Five levels of rural society were identified with some confidence, and the universality of their organisational roles within rural pre-industrial societies was proposed (Fleming 1984, 1988). The levels can be sought and usually recognised in all subsequent field systems or organised landscapes in Cornwall and Devon, and in some earlier ones too. The following notes on this possible layered social structure are based on Andrew’s work, with some additional comments. 1.

5.

The individual. Young or old, male or female, healthy or sick, cheerful or downhearted. The 77

focus of all interesting tensions. Most prehistoric households appear to have accommodated more than one individual. The household. Perhaps the basic economic unit, and possibly, but by no means certainly, a nuclear or extended family. Visible in the Dartmoor reaves through ruined roundhouses (both timber and stone), and associated groups of two or three enclosures, often secondary to the main framework of the parallel (co-axial) reaves. The co-operative group. These were groupings of households sharing resources and probably sharing their labour, and undertaking activities beyond the ability of single households to accomplish. Their communalism and cooperation made life viable for households of differing age structure, health and competence. This can be seen as loose groupings of roundhouses within the parallel reaves. As noted, individual houses tend to have had their own smaller enclosures around them making the settlements loosely dispersed (Fig. 9). That many Bronze Age settlements on Dartmoor were not nucleated suggests that individual households’ fields were not intermixed, and that the parallel reaves at least appear not to have been used like medieval strip fields. The community. These were groupings of individuals, households and co-operative groups, brought together to serve numerous social and economic functions. The closest historical analogy to this is the medieval parish. Each parallel or co-axial reave system contained several co-operative groups, but each system shared the same axis. Gang junctions in some reaves suggest that each co-operative group was in some way responsible for building their part of the system, but that they were also conscious of the community’s orientation of the whole pattern. The community may also be visible in the way that unenclosed ground within a coaxial system’s territory was shared between cooperative groups. The community is more clearly visible in the co-axial reaves than in any other prehistoric structure, but once seen here its presence is felt in earlier monuments like stone circles, and later ones like local hillforts. The district authority/council. The co-axial field systems of several communities were arranged around apparently shared resources such as the upland rough pastures of southern, northern and eastern Dartmoor. This was done in such a coherent way that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the whole reave system as anything other than the product of decisions made at a pan-Dartmoor level (Fig. 10). The pastures were undivided, and were presumably available to all the inhabitants of the reave systems (and perhaps also to other farmers living beyond Dartmoor). They may best be seen as commons, and the members of the communities

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 9. The Holne Moor part of the Dartmeet reave system of the second millennium BC. Four loose clusters of round houses appear to represent co-operative groups (containing both individuals and households) who adapted the coaxial field pattern laid out by all those groups that formed a single ‘community’ to suit their needs. Note how the terminal reave (Venford Reave) respects a stone row. Source: P. Herring, adapted from Fleming 1988: fig. 34.

who set out the reave systems as commoners. That the whole reave system depended from the positioning of the co-axials in relation to therough pastures suggests that these were already a critical resource by the middle Bronze Age. It seems to have been in the interests of all levels of society that access to summer grazing was carefully controlled, so there is no need to insist that the organisation of access to them was imposed in any authoritarian way. A form of council may have worked at least as well, and the sensitivity of the layout of the reave system may indicate that it was indeed established by people who knew the lie of the land well, and who had an interest in the effectiveness of the arrangements.

Identification of the district authority or council’s ability to oversee the design, construction and running of such an extensive field system as the Dartmoor reaves – because the whole Moor contains one coherent system (with co-axials radiating from two or more upland commons) – is important for the remainder of this paper. We have at the district authority/council level a body capable of undertaking, on behalf of the whole of society, further significant reorganisations of the rural world. Recognition of an integrated, coherent, flexible and understandable rural social structure that was capable of being transformed enriches prehistoric interpretation. By locating fine-grained phenomenological recording and analysis of the particular within processualism’s general scheme I believe that we diminish neither of these approaches, but rather enhance both. I will show that the pursuit of landscape design has thrown unexpected light on early Bronze Age land use. And whilst the tentative reconstructions of prehistoric ways of experiencing 78

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Figure 10. Co-axial field systems (representing ‘communities’) arranged around the shared rough pastures of the North, East and South Moors so coherently that they suggest a pan-Dartmoor agreement to provide access to these resources, which may have been regarded as commons. Source: P. Herring, adapted from Fleming 1988: fig. 30.

house, field, open space and wider world are created by imaginative modern minds, they undermine inflexible, over-simplified and ruthlessly imposed models of social structure and change. They revitalise and empower individual prehistoric people, and emphasise the breadth and depth of their knowledge of their world. This addsweight to my suggestion that prehistoric power was often directed from the bottom up, and not, as traditionally assumed, from the top down.

The following rapid review of Cornish prehistoric fields, from the Neolithic through to the immediate post-Roman period, develops these themes and creates a narrative history. This narrative hinges on the changing roles of individuals, households, co-operative groups, communities and district authorities/councils, and enables some direct links to be made between prehistoric fields and their succeeding medieval ones.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Analytical surveys of fields and boundary patterns such as those undertaken by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit (now Cornwall County Council’s Historic Environment Service) since the late 1970s have revealed changing relations between the levels of rural social structure. Through them we can discern the development of key elements of later prehistoric and early medieval society – the ‘king’ (at the district authority/council level), the estate (at the community level), the hamlet (co-operative group), and the peasant (individual/household). In the absence of any significant Roman disruption, it is possible to see a series of key reorganisations, from the middle Bronze Age to the early medieval period, each apparently adopted by all or most of Cornish society. Each can be interpreted as a reasonable agricultural and social response to developing pressures on regional and local farming systems. This overtly processual approach to prehistory is grounded in the observation of four clearly different and superimposed settlement and field patterns that can be identified and assigned to different periods. With the possible exception of the last, each can be best interpreted not as impositions from new or ‘outside’ cultures, but as responses to changing pressures on resources that previous ones had less effectively dealt with. They can also be thought of as reflections of related changes in the locus of agricultural and social responsibility, effectively the development of tenurial arrangements. Each appears to have been regional rather than just local in its extent, and so cannot be dealt with in a particularistic way. It is inevitable then that we must work on a large canvas, and to some extent with a broad brush. To present such a long history here has inevitably involved simplification, but the reader will be aware that what is presented is a model framework which contextualises the great variety in Cornish prehistoric activity. It should be clear for instance, where specialisation, trade and ritual/symbolic meanings can be incorporated into the model.

really were cultivated, and if they did not have fences around them. It would be interesting if Cornwall really did have unusually early cultivation and exploitation of agricultural resources, at least for mainland Britain, though it must be stressed that the evidence for any early Neolithic agriculture in Cornwall is not conclusive. There are hints in various other activities recorded in the excavated hilltop enclosures of Carn Brea and Helman Tor that Cornwall had a particularly active and complex early Neolithic, certainly when compared with central southern England (Mercer 1997: 56-7; Thomas 1991). Elsewhere in Cornwall there are largish, irregularly oval or subrectangular enclosures, though perhaps rather later than the early Neolithic. Low, stony banks define these enclosures, some attached to each other, and some with clearance heaps (therefore probably used for agriculture), but none with stone walled houses. In the north-west part of Bodmin Moor a few of these have been identified through field survey as pre-dating late Neolithic or early Bronze Age monuments that seem to have been built on top of them, perhaps deliberately. This has not been confirmed through excavation however. The most significant enclosures may be those on Roughtor, where one seems to lie beneath (and so pre-date) the bank cairn mentioned above. Others pre-date a group of round cairns, probably early second millennium in age, some of which were built on the enclosure banks (Johnson and Rose 1994, fig. 30) (Fig. 11). Unfortunately, it is not easy to use such enclosures to identify social structure without the visible remains of settlements. It might tentatively be suggested though that the early Neolithic hilltop enclosures (with possible wooden structures or houses only used occasionally) could be equated with the district authority/council. These might have been used as gathering places for a range of activities from rituals, ceremonies, gossip and pleasure taking, to exchange, to dispute resolution, and perhaps to partner acquisition. The early Neolithic quoits and long cairns, and the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age stone circles and stone rows (Mercer 1986) might, considering the density of their distribution, be seen as products and signals of the community. Whether a Cornish Neolithic society that was more sedentary and more complex than that further east included autonomous individuals and households, or whether its basic economic and social unit derived from Mesolithic bandlike structures that may be seen as proto-co-operative groups, is currently beyond modelling.

Early agriculture In Early Land Allotment both Charles Thomas and Roger Mercer drew attention to indications of very early cultivation on the higher slopes of Carn Brea, within and near the famous early Neolithic hilltop enclosure. Small heaps of cleared stones were found in a soil that appeared to have been worked, and whose lower layers contained only Neolithic artefacts (Mercer 1978, 1981; Thomas 1978). Interpretation of this soil is in need of critical review (Andy M. Jones pers. comm.). More recently, however, Dave Hooley (working as an English Heritage MPP Archaeologist) has identified potentially similar cleared (but unenclosed?) areas on the slopes of another significant hill with a probable Neolithic hilltop enclosure on Bodmin Moor, on Stowe’s Hill (Dave Hooley, pers. comm.). Similar cleared areas have also been noted by Hooley on Langstone Downs (ibid.), and by Sandy Gerrard on Roos Tor and at Trowlesworthy on Dartmoor (Gerrard 1997: 27). These cleared areas need excavation and soil micromorphological analysis to ascertain if they really were a product of the fourth millennium BC, if they

Roughtor’s oval enclosures, tentatively dated by relative chronology to at least as early as the later Neolithic period may, if they are not ritual or funerary enclosures, be precursors of the ‘pastoral’ enclosures of the Bronze Age (see below). They could have been used either as pens/pounds, or as settlement enclosures/gardens. The low positive lynchets along the lower boundaries of some need not have derived from cultivation, as soil can also migrate downslope due to pastoral use. Archaeological 80

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Figure 11. Small and possibly early enclosures on the higher north-western slopes of Roughtor, St Breward. Enclosure A appears (without excavation) to be overlain by the probably Neolithic bank cairn while enclosures B, C and D appear to be overlain by early Bronze Age round cairns. Source: Bodmin Moor Survey air photo transcription, SX 1481; © English Heritage.

interventions in lowland Cornwall are turning up fragmentary remains of Neolithic activity, such as early Neolithic pits at Portscatho (Andy M. Jones pers. comm.); and later pits with Grooved Ware at sites such as Probus (Jones and Nowakowski 1997), along the Trevone to Padstow pipeline (Andy M. Jones pers. comm.), and at Tremough (Gossip and Jones forthcoming). As yet, however, there are no settlements with houses. It seems that the lowland forests (or wood pastures) of Cornwall were being at least partially cleared, and the land perhaps farmed, by the later Neolithic period, with some parts of the uplands already being used mainly for grazing livestock. A recent review of the palynological evidence for Bodmin Moor indicates that the Neolithic clearance of woodland on the Moor was patchy. The great hill of Roughtor was fairly clear of trees by the later Neolithic period, but Stannon itself, just a mile away, was still largely wooded then (A.M. Jones pers. comm.; Jones forthcoming).

charcoal from beneath these cairns gave a series of dates from the first half of the second millennium BC. The soils indicated that the Colliford part of Bodmin Moor had communities of grass, heather/ling and bracken, but no nearby woodland. The mosaic of herbs, none except the bracken of any great height, was determined by varying intensities of grazing (Maltby and Caseldine 1984: 94-111). Upland grazing cleared of trees may have already been perceived as a finite resource by the middle Bronze Age. To maintain treeless vegetation cover requires fairly high levels of grazing. If DEFRA’s Countryside Stewardship scheme can be used as a guide (DEFRA 2002: 33), the 20 000 hectares of rough pastures of Bodmin Moor (the granite area) would require at least 5000 dairy or beef cows, or horses, or 8333 yearling cattle or ponies, or 50 000 sheep, of modern breeds, to maintain relatively open heathland. Numbers of prehistoric animals can be expected to have been significantly higher. This is significant when considering demographic and agricultural pressures from the middle Bronze Age period onwards in Cornwall and Devon.

The use of ‘landscape design’ with views across all parts of the upland country (and not just along a few restricted viewing lines), as mentioned above, suggests that significant parts of the landscape were open during the middle Bronze Age around 1500-1200 BC. The vegetation communities may have been as open and lowlying as on most commons today. At Colliford, pollen analyses were undertaken of soils buried beneath cairns excavated in advance of the building of a reservoir. Oak

Roundhouses and enclosures Judging from the frustratingly few excavations, from the second and third quarters of the second millennium BC a 81

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT variety of field and boundary systems on the Cornish uplands were associated with settlements of stone walled roundhouses, the ‘hut circles’ of the Ordnance Survey and traditional literature (for reviews of settlement form and chronology see Johnson 1980a and Johnson and Rose 1994). Recent excavations of houses associated with enclosures and fields at Leskernick have produced a range of radiocarbon dates in the middle centuries of the second millennium BC (B. Bender pers. comm.).

life (Nowakowski 1991, 2001), suggesting that later people might not have felt it proper to reuse such carefully decommissioned buildings. Settlements need not, therefore, have been anywhere near as large as they now appear to be. It may even be reasonable to propose that these were the seasonal homes of co-operative groups whose principal homes were in lowland Cornwall. Closer to modern conceptions of neat workaday field systems are the patterns of curvilinear enclosures attached to each other, at sites like Craddock Moor, Leskernick East and Newel Tor. Here there are discernible lynchets, and the fields are laid out on south-facing, relatively stone-free slopes (Fig. 12). People appear to have grown crops, as positive lynchets, stone clearance heaps, and stock-proof boundaries to keep livestock from fields all suggest. They also kept and carefully managed animals – the Craddock Moor lanes all have the distinctive widenings of stock processing areas. They practised a form of mixed agriculture but, given the balance between enclosed land and rough ground, livestock raising was probably still dominant.

At one end of the range in variety of settlement and enclosure patterns on Bodmin Moor are the 29 sites like Stanninghill and Catshole, mostly found in the heart of the Moor, which have groups of fairly closely spaced houses, but no enclosures. Set on the middle or higher slopes of hills, away from local tin-bearing streams, these are most realistically interpreted as the seasonal (summer) homes of people practising a pastoral economy. Close to these in form, and again mainly either in the heart of the Moor or on the higher, more exposed hills, are sites with a few small and irregular enclosures associated, like Blacktor which has 88 houses (Johnson and Rose 1994: fig. 39). At Brockabarrow Common, 61 roundhouses are associated with a scatter of small but more substantially built enclosures (ibid.: fig. 11). The Blacktor and Brockabarrow enclosures might have been used as gardens rather than as stock pens, but even if they were used for cultivation, the settlements could still be seen as essentially pastoral and seasonally occupied. The same could be said for the settlements with one or two larger enclosures, as on the western and southern slopes of Roughtor, or the west side of Leskernick, one house of which has been recently dated to the middle Bronze Age (B. Bender pers. comm.) (Fig. 13).

A group of apparently relatively independent households developed at Craddock Moor, each with its own enclosures (Fig. 12). They were brought together into a co-operative group by sharing rough grazing beyond the fields, a form of common, almost certainly also shared with several other similar groups in south-east Bodmin Moor, who together would have made up a community. The Craddock Moor settlement, field system and common, a probably pre-co-axial layout, display the lowest four levels of rural social organisation discussed earlier: the household and its constituent individuals, the co-operative group, and the community.

As Johnson and Rose have demonstrated (1994: 49-55, figs. 34, 35), there is considerable variety among the buildings in these settlements. Factors such as overall size, internal diameter, walling styles, and the presence or absence of porches may reflect, among other things, development/chronology, the size and status of the household or occupant, and function. At Leskernick and some other Bodmin Moor sites, houses can also be divided according to whether floors have been carefully levelled into the slope, or have been left sloping. Not enough excavations have been carried out to establish whether the former were dwellings (the level floor providing a good surface for domestic activity), and the latter ancillary buildings such as animal houses or stores.

Returning to the variety of surviving settlement and enclosure types, we can note their generally complementary distributions on Bodmin Moor (Fig. 13). In addition there is more palynological evidence for middle Bronze Age cultivation nearer the edge of Bodmin Moor or in sheltered positions on it. For example there is evidence in the De Lank valley (Jones and Tinsley 2000-2001), but none on the more exposed Stannon Down (Jones forthcoming). This may suggest that some or many were roughly contemporary, and also that settlement variety reflects different types of agricultural specialisation. Lowland Cornwall was also increasingly settled by the middle Bronze Age; most of our evidence for this has been gathered in the past twenty years during archaeological works undertaken in conjunction with various forms of development. Sites include the hamlet at Trethellan (Nowakowski 1991), houses at Callestick (Jones 1998-9), Mitchell (Jones and Taylor 2004), Boden Vean (Gossip forthcoming) and Scarcewater (Sean Taylor pers. comm.). Though often less clearly defined than the moorland settlements, these too may also have been specialised. If specialisation was so extensive, the organisation of the exchange of its products can be expected to have fallen to the community or district authority/council level of rural organisation.

There is no need to imagine that all houses were dwellings, or to suppose that all were occupied at any one time. A functionalist interpretation would be that there would have been a time when all were used at once because new ones would not have been built while walls of old houses could have been reused, but this is not certain. Some settlements have clear evidence of chronological depth, with houses or enclosure walls overlying each other, as on the west slopes of Roughtor. There is also good contextual evidence that some houses were ritually closed down at the end of their household’s 82

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Figure 12. Craddock Moor, St Cleer; a well-defined cooperative group, probably of the early or mid second millennium BC. Curvilinear enclosures, lynchetted on their downhill sides and clearly laid out through accretive development, appear to be directly associated with particular households, suggesting a form of private property. Walled lanes, with splays probably used in livestock processing, run out from two houses through the fields to rough grazing probably used by all these households, and those from other nearby cooperative groups, in common. Source: Steve Hartgroves, Historic Environment Service, Cornwall County Council.

Figure 13. Surviving prehistoric settlements and field systems on Bodmin Moor (with those mentioned in the text labelled). Note how the rectilinear or coaxial fields tend to be towards the edge of the Moor, leaving the possibly earlier curvilinear fields such as Craddock Moor beyond them and the central part an open common, as on Dartmoor (see Fig. 10). It is here that most of those ‘pastoral’ or transhumant settlements with either no enclosures or just small pen or garden-like enclosures are found. Source: P. Herring, adapted from Herring and Rose 2001: 33.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT An alternative interpretation of the settlement variety to specialisation, preferred here because it fits better within the long-term pattern and process of south-west land organisation, would involve a key role for the ‘district authority/council’. The two explanations however, neednot be mutually exclusive. Seasonal settlements on Bodmin Moor would be a key part of an agricultural system in many respects similar to those dominating medieval and post-medieval northern and western Britain, where transhumance was crucial. Removal of livestock from fields with crops and hay was as important as making effective use of both the fields themselves and the rough grazing available, principally in the summer months (May to October). People accompanied animals to the uplands to process their milk as much as to ensure their security (Herring 1996).

1987c; Johns and Herring 1996). They tend to be more fragmentary than the Dartmoor reaves, many being in what is now less marginal country and so overlain by later fields. In the more coherent systems, however, the same five levels of rural society discussed for Dartmoor can be identified. At East Moor (Fig. 14) and east Zennor, pairs of co-axial systems (with the individual, household, co-operative group and community levels visible) meet and together define the corners of large areas of upland rough grazing, organised by the district authority/council.

Some or even most of the ‘pastoral’ settlements (mainly on Bodmin Moor) could also have been associated with prehistoric summer grazing later than the middle Bronze Age. Excavations at Garrow (Herring 1986a) and Stannon (Jones forthcoming) have found Iron Age reuse of Bronze Age structures, of houses and a ring cairn respectively. Many settlements have smaller, later houses tucked inside the sheltering walls of earlier larger ones, as at Holne Moor on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988, fig. 44) and at Roughtor, Leskernick and Garrow among others on Bodmin Moor (Herring 1979). Implicit in the foregoing discussion is a prediction that, as we continue to undertake archaeological investigations in lowland Cornwall where preservation is likely to have been far more fragmentary, we should nevertheless encounter traces of more middle Bonze Age settlements, in addition to those mentioned above. These could be substantial, being the ‘home’ or year-round bases of the households that used the moorland settlements seasonally. Associated field systems should be relatively intensively used, but perhaps similar in pattern to those at Craddock Moor and Leskernick (i.e. accretive and curvilinear). The moorland fields could be regarded as colonising attempts to push cultivation onto the more exposed land, and thus a reflection of pressure on lowland resources.

Figure 14. Two coaxial field systems on East Moor, Altarnun; the one on Ridge (to the left, south-west) appears to abut that on Clitters Tor. Note the small cluster of round houses (a cooperative group) associated with enclosures secondary to the primary coaxial boundaries, the two lanes leading through the fields to the common pastures of Bodmin Moor visible at the top left, and the way the perimeter boundary of the Clitters system deliberately curved towards and incorporated the large earlier Bronze Age Clitters Cairn (see Fig. 3 and Brisbane and Clews 1979). National Monuments Record AC SX2478/3/190, 8th April 1976. Crown Copyright, used with permission.

The Dartmoor reaves are therefore not unique, but are the south-west’s most complete survivals of a region-wide, middle Bronze Age type of field system. Whatever they represent or mean appears to apply to either much of or even the entire region. Although fragmentary, the Cornish co-axials are more similar to the Dartmoor examples than commonly supposed – edging open commons with attached terminals, having nicely parallel boundaries, and displaying all the layers of society visible as on Dartmoor. (The principal difference was in terrain obliviousness of design, mentioned below.) The wooden fences found beneath some Dartmoor reaves (Fleming 1988: 86) may have been a more typical form of boundary, if co-axial fields were also established in the cleared parts of lowland Cornwall where surface stone would have been less available. Lowland Cornwall is largely formed of sedimentary rocks, which lie not at the

Mid-second millennium BC reorganisation The coherence of the Dartmoor-wide creation and organisation of the reave systems indicates a major change there in the middle centuries of the second millennium. Since the 1970s other parallel-banked or coaxial field systems have been recorded in Cornwall, lowland Devon and on Exmoor (Herring 2001). They appear to be of similar date to the reaves (mid-second millennium BC or later), and although there has been very little excavation of them, they do fit into the right phase of local relative chronologies, as surveyed. These systems are found mainly in upland areas but have also been recognised on coastal rough ground, such as Lowland Point in St Keverne, and Bosigran, Zennor Head and Treveal in West Penwith (Herring 1986b, 1987a, 84

PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL surface but are encountered only through fairly deep digging, and unlike granite they are not the stones of monuments. The lowlands would, however, have had more plentiful wood for fencing or, indeed, the plants that could have been used for hedging (Andrew Fleming pers. comm.). Any remains would therefore be substantially less easy to find, even without the effects of hundreds or thousands of years of subsequent cultivation.

There is thus a functional basis to the orientation of south-western systems which makes it unsurprising that there is no apparent preferred orientation, beyond perhaps slight preferences against orientations due north-south, as shown in the following table. Avoidance of shaded and exposed north-facing slopes might provide a simple explanation for the smaller number of north-south alignments.

Work by Dave McOmish, Graham Brown and Dave Field of English Heritage on Salisbury Plain, and by Christopher Taylor (formerly of RCHME) on parts of the Dorset downs, has identified possible preferred alignments to prehistoric co-axial field systems (e.g. Field 2001; McOmish, Field and Brown 2002). These might have echoed the orientations of earlier, more discrete monuments. Was there similar design in the form of preferred orientation in the co-axial field systems of south-western Britain? It is worth noting immediately that the Cornish co-axial field systems were not constructed remorselessly across the landscape, and so were less ‘terrain oblivious’ than those on Dartmoor which cut across hills and gorges (Fleming 1988). The Dartmoor co-axials are however, only terrain oblivious within a dominant orientation, this predicated upon being perpendicular to terminals that are themselves boundaries against upland grazing. The parallel reaves’ alignments depended on the terminal reaves, and the terminal reaves encircled the uplands and formed ‘edges’ against the higher ground. So the overall orientations do quite clearly reflect Dartmoor’s topography (ibid.: fig. 30; Fig. 10).

The extent of co-axial field systems, the labour involved in their creation, and their impact on previously open landscapes makes it likely that they were regarded as monuments as much as locales for agricultural activity. They were clearly the carefully designed products of peoples’ decisions, and may also have been regarded as impositions on a world previously open, where movement had been relatively unrestricted. It seems unlikely that co-axial patterns were ruthlessly imposed, especially when we see how sensitive their builders were to the monuments of previous local populations, monuments that may themselves have served in part as customary markers of territory or pastures. Stone rows were respected by the builders of terminal reaves on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988: fig. 24), and cairns were carefully incorporated into terminal banks at East Moor and in east Zennor (Brisbane and Clews 1979; Herring 1987b).

Locations Dartmoor1 Meldon Cosdon Gidleigh Meldon NW Stannon Shapley Easdon N Easdon S Hayne Down Cripdon Down Rippon Tor Dartmeet Corringdon Ball Bittaford Shaugh Moor Wigford Down Horseyeatt Whitchurch

General orientation (degrees east) 140 30 40 140 70 20 120 130 50 90 110 30 150 150 30 130 120 90

Andrew Fleming noted the visible gang junctions in reaves, where details of boundary building style change abruptly at points where it is suggested different groups Locations Bodmin Moor East Moor N2 East Moor S2 Sharp Tor3 Smallacoombe N3 Smallacoombe S3 Carne N3 Carne S3 Rowden3 Hamatethy3 Treswallock3 Watergate3 Other Cornish Kit Hill4 Godolphin S5 Godolphin N5 Bosigran6 Zennor East, W7 Zennor East, E7 Noon Digory8 Lowland Point9

General orientation (degrees east) 30 160 90 40 180 40 140 150 100 90 70 10 60 180 110 40 160 ? 140

Table 1. The orientation of field systems. Sources: 1) Fleming 1988: fig. 30; 2) Brisbane and Clews 1979: fig. 16; 3) Johnson and Rose 1994: map I; 4) Herring and Thomas 1988: fig. 23; 5) Herring 1997b: fig. 74; 6) Herring 1987a: map 5a; 7) Herring 1987b: map 5; 8) Johnson 1980b: front cover; 9) Johns and Herring 1996: fig. 20.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT of people worked on set lengths. He believed that this indicated that understanding and ownership of the concept of the reave systems extended down beyond the communities who oversaw the laying out of the parallel systems, to the co-operative groups, households and individuals who built their constituent parts (Fleming 1983). This might also explain the sequencing recorded more recently by Joanna Brück, Robert Johnston and Helen Wickstead at Shovel Down on the east side of Dartmoor. Their Trenches B and D appear to indicate that a primary axial reave was built in stages, ‘at different times’ (Brück, Johnston and Wickstead 2003: 11-12), but these times could have been separated by just hours or days as easily as the longer periods implied in the interim report. What seems significant is that the different builders maintained the line of the ‘primary’ reave so nicely, apparently confirming that different co-operative groups were indeed adhering to and thus co-owning a shared design. Simple inferences can be drawn – lower levels of rural society were beneficiaries of the system; it was not imposed rigidly upon them; and given its sensitivity to local features, it seems to have been designed in part by them.

Age, we can calculate a minimum time of 189 600 days, and a more realistic one (with materials having to be largely moved and/or unearthed) of 379 200 days. In the unlikely event that every day was worked, these would be the equivalent of 478 or 956 person years.

In other words, the people at lower levels had influence over district-wide decisions. But the extent of the reorganisation of the agricultural landscape was remarkable, even astonishing. Why did all levels of society feel the need to undertake the effort to make such changes, and to tolerate the disruption of established ways of ‘going on’? So far as limited excavations indicate, the Dartmoor reaves lasted from 300 to 700 years to around 1000BC (Fleming 1988: 110), a length of time that suggests they probably achieved their purpose. The recent excavations at Shovel Down confirm that reaves there were subject to ‘episodes of rebuilding and the creation of new access routes….the boundary system was adapted and changed during its history’ (Brück, Johnston and Wickstead 2003: 12; and see Fleming 1978 for an earlier reference to such time depth in the reave systems).

If the reaves really were functioning agricultural systems, and their logic suggests they were, then their frameworks at least would have needed to be created quite rapidly, in a few years at most. Population levels of capable adults from which the numbers of Rippon Tor wallers could be spared could have been considerably higher than is often thought, especially if the main framework of the reaves was built in a single momentous year (circa 500 to c. 1000 wallers, and perhaps at least as many again to undertake other necessary activities such as looking after families, crops and livestock, and undertaking trade, tinning and so on). Such levels may, however, be consistent with those whose large flocks and herds exerted the pressure on grazing that the reaves appear to be responses to.

We should consider how individuals, households and cooperative groups would have benefited from having their world seemingly turned upside down, and from the amount of work that was their share of the creation of a co-axial system. The most obvious benefits were the formalisation of access to two key agricultural resources. Enclosed farmland was organised through the parallel or co-axial reaves, and the limits of enclosure were also apparently pushed further onto the uplands and onto some cliffs. Unless we wish to envisage incursions by hordes of farmers, we must assume that the workforce and the pressure for such change came from the large population predicted earlier in this paper to be farming, not only on the uplands but also in lowland Devon and Cornwall. At least as important was the rationalisation of access (and rights) to the areas of open commons beyond the reave systems, delineated by the terminal and watershed reaves.

It was noted earlier that the parallel reaves seem not to have been strip-like allotments, in that the distribution of stone round houses makes it appear that individual strips or individual blocks within strips were not allocated to individual households, or groups of households. But perhaps we should not expect to read initial intention and design from the prosaic and organic patterns that seem to have developed from actual use. It can still be suggested that the grand parallel reaves were laid out with an allotment scheme of some sort in mind, but that their users gradually adapted them to their old tradition, whereby individual farmers worked within looser forms of co-operation. One effect of this might have been to leave large parts of the co-axial systems apparently allotted but under-utilised. This is an impression gained from the mixture of densely packed houses and enclosures interspersed with apparently empty and less intensively used blocks in the plan of Holne Moor (Fleming 1988, fig. 34; Fig. 9).

The Rippon Tor reave system, Dartmoor’s largest, is a little over six kilometres wide and at least nine kilometres long (Fleming 1988: 49), comprising an area of at least 56 square kilometres. A conservative estimate for the total length of boundaries in the Rippon Tor system can be suggested, by modelling from the well-preserved fragments on the higher moor. Co-axial boundaries were typically 60 metres apart, and there were typically around eight cross-banks (creating the long rectangular fields) in each of the strips. This produces a conservative estimate of 948 000 metres of walling in this one co-axial system alone – more liberal figures would be well over a million metres. When estimating how long this would have taken to build, we may assume that Bronze Age people were able to achieve the ‘journeys’ (accepted daily products) of nineteenth century wallers/hedgers. This was up to 16.5 feet in Cornwall, or say 5 metres per day, with materials already to hand, and more like 2.5m if materials had to be gathered; rates that are beyond most modern hedgers (Karkeek 1845: 445). If this was so in the Bronze

There is support for the view that the district authority/council’s influence was benign, and that the 86

PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL higher levels were of the same rural society as the lower ones and were thus serving the needs of the whole. Respect paid to the monuments of earlier farmers indicates continuity of both role and identity of the district authority/council through major changes in rural organisation. The utilisation of cairns in watershed reaves, as at Three Barrows Reave on Dartmoor (Fleming 1988: fig. 20) and in terminal boundaries of co-axial systems, such as East Moor and East Zennor above, indicates more than simple reuse of earlier territorial markers. This deliberately established connections between the people who organised former systems, and those creating new ones. If cairns were indeed monuments to both individuals and communities, then they suggest that similar reciprocal relations to those visible in the co-axial fields had also existed earlier in the second millennium BC. We will see further continuity in these fundamental relationships as south-western society developed.

Other developments can be noted that support an argument for there having been an organised and coherent change in agricultural arrangements throughout Cornwall around this time. Chronologies are, of course, imprecise. It is likely though that as the reorganisation was so profound, its elements so interconnected, it could only have been effectively achieved, like the establishment of the co-axial fields, in a single episode, and over either the whole of the region or large parts of it. I am of course creating a model here, supported by a coherent and holistic interpretation of the field evidence, and admittedly generalising from twenty-five years of more particular work. Nevertheless, this is the first model for Cornwall developed to deal with what we now know of later prehistoric fields and boundaries. The evidence includes an increase in nucleation and the reorganisation again of field patterns, and the interpretation that this reflects intermixing and further intensification of agriculture. There was also an extension of enclosed and cultivated fields to margins in one direction only – to cliff tops but not onto downlands – and the maintenance of the latter as commons used by transhumants. Absolute evidence for the rapidity and universality of the change will of course never be found, but both can still be modelled on the basis of the coherence of the argument.

Extension of the commons A recent tradition has developed that a key punctuation mark of the chronology of south-western prehistory is the general and gradual abandonment of permanent settlements on Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor (and some of the lesser downlands) around 1000BC. This episode is usually attributed to climatic and soil deterioration, peat growth and a consequent inability to secure harvests in increasingly marginal land (e.g. Brown 1977: fig. 27; Todd 1987: 151). These may, however, have been contributory factors to a different reason for the closure of settlements that continues the developing theme of this paper. I would suggest that rather than there having been hundreds or thousands of separate decisions made by individuals, households, co-operative groups and communities to leave their upland homes, there was instead a single decision to reorganise access to upland grazing. This was in response to a continued increase in human populations, as well as in herds and flocks. Rather than a depressing image of starvation and misery driving families from beloved homes, this episode may then be more positively seen as a considered response to a particular need, a response that could only be made at the district authority/council level of rural society. We may regard this as either a ‘clearance’ if we favour a top-down approach to interpretation, or as an agreed improvement in agricultural practice and arrangements if we see it as a bottom-up decision.

By the early centuries of the first millennium BC, the field systems of west Cornwall had been extended right up to the windswept cliff edges. At Maen, a ‘cliff castle’ whose pottery has recently been re-dated to the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age around 800 BC, an abrupt kink in the rampart was caused by partial re-use of the line of an earlier field boundary. The boundary had been used for long enough, or intensively enough, to have developed a substantial lynchet (Herring 1994) (Fig. 15). Similar lynchetted fields are found on other exposed west Cornish cliff tops, most notably along nearly all of the steep northern cliffs of Zennor and Morvah, including Trewey, Rosemergy and Bosigran (Fig. 16). But whilst field systems were being laid out on the most inhospitable cliffs, they were not being pushed up the slopes of the West Penwith hills. Indeed, there seems to have been a retreat from the hills of Zennor, Morvah and St Just. Bronze Age-style curvilinear field systems like Bosporthennis, Truthwall and Mulfra Hill, and co-axial fields at east Zennor and Noon Digory, were all apparently abandoned like those on Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor. West Cornish field patterns also changed at around this time. The so-called ‘Celtic fields’, dense grids of brickshaped enclosures like those at Maen Cliff, were often superimposed onto the earlier co-axial fields as at Bosigran (Fig. 17), but sometimes reused earlier orientations of lines, as at Treveglos and Foage (Herring 1986b, 1989). Subdivisions were much more closely spaced than in the previous co-axial systems, and the fields developed more massive lynchets, some reaching over two metres in height. The sectioning of some of these revealed stone-less soils, sorted by cultivation, which produced abraded sherds presumably brought from middens in manuring (Bull 1999). The lynchets indicate

Interestingly, the palaeo-environmental work of Ben Gearey and colleagues left them very uncertain that climate alone determined any abandonment of Bodmin Moor. The evidence for deterioration in climate and soil, and in grazing quality, is not universal for the later Bronze Age and an ‘interplay of socio-economic and environmental factors may be responsible for the shift in emphasis from upland to lowland’ (Gearey, Sharman and Kent 2000: 505).

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Figure 15. The distinct kink in the main stone faced rampart (shown black) of the early cliff castle at Maen, Sennen, just north of Land’s End, was created by its builders reusing a pre-existing lynchetted field boundary that was also cut by the ditch and overlain by the counterscarp bank. The field system of small brick-shaped fields with heavy lynchets is typical of those found in west Cornwall extending onto such inhospitable cliffs. Source: Herring 1994: fig. 1; the range of boundary styles is recorded in the varied conventions.

that, unlike in the co-axial systems, all these fields were cultivated.

nucleated settlements, especially outside the classic midlands landscapes. In Cornwall and Devon the field and documentary evidence clearly shows that all strips there were indeed associated with nucleations, even if those were very often very small. In Cornwall, medieval hamlets associated with strips typically ranged from two to ten households, with most being four or five. They were not Midlands villages, but they were nucleations of the scale we also find in later prehistoric Cornwall (Herring 1986a, 1999a, 1999b). When we do find single medieval households, a very rare occurrence, they are associated with irregular fields – Carkees being the best

Later prehistoric settlements were also more nucleated than the loose groups seen in the Bronze Age co-axial systems. The force towards nucleation may have been the same as that in Cornish medieval hamlets, where land held by households was intermixed through strip field systems, and settlement nucleation was largely caused by all farmsteads being located at the point where transport costs dictated (Herring 1986a). Not all British medieval strip fields were associated with larger, village-size 88

PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL

Figure 16. Brick-shaped lynchetted fields extending beyond those reused by medieval and modern farmers at Trewey, Zennor. Such lynchets are found on most clifftops on the 25 kilometre stretch of coast from Land’s End to St Ives. Source: P. Herring.

example, and Bosigran (below) being the best example for later prehistory.

of two adjoining field systems comprised radiating lines subdivided by cross banks into regular brick-shaped fields, ideal for the intermixing of holdings. The field system was focused on a hamlet of roundhouses, later converted into courtyard houses (Herring 1987a). Across the tiny stream to the east was a much smaller and highly

The regularity of later prehistoric Cornish fields would have made such allotment and intermixing easily achievable. At Bosigran in Zennor, the western and larger

Figure 17. To the west of the stream at Bosigran, Zennor is a well-defined pattern of regular, brick-shaped fields based on at least five curving parallel primary lines that follow the contour. The fields are of shapes and sizes suited to fairly equitable shareholding or allotment and are focussed on and associated with a hamlet of later prehistoric round houses that were incorporated into RomanoBritish courtyard houses, remains of four of which survive (numbered on the plan). Those fields associated with a solitary courtyard house (number 5 on the plan) east of the stream did not need to be shared or allotted and so are wholly irregular in shape and size. Source: Herring 1987a: map 3.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT irregular field system, with no primary lines and very sinuous boundaries, arranged around a single dwelling (Fig. 17). Survey work has confirmed that regular fields and hamlets were the norm in later prehistoric West Penwith, the eastern Bosigran farm being highly unusual. The latter was unlikely to have been a stockyard, or more specialist enclosures and building, as it was associated with a field system with lynchets.

level with denser patterns organised at the co-operative group level. As before, the reason for undertaking the physical and tenurial changes would have been the need to keep the whole farming system sustainable. Fields were by now more fully arable. Systems with massive lynchets had been established right onto the north facing cliffs of Zennor, and hay would also have been made in some fields to keep livestock through the winter. To secure the hay and crops, some or most of the animals had to be removed in the summer months to the uplands, cliffs and towans (dunes). On Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor later prehistoric transhumants inserted single-person huts into the shells of earlier round houses, or, as at Stannon, within an even earlier ring cairn. These had perhaps been the houses or cairns of past people with whom the transhumants had familial or historical links. As in the earlier Bronze Age, transhumance would also have allowed the farming community to make the fullest use of its seasonally available resources.

A conception of land being managed at the hamlet level seems to fit the evidence best. Property, if we feel able to apply to prehistory the term that most effectively describes how land would have been regarded, would therefore have been used in a more communal way than in earlier arrangements. Field systems would also, however, have been more efficiently operated in later prehistory, as reallocation made fuller use of land than in the co-axial systems, where large areas of apparently privately-held land appear to have been underutilised (as in the Holne Moor reave system, above). The Cornish evidence suggests that improvements in efficiency and consequent increases in productivity both appear to have been needed. Aerial photography, geophysical survey, watching briefs and excavations are making it increasingly clear that lowland Cornwall was fully settled by the end of the first millennium BC. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of people lived and farmed there, many more than has traditionally been imagined (Johnson 1998).

The smaller-scale field systems, organised at the cooperative group level, were usually more carefully fitted into the topography than the co-axial fields, at least from the purely economic viewpoint of a modern farmer. Some, as in the West Penwith coast land from St Ives through Towednack, Zennor, Morvah and St Just, were located within the ribbons of land mentioned earlier. The layout and equitableness of these suggests that they were allocated within this 16 kilometre by 3.5km block of land through agreement at the community level. As in the middle Bronze Age, there would have been several such communities arranged around the cleared large uplands, sharing common rights to them through the agency of the district authority/council. Day-to-day organisation of farming however, was firmly back at the more flexible and probably more sustainable co-operative group level.

Reorganisation of the farming landscape of Cornwall (and probably also of Devon) around 1000 BC was as fundamental as the creation of the co-axial systems several hundred years before. This reorganisation, however, was not dealing with the creation of access to enclosed land and rough pastures, but rather was a response to a significant increase in pressure on those resources. The rigid structure of the co-axial field systems and the allotment principles that underpinned them gradually became too inflexible to accommodate the arable needs of an increasing population. The areas of upland summer pastures defined by the terminal and watershed ‘reaves’ became too small to accommodate the herds and flocks. Those who would have been most aware of the old arrangement’s shortcomings, and most likely to benefit from its reworking, were the farmers – individuals, households, co-operative groups and communities. But, as before, they would have had to rely on the district authority/council when reorganising access and rights to the great commons of Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor and the West Penwith hills (and several other areas of Cornish downlands now largely enclosed and so less immediately visible to landscape historians; Herring forthcoming). As suggested above, such district authorities/councils could well have comprised gatherings of farmers like themselves, rather than individuals wielding ‘power’. The need for change would therefore have again been driven from below, but organised from above. The district authorities/councils are made archaeologically visible by their ability to organise the removal, or ‘clearance’, of people from the upland edges, and to replace co-axial fields organised at the community

The early hillforts like Lescudjack or Trencrom in West Cornwall (see Herring 1994), may be seen as the locus of the district authority/council. They were not necessarily home for all or any of its members, but were more likely formal meeting places. Here, agricultural matters such as the exchange of produce were undertaken, and the usual disputes over resources, custom and trespass resolved. These dramatic places, with the people perhaps drawn together through earth and sky-based ritual, would have been where agricultural decisions were either hammered out or disseminated. The later Iron Age and Roman periods – status differentiation at the co-operative group level Around 400BC in Cornwall the enclosed settlement or round appears in the archaeological record, and through it possible distinctions in the status of co-operative groups, as the encircling of hamlets by a bank and ditch with a more or less elaborate gateway was not universal. Over a thousand rounds have been identified in Cornwall, the most extensively excavated and most fully discussed 90

PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL being that at Trethurgy, St Austell (Quinnell 2004). Open, unenclosed Iron Age settlements, most clearly visible in the pre-courtyard house roundhouses of west Cornish sites like those at Chysauster and Carn Euny, were located in the same areas as rounds (Herring 1994). While some rounds have evidence for industrialisation and specialisation (such as varying intensities of metal working), others, perhaps most, appear to have been straightforward farming hamlets – co-operative groups of farming households. It is possible that the creation of banks, palisades and ditches was a signal of social differentiation akin to a co-operative group (rather than an individual household) having a licence to crenellate. It not only signalled to contemporaries a differentiation in status between those living in rounds and open settlements (Hingley 1989: 59; Quinnell 2004: 234), but also the transformation of the community level of rural society into an entity that could accord co-operative groups such rights. Such entities presumably received something in return, perhaps tribute. This may be the first clear indication that proto-estates were developing in Cornwall. The contextual and artefactual evidence for differences in status between rounds and open settlements has been discussed elsewhere (Quinnell 2004).

the Romans recognising a well-organised system, and maintaining and exploiting it. The household was the basic economic unit of farming society from at least as early as the middle Bronze Age, such as the individual holdings in systems like Craddock Moor and within the parallel reaves. But it is in the Romano-British courtyard houses of West Penwith that it is most clearly visible. Private household property can be seen in the rooms used for different functions, whether for sheltering owned livestock, storing owned deadstock, or for manufacturing and processing material for use and exchange. The architecture of the courtyard house was also inward-looking and private, apparently turning its back on the rest of the hamlet. A high blank wall closed off views from outside into the central courtyard, onto which all the separately roofed rooms opened. Courtyard houses were however, still found in densely nucleated groups, and we may presume that the various households’ holdings in the field systems were still intermixed. Did the changing patterns of consumption that developed during the Romano-British period lead to changes in how property was viewed and exchanged, for portable objects and land too? These are interesting questions, but reasons of brevity do not permit me to explore these more fully here. The selling of land may not have been as important as leasing it, if there really was a tenurial system. I think however that we should work back from courtyard houses, and seek earlier signs of ‘property’. The groupings of houses and smaller structures mentioned above in Bodmin Moor middle Bronze Age settlements may be of interest here, as well as the holdings in the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age fields, and even the co-axials. Nevertheless, by around the second century AD what we see are increasingly closely drawn relationships between individual households and the co-operative groups they lived and worked within, and then between the cooperative groups and the communities/estates to which they now belonged.

The pattern of hillforts also changed, the fewer, earlier irregular ones replaced by a greater number of more closely spaced smaller examples. These were now probably the bases for the community (estate) level, indicating a further intensification of agricultural organisation as population and pressure on resources continued to increase (Herring 1994). Despite this, there seems to have been little change to the extent and form of field systems – the brick-shaped fields endured; the uplands remained unsettled, open, and still used for transhumance. That the district authority/council was able to resist any pressure for re-colonisation of the uplands indicates that the basic south-western agricultural system was still in place; with relatively intensively worked enclosed fields complemented by extensive summer grazing.

New ideologies, new fields There was minimal Roman influence on Cornish rural society (Quinnell 1986, 2004), which allowed greater continuity of development from prehistoric to medieval periods of field systems and rural organisation. While there was widespread but not total abandonment of hillforts and cliff castles in the Romano-British period, there were still large numbers of rounds being established in the countryside (ibid.). That Cornwall was only loosely under Roman control, or acting as a sort of client state, is indicated by the large number of apparently autonomous enclosed or even defended farming settlements scattered across the countryside. There were still many open (lower status?) settlements too, like the famous courtyard house hamlets of Chysauster, Carn Euny and Bosigran. The community or estate level of society is less clearly visible in the Roman period, and it may best be sought archaeologically in the more substantial or elaborate rounds. The district authority/council role can be seen in

In the sixth or seventh centuries AD there were further significant changes in the Cornish countryside. Rounds were almost universally abandoned, except perhaps by a key new element of society, the church, operating at the community level and introducing new ideologies as well as an organised religious body (Preston-Jones and Rose 1986). Farming hamlets at the co-operative group level appear to have been all open or unenclosed, and many were given Cornish names prefixed with tre, signifying something like ‘farming estate’ or ‘township’ (Padel 1987). There are several examples of early medieval open settlements being established just a few metres outside the banks of rounds (for example Crasken, Helston and Tregear, Crowan), but no clear examples of rounds that continued to be lived in by early medieval farmers. There are still very few excavated early medieval settlements that we can generalise from. Inward-looking, 91

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 18. Cropping unit field systems associated with the early medieval settlements of Trenithan Bennett and Tregellas, Probus overlie and pay little or no heed to a pattern of field boundaries visible on aerial photographs (shown with thicker lines) associated with four later prehistoric or Romano-British rounds or enclosed settlements. Source: Preston Jones and Rose 1995.

courtyard type houses incorporating proto-longhouses with accommodation for the household’s own cattle, and apparently of tenth century date, were found at the Mawgan Porth hamlet (Bruce-Mitford 1997). These fit well with the idea that the household and individual determined the day-to-day organisation of farming life, albeit with both still working closely and co-operatively with their neighbours. The term ‘peasant’ might best describe these independent characters, whose property beyond the house and outbuildings was now even more closely defined. Throughout most of Cornwall, the probably intermixed holdings within the brick-shaped field systems, holdings that may have served for more than fifteen hundred years, were replaced by the certainly intermixed holdings in another completely new arrangement. These were strips within the Cornish equivalent of medieval open or subdivided fields, whose origins seem to be pre-Norman and may even be as early as the seventh century AD (Herring 1999a, 1999b). Geophysical survey and aerial photograph analysis indicates that many of the strip field systems paid little or no heed to the arrangements of later prehistoric fields (Fig. 18). In most parts of Cornwall, with the exception of the stone walled systems of West Penwith, St Hilary and St Keverne, there was a thorough reorganisation of the pattern of boundaries, with usually just a few prehistoric lines incorporated into the new patterns. Yet the people who farmed the new strip systems were probably the same as those who had lived in the prehistoric and Roman-British rounds and open hamlets, and who had worked the old fields.

The continued use of upland commons for transhumance is indicated in early (pre-Norman) Cornish place-names like havos (summer dwelling) and hendre (old, home, or winter township), and in the groups or seasonal hamlets of small oval or sub-rectangular huts found on Bodmin Moor (Herring 1996: 37-41). Such hamlets again indicate the delicate balance between co-operation/communalism in agricultural practice, and the individual household as the basic economic or social unit. Organisation of the commons by the hundred level of society confirms the continued need for and existence of the district council level of rural society (ibid.: 41-42). The role of the church in this last reorganisation of the Cornish farming landscape may have been critical. The church seems to have been embedded early on into the settlement pattern at the community or estate level, prefiguring the parochial system. That only the church retained the use of settlement enclosures, whether or not these were reused rounds, must have signified status. Reorganisation of the fields to reinforce the importance of the individual/household can be related directly to the ideological influence of a new religion that placed greater emphasis on individual action and salvation (e.g. Thomas 1985: 33). But in order to do this (and to continue one of the key threads of this paper), the church may have had a role at the regional level. This might have been through some sort of collegiate organisation of the church itself. However, there is a more likely option. There is evidence from Tintagel and St Michael’s Mount of a courtly layer in sixth and seventh century Cornish society, of the 92

PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL adoption of Christianity by what may now be termed not just a district authority/council, but a regional power, a kingship (Thomas 1993: Herring 2000). Such a king would have commanded the loyalty and support of what was still an essentially agricultural society. The rapid adoption of Christianity by district council and community layers (and those below them), probably reflects the long-term cohesion of Cornish rural society suggested by the above reconsideration of prehistoric fields, and by that society’s relation to the equally longterm organisation of Cornwall’s upland commons.

Bibliography Bender, B, Hamilton, S. and Tilley, C. 1995. Leskernick: the biography of an excavation. Cornish Archaeology 34: 58-73. Brisbane, M. and Clews, S. 1979. The East Moor field systems. Cornish Archaeology 18: 33-56. Brown, A.P. 1977. Late Devensian and Flandrian vegetational history of Bodmin Moor, Cornwall. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series B 276.946: 251-320. Bruce-Mitford, R. 1997. Mawgan Porth: a Settlement of the Late Saxon period on the North Cornish Coast. Excavations 1949-52, 1954 and 1974 (ed. R. Taylor). London: English Heritage. Brück, J., Johnston, R. and Wickstead, H. 2003. Excavations of Bronze Age field systems on Shovel Down, Dartmoor, 2003. Past 45: 10-12. Bull, E. 1999. Cornwall’s field boundaries. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Cornwall County Council. 1996. Cornwall Landscape Assessment 1994. Truro: Landscape Design Associates and Cornwall County Council. DEFRA 2002. The Countryside Stewardship Scheme: Information and how to Apply. London: DEFRA. Field, D. 2001. Place and memory in Bronze Age Wessex. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 57-64. Fleming, A. 1978. The Dartmoor Reaves. In H.C. Bowen and P.J. Fowler (eds.) Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. A Survey of Recent Work. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: BAR, pp. 17-21. Fleming, A. 1983. The prehistoric landscape of Dartmoor. Part 2: North and East Dartmoor. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 49: 195-241. Fleming, A. 1984. The prehistoric landscape of Dartmoor: wider implications. Landscape History 6: 5-19. Fleming, A. 1988. The Dartmoor Reaves. Investigating Prehistoric Land Divisions. London: Batsford. Fleming, A. 1999. Phenomenology and the megaliths of Wales: a dreaming too far? Oxford Journal of Archaeology 18 (2): 119-125. Fleming, A. 2005. Megaliths and post-modernism: the case of Wales. Antiquity 79: 921-932. Gearey, B.R, Sharman, D.J. and Kent, M. 2000. Palaeoecological evidence for the prehistoric settlement of Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, south-west England: Part II – land-use changes from the Neolithic to the present. Journal of Archaeological Science 27: 493-508. Gerrard, S. 1997. Dartmoor: Landscapes through Time. London: Batsford / English Heritage. Gossip, J. forthcoming. Boden Vean round and fogou. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Gossip, J. and Jones, A.M. forthcoming. Excavations at Tremough, Penryn, Cornwall. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 1979. Circularity on the Moor. Hut Circles on Bodmin Moor. Unpublished BA dissertation: University of Sheffield.

Acknowledgements This paper is based on a talk given in October 2002, when I was asked by Frances Griffith to tackle the prehistoric period in a symposium on field systems and historic landscapes organised by the Devon and Cornwall Archaeological Societies. I am grateful to Frances for providing the stimulus for gathering together thoughts that had developed piecemeal over three decades of fairly continuous recording, analysis and reflection on the field and boundary patterns of Cornwall’s well-preserved and varied prehistoric landscapes. Like several others, my interest in recording prehistoric land division and then getting the surveys to tell useful stories was stimulated in the late 1970s by being involved in Andrew Fleming’s work on the Dartmoor Reaves Project. Andrew has influenced most of my subsequent landscape history work, as have colleagues in the Historic Environment Service of Cornwall County Council (formerly the Cornwall Archaeological Unit, and before that the Cornwall Committee for Rescue Archaeology). Most notable have been Nick Johnson, Pete Rose and Jacky Nowakowski. I have enjoyed discussing prehistoric social structure with Cathy Parkes, Graeme Kirkham and Andy M. Jones (all now of the HES), and all have discussed aspects of this paper. My current passion for landscape design was stimulated by working in the mid90s on post-medieval designed landscapes in Cornwall, and in particular with the landscape historian Johnny Phibbs, who introduced me to the subtleties of Brownian landscape art. At around the same time visits to Chris Tilley, Barbara Bender, Sue Hamilton and their team from University College London brought me into contact with their work on the cultural and personal meanings embedded in ‘relict’ Bronze Age landscapes on Bodmin Moor, and especially at Leskernick. Barbara Bender, Andrew Fleming and Andy M. Jones have all read and made valuable comments on this paper. Tony Blackman and the late Jack Parkyn have helped to keep flights of fancy in properly Cornish proportion, and thanks to Graeme Kirkham, Linda Wyatt and Bryn Tapper for their help with the illustrations. I am particularly grateful for the close and critical reading by Adrian Chadwick of early drafts of this paper; his comments have enabled me to both tighten and extend arguments. 93

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Herring, P. 1986a. An Exercise in Landscape History. Pre-Norman and Medieval Brown Willy and Bodmin Moor. Unpublished MPhil thesis: University of Sheffield. Herring, P. 1986b. Treveglos, Zennor. Archaeological assessment. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 1987a. Bosigran, Zennor. Archaeological assessment. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 1987b. Wicca, Zennor. Archaeological assessment. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 1987c. Treveal, Zennor. Archaeological assessment. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 1989. Foage. Provisional archaeological survey. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 1994. The cliff castles and hillforts of West Penwith in the light of recent work at Maen Castle and Treryn Dinas. Cornish Archaeology 33: 40-56. Herring, P. 1996. Transhumance in medieval Cornwall. In H.S.A. Fox (ed.) Seasonal Settlement. Papers Presented to a Meeting of the Medieval Settlement Research Group. Vaughan Papers in Adult Education No. 39. Leicester: University of Leicester, pp. 35-44. Herring, P. 1997a. Early prehistoric sites at Leskernick, Altarnun. Cornish Archaeology 36: 176-185. Herring, P. 1997b. Godolphin, Breage, and Archaeological and Historical Assessment. Truro: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 1998. Presenting a Method of Historic Landscape Assessment. Truro: Cornwall County Council and English Heritage. Herring, P. 1999a. Farming and Transhumance in Cornwall at the turn of the first millennium AD. Part 1. Journal of the Cornwall Association of Local Historians 37: 19-25. Herring, P. 1999b. Farming and transhumance in Cornwall at the turn of the first millennium AD. Part 2. Journal of the Cornwall Association of Local Historians 38: 3-8. Herring, P. 2000. St Michael’s Mount, Archaeological works, 1995-8. Truro: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. 2001. Review of field systems. In R. Cole, P. Herring, C. Johns and A. Reynolds (eds.) Godolphin, Cornwall: Archaeological Research and Recording. Truro: Cornwall County Council, pp. 10-15. Herring, P. forthcoming. Cornish uplands: medieval, post-medieval and modern extents. In I.D. Whyte and A.J.L. Winchester (eds.) Society, Landscape and Environment in Upland Britain. Society for Landscape Studies. Herring, P. and Kirkham, G. forthcoming. A bank cairn on Roughtor. Cornish Archaeology. Herring, P. and Rose, P. 2001. Bodmin Moor’s Archaeological Heritage. Truro: Cornwall County Council. Herring, P. and Thomas, N. 1988. Kit Hill. Archaeological Assessment. Truro: Cornwall County Council.

Hingley, R. 1989. Rural Settlement in Roman Britain. London: Seaby. Johns, C. and Herring, P. 1996. St Keverne Historic Landscape Assessment. Truro: Cornwall County Council. Johnson, N. 1980a. Later Bronze Age settlement in the south-west. In J. Barrett and R. Bradley (eds.) The British Later Bronze Age. BAR (British Series) 83. Oxford: BAR, pp. 141-180. Johnson, N. 1980b. West Penwith Field Project. Cornwall Committee for Rescue Archaeology 197980. 5th Annual Report. Truro. Johnson, N. 1998. Cornish farms in prehistoric farmyards. British Archaeology 31: 12-13. Johnson, N. and Rose, P. 1994. Bodmin Moor: an Archaeological Survey. Volume I: The Human Landscape to c. 1800. London: English Heritage. Jones, A.M. 1998-9. The excavation of a later Bronze Age structure at Callestick. Cornish Archaeology 378: 5-55. Jones, A.M. forthcoming. Settlement and ceremony: archaeological investigations at Stannon Down, St Breward, Cornwall. Cornish Archaeology. Jones, A.M. and Nowakowski, J.A. 1997. Excavations along the Probus by-pass. Unpublished report: Cornwall County Council. Jones, A.M. and Taylor, S. 2004. What lies beneath….St Newlyn East and Mitchell. Truro: Cornwall County Council. Jones, A.M. and Tinsley, H.M. 2000-1. Recording ancient environments at De Lank, St Breward, Cornwall. Cornish Archaeology 39-40: 146-160. Karkeek, W.F. 1845. On the farming of Cornwall. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England 6: 400-462. Maltby, E. and Caseldine, C.J. 1984. Environmental reconstruction at Colliford. In F. Griffith Archaeological investigations at Colliford Reservoir, Bodmin Moor, 1977-78. Cornish Archaeology 23: 92116. McOmish, D., Field, D. and Brown, G. 2002. The Field Archaeology of the Salisbury Plain Training Area. Swindon: English Heritage. Mercer, R.J. 1978. The linking of prehistoric settlement to its farming landscape in south-western Britain. In H.C. Bowen and P.J. Fowler (eds.) Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. A Survey of Recent Work. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: BAR, pp. 163-170. Mercer, R.J. 1981. Excavations at Carn Brea, Illogan, Cornwall. A Neolithic fortified complex of the third millennium BC. Cornish Archaeology 20: 1-204. Mercer, R.J. 1986. The Neolithic in Cornwall. Cornish Archaeology 25: 35-80. Mercer, R.J. 1997. The excavation of a Neolithic enclosure complex at Helman Tor, Lostwithiel, Cornwall. Cornish Archaeology 36: 5-63. Nowakowski, J.A. 1991. Trethellan Farm, Newquay: the excavation of a lowland Bronze Age settlement and Iron Age cemetery. Cornish Archaeology 30: 5-242. Nowakowski, J.A. 2001. Leaving home in the Cornish Bronze Age: insights into planned abandonment 94

PETER HERRING: COMMONS, FIELDS AND COMMUNITIES IN PREHISTORIC CORNWALL processes. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 139-160. Padel, O.J. 1985. Cornish Place-Name Elements. Nottingham: English Place-Names Society. Preston-Jones, A. and Rose, P. 1986. Medieval Cornwall. Cornish Archaeology 25: 135-185. Preston-Jones, A. and Rose, P. 1995. Changes in the Cornish countryside AD 400-1100. In D. Hooke and S. Burnell (eds.) Landscape and Settlement in Britain, AD 400-1066. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Quinnell, H. 1986. Cornwall during the Iron Age and Roman Period. Cornish Archaeology 25: 111-134. Quinnell, H. 1994. New perspectives on upland monuments – Dartmoor in earlier prehistory. In D.M. Griffiths (ed.) The Archaeology of Dartmoor. Perspectives from the 1990s. Proceedings of the 1994 Dartmoor Exploration Committee Centenary Conference. Devon Archaeological Society Proceedings 52. Exeter: University of Exeter/Devon Archaeological Society, pp. 49-62. Quinnell, H. 2004. Trethurgy, Excavations at Trethurgy Round, St Austell: Community and Status in Roman and Post-Roman Cornwall. Truro: Cornwall County Council. Riley, H. and Wilson-North, R. 2001. The Field Archaeology of Exmoor. English Heritage/Exmoor National Park. Thomas, C. 1978. Types and distributions of pre-Norman fields in Cornwall and Scilly. In H.C. Bowen and P.J. Fowler (eds.) Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. A Survey of Recent Work. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: BAR, pp. 7-16. Thomas, C. 1985. Christianity in Roman Britain to AD 500. London: Batsford. Thomas, C. 1993. Tintagel, Arthur and Archaeology. London: Batsford/English Heritage. Thomas, J. 1991. Rethinking the Neolithic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Tilley, C. 1995. Rocks as resources. Cornish Archaeology 34: 5-57. Todd, M. 1987. The South West to AD 1000. London: Longman.

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A thick stone and earth bank boundary on Lundy Island, off the north coast of Devon. The upright stones (which have been moved) have early medieval inscriptions on them. In the background are more recent drystone walls, and the current church. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Encounters with place in prehistory: writing a case study for Shipman Head Down, Isles of Scilly Eleanor Breen Introduction

consistency and coherence as many authors use the word landscape in myriad and ambiguous ways.

The study of land allotment and field systems has a sound pedigree within archaeology; evidenced not least by the publication of Bowen and Fowler’s Early Land Allotment in the British Isles in 1978; itself a review of Bowen’s (1961) volume on field system studies. The discipline of archaeology has changed since the 1970s with more emphasis being placed on the people of the past as agents of action, rather than passive actors driven forward by the relentlessness of progress towards Western civilisation. In this paper I wish to briefly present the evidence for Bronze Age field systems on the Isles of Scilly. Using Shipman Head Down, Bryher (Figs. 1, 2) as a case study, I shall identify aspects of these fields that affected the people who lived in that landscape. A key theme in this paper is the impact of motivation on the sensory experience of movement, and in considering motivation I intend to explore the experiences of recent visitors to Scilly, myself included. Allied to current experiences of Shipman Head Down, I intend to examine prehistoric people’s experiences of the built landscape rather than their actions as builders. This paper is also concerned with the experience of writing and I consciously focus on the impact of language on the reader. Subtle nuances of language can alter readers’ perceptions of the archaeological data and the interpretations imposed on those data by the writer. Our perceptions of past experiences are firmly fixed in the present and I hope to reflect the contemporary nature of my interpretation through the language I use.

I define landscape as the setting for human action which is made up of both natural and built features. In the case of Shipman Head Down, Isles of Scilly this includes field walls, cairns, undulating ground, hills and rocky outcrops. The landscape in this paper is physical, and can be measured and described. It is in the interpretation of these features that they cease to be a setting and become meaningful, socialised aspects of everyday life. This approach allows the writer to use existing language and data to identify aspects of the study area to be examined, and to use traditional archaeological techniques to pose and to answer new questions. While Thomas (1993) suggests that mapped overview approaches to landscape do nothing to aid understandings of place, he also includes a distribution map of Avebury and surrounding archaeological sites to illustrate the archaeology he wishes to explore. As archaeologists we find mapped overviews useful, not as an indication of how people viewed their world in prehistory, but as tools to assist us in identifying the relationships between people and place. We can also explore these landscapes without maps, and can discuss issues of inhabitation and embodiment in a landscape setting. It is incumbent on the archaeologist to engage past people with their setting. The redefinition of landscape as an embodied active entity does not accomplish this engagement of people and place. It does not suffice to use landscape as a shorthand reference for a set of meanings that can, and will, change over time. This engagement can only be achieved using language that explicitly addresses issues of embodiment and engagement. Therefore, my use of landscape is as the mapped and bounded place that can be described and illustrated using traditional means and terms. It is tangible, and primarily visual. I intend to present an archaeology of Scilly that illustrates the experience of encountering place based on my description of the setting and of the archaeological data. The embodiment of the landscape is based on the experience of encounter within the described landscape.

The language of archaeology Landscape The use of landscape in archaeological texts has been changing since the early 1990s with the work of writers such as Bender (1992, 1993) and Tilley (1994, 2004). While the ideas behind new perceptions of landscape provide useful approaches to understanding how people may have viewed place in prehistory, they have done little to clarify the now multi-faceted nature of landscape archaeology. This is due mainly to a lack of consistency in the use of terminology. There are numerous explanations of landscape and landscape archaeology offering a variety of possible meanings including for example, a visual and described landscape, or an experiential arena (Chadwick 2004a; Fleming 1999; Knapp and Ashmore 1999; Thomas 2001). I agree with Thomas (ibid: 166) that multiple meanings and understandings can be productive. The problem for me lies in the continual rewriting of these meanings without

As discussed in relation to Thomas (1993), the twodimensional mapped landscape still appears to be essential to our ability to contextualise archaeological studies. Current methods for the production of meaning in archaeology enable multiple interpretive approaches. The writing of an embodied landscape archaeology is assisted by the maintenance of a distinction between that which is described, and that which is experienced. Following this convention, my considerations of embodied landscapes will begin with a description of the 97

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT topography. It is not my intention to imply that the mapped landscape is an objective reality that exists outside the bounds of interpretive frameworks (as critiqued by Chadwick 2004a: 21; Thomas 1993, 2001: 171). The interpretations and understandings we derive from this topography need not be defined solely by that description, but rather by our embodied engagements with it, and our perceptions of how other people in the past may have engaged experientially with these landscapes. In addition, by describing the physical characteristics of the landscape we invite and facilitate future interpretation and critique.

In small things forgotten The path of humanity towards civilisation is a long established theme in archaeology that has emphasised the importance of progress from simple societies to state formation (e.g. Borlase 1881; Childe 1981). This presumption of progress is a viewpoint not shared by many contemporary archaeologists. The focus on allencompassing issues such as state formation has given way to an increasing emphasis on aspects of everyday life in curatorial, developer-funded and research archaeology, aided by developments in material culture studies. In his book In Small Things Forgotten for example, Deetz (1977) highlighted how everyday objects can hold a wealth of evidence for the social beliefs and practices of the people who created and used those artefacts.

Fields and farming As illustrated above, any discussion of landscape nowadays seems to be littered with caveats. In our quest for new terminology to illuminate what we like to think of as new ideas, we become very aware of the impact of old language on traditions of thinking. The term ‘land allotment’ has particular connotations, as does ‘field system’. We can easily find ourselves locked into traditional mind-sets that impel us towards what we, perhaps subconsciously, might regard as straightforward first principles, such as fields mean farming, and hence onto discussions of arable or pastoral agricultural regimes. These approaches offer a very limited perspective on the lives of past people and it seems obvious that there is and was a lot more to the inhabitation of landscapes than can be described by purely functional approaches to economy and subsistence.

An interest in the commonplace of everyday lives other than our own is not purely of academic concern. The impending environmental disaster that has been forecast for our planet due to global warming is currently making media headlines. The perceived abuse of our environment has inspired people to look at ways of living that are not exploitative. This interest in everyday life has done much to enhance views other than a western capitalist approach to understanding the human condition. Charitable initiatives such as Band Aid and Red Nose Day make the public aware of practices in less industrialised countries where environmental impact on everyday life can often be identifiably more immediate than in our own daily experience. Such media images impress on us how different people’s lives are around the world and sow the seeds in our minds of the many ways there are of providing food and shelter and the connection between subsistence and cultural practices.

Archaeologists have often presented discussions of prehistoric practices in terms applicable to twentieth century economics, presuming an optimal return for labour and the maximum utilisation of resources (Renfrew 1973). I am not convinced that such a mindset existed in prehistory. The folly of such an approach to food production within our own society is emphasised by European Union directives demanding agro-environment schemes in member states because the post-Second World War emphasis on optimising production has been seen to serve a limited purpose. European Union funded schemes such as Tir Gofal in Wales are intended to repair some of the environmental damage caused by excessive subsidised production. As Abram (1997) explains, any reconnection by people to the land must be largely learned. The society in which we live precludes any automatic ‘return’ to ways and understandings of our distant ancestors. In realising this, we as archaeologists can identify the gulf of perception between us and those people in the past whose lives we attempt to understand. Searching for new approaches to understanding how and why people constructed their landscapes is not a whimsical attempt to make fields more exciting. Rather, it is a matter of identifying the assumptions that limit our ability to understand lives that are outside our personal experience, while acknowledging that we can only understand through our own experiences.

The use of ethnographic analogy in archaeology has its origins in a view that non-capitalist societies could be regarded as ahistorical or prehistoric due to their perceived lack of technological and cultural advancement (Gosden 1999; Wolf 1982). Needless to say, ethnographic analogies must be very carefully drawn and need not come solely from small-scale societies. By allowing such societies to have histories, we can look beyond perceived similarities in material culture for explanations of motivations for action and to consider other ways of engaging with the world. I wish to draw on the diversity within human societies to describe the lived landscape of prehistoric Scilly. Anthropology and archaeology have also done much to dispel the notion of normative experiences, an average or universal way of living. This is most obviously seen in gender studies where explicit reference is made to differential understandings of place and material culture occurring simultaneously depending on people’s age, class, gender and identity (e.g. Bender 1992, 1998; Conkey and Gero 1991). It remains the case that the majority of archaeological texts are written from a limited set of perspectives, where the people of the past are still grouped and normalised. Alternative approaches to presenting archaeology have included experiments with 98

ELEANOR BREEN: ENCOUNTERS WITH PLACE IN PREHISTORY: WRITING A CASE STUDY FOR SHIPMAN HEAD DOWN text, websites and photographic presentations (e.g. Chadwick 2002b; Edmonds 1999; Joyce et al. 2002; Shanks 1992). My own view is that a limited range of perspectives is inevitable, and I am unable to conceive of an alternative means of writing prehistory that recognises the individual as playing an active part in social life without resorting to fantasy.

I have introduced the themes that inform this paper. I will now outline the archaeology of Scilly and the early field systems of Shipman Head Down. Prehistory on Scilly In this paper the term ‘early period’, as used by Paul Ashbee (1974) and Charles Thomas (1985), will be continued. I acknowledge that the term is highly problematic, and has the effect of collapsing the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age of Scilly into a single phase. The question of chronology is problematic in Scilly, and while palaeo-environmental sampling programmes have greatly added to the available data (e.g. Ratcliffe and Straker 1996), there is a long way to go yet. Many of the numerous surviving stone walls on Scilly, including those on Shipman Head Down, are thought to be Bronze Age in origin, in line with proposed dates for much entrance grave and settlement use as evidenced by pottery (Ratcliffe 1989: 34). The old ground surface at East Porth, Samson is dated to the early Bronze Age and is considered to be associated with the Samson field walls (Ratcliffe and Straker 1996: 61). The numerous walls and cairns on Shipman Head Down form the case study for this paper and, in line with current thinking on the issue, I too consider these to have been constructed and used during the Bronze Age.

Sensing the world In his volume on the disjunction in Western society between people and their environment, Abram (1997) offers insights into human engagements with the landscape that are harmonious rather than conquering and exploitative. In my exploration of the archaeology of Scilly, in the absence of evidence for extensive exploitation, I intend to present (or perhaps enter) such a world, literarily rather than literally of course. In this world, nature is not perceived as something apart from the realm of humanity, nor is sensory perception divisible into five quantifiable units of experience. I acknowledge that my writing is bounded by the cultural and historical context in which language and its uses came to be. The use of words such as ‘nature’ and ‘touch’ can carry particular implications; just as happens with the word ‘field’. However, by opening our minds to other ways of thinking, we can try to move beyond what can be termed our own zones of understanding.

The Isles of Scilly are located approximately 45 kilometres southwest of Land’s End, Cornwall (Figure 1). The islands are situated around a shallow lagoon, whose submerged peats and sediments indicate the impact of sea level rise since the late Mesolithic or early Neolithic (Ratcliffe and Straker 1996). The prehistoric archaeology of the islands consists mainly of field systems, cairns, settlements and entrance graves; as well as an extensive collection of artefacts gathered from beaches, coast paths and arable land. In the 1750s William Borlase, a prominent antiquarian of his day, visited the islands. While standing on North Hill on the island of Samson Borlase identified “…Hedges of stone six feet under the common run of the sand-banks: here are also many remains of Hedges descending from the Hill, and running many feet under the level of the Sea…” (Borlase 1966 [1756]). (In Cornwall and on the Isles of Scilly, field walls are commonly known as hedges).

Recent publications of experiential approaches to archaeology have highlighted, though seldom intentionally, the overwhelming bias in archaeology towards the visual aspect of engagement with place (e.g. Cummings and Whittle 2004; Tilley 2004). Cummings and Whittle blame our culture’s preoccupation with the visual (2004: 9). However, they go on to suggest that vision became more important from the Neolithic onwards but in a way that was “…partial, referential, ambiguous, and probably also in some ways seasonal” (ibid.), terms which are offered to differentiate Neolithic vision from our own visual understandings. Practically speaking, the overview with which we credit ourselves is seldom, if ever, realised. Our visual (and perceptual) capabilities are not equal to the task. Our vision is not allseeing. The continued emphasis on vision in prehistory does not, in my view, enable a deeper understanding of prehistoric perceptions of place. Cummings (2002) drawing on Whittle (1997), suggests that the shape and grain of stone offers an encounter with ‘visual texture.’ This seems to me to be too great a bias towards vision. Such an approach to sensory perception begs the question as to why, when you can also run your hand over or lean your face against a block of stone and feel the texture, feel the hot sun, smell the warm rain, or touch the tiny icicles caught in the stone’s cavities, you would simply refer to the visual texture. I feel very strongly that we cannot move away from our preoccupation with the visual whilst the visual is itself reiterated incessantly.

The early walls of Scilly are referred to as field systems, which perhaps does not tell the entire story. There are 71 extant field systems recorded in the Sites and Monument Record, although some of these records may be duplicated, referring to a number of elements of a single system on occasion (Ratcliffe 1989: 48). The walls vary in form from place to place. On Shipman Head Down, Bryher they are predominantly rows of upright stones, with little evidence for extensive collapse. Walls were often located on ridges, making them highly visible on the skyline from a number of angles. On parts of Castle Down, Tresco the walls run to a couple of courses and may be more like a functional agricultural field system (Fig. 3). On North Hill, Samson, on Tregarthen Hill, 99

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Figure 1. The Isles of Scilly with places mentioned in the text. Source: redrawn by A. Leaver from E. Breen, after Ratcliffe 1989.

Castle Down, and on Kittern Hill, Gugh linear stone structures run between carns, cairns and entrance graves. On Chapel Down, St Martin’s and Castle Down, the walls form rectilinear enclosures in places. It is important to note that many areas have a diverse set of prehistoric boundaries within an area considered to have a single

field system. Fowler and Thomas make the distinction between boulder walls and walls of edge set stones which are relatively small in size, and ‘walls proper’ that are faced on both sides (Fowler and Thomas 1979: 184). This distinction is important as the variety of wall structures suggests that these sites almost certainly do not all have 100

ELEANOR BREEN: ENCOUNTERS WITH PLACE IN PREHISTORY: WRITING A CASE STUDY FOR SHIPMAN HEAD DOWN

Figure 2. Plan of Shipman Head Down field system and cairn field. Source: redrawn by A. Leaver from E. Breen, after Thomas 1985.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT an agricultural purpose. It may be more fruitful to consider Scillonian field systems as linear monuments rather than as measures of economic activity. Thomas (1985: 140) has likened the walls on Kittern Hill to power lines rather than evidence of agriculture.

Prehistory on Shipman Head Down Shipman Head Down is located on the north end of Bryher, which in turn is on the north end of the Isles of Scilly (Figure 1). Soil cover is generally thin, with large areas of erosion caused by the exposed location, which takes the force of the Atlantic weather. The topography is undulating, with a number of rocky outcrops and the ground cover is generally heather with areas of gorse and with bracken on the eastern and southern slopes. Palaeoenvironmental data from a late Bronze Age settlement at Bonfire Carn on the southern end of Bryher indicates a landscape that might be broadly familiar to us with heather, gorse and bracken, in addition to a small amount of evidence for barley as well as arable weeds and other wild plants (Ratcliffe and Straker 1996: 80). The archaeology on Shipman Head Down consists of stone walls, two earthen banks that may contain stone, over 80 small cairns, two entrance graves on the south of the down and four large cairns with cists (Fig. 2). Two of these cairns are located on the higher ground west of the north end of Wall A, and the remaining two are located south of the western terminal of Wall F. Field survey was undertaken on Shipman Head Down during April 2003, to identify the relationships between cairns and walls.

Cairns on Scilly can be found in extensive cairn fields such as those on Wingletang Down, St Agnes and Shipman Head Down, Bryher. Cairns may be kerbed but this is not always the case. Clearance cairns are known from Castle Down and large cairns with central cists possibly associated with burial are known from Kittern Hill, Shipman Head Down, and North Hill. Entrance graves on Scilly occur in groups, for example on Porth Hellick Down, St Mary’s and in smaller numbers throughout the islands often in groups with large cairns. While pottery in entrance graves indicates use during the Bronze Age there is some evidence that a number of these monuments may have Neolithic origins (Ratcliffe 1989: 42). Early period settlement evidence on Scilly consists mainly of roundhouses. A number of sites eroding from cliff faces have provided palaeoenvironmental data as at Porth Killier, St Agnes. On Castle Down roundhouses have been identified amongst the cairns and rectilinear fields, rather than with the linear boundaries. Palaeo-environmental data for Scilly suggest tree clearance in the Neolithic to middle Bronze Age, evidenced by pollen cores from St Mary’s (Ratcliffe and Straker 1996: 29-31). There is a possible Neolithic calf tooth from Higher Town Beach (also known as Par Beach), St Martin’s (ibid.: 19) and the earliest evidence for cereal cultivation is barley from the early Bronze Age hearth site at East Porth, Samson (ibid.:10). Domestic and wild animals are indicated by faunal remains from the middle to late Bronze Age settlement site of Porth Killier, St Agnes. The midden material eroding from the cliff face includes bones of ox, sheep, pig and a single deer bone in addition to extensive remains of shellfish, fish and birds (ibid.: 66). There is ample evidence for prehistoric farming on Scilly in addition to the use of wild resources.

Figure 3. Coursed wall on Castle Down, Tresco. Source: E. Breen.

Following on from observations made by Borlase, the study of Scilly’s early field systems was taken up over a century and a half later by O.G.S. Crawford (1927) in the first paper in Antiquity Volume 1, and then again by Charles Thomas and Peter Fowler from 1956 (Fowler and Thomas 1979; Thomas 1985). Excavation at Bar Point, St Mary’s provided evidence for an Iron Age field system (Evans 1984), research that focused largely on the economics of prehistoric Scilly. Recent field survey on the Isles of Scilly has produced new data that allow for a much more nuanced understanding of the interrelationships of the archaeological features. The purpose of my PhD field survey and research is to gain insights into the experiences of those people who inhabited Scilly during later prehistory, and how they went about their daily (and nightly) pursuits.

The Shipman Head Down walls appear as linear stone features. The walls vary in their location and construction. The main plan of Shipman Head Down shows walls and two linear earthen banks (H and K). These ‘walls’ may not be single structures, and the earthen banks may mask walls. There is some evidence to suggest that some of the walls have low banks (e.g. wall F, Fig. 4), although soil erosion and redeposition may be responsible for a build up of material around the stones in some cases. The walls are constructed of upright stones with their long axis either along or across the walls. The stones can range from approximately 0.30 metres to 1.50m apart and more. As noted by Thomas (1985: 129), the most visible of these walls are located on what natural ridges exist, including walls A, D and F. This gives them added height and makes them highly visible. A number of short lengths of walling are in evidence, to the north and 102

ELEANOR BREEN: ENCOUNTERS WITH PLACE IN PREHISTORY: WRITING A CASE STUDY FOR SHIPMAN HEAD DOWN east of wall E and on the south west slope of the down, and it is not always clear if these fragments once formed larger structures. Walls A and F are predominantly rows of upright stones up to 0.40m high and 0.30m to 0.60m apart. There is little evidence for extensive collapse that would indicate that the walls had been any great size. In most instances the stones were set with ends adjacent (Fig. 4), but on occasion the stones were set face to face along the length of the wall (Fig. 5). The walls join in places, and around the junction of A, D and E there is a great deal of stone which may indicate an elaboration of this junction. This is arguably in evidence at other locations too. There is a cairn at the junction of B and C and at the junction of D, F and G. There is a substantial gap between F and the junction of D and G. Numerous small cairns are physically associated with these walls, and there are remarkably few found that are not in close contact with a wall. The cairns range in size from approximately 1.6m to over 6 metres in width, but most are in the range of 2.5m to 5m. Many have low stone kerbs or revetments while very few appear as low mounds or platforms with little or no evidence for kerbs. Cairns are predominantly of stone construction but a number contain a large amount of earth. There is no evidence that any stone was imported from other areas, but as Scilly is almost completely granite the importation of material from other areas may not be apparent. More than half of the cairns on the down have a demonstrable physical relationship with the walls, and the survey focused on these features. In some cases the cairns appear to abut a wall, and are ‘D’ shaped in plan (e.g. 8, Fig. 6). A number of cairns appear on both sides of a wall – built over, under or contemporaneously with the wall (e.g. 10, Fig. 7). Other cairns appear to curve into the wall structure, as though just truncated by it (e.g. 11, Fig. 8). There are also a number of circular or subcircular cairns associated with gaps in walls (e.g. 26, 27, 28, 32, 44 and 46). These gaps can range from 4m to 24m in width, and may be due to the differential preservation of wall structures.

Figure 4. Wall F looking west with possible bank and stones set end to end, Shipman Head Down. Source: E. Breen.

seems entirely plausible, and later robbing is the obvious explanation for the nature of the archaeological remains where there is not enough stone apparent to have constructed a functionally useful wall. A different approach may produce an alternative interpretation of these stone features however. The larger areas of prehistoric field system are peripherally located, away from centres of population and at the extremity of the islands (bearing in mind the scale of Scilly). None of the areas being studied is surrounded by later field systems that may have needed building material, and all later building is restricted to one or two sides of the downs. The uniformity of survival indicates that the visible prehistoric remains are not the product of opportunistic quarrying. There is no indication of a fall off in stone robbing at a distance from the later field walls for example. The tide lines of Scilly are littered with suitable stone for building, and there are ample opportunities for quarrying from the numerous areas of scree and rock face around the islands. For this reason, I believe that many of the field systems on Scilly may have had meanings and functions that are not attributable solely to agricultural sets of uses.

To suggest walls were built before cairns or vice versa would thus be a very simplistic approach to chronology in this landscape, and as with prehistoric field systems and cairn fields elsewhere in Britain, those on Shipman Head Down were probably the result of complex histories and sequences. None of the palaeo-environmental data described above for Scilly were derived from Shipman Head Down and unless the existence of walls is accepted as evidence of farming there is no direct evidence for either arable or pastoral practices associated with these features.

The fields of Shipman Head Down cannot easily be ascribed a function. Although our assumptions about field systems propel us towards purely agricultural explanations, in the case of Shipman Head Down this may be a difficult argument to sustain. Charles Thomas has cogently argued that the location of this field system makes any discussion of agriculture problematic (Thomas 1985: 132-133). Even taking into account a larger land mass during prehistory, Shipman Head Down would not have been far enough from the sea to protect crops from salt spray. Current farming practice on Scilly is to grow hedges of escallonia and other evergreen shrubs to protect soil and crops from wind and sea spray, a practice introduced during the nineteenth century during the growth of the flower industry on Scilly (Gill 1975: 76). The surviving height of the walls, being of a single upright stone, could not prevent any movement of animals and there is no evidence to suggest that these walls have ever been more substantial. Borlase (1966

I think it is important here to discuss the survival of Scilly’s prehistoric walls. It is common in field archaeology to explain the robbing out of archaeological features by identifying later uses for construction materials. On Scilly, later uses for stones from the prehistoric field systems can be attributed to wall building for post-medieval field systems or, in the case of Castle Down, for castle building. On the face of it this 103

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT [1756]) recorded turf extraction on Shipman Head Down as being the down’s only use. It has been suggested that the walls may be of relatively late construction and indicative of differential rights to turf extraction (Thomas 1985: 133), but this implies a simple construction sequence that the evidence does not support. Monuments, topography and walking The Isles of Scilly are a popular holiday destination. Amongst the many holiday activities on Scilly walking and bird watching are very popular, both of which are undertaken in the same locations. These activities involve multiple sensory encounters with the sights, sounds and smells of this simultaneously teeming and tranquil place. While undertaking fieldwork during the busy summer months I was surprised to encounter so many visitors who had not recognised the archaeological landscapes they traversed. What makes this lack of recognition more remarkable is the wealth of literature available to the casual visitor – the guidebooks stress the importance of the archaeology, the birds, the plants and the sea life. Many of the footpaths lead along field walls with adjacent cairns, and from one entrance grave to the next, and many walls follow contours. These walls and other monuments affect the experience of walking. They are noticed and negotiated, whether this is explicitly recognised or not. The terrain is gently undulating for the most part, so the need to step up and step down is often the result of an encounter with archaeological features – a cairn, a series of set stones or an entrance grave. These features are often considered part of a naturally wild and barren landscape unaffected by human actions. There are many visitors who recognise and go looking for the archaeology, and others who merely note it and pass on. There is a range of expectations and of experiences.

Figure 5. Wall A with stones set face to face, Shipman Head Down. Source: E. Breen.

I was drawn to the Scillonian field systems because of the experience of walking through them. In fact, one area in particular convinced me that there was something special involved in the arrangement of these monuments. On Shipman Head Down, while walking from east to west along a short length of wall, Wall E, I was struck by the alternating arrangement of cairns. I had to walk round or over some cairns, and I walked by others on the far side of the wall I was following. In addition, I had to negotiate the heather, which at times felt like walking though snow due to its depth and texture. Not only did the wall form my routeway, but this route impelled me to follow certain actions and perform certain movements. This particular wall is not located along any of the main footpaths, and as a result the cairns had not been eroded by years of walking feet. The relationships between these cairns and walls seemed to me to be quite purposeful, although the nature of the purpose escaped me. As I walked along this wall, it struck me that discussions regarding the chronology on Shipman Head Down perhaps did not address the whole story of these walls and cairns. I agree that to answer the question of chronology is important. If we can state that the cairns were constructed before the walls or vice versa, we can identify a set of relationships

Figure 6. Cairn 8, Shipman Head Down. Source: redrawn by A. Leaver from E. Breen.

between the builders and their environment that would enhance our understanding of the history of place and 104

ELEANOR BREEN: ENCOUNTERS WITH PLACE IN PREHISTORY: WRITING A CASE STUDY FOR SHIPMAN HEAD DOWN people. This does not preclude alternative approaches to understanding place. If we think of Shipman Head Down as a ‘finished’ landscape, a place to be considered without identifying its origins, then we can think about how people lived within and encountered this place without charging them with invention and physical construction as well. Movement I have described my first meaningful encounter with the walls on Shipman Head Down. The walls seemed to play an active role in creating my response to this place. And this response was not primarily academic, that of an archaeologist. My response to the walls and cairns of Shipman Head Down was generated by a physical need to negotiate my surroundings. Only then did it become a matter of applying a set of academic understandings to the archaeological features I had encountered. Following my walk along Wall E, I began to look anew at the remainder of the Shipman Head Down walls and associated cairns. It became clear that while the existing data on Shipman Head Down recorded the walls and cairns, it did not allow me to understand more detailed aspects of the inter-relationships of these archaeological features. Both my survey data and my meanderings across Shipman Head Down led me to make further observations. Of the seventeen cairns recorded along Wall A, only two cairns (18 and 19) are located on the west side. A similar pattern can be seen with Wall B and Wall G. There are two areas containing numerous cairns that are not near walls – the north end of Shipman Head Down to the west of Wall A, and the area west of Wall G and south of Wall F. Notwithstanding the interesting questions to be answered regarding the intentionality behind the construction of this prehistoric landscape, I intend to focus here on Shipman Head Down as a ‘finished’ landscape as explained above, rather than look at the origins of wall construction.

Figure 7. Cairn 10, Shipman Head Down. Source: redrawn by A. Leaver from E. Breen.

surrounding ground all falls away from most of the chosen routeway. Wall A was built largely on the ridge between rocky outcrops on the east side of Shipman Head Down. Although Scilly is part of the granite mass that extends from the south of England into the Atlantic, these features are not comparable to the Dartmoor tors. When viewed from below they appear as substantial rock features, but while walking to and fro across Shipman Head Down these areas of outcrop are not so prominent. However, the diminutive nature of the outcrops does not preclude their significance (Kirk 2004: 238). There is an area of outcrop located beyond the southern end of Wall A suggesting that it was referenced by the builders of the walls, although this may simply be a coincidental aspect of the natural topography of the down. This outcrop is visible on the approach to Shipman Head Down from the south east but is not visually remarkable from the down (Fig. 9). Having reached the outcrop and then onto Shipman Head Down, the current footpath leads the walker along Wall A towards the north of the down and ultimately to Shipman Head. Apart from the occasional slight detour to climb to the top of a cairn and survey the scene, by far the most common course for any visitor is to follow the path north. The ground is undulating, and the path begins on the west side of the wall. The natural undulations of the down, the vegetation and the encounters with three wall junctions provide the immediate context for movement. This contrasts with the east side of the wall that has one wall junction and numerous cairns. The east side also has more gorse and heather cover than the west side, probably due to footpath use keeping the area clear.

Having established that movement along Wall E was affected by the situation of the cairns, it also seemed clear that the patterning of cairns and walls in other areas could elicit comparable responses. Wall A broadly runs from south to north of Shipman Head Down, following the natural ridge. Of all the cairns adjacent to Wall A, only Cairns 18 and 19 are situated on its west side. This does not provide uninterrupted access to the remaining length of the wall on the west side, as Wall A is joined by Walls B, D and L. The wall junctions must be negotiated. The elaboration of the junction of Walls A, D and E is evidenced by the quantity of stone in that area, producing a substantial feature to navigate a passage through. Without knowing the nature of this feature it is not fruitful to surmise any further, other than to suggest it may have the same impact on a person’s movement as the cairns. The other wall junctions are less notable, but also affect movement across them. The impact of the natural ridges means that to walk alongside Walls A and F particularly you must rise to the higher area on the down. While these heights are by no means dizzying, the 105

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT west of this point on Wall D, cairn 32 marks another gap suggesting a path across a field. Cairn 8 marks a gap in Wall A at a point very close to the junction of Walls A, D and E and close to a gap in Wall E marked by Cairns 10 and 9, the latter located on the west side of the gap. Prehistoric perambulations What, if anything, can twenty-first century wanderings on Shipman Head Down tell us of the prehistoric experiences of the landscape? On the one hand, it tells us very little. We must base our understandings of past encounters on our own engagements with places and objects, whilst using ethnographic analogies to find meanings beyond our own experiences. The present is not prehistory, and a visitor going for a recreational walk in the twenty-first century may have little in common with those people who walked here thousands of years before. I am writing in the present about perceptions that may relate to the prehistory of Figure 8. Cairn 11, Shipman Head Down. Source: redrawn by A. Shipman Head Down. In order to illustrate the Leaver from E. Breen. contemporary nature of interpretation I intend to write this passage in the present tense rather than suggest that I believe that what I am writing can stand for the past. The intention is to strengthen the point that interpretations are a product of the time in which they are conceived. We might suggest that while current visitors to Scilly have footwear, people in prehistory may have been barefoot (or at least not wearing preformed rubber-soled shoes), giving the experience of walking a more direct link with the terrain. As Ingold (2004: 332) suggests ‘the skill of walking’ is not just in the head but is distributed amongst the person and their environment. The effect of footwear is fundamental to our experience of walking (ibid: 337). Less robust footwear allows the wearer to have a more immediate contact with the ground. The recent visitor to Scilly lives in a world largely detached from the land (with or without an understanding of modern agricultural practices). The walker in prehistory may have a more immediate link with both the land and the sea as the givers and the takers of the means to survive implying a dependence and even an interdependence as land and sea are brought into existence by human thought and action. Such forces are not so immediately apparent for today’s visitors.

Figure 9. Wall A looking south towards cairn, Shipman Head Down. Source: E. Breen.

A further consideration in the relationship between movement and built features comes from the numerous gaps in walls. Some of these interruptions in the walls may result from differential wall survival, but there is an interesting pattern of cairns located at wall gaps. The gaps are largely invisible from any distance, and I found that I generally happened upon them rather than in any sense planning my movements according to where they are located. The juxtaposition of cairns and gaps has a number of effects. The cairns can be considered to punctuate wall terminals, thus emphasising the interruption in the wall. Where cairns are located on each side of a gap, they appear to further enhance the effect of formalising points of passage across the down. Cairns 26, 27 and 28 mark a substantial gap in Wall B, and north-

If we presume familiarity of the prehistoric walker with the landscape then perhaps we can imagine largely unconscious movement through the fields, and over and around the walls and cairns. We can consider the possibility that the topography of this landscape served to elicit a particular set of responses, whether or not this was the intention during the construction of the cairns and walls. Unconscious movement may be the result of a repetition of careful choreography, a fixed set of actions using the physicality of the landscape as a mnemonic structure. If the movement is conscious, we can explore 106

ELEANOR BREEN: ENCOUNTERS WITH PLACE IN PREHISTORY: WRITING A CASE STUDY FOR SHIPMAN HEAD DOWN the relationships between the constructed elements within the landscape, their relationships to the natural features, and how these might affect the perception of place and the experience of the encounter. The relationship between movement and understandings of place is bound up in a complex web of recursive human engagements with the environment that are neither wholly conscious nor unconscious (Ingold 2000: 55; Tilley 1994: 29). We can perhaps envisage differing degrees of consciousness dependent on motivation for movement, and taking into account the routine nature of many activities in day-today living (Whittle 2003: 23-4).

must acknowledge the diversity of human feelings that can exist at any one time. These can be dissected and categorised but cannot be understood individually. This takes us back to our motivations as archaeologists. If we wish to reconstruct a prehistoric version of ourselves, we can identify nuclear families building homes, constantly maximising agricultural production, and concentrating on making ends meet, with a separate ritual sphere of practice. However, in so doing, we misrepresent those past people whose lives we are attempting to understand as well as underestimating the complexity of our own lives.

We can consider the nature of ritual both as special events and as aspects of everyday life. The everyday nature of ritual is illustrated by Abram’s (1997) account of a Bali family compound where he witnessed a woman making offerings of rice on specially woven palm leaf trays, to the spirits of her dwelling each morning. This resulted in a line of ants walking to the corner of the house, taking the rice, and leaving again. Abram (ibid: 14) suggests that this daily ritual maintains a balance between different inhabitants, namely the family and the ants, where boundaries are reinforced daily creating a harmonious living environment. Perhaps living in a country such as Britain with a history of grand public occasions has encouraged us to look on all ritual as ostentatious. Such a view of ritual has its place, but it is also quite limiting, and we can see from Abram’s account that rituals, which may be fundamental to how people live their lives, can be subtle and embedded in everyday practices (Brück 1999).

By undertaking this research I am thinking about the pleasure I derive from fieldwork and from reading and my contribution to furthering understandings of prehistory. Farmers have many work-related motivations, such as tilling the land and tending stock, that are not to the exclusion of other activities such as fishing and hunting, and reading, painting and jam making. As academics we socialise and maintain our homes as well as engaging with the academy. These multiple and simultaneous aspects of our lives inform our experiences and motivations. Conclusion My intention in this paper has been to engage people with place, and to illustrate the multiple meanings of people’s actions. I believe it is important that we consider multiple aspects of life simultaneously, and that any treatment of prehistoric subsistence and economy must also acknowledge the multi-faceted nature of being human. Fields are not just economic tools nor are fields always economic tools. They structure the movements and experiences of people and form part of the social fabric of a community.

Motivation When considering movement we may find it productive to consider its motivation. We can consider hopeful expectation, happy fulfilment, disappointment and exhaustion, and these can apply to any number of activities. Physical conditions are also a factor, and can affect the character of the landscape and people’s moods alike. Rain on the downs of Scilly tends to be accompanied by an Atlantic airflow and, as a consequence, is often horizontal. Winter storms send waves crashing over the downs and the sun makes them warm and welcoming. Weather conditions impact on daily life. We can consider their effect on certain activities while also bearing in mind physical comfort. It may be good to be cold and wet if this is the result of weather suitable for seal hunting. Smells differ with wet and dry conditions. Cloud cover can impact on sound and visibility. Snow muffles sound and can also alter visibility both covering and accentuating features within the landscape. Wind can distort sights and sounds and transport sounds and smells. Physical aspects of weather can also be accompanied by a spiritual dimension giving a further set of experiential considerations. There are myriad ways in which a single place can offer multiple experiences, all of which can affect the motivation for particular activities within the landscape.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank the following people with whom I have discussed the issues addressed here and some of whom also kindly read and commented on this paper in draft: Adrian Chadwick, Sarah Daligan, Andrew Fleming, Trevor Kirk, Paul Rainbird and Katie Smith. I take full responsibility for what I have written. Fieldwork on Shipman Head Down was undertaken with the financial support of University of Wales, Lampeter. Assistance in the field was provided by the unstinting hard work of Nick Garry and Trevor Kirk. Jill Arbery of English Heritage and Dave Mawer of the Isles of Scilly Wildlife Trust gave permission to survey on Bryher. Fraggle Rock Café Bar provided equipment storage space and battery charging facilities for which I am very grateful. For the duration of my research on Scilly my travel to and from the islands has been generously sponsored by the Isles of Scilly Steamship Company.

Clearly, there are and were a multiplicity of meanings that form human experiences of the landscape, and we 107

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A student adding detail to a walkover sketch plan during part of the Shoveldown Project, directed by Joanna Brück, Helen Wickstead and Robert Johnston. The line of gorse and stones extending into the distance marks a Bronze Age reave boundary forming part of a co-axial field system on Shoveldown, Dartmoor, Devon. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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The place and materiality of an upland field system at Cwm Ffrydlas, North Wales Robert Johnston Fields as places This paper examines the irregular prehistoric enclosures, field banks and settlements that are a common archaeological feature in many areas of unimproved upland pasture in Britain (Figure 1). It will take as its focus the scattered ‘hut circle’ settlements identified in North Wales, and will argue that these are important sites to study if we wish to understand the changes in tenure, degrees of mobility, and the scale and identity of communities, which have become an important element of histories of social life during the late third to first millennia BC. The Britain-wide distribution of these monuments was first widely recognised through the work of the Archaeology Division of the Ordnance Survey and the inventories produced by the Royal Commissions, and it was in the context of this work that Feacham published a review of the evidence in 1973 (Feacham 1973). The project that Feacham reported on had set out to establish the function of the many groups of small cairns that were being discovered in upland areas of Scotland (Bowden and Mackay 1999; q.v. Childe 1935: 216; Graham 1959). It demonstrated that the cairns were the results of field clearance, associated with other agricultural and settlement remains such as stone banks and roundhouses. The typological scheme that Feacham established from this evidence charted the development of simple and irregular field banks and cairns of the third and second millennia BC, to complex and regular field systems of the first millennium BC (cf. Fowler 1983).

Figure 1. Location map of the study areas. Source: A. Leaver.

landscapes might tell us about social and cultural processes during the Bronze Age.

The classification of the fields and associated settlements has continued, in conjunction with detailed survey and occasional excavation. In the majority of cases, the results of this research has been presented in support of the thesis that the sites result from a brief colonisation of upland regions during the late third millennium and second millennium BC (e.g. Burgess 1985; but see Tipping 2002 and Young and Symonds 1995 for an alternative view). This period of occupation ended, it is argued, as a variety of anthropogenic and climatically induced environmental changes forced the abandonment of so-called ‘marginal’ areas. There are very few substantially argued alternatives to these perspectives. The research carried out by John Barnatt and others in the Peak District is unusual, though not unique, in that its focus is directed towards reconstructing the social context of the settlements (Barnatt 2000; Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds 2002). The fact that these interpretations have been productively challenged (e.g. Kitchen 2001) is even more rare, as elsewhere in Britain there has been relatively little recent debate exploring what these

This paper will offer a further perspective by taking a considerably more close-grained look at some small upland field systems and settlements. The overall rationale is to treat them as places rather than as sites. By this, I mean giving less emphasis to the final morphological form of the structures, and instead focusing on the changing identities of the places as they were occupied. Such an approach is possible because the physical remains are not simply a consequence of the ways in which they were occupied, but also form part of the conditions for those same and future inhabitations. Part of the challenge lies in picking apart the dense tangle of events that built up through what might potentially be generations of occupation at the same place. To achieve this, I have taken literally Geertz’s argument that the study of place is “…determinedly local…tight, drawn-in focus, of looking at things obsessively up close…” (Geertz 1996: 260). The following study examines the history of one place in an attempt to demonstrate some of 111

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT the ways in which small upland fields might be drawn into the narratives of the intimate and changing relationships between people, and between people and land, during the second millennium BC.

locations, frequently on the south facing side of gently sloping valleys, and are distinguished from other forms of prehistoric settlement by the small size of the houses, and the denuded and slight nature of the remains (Griffiths 1951). The sites were first recognised and mapped in the nineteenth century (e.g. Owen 1866), although the most intensive fieldwork was undertaken much later (RCAHMW 1921, 1956). Griffiths (1951) argued that the remains represented a phase of early Bronze Age settlement in the North Welsh hills that could be equated with sites on Dartmoor and in Cornwall. The broad array of generally lower lying sites that were set within more regular patterns of field systems and included larger and

‘Scattered unenclosed settlement’ in the uplands of North Wales There is a relatively distinctive type of ‘settlement/field system’ in North Wales that compares closely with the examples from Scotland and the Peak District alluded to in the previous section. They are found in upland

Figure 2. The stone boundaries at Cwm Ffrydlas and the surrounding landscape Source: photographs R. Johnston, photomontage A.M. Chadwick and A. Leaver.

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Figure 3. A survey plan of Cwm Ffrydlas (originally reproduced at a scale of 1: 1152, RCAHMW 1956: 145). Source: Crown Copyright: RCAHMW.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT better preserved roundhouses were later, dating from the first millennia BC and AD. This was not based solely on the assumption that irregular, smaller and more crudely built settlements must be earlier, but also stemmed from observing associations between large cairns (presumably Bronze Age in date) and the field banks north of Llefn, and instances where the irregular settlements were overlain by regular field systems and larger well-built roundhouses, as on Moel Faban and Conwy Mountain (Griffiths 1951: 68-69). There were no excavated sites to either support or refute Griffiths’ interpretation. The few sites that have since been investigated, albeit outside the study area that he examined, have done nothing to resolve the situation – they range from the late third millennium (Caseldine, Smith and Griffiths 2001), to the late second (Manley 1990) and later first millennium BC (Crew 1998).

overall morphology of the monument rather than the subtle complexities of its history. I now wish to leave aside the published plan, and use instead a copy annotated during a walk-over survey of the monument (Fig. 4). Although this version is more difficult to ‘read’, it does provide a more complex representation of the archaeological features. The visibility of stone around the field edges, for instance, is variable. Tentatively, one might suggest that this correlates partly to different scales, intensities and rhythms of clearance within the fields, much in the way as the build up of soil along a lynchet or the recutting of a ditch (Chadwick 1997) materialises the practices of working within the field and maintaining the boundaries. Theoretically, the banks preserve histories of the fields they surround, even if it may be practically difficult, even with excavation, to reconstruct those histories. The presence of other, slighter features beyond the lines of banks and buildings further emphasises the extent to which these places were reworked through time – traces of a low earthen bank lie in the farthest corner of the most northerly enclosure; an access-way was cut through the bank of the eastern enclosure, then the stone heaped to one side; and an earthfast boulder was partly buried with cleared stones. These fragments are reminders of particular events that occurred during the use of the fields. The focus for these activities was not the banks of the field systems, but the spaces that the boundaries enclosed.

The lack of consistent dating evidence has in part contributed to a greater emphasis on the idea that these ‘scattered settlements’ were part of a contiguous settlement pattern linking the upland and lowland. In his analysis of the hut circle settlements in Gwynedd, Smith noted a distinction in the modal altitudes between the scattered settlement at 300-400m AOD, and other enclosed sites at 100-200m (Smith 1999: 37). He interpreted this pattern as evidence for a degree of ‘economic specialisation’ in each of the settlement types. The alternative hypothesis, also discussed by Smith, was that the upland scattered settlements, particularly the slight stony platforms (e.g. Manley 1990), might date to the second millennium BC and be contemporary with low lying sites of which only Mellteyrn Uchaf (Ward and Smith 2001) has so far be recognised. This puzzle is still unanswered, and shall remain so until sufficient numbers of sites have been excavated and dated. Our narratives of how these landscapes were inhabited therefore rely almost wholly upon typological and locational analyses, which by their nature cannot take account of the complex temporal qualities of the sites. They rest upon a reduction to two dimensions of what are four dimensional structures.

When people built the enclosures at Cwm Ffrydlas they took account of the existing structure of the place. This can be seen in the abrupt changes of direction taken in the lines of some of the banks, ‘empty’ junctions where boundaries converge on now absent features, and lengths of bank that no longer enclose an area of land. The sinuous courses of some of the stone banks may have built up gradually at the edge of an otherwise unenclosed field, as amongst the ‘discontinuous serpentine rubble wall[s]’ on the east of Dyffryn Nedd and at Garn Ddu, Brecknock, South Wales (RCAHMW 1997: 236-237). There, the banks of fieldstone weave sinuous lines along the hillside, apparently formed at the limits of cleared land; with episodes of clearance tacked one onto the other.

The place and materiality of Cwm Ffrydlas The enclosures, cairns and buildings at Cwm Ffrydlas are situated at just over 400m AOD on the south facing slopes of Gyrn, a cone-shaped rocky hill on the northwestern edge of Snowdonia (RCAHMW 1956: 144-145) (Fig. 2). The settlement overlooks a broad, shallow and permanently wet ‘basin’ formed in the valley of the Afon Ffrydlas. Cwm Ffrydlas is recognised as a type-site of the scattered settlements with curvilinear fields that Griffiths attributes to the early Bronze Age (e.g. Lynch, AldhouseGreen and Davies 2000: 91). It consists of both circular and oval structures – presumably buildings, several cairns, and four enclosed plots. In the published plans, the form of the banks that surround the fields and define the buildings are portrayed in a uniform style (Fig. 3). This is partly a function of the scale at which the survey was undertaken, but it also reflects a primary concern with the

A further, and perhaps more deliberate, aspect of the laying out of the enclosures is the use made of earthfast boulders and existing accumulations of field-cleared stone, buildings and cairns. As already discussed, the accumulating ‘architecture’ of the settlement is important in structuring subsequent uses of the place. The two cairns form key nodes in the layout of the earliest enclosure. Boundary junctions and changes in the path of the banks, some of which are quite subtle, are in many cases marked by a greater amount of stone, the use of larger stones, or the presence of an earthfast boulder. The microtopography of Cwm Ffrydlas – the prominent boulders, denser areas of fieldstone – became significant and perhaps named parts of the place as the fields were used, cleared and enclosed within boundaries. As at the 114

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Figure 4. A selection of the annotations from a walkover survey at Cwm Ffrydlas. Additional stone heaps are shown as stippling over the shaded base map (based on a survey originally reproduced at a scale of 1: 1152). Source: R. Johnston, after RCAHMW 1956: 145).

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Figure 5. The stone banks and cairns in the limestone landscape at Mynydd y Garn, Brecon Beacons. Source: photographs A.M. Chadwick, photomontage A.M. Chadwick and A. Leaver.

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ROBERT JOHNSTON: THE PLACE AND MATERIALITY OF AN UPLAND FIELD SYSTEM AT CWM FFRYDLAS, NORTH WALES southernmost side of the enclosures, a large earthfast stone was used as a marker for the edge of a field and as the point at which the bank began to turn northwestwards. It is interesting to compare this to the enclosures at Mynydd y Garn, Brecknock, where the paths of the boundaries incorporated shake holes or sinkholes that formed as the result of fluvial erosion of the underlying limestone (RCAHMW 1997) (Fig. 5). While it is clear that some of these formed after the banks of stone had been built, in many cases the holes form alignments that the boundaries follow, or they are located at bends, junctions and access-ways of later boundaries. Some boundaries even curve around the ‘lips’ of shake holes.

isolated lengths of bank, perhaps vestiges of an earlier period of occupation either slighted or unnoticed by those building the enclosures. In contrast, the latter, while irregular, have built up with reference to one another in a cumulative or agglomerative fashion. This process also appears to have taken place at Cwm Ffrydlas (Fig. 6). The initial enclosure, including two cairns and an oval house, was extended and reworked on several occasions. These episodes of rebuilding may well have involved the removal of stone from the earlier features – the two north-eastern plots are indistinct, whereas the banks of those on the west are relatively stony and their edges are well-defined. A similar pattern might be explored at the comparable site of Mynydd Du, located several kilometres to the south of Cwm Ffrydlas on the lower slopes (420-440m AOD) of a rocky spur overlooking the Afon Llafar

Amongst the enclosures at Mynydd y Garn there are several short lengths of boundary that apparently bear no relationship to the main pattern of fields. They lie as

Figure 6. A suggested sequence for the development of the field plots at Cwm Ffrydlas based on observations made during the walkover survey (see Fig. 4). Source: R. Johnston.

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Figure 7. The differential densities of structural stone on the collapsed field banks and house platforms at Mynydd Du, Gwynedd. Dark shading – dense, compact stone banks; light shading – sparse, stony banks; the outline of large earthfast stones are shown in black. Source: R. Johnston; based on a survey originally reproduced at a scale of 1: 1152, RCAHMW 1956: 140.

(RCAHMW 1956: 140). Situated on a hillside strewn with rocks, the buildings and enclosures at Mynydd Du contain much more stone that those at Cwm Ffrydlas, and it is therefore easier to trace where material has been partially removed from the banks (Fig. 7). The gathered stone was presumably incorporated into later buildings and boundaries at the same site, as there are no nearby features such as modern field walls or sheep folds for which it might have been used. The variation in the distribution of stone is complex, although a few aspects of the sequence can be unravelled. For example, the westernmost building and the bank to its north display

only low densities of material. Large sections of the bank of the eastern enclosure are similarly denuded. The The foundations for permanence The survey of Cwm Ffrydlas, which formed the basis for the annotated plan used above, portrayed the stone banks of the fields and buildings as being of a uniform and, by inference, contemporary build. Such depictions are important, as they record the surviving layout and extent of the archaeological features, and they provide the morphology of the settlement for comparative purposes. 118

ROBERT JOHNSTON: THE PLACE AND MATERIALITY OF AN UPLAND FIELD SYSTEM AT CWM FFRYDLAS, NORTH WALES Nevertheless, because of the relatively short space of time allocated to these surveys, and because of their limitations of scale, they can obscure many of the details of these places, and therefore the complexities of their histories too. Such images contribute to the broad narratives that archaeologists have used to explain human occupation of these landscapes. These explanations prioritise a marginal role for the settlements, either as seasonal huts and paddocks serving lower lying, enclosed sites occupied year round, or as a rapid but short-lived agricultural expansion onto higher ground during periods of climatic amelioration in the second millennium BC. These ideas remain hypothetical, since the sites are still woefully under-investigated, despite being recognised and recorded since the nineteenth century, and the repeated calls for more excavation since the 1950s.

Acknowledgements Adrian Chadwick and Helen Wickstead generously invited me to take part in the session on Land Allotment at TAG 2003, and I am further grateful to Adrian Chadwick for his insightful editing while preparing the paper for publication. John Roberts read and commented upon an earlier draft of the text, and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales kindly agreed to the reproduction of Fig. 2. The paper was written whilst I was on a period of sabbatical leave funded by the Leverhulme Trust. References Barnatt, J. 2000. To each their own: later prehistoric farming communities and their monuments in the Peak. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 120: 1-86. Barnatt, J., Bevan, B. and Edmonds, M. 2002. Gardom’s Edge: a landscape through time. Antiquity 76: 51-56. Bowden, M. and Mackay, D. 1999. Archaeology and the Ordnance Survey revisited: field investigation by the Ordnance Survey Archaeology Division 1947-1983. In P. Frodsham, P. Topping and D. Cowley (eds.) ‘We were always chasing time’: papers presented to Keith Blood. Northern Archaeology 17/18 (Special Edition): Northumberland Archaeology Group, pp. 113. Bradley, R. 2002. The Past in Prehistoric Societies. London: Routledge. Burgess, C. 1985. Population, climate and upland settlement. In D. Spratt and C. Burgess (eds.) Upland Settlement in Britain: the Second Millennium BC and After. BAR (British Series) 143. Oxford: BAR, pp. 195-230. Caseldine, A.E., Smith, G. and Griffiths, C. J. 2001. Vegetation history and upland settlement at Llyn Morwynion, Ffestiniog, Meirionnydd. Archaeology in Wales 41: 21-33. Chadwick, A. 1997. Towards a social archaeology of later prehistoric and Romano-British field systems in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. assemblage 2. World Wide Web http://www.shef.ac.uk/%7Eassem/2/2chad.html. Childe, V.G. 1935. The Prehistory of Scotland. London: Keegan Paul. Crew, P. 1998. Excavations at Crawcwellt West, Merioneth 1990-1998: a late prehistoric upland ironworking settlement. Archaeology in Wales 38: 23-35. Feacham, R.W. 1973. Ancient agriculture in the highland of Britain. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 39: 332-353. Fowler, P.J. 1983. The Farming of Prehistoric Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, C. 1996. Afterword. In S. Feld and K.H. Basso (eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 259-262. Graham, A. 1959. Cairnfields in Scotland. Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland 90: 7-23.

In this paper, I have put forward an alternative to the generic classification of Cwm Ffrydlas by examining its development as a place rather than its role as a site. This has involved a change in scale to offer a distinctly local and fine-grained account, and an emphasis upon tracing histories of occupation rather than identifying typologically diagnostic characteristics. The representation of this perspective could have taken a variety of forms, including photographs, reconstructions or more detailed graphic survey. For this paper I have chosen to use an annotated plan – a form that is widely utilised within the process of undertaking an archaeological survey but which is only very rarely employed in publication (e.g. Johnson and Rose 1994: 15). The annotations depict a considerably greater degree of complexity than is shown on the published plan. The variable visibility of stone along the field edges, the presence of slight features within the enclosures, and evidence for the processes by which the routes taken by the banks were chosen, together evoke a place with a history of inhabitation. It was during these occupations that the ground was cleared of stone, the fields utilised and during the course of this, the material traces of earlier settlement were encountered and modified. The evidence suggests that the creation of places high up in the valleys of Snowdonia was a gradual process involving repeated visits, reworking and rebuilding. If, as earlier fieldworkers have suggested, the origins of these sites lies in the late third and earlier half of the second millennium, then we can see a developing commitment to upland places defined by houses and field areas that contrasts with the evidence for settlement known from lower lying sites. In such a scenario, places such as Cwm Ffrydlas and Mynydd Du were exceptional in the permanence of their domestic and agricultural architecture, and therefore the earliest persistent use of places involving roundhouses and enclosed plots might have occurred in the uplands. This interpretation situates the uplands not at the margins of social change, but rather as landscapes that were crucial in transforming people’s commitment to places.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Griffiths, W.E. 1951. Early settlements in Caernarvonshire. Archaeologia Cambrensis 101: 3871. Johnson, N. and Rose, P. 1994. Bodmin Moor: an Archaeological Survey Volume 1 – the Human Landscape to c. 1800. London: English Heritage. Kitchen, W. 2001. Tenure and territoriality in the British Bronze Age. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes: Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 110-120. Lynch, F., Aldhouse-Green, S. and Davies, J. 2000. Prehistoric Wales. Stroud: Sutton. Manley, J. 1990. A late Bronze Age landscape on the Denbigh Moors, northeast Wales. Antiquity 64: 514526. Owen, E. 1866. Ancient dwellings, or cyttiau, near Llanllechid. Archaeologia Cambrensis Series III 12: 215-226. RCAHMW. 1921. An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Merionethshire and Wales. London: HMSO. RCAHMW. 1956. An Inventory of the Ancient Monuments in Caernarvonshire, Volume I. London: HMSO. RCAHMW. 1997. Brecknock (Brycheiniog): An Inventory of the Later Prehistoric Monuments and Unenclosed Settlements to 1000 AD. RCAHMW/Sutton. Smith, G. 1999. Survey of prehistoric and RomanoBritish settlement in north-west Wales. Archaeologia Cambrensis 148: 22-53. Tipping, R. 2002. Climatic variability and ‘marginal’ settlement in upland British landscapes: a reevaluation. Landscapes 3 (2): 10-29. Ward, M. and Smith, G. 2001. The Llŷn cropmarks project: excavations by Richard Kelly and Michael Ward. Studia Celtica 35: 1-87. Young, R. and Symonds, T. 1995. Marginality and the nature of later prehistoric upland settlement. Landscape History 17: 5-16.

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A disused medieval or post-medieval trackway and associated bank, now lying in more recent plantation woodland near Ystradfellte, Brecon Beacons, Powys, Wales. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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After the axe: ways into the upland landscapes of Cumbria Helen Evans Introduction

and Knapp 1999; Barnatt 1999, 2000; Barrett 1994; Bradley 1993; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Ingold 1986, 1993; Johnston 2000; Moore 1993; Simmons 1993, 1996). As many contributions to this volume demonstrate, field systems and cairnfields were socially constructed. This means that they can now be understood, in similar ways to overtly ‘ritual’ monuments, to illustrate the appropriation of particular places within social landscapes (e.g. Johnston 1999, 2000; Tilley 1996; Tilley and Bennett 2001).

Understandings of the prehistoric record in Cumbria have focused largely on the so-called Neolithic ‘axe trade’. Distributed across much of Britain, polished stone axes were produced from rock outcropping in the mountains of the central Lake District (Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Edmonds 2004; Fell 1964). Often interlinked with interpretations of the distribution of axes, the region is also well known for its large freestanding stone circles. Monuments such as Long Meg and Castlerigg have been understood as being located almost as a ring encircling the central fells, and used to ‘facilitate’ the ‘movement’ of axes beyond the modern county boundaries (e.g. Burl 1976, 1988). As analysis has focused on the interregional importance of the relatively few large, spectacular stone circles and their links with the distribution of axes, the character of the remainder of monuments within the county remain extremely poorly understood (Evans 2004). This discussion aims to redress this imbalance through looking at the nature and distribution of monuments into the early Bronze Age. In contrast to the usual focus on stone circles, the region’s upland record is in fact dominated by extant cairnfields, often associated with ring cairns and round funerary cairns. Taking a more holistic and contextual view across and beyond these monuments, this paper focuses on two main themes – how the history and topography of specific landscapes shaped localised patterns of land use, and how the settings and locations of monuments reflected some of the ways small scale communities articulated with wider social worlds.

Although there has been some application of these theoretical perspectives to specific regions, studies of prehistoric occupation often concentrate on the southern and eastern lowlands (e.g. Bradley 2000; Brück 2000; Topping 1997). In the rockier landscapes of the north and west, although the Neolithic is increasingly well represented (e.g. Cummings and Fowler 2004; Harding and Johnston 2000), understandings of the Bronze Age remain in virtual stasis. Falling back on outdated and superficial academic grand narratives set predominately at a national scale, these tend to condense diverse and distinctive regional traditions into palatable national pictures. One of the reasons for this is that we tend not to engage with the specifics of regional landscapes, with discussions of regional variability in monuments and material culture styles often treated as superficial products of wide scale social processes. However, prehistoric communities may have taken on aspects of particular traditions in different contexts, so shared styles need not have represented shared practices or common understandings (C. Evans 1988; Thomas 1998). If different communities had their own understandings of what monuments meant, then their construction and use was the product of more localised histories, social and political conditions. If different landscapes offered varying potentials for occupation as well as for the settings and construction of monuments, then localised practices need not bear close comparison with other areas of the British Isles, or even different parts of a given region (see Cooney 1997, 2000). In order to better understand the context of upland settlement, we therefore need to appreciate the regions in which this took place – their traditions, their histories and the character and configuration of their landscapes. Only when we engage with the specifics of regional traditions will it be possible to assess how the practices represented by the prehistoric record in localised landscapes articulated with the larger scale social processes evidenced at wider geographical scales.

Regional landscapes and interpretative traditions In part a debt to the culture historical delineation of the Highland and Lowland Zones (Childe 1941; Fox 1932), northern and western Britain have often been marginalised from the supposedly ‘core’ regions of the south and east. Interpretations of upland early Bronze Age occupation have frequently been based on economically and environmentally deterministic interpretations, with the inhabitants of the uplands generally perceived as the poor relations of those occupying more fertile landscape zones (e.g. Bradley 1984; Bradley and Hart 1984; Higham 1986; see discussion in Tipping 2002; Young and Simmonds 1995, 1999). More recent interpretations of the nature of prehistoric land use have shifted from processual/economic models to those drawing on the anthropology of landscape occupation. Changing understandings of the nature of tenure, mobility and seasonal land use have begun to feed into studies of Neolithic and Bronze Age occupation, as have new interpretations of the environmental record (e.g. Ashmore

Configurations: history and geography Before discussing the prehistoric upland record in Cumbria, it is necessary to outline the character and 122

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Figure 1. Location map illustrating monuments and other places mentioned in the text. Source: H. Evans and A. Leaver.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT configuration of the landscapes in which monuments were constructed and used. Although the mountains and dales of the Lake District are often central to views of Cumbria, the Lakes themselves form only part of what is a large and topographically varied region. Beyond the central Lakes, a multitude of watercourses flow down from the mountainous ‘dome’ of uplands and off the fells into a diversity of lowland landscapes (Figure 1). Each of the major valleys has its own configuration of landscape zones, defined by geology, watercourses, the effects of glaciation and more recent geomorphological and anthropogenic processes. Each offer varied sets of potentials for occupation and agricultural exploitation, and each have their own histories, many hinted at by patterns of enclosure and modern land use. It would be naïve to assume these different configurations of mountains, fells, lowlands and valleys were utilised, moved through and understood by prehistoric communities in the same ways Figure 2. Distribution of simple and complex cairnfields in southacross the entire region. Although different, western Cumbria. Source: H. Evans, mapping data © Crown Copyright what they have in common is that life is, and Ordnance Survey. An Edina Digimap/JISC supplied service. has always been, lived up and down the distributions of monuments within specific landscapes valleys rather than across the mountains and ridges that might illustrate something of the scale and character of separate them: localised occupation, and how this changed over time, remains one that is rarely considered. Like the becks it [life] begins at the dale head, gathers tributaries from farms and hamlets, and descends to the comparative lowlands where it usually finds a village or small town... (Nicholson 1972: 16, my addition in parentheses).

The character and distribution of cairnfields Areas of cairnfields in southern Cumbria are most common around the 200 metre contour, and are often located on shelves or shoulders of south or south-west facing land between the lowlands and high uplands. Many survive immediately above the walls demarcating the extent of enclosed land, attesting to the extent of medieval and later field clearance. That prehistoric clearance also occurred at lower levels is illustrated by some examples of cairnfields which survive on low-lying commons and within emparked landscapes (see Edmonds and Evans in prep.; Evans 2005, in prep.). Cairnfields are today at their densest in the south-west where the coastal strip, in some places as narrow as two kilometres, ascends steeply into the fells. Some cairnfields, like those on Bootle Fell, directly overlook the coastal plain. Others, such as those on Town Bank and Stockdale Moor, face down river valleys running between the central fells and the Irish Sea (Fig. 2).

Nicholson’s metaphor captures the ways in which life in the present and recent past worked at a variety of social and geographical scales. Much as they do in the present, everyday lives in prehistory would have operated across different places, at different times and under varied sets of social circumstances. The diverse nature of the region’s physical landscapes meant that particular areas and the resources they provided would have been suitable for specific uses. As archaeologists, we must understand that daily and seasonal subsistence tasks, such as those undertaken in upland cairnfields in coastal or woodland areas, brought people into different spheres of contact than those where communities came together at large scale monuments or at other gatherings. Consideration of the ways and scales at which people operated can therefore inform our understandings of different scales of community, and our interpretations of monuments. This represents a departure from conventional approaches to monuments that have often focused on the classification and regional or national distributions of particular forms (e.g. Barnatt 1989; Burl 1976), on the specific ways individual sites could be ‘experienced’ (e.g. Barrett 1994; Bradley 1998; Thomas 1993), or in the case of cairnfields, the agricultural regimes that these features might represent. The notion that the settings and

Other than nineteenth century descriptive and measured surveys (Clifton Ward 1878; Dymond 1891, 1893; Swainson-Cowper 1888), few cairnfields in Cumbria were recorded in detail until recently. Although unpublished at present, the 1980s and 1990s saw a programme of large-scale upland survey undertaken by Lancaster Archaeological Unit (LAU, now Oxford Archaeology North) for the Lake District National Park 124

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Figure 3. Quartermaine’s (2003) cairnfield typology. Source: H. Evans, after Quartermaine 2003.

Authority. Commissioned in response to problems of coverage and as an administrative tool, the surveys identified over 13000 features on the western, southern and eastern fells (Quartermaine 1986, 2002; Quartermaine and Leech forthcoming). Across southern and western Cumbria these included approximately 300 areas of cairnfield, 200 round funerary cairns and 70 ring cairns (Evans 2005, in prep.).

represent areas where small-scale clearance occurred at many possible points in time, but was not sustained. Furthermore, such interpretation not only denies the possibility that different agricultural and occupation practices may have co-existed, but also that the recognition of particular ‘types’ of field area depends on localised topographic conditions (see Barnatt this volume). Another problem with this typology is that it limits the possibility of identifying time depth in the surviving archaeological record. The LAU surveys not only involved the classification of cairnfields but also the round funerary cairns and ring cairns with which they are often associated (see Evans 2005, in prep.; Quartermaine and Leech forthcoming). The classificatory schema used were based predominantly on those proposed for other areas (e.g. Lynch 1972, 1979; Yates 1984), overlooking the fact that these monuments were the products of localised histories drawing on more widely recognised architectural forms (e.g. Barnatt 1989; Last 1999; Thomas 1998). Furthermore, the assumption that particular monument types resulted from single phases of construction ignores that they were often the ‘end points’ of long histories of building and deposition. Often taking place over hundreds of years and crossing our period distinctions, many assumed a variety of forms prior to those we see today and as such, may be better understood as ‘projects’ (q.v. Chadwick and Pollard 2005; C. Evans 1988; McFadyen 2006, forthcoming). The different forms in which particular monument types occurred, often themselves subject to detailed classifications (e.g. Burl 1976; Gibson 1998;

Classification and typology Although the LAU surveys have the potential to transform understandings of the character and chronology of upland occupation in Cumbria, the data have been understood primarily in economic terms with ‘settlement’ of these landscapes often assumed to have been permanent. Analysis has largely been limited to the creation of a cairnfield typology, based on a postulated sequence of ‘economic adaptation’ (Quartermaine 2003; Quartermaine and Leech forthcoming). According to the LAU typology, ‘Primary’, ‘Proto field systems’ and ‘Cairn-field systems’ are believed to be largely Bronze Age in date. ‘Cultivated field systems’, on the basis of associated enclosed settlement types, are thought to date to the later Bronze or early Iron Age (Fig. 3). Using the increasing complexity of the cairnfield record as a typological indicator is superficially persuasive but inherently problematic. At a broad scale, cairnfield typologies do illustrate some of the ways the character of upland occupation changed over time. However, as it is likely that all areas of clearance began as a limited number of cairns, ‘Primary’ cairnfields could therefore 125

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Lynch 1972), can be regarded as stages in processes that ended at different points at different sites (Barrett 1994; Bradley 1998). This observation is equally applicable to monument clusters such as ceremonial complexes and cairn cemeteries, as well as to cairnfields and field systems. The only way to begin to understand the processes involved, at the scale of individual monuments and the landscapes in which they were set, is to work back from their configurations as they exist in the present.

simpler cairnfields is problematic. In the Peak District, research extending the chronology of the East Moors cairnfields into the Iron Age has concentrated on welldeveloped complex sites (Barnatt 2000, this volume). As in Cumbria, it is not known if dispersed and disorganised simpler cairnfields reflect ‘early’ clearance that was not sustained, attempts in later periods to expand larger complex systems, or even more recent clearance episodes. Barnatt (2000) suggested that in the early Bronze Age, occupation and clearance activity on the East Moors of the Peak District might have been more extensive than in later periods. On the basis that small stone circles, ring cairns and round funerary cairns were associated with both simple and complex cairnfields, he suggested that the simple cairnfields may be characteristic of early Bronze Age occupation. Through analysis of monuments associated with cairnfield areas on the East Moors, it was demonstrated that 60-90% of cairnfields had associated stone circles, ring cairns or other stone settings, 80-90% had funerary cairns, and 50-80% had both (Barnatt 2000: 44). This correlation and the character and layout of cairnfields led to the suggestion that in the early Bronze Age, small farming communities had their own funerary cairns and ring cairns (Barnatt 1999, 2000).

Ways into the upland record The LAU surveys have added significantly to the recognition of upland monuments. Although there are problems with the classification schema utilised, the surveys have thrown up a number of questions regarding the chronology of cairnfields and their associations with other monuments. To examine these relationships in detail, it has been necessary to simplify what is an extremely large and complex dataset. Through consideration of the most basic forms of and associations between simple and complex cairnfields, ring cairns and round funerary cairns, it is possible to explore what the settings of particular monuments suggest about the nature and scale of prehistoric upland occupation.

Cairnfields and monuments

Similar associations might provide a means of unravelling aspects of time depth inherent in the layout and distribution of cairnfields in Cumbria. If simple cairnfields represent ‘early’ clearance and occupation, then ‘complex’ examples are likely to be the product of sustained use during the later Bronze Age and probably into the Iron Age. Barnatt suggested that “...cairnfields elsewhere in Northern Britain need re-evaluation against the Peak District evidence” (1999: 34). Although the physical characteristics of the Peak and Cumbria are different in many ways, some specific aspects of their prehistoric records are similar. As there are few areas of western Britain where stone circles, ring cairns and cairnfields occur in close proximity, monuments in the two upland regions may provide suitable basis for contrast and comparison. Before exploring the relationship between individual cairnfield areas and early Bronze Age monuments in Cumbria however, we need to examine problems with drawing close links between these two regions. Cumbria and the Peak are different in physical character, and this led to distinctive localised and long-term occupation histories based on the differential configuration of valley systems, upland and lowland landscapes. In Derbyshire, long and chambered cairns and henge monuments are distributed around the margins of the White Peak (see Barnatt 1996a, 1996b; Edmonds and Seaborne 2001). Ring cairns and small stone circles occur almost exclusively on the East Moors of the Dark Peak, in association with cairnfields (Barnatt 1990).

So how do we go about interpreting simple cairnfields? Although the longevity of complex field systems is suggested by the presence of features such as enclosed settlements and enclosures, establishing chronologies for

In southern and western Cumbria such distinctions are more difficult to draw in that associations between cairnfields and particular monument ‘types’ are less clear. Long cairns and large freestanding stone circles occur

For the purposes of this analysis, cairnfields recorded across the southern half of Cumbria have been split into ‘simple’ and complex’ forms (Evans 2005, in prep.). ‘Simple’ cairnfields comprise apparently disorganised cairn clusters, and those incorporating cairn alignments and small stretches of banks. ‘Complex’ cairnfields are those where the field layout appears organised, and include enclosures and probable ‘later’ settlement remains. Although more areas of upland clearance are yet to be characterised, there are around 250 ‘simple’ cairnfields in southern Cumbria. This includes about 120 small cairnfields composed of ten or less features. There are approximately 52 ‘complex’ cairnfields, or around a quarter of those identified. ‘Simple’ cairnfields incorporate the LAU ‘Primary’ and ‘Proto’ cairnfield types, and ‘complex’ cairnfields broadly equate to the LAU ‘Cairn-Field-Systems’ (Figs. 2, 3). Although both simple and complex cairnfields are relatively evenly distributed across the same areas, complex examples are predominantly located on relatively low-lying and freedraining areas of land. Around half of the simple cairnfield groups (making up three quarters of the cairnfield record) comprise clusters of ten or less cairns. Where these occur alongside complex cairnfields, they are usually situated at their margins, on slopes or patches of land between areas of bog and/or outcropping rock.

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Figure 4. A cairnfield on Burnmoor. The cairns are visible as slightly raised hummocks of more lush vegetation. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

close to or within cairnfields, but also as constituents of ceremonial complexes (some including possible Neolithic enclosures and henges) situated at major valley meetings. Although a significant proportion of ring cairns in Cumbria are closely associated with cairnfields this is not an exclusive relationship, as they are also found with ceremonial complexes and upland cairn cemeteries. There are no large Neolithic freestanding stone circles known in the Peak, although the presence of chambered cairns suggests that these monuments fulfilled similar roles (see Bradley 1998b). The ‘stone circles’ associated with cairnfields in the Peak are small in diameter and likely to be early Bronze Age in date (Barnatt 1990). These features are more comparable to the cairnfield ring cairns in the Peak and in Cumbria than they are to large Neolithic freestanding circles.

Round funerary cairns Alongside cairnfields, round funerary cairns represent a significant proportion of the prehistoric monuments identified across the Cumbrian uplands. Beyond factors of differential preservation, their distribution suggests that they were constructed in relatively large numbers across all areas of the occupied landscape. Around half the 200 or so round cairns recorded in the southern half of Cumbria occur within the LAU survey areas. This illustrates their common association with cairnfields, but also that where detailed survey has not taken place, many funerary cairns remain unrecorded. Simplistic modern archaeological distinctions between ‘funerary’ and ‘agricultural’ cairns may often not reflect prehistoric practices (see Johnston 1999, 2000). However, as the available survey evidence has been based on maintaining distinctions between their morphology and setting (Quartermaine and Leech forthcoming), these typological categories have been retained for the purposes of this discussion.

So, whilst the Peak monuments exhibit relatively clearcut distributional distinctions between classic ‘Neolithic’ and ‘Bronze Age’ forms in different parts of the region, in Cumbria it is unclear how their changing distributions and associations ‘work’ at either localised or regional scales. If communities in Cumbria and the Peak built and used monuments of similar forms and scales during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age, then differences in their locations and associations must be the product of specifically local and regional traditions. In order to explore these traditions, it is necessary to look more closely at the settings of monuments and the relationships between them, in the different landscape and social contexts in which they were built and used.

A significant proportion of round funerary cairns are isolated from other monuments and evidence for field clearance. Situated on ridges and summits, these features are locally prominent and many hold wide vistas (Fig. 5). The majority have not been described in detail since they were first mapped by the Ordnance Survey, and others probably remain concealed beneath modern marker cairns, field walls or peat deposits. The locations of these features are relative to the topographic areas in which they are set and in some cases their recognition has been 127

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Figure 5. A summit cairn on Bleaberry Haws, overlooking the Duddon estuary. Source: H. Evans.

influenced by later land use. On relatively low-lying fells such as those on the southern and eastern limestones, only small numbers of funerary cairns have been identified, distributed along low ridges and scarp edges overlooking valleys. These are likely to be localised versions of the summit cairns occupying the higher fells of the western and central Lakes. Neither of these landscape types is suitable for intensive agricultural exploitation, and both have traditionally been used for summer grazing.

funerary cairns associated with cairnfields were early Bronze Age ‘family’ monuments (q.v. Barnatt 1999, 2000), this difference may have chronological implications (see below). Few funerary cairn cemeteries have been identified in Cumbria in the past, and distinctions between funerary cairns in cairnfield contexts can only be drawn through close analysis of their settings and associations. Across Britain, cemetery clusters occur in different concentrations, some tightly grouped with others more dispersed (Fleming 1971; Woodward 2000). Both ‘types’ exist in Cumbria, and although there are no clear distinctions, localised groups of funerary cairns occur largely in upland and cairnfield contexts, with more dispersed examples often situated in the environs of ceremonial complexes. In both cases these monuments occupy ridge tops and scarps overlooking valleys. The upland cemeteries in particular are consistently associated with ring cairns.

Across the southern and western fells, the densest clusters of funerary cairns are associated with major groups of simple cairnfields (Fig. 6). In areas with dispersed cairnfields such clusters are less apparent, with individual funerary cairns more evenly and widely distributed. In other words, major cairnfield groups contain significant numbers of funerary cairns, but small areas of cairnfield are more often than not associated with only one or two funerary cairns. This suggests that individual cairnfields may have been associated with their own funerary cairns. While this correlation is clearly illustrated where individual cairnfields can be identified, the situation is more complex in major cairnfield clusters. When examined at a detailed landscape scale however, funerary cairns are located in two main settings. The first and more common location is that they are situated on localised areas of high ground within or slightly peripheral to individual cairnfields. Such monuments are relatively low-lying and appear to be associated with individual field areas. The second common location of funerary cairns was in groups along contours upslope of major concentrations of cairnfields, on natural routeways overlooking wide areas. Such clustering suggests these monuments formed cemetery groups. If individual

Ring cairns Many Cumbrian ring cairns have been recorded and interpreted as ‘hut circle’ structures or disturbed funerary cairns and as with round funerary cairns, there are a number of factors suggesting that their presently understood distribution is skewed. Although the LAU surveys significantly increased the numbers of ring cairns identified in cairnfields, it is likely that more remain to be identified outside the survey areas. For example, informal walkover survey in the central fells has identified around twenty new ring cairns of different forms (Rogers 2000) situated in settings analogous to the summit cairns. Although ring cairns have been the subject of many sub128

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Figure 6. The distribution of ring cairns, funerary cairns and cairnfields on the south-western fells. Source: H. Evans, mapping data © Crown Copyright Ordnance Survey. An Edina Digimap/JISC supplied service.

classifications in the past (e.g. Lynch 1972, 1979), recent analyses have recognised that these may have been overstated (Barnatt 1990; Lynch 1993; Evans 2005, in prep.). Given the problematic ring cairn data in Cumbria, the simplest approach is the most useful. Like stone circles, the main problem is that there are a number of qualitative (if not clearly quantitative) physical distinctions between monuments classified as ‘ring cairns’ (Fig. 7). In Cumbria, although ring cairns share many architectural traits, they can be divided into three broad ‘types’ on the basis of size, setting and associations with other monuments.

Hardendale Nab near Shap (Turnbull and Walsh 1997; Williams and Howard Davies forthcoming) revealed long and complex constructional and depositional sequences spanning the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age. These date ranges and those from large ring cairns in other regions (e.g. Lynch 1993) suggest that large ring cairns are later in date than large freestanding stone circles. They occur in ceremonial complexes and in cairn cemeteries isolated from evidence for cairnfield clearance. The Cockpit and Kopstone for example, are situated within a cluster of monuments on a natural routeway followed by the course of the High Street Roman road (Fig. 8). Neither have seen recorded excavation, but are associated with a number of kerbed funerary cairns on Moor Divock which contained early Bronze Age cremations (Greenwell 1874; Taylor 1886; see Waterhouse 1984).

A number of large and overtly monumental ring cairns in Cumbria are morphologically similar both to freestanding circles and ‘classic’ ring cairns, sharing a broad diameter range of 20-30m diameter and characterised by substantial ring banks with or without surviving orthostatic kerbing. Excavations at Oddendale and

Classic ring cairns are between 10-20m in diameter, and 129

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Figure 7. Plans of ring cairns. Top row: Large embanked ring cairns; second and third rows: ‘classic’ ring cairns; bottom row: small stone rings. The lack of a clear differentiation between the diameters of the different forms demonstrates the ‘sliding scale’ of ring cairn size. Source: H. Evans.

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Figure 8. The Cockpit, Moor Divock. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

share architectural features with the larger ring cairns but are generally smaller and less overtly ‘monumental’. They occur in a variety of forms with and without visible entrances or prominent kerbing. In the southern half of Cumbria, ‘classic’ ring cairns fall into four main geographical clusters (Evans 2005, in prep.), corresponding to the densest areas of cairnfields. As with the clusters of funerary cairns with which they are commonly associated, the majority are either relatively densely but evenly distributed within wide expanses of cairnfield, or occur as more isolated examples associated with less densely clustered cairnfield areas (Fig. 6). Within cairnfields, ring cairns, like funerary cairns, occur in two main settings. The first is that are commonly situated on localised hillocks or high points at the edge of the cairnfield(s) with which they are associated. The second is that these features also occur in association with funerary cairn cemeteries, located upslope and isolated from cairnfields and situated along valleyside routeways between upland and lowland areas.

forthcoming). It is likely that small stone rings were much more common than has been recognised, partly due to their morphological similarity to other small circular forms. There are clusters of small stone rings high in the central fells (Rogers 2000). These are largely isolated from the lower lying cairnfield areas and, like summit cairns in similar contexts, may represent the use of these areas for upland grazing (see discussion below). The architecture and chronology of ring cairns In some regions of western Britain, ring cairns occur exclusively in monument complexes, often associated with barrow cemeteries (Lynch 1993). In Cumbria however, ring cairns are located in monument complexes, in cairnfields and in relative isolation from other monuments. What do the settings, associations and sizes of the three identifiable ‘types’ of ring cairn suggest about the character and chronology of upland occupation? Although drawing clear distinctions is problematic, the ‘sliding scale’ of ring cairn diameter is also reflected by the localised associations between ring cairns and other monuments. To summarise:

Little is known about the character and distribution of small stone rings. These simple ring banks are between 510m in diameter and occur in localised clusters associated with or upslope from cairnfields (see Fig. 9). As with large and ‘classic’ ring cairns, these features often incorporate prominent earthfast boulders (Fig. 10), and whilst they usually have open central areas this is sometimes infilled (Quartermaine and Leech

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Both large and ‘classic’ ring cairns are commonly associated with ceremonial complexes and cairn cemeteries.

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Figure 9. The relationship between cairnfield groups, ring cairns, funerary cairns and watercourses on Bootle Fell. Source: H. Evans, after LAU 1987.

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Large ring cairns are generally found with dispersed cemeteries as at Moor Divock, and classic ring cairns in more localised clusters situated above cairnfield areas.

Classic ring cairns and small stone rings occur more closely associated with cairnfields, or in apparent isolation in the high uplands.

Although the possibility exists that chronological differences affected these distributions, this is extremely 132

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Figure 10. A small stone ring on Burnmoor approximately 2-3m across, appended to a large natural earthfast boulder. The boulder also has a possible small ‘mini-cairn’ of stones placed on top of it, which weathering suggests might also be of prehistoric date. These small accumulations of stone and ‘modifications’ of natural outcrops are extremely difficult to identify and date. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

difficult to establish. At a broader scale however, it may be possible to identify some of the processes that led to these changing associations.

with cairnfields. This may be chronologically significant. Put simply, ring cairns in cairnfields may have represented similar ‘kinds’ of features to those in monument complexes, but situated according to slightly different and more localised principles. The changing distributions and settings of monuments of similar morphological ‘type’ has implications for understanding the morphological relationship between stone circles, kerbed funerary monuments and ring cairns; a problem illustrated by the definition of many such forms as ‘variant circles’ (Bradley 1998; Lynch 1972, 1979, 1993). The construction and use of these architectural ‘variants’ drew on the significance of earlier stone circles, and it appears that architectural forms surrounding open circular areas remained in use over long periods. Over time such monuments were constructed in a variety of contexts and settings, and in a number of different size ranges.

Ring cairns have been traditionally understood as middle Bronze Age ‘cremation cemeteries’, largely on the basis of antiquarian excavations. Although modern excavations remain rare, changes in archaeological methods and project funding have begun to reveal long and complex histories for these monuments. Whilst close dating remains problematic, many appear to have been constructed around the Neolithic-Bronze Age transition. Excavations in Cumbria and other regions have revealed structures such as Neolithic timber or stake circles and Beaker burials sealed beneath ring cairns used for burial and other depositional acts well into the Bronze Age (e.g. Chadwick and Pollard 2005; Lynch 1993; Owoc 2001; Turnbull and Walsh 1997; Williams and Howard Davies forthcoming). That many of these features were earlier in date than has generally been supposed has important ramifications for understanding chronologies of cairnfield formation.

Whilst in some cases monuments were built with reference to features in their immediate environs, broader similarities between architectural forms may have resulted from their construction and use with reference to the past. At both a theoretical and landscape level this is not a new idea, having been discussed in relation to the life histories of individual monuments, the growth of cemeteries and ceremonial complexes and at more interpretative scale, the changing structure of communities across the Neolithic and Bronze Age (e.g.

Where excavation has revealed ‘early’ dates for ring cairns in Cumbria, these have almost exclusively been associated with ceremonial complexes. However, like funerary cairns these features also occur within dispersed cemetery clusters in the high uplands, closely associated 133

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Barrett 1994; Bradley 1998). The distribution of ring cairns, funerary cairns and cairnfields across the Cumbrian uplands clearly suggests a major shift in occupation practice and monument use around the beginning of the early Bronze Age. Across Britain, this has been interpreted as the point at which the importance of ‘ritual’ landscapes of stone circles and ceremonial complexes declined, overtaken in significance by the concerns of localised communities marking out their connections to ‘agricultural’ landscapes (e.g. Barrett 1994; Barrett and Bradley 1980; Barrett, Bradley and Green 1991, Bradley 1998; Brück 1999, 2000). Although this has often been assumed to mark a clear cut change in the middle Bronze Age, it is apparent that this was a culmination of processes emerging in the final stages of the Neolithic.

of community. This might also be indicated by the settings of many monuments close to watercourses. Across the uplands, ring cairns and round funerary cairns demonstrate clear and consistent concerns with tributary becks (small streams) running down off the fells. Ring cairns of all forms are consistently located close to springs; small stone rings are often located on dry ‘islands’ in boggy deltas formed by multiple springs; and ‘classic’ ring cairns are commonly situated close to the springs feeding the becks which themselves often define cairnfield areas (Fig. 9). Like large ring cairns, ‘classic’ ring cairns are also commonly situated on hummocks above bends in becks. Round funerary cairns exhibit similar locational themes – whilst many are situated to incorporate wide vistas overlooking major river valleys, at a closer scale, these are frequently situated on scarps overlooking ghylls (becks flowing down ravines) and localised watersheds (Figs. 9, 11). The beck heads, their watersheds and the routes of watercourses physically defined the land available for agriculture in the uplands, and these features formed natural boundaries between cairnfield areas. Given that many cairnfield areas had their own funerary monuments and ring cairns, it seems likely that the watercourses these referenced themselves defined boundaries between areas exploited by individual social groups. The recurrent placing of the dead close to watercourses is likely to have had powerful associations. These relate not only to the symbolic potency of water itself but also that the physical configuration of becks and rivers in Cumbria can be understood as a metaphor for different scales of community (Evans 2005, in prep.).

During the later Neolithic and into the early Bronze Age, there was a clear shift towards the construction and use of round funerary monuments. In Cumbria, the changing significance of large freestanding stone circles is illustrated by the addition of central elements (many containing evidence for burial) to previously open monuments, together with the construction of funerary monuments in their environs (see Evans 2005, in prep.). The size of round funerary monuments and their common association with individual burials has been linked to the fragmentation of large scale communities, constructed and used by individual descent groups and acting to indicate localised tenurial ties (e.g. Barnatt 1996a, 1999, 2000; Barrett 1990, 1994; Garwood 1991; Johnston 1999, 2000; Mizoguchi 1992; Peterson 1972; Thomas 1991, 1998). From a quantitative perspective, this may be demonstrated not only by the relatively small size of funerary cairns, but also by their sheer numbers and the diversity of landscape contexts in which they were constructed. Although these changes may have been the culmination of gradual and long term processes, large-scale clearance of the Cumbrian uplands becomes archaeologically detectable during the early Bronze Age. Accompanied by the construction of ring cairns and funerary cairns closely associated with individual cairnfields, this clearly illustrates that particular areas, likely associated with ‘families’ within wider social groups, became foci for the expression of localised tenurial concerns. On this basis it has commonly been supposed that such communities became increasingly isolated. However, that more isolated upland monuments and those in ceremonial complexes saw use and structural elaboration and deposition into the early Bronze Age is testament to the continuing importance of wider networks of contact (Evans 2005, in prep.).

Figure 11. A funerary cairn on Torver High Common overlooking Torver Beck. Source: H. Evans.

If we want to further understand the ways in which smallscale communities articulated with wider social worlds, we have to follow the watercourses down off the fells into the lowland landscapes below. As the tributary becks referenced by many small scale monuments run off the fells, they combine to form larger rivers that in the west and south flow from wide estuaries into the Irish Sea. Many of these estuaries are also referenced and marked by monuments. Large freestanding stone circles such as Grey Croft, Birkrigg and the Lacra circles on the southwest coast were sited to overlook the places where rivers met with the Irish Sea and the wider world beyond (Evans 2005, in prep.). In the north and east, the becks

Scales of community and the landscape settings of monuments The sizes and locations of the different monuments constructed, used and re-used in the early Bronze Age suggest the existence and articulation of different scales 134

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Figure 12. The location of the Grey Croft stone circle in relation to coastal occupation sites and monuments on Town Bank and Stockdale Moor. Source: H. Evans, mapping data © Crown Copyright Ordnance Survey. An Edina Digimap/JISC supplied service.

form rivers that flow through major routeways between Cumbria, the Pennines and southern Scotland. Some of the places these rivers meet are also associated with large scale monuments. This correlation is not a new observation – the location of the Penrith henges between the rivers Eamont and Lowther has been discussed in terms of the relationships observed between henges and water (Harding 2003; Richards 1996). Similar scales of reference have been used to interpret the proximity of Kemp Howe to the Lowther; and in south-west Cumbria, Swinside to the Duddon (Burl 1976).

and watersheds suggests that the areas served by rivers and their tributaries reflected the ‘catchment’ of individual groups and the wider communities that came together at these monuments. The becks and springheads that characterise many areas of the uplands not only form the points from which the larger rivers are derived, but many were themselves marked by monuments. Taking the stone circle of Grey Croft as an example, it is possible to discuss the ways the histories of specific landscapes shaped the distribution of prehistoric monuments, and also to suggest some of the ways early Bronze Age occupation drew on the past. Grey Croft is today situated in a rather incongruous location immediately adjacent to the nuclear re-processing plant at Sellafield. Set on a low plateau above an estuary, the monument marks the meeting place of the rivers Calder, Ehen and Newmill Beck with the Irish Sea (Fig. 12). The coastal lowlands in the environs of Grey Croft formed a focus for Neolithic and early Bronze Age occupation. The association between the Ehen and Neolithic and Bronze Age occupation is well known – Ehenside Tarn produced numerous waterlogged wooden implements, stone axes and Neolithic and Bronze Age pottery (Darbishire 1872). Pollen sequences from the tarn suggest clearance and cultivation between c. 3900 and 1500 cal. BC (Walker 2001). Together with the density of coastal lithic scatters between Nethertown and Seascale (Cherry and Cherry 1984), this illustrates that the area formed a focus for occupation and small-scale cultivation. Travelling inland

That monument locations were significant for contact between dispersed communities has been drawn on in interpretations of the exchange of Neolithic stone axes (Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Burl 1976, 1988). Whilst major ceremonial monuments undoubtedly ‘operated’ at a number of different social and geographical scales, focused largely on the idea that stone circles ‘facilitated’ the movement of stone axes beyond the county boundaries, such discussions have often overlooked the significance of these monuments in their own local and regional contexts. These largely low-lying monuments illustrate concerns similar to those of the smaller-scale upland ring cairns and funerary cairns. Whilst being set close to major rivers and the natural routeways they follow, large stone circles and henges are also located adjacent to tributary becks, in river bends, downstream of waterfalls and close to springs (Evans 2005, in prep.). The locations of circles and henges in relation to estuaries 135

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Figure 13. Samson’s Bratful long cairn, looking towards the coastal plain. Source: H. Evans.

– following the rivers upstream and into the fells – many of their sources and tributaries are also marked by monuments.

The cemetery clusters on Stockdale Moor all overlook cairnfields which are themselves associated with relatively low-lying funerary cairns and ring cairns. These monuments appear to be associated with individual cairnfields and often overlook watersheds, demonstrating clear concerns with the tributary becks dissecting the fells. The southern part of Stockdale Moor is bisected by the promontory and the tributary which springs from its foot. Samson’s Bratful was built directly above this spring. The distribution of round cairns and ring cairns associated with individual cairnfield areas across this part of the moor suggests that the tributary formed a natural boundary between them. So not only were these monuments sited according to localised patterns of tenure defined by the specifics of the local landscape, such lines were clearly also drawn in relation to the past.

Town Bank and Stockdale Moor are situated at the southern extent of the Copeland Fells (Fig. 12). Defined by the Calder and Bleng valleys, they are bisected by Worm Gill, a tributary of the Calder. The Bleng and Worm Gill valleys form natural passes to the north and south of a promontory on Stockdale Moor, leading into the high western and central fells. Samson’s Bratful Neolithic long cairn is situated in a ‘classic’ long cairn location, on the lower shelves of this promontory above a spring of a tributary beck with a clear view of the coastal plain below (Fig. 13). Into the early Bronze Age, Town Bank, Stockdale Moor and Samson’s Bratful formed foci for the construction of monuments, and for extensive cairnfield clearance. North and south of the Stockdale Moor promontory, clusters of funerary cairns overlook the passes leading to the high fells and the steep descent towards the river valleys running to the coast. The southern cluster overlook the Bleng and the northern cluster, Monk’s Graves, is set on high ground overlooking Worm Gill as it drops towards the valley floor (Fig. 14). Downslope to the west, a group of funerary cairns on Town Bank is set above the watershed of Worm Gill and the Calder, with clear views across the coastal plain and the site of Grey Croft (Fig. 15).

Figure 14. Worm Gill, running between Town Bank and Stockdale Moor. Source: H. Evans.

136

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characterised by species rich natural grassland. Although illustrating no clear signs of human interference, such open areas would have been conducive to grazing, hunting and occupation. During the second half of the Neolithic, high levels of charcoal at Bank Moor have been taken to suggest managed burning (ibid.). Charcoal was recorded discontinuously into the first half of the second millennium BC with cereal pollen present from the early Bronze Age onwards. Although the pollen data does not have the resolution to prove this conclusively, the presence of cairnfields close to Bank Moor may indicate that the charcoal present from the Later Neolithic related to vegetation stripping prior to field clearance, with limited cereal cultivation taking place from the early Bronze Age (ibid.).

Looking at how the history and topography of specific landscapes shaped patterns of upland and cairnfield occupation can illustrate how communities organised themselves across the landscape both before and after the Bronze Age. Together with environmental data, looking at these long term histories can begin to tell us something about how the different scales and settings of monuments were tied into patterns of land use through the Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Both Grey Croft and Samson’s Bratful have been linked with seasonally transhumant movement between the coastal lowlands and the stone sources in the central fells used for the production of Neolithic stone axes (Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Burl 1976; Edmonds 2004; Evans 2005, in prep). Pollen evidence from the high uplands suggests that during the later Mesolithic and early Neolithic, small-scale clearances were established in sheltered valleys at the edge of the tree line and in the environs of upland tarns (Pennington 1964, 1975; Walker 1965). Given the proximity of these areas to the stone quarries used for the production of Neolithic axes, it seems likely this took place in conjunction with summer grazing (Bradley and Edmonds 1993; Edmonds 2004; Evans 2004, 2005, in prep.). The distribution of axes down the major valleys and in coastal and lowland contexts therefore seems to suggest that communities, or parts of communities, moved periodically between the high uplands and lower lying areas. As animal husbandry, woodland management and cultivation are closely linked to the seasonal routines of grazing and harvesting, it seems likely therefore that occupation ran in conjunction with these cycles. Some kind of transhumant movement may also be inferred by the pollen data. Small scale cultivation occurred both on the coastal plain and the low-lying eastern limestone plateau at around 4000 BC but in the uplands, clearings at this time appear to be associated primarily with the maintenance of open or grassland areas (Pennington 1964, 1975; Skinner 2000).

It is evident that different areas of Cumbria, and the variety of landscape types which made them up, saw specific and varied histories. However, gradual and long term changes in the character of land use and occupation can be identified across the region. These suggest agricultural proliferation, diversification and intensification, in particular in upland contexts, from the latter part of the Neolithic into the early Bronze Age (Evans 2005, in prep). Although this process is recognisable to some extent in pollen sequences, where it is particularly evident is in the upland monument record. The abundance of small scale monuments, in particular in upland contexts, illustrates something not only the changing character and human scale of land use and occupation, but also how specific aspects of the landscape were increasingly used to signify social relationships. The inhabitation of many upland areas becomes archaeologically visible only in the early Bronze Age when the proliferation of funerary monuments and the growth of upland cairn cemeteries suggest concerns with marking localised patterns of occupation. Individual funerary cairns and ring cairns were constructed on high summits and along ridgeways, and cemeteries developed on the natural routeways between areas of low and high ground. In some places already marked by earlier monuments such as long cairns, this may have related to patterns of movement and transitory occupation set in motion during earlier periods. Over time, the long-term cyclical nature of management, cultivation and clearance meant that in the uplands, clusters of cairnfields grew up between becks and rivers, many associated with their own ring cairns and funerary monuments. That these monuments seem to have operated as familial plots suggests an increasingly localised domestic focus. If the funerary monuments on routeways between the lowlands and upland grazing areas were constructed as points on journeys, rather than under conditions not hinged on persistent occupation, those more closely associated with cairnfields suggest that over time, patterns of residence became focused on particular upland plots.

Into the later Neolithic and early Bronze Age, the pollen record illustrates evidence both for continuity and change in landscape use. Although the quality of the data is much poorer than that for the early Neolithic, the evidence suggests that during and after the later Neolithic, resulting both from natural processes and the effects of human activity, the landscape became increasingly open (e.g. Pennington 1964, 1975; Walker 1964, 1966, 2002; Skinner 2000; Wimble et al. 2000). Whilst areas with recorded later Mesolithic/early Neolithic clearance episodes often illustrate an almost continuous presence into the Bronze Age and later, places in both upland and lowland contexts which had not seen ‘early’ clearance began to see increasingly intensive use both for cereal agriculture and pasture. This alteration in the intensity of use to which upland areas in particular were put is illustrated by a pollen sequence from Bank Moor on the eastern fells (Skinner 2000). From the Mesolithic onwards the area was

Although elements of the upland cairnfield record in Cumbria suggest that individual communities saw themselves as small groups tied to particular places, they 137

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Figure 15. A funerary cairn on Town Bank, looking west towards the coastal plain. Sellafield (and the location of Grey Croft) are visible in the distance beyond the post marking the centre of the cairn. Source: H. Evans.

also remained within wider social worlds. The articulation of the ‘local’ and the ‘regional’ is evidenced by the settings and scales of monuments built and used into the early Bronze Age (Evans 2005, in prep.). Focused on watercourses and the natural routeways they provided, henges, stone circles, ring cairns and funerary cairns formed networks of places along pathways. Marking routes between the uplands and lowlands, and between wider regions, their settings can be regarded as a metaphor for the different scales at which these communities operated. The configurations of springs, becks, rivers, estuaries and the sea were clearly marked by monuments, and formed foci for the ways in which small-scale groups understood themselves in relation to wider social worlds.

of community is based on traditional agricultural life in Cumbria as it was in the middle decades of the twentieth century. That the locations of prehistoric monuments seem to echo many themes illustrated by historical and modern agricultural practice reveals how landscapes and their histories shape traditions of occupation and communication. As has been discussed, understanding the chronology of upland and cairnfield occupation is problematic in many ways. Many of the more complex areas of cairnfield clearance in the Cumbrian fells, however, appear to incorporate evidence for post-Bronze Age occupation. In addition to the increasingly complex arrangements of cairns and linear field boundaries used in the LAU cairnfield typology (see discussion above; Fig. 3) some areas include stone built stock and ‘settlement’ enclosures as well as shielings and ‘homesteads’. Although the dating of many such structures remains equivocal, a number of ‘enclosures’ have provided Iron Age and Romano-British material (Dobson 1912; Hodgson 2004; McKenny Hughes 1912). Others, some associated with patches of ridge and furrow, are believed to be Medieval in date (Higham 1986; Quartermaine and Leech forthcoming). This patterning clearly suggests the repeated use of particularly favourable places in upland contexts; not just over the course of prehistory, but into more recent centuries. Indeed, historical references and place name evidence from Cumbria suggest transhumant grazing patterns from at least the early medieval period (Bradley and Edmonds 1993). Although records go back

In Cumbria, the common associations between monuments, routeways and water are unsurprising given the nature and uncompromising topography of the region. Access and movement are restricted, particularly in the fells where the many rivers and becks follow the easiest routes through often imposing landscapes. At the outset of this paper, it was stressed that the configuration of ridges and river valleys characterising the distinctive landscapes of Cumbria have shaped the ways that agricultural life has been lived in the region. As well as being important sources of water for humans and animals, watercourses have affected the ways settlement, agriculture and communication have been organised throughout history (e.g. Nicholson 1972). Nicholson’s understanding of the structure and physical organisation 138

HELEN EVANS: AFTER THE AXE: WAYS INTO THE UPLAND LANDSCAPES OF CUMBRIA no further than the twelfth century AD, it seems likely, caveats aside, that seasonally transhumant patterns of land use have been common in the area since the introduction of domesticates.

which communities operated. Drawing on the local, the intra-regional, the regional and the wider world, these scales overlapped in different ways, some of which became ‘fossilised’ within the monument record. It is the scale at which we choose to interpret and write about monuments in particular that separates established ‘grand narrative’ accounts from close grained contextual studies based on the specifics of local landscapes. Where problems still lie, however, is that our continued reliance on the timescales and geographies of typology and classification frustrate the production of integrated regional narratives exploring the relationship between local, regional and national traditions. We have to ask therefore, if the ways we interpret and write about the prehistoric record can successfully capture the nature and scale of life as it was lived both across specific landscapes and in relation to broader trends.

In some areas of modern Cumbria, animals still spend much of the summer grazing in the uplands, retreating to lower sheltered ground in the winter months. Today, in towns such as Kendal and Ulverston, lantern processions during September mark the traditional return of livestock from the fells. Probably akin to gatherings in henges and stone circles during the Neolithic and Bronze Age, these market festivals celebrate the coming together of communities, both of people and animals, which had been dispersed across the fells over the summer months. Over-wintering and lambing and calving in spring take place close to the lowland farms, after which the animals are again returned to the fells. These seasonal traditions have always been closely tied to the social and geographical scales at which agricultural life has been played out.

Acknowledgements Many thanks are due to Mark Edmonds for his dedicated supervision of my PhD research and for his comments on an earlier version of this text. Thanks also to Chad for inviting me to contribute to this volume, and for being patient with my excuses. Much of the data concerning cairnfields was derived from unpublished surveys undertaken by the Lancaster Archaeological Unit (now Oxford Archaeology North). I am grateful to Jamie Lund for providing information from the National Trust SMR, to Helena Smith (Cumbria County SMR) and to Eleanor Kingston and John Hodgson (Lake District National Park SMR). Finally, thanks to Mills and especially the late Bean for accompanying me on our many adventures on the fells.

Conclusion Demonstrating the existence and articulation of different social and geographical scales of community is of fundamental importance to understanding the nature of prehistoric monuments across local and regional landscapes. Contrary to conventional approaches to the ‘Bronze Age’ cairnfield record, this sort of analysis demands holistic interpretations; not only of the settings of upland monuments associated with cairnfields, but also those exhibited by earlier monuments, often in lowerlying contexts, which saw re-use and elaboration into the Bronze Age. It is easy to overlook the fact that communities lived across landscapes already replete with the physical evidence of past activity and that this was often drawn on and reworked.

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An old corrugated iron roofed, wheeled shepherd’s trailer standing disused in a farmyard in West Dean, Wiltshire. Such mobile shelters formed part of the ‘sheep and corn’ system of agriculture on the chalk downlands, where shepherds spent weeks at a time out with their flocks, especially during lambing. Such practices finally died out during the 1950s. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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An empty hole, or a meaningful whole? Approaches to the study of pit alignments John Thomas Introduction Pit alignment boundaries are widely accepted as some of the earliest landscape features of the first millennium BC and are a familiar, but enigmatic, cropmark feature of central and eastern Britain, particularly clustering in the midlands. Outlying examples exist, particularly in Scotland where they often date to the Neolithic. Middle to late Iron Age examples have been excavated in Cambridgeshire (Gurney, Neve and Pryor 1993), and some of the pits in alignments recorded at at Rampton in Nottinghamshire and Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire contained late Iron Age and Romano-British deposits (Knight, Howard and Leary 2004; Richardson 2005). More intriguingly still, recent excavations during 20022003 at Holme Pierrepont in Nottinghamshire recovered well-stratified medieval and post-medieval brick and tile fragments from several pits forming part of a north-west to south-east alignment leading to the gravel terrace edge (Guilbert 2006: 43-44). This shows that caution still has to be exercised when interpreting unexcavated cropmarks with few if any landscape stratigraphic relationships. Nevertheless, the vast majority of alignments in the main midlands concentration can probably be assigned to the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age (Hingley 1989). Consisting of linear arrangements of generally uniformly shaped, regularly spaced pits, they are often recorded as part of a wider network of similar boundaries and play an integral role in complex landscape histories (Figure 2). Despite their increased recognition and excavation however, pit alignments remain relatively enigmatic. They are notoriously difficult to date, usually having very artefact-poor fills; and with only a few exceptions they display no stratigraphic relationships with earlier archaeological features. Until fairly recently, they were rarely excavated as elements within wider archaeological landscapes. The varied approaches taken to explain pit alignments highlight the tensions between functional and symbolic approaches to prehistoric boundaries.

Figure 1. Location map, showing the approximate region covered by the sites in the text. Source: A. Leaver.

may more usefully be considered ‘a meaningful whole’. Some examples from the English midlands will be used to illustrate these ideas. Explaining the ‘unexplainable’ – previous archaeological interpretations of pit alignments Although recognised as surface features as early as 1895 (Mortimer 1895: 267-8), it was only during the post-war years, with the advent of systematic and wide ranging programmes of aerial photography, that the distribution and frequency of pit alignments across the landscape was recognised (Wilson 1982). In 1960 the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments' survey of England’s river gravels, A Matter of Time, listed around a hundred known examples of pit alignments, of which only three had been excavated. By 1978 the number of examples had increased to 470 (Wilson 1978). In recent years, following the introduction of PPG16 in 1990, a significant increase in the excavation of pit alignments has led to a large amount of new information with which

This paper will attempt to highlight several areas of study that consider the social, symbolic and landscape aspects of pit alignments and hopefully go some way towards furthering the debate and providing a broader base for their interpretation. To provide some background to the paper, a short discussion of previous explanations for the role of pit alignments will be presented. This will be followed by a consideration of the role of pit alignments within current archaeological debates concerning Iron Age society and boundaries in general. Finally, a discussion of several areas of future research will be presented which aim to transcend ‘functional’ and sitebased approaches to the understanding of pit alignments and show that rather than a row of ‘empty holes,’ they 144

JOHN THOMAS: AN EMPTY HOLE, OR A MEANINGFUL WHOLE? APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF PIT ALIGNMENTS to study these boundary forms. Conversely though, the limitations of PPG16 archaeology has resulted in piecemeal recording, often of only one or two pits in alignments that may stretch up to a kilometre or more. In some cases however, particularly with the large-scale winning of aggregates and exposure of large tracts of land during quarrying (Fulford and Nichols 1992), pit alignments have been recorded in their wider landscape context.

landscape and symbolic aspects of pit alignments together (Pollard 1996; Waddington 1997). However, it is clear that current information does not lend itself to a clear understanding of their role in later prehistoric society. From a modern viewpoint pit alignments are confusing, for as boundaries their permeability defies functional logic. There are many examples of contemporary boundary systems constructed from ditches, so it seems reasonable to assume that the intentionally different form chosen by the builders of pit alignments was significant. In many respects pit alignments emphasise the ‘otherness’ of the Iron Age which recent discussions of the period have focused on (Fitzpatrick 1997, Hill 1993, Parker Pearson 1996), and this should be a key factor to consider when approaching their interpretation. Pit alignments have encouraged many debates over their purpose and although there is broad agreement about their status as boundaries, opinions have differed as to the nature of the division. Although the obviously ‘different’ nature of pit alignments has been considered by past authors, they have tended to take a purely ‘functional’ approach to their interpretations. This has resulted in unconvincing arguments that fail to acknowledge the human thought processes behind their construction. This ‘common-sense’ approach to pit alignments has also been exacerbated by the restrictions imposed by the smallscale, site-based approach to the phenomena, which has been a common factor of the earlier studies. Several authors have postulated that pit alignments were constructed to hold lines of posts (Harding 1981: 117; Miket 1981: 145; Williams 1946-7: 55). Miket used the presence of ‘shelves’ on the side of pits and contextual evidence to argue for the purpose of the pits being postholes. Despite Miket’s argument, most pit alignments offer little evidence that they once held posts. Excavations at Eskbank Nurseries, Lothian were undertaken with the specific aim of establishing whether or not the pits once held posts, or simply to provide upcast for a bank. In all, twelve pits were uncovered on the Eskbank site, of which five were half-sectioned (Barber 1985: 151). No evidence of post-pipes was found in any of these pits, and central concentrations of stones were attributed simply to the effects of gravity, rather than packing for vertical posts. Furthermore, the fills were deposited horizontally, and showed no signs of vertical disturbance. Micromorphological analysis of the soils demonstrated that the pits had not been deliberately backfilled but had silted naturally, suggesting that they had been left open for some time. Barber argued that, in the absence of evidence for the pits having been used as postholes, they were probably quarries for an upstanding bank, which performed the main boundary function (ibid.: 162).

Figure 2. An excavated section of pit alignment at Church Lawford quarry, Warwickshire. The remarkable regularity in form is clear, as is the shallow gully that effectively ‘formalised’ the previously broken boundary. Source: J. Thomas, and used with kind permission of Stuart Palmer, Warwickshire Museum Field Archaeology Service.

As a result of the often small-scale investigations involved and perhaps as a reaction to the apparent ‘nonfunctionality’ of pit alignments (Pollard 1996: 93; Pryor 1993: 142), a wide variety of explanations have been put forward regarding their purpose. Many of these explanations have acknowledged the ‘different’ nature of pit alignments, but have not expanded to ask the question of ‘why’ this particular boundary form was adopted. Archaeological explanations, largely based on limited excavated evidence, have concentrated on the ‘function’ of pit alignments, ignoring the role of human agency behind their construction. Several recent discussions have attempted to redress the balance by considering the

Some other examples would initially seem to support this argument. At Marygoldhills, Berwickshire for example, pits were seen flanking a linear earthen bank, and displayed continuation of this boundary line where the bank itself had been ploughed away (Strong 1988). Similarly, Yorkshire pit alignments have been surveyed 145

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT which are associated with relic banks. At Lady Graves, Fimber in East Yorkshire, a pit alignment was flanked on both sides by parallel banks (Ehrenberg and Caple 1983, 1985). Those at Ebberston Moor, North Yorkshire, were thought to date to the late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age and were in part, overlain by a large Bronze Age round barrow (Ainsworth 1999). At Middle Rigg, also on the North Yorkshire Moors, double rows of segmented, embanked pit alignments appeared to respect, or be respected by, a similarly aligned row of Bronze Age barrow monuments and also appeared to respect an area of marshland known as Bella Dale Slack (Lofthouse 1993). These instances provide interesting evidence for the original form and variety of pit alignments but are rare however, and it is interesting to note that they fall outside the area of the main concentration of pit alignments and indicate a much earlier date for their construction. This suggests alternative practices and uses. Furthermore, as Barber explains (1985: 162), in certain circumstances subsequent plough truncation may provide the illusion of a pit alignment cropmark where the underlying feature was originally a linear ditch and associated bank. Nevertheless, the majority of excavated pit alignments actually show little evidence to support the existence of a bank. The pits are usually relatively evenly filled, with no sign of deposit asymmetry that might indicate bank material eroding and slumping into them, or where a bank was deliberately used to backfill a boundary. This does not however preclude the existence of a bank. Some banks may have been low and wide, and/or situated away from the pits and separated from them by a gap or berm.

Figure 3. Cropmark of pit alignments adjacent to the River Welland at Ketton, Rutland (SK 980022 – NMR ref. 2480/37). The photograph illustrates the inclusion of pit alignments within complex biographies of landscape use. A loose co-axial arrangement of pit alignments can be seen to interact with at least three ring ditches or barrows. In the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph lie two square enclosures of unknown date. Source: Glenn Foard 1984, reproduced by permission of the Historic Environment Team, © Northamptonshire County Council.

Many lengthy pit alignments have been identified on the Tabular Hills and Yorkshire Wolds through topographic and aerial survey (e.g. Stoertz 1997). Spratt thought that those pit alignments on the Tabular Hills of north-east Yorkshire were indistinguishable in function from the banks and ditches of the large earthwork dykes, and their construction had no obvious explanation other than labour-saving, or as a first stage in dyke building (Spratt 1989: 14). Interestingly though, the pit alignments he recorded do not often form continuations of the linear earthworks, or even to have been on similar orientations in many cases. He saw these differences in alignment as resulting from the fact that pit alignments may have been subdivisions of the main boundary systems, but this may also have been due to functional, symbolic or chronological differences. At Cat Babbleton, Caythorpe and Heslerton in North and East Yorkshire for example, short pit alignments did precede the construction of linear banks and ditches, or were themselves re-cut into continuous ditches (Abramson 1996; Cardwell 1989; Powesland 1988).

once hedges had defined fields, crop-bearing trees would have been planted alongside these hedgerow boundaries. The size and spacing of pits related to the different species of trees used, whilst he interpreted double pit alignments as two lines of trees planted in two different fields, and separated by an earlier hedge. Whilst this novel definition represents a move away from earlier ideas, it is difficult to imagine that pit alignments were used as tree holes. Many factors undermine this theory. Firstly, there is usually little evidence to suggest single episodes of backfilling. On the contrary, much of the excavated evidence suggests that the pits were left open for sustained periods of time, silting up naturally until they either went out of use or were re-dug as linear features. The shape of the pits also precludes the existence of tree growth. Their smooth profiles do not show any signs of the disturbance that may be expected from tree roots, and where waterlogged pits have been excavated, no tree roots have been recovered.

A unique theory for the use of pit alignments was put forward by Pickering. He argued that the sharp definition of many pit alignment cropmarks was the result of a single episode of infilling, which quickly stabilised and thus preserved the shape (Pickering 1992: 417-419). Pickering believed that the pit alignments were actually the remains of Neolithic arboriculture. He argued that

Although in some cases there are convincing elements to the first two explanations of pit alignments, both theories fall short of a complete interpretation by failing to go beyond functional aspects. To merely attempt to explain ‘function’ without addressing the meaning behind 146

JOHN THOMAS: AN EMPTY HOLE, OR A MEANINGFUL WHOLE? APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF PIT ALIGNMENTS ‘function’ does not constitute a full understanding, and furthermore it denies the role of personal and cultural biographies in the creation of archaeological features and human inhabitation of the landscape (q.v. Ingold 1993; Tilley 1994). This does not mean that functional explanations are worthless, to achieve a fuller understanding of pit alignments however, and the reasoning behind their particular form, it is important that they are not viewed in isolation, and thus divorced from the original input of human meaning and action.

result of acts of deliberate choice rather than happenstance, and may thus reflect a conscious referencing of the earlier monuments. At Barnack in Cambridgeshire, a pair of Bronze Age mortuary features were very carefully bisected by a pit alignment, a respect that would seem unnecessary if the boundary had a purely functional role (see Fig. 5, after Mackreth and O’Neill 1979: 24, fig. 14). A recently excavated pit alignment complex at Eynesbury, Cambridgeshire also provides a vivid example of their integrated role in landscape development (Ellis 2004). Here, a large rectangular block of land, possibly an enclosure was defined by pit alignments dating to the late Bronze Age-early Iron Age. This was constructed on a river flood plain that had previously been occupied by Neolithic features including a mortuary enclosure, a long barrow, two cursuses and a henge. The eastern and western, roughly north-south pit alignments clearly adopted the orientation of the northernmost Neolithic cursus, and so consequently the entire parcel of land was aligned sympathetically to this earlier monument. At the southern end of the pit alignment complex where it turned roughly westwards towards the river, the boundary cut the northern edge of a small, circular hengiform enclosure ditch. The three pits in the alignment that did this were the only ones that had evidence for upright post settings (ibid.: 34-35). This all strongly suggested that the positioning of the pit alignments was structured and deliberately inclusive of the earlier features. Interestingly, another isolated pit of similar late Bronze Age or early Iron Age date also cut the southern part of the hengiform ditch, and contained a near complete pottery vessel, whilst to the north a similar pit cut the tertiary ditch fills of the Neolithic long barrow, and contained structured deposits including quernstone fragments and another near complete vessel. The eastern pit alignment was itself redefined as part of a late Iron Age and Romano-British droveway, thus emphasising the continued reworking of the landscape through time (Ellis 2004). The Romano-British fields and boundaries were thus following a general alignment in the landscape that had been established during the Neolithic. This hints at the significance of earlier monuments in terms of the definition of space in the landscape, and perhaps the continued importance of ancestors. The pit alignments thus clearly played an important historical role in both the continuity and reworking of landscape features.

In the light of recent re-considerations of the archaeological record for the later Bronze Age and Iron Age (e.g. Brück 2001; Hill 1989), it may be that the key to the significance of pit alignments lies in their intentionally different form. As Francis Pryor has pointed out, people of this period were perfectly capable of constructing ditched boundaries should they have wanted to (Pryor 1993: 43). Although reappraisals of boundary features have taken place in recent years (Bevan 1997; Bowden and McOmish 1987; Chadwick 1999; Hill 1993; Hingley 1990), pit alignments have largely been excluded from these discussions (but see Pollard 1996 and Waddington 1997 for exceptions to this). This omission from general archaeological debate may reflect the many problems presented by the data. However, since 1990, aggregate extraction and other large-scale infrastructure projects have resulted in developer-funded archaeological excavations in which large landscape areas have been stripped and excavated. The results of these investigations, together with a more fine-grained, contextual approach to the evidence recovered from aerial photography, topographic survey and excavation, allows a much greater understanding of pit alignments. This understanding is predicated not only on acknowledging the possible functional roles of these boundaries, but also the practices that led to their creation, and the way in which pit alignments were part of past people’s landscapes and taskscapes (Pollard 1996: 111). Pit alignments and their relationship with other archaeological features The relationship of pit alignments to other archaeological features has in the past been used mainly as a relative estimate of dating. Overall though, it appears that with only a few exceptions, they did not truncate earlier archaeological features. Nevertheless, there are examples where the builders of pit alignments can be seen to have consciously avoided or respected earlier monuments. A recently excavated alignment at Eye Kettleby in Leicestershire provides one such example (N. Finn forthcoming, pers. comm.). The alignment here cut earlier Neolithic and Bronze Age mortuary enclosures (Fig. 4). This might suggest that the earlier features were no longer a physical presence in the landscape at the time of the pit alignments construction. However, there was a deviation in the line of the pit alignment at Eye Kettleby that enabled it to neatly bisect the Bronze Age enclosure and at the same time pass very close to the entrance of the adjacent Neolithic enclosure. This seems likely to be the

At Plant’s Farm, near Maxey in Cambridgeshire, part of an Iron Age pit alignment aligned off the River Welland was re-used as part of a later Iron Age enclosure boundary (Gurney, Neve and Pryor 1993: 75). The eastern side of the later enclosure ditch ran parallel to the roughly square pits, and cut across two of them. This close spatial relationship, and the mix of early to middle or late Iron Age pottery recovered from the pits, suggests that they were still open, socially significant features when the enclosure was constructed. At Tallington in Lincolnshire, located near Maxey but on the north side of the River Welland, a sinuous line of pits was aligned towards the river, and in sections it was a double 147

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Figure 4. Eye Kettleby: the pit alignments in relation to earlier features. Source: J. Thomas.

alignment. There was also a single pit alignment (French, Gurney, Pryor and Simpson 1993: 30). The single pit alignment was incorporated into one of the ditches of a later trackway. The partly double pit alignment contained late Bronze Age and early Iron Age pottery, and its sinuous course may have been due to the fact that it appeared to respect the positions of four large ring ditches, presumably earlier Bronze Age in date. An early Iron Age rectangular enclosure then respected part of the sinuous pit alignment. A trackway associated with the enclosure cut across the pit alignment at right angles. The butt ends of two early phases of one trackway ditch ended right alongside one of the pits (ibid. 40-43). Later phases of two trackway ditches then cut across the centres of two of the pits. Interestingly, the pits within the area of the intersection with the later trackway had re-cut some earlier, shallower pits that seem to have been deliberately incorporated into the pit alignment. These re-cutting pits were larger and squarer in shape than those in the rest of the alignment. At this point the later trackway had a marked change of alignment too.

Near Biddenham in Bedfordshire, a pit alignment orientated roughly east-west and nearly a kilometre long defined a large area over a kilometre square in a pronounced loop in the River Great Ouse (Dawson 2000: 133). Aerial photography and geophysical survey suggest that further pit alignments may have existed within the area, although none of these have been excavated, and some may lie buried underneath alluvial deposits. Excavation of nearly 300 metres of the main pit alignment by Albion Archaeology demonstrated that although the pits were generally very similar, there were also some ‘marker pits’ that were different in size and shape to the rest. The excavated pits produced small quantities of late Bronze Age and early Iron Age pottery from within the primary fills, but more substantial amounts from secondary pit deposits (Albion Archaeology in prep.; M. Luke pers. comm.). There was dispersed, unenclosed settlement of this date approximately 180 metres to the north of the pits, but in the middle Iron Age the western end of the pit alignment was overlain by a farmstead. Storage pits associated with this later settlement truncated some of the infilled pits of

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Figure 5. Barnack: the relationship of the pit alignment to earlier barrows. Source: J. Thomas, after Mackreth and O’Neill 1979: 24, fig. 14.

the alignment, and an inhumation truncated the fills of one pit. The skeleton produced a radiocarbon determination of 415-170 cal. BC, at 95% probability (ibid.). A later field ditch was constructed some 75 metres to the north of the Biddenham Loop pit alignment, but running parallel to it and thus respecting the line of the pits. This linear boundary was itself associated with a perpendicular boundary containing Romano-British pottery that truncated the alignment (Albion Archaeology in prep.; M. Luke pers. comm.).

relationships to the earlier pits – one respecting the alignment, and deliberately incorporating it within later boundaries, and another ignoring it. The latter enclosure may have been constructed when the pit alignment had silted up and was no longer visible in the ground, but it could also be that this apparently accidental palimpsest was a deliberate slighting of an earlier boundary. In other examples, earlier pits and pit clusters appear to have acted as a focus for the terminal pits of multiple alignments. Over wide areas, these can be seen to provide linkages between earlier, probable focal points in the landscape (Taylor 1996: 174-5). At Grendon in Northamptonshire, five pit alignments converged on, or radiated out from, a single large pit that lay diagonally at their junction. The orientation of two of the alignments delimited an area of Neolithic and Bronze Age burial and ceremonial monuments, whilst a third was found to terminate where it met a group of three earlier pits. A further alignment in the complex had apparently been deliberately sited to reference another cluster of earlier pits (ibid.: 142). The fact that the earlier features were so explicitly referenced by the pit alignments indicates that they were either still visible elements of the landscape, or were remembered, and that they perhaps held significance as a link to the ancestral past. A recently revealed example at Church Lawford, Warwickshire presented a similar situation to that at Grendon. Here, a large rectangular pit acted as the focal point for several pit alignments, all of which respected the earlier feature (Palmer 2003). The nodal pit was of a completely different character to those in the alignments and may, like the examples at Tallington and Grendon, have acted as a reference to earlier focal points and memories.

At Datchet in Berkshire, aerial photographs suggest that a pit alignment was incorporated into the ditch of a small sub-rectangular enclosure of probable Iron Age date, but the actual field system ditches associated with this enclosure do not follow the same orientation as the alignment (Gates 1975: 49). The enclosure may thus be intermediate in date between the pits and the fields. The pit alignment may originally have been defining an area in a loop of the River Thames. Near Osberton Grange and Upper Morton Grange, and Cromwell and Muskham, all in Nottinghamshire, possible pit alignments identified on aerial photographs appear to have been selectively incorporated into later Iron Age and Romano-British field system boundaries (Riley 1980: 129-129; Whimster 1989: 68, 81). In another example at Warren Farm, near Bothamsall in Nottinghamshire, aerial photographs revealed a pit alignment at right angles to the River Maun (Riley 1980: 143). The pits appear to lie underneath one cropmark enclosure complex of late Iron Age or Romano-British date, but just to the south of this, the pit alignment seems to have been incorporated into the line of another enclosure complex. These two enclosures therefore seem to have had two very different 149

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Near Cromwell in Nottinghamshire, aerial photographs of the floodplain of the River Trent revealed at least four long pit alignments. Here, two pairs of pit alignments came to two different but nearby foci, leaving a gap in between the two pairs of approximately 100 metres. What this gap was for or what the overall focus of the four pit alignments originally was is not clear, but presumably it had some socio-political importance. However, an enclosure settlement complex of probable late Iron Age date partly overlies one pit alignment, and this is in turn overlain by a Romano-British villa, both lying in the gap between the two pairs of pit alignments (Whimster 1989: 79). The locale defined by the pit alignments therefore seems to have continued to be important long after the pit boundaries themselves fell out of use. This hints at a potentially quite lengthy period for the continued significance of this particular place within the landscape. This evidence is all indicative that pit alignments had great social and symbolic importance, and that they must have been caught up with ideas of memory, identity and tenure.

barbed and tanged flint arrowhead (French, Gurney, Pryor and Simpson 1993: 55), possibly a deliberately curated object. At Plant’s Farm near Maxey in Cambridgeshire, the pit alignment produced comparatively large amounts of Iron Age pottery (Gurney, Neve and Pryor 1993: 79-80). However, the sherds appeared to span the early to later Iron Age. Moreover, although most sherds were weathered, pottery from one pit was very fresh, and this represented mainly one vessel. These contexts all hint at interesting depositional practices, over quite a protracted period involving many generations. Bone assemblages from pit alignments also raise the possibility of structured deposition. At Long Bennington, Lincolnshire for example, a horse long bone with both ends broken off, was found inserted vertically into the centre of a nearly silted-up pit (Fearn 1993). Whilst the positioning of the bone may have been a result of taphonomic processes (though this is unlikely), the absence of other finds from the site highlight its unusual nature. An apparently carefully selected collection of bones including right-sided cattle limb bones and both human and horse skull fragments, were recovered from pits at Tallington (French, Gurney, Pryor and Simpson 1993: 42). An unusual deposit of animal bone was also recovered from one of the pits in Alignment 1 at Eye Kettleby, Leicestershire. Here two cattle long bones (a femur and a metatarsal), the distal half of a sheep humerus and a cattle molar were discovered towards the base of the pit. Both long bones had apparently been hollowed and had their ends missing (Knight forthcoming). Whilst the survival of organic finds on the site was very much dependent on localised geology, the relative lack of finds from other pits in the alignment, also dug into the same subsoil, highlighted the unusual nature of the deposits. At the Biddenham Loop alignment, possible placed deposits might have included the partial skeletons of a piglet and a pike recovered from two pits, the latter some 300 metres away from the river course itself (Albion Archaeology in prep.; M. Luke pers. comm.). A number of pits contained deposits of burnt stones and charcoal, and these were often next to the ‘marker pits’. One of the ‘marker pits’ produced a single beaver bone from a tertiary fill.

As a result of their landscape position away from most settlement foci, pit alignments rarely produce significant amounts of artefacts. Where they do yield finds however, these are often notable by their distinctly unusual nature and can be likened to recent ideas of ‘structured’ or placed deposits within boundaries (q.v. Chadwick 1999; Hill 1995; Hingley 1990). Artefacts recovered from excavated pits in alignments may thus have held much more significance than simple chance loss or discard. Many have previously been discussed (Pollard 1996: 111), but fit well into the context of this paper. Sometimes these unusual deposits occur at the end of the pit alignment’s life, suggesting acts of ‘closure’. At Gretton, Northamptonshire (Jackson 1974: 42), a hoard of iron currency bars had been deposited in a pit that had been accurately placed to cut a near silted pit within the former boundary. This association is especially significant given the social and symbolic meanings that might have been attributed to metal and metalworking in later prehistory (e.g. Budd and Taylor 1995; Hingley 1997). At Heslerton in East Yorkshire, pottery sherds and fragments of bronze dating to the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age were recovered from some distinctively square pits in alignments within the Vale of Pickering (Powesland 1988: 102). Recently recovered finds from pit alignment excavations at Whitemoor Haye quarry in Staffordshire included large sherds of pottery, a granite rubbing stone and a flint core (Coates 2002). These were tentatively interpreted as placed deposits and in the case of the flint core, that it was deposited as an ‘heirloom’ with ancestral connotations. Pottery vessels were recovered from pits at Ringstead (Jackson 1978) and Gretton (Jackson 1974: 42), both in Northamptonshire. Another pit in the alignment at Gretton also produced a bronze pin with adhering textile remains (Jackson 1974: 42). At Tallington in Lincolnshire, one pit in the alignment excavated there in the 1960s produced a

Animal bone deposits were also recovered at the important waterlogged pit alignment site at St Ives in Cambridgeshire (Pollard 1996). These included significant quantities of fragments from a sheep/goat skull, a red deer metacarpal and a single large mammal rib. Here also, a further class of deposit was recorded which might not be so identifiable under different conditions. Due to the exceptional preservation of the waterlogging, fragments of wood thought to have originated in former hedged or fenced boundaries survived in the bases of the excavated pits. It was suggested that the act of deposition might have served to provide a metaphoric link between old and new boundaries (Pollard 1996: 111).

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Figure 6. Pit alignments in relation to rivers – examples from Warwickshire. Blocked areas represent settlements. Source: J. Thomas; adapted from Hingley 1996: 13, fig. 6.

single pit alignments parallel to a brook (Riley 1980: 121). These alignments may originally have formed one line, but were then incorporated into the ditches of an enclosed settlement of possibly later Iron Age or Romano-British date, which now lies across the pits. Many of the pit alignments around South Muskham in Nottinghamshire on the floodplain of the River Trent seem to have been not only parallel to the river (Whimster 1989: 80-81), but also defining large loops in the watercourse. This was clearly the case at the Biddenham Loop in Bedfordshire (Dawson 2000; M. Luke pers. comm.).

Pit alignments and their position within the ‘natural’ landscape Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the pit alignment phenomenon is their relationship with natural features. It is worth staying with the St Ives, Cambridgeshire example to illustrate this. Here, a double alignment was sited adjacent and parallel to a palaeochannel that would have been a contemporary watercourse. The river would have flooded for parts of the year, especially during the winter and spring, covering the pit alignment and thus rendering the boundary ‘function’ useless (Pollard 1996: 110). Rather than acting in what we might think of as ‘functional’ way, it is possible to interpret the rows of pits as a symbolic reaffirmation or reference to an existing natural boundary.

A study of pit alignments in Warwickshire highlighted many examples of the relationship between the rows of pits and watercourses (Thomas 1997). At Ryton-onDunsmore and Old Milverton, pit alignments were positioned to effectively demarcate bends in nearby rivers (Figure 5). At Wellesbourne a more complex arrangement involved a pit alignment that cut off a loop in the river in association with a second alignment, at right angles to the river, which further divided the riverside area. This arrangement has also been recorded at Wasperton, near Warwick, where one of the pit alignments later became the focus for long-lived settlement during the late Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman periods (Crawford 1985). The axis to the settlement was continually aligned with the pit alignment throughout its history (Fig. 6). Similar relationships between pit alignments and watercourses have been recorded elsewhere, for example at Long Bennington in Lincolnshire where an alignment mimics the course of the upper River Witham (Boutwood 1998: 41). At Peckleton in Leicestershire, a series of alignments can be seen stretching away from the nearby river, apparently utilising the natural boundary to define long rectangular blocks of land (Pickering and Hartley 1985: 31).

The relationship between pit alignments and rivers is interesting, and they are often closely linked in spatial terms. Hingley (1989) identified several situations in which pit alignments may occur including running parallel to a river or stream, cutting off a bend in a river, or running away from rivers at right angles. The alignments at Eye Kettleby, Leicestershire appear to adopt similar characteristics. Alignment 2 mimics the course of the adjacent River Eye/Wreake, whilst at the same time demarcating an area by cutting off a bend. The limited information revealed of Alignment 1 indicates that it further sub-divides the area created by Alignment 2 (Finn forthcoming). At Eynesbury in Cambridgeshire, the north-south pit alignment ran broadly parallel to the river, but the east-west row ran off at right angles to it (Ellis 2004). Near West Deeping and Maxey in Cambridgeshire, several pit alignments have been identified. One runs off the line of the River Welland (Gurney, Neve and Pryor 1993: 70), but then meets two further pit alignments in a ‘T-junction’, and these latter pits are roughly parallel to the river.

As Boutwood points out, although the symbolic significance of the relationship between pit alignments and watercourses should not be underestimated, prosaic

At Glebe Farm, north-west of Babworth in Nottinghamshire, aerial photographs have shown two 151

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT concerns may also have played a part. There may also have been a desire to demarcate areas of different land use by communities involved in mixed farming regimes (Boutwood 1998: 41). A pit alignment positioned to cut off a bend in a river might have served to segregate areas of pasture and would also have demonstrated control over resources. Thus, although the permeability of pit alignments would not have allowed them to function as effective physical barriers, they may still have had political and symbolic importance in concepts of land tenure and rights of access. As has been noted by several researchers, in prehistory ‘functional’ attributes and more symbolic or cosmological ideas were probably very closely interwoven (Brück 1999; Hill 1995). Trying to distinguish between the two may reflect our own modern concerns rather than those of people in the past.

demarcation of areas of land in landscapes that had previously been open. The Gardom’s Edge pit alignment provides an interesting example that may be linked to Taylor’s ideas of visibility. The excavated pits were claylined, this material having been brought into them from some distance away. The pits could thus have held water, and when filled, the reflective qualities produced would have enhanced the visibility of the boundary in the landscape (Gardweb 1998 http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/projects/geap.htm). The pit alignments at Eynesbury in and St Ives in Cambridgeshire might also have been able to hold water after flooding by the river (Ellis 2004: 106; Pollard 1996: 113). In such cases the dramatic visual impact of lines of shimmering circular pools would have been great. Water may have held its own symbolic connotations during prehistory, and might have been perceived as a mysterious, life-giving yet liminal substance (q.v. Bevan 1997; Chadwick 2004; Richards 1996).

Some of the pit alignments in the Vale of Pickering in East Yorkshire were orientated east-west along the valley floor, parallel to the line of the Wolds escarpment. Others appear to have been constructed along ridgelines, or across ridges, down the sides of hills and ridges into the valleys below (Powesland 1988; Stoertz 1997). At Gardom’s Edge in Derbyshire, a late prehistoric pit alignment was aligned at right angles across the moorland shelf on which later Bronze Age and early Iron Age field banks and roundhouses were situated (Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds 2002). The pits may therefore not only have had the effect of linking two scarp edges, but also ran across a natural axis of movement in the landscape. As well as relationships with more obvious natural landscape features, other elements, perhaps not always evident, may have played an important role in defining the location of pit alignments. In some instances, the sinuous nature of many pit alignments may reflect their avoidance or assimilation of natural features such as trees, which have long since disappeared from the landscape. Excavations ahead of the A43 Towcester to M40 dualling project carried out by Northamptonshire Archaeology revealed a short section of pit alignment which had apparently deviated its course to incorporate a standing tree, now evidenced only by an area of root disturbance (Mudd 2002: 18). This is not that surprising, given that consideration of the landscape into which boundaries were placed appears to have been an integral element, in certain circumstances, into the early historic period. Hooke (1981: 41) refers to the use of trees, pits and other relatively ephemeral landmarks which, as folk knowledge of their locations, transcended generations and were referenced during the laying out of Anglo-Saxon boundary systems.

The general significance of pit alignments as a landscape feature As with other forms of boundary, the physical act of construction and general maintenance would have instilled a particular significance to the communities who were responsible for the pit alignment boundaries. The carefully laid out rows of pits would have represented the physical embodiment of communal labour and contributed towards building a sense of group identity. A common feature of pit alignments is the apparently ‘disjointed’ appearance of the boundary lines, prompting suggestions of gangs being responsible for the digging of groups of pits (Powesland 1986). This could be interpreted in terms of the responsibility held by kinbased groups for the construction and maintenance of particular sections of the alignment. Within alignments however, the relative uniformity of the shape and spacing of pits suggests that the activity of construction and the form of the boundary were highly significant, and that there were clear ‘templates’ of form being followed. There is also evidence to suggest regular maintenance and cleaning of some pits, which would have further reenforced feelings of group identity and community spirit analogous with the medieval tradition of ‘beating the bounds’ (Pollard 1996: 110). Specific examples of the relationship between alignments and earlier monuments have already been discussed. However, a broader landscape view provides further suggestion that the positioning of certain alignments was deliberate and symbolic. At Whitemoor Haye in Staffordshire, two double pit alignments effectively separated an area of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in the northern area of the site from an area occupied by Iron Age and Romano-British agricultural settlement to the south (Coates 2002: 82). Similar situations have also been recorded at Grendon, Northamptonshire (Taylor 1996: 142-143) and Church Lawford, Warwickshire (Palmer 2003: 4), discussed above. At the Biddenham Loop in Bedfordshire, at least

We should also be aware of the ways in which some pit alignments might have been positioned so that they were visible in relation to key locales within the landscape, or that such locales were visible from along them. Taylor (1997: 175) has noted that from certain angles a permeable boundary may appear impermeable, the gaps only becoming apparent as the viewer approached. He argues that evidence from his study of landscape development in Northamptonshire suggests that this could have been a deliberate way of negotiating the 152

JOHN THOMAS: AN EMPTY HOLE, OR A MEANINGFUL WHOLE? APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF PIT ALIGNMENTS cutting of the pit alignments into ditched boundaries occurring precisely along their original lines (Figure 7). Similar examples have also been recorded at Church Lawford, Warwickshire where two enclosures were sited directly on the line of pit alignments (Figure 8; Palmer 2002).

Figure 7. Detail of excavations at Wollaston, Northamptonshire showing the selective appropriation of parts of earlier pit alignments for settlement boundaries. Source: J. Thomas; adapted from an original plan drawn by Jacqueline Harding of Northamptonshire Archaeology.

The landscape position of the pit alignments at Eye Kettleby in Leicestershire coincides with part of the local Anglo-Saxon Wapentake boundary and the point where the River Eye becomes the River Wreake. This suggests that the location was important in the continued landscape management of the area into the early historical period (L. Cooper pers. comm.). In some extraordinary cases the lines of pit alignments have been followed over such a great timescale that they have been ‘fossilised’ or reworked into boundaries that are still extant within the modern landscape. At Four Crosses in Powys, the position of a pit alignment was reflected in modern field boundaries, prompting the excavators to originally postulate a medieval origin for the pits (Owen and Britnell 1989). At Tallington in Lincolnshire, a right-angled extension to a pit alignment became part of a boundary that persisted in the landscape until the 1960s (French, Gurney, Pryor and Simpson 1993: 30). The line of a recently excavated pit alignment between the two parishes of Ashton Keynes and Somerford Keynes was followed by successive boundaries over time, and became incorporated in the modern county boundary between Wiltshire and Gloucestershire (Hey 1999: 4).

This redefinition of pit alignments as field ditches or settlement and administrative boundaries could be regarded as an attempt to negate or deliberately slight them, and re-appropriate the original symbolism or function of the boundaries by ‘formalising’ them. Alternatively, as Pollard has argued (1996: 113), these later acts may be seen as an acknowledgement of the former boundary’s importance and incorporation into newer routes of activity and communication. Although the exact meanings and functions of these boundaries may have changed therefore, in some instances their overall social significance did not.

thirty known ring ditches within the bend of the loop itself, all presumably of early or middle Bronze Age date, were separated from the hinterland by the pit alignment, and none of these earlier monuments was closer than 25 metres to the line of the later pits (M. Luke pers. comm.). This does suggest a respect for the enclosed area and the monuments within it. The importance of the line originally adopted by pit alignments can often be seen to continue long after the pit boundary had ceased to be maintained and had almost filled in. Pit alignments were regularly re-defined as ditched boundaries, as at West Heslerton (Powesland 1986). They were used as the spine for ‘clothes line’ enclosures as at Tallington, Lincolnshire, where a pit alignment had been re-dug as the northern ditch of a trackway which later became the site of an enclosure (Simpson and May 1993, fig. 24). At Wollaston in Northamptonshire, a coaxial system of pit alignments covering some 2.5 square kilometres was laid out in the early first millennium BC, and this became the focus for three discrete areas of settlement (Meadows 1995; Taylor 1996: 137-138). During the later first millennium BC the settlement areas were apparently formalised, with the re-

Conclusions This paper has attempted to review previous archaeological explanations of pit alignments and present some alternative explanations for them and ideas for future study. Previous functional explanations have marginalised the human involvement behind the construction of pit alignments, and created a view that they were passive features in areas of inactivity (Barber 1985; Harding 1981; Williams 1946-7). This approach, as Pollard has argued, de-contextualises the pits from their 153

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Figure 8. Excavations at Church Lawford, Warwickshire – an excavated ‘clothes line’ enclosure using the axis of former pit alignments as a base for the boundaries of the later settlement complex. Source: J. Thomas, from an original plan drawn by Candy Stevens of Warwickshire Museum Field Archaeology Service.

landscape settings and ignores the conscious choice of constructional form (Pollard 1996: 110). By acknowledging the role of human action behind the formation of pit alignment boundaries, they too become dynamic arenas for social intercourse rather than simply peripheral areas or static boundaries. A short discussion such as this cannot hope to cover in detail the range of information that pit alignments can provide. This is itself testament to the importance of these boundaries. It is also becoming increasingly clear that in many of the areas they occupy, an understanding of pit alignments may be crucial to understanding the transition between relatively ‘open’ and fully enclosed landscapes.

As with other more ‘conventional’ boundaries, pit alignments can be seen as a key feature in creating group identity. The very acts of construction and maintenance of the alignments resulting in the physical embodiment of a group’s labour. The evidence also suggests that pit alignments were integrally linked within both the cultural and natural landscapes within which they were constructed. This is perhaps a reflection that the practices and beliefs of the communities involved did not distinguish between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ in the same way as we do today in the modern West (A. Chadwick pers. comm.; Brück 1999). Pit alignments often appear to have been carefully placed in respect to earlier archaeological features that potentially held great mythical, historical or political importance to the communities responsible for their construction. The significance of the pit alignments was echoed during later periods when many were re-used as the settings for acts of structured deposition, and later still as either ditched boundaries or the focus for settlements. Within the wider landscape there is strong evidence to suggest that many pit alignments were sited with respect to ridgelines and rivers.

The location of pit alignments in both upland and lowland contexts, their relationship or not to rivers and their variety of forms suggests that very general explanations for their existence would do their builders a disservice. Large complexes of pits existed as well as single alignments, and some traversed relatively undifferentiated terrain, whereas others had close relationships to natural boundaries. It is thus highly likely that the significance of pit alignments varied according to the cultural biographies of individual groups in different areas.

In a study of boundary definition in Bronze Age Wessex, Field (2001) has drawn attention to the anthropological work of James Snead, Robert Preucel and Maurice Bloch 154

JOHN THOMAS: AN EMPTY HOLE, OR A MEANINGFUL WHOLE? APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF PIT ALIGNMENTS which may be of relevance when considering the original development of pit alignment landscapes. Snead and Preucel have proposed that in many societies, the construction of markers and boundaries in the landscape may be a process of reconfiguring ‘nature’ in order to place it within cultural frames of reference (Snead and Preucel 1999: 171-173). There may also be a related process of ‘naturalisation’ – the legitimisation of social practices by linking them to natural landscape features and cycles. Bloch’s study of the Zafimaniry landscapes in the eastern highlands of Madagascar (1995), discussed how ideological concerns with permanency in the landscape might lead to the deliberate referencing of earlier monuments and natural features of importance to the community. In terms of pit alignments, their position in relationship to earlier ceremonial monuments and potentially significant natural features in the landscape might have reflected similar concerns of the builders, and may also have served to legitimate their actions, and their claims of tenure and access.

Overall, a reassessment of pit alignments with consideration of their broader landscape context provides a wider range of information for understanding these boundaries. Future strategies for their examination, both desk and site-based, should take into account the potential range of information that can be retrieved if we are to build upon the information so far collected. As with other boundary systems of the period, dating is a priority with an increasing range of methods at our disposal, including better 14C sampling and analysis, and Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dating. Rather than just sampling a few pits, as much of the alignment as possible should be excavated and recorded on excavation projects, in consultation with curatorial staff and developers. The excavation projects at Biddenham Loop, Bedfordshire and St Ives, Cambridgeshire, have been notable instances where such methodologies have proved highly informative. It may be appropriate for example to adopt the recent strategies suggested for Iron Age ditches, which have recommended excavation of at least 20% of boundaries, with particular concentration on ditch terminals (Chadwick 1997, 1999: 165; Haselgrove et al. 2001: 10). Excavation should also target areas with potential stratigraphic relationships between pit alignments and earlier or later archaeological features, particularly settlements and field systems. There is also considerable potential for the use of palaeo-environmental information including soil micromorphology, pollen evidence and molluscan remains to ‘flesh out’ pit alignment landscapes. Once-contemporary palaeochannels should also be extensively sampled for palaeo-environmental evidence.

As Taylor has argued (1996: 174-5), the establishment of pit alignments may have been a deliberate response to growing pressures on resources. By their reference to earlier focal features in the landscape, pit alignments may have drawn upon ‘ancestral’ or ‘traditional’ authority for their creation, and established permeable boundaries between groups that allowed free movement, but which were also a statement of tenure. In comparison to the core area of pit alignment landscapes, neighbouring areas appear to have developed different tenurial statements whilst still acknowledging ‘traditional’ authorities. In Wessex, a system of ditched boundaries was established that referenced earlier barrow features, yet often paid little respect to remains of earlier ‘Celtic’ fields (Field 2001: 60-61). Similarly the Yorkshire Moors were divided at this time by long, cross-ridge dykes that also referenced earlier monuments and may, in some instances, have been used in conjunction with pit alignments (Bevan 1997: 183-4). It is clear that pressure on resources during the first millennium BC gave rise to various social and political solutions to the attendant problems. In Wessex, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the Yorkshire Moors, permanent tenurial statements were set out with the construction of impermeable ditched boundaries. In contrast, the establishment of pit alignment landscapes suggests different perceptions to tenurial rights. Whilst sharing a need to legitimise ownership by the incorporation of important landscape features from the past, the permeability of the boundaries may indicate a more flexible system of appropriation. Resources in the pit alignment landscapes may have been used by more than one group or family, perhaps sharing communal access to areas of grazing. In this way, we can consider pit alignments as a means by which change was negotiated by the communities concerned. The later formalisation of many pit alignments into ditched boundaries indicates changes in perceptions of the landscape as pressure on resources increased, and created a desire by communities to express stronger tenurial control.

On a wider scale, the areas where pit alignments were adopted can be compared with areas where such boundaries were absent. Areas with extensive evidence for Bronze Age ditched field systems but no apparent pit alignments would make ideal comparative research projects. Such comparisons may provide insights into the range of different cultural responses to common problems, such as any limited availability of resources. The adoption of a wider range of strategies calls for much greater interaction between academic and field-based archaeologists in order to integrate more closely theoretical approaches with excavation methodologies and explanations. One way forward has been the implementation of regional research frameworks. These have brought together archaeologists with a range of experiences from different organisations, and have provided platforms for wider synthetic reports of regions with an emphasis on making unpublished ‘grey literature’ information more widely accessible. As an enigmatic form of boundary with evidence suggesting a prominent symbolic element behind their constructional form, pit alignments offer the opportunity to understand the processes leading from relatively open to a fully enclosed landscape. With more integrated studies drawing upon detailed contextual evidence and landscape approaches, a much fuller understanding of pit alignments may be gained and their significance appreciated. 155

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Acknowledgements

Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 149-160. Budd, P. and Taylor, T. 1995. The faerie smith meets the bronze industry: magic versus science in the interpretation of prehistoric metal-making. World Archaeology 27: 133-143. Cardwell, P. 1989. Excavations at Cat Babbleton Farm, Ganton, North Yorkshire, 1986. Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 61: 15-27. Chadwick, A.M. 1997. Towards a social archaeology of later prehistoric and Romano-British field systems in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. assemblage 2. World Wide Web http://www.shef.ac.uk/~assem/2. Chadwick, A.M. 1999. Digging ditches, but missing riches? Ways into the Iron Age and Romano-British cropmark landscapes of the north midlands. In B. Bevan (ed.) Northern Exposure. Interpretative Devolution and the Iron Ages in Britain. Leicester: Leicester Archaeological Monographs, pp. 149-171. Chadwick, A.M. 2004. Rivers, lakes, springs and streams. In A.M. Chadwick (ed.) Stories from the Landscape: Archaeologies of Inhabitation. BAR (International Series) S1238. Oxford: BAR Publishing, pp. 52-54. Coates, G. 2002 A Prehistoric and Romano-British Landscape: Excavations at Whitemoor Haye Quarry, Staffordshire, 1997-1999. BAR (British Series) 340. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. Crawford, G. 1985. Excavations at Wasperton: 5th Interim Report. West Midlands Archaeology 28: pp. 1-3. Dawson, M. 2000. Iron Age and Roman Settlement on the Stagsden Bypass. Bedfordshire Archaeological Monograph 3. Exeter: Short Run Press/Bedfordshire County Council. Ehrenberg, M. and Caple, C. 1983. Excavations at Fimber, Yorkshire. Interim report. Yorkshire Archaeology Society Prehistoric Research Bulletin 20: 7-8. Ehrenberg, M. and Caple, C. 1985. Excavations at Fimber, Yorkshire. Interim report. Yorkshire Archaeology Society Prehistoric Research Bulletin 22: 7-8. Ellis, C.J. 2004. A Prehistoric Ritual Complex at Eynesbury, Cambridgeshire: Excavation of a Multiperiod Site in the Great Ouse Valley, 2000-2001. East Anglian Archaeology Occasional Papers 17. Salisbury: Wessex Archaeology. Fearn, K. 1993. Excavation of two pits of an alignment at Moor Lane, Bennington, Lincolnshire. Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 28: 5-8. Field, D. 2001. Place and memory in Bronze Age Wessex. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 57-64. Finn, N. forthcoming. Excavations at Eye Kettleby, Leicestershire: the prehistoric landscape. The Archaeological Journal. Fitzpatrick, A. P. 1997 Everyday life in Iron Age Wessex. In A. Gwilt and C. Haselgrove (eds.) Reconstructing Iron Age Societies. Oxbow Monograph 71. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 73-86.

An earlier, shorter version of this paper was previously published in proceedings from the Iron Age Research Student Seminars 1999 and 2000 (Thomas 2003). This updated version presents a fuller discussion of the topic, and highlights some of the more recent evidence for pit alignments, including that from developer-funded projects. I would like to thank Adrian Chadwick and Helen Wickstead, the organisers of the Manchester TAG session on The Archaeology of Land Allotment, for a stimulating day and for giving me the chance to air this paper. I would also like to thank Jeremy Taylor for his help and advice, and Adrian Chadwick and my colleague Lynden Cooper for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Many thanks also to Neil Finn of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, Mike Luke of Albion Archaeology, Chris Ellis of Wessex Archaeology, Ian Meadows of Northamptonshire Archaeology and Stuart Palmer from the Warwickshire Museum Field Archaeology Section for providing me with information from the unpublished projects with which they are involved. Bibliography Abramson, P. 1996. Excavations along the Caythorpe Gas Pipeline, North Humberside. Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 68: 1-88. Ainsworth, S. 1999. Prehistoric Embanked Pit Alignments on Ebberston Low Moor, Ryedale, North Yorkshire. London: English Heritage. Albion Archaeology. in prep. The Archaeology of the Biddenham Loop. Barber, J. 1985. The pit alignment at Eskbank Nurseries. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 51: 149-166. Barnatt, J., Bevan, B. and Edmonds, M. 2002. Gardom’s Edge: a landscape through time. Antiquity 76: 51-56. Bevan, B. 1997. Bounding the landscape: place and identity during the Yorkshire Wolds Iron Age. In A. Gwilt and C. Haselgrove (eds.) Reconstructing Iron Age Societies. Oxbow Monograph 71. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 181-191. Bloch, M. 1995. People into places: Zafimaniry concepts of clarity. In E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds.) The Anthropology of Landscape. Perspectives on Place and Space. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 63-77. Boutwood, Y. 1998. Prehistoric linear boundaries in Lincolnshire and its fringes. In R.H. Bewley (ed.) Lincolnshire’s Archaeology from the Air. Occasional Papers in Lincolnshire History and Archaeology. Gainsborough: G.W. Belton Ltd, pp. 29-46. Bowden, M. and McOmish, D. 1987. The required barrier. Scottish Archaeological Review 4: 84-97. Brück, J. 1999. Ritual and rationality: some problems of interpretation in European archaeology. European Journal of Archaeology 2 (3): 313-344. Brück, J. 2001. Body metaphors and technologies of transformation in the English Middle and Later Bronze Age. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age 156

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Thomas, J. 2003 Prehistoric pit alignments and their significance in the archaeological landscape. In J. Humphrey (ed.) Re-searching the Iron Age. Leicester Archaeology Monographs 11. Leicester, pp. 79-86. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Waddington, C. 1997. A review of ‘pit alignments’ and a tentative interpretation of the Millfield Complex. Durham Archaeological Journal 13: 21-34. Whimster, R. 1989. The Emerging Past. Air Photography and the Buried Landscape. Abingdon: RCHME. Williams, A. 1946-7. Excavations at Langford Down, Oxon (near Lechlade) in 1943. Oxoniensia 11: 44-64. Wilson, D.R. 1978. Pit alignments: distribution and function. In H.C. Bowen and P.J. Fowler (eds.) Early Land Allotment. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, pp. 3-6. Wilson, D.R. 1982. Air Photo Interpretation for Archaeologists. London: Batsford.

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Aerial photograph of part of the cropmark complex at Cromwell, in the Trent Valley of Nottinghamshire. The River Trent itself runs across the top of the image. In the foreground, aligned left to right, a later prehistoric pit alignment is visible, one of two pairs of such boundaries that converge on the floodplain of the river. In the centre and upper right are the cropmarks of a later Iron Age or earlier Romano-British agglomerated enclosure complex. The double ditches of a villa complex are also visible superimposed on these earlier features, along with the T-shaped villa buildings themselves (upper right). Sheffield Library of Aerial Photographs (SLAP)

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Towards a bounded landscape. Excavations at Gonalston, Nottinghamshire, and the development of the earliest field systems in the Trent Valley David Knight and Lee Elliott Introduction

preliminary results of continuing investigations at this quarry (see also summaries by Elliott and Knight 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003).

Excavations in the Trent Valley downstream of Nottingham have shed important light upon the development of the earliest systems of land allotment in this region, which in contrast to many neighbouring areas appears on present evidence to have retained a largely open landscape throughout the Bronze Age and earlier Iron Age (see Knight and Howard 2004c; Knight 2007). This work was carried out in advance of gravel extraction at Hoveringham Quarry, on the south-eastern fringe of Gonalston parish (Figure 1), and was funded by Tarmac Central Ltd as part of a Scheme of Treatment approved by a planning agreement with Nottinghamshire County Council. Archaeological investigations at this site have revealed unexpected evidence for the sub-division of a sand and gravel ‘island’ and adjoining alluvial areas by a series of irregularly spaced but broadly parallel linear ditches that may have been laid out from the mid-first millennium BC (Fig.1: G-M, and possibly P, Q, W and Y). These boundaries appear to have provided a framework into which several Iron Age rectilinear ditched enclosures were later incorporated, and may represent a preliminary stage in the transition from an open to a substantially enclosed landscape. The settlement pattern was modified further in the RomanoBritish period, partly perhaps in response to increased flooding and alluviation, while the striking absence of evidence for early medieval settlement suggests further fundamental changes in landscape organisation during the post-Roman era.

Attention is focused first upon changes in the local environment that may have affected the attitudes of valley communities towards the spatial organisation of land resources, with particular emphasis upon the evidence for woodland clearance, the expansion of wetlands and the processes of alluviation and colluviation. Subsequent sections deal in turn with the evidence for the development of linear land boundaries and the phenomenon of enclosure. Dating of these remains at Gonalston relies mainly upon associations with imprecisely dated pottery, supplemented by rare discoveries of other closely datable artefacts and by radiometric dating. For the later second and first millennia BC, the dating scheme employed here follows the sequence of ceramic phases proposed in a recent review of the East Midlands later prehistoric ceramic sequence (Knight 2002). The environmental background The greater part of the area investigated in advance of quarrying occupied a wide tract of sand and gravel, elevated slightly above the broad alluvial floodplain of the River Trent (Fig. 1). These deposits form part of the Holme Pierrepont Sand and Gravel, deposited as outwash during the late Devensian/early Holocene. Subsequent fluvial incision created an elongated sand and gravel ‘island’ edged by expanses of low-lying alluvium with an intricate network of palaeochannels, some containing buried peat deposits. This sand and gravel ‘island’ had originally continued eastwards, into an area subjected to extensive earlier quarrying (see Allen, Harman and Wheeler 1987).

The site provides a valuable insight into the development of the earliest discernible systems of land allotment in the Trent Valley, which in this region appear to have developed mainly from the later Iron Age onwards (Knight and Howard 2004c: 100-102). This late chronology for the inception of large-scale land division contrasts sharply with many neighbouring areas of the Midlands and eastern England (e.g. Evans and M. Knight 2000, 2001; M. Knight and Patten this volume; Lambrick 1992; Pryor 1996; Yates 1999, 2007), and has prompted much speculation on the factors that might underlie these regional disparities. Excavations at Gonalston have emphasised the possibility of significantly earlier origins in some parts of the Trent Valley for the changes in landscape organisation that attained their ultimate expression in the remarkable co-axial field systems of the river terraces downstream of Newark (Knight and Howard 2004c: 102, fig. 5.18; Whimster 1989). These excavations are discussed here in advance of full publication with the aim of circulating more widely the

An extensive programme of palaeoenvironmental sampling was carried out during excavations under the general guidance of James Rackham. Post-excavation analyses are still in progress, but the results of preliminary assessments of the palaeobotanical remains provide a useful insight into some of the processes of landscape change that are discussed below. Woodland clearance The small proportion of the extensive palaeobotanical data from Gonalston that has been fully analysed conjures an image of a valley landscape that by the early first millennium BC may have been extensively cleared of woodland. Analyses are still in progress, but a number of 160

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Figure 1. Location map, and prehistoric and Romano-British features recorded during excavations prior to gravel extraction at Hoveringham Quarry, Gonalston. Source: Drawing by J. Goddard and A. Leaver.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT important preliminary conclusions on the vegetational sequence may be drawn from studies of pollen preserved in organically rich sediments in ditches, pits and ponds on or close to an Iron Age and Romano-British settlement near Bottom Osiers (Figs. 1 [Site A] and 13; Elliott and Knight 1997; Scaife 1999). Interpretations of this work should bear in mind that much of the pollen rain in these features may have been local, and hence even woodland no more than a mile away could be significantly underrepresented in the pollen assemblages. The possibility must therefore remain of denser woodland away from the site, particularly on the valley sides and on the heavier clay soils of the Mercia Mudstone escarpment immediately to the south.

were represented than in the Bronze Age samples, but sufficient oak and hazel pollen was recorded to suggest the continuity of these species after the clearance of other woodland types such as lime and elm (perhaps indicating selective felling of tree species). A comparatively poor representation of holly, lime and elm pollen suggests isolated or sporadic examples of these species. Alder was also present, but reduced values by comparison with the Bronze Age could reflect significant changes in the character of the floodplain. The lower proportion of alder could imply increased waterlogging due to the impact of clearance upon surface runoff and groundwater levels, which may have caused an expansion of reed beds into former areas of alder carr (Knight, Howard and Leary 2004: 122). Another reason for the contrast between Bronze Age and later Iron Age/early Roman values of alder may be the comparative dryness of the later period (J. Rackham pers. comm.), which would have created a generally less favourable environment for this species (see Knight, Howard and Leary 2004: 116-7 for RomanoBritish climatic conditions).

Pollen grains contained within the waterlogged basal fills of pits 108 and 130 provide evidence for a locally cleared environment with both pasture and arable cultivation from as early as the Middle and Late Bronze Ages (Fig. 2; Scaife 1999). Hazel twigs from the lower fill of pit 108 yielded a radiocarbon date of 2960 ± 50 BP (Beta104494; 970-790 cal. BC), whilst part of a sharpened hazel post from near the bottom of pit 130 provided a terminus post quem for the deposit of 3220 ± 80 BP (Beta-104493; 1690-1310 cal. BC). Analyses by Scaife (1999) of associated organic deposits from both pits identified arboreal pollen, predominantly of oak and hazel, with lower proportions of lime, beech, ash and holly. Alder pollen was moderately well represented, and may be attributed to floodplain woodland or growth along riverbanks and in other damp areas. Grasses and grassland indicators such as ribwort plantain, buttercups and dandelion types were well represented, predominating in all of the Bronze Age pollen spectra, together with some cereal pollen and taxa indicative of disturbed ground including spurrey, greater plantain, nettle, knotgrass, mugwort and bindweed.

Pollen from second century AD ditch and pond fills implies a further reduction in the number of trees and a corresponding increase in herbs of cultivation, suggesting yet further expansion of agricultural activity. Small percentages of oak and hazel, plus even smaller quantities of ash, lime, beech and holly, provide an insight into the character of the remaining regional woodland. A diverse herbaceous flora is indicated, dominated by grass species but with evidence too for the cultivation or processing of cereals (including spelt and oats) and the presence of flax. Expansion of valley wetlands Woodland clearance on the scale implied by the evidence discussed above would have had a major impact upon surface water runoff levels, particularly if a significant portion of the newly cleared land had been converted to arable use. In turn, this may have contributed to the formation of the wetland environments that excavations at Gonalston, Mattersey and elsewhere have indicated were developing in valley bottom locations along the Trent and some of its tributaries during the first millennium BC and first millennium AD (Knight and Howard 2004c: 81; Knight, Howard and Leary 2004: 120, fig. 6.17). The expansion of valley wetlands in the Trent Valley during these periods may also be related to fluctuations in precipitation levels and, in the lowermost reaches of the Trent, to rising sea levels (Knight, Howard and Leary 2004; Van de Noort and Davies 1993: 18). Thus, too much emphasis should not be placed upon localised woodland clearance as a factor of change to the exclusion of broader valley-wide processes.

The picture that emerges is of a substantially cleared and cultivated landscape in the vicinity of the sampled features by the late Bronze Age, with more distant woodland and floodplain pasture. This is replicated at other locations in the Middle Trent Valley yielding palaeobotanical and insect remains (Knight and Howard 2004c: 84) – notably at the Derbyshire sites of Hicken’s Bridge, Aston-upon-Trent (Knight and Howard 2004b: 52) and Shardlow (ibid. 52; Howard et al. forthcoming), and by organic samples obtained from palaeochannel fills at a site in Leicestershire near Willow Farm, Castle Donington (Smith and Howard 2004: 114, table 4). In the Roman period, analyses of pollen preserved in a variety of mid-first to second century AD pits, ponds and ditches at Bottom Osiers provide evidence for further woodland clearance (Scaife 1999; Fig. 3). Pollen remains from mid to late first century AD contexts at that site have demonstrated an expansion of herb flora, particularly grasses, suggesting that pasture or grassland was locally important. Cereals were also present in significant quantities (comprising up to 10% of total dry land pollen in a sample from pit 170), suggesting to Scaife a mixed arable and pastoral economy. Fewer trees

The evidence for wetland formation at Gonalston is restricted to data obtained from excavations to the northwest of the gravel island, in an alluvial zone lying southwest of the woodland plantation of Bottom Osiers (Fig. 1). Extensive sub-alluvial peat deposits of variable thickness were recorded during the machine-stripping of overburden from this area. These were stratified in some areas above a thin bed of alluvial clay, beneath which were observed 162

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Figure 2. Pollen percentages in organic material from Middle Bronze Age pit (108) recorded to the north-west of Late Iron Age and Romano-British settlement at Bottom Osiers. Source: Scaife 1999; reproduced by permission of Dr R. Scaife.

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Figure 3. Pollen percentages in organic material from Romano-British pond (305) at Bottom Osiers. Source: Scaife 1999; reproduced by permission of Dr R. Scaife.

164

DAVID KNIGHT AND LEE ELLIOTT: TOWARDS A BOUNDED LANDSCAPE. EXCAVATIONS AT GONALSTON sands and gravels preserving numerous irregular hollows that, on the basis of their shape, dimensions and characteristic stratigraphy, were interpreted as tree-throws. Deposits associated with these tree-throws protruded through the peaty layer, which may have accumulated therefore at the same time as former areas of floodplain woodland had succumbed to the effects of increasing groundwater levels. These peat deposits were interleaved at one location, immediately north-east of ditch G (Fig. 1), with a highly compacted layer of shattered, burnt stones, representing the truncated remains of a burnt mound. This structure has not yet been dated, but is most probably of Neolithic or Bronze Age date by analogy with comparable monuments elsewhere in the Trent Valley (Knight and Howard 2004c: 87-89; compare Elliott and Knight 1998). In addition, some pockets of peat were recorded beneath another burnt mound lying south-west of Bottom Osiers plantation, stratified above sandy loam (Fig. 1: F); peaty deposits were also recorded in the lower layers of the associated trough (Knight and Howard 2004c: fig. 5.7), stratified beneath a thick deposit of alluvial clay. Further evidence that the origins of peat formation should be traced at least to the earlier first millennium BC is provided by the excavation through peat of ditches yielding Iron Age and Romano-British pottery and occasionally other artefacts of these periods. Peat was also observed filling some of these ditches, which were sometimes flanked by a linear stony layer, interpreted as probably the relic of an associated bank created from ditch upcast (Fig. 6). Interestingly, the Romano-British ditches which were observed to cut through peat were located at higher levels, closer to the gravel island, suggesting therefore a gradual shift in the focus of the field system to marginally higher and drier environments.

Romano-British enclosure complex immediately adjacent to the plantation at Bottom Osiers (Fig. 13). Some of the more substantial Romano-British features preserved upper fills comprising thick oxidised orange-brown clays, possibly representing flood deposits. The most striking example was a large pond (305), some 10 metres in diameter, which yielded a thick upper layer of clay above waterlogged lower fills containing substantial quantities of second century AD pottery and organic artefacts (Fig. 4; Elliott and Knight 1997). The upper clay contained a variety of post-medieval artefacts, which may imply deposition over a protracted time period. Activity at Bottom Osiers generated large amounts of pottery and other domestic refuse attributable to the first and second centuries AD, but typologically diagnostic later material was conspicuous by its absence. The site would appear, therefore, to have been abandoned in the third century, at least as a focus of permanent occupation. The reasons for abandonment of the settlement are unclear, but the upper clay fills of some features and the overlying alluvial deposits could signify desertion in response to regular inundations by flood waters in the later Roman period. This hypothesis is supported by investigations on other Nottinghamshire sites such as Rampton and Littleborough, where Romano-British features and deposits were recorded beneath and interdigitated with alluvial layers interpreted as evidence of overbank flooding (Knight, Howard and Leary 2004: 117-120). It remains uncertain, however, whether later Roman flooding at Bottom Osiers would have been of sufficient severity to cause the annual inundations that might be expected on the floodplain to have extended regularly over the low gravel island that formed the focus of occupation. Another possibility is that the generally wetter and cooler conditions of the third and fourth centuries may have prompted land-use changes that would have rendered the enclosure complex redundant (J. Rackham pers. comm.). However, significantly more information on changing land-use patterns would need to be extracted from the available palaeoenvironmental data before this hypothesis could be tested.

Samples for radiometric dating were obtained from monoliths through these peat deposits and from timbers associated with the burnt mound south-west of Bottom Osiers plantation (Fig. 1: F). Samples of heat-affected pebbles from the compacted stone layer of this mound were taken for thermoluminescence dating in the event that radiocarbon dating proved problematic. Samples will be submitted for dating during full post-excavation, and it is hoped that they will clarify both the date of accumulation of the sub-alluvial peat and the period of use of the burnt mound.

Open landscapes of the early first millennium BC Human occupation within the progressively cleared environment of the early first millennium BC appears to have spread extensively, but relatively unintensively, over the gravel terrace and into some lower-lying areas now sealed by alluvial clays. Rare discoveries have been made in scattered pits and postholes of sherds from Deverel-Rimbury vessels and post Deverel-Rimbury (PDR) plainwares, dated respectively to the latter half of the second millennium cal. BC and to the period from the late second millennium to the tenth/ninth centuries cal. BC (Elliott and Knight 2002: 148-149; Knight 2002: 123126). Other scattered pits, postholes and gullies, including curvilinear features interpreted as the drainage gullies or bedding trenches of roundhouses, have also yielded late Bronze Age-earlier Iron Age (LBA-EIA) sherds dating broadly from the ninth to fifth/fourth

Alluviation and colluviation Removal of the forest canopy and increases in surface runoff levels may also have increased the erosion of exposed soils and the redeposition by colluviation and alluviation of fine-grained sediments. The accumulations of alluvial clays that were observed above the peaty deposits on the north-western side of the quarried area have yet to be closely dated. However, the preservation beneath this alluvium of several ditches which on the basis of associated finds may be attributed to the Iron Age and Romano-British periods suggests a comparatively late date for this phase of significant alluviation. Further evidence supporting a late phase of alluviation was provided by the recurrent stratigraphy of the fills of the features recorded on the Iron Age and 165

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Figure 4. Section across quadrant of Romano-British pond (305) at Bottom Osiers, showing thick alluvial clays stratified above waterlogged organic deposits. Source: L. Elliott.

centuries BC. Features interpreted as evidence of an early phase of open settlement have also sometimes been recorded at locations where they were truncated by later enclosure ditches (e.g. Elliott and Knight 2002: 148-149, 2003: 201). These structural elements form sporadic, low-density scatters with no discernible spatial patterning, recalling the discovery of scattered unenclosed features on other later Bronze Age and earlier Iron Age sites in the Trent Valley that have been extensively investigated. Notable examples include quarry sites at Castle Donington in Leicestershire (Coward and Ripper 1999) and Barrowupon-Trent and Willington in Derbyshire (Knight and Southgate 2001; Wheeler 1979: 78-86). The absence of archaeologically detectable boundaries, which provides such a striking contrast with settlements of the later Iron Age and Romano-British periods, could imply a largely unbounded landscape during the early first millennium BC, and by implication perhaps comparatively unrestricted access to land and resources (compare Pryor 1998: 144-145). The settlements represented by these remains may have overlapped the period of use of burnt mounds, which might have developed from the later Neolithic period in this region as social foci for widely dispersed communities (e.g. Beamish and Ripper 2001). The precise functions of these monuments remain uncertain, but the range of possible uses includes saunas, communal cooking and feasting sites and foci for textile production and other craft or industrial activities. One of the five examples recorded so far in Hoveringham Quarry was truncated by a drainage dyke (Fig. 1: T), and was dated to

Figure 5. Linear ditch aligned on the trough of a burnt mound, preserved beneath alluvium and peat to the north-west of the gravel island; preserved timbers are visible in the trough, which is located at the edge of a pronounced concentration of blackened, heat-shattered stones (two baulks across this thin and highly compacted stone layer are visible to the left of the trough); tree throw clearly visible in plan in left foreground. Source: L. Elliott.

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DAVID KNIGHT AND LEE ELLIOTT: TOWARDS A BOUNDED LANDSCAPE. EXCAVATIONS AT GONALSTON the Neolithic or earlier Bronze Age on the basis of thermoluminescence dating of heat-affected stones (Elliott and Knight 1998). A similar date range can be postulated for the other burnt mounds, although some could conceivably have continued in use as late as the early centuries of the first millennium BC. Unequivocal evidence for such late dating has yet to be obtained. However, one of the ditches (Fig.1: K), forming part of the boundary system that it is suggested below may have originated in the mid-first millennium BC, appears to have been aligned so as to run into the trough of one of the burnt mounds recorded during gravel extraction (Fig. 1: F, Fig. 5). This may relate to the final use of a feature originally used for other purposes and perhaps long decayed, but it implies that the trough may have remained visible well into the first millennium BC.

significant implications for the origins of the settlement at Bottom Osiers. Three of the major linear features continued north-west of the gravel island, vanishing beneath alluvium into lower lying and comparatively poorly-drained land, including the ditch that might have been aligned deliberately on the burnt mound trough (Fig. 1: K). Two of these ditches were spaced about 30m apart, and if in contemporary use might have defined a broad corridor of movement linking the gravel terrace with the neighbouring alluvial zone and hence connecting areas of rich pasture with the slightly raised and drier terrace zone (Fig. 1: H, J, K, I). Further complexity is introduced by the two westernmost linear boundaries (Fig. 1: G, M), which may have been linked by a sub-alluvial ditch running parallel with the edge of the gravel island (Fig. 1: N, U). This may have created an extremely large enclosure at least 6 hectares in area, but quarrying did not extend far enough to the south-east for this possibility to be tested.

Linear ditched and embanked boundaries One of the most significant results of the Hoveringham Quarry excavations was the identification of at least five roughly parallel ditches, aligned approximately northwest to south-east, which divided the elongated gravel promontory into several large rectilinear blocks of unequal size (Fig. 1: G-M). Another shallow ditch, yielding no associated finds but consistently cut by Iron Age and Romano-British features at Bottom Osiers, may also be related to these ditches, although it veered away from these towards the north (Fig. 1: Q; Elliott and Knight 1996: 163, fig. 1 feature 173). In addition, a shallow linear ditch following the course of a stratigraphically earlier pit alignment in the north-east corner of the quarry adjacent to Bottom Osiers plantation (Fig. 9: 116; Fig. 1: P) might represent a continuation of the linear ditch recorded some 50m to its south-east (Fig. 1: L). Unfortunately, any extension of ditch P towards the south-east was destroyed during stripping by box graders of a substantial portion of the quarried area. A length of ditch to the north-east of ditch P could represent part of an associated boundary (Fig. 1: W, Fig. 9), but stripping by box graders prevented identification of more than a short length of this feature. The latter ditch (W) was observed to follow approximately the alignment of a major NW-SE ditch that was recorded during excavations at Bottom Osiers (Fig. 1: Y; Elliott and Knight 1997: 67: fig. 1, ditch 157), but as neither ditch could be traced through the area stripped by box graders their relationship must remain uncertain. Ditch 157, a trapezoidal ditched enclosure appended to its western side (ibid.: fig. 1, enclosure A) and a NW-SE boundary ditch some 50m to the west (ibid.: fig. 1, M) were assigned in an early interim report to the mid-first century AD (ibid. 67: fig. 2b). Further work, however, has suggested an earlier origin for the westernmost boundary ditch (one terminal of which yielded an assemblage of LBA-EIA pottery that is discussed briefly below: Fig. 7) and perhaps also ditch 157 and the appended trapezoidal enclosure. It is hoped that full post-excavation analysis will clarify the complex and as yet unresolved chronological relationships between these features, the development of which carries

The ditches varied significantly in size, from quite shallow and narrow features to more substantial constructions up to around a metre wide and 0.5m deep. Stretches of some ditches, particularly those on the western side of the quarry (Fig. 1: G, H), were represented by wide bands of relatively heterogeneous fill, up to circa 5m wide in places (Fig. 14: A). These have been interpreted as the consequence of protracted re-cutting sequences (Elliott and Knight 2003: 201), which may have significant implications for interpretations of their role as community boundaries. The ditches could originally have been flanked by banks, hedges or fences, although comparatively few features preserved unequivocal evidence for an associated upstanding structure. Several features preserved traces of flanking banks buried beneath alluvium or, in one case, below a headland associated with a post-medieval field boundary (Fig. 1: section across ditch H, at north-western edge of gravel island). One of the better preserved banks was recorded to the north-west of the terrace close to Gonalston Lane, bordering the south-western edge of a substantial linear ditch (Fig. 1: G). It comprised a wide sandy clay and gravel spread, stratified above a buried soil of dark brown silty clay loam and a lower dark greybrown clayey peat (Fig. 6; Elliott and Knight 2003: 201). The presence of a tree bole in one section across the bank raises the possibility of an associated tree, suggesting therefore that the boundary may have been in use for some time. Most of these major boundaries followed remarkably straight alignments, carefully positioned so as to bisect the gravel island from north-west to south-east. Some stretches, however, particularly to the north-west of the terrace, preserved more sinuous ground plans which could signify the avoidance of pre-existing obstacles such as trees or buildings. The continuation of some boundaries across the terrace edge into lower-lying areas more prone to flood, where they were sealed by alluvium, may indicate the incorporation of pasture and arable land within each rectilinear land block. This recalls in a 167

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Figure 6. Sub-alluvial gravel bank adjacent to linear ditch, stratified above thin layer of peat. Source: drawn by J. Goddard, based upon original by L. Elliott.

Figure 7. Late Bronze Age-earlier Iron Age pottery from the terminal of a linear ditch immediately west of Bottom Osiers enclosure complex. Source: drawn by J. Goddard.

general sense the characteristic linearity of many medieval parishes either side of the River Trent (Elliott, Jones and Howard 2004: 166, fig. 7.7), and may reflect the same desire by community groups to formalise access to a wide range of landscape resources. Interestingly, the alignment of these linear boundaries at right angles to the axis of the elongated gravel terrace correlates closely with the spatial arrangement of post-medieval field boundaries, suggesting that similar concepts of resource allocation may have preoccupied communities separated widely in time.

(Fig. 1: E), from which were recovered significant quantities of Scored Ware and other pottery deriving from middle and late Iron Age activity. The most significant ceramic association was obtained from the northern ditch terminal of an entrance through the easternmost of the known linear ditches (Fig. 1: L). This produced largely unabraded pottery sherds that may have been deliberately deposited, and hence could genuinely relate to the period of its use (Fig. 7). They included part of a pot of uncertain form with a high, concave neck and a wide internal neck channel (Fig. 7.1), reminiscent of several unusual LBA-EIA vessels with internally channelled necks from Gretton, Northamptonshire (Jackson and Knight 1985: 58, 65, 73, e.g. figs. 6.24, 8.55, 8.58) and Fiskerton, Lincolnshire (Elsdon and Knight 2003: 88-91, figs. 5.1.1, 5.2.3, 5.2.5; Knight 2002: 130, 135), together with several other typical LBA-EIA ceramic types (Fig. 7.2-6; compare Knight 2002: 126131). This pottery assemblage might, therefore, signify construction from at least the mid-first millennium BC.

Dating of these ditch systems is complicated by the extreme paucity of diagnostic finds, except where ditches impinged on settlement foci, although radiocarbon dating of associated animal bone and wood (including a wooden shovel: Fig. 8) may eventually elucidate their chronology. Some of the highest finds concentrations were recorded in ditches running along the south-western side of an enclosure complex lying north-east of Gonalston Lane 168

DAVID KNIGHT AND LEE ELLIOTT: TOWARDS A BOUNDED LANDSCAPE. EXCAVATIONS AT GONALSTON Other boundary ditches running roughly parallel to and south-west of this feature yielded variable quantities of middle and late Iron Age pottery, including Scored Ware and wheel-thrown Late La Tène sherds, although interpretation of the artefact record must take into account the possibility of repeated recutting of features and hence bias towards later periods.

mid-first millennium BC, although late Bronze Age or earlier Iron Age pottery at sites such as Willington in Derbyshire (Wheeler 1979) raises the possibility that comparable early systems might exist elsewhere along the Valley (see Knight and Howard 2004c: 100-101). Artefactual evidence for the earliest phases of ditch construction may obviously have been erased from many ditches during later cleaning or re-cutting, but with this important proviso the available dating evidence would suggest a significantly later origin for the majority of field boundaries in the Trent Valley. These include the components of the remarkable co-axial field systems that extend over large areas of the Trent river terraces to the north of Newark (Whimster 1989), which on current evidence would appear to have developed mainly in the Romano-British period from origins probably in the late Iron Age (Knight and Howard 2004c: 102). The extensive co-axial and more irregular field systems of the Sherwood Sandstone areas of north Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire and the Magnesian Limestone and Coal Measure areas of South and West Yorkshire appear also to have originated in the late Iron Age, but probably with much expansion and intensified activity during the Romano-British period (Burgess 2001a; Chadwick 1997, 1999, 2004; O’Neill 2001; Riley 1980; Robbins 1998; Roberts this volume). This late dating provides a curious contrast with other regions of the Midlands and eastern England, and it is argued below may reflect significant spatial variations in socio-economic as well as environmental conditions.

Samples were taken from some ditches of faunal and other organic material suitable for radiocarbon dating, and it is hoped that radiocarbon determinations will permit further refinement of the proposed date range. Mention should also be made of the retrieval from the waterlogged basal fill of one of the sub-alluvial linear ditches of a substantially complete shovel made of oak, with traces of use-wear along its working edge (Fig. 8). This rare and remarkable wooden artefact provides unique evidence from the Trent Valley for one of the tools employed during ditch construction. These may otherwise only be deduced archaeologically from rare discoveries of tool marks in the bottoms and sides of ditches, as at East Carr, Mattersey, Nottinghamshire (e.g. Morris and Garton 1998) and from occasional discoveries in neighbouring regions. Somewhat farther to the north, for example, an iron spade shoe was recovered from a late Iron Age or Romano-British ditch at Lincolnshire Way, Armthorpe in South Yorkshire (Rose and Richardson 2004).

Key questions remain regarding not only the date but also the functions of these major linear boundaries. Drainage may have been an important consideration, particularly in lower-lying areas prone to flooding, and may have become even more problematic over time as surface runoff levels intensified and wetland areas extended along the fringes of the river terrace. These major land divisions may also have served to control the movement of stock, and might have marked the territorial and/or tenurial limits of different social groups. Arguments for the social significance of linear boundaries may be reinforced by the identification in some areas of complex re-cutting sequences which challenge simple practical explanations such as repeated cleaning out of silted enclosure ditches (Fig. 14: A). This essential activity could have been achieved more easily by the digging out of accumulated ditch silts and vegetation rather than the frequently observed practice of re-digging beside a previous alignment, particularly if the ditch had been flanked by banks, except probably in the case of ditches that were seriously waterlogged. Some researchers have speculated whether protracted re-cutting sequences should be viewed partly as symbolic acts, aimed at emphasising by means of successive re-inscriptions upon the landscape the strong links between communities and the lands they farmed (e.g. Chadwick 1997, 1999: 161164; Hingley 1990). Pressures upon limited land resources in the Trent Valley may have intensified significantly from the later first millennium BC, and it is possible that communal activities emphasising rights of access or ownership or which reinforced group identity

Figure 8. Iron Age wooden spade retrieved from the bottom of a linear ditch to the north of the gravel island. Source: drawn by S. Allen.

Very few other boundary systems in the Trent Valley have yielded evidence indicative of construction from the 169

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT and bound individual members more closely together may have assumed ever growing significance.

discontinuous linear ditch, interpreted as probably a continuation of one of the Iron Age ditched boundaries discussed above (Fig. 1: L), creating a Y-shaped arrangement in plan (Fig. 9). This curious juxtaposition hints at a relationship between these features, but unfortunately neither the pits within the alignment nor the linear ditch yielded direct dating evidence. The ditch followed the alignment of an earlier row of up to six subrectangular pits, each up to 1.5m wide, which itself was possibly of at least two phases – providing further evidence that some linear boundaries may have begun life as pit alignments. The only dating evidence from this part of the site came from a large pit (108), immediately west of the linear ditch (Fig. 9), which preserved in its lower fill hazel twigs dated to 2960 ± 50 BP (Beta-104494; 1305-1005 cal. BC). There is, however, no reason to suppose an association between the pit alignment and this relic of dispersed later Bronze Age activity.

Pit alignments Excavations at Gonalston have unearthed traces of three pit alignments, two of which might represent the earliest phase in the construction of the linear land boundaries discussed above (Elliott and Knight 2003: 201). One of these alignments survived as a truncated row of three pits spaced about 1.5m apart, each approximately circular in plan and averaging 0.9m in diameter, which were cut by a multiphase linear boundary (Fig. 1: G) running along the south-western edge of an Iron Age and Roman enclosure complex close to Gonalston Lane (Fig. 1: E; Fig. 14: features 231, 232, 233). None of these pits yielded dating evidence, but their stratigraphic position beneath a frequently recut linear ditch from which was recovered Scored Ware and other middle to late Iron Age pottery implies an earlier origin. An early date would be of particular interest from the viewpoint not only of the development of the first millennium BC landscape at Gonalston but also of the chronology of pit alignments in the Trent Valley generally. Some of these monuments may have been constructed in the earlier first millennium BC, to judge by occasional associations with LBA-EIA pottery at sites such as Aston Hill, Aston-upon-Trent, Derbyshire (Knight and Howard 2004c: 102-103) and Girton, Nottinghamshire, where LBA-EIA sherds have recently been identified in association with a multi-phase pit alignment adjacent to a palaeochannel (H. Jones pers. comm.; pottery assessment D. Knight). Many others may date from the later first millennium BC, as at Whitemoor Haye in Staffordshire (Coates 2002: 13-15), or may have formed important elements of the Romano-British landscape around settlements such as Rampton, Nottinghamshire (Knight, Howard and Leary 2004: 144, fig. 6.16). The extreme paucity of evidence for LBA-EIA usage is in sharp contrast to areas such as the Nene Valley, where at Wollaston, Grendon, Gretton, Ringstead and elsewhere in Northamptonshire pit alignments, arranged sometimes in co-axial fashion, played an important role in the division of the early first millennium BC landscape (Jackson 1974, 1978; Meadows 1995). Many other pit alignments in the Midlands and eastern England also appear to be of Late Bronze Age or earlier Iron Age date (Ellis 2004; Pollard 1996; Thomas 2003, this volume), emphasising further the comparative dearth of evidence for early pit alignments in the Trent Valley. This contrast may reflect only the accident of survival, or alternatively could signify further significant landscape contrasts between this region and some neighbouring river valleys.

The transition from open to enclosed settlement Further significant changes in the spatial organisation of settlement may be discerned at Gonalston during the later first millennium BC, with the progressive enclosure of occupation foci and specialised activity areas by ditches, many of which may have been flanked by other barriers to movement such as earthen banks, hedges and palisades. Associations between some enclosure ditches and earlier and late La Tène pottery suggest an origin for this process in the mid-first millennium BC, recalling evidence from other Trent Valley sites such as Barrow-upon-Trent, Derbyshire (Knight and Southgate 2001), Gamston, Nottinghamshire (Knight 1992) and, just south of the Tame-Trent confluence, the settlement of Fisherwick, Staffordshire (Smith 1979). At least eight enclosures on the terrace at Gonalston may be attributed to the Iron Age on the basis of associated artefacts and their stratigraphic relationship to RomanoBritish features, notably Enclosure A at Bottom Osiers (Fig. 13, Elliott and Knight 1996: 163, fig. 1) and a rectilinear ditched enclosure (Fig. 10: A) cut on one side by Holme Dyke and appended to one of the main NW-SE linear boundaries (Fig. 10: B). Interestingly, these include two sub-square ditched enclosures which, in addition to yielding small numbers of Iron Age sherds, have a distinctive form very similar to Iron Age square-ditched funerary barrows (Fig. 1: B; Boyle 2004; Stead 1991; Whimster 1989: 25, 33). It is unclear how many of these enclosures were in contemporary use or how many might represent habitation foci, but with these provisos the contrast between the density of Iron Age enclosures and settlement remains of earlier periods is sufficiently striking to suggest a significant increase in the density of activity – and hence possibly in population levels. Several of these enclosures continued in use into the RomanoBritish period, which saw significant modifications of some existing enclosures and the construction at Bottom Osiers of a distinctive multiple enclosure complex, linked to a multiphase system of outlying fields and paddocks by a sinuous ditched trackway (Figs. 12-13; Elliott and Knight 1997: 67-69).

The other two pit alignments at Gonalston were found during a watching brief in the north-eastern corner of the quarry, adjacent to the plantation at Bottom Osiers (into which one at least appears to have continued – Fig. 9). The longer of these comprised a slightly curving length of seven large subrectangular pits up to 1.7m wide, extending over a distance of some 20m. The south-westernmost pit in this alignment was located immediately to one side of a 170

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Figure 9. Junction of two pit alignments, one marking a boundary that was later recut as a linear ditch, and scattered Middle Bronze Age (108) and undated pits adjacent to Bottom Osiers plantation. Source: drawn by J. Goddard.

The Iron Age enclosures at Gonalston are represented archaeologically by single-ditched boundaries, often with complex histories of re-cutting, enclosing areas of subrectangular or subsquare shape. The ditch circuit was generally interrupted along at least one side of the enclosure or at one of the corners by a simple entrance causeway lacking associated outworks or other visible structural elaborations. There were large variations in the size of the enclosed areas, which ranged from around 0.01 to 0.7ha. The ground plans of the several Romano-

British enclosures at Gonalston imply a more sophisticated allocation of space, with groups of small shallow-ditched rectilinear enclosures appended to singleor multiple-ditched subrectangular enclosures (e.g. Fig. 14: enclosures appended to NE side of Romano-British Enclosure C). The Romano-British enclosure complex at Bottom Osiers displayed a particularly complex design, focused in its final phases upon a large, approximately square enclosure, demarcated by multiple ditched boundaries; these defined an area dominated by a 171

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Figure 10. Plan of Iron Age and Romano-British enclosure complex adjacent to Holme Dyke. Source: drawn by J. Goddard.

prominent central pond (305), interpreted as a watering place for livestock (Fig. 13; Elliott and Knight 1997: 6769). The enclosure was entered from its south-eastern side via a sinuous ditched trackway flanked by small single-ditched rectilinear enclosures. These might have served as garden plots, or more likely paddocks, and hence might have been associated with livestock management.

been positioned relative to these boundaries. However, the retrieval of diagnostic LBA-EIA pottery sherds from the recut entrance postholes on the south-eastern side of the structure raises the possibility that at least the earlier phases of the roundhouse may have preceded construction of the enclosure ditch. The roundhouse overlay a single-ditched curvilinear enclosure currently of uncertain date and function (Fig. 10: D) and was itself cut by one arm of a small subrectangular enclosure of Romano-British date (Fig. 10: E). Some of the scattered pits, postholes and gullies of uncertain function which were recorded inside the Iron Age enclosure may have been contemporary with the period of its use, but the ceramic associations which provide the key dating evidence are insufficiently precise for contemporary internal structures to be identified with certainty.

Large-scale area excavations of the interiors of some of the Iron Age enclosures have uncovered a variety of structural remains, although interpretation is invariably complicated by the difficulty of establishing which features had been in contemporary use. Only rarely could stratigraphic links be demonstrated between enclosure ditches and internal features, and assessment of the contemporaneity of internal structures must rest largely upon consideration of their spatial relationships (Knight and Howard 2004c: 90-93). This problem may be exemplified by the discovery inside a subrectangular ditched enclosure adjacent to Holme Dyke of a roundhouse defined by two phases of bedding trench, 11m and 12m in diameter, and by a slightly larger ring of post-holes partially cutting the outermost bedding trench (Fig. 10: C; Fig. 11). Its spatial location, some 15m SE of the northerly enclosure ditch and roughly equidistant from the south-western and north-eastern enclosure ditches, suggests that it might have

Similar problems of interpretation frustrate study of the internal spatial organisation of other Iron Age and RomanoBritish enclosures at Gonalston, particularly when they were modified over protracted time periods. This complicates attempts to establish their functions and the size of the community groups that might have been represented. The most informative enclosures from the viewpoint of their internal spatial organisation include the multiple enclosure complex at Bottom Osiers (Fig. 1: A, Figs. 12-13) and a multi-phase Romano-British enclosure 172

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Figure 11. Iron Age roundhouse inside Holme Dyke enclosure. Source: L. Elliott.

Figure 12. Aerial photograph of multiple-ditched enclosure complex at Bottom Osiers prior to excavation. Source: reproduced by permission of English Heritage (NMR); photograph reference SK 6947/16.

173

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Figure 13. Plan of Romano-British multiple-ditched enclosure complex at Bottom Osiers. Source: J. Goddard; reproduced by permission of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire.

north-east of Gonalston Lane (Fig. 14: C) which replaced two chronologically successive rectilinear Iron Age enclosures (Fig. 1: E; Fig. 14: B and E).

apparently closely integrated with the trackway and concentric enclosure ditches. The interior of the central multiple-ditched enclosure was dominated by a large, roughly central pond (305) with gently sloping sides, approximately 10m in diameter and originally up to 1.3m deep, which is interpreted as most probably a waterhole for stock. The lower waterlogged pond fills incorporated large quantities of second century AD artefacts, many of which appear to have been deliberately deposited at the end of the period of its use, including pottery, querns, tiles, artefacts of

The site at Bottom Osiers focused upon a multiple-ditched enclosure, possibly with internal subdivisions, approached from the south-east via a large subrectangular yard from which a ditched trackway led into surrounding fields. The yard fronting the entrance to the enclosure was flanked on either side by subrectangular and subsquare enclosures, 174

Figure 14. Plan of Iron Age and Romano-British enclosure complex adjacent to Gonalston Lane. Source: J. Goddard.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT wood, leather shoes and textile fragments, and a perforated wooden disc. There are strong grounds to suppose that the pond was in use at the same time as the enclosure ditches, which were also dated to the early Romano-British period on the basis of associated pottery. Its central position within the enclosure suggests a strong association with stock management, while the very mixed basal and side fills of the feature could indicate trampling by stock of the gently sloping sides.

feature 073; Fig. 15). The discovery of significant quantities of Romano-British domestic debris, including pottery, tiles, fired clay loomweights, querns and smithing slag, implies a focus of settlement, but as at Bottom Osiers no structural remains indicative of dwellings could be located. The survival of a linear arrangement of skerry slabs close to some of the pits described above may indicate, however, the use of constructional techniques that had not penetrated significantly below ground level (Fig. 14: feature 150; plan after removal of skerry). This c. 5m long feature was interpreted as probably the base of a stone-lined drain flowing into the terminal of Enclosure D, and may perhaps have been associated with a building leaving no other archaeological trace. It is possible that many of the unusually abundant skerry slabs that were recorded during excavation had derived from building foundations, emphasising that the absence of obvious structural remains might only reflect taphonomic processes.

The argument for an association between this enclosure complex and animal husbandry is reinforced by the sinuous ditched trackway that entered the enclosure from the southeast, which it is suggested may have served to funnel stock in and out of the enclosure. The enclosure contained a number of other features that, on the basis of associated pottery, were probably contemporary with the period of its use; these included another smaller pond (306) that provided further evidence for the watering and corralling of stock. There was no convincing evidence for any associated dwellings, however, despite the presence of extensive occupation debris in the lower fills of the central pond (including roof tiles). Two poorly preserved curvilinear gullies, each interpreted as possibly bedding trenches, might mark the foundations of roundhouses, but neither the functions nor the dating of these can be established with certainty. The artefactual and structural evidence for habitation is not easily reconciled, and we could imagine therefore either a more peripheral focus of occupation or the existence of structures whose foundations were not sufficiently deep to survive. Either interpretation seems plausible, although some further support for the latter may be provided by the evidence from the Gonalston Lane enclosure discussed below.

Figure 15. Foundations of Romano-British stone-lined pit inside Gonalston Lane enclosure. Source: L. Elliott.

The multi-phase Romano-British enclosure adjacent to Gonalston Lane (Fig. 14: C) preserved traces of an internal ditched compound occupying one corner of the enclosure (Fig. 14: D), together with an interesting group of specialised domestic or industrial structures that appear to have been in use while the main enclosure ditch was open (Figs. 15-16). These included a scatter of small, roughly rectangular pits lined with vertically set stone slabs, each one opening into a narrow gully resembling a flue (Fig. 14: features 069, 156, 157, 197; Fig. 16). The building material was a sandstone (skerry), derived from thin beds outcropping in Mercia Mudstone deposits, comparable to those exposed by fluvial erosion of the Trent near Gunthorpe, Nottinghamshire, some 4 kilometres upstream. Fragments of fired clay around the rim of at least one pit, apparently surviving in situ, suggest a clay superstructure typical of a small domestic oven, although industrial use is also possible. None of the pits preserved evidence of exposure to very high temperatures or an association with diagnostic waste. Dumped skerry slabs that may have derived from these structures were recovered from along the inner edge of the enclosure ditch, close to features 156 and 157, implying perhaps that the ditch had remained open during the period of their use. Another pit, perhaps representing the base of a bread oven or related structure, had a floor of laid cobbles and a shallow gully with charcoal and other burnt material on one side (Fig. 14:

Although a wide range of activities associated directly with occupation may be postulated for enclosures of both periods, it is likely that some enclosures had performed specialised roles for communities whose habitation focus was located some distance away – as paddocks, for controlled grazing or the intensive care of stock during periods of lambing or calving (Ciaraldi 2002: 63; Lambrick 1992: 100-101), as fodder and crop stores (Knight 1992: 84) or even perhaps as coppice enclosures (Smith 1978: 5). A specialised function unconnected with habitation is particularly likely for a small (0.01ha) ditched subsquare enclosure attached to one of the main linear boundaries (Fig. 17). This was entered via a narrow causeway adjacent to the linear boundary that had preceded its construction, and would have been too small even for a single dwelling, especially if the enclosure had possessed an internal bank. A small paddock for limited numbers of stock may be a more appropriate interpretation, while the possibility might also be ventured of a link with ritual or ceremonial activities (as suggested later in this section for a pair of small approximately square enclosures demarcated by continuous ditches; Fig. 1: B). Similar problems of interpretation attend a number of other diminutive 176

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Figure 16. Base of Romano-British pit, possibly marking the floor of a domestic oven, inside Gonalston Lane enclosure. Source: L. Elliott.

Figure 17. Small Iron Age enclosure north-west of Holme Dyke enclosure, appended to linear boundary ditch; entrance causeway visible in left background. Photograph: L. Elliott.

177

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT enclosures in the Trent Valley and beyond, including a sub-oval 0.01ha enclosure demarcated by a disproportionately large ditch up to c. 2m wide by 1.4m deep close to the Roman town at Brough-on-Fosse, Nottinghamshire (Knight and Howard 2004c: 93, fig. 5.16: Enclosure A), and a curious group of small annular ditched enclosures or palisaded enclosures of Iron Age and Romano-British date and uncertain function that have been excavated recently in South and West Yorkshire (A. Chadwick pers. comm.; e.g. Manor Farm, West Yorkshire: Burgess 2001b: 78-79, figs. 53, 59; Swillington Common, West Yorkshire: Howell 2001: 5658, figs. 30, 45; Sykehouse, South Yorkshire: Roberts 2004: 12-13, fig. 12).

gullies inside the main enclosure at Sutton Common in South Yorkshire (Chapman 2003; Chapman and Van de Noort in prep.) and within small square mortuary structures in the Vale of Pickering in East Yorkshire (Powesland 2004) suggest that many regional variations in Iron Age mortuary and ritual practices exist, and that more might await discovery. Each of the square enclosures at Gonalston was investigated by a trench that cut across the continuous outer ditch and part of the interior, but the greater part of each site was preserved in situ (Woodhouse 1993: 12-13). Small quantities of Iron Age sherds were retrieved from the fill of each enclosure ditch, supporting the case for a later Iron Age origin. Neither enclosure yielded positive evidence for an associated mound or for inhumation burials, although the absence of inhumation remains could reflect only the poor preservation of bone in the acidic soils of the gravel terrace. An elongated grave-like pit cut into the fill of one of the enclosure ditches might represent a secondary burial, but neither the date nor the function of this feature could be established.

Even for those enclosures where contemporary internal occupation can be deduced, doubts often remain whether occupation would have been permanent or seasonal in nature. Many lower-lying sites such as that at Bottom Osiers might have been particularly prone to flooding and, in common with certain sites in other Midlands river valleys, may have been occupied only during the summer months (Chadwick 2004; Lambrick and Robinson 1978; Robbins 1998). At Bottom Osiers, feature fills may indicate progressive inundation of the site during the Roman period, leading ultimately to abandonment of the settlement, although it may be debated whether later Roman flooding would have been of sufficient severity to have forced abandonment or whether increased wetness might have prompted land use changes that eventually rendered this enclosure complex redundant (J. Rackham pers. comm.). Other Romano-British sites on the gently undulating river terrace at Gonalston may have been affected differently by changes in flood frequency, as all were located at slightly higher elevations (up to 0.5m higher than Bottom Osiers) and hence would have been less prone to serious inundation.

The ceremonial dimension of the enclosure process itself might be indicated by the protracted sequences of ditch recutting that have been recorded during the excavation of some linear ditches and enclosure boundaries. This phenomenon is aptly illustrated by the complex sequence of re-cuts that was deduced from excavations of a major linear ditch (Fig. 1: G) where it flanked the south-western edge of the Gonalston Lane enclosure complex (Fig. 14: A; Fig. 18; Elliott and Knight 2003: 202). Routine cleaning could probably have been achieved more easily by the regular scouring out of accumulated ditch silts rather than by wholesale re-digging beside a previous alignment, especially as ditch construction could have necessitated the levelling and reconstruction of an associated bank, and it is worth recalling the suggestion by some of a link between successive recutting and symbolic acts aimed at reinforcing rights of ownership or group identity (q.v. Chadwick 1999: 161-164; Hingley 1990). There is also increasing evidence for the deliberate placement of artefacts and other material in Iron Age and RomanoBritish contexts across the region, as argued recently for deposits of red deer antler and a pig jaw in a pit dug into the corner of an Iron Age enclosure ditch at Fleak Close, Barrow-upon-Trent, Derbyshire (Knight and Howard 2004c: 93). The ditch and gully terminals of enclosure and roundhouse entrances, wells and pits often acted as foci for these practices (Chadwick 2004: 98-101). At Bottom Osiers, some of the material retrieved from the central pond inside the multiple-ditched enclosure could represent deliberate deposits associated with votive rites or ceremonies of closure and termination. Even apparently mundane depositional patterns might reflect in some cases prevailing cosmological notions and social rules of behaviour relating to concepts such as cleanliness or inside and outside. Further debate on these issues requires significant investment in the plotting of artefact types on archaeological sites (e.g. Robbins 1997) and dissemination of this information by publication.

Attention should be drawn finally to possible links between the enclosures at Gonalston and ceremonial and ritual activities. Immediately south-east of the quarried area, cropmarks indicate two closely spaced 10 x 10m subsquare ditched enclosures (Fig. 1: B). These invite close comparison with the square-ditched barrows of the East Yorkshire Arras tradition (Bevan 1999; Stead 1991; Whimster 1989: 25, 33), although it should be emphasised that neither cropmark displays the central pit which is such a distinctive feature of many Iron Age Arras burials (Stead 1991: figs. 5-17). Small clusters of similar enclosures have been recorded elsewhere in Nottinghamshire at North Muskham (Whimster 1989: 25, plate 17) and are known farther upstream at the Derbyshire sites of Aston-upon-Trent (May 1970) and Barrow-upon-Trent (Derbyshire Sites and Monuments Record 16709b), all in locations close to water that recall the topographical preferences of Iron Age barrow builders in eastern Yorkshire (Bevan 1999: 137-138). The recent discovery of an Iron Age square-ditched cart burial at Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire (Boyle 2004) and Iron Age cremation burials in small subrectangular 178

DAVID KNIGHT AND LEE ELLIOTT: TOWARDS A BOUNDED LANDSCAPE. EXCAVATIONS AT GONALSTON Figure 18. Sequence of ditch re-cuts recorded during the excavation of a major linear boundary flanking the south-western edge of the Gonalston Lane enclosure complex. Source: drawn by J. Goddard, based upon original drawing by L. Elliott.

Conclusions: the key processes of change Excavations at Gonalston have revealed a complex sequence of landscape change, from a largely cleared landscape characterised by dispersed unenclosed settlements during the early first millennium BC, towards an increasingly enclosed and more densely settled landscape where the emphasis had shifted firmly towards the clear definition and physical demarcation of land. The first archaeological manifestation of this process at Gonalston was the superimposition from the mid-first millennium BC of a series of linear ditched boundaries running at right angles to the axis of the river, at least two of which may have succeeded earlier pit alignments. These demarcated rectilinear land blocks of unequal size, possibly positioned so as to incorporate a variety of arable, pasture and wetland resources. They provided a framework to which a number of predominantly rectilinear Iron Age ditched enclosures were later attached (Elliott and Knight 2002: 149, 2003: 201), possibly at an early stage in the development of a landscape where occupation foci and specialised activity areas were increasingly defined by ditches and other boundaries. This enclosed landscape continued into the Romano-British period, which it is suggested witnessed modifications to the pattern of land boundaries, the expansion and modification of many existing enclosures (including the addition of groups of small rectilinear enclosures to single-or multipleditched enclosures), and at Bottom Osiers the growth of a sophisticated multiple-enclosure complex linked to outlying fields by a sinuous trackway. Progressive flooding of lowerlying parts of the gravel island may have prompted abandonment of some settlement from the third century AD, as perhaps at Bottom Osiers, although other settlements on slightly higher ground may have continued longer in use (e.g. Gonalston Lane enclosure; Fig. 14). The conspicuous absence of evidence for Anglo-Saxon activity suggests that settlement may have shifted in that period from the floodplain and the lower terraces most liable to flooding to locations that may have coincided with the modern villages of Hoveringham and Gonalston. The truncation of all excavated sites on the gravel terrace by medieval furrows is testimony to the extent of medieval arable farming, which from the evidence of excavation appears to have been restricted to the better-drained sands and gravels elevated above the alluvial floodplain. By the later medieval period, therefore, the gravel island would appear to have been transformed from the enclosed landscape that it has been suggested characterised the Iron Age and Romano-British periods to the landscape of open fields that dominated much of the Trent Valley and 179

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Figure 19. Location of archaeological sites referred to in the text. Source: D. Knight.

neighbouring areas of the Midlands during this period (Elliott, Jones and Howard 2004: 174-175).

individual communities. These pressures may have been exacerbated by the processes of environmental change that were outlined in the introductory sections of this paper. These include climatic change, which would have affected precipitation and hence levels of surface runoff, soil erosion and flooding, thus contributing to the expansion of valley wetlands and the accumulation of deep alluvial and colluvial deposits. Continued clearance of the protective forest canopy for arable agriculture and most particularly pasture, which appears to have been well advanced by the early first millennium BC at Gonalston, would have created conditions that were likely to have intensified the impact of these changes, and to have imposed even greater pressures

The process of enclosure may have been spurred in the first millennium BC by population growth, which at Gonalston is implied by a pronounced increase in settlement remains dating from the later first millennium BC and RomanoBritish periods. There is persuasive evidence for significant population growth elsewhere in the Trent Valley during the first millennium BC (Knight and Howard 2004c: 107), and it is likely that the pressures this imposed upon available land resources would have necessitated stricter demarcation of the territories of 180

DAVID KNIGHT AND LEE ELLIOTT: TOWARDS A BOUNDED LANDSCAPE. EXCAVATIONS AT GONALSTON upon the available land resources. Communities may have responded by the imposition of tighter controls on valley resources, leading to the progressive enclosure for both practical and symbolic reasons of community territories, settlement sites and specialised activity foci. These changes may well have accelerated in the Romano-British period, as developments in the agrarian economy prompted further intensification of arable farming, and hence probably significantly higher rates of soil erosion, flood frequency and alluviation (Knight, Howard and Leary 2004: 117-120). At Gonalston, this may have marked the beginning of the process of abandonment of the lower-lying and more floodprone terrace environments as locations for settlement.

Nottinghamshire. Assemblage 2. World Wide Web http://www.shef.ac.uk/~assem/2. Chadwick, A.M. 1999. Digging ditches, but missing riches? Ways into the Iron Age and Romano-British cropmark landscapes of the North Midlands. In B. Bevan (ed.) Northern Exposure: Interpretative Devolution and the Iron Ages in Britain. Leicester: Leicester Archaeological Monographs 4, pp. 149-171. Chadwick, A.M. 2004. ‘Heavier burdens for willing shoulders’? Writing different histories, humanities and social practices for the Romano-British countryside. In B. Croxford, H. Eckardt, J. Meade and J. Weekes (eds.) TRAC 2003: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 90-110. Chapman, H. 2003. Wetland research in South Yorkshire: recent work at Sutton Common, and Thorne and Hatfield Moors. Paper presented at the South Yorkshire Archaeology Day, November 2003. Chapman, H. and Van de Noort, R. in prep. Excavations at Sutton Common, Askern, South Yorkshire. Ciaraldi, M. 2002. Plant macroremains. In G. Coates A Prehistoric and Romano-British Landscape. Excavations at Whitemoor Haye Quarry, Staffordshire, 1997-1999. BAR (British Series) 340. Oxford: BAR Publishing, pp. 62-66. Coates, G. 2002. A Prehistoric and Romano-British Landscape. Excavations at Whitemoor Haye Quarry, Staffordshire, 1997-1999. BAR (British Series) 340. Oxford: BAR Publishing. Coward, J. and Ripper, S. 1999. Castle Donington. Willow Farm (SK 445 288), Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 73: 87-91. Elliott, L., Jones, H. and Howard, A.J. 2004. The medieval landscape. In D. Knight and A.J. Howard (eds.) Trent Valley Landscapes. Kings Lynn: Heritage Marketing and Publications Ltd, pp. 153-191. Elliott, L. and Knight, D. 1996. Excavations of an Iron Age and Romano-British settlement near Gonalston, Nottinghamshire. Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 100: 161-164. Elliott, L. and Knight, D. 1997. Further excavations of an Iron Age and Romano-British settlement near Gonalston, Nottinghamshire. Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 101: 65-72. Elliott, L. and Knight, D. 1998. A burnt mound at Holme Dyke, Gonalston, Nottinghamshire. Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 102: 15-22. Elliott, L. and Knight, D. 1999. An early Mesolithic site and first millennium BC settlement and pit alignments at Swarkstone Lowes, Derbyshire. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 119: 79-153. Elliott, L. and Knight, D. 2002. Gonalston Holme Dyke. Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 106: 14-89. Elliott, L. and Knight, D. 2003. Hoveringham, Gonalston Lane. Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 107: 20-22. Ellis, C.J. 2004. A Prehistoric Ritual Complex at Eynesbury, Cambridgeshire: Excavation of a MultiPeriod Site in the Great Ouse Valley, 2000-2001.

Acknowledgements Thanks must be extended to Mike Bishop, Adrian Chadwick, Andy Howard and James Rackham for reading and commenting upon a draft of this paper. Thanks are due also to Jane Goddard for preparing most of the drawings accompanying the text, to Rob Scaife and Steve Allen for permission to reproduce Figs. 2-3 and Fig. 8 respectively, and to Peter Marshall for calibrating the radiocarbon dates quoted in this paper (using OxCal v.3.5). We are indebted finally to Tarmac Central Ltd for funding the excavations at Hoveringham and to all those, too many to mention, who have assisted during excavations from 1996 to the present day. Bibliography Allen, C.S.M., Harman, M. and Wheeler, H. 1987. Bronze Age cremation cemeteries in the East Midlands, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53: 187-221. Beamish, M. 2001. Excavations at Willington, south Derbyshire. Interim report. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 121: 1-18. Beamish, M. and Ripper, S. 2000. Burnt mounds in the East Midlands. Antiquity 74: 37-38. Bevan, B. 1999. Land-life-death-regeneration: interpreting a middle Iron Age landscape in eastern Yorkshire. In B. Bevan (ed.) Northern Exposure: Interpretative Devolution and the Iron Ages in Britain. Leicester: Leicester Archaeological Monographs 4, pp. 123-147. Boyle, A. 2004. Riding into history. British Archaeology 76: 22-27. Burgess, A. 2001a. The Iron Age. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 260-269. Burgess, A. 2001b. Manor Farm. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 72-83. Chadwick, A.M. 1997. Towards a social archaeology of later prehistoric and Romano-British field systems in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and 181

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT East Anglian Archaeology Occasional Papers 17. Salisbury: Wessex Archaeology. Elsdon, S. and Knight, D. 2003. The Iron Age pottery. In N. Field and M. Parker Pearson Fiskerton. An Iron Age Timber Causeway with Iron Age and Roman Votive Offerings: the 1981 Excavations. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 87-92. Evans, C. and Knight, M. 2000. A fenland delta: later prehistoric land-use in the lower Ouse Reaches. In M. Dawson (ed.) Prehistoric, Roman and Saxon Landscape Studies in the Great Ouse Valley. CBA Research Report 119. London: CBA. Evans, C. and Knight, M. 2001. The ‘community of builders’: the Barleycroft post alignments. In J. Brück (ed.) Bronze Age Landscapes. Tradition and Transformation. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 83-98. Hingley, R. 1990. Boundaries surrounding Iron Age and Romano-British settlements. Scottish Archaeological Review 7: 96-103. Howard, A.J., Green, F.M., Hunt, C.O., Monckton, A., Smith, D.N. and Garton, D. forthcoming. Middle to Late Holocene environmental change recorded in palaeochannels of the River Trent, Shardlow, Derbyshire, UK. The Holocene. Howell, J.K. 2001. Swillington Common. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 47-68. Jackson, D.A. 1974. Two new pit alignments and a hoard of currency bars from Northamptonshire. Northamptonshire Archaeology 9: 13-45. Jackson, D.A. 1978. A late Bronze Age–early Iron Age vessel from a pit alignment at Ringstead. Northamptonshire Archaeology 13: 168. Jackson, D.A. and Knight, D. 1985. An early Iron Age and Beaker site near Gretton, Northants. Northamptonshire Archaeology 20: 67-85. Knight, D. 1992. Excavations of an Iron Age settlement at Gamston, Nottinghamshire. Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 96: 16-90. Knight, D. 2002. A regional ceramic sequence: pottery of the first millennium BC between the Humber and the Nene. In A. Woodward and J.D. Hill (eds.) Prehistoric Britain. The Ceramic Basis. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 119-142. Knight, D. 2007. From open to enclosed: Iron Age landscapes of the Trent Valley. In C. Haselgrove and T. Moore (eds.) The Later Iron Age in Britain and Beyond. Oxford: Oxbow Monographs, pp. 190-218. Knight, D. and Howard, A.J. (eds.) 2004a. Trent Valley Landscapes. Kings Lynn: Heritage Marketing and Publications Ltd. Knight, D. and Howard, A.J. 2004b. From Neolithic to early Bronze Age: the first agricultural landscapes. In D. Knight and A.J. Howard (eds.) Trent Valley Landscapes. Kings Lynn: Heritage Marketing and Publications Ltd, pp. 47-77. Knight, D. and Howard, A.J. 2004c. The later Bronze Age and Iron Ages: towards an enclosed landscape. In D. Knight and A.J. Howard (eds.) Trent Valley

Landscapes. Kings Lynn: Heritage Marketing and Publications Ltd, pp. 79-113. Knight, D, Howard, A.J. and Leary, R. 2004. The RomanoBritish landscape. In D. Knight and A.J. Howard (eds.) Trent Valley Landscapes. Kings Lynn: Heritage Marketing and Publications Ltd, pp. 115-151. Knight, D. and Southgate, M. 2001. Barrow-upon-Trent: Fleak Close and Captain’s Pingle. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 121: 201-202. Lambrick, G. 1992. The development of late prehistoric and Roman farming on the Thames gravels. In M. Fulford and E. Nichols (eds.) Developing Landscapes of Lowland Britain. The Archaeology of the British Gravels: a Review. Society of Antiquaries Occasional Papers Paper 14. London: Society of Antiquaries, pp. 78-105. Lambrick, G. and Robinson, M. 1979. Iron Age and Roman Riverside Settlements at Farmoor, Oxfordshire. CBA Research Report 32. London: CBA/Oxfordshire Archaeological Unit. May, J. 1970. An Iron Age square enclosure at Astonupon-Trent, Derbyshire: a report on excavations in 1967. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 90: 10-21. Meadows, I. 1995. Wollaston. South Midlands Archaeology 25: 41-45. Morris, T. and Garton, D. 1998. Romano-British ditchdigging at East Carr, Mattersey, Lound Quarry, Nottinghamshire. Tarmac Papers 2: 51-63. O’Neill, R. 2001. The Roman period. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: WYAS, pp. 269-280. Pollard, J. 1996. Iron Age riverside pit alignments at St Ives, Cambridgeshire. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 62: 93-116. Powesland, D. 2004. Finding the past is not enough. Securing its future is the bigger challenge. Rescue News 93: 1-2. Pryor, F. 1996. Sheep stockyards and field systems: Bronze Age livestock populations in the Fenlands of eastern England. Antiquity 70: 313-324. Pryor, F. 1998. Farmers in Prehistoric Britain. Stroud: Tempus. Riley, D.N. 1980. Early Landscape from the Air. Sheffield: Department of Prehistory and Archaeology. Robbins, G. 1997. Scrooby Top 1997: ceramic report. In G. Davies, M. Parker Pearson and G. Robbins Report on the excavation of the enclosure at Scrooby Top, Nottinghamshire. Unpublished report: ARCUS/University of Sheffield. Robbins, G. 1998. Cropmark landscapes and domestic space. assemblage 3. World Wide Web http://www.shef.ac.uk/~assem/3. Roberts, I. 2004. Excavations at Topham Farm, Sykehouse, South Yorkshire. A Late Iron Age and Romano-British Settlement in the Humberhead Levels. Archaeological Services (WYAS) Publications 5. Morley: WYAS.

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DAVID KNIGHT AND LEE ELLIOTT: TOWARDS A BOUNDED LANDSCAPE. EXCAVATIONS AT GONALSTON Rose, M. and Richardson, J. 2004. Lincolnshire Way, Doncaster, South Yorkshire: archaeological evaluation and excavation. Unpublished report: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service. Scaife, R. 1999. Gonalston: pollen analysis of the Bronze Age and Romano-British features. Unpublished report. Smith, C.A. 1978. The landscape and natural history of Iron Age settlement on the Trent gravels. In B. Cunliffe and T. Rowley (eds.) Lowland Iron Age Communities in Europe. BAR (International Series) 48. Oxford: BAR, pp. 91-101. Smith, C.A. (ed.) 1979. Fisherwick. The Reconstruction of an Iron Age Landscape. BAR (British Series) 61. Oxford: BAR. Smith, D.N. and Howard, A.J. 2004. Identifying changing fluvial conditions in low gradient alluvial archaeological landscapes: can coleoptera provide insights into changing discharge rates and floodplain evolution. Journal of Archaeological Science 31: 109120. Stead, I.M. 1991. Iron Age Cemeteries in East Yorkshire: Excavations at Burton Fleming, Rudston, Garton-onthe-Wolds and Kirkburn. English Heritage Archaeological Reports 22. London: English Heritage/British Museum Press. Thomas, J. 2003. Prehistoric pit alignments and their significance in the archaeological landscape. In J. Humphrey (ed.) Re-searching the Iron Age. Leicester: Leicester Archaeology Monographs 11, pp. 79-86. Van de Noort, R. and Davies, P. 1993. Wetland Heritage. An Archaeological Assessment of the Humber Wetlands. University of Hull: Humber Wetlands Project. Wheeler, H. 1979. Excavations at Willington, Derbyshire, 1970-2. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 99: 58220. Whimster, R.P. 1989. The Emerging Past. Air Photography and the Buried Landscape. London: RCHME. Woodhouse, G. 1993. Tarmac Hoveringham (THM): archive report. Unpublished report: Trent and Peak Archaeological Trust, University of Nottingham. Yates, D.T. 1999. Bronze Age field systems in the Thames valley. Oxford Journal of Archaeology 18 (2): 157-170. Yates, D. 2007. Land, Power and Prestige. Bronze Age Field Systems in Southern England. Oxford: Oxbow.

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Regular, post-Enclosure drystone field walls near Rainster Rocks on the limestone White Peak of Derbyshire. The spoil heaps from a post-medieval lead rake are also visible. Lead miners often had rights to mineral extraction that allowed them access to land belonging to other landowners and their tenants, sometimes leading to disputes and conflicts between them. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Late prehistoric and Romano-British land division in South and West Yorkshire: an overview of the evidence Ian Roberts regional overview providing a comprehensive and coherent understanding of the cropmark landscape in this part of Yorkshire, nor has there been any widespread integration and synthesis of other forms of archaeological evidence towards achieving better knowledge of what is a fast diminishing archaeological resource, which is experiencing progressive erosion through widespread and intensive agricultural activity, and localised destruction by mineral extraction, drainage and other developments (though Chadwick 1997, 1999, 2004, 2007 and in prep.; and Roberts et al. 2004, 2007 are steps towards the production of such an interpretative and integrated regional overview for the Iron Age and Romano-British periods).

Introduction This paper considers the archaeology of the former field and enclosure systems that cover the rural landscapes of the eastern parts of South and West Yorkshire (Figure 1). Geologically, the area has a common denominator in the form of the north-south Magnesian Limestone belt, flanked to the west by Coal Measures Sandstone and to the east by deposits of the Sherwood Sandstone Group. Topographically, the area is generally gently undulating (between 10-100 metres Ordnance Datum). In antiquity the area formed a geographical zone between the Pennines to the west and the lower wetland areas of the Vale of York and the Humberhead levels to the east, a fact that resulted in its exploitation as a settlement area and routeway from earliest times. For many years archaeological investigation of this landscape relied largely on aerial photography, the predominantly arable area and favourable well-drained soils being conducive to good cropmark formation. Over the last thirty years there has been regular aerial reconnaissance and mapping of the cropmark landscapes in the eastern parts of South and West Yorkshire, that has demonstrated an intensity of past settlement and land division which is not so apparent in the western parts of these counties.

Prior to the introduction of PPG16 in 1991 (DoE 1990), there was relatively little archaeological investigation of the known cropmark landscape of this area. With a few exceptions, the work that was undertaken was often small-scale in nature and poorly rewarded in terms of finds. Consequently, interpretations of the cropmark landscape were largely intuitive. As in some other areas of rural Britain, the introduction of PPG16 resulted in a massive increase in archaeological investigations that provided renewed impetus in the study of late prehistoric and Romano-British rural landscapes. However, many of these investigations in the early 1990s focused almost entirely upon what were perceived to be settlement enclosures, with relatively little attention being paid to the surrounding field systems. This approach, not surprisingly, resulted in only a limited understanding of the chronological development of landscape division. Since the mid-1990s, however, a number of larger scale projects have afforded opportunities to investigate the cropmark landscape more extensively.

Parts of the region, particularly the landscape around Doncaster, benefited hugely from the earlier aerial reconnaissance and cropmark mapping work of the late Derrick Riley (Riley 1980). There have also been some smaller air photo investigations carried out on a research basis (e.g. Chadwick 1998; Cox 1984). More recently, the region has benefited considerably from the cropmark mapping and interpretation of Alison Deegan (see below), and the staff of English Heritage. However, it is only very recently, in the form of the Lower Wharfedale National Mapping Project in West Yorkshire (completed in November 2004), that any part of this landscape has been submitted to systematic cropmark mapping from air photographs. At the time of writing no similar wide-scale survey work has been undertaken in South Yorkshire since Derrick Riley’s initial work, although this is being rectified through the work being funded through the Aggregates Levy Sustainability Fund or ALSF (Roberts et al. 2004, 2007).1 There remains however, no published

This paper is not a comprehensive résumé of work carried out in the area. It draws principally on the work carried out by Archaeological Services WYAS, and therefore cannot provide more definitive statements about the nature of the development of the archaeological landscapes of South and West Yorkshire. Many of the issues considered are not new ones, and have been touched upon frequently by researchers past and present. In many cases the conclusions drawn have not changed from those of others, and this paper endeavours to present a limited review of the archaeological background and the perceived research issues that now arise after some seventeen years of commercial archaeology. It presents the findings from a selection of key recent excavations,

1 1. In March 2005 Archaeological Services WYAS was commissioned through the ALSF to carry out comprehensive archaeological mapping of the eastern parts of South and West Yorkshire, focusing on the Magnesian Limestone belt and the adjacent areas. The project involved extending the NMP air photo mapping coverage between the areas already covered in West Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire, and combining the cropmark data of both South and West Yorkshire with geophysical and excavation mapped data using a GIS system, all within a proposed 1200km2 study area (Roberts et al. 2004). The initial assessment phase of the project was completed in 2007 (Roberts et al.

2007). A second more detailed phase is currently underway and will be completed soon, and it is hoped that this will lead to publication.

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Figure 1. Location map of sites mentioned in the text. Source: A. Deegan.

subject of a number of discrete mapping interpretation projects by Alison Deegan in advance of development projects (e.g. Deegan 2000; 2001b); though none have yet had the scope to significantly develop Riley’s work. Riley’s 1980 study identified three basic regimes of land division – the very regular ‘brickwork’ pattern, named after the subdivisions of the long straight parallel boundaries that typify many of the field systems; the ‘nuclear’ arrangement, whereby land allotments respected a pre-existing enclosure; and the organic ‘irregular’ pattern (Riley 1980: 12-19). In the absence of any substantial archaeological evidence for determining absolute chronologies, Riley supposed that in cases where brickwork fields coexisted with nuclear fields, such as around Rossington for example, that the brickwork fields were later in-fills between supposedly earlier nuclear complexes (ibid.: 25).

and might be viewed as a more wide-ranging supplement to published summaries on the rural Iron Age and Roman archaeology of part of the area (Burgess 2001; O’Neill 2001b). Archaeological background South Yorkshire The Magnesian Limestone and Sherwood Sandstone areas of South Yorkshire received regular recording through air photography since the 1970s. Foremost amongst the early pioneers was Derrick Riley, whose particular research interest concerned the cropmark landscapes of the sandstones of South Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire (Riley 1980). More recently, areas of the South Yorkshire cropmark landscape have been the 186

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Figure 2. The Methley gravels, West Yorkshire. Late prehistoric and Romano-British field divisions as manifested in the cropmark and geophysical survey record. Source: I. Coady.

pre-Roman Iron Age, but were subsequently re-used and redefined throughout the Romano-British period (Chadwick 1995: 46-48, 1999: 160-164; Cumberpatch and Robbins n.d.). That Iron Age pottery has now been recovered in small amounts from some large open-area sites at sites at Armthorpe, Sykehouse, Adwick-le-Street and Balby Carr and other sites in South Yorkshire, along with others in West Yorkshire such as South Elmsall, Parlington Hollins, Swillington Common and Ferrybridge, would seem to at least partly vindicate the hypothesis of the early 1990s.

The actual dates for the creation of different field systems have been less easy to establish. It would appear that the superimposition of the Lincoln to Doncaster Roman road over the brickwork fields at Warren House, Austerfield, places that particular example in the pre-Roman Iron Age (Riley 1980: 25, pl. 2). However, small-scale excavations of brickwork systems in South Yorkshire by Samuels and May (1980), by the former South Yorkshire Archaeology Unit and by ARCUS (Archaeological Research and Consultancy at the University of Sheffield) on a variety of cropmark sites in the 1990s mainly produced pottery of second to third century AD date, and that in relatively small quantities (e.g. Chadwick 1995: 45; Cumberpatch and Webster 1998; Robbins 1997). A similar pattern emerged from excavations of brickwork sites in north Nottinghamshire (e.g. Garton 1987: 67).

West Yorkshire In West Yorkshire most of the recorded land divisions would appear to correspond with Riley’s ‘nuclear’ or ‘irregular’ categories, although there are also co-axial field systems focused upon ditched trackways which in places, resemble the morphology of the brickwork plan. As in South Yorkshire, such systems appear to be either ‘infill’ between more nucleated sites, or occasionally form complexes in their own right, sometimes with integrated corner field enclosures, though never quite so regimented as the South Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire brickwork examples. Although systematic mapping of the cropmark landscape of eastern West Yorkshire has recently been completed as part of the Lower Wharfedale NMP project, this has not yet been subject to any comprehensive analysis (Deegan pers. comm.). However, there have been a number of areas that have received more detailed analysis as part of specific archaeological landscape projects. Notable amongst these is the Aire-Calder Confluence at Methley (Deegan 1997), and the routes of the A1 Diversion at Ferrybridge and the

Many investigations produced no dating evidence at all, absences which became synonymous with a pre-Roman origin (e.g. Adams 1993: 56; Atkinson 1996: 19; Merrony 1993: 52), but not without some validity. At that time, the only cropmark site in South Yorkshire to have produced any definite Iron Age pottery was Pickburn Leys (Sydes 1993). The lack of pollen or bone preservation also hampers attempts to understand the economic functions of the fields and settlements. Iron Age pottery was indeed rare in the region and is, moreover, rather fragile and so only survives in wellstratified contexts. It also possibly owed its apparent scarcity to some of the earlier post-PPG16 excavation strategies that were either poorly targeted or inadequate in sample size. The evidence overall was taken to imply that some of the brickwork fields had their origin in the 187

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Limestone such as at Barnsdale Bar and Scorcher Hills in South Yorkshire (Webb 2003; Webb and Rose 2004).

M1-A1 Link Road (Deegan 1998b; 2001a). Elements of the Lower Wharfedale NMP data will also receive analysis through the recent ALSF project (Roberts et al. 2004, 2007).

Certain areas though remain non-conducive to cropmark formation and unresponsive to geophysical survey. In the past such sites would not have received any further evaluation, and would have been dismissed as blank areas. Comprehensive evaluation by trial trenching in such areas has been able to show that early land divisions and enclosure was taking place in at least parts of areas formerly believed to be unoccupied in the later prehistoric and Roman periods. Recent examples of such revelations has been the discovery of settlement and field system in areas of the West Moor Park landscape at Armthorpe, South Yorkshire (Burgess 1997; Richardson 2001; 2004a) and, perhaps more surprisingly, at Sykehouse, South Yorkshire (Fig. 3), in the heart of the Humberhead Levels, a site which has produced one of the largest assemblages of Iron Age pottery in the region (Roberts 2004). Ultimately, it has to be a combination of various archaeological methods employed over large areas that will allow meaningful conclusions to be drawn about the history and development of these past landscapes. A notable project in this respect was the archaeological investigations facilitated by the creation of the M1-A1 Link Road in West Yorkshire, carried out between 1996-2001.

Prior to 1991, very few of the West Yorkshire cropmark sites had received any form of physical investigation. At the time of the publication of the West Yorkshire archaeological survey, before any significant sample of the cropmark sites had been excavated, it was anticipated that a proportion of known cropmark sites might ultimately prove to be of earlier prehistoric origin (Keighley 1981: 92-93, 110-111). Only two open-area excavations had taken place, at the aggregated Iron Age settlement and subsequent Romano-British villa at Dalton Parlours (Wrathmell and Nicholson 1990), and part of the Iron Age and Romano-British site at Ledston (Roberts 2005b). Although in retrospect neither site can now be seen to have been typical for the region, in chronological terms they were a very representative sample (see below). Opportunistic open-area rescue excavations on rural sites in the 1980s were relatively few in number and tended to be targeted upon enclosure interiors, these being seen as potential settlement foci and therefore the best way to address an impoverished knowledge about rural settlement in the prehistoric and Romano-British periods. Whilst the advent of PPG16 saw a huge increase in the numbers of rural excavations carried out, for a long time the strategy of targeting apparent ‘hot spots’ of settlement continued. Consequently, a large number of excavations of sites of the ‘nuclear’ type were undertaken. Whilst many of these proved very significant in their own right, and collectively provided much needed data on the nature and degree of preservation of rural archaeology of the region, the results proved to be of limited value in providing a broader perspective of landscape evolution and chronology. As in South Yorkshire, one of the biggest problems was, and remains, a paucity of dating and palaeo-environmental evidence, both in terms of diagnostic artefacts and also material suitable for radiocarbon dating. Although sites such as Dalton Parlours and Ledston had clearly demonstrated the existence of mid-late Iron Age rural sites, the majority of rural sites excavated in West Yorkshire up to the mid1990s were either undated or determined to be RomanoBritish on the basis of small assemblages of pottery, invariably dated to no better resolution than the second to fourth centuries AD.

The M1-A1 Link Road project The M1-A1 Link Road project provided the opportunity to carry out a comprehensive and to some extent random investigation of the rural archaeological landscape along a 20 kilometre corridor on the Coal Measures and Magnesian Limestone, between Colton and Aberford to the east of Leeds. The project investigated 33 discrete sites, 17 of them through full open-area excavation, and also brought together the results of cropmark mapping, geophysical survey trial trenching and ‘strip and record’ work along the whole of the route, to provide a local synthesis and interpretation of settlement and surrounding land division. A significant element of the research was a large palaeo-environmental sampling programme that, although ultimately unable to shed much light on the economies of the settlements concerned, did produce 83 radiocarbon dates to compensate for a relative paucity of other dating evidence. The results of this work enabled the development of a broad chronological model of progressive land division that began in the later prehistoric period and continued into the late RomanoBritish period (Roberts, Burgess and Berg 2001).

Site detection It is not just the increase in excavation work that has improved our understanding of former land divisions. The post-PPG16 increase in the use of geophysical survey as a supplementary and complimentary means of mapping early land allotment has been hugely beneficial, particularly in areas not conducive to good cropmark formation. Good examples where field systems have emerged from the geophysical data from apparently blank sites include areas of the Methley gravels in West Yorkshire (Marriott and Yarwood 1992; Webb 1996, 2000; see Fig. 2), and a number of sites on the Magnesian

The picture that emerged from the M1-A1 Link Road results was that, without exception, ditched enclosures of any sort, whether for settlement, industrial or agricultural purposes, did not exist prior to 800 BC, and more usually somewhat later than 500 BC, a picture not dissimilar to the Yorkshire Wolds where enclosure began around the third century BC (Dent 1982: 453; Stoertz 1997: 65). As proposed by Riley (1980: 25) for South Yorkshire, these primary enclosures often provided the nucleus for 188

IAN ROBERTS: LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH LAND DIVISION IN SOUTH AND WEST YORKSHIRE

Figure 3. Topham Farm, Sykehouse, South Yorkshire. The Iron Age and Romano-British settlement exposed after topsoil stripping. Source: D. Weston, after Roberts 2004.

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Figure 4. Swillington Common, West Yorkshire. The prehistoric and Romano-British landscape as revealed by cropmarks, geophysical survey and excavation. Source: D. Weston, after Deegan 2001a: fig. 13.

been at work in revolutionising agriculture from the third century AD, a period that also saw a notable increase in the deposition of Roman pottery, the changes were probably being implemented by a largely local native population, rather than by an external authority.

associated and subsequent land division and subenclosure. In some cases these allotments were piecemeal intakes of land surrounding the enclosure, articulating with the initial enclosure and previous land boundaries. What is perhaps surprising is that there appears to have been little or no evidence of any disruption or major reorganisation of the landscape at any time during this process, especially given that the expansion of the field systems continued into the Romano-British period. There were three very consistent features of the Romano-British fields of the second to fourth century AD. Firstly, the later fields were markedly larger than the earlier ones, invariably in excess of 0.5 hectares; and secondly, the Romano-British period fields were notable for being delineated by very long, straight ditches. The third trait was that the large fields, although clearly the result of an agricultural regime on a different scale, did not seem to impinge upon the previously defined enclosures and fields. Rather, the large rectangular fields in-filled the areas between them, and often adopted irregular shapes in order to accommodate the existing fields. This ‘respect’ suggests that although a Romanising influence may have

Swillington Common One of the key sites along the Link Road, and one that best that demonstrates the progressive enclosure of the landscape during the Iron Age and Roman periods, was Swillington Common (Fig. 4). Here, to the east of the linear earthwork monument known as Grim’s Ditch, an extensive open-area excavation was carried out in a landscape mapped from cropmark and geophysical data. This work revealed that, although the earliest activity on the site dated to the Neolithic (see below), with the earliest tangible features taking the form of a number of circular and sub-rectangular post-hole structures of Bronze Age date (Howell 2001: 49-54), the first major ditched boundaries were not created until between 800400 BC, approximately the same period to which Grim’s Ditch is now dated (Wheelhouse and Burgess 2001: 129).

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Figure 5. Roman Ridge at Hook Moor, West Yorkshire. An Iron Age enclosure and field system cut by the Roman road. Source: D. Weston, after Deegan 2001a: fig. 17.

Further enclosures were appended to the primary boundaries, and minor subdivisions of the landscape were made between 400-200 BC. A D-shaped palisade enclosure defined by post-holes and invisible to remote sensing was also revealed. The final phase of land division in the third and fourth centuries AD saw the creation of a series of large straight-sided rectangular fields articulating in co-axial fashion with the earliest boundaries, including Grim’s Ditch, to take in all previously unenclosed land (Howell 2001: 54-68). A similar sequence of events had previously been identified in this landscape from excavations at Stile Hill to the west of Grim’s Ditch in 1992 (Fig. 4). There, a small late Iron Age hilltop enclosure formed the nucleus of a complex of second to third century AD enclosures which subsequently became linked to Grim’s Ditch through the creation of the larger Romano-British fields in this area (Roberts in prep.). This basic chronological model for the enclosure of land in the Iron Age and Roman periods seems to apply for Swillington Common, and for virtually all other excavated sites on the M1-A1 Link Road.

Roman Ridge At Roman Ridge, near Hook Moor, a pre-Roman enclosure and localised field system was severely disrupted by the construction of the Roman road between Castleford and York (Fig. 5). The small late Iron Age enclosure was destroyed (mainly by quarry pits for the agger of the road), and its associated rectilinear field system was bisected (O’Neill 2001a). However, despite this it would appear that the pre-Roman fields, at an angle to the line of the road, continued in use and were actually respected by the later Romano-British larger-scale field divisions, which then articulated with the Roman road at right angles. This is an interesting parallel to the situation of the brickwork fields at Austerfield in South Yorkshire, where the Roman road also cut across a pre-Roman field system. The difference was that at Austerfield there was apparently no subsequent regime of land division oriented to the road. One possible reason why this did not happen is that the original pre-road system of land division was quite comprehensive, with no scope for post-road expansion. As demonstrated at Hook Moor, it is most unlikely that the fields went out of use as a consequence of the impact of road construction, and we must suppose 191

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Figure 6. West Moor Park, Armthorpe, South Yorkshire. A Romano-British brickwork field system and earlier enclosures as revealed by geophysical survey and large-scale topsoil stripping. Source: I. Coady, compiled from Hale 2006; Richardson 2004a; Richardson and Rose 2004; Whittingham 2002.

the relationship between nuclear and brickwork field patterns. Riley’s original transcription of the cropmarks revealed a classic brickwork field system to the east of Edenthorpe and to the north of Armthorpe, with nothing visible to the east (Riley 1980: fig. 9). Notable components of this system were two double-ditched trackways, the easternmost of which has been extrapolated through later mapping and interpretation to reveal its sinuous course for some 3km to the east of Armthorpe (Deegan 2001b). This trackway linked at least two discrete (nuclear) enclosure complexes, one of which appears to have been an iron working site dating to the late Iron Age and early Romano-British period (Burgess and Richardson 2003; Richardson 2002). A later brickwork field system in this area was not revealed as cropmarks, and indeed barely registered in geophysical data (Whittingham 2002). Its presence was only confirmed by trial trenching which revealed the ditches to have been heavily truncated by deep ploughing, often surviving to depths less than 0.30m. Subsequent openarea investigations over a total area of some 8ha. between 2000 and 2003, epitomised the newly adopted approach towards large-scale investigations that has long been advocated for rural sites in South Yorkshire and north

that they continued in use into the Romano-British period. Collectively, the results of the M1-A1 investigations suggested a model of incremental enclosure and progressive land division from the later Iron Age to the late Roman period, to some extent confirming notions proposed by Riley for ‘nuclear’ sites in South Yorkshire. The model may therefore have a wider geographical application. However, the results of the M1-A1 work, which drew upon the results of several other cropmark sites in West Yorkshire, concluded that the field systems most similar in form to the brickwork fields of South Yorkshire were nearly always dated, where this proved possible, to the later Romano-British period. Two South Yorkshire case studies West Moor Park, Armthorpe A series of recent investigations at West Moor Park, immediately to the east of Armthorpe, provide a further case study in the use and synthesis of different types of archaeological data to provide a better understanding of 192

IAN ROBERTS: LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH LAND DIVISION IN SOUTH AND WEST YORKSHIRE Birmingham Field Archaeology Unit (Jones 2002, 2005) exposed a 0.3ha area that contained a typical brickwork pattern of field ditches, but produced nothing that was able to date the land divisions to closer than the later Iron Age or Romano-British periods, an origin broadly confirmed by radiocarbon dating. Critically however, this site lies on clay, and whilst the investigation yielded little artefactual evidence, the fact that one of the ditch fills had remained waterlogged resulted in the preservation of large amounts of timber and other organic plant and insect remains, offering a previously unrealised potential for dated palaeo-environmental reconstruction for some of the brickwork fields.

Nottinghamshire (e.g. Chadwick 1999: 156; Chissell and Newsome 1998: 44; Garton 1987: 68). The excavations at West Moor Park revealed an extensive system of regular brickwork fields, accessed via a system of trackways, which articulated with a more irregular complex of earlier late Iron Age/early Romano-British iron working enclosures, and again demonstrating brickwork fields infilling areas of the landscape around earlier enclosures (Burgess and Richardson 2003; Richardson 2001, 2004a; see Fig. 6). The truncation of the features at West Moor Park, as with many other brickwork field sites, precluded the survival of most features. The shallow fills in the bases of the ditches were for the most part, typically unrewarding in their content. The remarkable exception was seen in two discrete locations within the ditch system, which together produced well over 4000 sherds of pottery, most of it manufactured locally. Such rare concentrations of finds might be suggestive of dumps associated with former settlement foci situated within the brickwork system here, but these settlements have proved invisible to all forms of remote sensing and invasive investigation, and are not accommodated within the nomenclature of cropmark typology. All the pottery recovered from the ditches of the brickwork pattern fields was Romano-British, of second to third or third to fourth century date (Leary 2003). Although the pottery suggests that the brickwork fields at West Moor Park were probably created and used only in the Romano-British period, rather than the Iron Age, the range in dating clearly indicates longevity of use, and perhaps abandonment in the fourth century AD. The quantity of pottery from West Moor Park is unprecedented for a brickwork field system site in South Yorkshire, or indeed for any rural site in the region bar the villas. There were for example, only 1239 sherds recovered from all of the sites excavated on the M1-A1 Link Road route in West Yorkshire, the highest number from any one site being 582 (Evans, Briscoe and Dickinson 2001). Apart from the discrete pottery dumps there were few finds from the ditch fills, the most notable being a Romano-British spade iron (Fig. 7), almost certainly lost or discarded in the maintenance of the field boundaries.

Figure 7. Romano-British spade-iron from West Moor Park, Armthorpe, South Yorkshire. Source: P. Gwilliam.

Balby Carr, Catesby The unpredictable nature of the brickwork fields of South Yorkshire has rarely been exposed by small-scale investigations, which have often failed to recover any dating material. Moreover, for a phenomenon that supposedly had its origins in the Iron Age there has been a distinct shortage of material evidence to support such a notion, a problem further compounded by the poor survival of organic material that could provide radiocarbon dates, as well as much needed raw material for informing on the environment and economies of these sites. Previously such rare information has only been derived from the few excavated deep wells, such as at Dalton Parlours and Rothwell Haigh (Berg 1990; Richardson in prep.). Ongoing investigations at Balby Carr, Catesby, to the south-west of Doncaster, could potentially change this situation. Initial excavations by

Anomalous to the straight ditches encountered in the 2002 investigation was part of a curvilinear ditch at the western extremity of the site, which hinted at a different function and date to the brickwork fields. This area has been investigated by Archaeological Services WYAS (Rose 2003; Rose and Richardson 2005) and was confirmed as a likely settlement enclosure (Figure 8). In addition to well-preserved organic material in the ditches, there was also a significant assemblage of structural daub with wattle voids (Fig. 9), and well-preserved animal bones. A small amount of handmade pottery and a fragment of a La Tène glass bangle point to a late Iron Age date (Rose 2003). Neither of these sites has yet been published. The findings from them however, along with recent work on the Balby Carr landscape which has 193

Figure 8. Balby Carr, South Yorkshire. Iron Age roundhouses and field ditches as revealed by topsoil stripping. Source: I. Coady, after Richardson and Rose 2005; Rose and Roberts 2006.

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IAN ROBERTS: LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH LAND DIVISION IN SOUTH AND WEST YORKSHIRE Barnby Moor, South Yorkshire (Riley 1980: map 19), although similar arrangements are increasingly recognised elsewhere, as at West Moor Park, Armthorpe. Beyond establishing the existence of a large Iron Age field system in West Yorkshire, and offering a reliable glimpse of the earlier segmented field divisions, which may well have not survived on the majority of other sites, the Ferrybridge field system is also notable for providing the most convincing example yet for the deliberate Romanisation of a field unit. The impact of the nearby Castleford Roman fort and vicus on the surrounding native landscape is not well understood. It was once believed that the vicus settlements of the north of England would have provided markets for the surrounding rural settlements, but the evidence suggests that they generally had little economic effect (see Hingley 1989: 144-145). Contemporary ‘single unit’ native farms, such as those excavated at Methley and Whitwood (Burgess and Roberts 2004; Roberts and Richardson 2002), seem to have carried on for some considerable time after the Roman occupation of the north in c. AD 70-71, with no evidence at these or other contemporary local sites for an expansion to meet an increased military demand. Indeed, it has been proposed that the large number of sites in low-lying areas in this period probably owes more to late Iron Age population growth than to any increased demand created by the arrival of the Romans (Haselgrove et al. 2001: 29). Nevertheless, many late Iron Age sites formed the basis for developed Romano-British farm complexes that expanded between the first and third centuries AD. One problem in trying to identify sites that might have been established as part of a deliberate policy to feed the army is that few sites produce adequate dating resolution, animal bone or organic material to support any notion of them being specialist arable or livestock producers (Richardson 2001: 219, 246-248).

Figure 9. Daub with wattle voids from Balby Carr, South Yorkshire. Source: P. Gwilliam.

identified further roundhouses (Rose and Roberts 2006), may provide a valuable opportunity to investigate the origins, function, evolution and environment of the brickwork fields and their enclosures. Ferrybridge Somewhat contrary to the M1-A1 Link Road model for West Yorkshire, recent large-scale excavations at Ferrybridge demonstrated the existence of a large-scale sub-rectangular plan field system that had its origins in the pre-Roman Iron Age. The earliest fields were defined by segmented ditches, parts of which survived when the later Iron Age field ditches were re-cut on a slightly different orientation (Richardson 2005a). Such segmented boundaries have been recorded at other sites such as Dalton Parlours (Wrathmell and Nicholson 1990: 7), South Elmsall (McNaught 2001) and Wentbridge (Gidman and Whittaker 2004); although due to truncation there has always been reservations as to whether these were boundaries in their own right, or just the deeper remnants of truncated ditches. At Ferrybridge the evidence seemed unequivocal, as the segmented boundary form was reinforced by an association with an extensive, contemporaneous Iron Age pit alignment (Fig. 10). The latter demarcated an unenclosed area around the Ferrybridge henge, re-used in the Iron Age, and formed an interface between the ritual zone and the field system (Richardson 2005a, 2005b: 208-209; Roberts 2005a: 210).

It is therefore highly significant that the Ferrybridge field system indicates a marked transition from a large late Iron Age field system, sub-divided into smaller fields, with integral field corner settlement enclosures, to a rationalised unit of one large field with no sub-divisions and just one central enclosure (Fig. 10). Within this new enclosure were a range of structures, including a large central crop drying kiln, the latter a rare survival in itself, which can be compared to that from Appletree Close, Pontefract (Wrathmell 2001: 8), the T-shaped late Romano-British examples from Womersley (Buckland 1986: 36) and from Thurnscoe (Neal and Fraser 2004: 2021). The Romanised character of this development is revealed not only through artefactual evidence, but also through the adoption of rectangular structures, rather than roundhouses. This transition is dated to the late first or second century AD, the same period as the occupation of the later fort and vicus at Castleford. The fact that the new field system was superimposed upon the former field system, with the enclosure actually cutting the in-filled Iron Age field ditches, rather than being respectful of it, suggests that it might be more readily equated with Roman supply and demand. Elsewhere in the vicinity,

There was clearly Iron Age land allotment taking place on a large scale at Ferrybridge, with the divisions appearing to correspond to distinct field units, separated by double ditched trackways or field boundaries, and internally subdivided into sub-rectangular fields with integral field corner enclosures (Richardson 2005a). Although more irregular, this arrangement is reminiscent of some of the brickwork field patterns, whereby distinct units appear to be separated by double ditched boundaries. A classic example is the land division on 195

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Figure 10. Part of the Iron Age pit alignment at Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire. Source: P. Gwilliam.

sites that display evidence of large field units, rectangular structures and relatively large quantities of Roman artefacts, especially pottery, do not occur until the late second to third centuries AD. This is well after the military occupation at Castleford, when the surrounding hinterland appears to have embraced Roman culture more

extensively, and corresponds with the emergence of villas such as Dalton Parlours, and larger Romanised farm sites implied by evidence from Parlington Hollins and Brierlands, Garforth (Holbrey and Burgess 2001; Owen 2000; Wrathmell and Nicholson 1990).

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IAN ROBERTS: LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH LAND DIVISION IN SOUTH AND WEST YORKSHIRE Topography apart; and accepting that certain field plans may well be advantageous to different types of agricultural practice, a key factor in determining the shape and extent of fields may have been the area that was cleared of woodland. Nationwide the pollen evidence indicates progressive forest clearance throughout the first millennium BC (Cunliffe 2005: 439; Harding 2004: 1011). Pollen records for West Yorkshire, however, suggest that there was probably no significant woodland clearance, perhaps with the exception of ritual landscapes, until the later Iron Age (Berg 2001: 8-9), the period that in the north at least, generally saw the introduction of enclosed settlements with their associated compounds and field systems. By contrast, pollen records for South Yorkshire suggest that parts of the Humberhead Levels around Doncaster had been subject to clearance and some regeneration by the Iron Age, with forest clearance for mixed farming continuing throughout the Iron Age and Romano-British periods (Buckland 1986: 33; Dinnin 1997). As has already been noted for sites in East Yorkshire (Halkon and Millett 1999: 35), the morphology of nuclear or aggregated complexes often appear typical of the piecemeal intake of land over a period of time. The principal boundaries and trackways associated with such settlements are frequently sinuous and meandering, the courses of which apparently have nothing to do with topography, as for example at West Moor Park, Armthorpe, Wattle Syke, Collingham (Webb 2004a) and Brierlands, Garforth (Webb 2004b). The influence of rivers (Deegan 1996: 21; Robbins 1998), microtopography (Halkon and Millett 1999: 29) and even ritual areas and/or earlier monuments as at Ferrybridge, and possibly Ledston, could also be determining factors. However, in the absence of such obvious features, the erratic nature of field boundaries was probably due to them marking the edge of clearance phases. Such features, integrated into a wider regular field system, stand out as being anomalous, such as the meandering trackways at Swillington Common, Edenthorpe and Armthorpe, which both formed co-axial boundaries when integrated into their respective later rectangular field systems (Figs. 4 and 6).

A matter of clearance? The degree to which the regimes of land division of South and West Yorkshire really differ is a matter that remains to be determined. Morphologically, there appears to be one principal element in the form of the brickwork fields of South Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire, which do not appear to have existed in the same form in West Yorkshire, where parallels might readily be drawn with the land division of lowland East Yorkshire or extant pre-Roman field systems of the Dales. However, the recent work in West Yorkshire has identified limited areas of similar large-scale land division which appear to have their origins in the pre-Roman Iron Age, although generally the adoption of large rectangular field systems appears to be a later Romano-British phenomenon. This rather mirrors the situation for South Yorkshire, where the evidence for the brickwork fields proper similarly points to their formation, at different places, in the Iron Age and Romano-British periods. In both circumstances there is evidence to demonstrate that large-scale, regular land division was preceded by smaller-scale, nucleated or aggregated enclosure complexes. This may not necessarily be chronologically reconciled, but reflects the logical sequence of events in the progressive exploitation of a landscape over time. It is tempting to see the different types of field system as representing different forms and levels of agricultural activity prevailing at different times. The creation of deep, often rock-cut ditches might be seen as a massive expenditure of labour that would be unnecessary merely to define arable fields, and therefore must be for stock control. It could however be argued that the long strip fields typical of the brickwork system were associated with strip ploughing (Riley 1980: 26). Branigan (1989: 164) even advanced the notion that the same field systems were probably Roman sheep farming estates, arising from a planned intensification of farming. The fact remains that the archaeological evidence does not support either theory exclusively and, as Robbins has pointed out, regularity of fields need not necessarily imply centralised or single-phase planning (Robbins 1997), although social organisation beyond the household scale is implied (Harding 2004: 291). Ditches must have been an important means of determining land ownership and territoriality, whatever agricultural purpose the enclosed land was put to. Excavation has rarely been able to reveal anything conclusive about the economies of these late Iron Age and Romano-British settlements, though the limited evidence suggests mixed subsistence farming (Berg 2001; Giorgi 2004; Richardson 2001; van der Veen 1992). It is likely that the sub-division of the landscape was a system devised to separate and rotate stock and crops, but there is too increasing evidence for integrated industrial enclosures where metalworking was taking place, at sites such as Ferrybridge, South Elmsall, Ledston, and West Moor Park, Armthorpe and Methley (Cowgill 2005; Cowgill and Gilmour 2005; O’Neill 1997; Richardson 2002; Wright 1994).

It seems probable that the earliest field systems preferentially exploited areas of earlier clearance. Early prehistoric settlement sites are notoriously difficult find in this area, but sometimes the excavation of a later prehistoric or Romano-British enclosure site will produce some residual evidence of earlier activity. The site at West Moor Park, Armthorpe produced a small quantity of Peterborough-type ware (Vyner 2003), whilst at Swillington Common two Bronze Age roundhouses and a small assemblage of Neolithic stone artefacts and charcoal was excavated (Howell 2001: 49). It seems unlikely that this is due to the ubiquitous distribution of early prehistoric sites and artefacts across the landscape. Rather, many later prehistoric and Romano-British settlement sites may have selectively exploited sites where clearance had already occurred. This did not necessarily reflect continuity, but perhaps advantageous re-occupation of a less regenerated area. 197

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Figure 11. Ferrybridge, West Yorkshire. Schematic plans showing the development of the landscape to the south-west of the henge. Source: D. Weston, after Roberts 2005: fig. 133.

Grange in Derbyshire (Chadwick and Evans 2000; Hodges 1991).

Given that clearance is a major factor in the creation of field systems, the appearance of the brickwork field system in South Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire in the Iron Age implies that different mechanisms or landscape histories prevailed here when compared to West Yorkshire, as suggested by the pollen evidence. There is ample evidence for a well-organised rural economy well before the Roman conquest elsewhere in England, particularly in the south (Dark and Dark 1997: 94), so the South Yorkshire evidence is not anomalous. There is, however, little to compare with the Iron Age settlement sites of the south, many of which are characterised by large numbers of grain storage pits. Only the sites at Ledston (Roberts 2005) and Micklefield (Brown et al. forthcoming) in this region have produced large concentrations of pits, although their interpretation as grain storage pits is difficult to sustain from the available evidence. Whilst Piggott’s (1958) model of northern nomadic pastoralists is outmoded, the evidence from northern sites generally does point to a greater reliance on stock rearing within a mixed economy (q.v. Chadwick 2007; Cunliffe 2005: 213). Nevertheless, irrespective of the balance of interpretation, both crop raising and stock rearing would have required land boundaries for field demarcation and corralling, as for example has been interpreted for enclosures at Roystone

Topography was likely to have been a big influence on the nature of the land division. This is perhaps seen in that the brickwork fields occurred on the flatter sandstone areas, although this cannot have been the only factor, for large field systems were adopted on the more undulating limestone areas in the later Romano-British period in West Yorkshire. The limit of the classic brickwork fields to the area south and east of the Rivers Don and Humber might imply a political or cultural factor at work, as this might have been the zone of transition corresponding roughly with the pre-Roman Iron Age tribal border between the Brigantes and the Corieltuavi, as well as the limit of Roman control between AD 47-70 (Cunliffe 2005: figs. 8.1, 10.3; Parker Pearson and Sydes 1997: 254). The consideration of co-ordinated woodland clearance on a grand scale, a pre-requisite for a brickwork system where a good line of sight was required, does not necessarily equate with a grand agricultural strategy. The clearance may have occurred much earlier, and even the most regular brickwork fields reflect many different phases of construction, use and re-use, expansion or even 198

IAN ROBERTS: LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH LAND DIVISION IN SOUTH AND WEST YORKSHIRE the evidence from Ferrybridge suggests that some initiatives were taken in limited areas close to the principal markets. The large-scale field systems of the later Romano-British period may well reflect intensified exploitation by a larger population than in earlier periods, and this may coincide with the emergence of villas. However, there should be no archaeological preoccupation with villa economies, when so few villas are known in the region. Rather, it would appear that villas were often associated with the rise of more sophisticated native elites and their settlements. This was perhaps a more subtle form of Romanisation than the intensive reorganisation envisaged by researchers in earlier decades (q.v. Chadwick 2004: 93; contra Branigan 1989).

contraction (Chadwick 1995, 1999; Deegan 1998a; Robbins 1998). This certainly applies to Ferrybridge, where a large, regular field system existed in the Iron Age. But this particular landscape may well have been the setting for the creation of a large field system simply because it had been previously cleared. The evidence from the analysis of buried soils and snails from the ritual landscape around Ferrybridge henge reveals it to have been cleared of woodland by the late Neolithic (Carrott 2005; McHugh 2005). Conclusions Our knowledge of the Iron Age and Romano-British rural landscape in South and West Yorkshire is benefiting enormously from the introduction of more rigorous evaluation strategies and the employment of large openarea excavations, without which the more ephemeral field boundaries such as pit alignments and segmented ditches, and settlement areas are often not readily apparent. There has been little tangible evidence for the hedged field boundaries that are presumed to have formed land divisions at this time (Buckland 1986: 34; Cunliffe 2005: 414), although at Balby Carr near Doncaster, macrofossils of hedgerow plants such as hawthorn and buckthorn were recovered from the waterlogged ditches of enclosures and trackways (Greig 2005: 13). Moreover, it is clear that whether or not there was preferred exploitation of well-drained soils in the Iron Age and Romano-British periods, it is the past exploitation of poorly drained clayey landscapes, such as Balby Carr, that today offer the more comprehensive research potential towards a better archaeological understanding of settlement and land division in these periods.

The M1-A1 Link Road project has been instrumental in refocusing ideas about the nature and development of the late Iron Age and Romano-British rural landscape. Its findings have given rise to wider considerations about the region. A number of other recent excavation projects in the region, such as the Redhouse Farm project at Adwickle-Street, Billingley Farm near Thurnscoe (Neal and Fraser 2004) and the A1 Diversion Works in West Yorkshire (Brown et al. forthcoming), also have the potential to contribute significantly to the debate. This paper is no substitute for the comprehensive landscape synthesis that is required, and has merely been an exploratory outline of some of the research issues that have been raised or realised through recent work. There is now a real need, after fifteen years of commercial archaeological investigation, to redefine our baseline knowledge, and to reframe our research objectives accordingly.1

Investigations confirm that there was considerable diversity in the later Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes, but with little evidence for hierarchy, and no universally applicable model satisfies all the available evidence. There are some detectable trends, but these are difficult to date. Whilst the evidence suggests a progression from nuclear to aggregated to large regular field systems, it equally highlights that such developments occurred at different rates in different places, and in different periods. In chronological terms at least, it seems that Branigan’s conclusion that there were two phases of Iron Age and Romano-British settlement (i.e. land intake) in South Yorkshire, the first between 100 BC-AD 100 and the second from the second century AD onwards, does generally hold. Roberts and Wrathmell (2002: 179-80) suggest that little clearance took place in the immediate post-Roman period, with Anglo-Saxon landscape development having essentially been ‘framed by antecedent landscapes inherited from Roman Britain’.

Acknowledgements The author is grateful to Adrian Chadwick for information relating to a number of rural excavations carried out in South Yorkshire in the 1990s, and for his constructive comments on the initial draft of this paper. Apart from Figure 1, the figures used to illustrate this paper have largely been taken from publications and reports produced by Archaeological Services WYAS (AS WYAS), to whom thanks are due for their kind permission to reproduce their adapted figures for the purposes of illustrating this publication. Unless stated, all the following are or have been employees of ASWYAS. Figure 1 was created by Alison Deegan (freelance). Figures 3-5 and 8 were prepared by David Weston, adapting the earlier work of J. Prudhoe and A. Deegan. Figures 2, 6 and 7 were digitised and reproduced by Ian Coady. Figure 2 is based upon the work of M. Whittingham, J. Marriott and R.E. Yarwood (former West Yorkshire Archaeology Service), whilst Figure 6 has been compiled from the work of R. Causer, L. Martin, M. Whittingham, and D.N. Hale (GeoQuest). Figure 7 is based upon the work of S. Toase and M. Rose, and N. Dodds (Birmingham University Field

It is possible that political, cultural and territorial factors, as much as economic aspects, affected the distribution of the brickwork field systems, certainly in the pre-Roman period. Archaeological work to date has not been conducive to establishing the uses of the field systems, and there is little evidence for rural intensification as a response to the arrival of the Roman military, although 199

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1994-1995. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 41-49. Chadwick, A.M. 1997. Towards a social archaeology of later prehistoric and Romano-British field systems in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire. assemblage 2. World Wide Web http://www.shef.ac.uk/~assem/2. Chadwick, A.M. 1998. A study of possible Iron Age and Romano-British features revealed by aerial photographs of cropmarks on Coal Measures and Magnesian Limestone areas of South Yorkshire. Rectification and interpretation. Unpublished MA report: University of Sheffield. Chadwick, A.M. 1999. Digging ditches, but missing riches? Ways into the Iron Age and Romano-British cropmark landscapes of the north midlands. In B. Bevan (ed.) Northern Exposure. Interpretative Devolution in the British Iron Ages. Leicester Archaeological Monographs, pp. 149-171. Chadwick, A.M. 2004. ‘Heavier burdens for willing shoulders’? Writing different histories, humanities and social practices for the Romano-British countryside. In B. Croxford, H. Eckardt, J. Meade and J. Weekes (eds.) TRAC 2003: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 90-110. Chadwick, A.M. 2007. Trackways, hooves and memorydays – human and animal memories and movements around Iron Age and Romano-British rural landscapes. In V. Cummings and R. Johnston (eds.) Prehistoric Journeys. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 131-152. Chadwick, A.M. in prep. Fields for Discourse: Landscape and Materialities of Being in South and West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire during the Iron Age and Romano-British Periods. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Wales, Newport. Chadwick, A.M. and Evans, H. 2000. Reading Roystone’s rocks. A topographic survey and analysis of lithics from test pitting at Roystone Grange, Ballidon, Derbyshire. Its implications for previous interpretations of the archaeology of the area. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 120: 101-122. Chissell, C. and Newsome, S. 1998. Iron Age and Roman South Yorkshire: a review of the recent evidence. Unpublished report: University of Sheffield. Cowgill, J., 2005. Ironworking debris. In I. Roberts (ed.) The Iron Age Settlement at Ledston, West Yorkshire: a Report on the Excavations of 1976 and 1996. Archaeological Services WYAS Publications 7. Leeds: ASWYAS, pp. 28-30. Cowgill, J. and Gilmour, B. 2005. Crucible fragments and associated working debris. In I. Roberts (ed.) Ferrybridge Henge: the Ritual Landscape. Yorkshire Archaeology 10. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 165-166. Cox, C. 1984. Cropmarks on the Magnesian Limestone north of the River Don in South Yorkshire. Unpublished MA dissertation: University of Sheffield. Cumberpatch, C.G. and Robbins, G. n.d. The Iron Age in South Yorkshire, with reference to evidence from

Archaeology Unit). The photographs are by Paul Gwilliam. Bibliography Adams, M. 1993. Archaeological investigation at Campsall Quarry, Doncaster. In C.G. Cumberpatch and M.J. Francis (eds.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1992-1993. Sheffield: South Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 53-56. Atkinson, S. 1996. Survey and excavation at Church Field, Stripe Road, Rossington, Doncaster. In C.G. Cumberpatch, J. McNeil and S. Whiteley (eds.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1995-1996. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 15-19. Berg, D. 1990. The assemblage from Well 1. In S. Wrathmell and A. Nicholson (eds.) Dalton Parlours. Iron Age Settlement and Roman Villa. Yorkshire Archaeology 3. Wakefield: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 195-271. Berg, D. 2001. The physical environment. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: WYAS, pp. 3-9. Branigan, R. 1989. An early landscape revisited. In D. Kennedy (ed.) Into the Sun. Essays in Air Photography in Archaeology in Honour of Derrick Riley. Sheffield: Department of Prehistory and Archaeology, pp. 161-166. Brown, F., Howard-Davis, C., Brennand, M., Boyle, A., Evans, T., O’Connor, S., Spence, T, Heawood, R. and Lupton, A. The Archaeology of the A1 (M) Darrington to Dishforth DBFO Road Scheme. Lancaster: Oxford Archaeology North. Buckland, P.C. 1986. Roman South Yorkshire: A Source Book. Sheffield: Department of Archaeology and Prehistory. Burgess, A. 1999. Rands Lane, Armthorpe, South Yorkshire: evaluation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services (WYAS) 734. Burgess, A. 2001. The Iron Age. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 260-269. Burgess, A. and Richardson, J. 2003. Rands Lane, Armthorpe, South Yorkshire: archaeological evaluation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1092. Burgess, A. and Roberts, I. 2004. The Excavation of Two Late Iron Age and Romano-British Settlement Enclosures at Whitwood, West Yorkshire. ASWYAS Publications 6. Leeds: Archaeological Services ASWYAS. Carrott, J. 2005. The snails. In I. Roberts (ed.) Ferrybridge Henge: The Ritual Landscape. Yorkshire Archaeology 10. Leeds: Archaeology Services WYAS, pp. 186-187. Chadwick, A.M. 1995. Further work on the Iron Age and Romano-British landscape at Edenthorpe. In C.G. Cumberpatch, J. McNeil and S.P. Whiteley (eds.) 200

IAN ROBERTS: LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH LAND DIVISION IN SOUTH AND WEST YORKSHIRE Yorkshire. Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 76: 5981. Greig, J.R.A. 2005. Pollen and plant macrofossils. In L. Jones Archaeological excavation of a brickwork plan field system at Catesby Business Park, Balby Carr, Doncaster, South Yorkshire, 2002. Unpublished report: Birmingham Archaeology, pp. 10-14. Hale, D.N. 2006. Geophysical Survey at Armthorpe, South Yorkshire. Unpublished report: GeoQuest.

north Nottinghamshire and West Yorkshire. Unpublished paper. Cumberpatch, C.G. and Webster, S. 1998. Preliminary results of an archaeological evaluation at Nutwell Lane, Armthorpe. In C. Cumberpatch, J. McNeil and S. Whiteley (eds.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1995-1996. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 19-22. Cunliffe, B. 2005. Iron Age Communities in Britain (4th edition). London: Routledge. Dark, K. and Dark, P. 1997. The Landscape of Roman Britain. Stroud: Alan Sutton. Deegan, A. 1996. North Nottinghamshire field systems – a landscape overview. Aerial Archaeology Research Group 12: 18-24. Deegan, A. 1998a. The interpretation of Nottinghamshire field systems. Paper presented at the Workshop on Iron Age and Romano-British Landscapes in the North Midlands, Sheffield University, February 1998. Deegan, A. 1998b. Ferrybridge Henge and the surrounding landscape: air photo assessment. Unpublished report. Deegan, A. 2000. Air photo mapping and interpretation of land around Barnsdale Bar Quarry, Southern Extension, Norton, South Yorkshire. Unpublished report. Deegan, A. 2001a. Aerial photographs. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 13-36. Deegan, A. 2001b. Air photo mapping and interpretation of land at Armthorpe, South Yorkshire. Unpublished report. Dent, J. 1982. Cemeteries and settlement patterns of the Iron Age on the Yorkshire Wolds. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 48: 437-457. Department of the Environment 1990. Planning Policy Guidance Note 16: Archaeology and Planning. London: HMSO. Dinnin, M. 1997. Introduction to the palaeoenvironmental survey. In R. Van de Noort and S. Ellis (eds.) Wetland Heritage of the Humberhead Levels: An Archaeological Survey. Kingston upon Hull: University of Hull, pp. 31-45. Evans, J., Briscoe, D. and Dickinson, B. 2001. Iron Age, Roman and Early Saxon pottery. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 149-153. Garton, D. 1987. Dunston’s Clump and the brickwork plan field systems at Babworth, Nottinghamshire. Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 111: 16-73. Gidman, J. and Whittaker, P. 2004. Went Edge Quarry, Kirk Smeaton, North Yorkshire: archaeological evaluation and watching brief. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1230. Giorgi, J.A. 2004. The charred plant remains. In P.G.E. Neal and R. Fraser A Romano-British enclosed farmstead at Billingley Drive, Thurnscoe, South

Halkon, P. and Millett, M. 1999. Rural Settlement and Industry: Studies in the Iron Age and Roman Archaeology of Lowland East Yorkshire. Yorkshire Archaeological Report 4. Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society Harding, D.W. 2004. The Iron Age in Northern Britain. Celts and Romans, Natives and Invaders. London: Routledge. Haselgrove, C., Armit, I., Champion, T., Creighton, J., Gwilt, A., Hill, J.D., Hunter, F. and Woodward, A. 2001. Understanding the British Iron Age. An Agenda for Action. Salisbury: Trust for Wessex Archaeology.Hingley, R. 1989. Rural Settlement in Roman Britain.London: Seaby. Holbrey, R. and Burgess, A. 2001. Parlington Hollins. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 83-105. Hodges, R. 1991. Wall-to-Wall History: The Story of Roystone Grange. London: Duckworth. Howell, J.K. 2001. Swillington Common. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 13-36. Jones, L. 2002. Land at Catesby Business Park, Balby Carr, Doncaster, South Yorkshire: an archaeological excavation 2002. Post-excavation assessment and research design. Unpublished report: Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit. Jones, L. 2005. Archaeological excavation of a brickwork plan field system at Catesby Business Park, Balby Carr, Doncaster, South Yorkshire, 2002. Unpublished report: Birmingham Archaeology. Keighley, J. 1981. The prehistoric period. In M.L. Faull and S.A. Moorhouse (eds.) West Yorkshire: An Archaeological Survey to AD 1500. Leeds: West Yorkshire MCC, pp. 73-139. Leary, R.S. 2003. The Roman pottery. In J. Richardson and M. Rose Lincolnshire Way, Armthorpe: archaeological evaluation and excavation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1212. Marriott J. and Yarwood, R.E. 1992. Methley, Park Lane: geophysical survey. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS. Martin, L. 2005. The Iron Age and Romano-British enclosures. In I. Roberts (ed.) Ferrybridge Henge: The Ritual Landscape. Yorkshire Archaeology 10. Leeds: Archaeology Service WYAS, pp. 89-125. 201

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Yorkshire Archaeology 10. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 53-70; 207-209. Richardson, J. and Rose, M. 2004. Lincolnshire Way, Armthorpe: archaeological evaluation and excavation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1212. Richardson, J. and Rose, M. 2005. Balby Carr, Doncaster: archaeological assessment report. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1345. Riley, D.N. 1980. Early Landscape from the Air. Studies of Crop marks in South Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire. Sheffield: Department of Prehistory and Archaeology. Robbins, G. 1997. Scrooby Top 1997: ceramic report. In G. Davies, M. Parker Pearson and G. Robbins Report on the excavation of the enclosure at Scrooby Top, Nottinghamshire. Unpublished report: ARCUS/University of Sheffield. Robbins, G. 1998. Cropmark landscapes and domestic space. assemblage 3. World Wide Web http://www.shef.ac.uk/~assem/3. Roberts, B.K and Wrathmell, S. 2002. Region and Place. A Study of English Rural Settlement. London: English Heritage. Roberts, I. 2004. Excavations at Topham Farm, Sykehouse, South Yorkshire. A Late Iron Age and Romano-British Settlement in the Humberhead Levels. Archaeological Services WYAS Publications 5. Leeds: ASWYAS. Roberts, I., 2005a. The adaptation of the landscape from the later Iron Age. In I. Roberts (ed.) Ferrybridge Henge: the Ritual Landscape. Yorkshire Archaeology 10. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 210-218. Roberts, I. (ed.) 2005b. The Iron Age Settlement at Ledston, West Yorkshire: a Report on the Excavations of 1976 and 1996. Archaeological Services WYAS Publications 7. Leeds: ASWYAS. Roberts, I. in prep. Excavations at Stile Hill, Colton, West Yorkshire. Roberts, I., Berg, D., Deegan, A. and Wheelhouse, P. 2004. The Magnesian Limestone in South and West Yorkshire. Archaeological mapping and assessment project. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS. Roberts, I., Burgess, A. and Berg, D. (eds.) 2001. A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service. Roberts, I., Deegan, A., Berg, D. and Ford, L. 2007. Archaeological cropmark landscapes of the Magnesian Limestone. A study of the cropmark regimes of the Magnesian Limestone belt and its margins in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and parts of North Yorkshire and North Nottinghamshire. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS. Roberts, I. and Richardson, J. 2002. Iron Age and Romano-British Settlement Enclosures at Moss Carr, Methley, West Yorkshire. Archaeological Services WYAS Publications 3. Leeds: ASWYAS.

Merrony, C.J.N. 1993. The archaeological assessment in advance of the Dearne towns Link Road (Stage 4) development at Goldthorpe. In M.J. Francis and C.G. Cumberpatch (ed.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1992-1993. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 43-52. McHugh, M. 2005. Soils. In I. Roberts (ed.) Ferrybridge Henge: The Ritual Landscape. Yorkshire Archaeology 10. Leeds: Archaeology Services WYAS, pp. 232-234. McNaught, R. 2001. Land at the junction of Doncaster Road and Field Lane, South Elmsall, West Yorkshire. Unpublished draft report: Archaeological Services WYAS. Neal, P.G.E. and Fraser, R. 2004. A Romano-British enclosed farmstead at Billingley Drive, Thurnscoe, South Yorkshire. Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 76: 7-92. O’Neill, R. 1997. Land to the north of Field Lane, South Elmsall. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 450. O’Neill, R. 2001a. Roman Ridge. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 105-117. O’Neill, R. 2001b. The Roman period. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 269-280. Owen, P. 2000. Excavations at Garforth, West Yorkshire. Unpublished report: Gifford and Partners Ltd. Parker Pearson, M. and Sydes, R.E. 1997. The Iron Age enclosures and prehistoric landscape of Sutton Common, South Yorkshire. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63: 221-259. Piggott, S. 1958. Native economies and the Roman occupation of north Britain. In I.A. Richmond (ed.) Roman and Native in North Britain. London: Nelson, pp. 1-27. Richardson, J. 2001. The environmental evidence. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 207-246. Richardson, J. 2001. West Moor Park, Armthorpe, South Yorkshire: archaeological evaluation and excavation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 942. Richardson, J. 2004a, Westmoor Park II, Armthorpe, West Yorkshire. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1227. Richardson, J. 2004b. Rothwell Haigh, Leeds, West Yorkshire. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1236. Richardson, J. 2005a. The Iron Age and Romano-British field systems. In I. Roberts (ed.) Ferrybridge Henge: The Ritual Landscape. Yorkshire Archaeology 10. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 7289. Richardson, J. 2005b. The pit alignment. In I. Roberts (ed.) Ferrybridge Henge: The Ritual Landscape. 202

IAN ROBERTS: LATE PREHISTORIC AND ROMANO-BRITISH LAND DIVISION IN SOUTH AND WEST YORKSHIRE Yorkshire Archaeology 3. Wakefield: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service. Wright, J. 1994. Redland’s Quarry, Methley. Unpublished report: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service.

Rose, M. 2003. Balby Carr, Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Archaeological evaluation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1118. Rose, M. and Roberts, I. 2006. First Point, Balby Carr, Doncaster, South Yorkshire. Archaeological excavation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS. Samuels, J. and May, J. 1980. The excavations. In D.N. Riley Early Landscape From the Air. Sheffield: Department of Prehistory and Archaeology, pp. 7381. Stoertz, C. 1997. Ancient Landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds. London: RCHME. Sydes, R.E. (1993). Excavations at Pickburn Leys, Adwick-le-Street, Doncaster. In M.J. Francis and C.G. Cumberpatch (eds.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1992-1993. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 36-42. van der Veen, M. 1992. Crop Husbandry Regimes: An Archaeobotanical Study of Farming in Northern England 1000 BC – AD 500. Sheffield: Department of Archaeology and Prehistory. Vyner, B. 2004. The prehistoric pottery. In J. Richardson and M. Rose Lincolnshire Way, Armthorpe: archaeological evaluation and excavation. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1212. Webb, A. 1996. Parlour Pit, Methley: geophysical survey. Unpublished report: ASWYAS 318. Webb, A. 2000. Boat Lane, Methley: geophysical survey. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 813. Webb, A., 2003. Barnsdale Bar Quarry Extension, Norton, South Yorkshire: geophysical survey. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1167. Webb, A. 2004a. A1(M) Bramham to Wetherby Upgrading Scheme, West Yorkshire: geophysical and fieldwalking surveys. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1252. Webb, A. 2004b. Land adjacent to Brierlands, Garforth: geophysical survey. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1291. Webb, A. and Rose, M. 2004. Land at Scorcher Hills, Burghwallis. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1212. Wheelhouse, P. and Burgess, A. 2001. The linear earthworks. In I. Roberts, A. Burgess and D. Berg (eds.) A New Link to the Past. The Archaeological Landscape of the M1-A1 Link Road. Yorkshire Archaeology 7. Leeds: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 123-148. Whittingham, M. 2002. West Moor Park, Armthorpe, South Yorkshire: geophysical survey and trial trenching. Unpublished report: Archaeological Services WYAS 1064. Wrathmell, S. 2001. Romano-British Enclosures at Appletree Close, Pontefract, West Yorkshire. Archaeological Services WYAS Publications 1. Leeds. ASWYAS. Wrathmell, S. and Nicholson, A. (eds.) 1990. Dalton Parlours. Iron Age Settlement and Roman Villa. 203

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A large Romano-British enclosure ditch spray marked after soil stripping, prior to large-scale excavations at the agglomerated Iron Age and Romano-British enclosure complex at Wattle Syke, near Wetherby, West Yorkshire in 2007. The ditch shows up as the dark mark against the limestone natural. In the field beyond, the ditch has caused a pronounced positive cropmark, and in the background further positive cropmarks mark the lines of other enclosure ditches. Such ditches were often far larger than necessary simply to be functional barriers. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Fields for discourse? Towards more self-critical, theoretical and interpretative approaches to the archaeology of field systems and land allotment Adrian M. Chadwick regarded as little more than chronological markers – ‘type-fossils’ in landscape palimpsests. The human and animal communities that were creating and inhabiting these fields are often little discussed in most of the archaeological accounts that have been written about field systems and land allotment, a trend particularly prominent within Romano-British and medieval archaeology (though not in medieval history).

Introduction The 1970s and 1980s saw a series of ‘new approaches to ancient fields’ (q.v. Hayes 1981). In Britain, there were many pioneering investigations of prehistoric and Romano-British field systems and linear boundaries, and medieval fields too were the subject of renewed interest. Some of these studies were characterised not only by their extensive breadth of survey and/or excavation, but also by the theoretical ideas driving the enquiries (e.g. Barrett, Bradley and Green 1991; Bradley, Entwistle and Raymond 1994; Fleming 1988). Extensive multi-period surveys by English Heritage, Cadw, RCAHMW and Historic Scotland, and the National Mapping Project and various Aggregates Levy-funded schemes in England, have also provided invaluable information (e.g. Brown, Field and McOmish 2005; Browne and Hughes 2003; McOmish, Field and Brown 2002; Riley and WilsonNorth 2001; Roberts et al. 2004, 2007; Stoertz 1997). Aerial photography and measured earthwork survey remain key techniques, but are increasingly supplemented by digital mapping. This empirical work continues to be extremely important, as does the enormous contribution made by traditional historical geography approaches to local landscape history using map regression, documentary and place name evidence, and through fieldwalking and observation and recording of boundaries and earthworks.

Yet in addition to the considerable improvements in the methodological tools we can use, I believe that many theoretical ideas concerning human societies, landscape, identity and materiality also have much to offer. The cautious and critical use of ethnographic and ethnohistorical studies also has a role. In combination, these methodological advances and theoretical considerations should allow us to write fine-grained archaeologies, setting these features within more subtle and localised considerations of landscape and taskscape. There could and should be much more discussion of seasonality, complexity, access and restriction, persistence and discontinuity, embodiment, labour and power, structure and agency. Archaeologists are also still largely ignoring materiality, movement, memory, identity and community. Through weaving the lives of people, plants and animals together with these more critical ideas, we can produce challenging and more explicitly theoretical narratives that explore routine, everyday practices in the past. The relevance of many of these approaches to landscape and landscape archaeology has been summarised elsewhere (Bender 1993; Chadwick 2004b; Johnston 1998; Tilley 1994). Some aspects of them have proved highly controversial, and have been critiqued on theoretical and methodological grounds (e.g. Bender 2001; Brück 1998, 2005; Fleming 1999, 2005). There is no doubt that the very uncritical use of phenomenology in particular has been of questionable use in some instances, and often provides greater insights into the mindset of contemporary researchers rather than the lives and embodied identities and experiences of people in the past. Andrew Fleming has been especially indignant and scathing about many recent explorations of landscape within archaeology that have experimented with alternative ways of writing or presenting the past. Whilst wholeheartedly accepting many of his criticisms of the uncritical use of phenomenology within archaeology, I nevertheless strongly disagree with Fleming’s assertion that all theoretically-influenced landscape studies have ‘freed themselves from traditional concerns with verification’ (Fleming 2006: 268). Some experimental approaches to considering the past (e.g. Chadwick 2004c;

Despite these vitally important and often very impressive empirical studies, however, I would argue that in theoretical terms very little has actually changed in field system and linear boundary studies within archaeology since the publication of Early Land Allotment in 1978. For example, with some notable exceptions (e.g. Bradley 2005; Fleming 1987, 1988, 1989; Johnston 2001a, 2001b; Kitchen 2001; Yates 1999, 2001, 2007) mostly linked to considerations of Bronze Age land allotment and field systems, there have been relatively few discussions within archaeology of the social implications of later prehistoric, Romano-British and medieval field systems, yet they are encountered and recorded on increasingly frequent and widespread scales as a result of commercial developer-funded fieldwork. Although archaeologists such as Andrew Fleming, Melanie Giles, Robert Johnston, Willy Kitchen and Mark Knight have cogently explored issues of tenure and social organisation, in most landscape studies field systems of all periods, as well as linear earthworks, pit alignments and other forms of land allotment still continue to be considered largely within meta-narratives of agriculture or economy. Within many developer-funded archaeology reports they are often still 205

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Figure 1. The measured survey using a Total Station of post-medieval lime kilns at Penhein, Monmouthshire by Vaughan Birbeck, Paul Huckfield and Daryl Williams, then all undergraduate archaeology students at the University of Wales, Newport. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Edmonds 2004; Edmonds and Seaborne 2001; Giles 2004; Shanks 1992) were just that – experiments in writing or presentation. They were not trying to downplay or denigrate fieldwork and recording techniques, or replace traditional archaeological reports. Empirical research that can be quantified and verified (or contested) by other researchers must always be at the heart of archaeological research, and theoretical approaches should be robust enough to withstand criticism on both philosophical and methodological grounds.

researchers in the future. Infra-red photography has proved useful in some instances (e.g. Bowden 1999 colour plate 12), and high-altitude satellite imagery is increasingly used in some parts of the world to map large-scale, extensive archaeological features (e.g. Oscar Aldred this volume). Infrared linescan (Wilson 2000: 3637), a thermal sensing technique, and LiDAR, a lowaltitude topographic scanning technique, also offer great potential for future work, though both remain expensive at present.

Many of the papers within this volume demonstrate how sound fieldwork can be combined with interpretative ideas to write more nuanced accounts of past land allotment. In this paper I will discuss the potentials offered by some of these ideas with particular reference to two of my research areas – the upland landscape and later prehistoric boundaries of Gray Hill, Monmouthshire, South Wales; and the Iron Age and Romano-British field systems and settlements of north Nottinghamshire, South and West Yorkshire. Before I approach these study areas, however, I will critique aspects of more recent methodological approaches to landscape and land allotment, based upon my own experience of both research and developer-funded projects. I am not trying to argue that these methodologies are inherently unsound or should not be used, but I do wish to highlight some aspects of their use that I feel are problematic.

Electronic recording techniques using Total Stations, Geodimeters and Global Positioning Systems and the use of computer-based packages such as AUTOCAD and GIS have also become widespread. Increasingly, archaeology students and professional field unit staff quite rightly all wish to learn these methodologies. But there is a potential danger that the methodology employed becomes the main focus of archaeological enquiry and discussion (Chadwick 2004b: 21). In some of the recent literature on GIS for example, there has been a tendency to focus solely on survey data, viewsheds and predictive modelling at the expense of any consideration of how people in the past inhabited their world. We cannot blame the methodologies for this – it is how they are used (and sometimes abused). There have been many exceptions to this trend, where archaeologists have used these techniques in a much more interpretative manner to investigate past human movements and practices (e.g. Edmonds and McElearney 1999; Llobera 1996; Pollard and Gillings 1998; Wickstead 2002, 2004, 2007). There is an interesting challenge ahead to employ these methods in discussions of inhabitation in the past. Can archaeologists develop GIS to show routeways, taskscapes, symbolic or sacred places or models of different forms of access and/or tenure; rather than just physical characteristics such as slope, aspect, altitude and vegetational cover?

Survey techniques – the eyes of Heisenberg? In the past twenty years, there have been major advances in existing archaeological survey techniques, accompanied by the development of some new technologies. Aerial photographic coverage of Britain is steadily increasing, and in England the compilation and plotting of all known archaeological aerial photographs for each county is nearing completion, as part of the National Mapping Project. These county-wide databases and plots will prove invaluable to curators and

There is also a potential tension between these new digital methodologies and more traditional fieldwork 206

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: FIELDS FOR DISCOURSE? techniques. As many fieldworkers have known for decades, when carrying out analytical surveys in order to establish ‘soft detail’ such as the subtle indications of earthworks, it is still best to use fairly ‘low-tech’ methods such as offset tape survey or plane tabling (Bowden 1999: 60-62, 2002), once control grids and some ‘hard’ detail have been established. These traditional methods continue to be used by the excellent archaeological surveyors of RCAHMW, Historic Scotland and English Heritage.1 Their work depends on the ability to recognise and interpret often quite subtle upstanding earthwork features, and to be able to work out, wherever possible, the stratigraphic relationships between them. These abilities take time and a lot of experience to develop, and people quite literally have to ‘get their eye in’ before they can identify and interpret many of these features themselves. It is normally far quicker to show people how to use Total Stations and GPS units than it is to inculcate them with such abilities, but I believe that it is equally important to try to show younger or less-experienced archaeologists how to do this. Anyone can be taught how to use survey equipment, but it is how it is used which counts most. Along with many colleagues, I have noticed a trend in many professional field units for staff to know how to record archaeological features on excavations and/or areas stripped of topsoil using digital means, but for these same people to be less able to identify and record subtle earthworks and the relationships between them. There is a danger that such knowledge will become increasingly scarce in future years. This is a case where traditional techniques are clearly still superior to more recent technology.

stratigraphic relationships between them and record these using hachures in the correct manner. But I also tried to explain to the students how survey, be it walkover survey, or measured topographic and earthwork survey, always contains an interpretative, subjective element. This does not mean of course that we cannot record archaeological features or make objective statements about them. Measured recording of the physical remains of the past will always remain at the heart of archaeological fieldwork. Rather, survey can be regarded as a wider form of praxis, a way of engaging with the landscape whereby our observations comprise part of a ‘logic of inference’ (q.v. Adams 1991) in order to produce accountable knowledge. When looking at an area of landscape, experienced surveyors attempt to map the archaeological features as objectively and accurately as possible, but this necessarily involves a first level of interpretation and inference, in deciding which features are archaeological or which comprise part of the ‘natural’ landscape, and in choosing where to mark the tops and bottoms of slopes, the edges of cairns, the many different components of ridge and furrow. But during this process, they are usually also interpreting these features from a second, classificatory perspective, such as whether a small, walled feature was an enclosure for livestock, or possibly for human habitation. Is it a roundhouse, or a shieling or hafodeth? Was a cairn for clearance, or was it more likely to have been a funerary structure? Did a formal funerary cairn have stones from clearance subsequently added to it? Is there earthwork evidence that an area of ridge and furrow was reduced in size, expanded beyond its original extent, or subsequently cross-ploughed?

Gray Hill in Monmouthshire, south-east Wales, has for the past four years formed the focus of a landscape survey and excavation project undertaken primarily by staff and students of the University of Wales, Newport, but also involving staff and students from the University of Bristol and Cardiff University (Chadwick et al. 2002, 2003; Chadwick and Pollard 2005 – see below). I established this project not only to characterise and date some of the previously identified archaeological features in this upland landscape (Makepeace 1999, 2000), but also to add to this known archaeology through measured, detailed survey. Some of the results of the five years of survey and excavation work will be shown below. It has sometimes involved plotting features and establishing survey stations with Total Stations, but much of the survey work, which formed part of undergraduate survey modules, also involved close-grained offset recording at scales of 1: 50. I wanted our students to be able to identify the more subtle details of construction of the stone and earth features, and to be able to interpret the

There is then a third level of inference, which comes about through thinking about the functional or utilitarian attributes of features. How did a gateway in an enclosure or a field boundary structure human and animal movements around that landscape, and how did a series of boundaries and trackways actually ‘work’ in terms of the everyday practicalities of an agricultural regime? From which direction might a cairn have been approached from in the past? Where were the headlands and furlong boundaries? And finally, there is a fourth level of inference too, which entails thinking about social practices such as land allotment, tenure and cosmology, and issues of power and prestige (Bowden 1999: 40). Might constructional differences in surveyed boundaries reflect different phases of land allotment and land division, the constructional work of different groups, or different tenurial approaches? Could changes in headlands and furlongs indicate medieval boundary disputes? Why were a series of cairns sited (and sighted) in a particular place within the landscape? And what might the experiential inhabitation of a particular landscape have been like for people in the past, on a daily, seasonal or longer-term basis?

1

Reorganisation and redundancies within English Heritage have threatened the continued existence and excellent work of their field survey unit, which includes some of the most experienced archaeological surveyors in the world. The consequences of such shortsighted decisions on future archaeological landscape survey work and research within England can only be deleterious, although hopefully no further cuts will be made in the future.

Some archaeologists might argue that surveyors should, in the first instance and certainly when in the field, only restrict themselves to the first and second levels of 207

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT aesthetic grounds or modern vegetation cover rather than historical or archaeological criteria, yet they still wanted explanations for why the various character types appeared different today. So I had to try and find archaeological or historical reasons why, for instance, Type 2b valley side woodland was different to Type 2a valley floor woodland. In many cases this was impossible to do, and seemed to be putting the epistemological cart before the methodological horse. Surely, it should have been historical and archaeological criteria that were used to define landscape character types, rather than the other way round. Archaeologists and historians should have been involved with the designation process at a much earlier stage. There are also grave dangers in attributing greater aesthetic or historical value to one particular type of landscape rather than another, and there has been much debate concerning this (e.g. Fairclough 1999; Foard and Rippon 1998; Rippon 2004).

inference, to the supposedly objective recording and classification of empirical information. Within some commercial contract archaeology units, I have noted a tendency to concentrate only on the recording side of the survey process, and not the interpretation. But I would argue that as surveyors move about the landscapes which people inhabited in the past, many of them are already subconsciously or implicitly engaged in thinking about the other levels of inference too. All of these different levels of inference are thus not separate, and all should actually be taking place at the same time as part of a selfquestioning reflective approach. In addition to the actual survey plans or digital records therefore, surveyors should also be explicitly noting their thoughts on these inferences, complimenting the ‘objective’ recording. These can be in the form of notebooks, or in notations on walkover survey drawings or offset and plane table plans. This does not alter the primary drawn or digitally mapped record, but rather substantially enhances it. Such reflective and inferential approaches are routinely if implicitly utilised by experienced archaeological surveyors, and may seem self-evident to them, but I believe that it is important to make such levels of inference explicit so that others may understand this.

Historic Landscape Characterisation (Historic Land-use Assessment or HLA in Scotland) was a method of landscape analysis that was developed during the 1990s, primarily for resource management purposes, and which has subsequently proved extremely popular (Aldred and Fairclough 2003; Dixon and Hingley 2002; Fairclough 1999; Fairclough, Lambrick and McNab 1999; Herring 1998; Rippon 2004; Turner 2006). It has been widely endorsed and sponsored by organisations such as English Heritage, Cadw and Historic Scotland. I have some experience this methodology, as during my employment as a Project Officer for Wessex Archaeology I worked on the production of HLC reports for the North Wessex Downs Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs AONB, and a pilot HLC study of two different parishes forming part of Salisbury District (e.g. Chadwick and Donachie 2001). Although these studies were in themselves very interesting, along with colleagues I ended up questioning some aspects of them and their archaeological and historical validity. Some methodological criticisms were outlined in the North Wessex Downs AONB Landscape Character Assessment (ibid.: 73-75), but because of the increasing ubiquity of the HLC approach, I feel that these criticisms have wider relevance and are worth reexamining in more detail here, although other authors too have noted these and additional concerns (e.g. Rippon 2004: 36; Williamson 2006: 57-59, 2007).

Secondly, there were also significant time restrictions, which meant that most of the HLC reports I produced were based on rapid assessments of modern map evidence, with some limited documentary research and map regression. I often had only a few weeks to compile my reports. It was rarely possible to properly integrate data from County Histories, Sites and Monuments Records, aerial photographs, previous archaeological evaluations and excavations, fieldwalking and palaeoenvironmental information, and place and field name evidence. This was not just a problem with the reports I was working on – other HLC studies I used as methodological templates also seem to have suffered from an over-reliance on cartographic data, as with the case of Hampshire (e.g. Fairclough, Lambrick and Hopkins 2002). Utilising map regression data alone can be misleading, and might obfuscate very real differences in the historical and social trajectories of different areas. For instance, on early edition Ordnance Survey maps if very regular, straight-edged rectangular fields appeared during the later nineteenth century in two adjacent parishes it would be a logical inference that these were the result of formal Parliamentary enclosure. Yet in one parish the major landowner(s) might have largely imposed enclosure upon a community, whilst in the other the majority of people in the parish might have welcomed the process and invited the Parliamentary surveyors in to begin their work. There was often considerable variation in the enclosure process at a very local level (see Hannah Sackett this volume). Superficially, the resulting landscapes might appear the same, but they were in fact the product of very different histories and social contexts. The result is that the human experiences of such landscape changes, both negative and positive, are ignored altogether. Detailed documentary research may of course elucidate such local differences, but only if enough time is allocated for this level of analysis.

Firstly, with regard to my own experience of HLC work it was mainly landscape architect firms that had commissioned the studies that I undertook, and it was they who had already defined the different landscape character types. This was almost always based on

Thirdly, in the studies I undertook there was usually only time for a few field visits – sometimes only one, and during these I could not hope to adequately examine the areas involved. Again, this narrow approach could potentially produce misleading results. From map

Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC)

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Figure 2. A cross-valley boundary in the chalk downland parish of West Dean, Wiltshire, recorded during an HLC study. This sinuous boundary today consists of a highly mature, species-rich hedgerow and in places an associated bank, but may reflect the line of a much older Anglo-Saxon cross-valley tithing. These may have been constructed across downland valleys as a relatively equitable process of land allotment in order to give different households equal access to valley bottom, valley side and elevated downland locales. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

modern appearance of the landscape, such as the formation of acidic soils, peat deposits and moorlands in upland areas of Britain, or widespread areas of open grassland on the chalk downlands. All these developments appeared or accelerated in later prehistory, but their designation simply as part of a ‘relict’ landscape (e.g. Rippon 2004: 29-30) might result in their importance being downplayed in favour of later developments and patterns of land use.

regression evidence alone, two very similar, slightly sinuous extant boundaries in one parish might be interpreted as being medieval or post-medieval in origin. Even on an aerial photograph, if they both had large, mature hedgerows running along them, they might be attributed to broadly the same period. But a field visit might discover that one of these modern boundaries in fact lies on top of a broad earthen bank, and might thus potentially reflect the line of an older Anglo-Saxon land division. Further detailed documentary and survey work might be necessary in order to resolve this. Once again however, two boundaries that from map evidence alone may appear ostensibly similar might actually have very different origins.

Increasingly, most HLC studies use GIS to assess and label parcels of land with given attributes. There is a potential danger that they will be used merely to categorise, classify and objectify landscapes (Brück 2005; Chadwick 2004b). It increases the likelihood that morphological characteristics will be mainly used in the classification process, and that an overly typological form of landscape analysis will result. Many fields may appear superficially similar in plan on GIS-based HLC maps, yet this may conceal very real differences in the character and experience of those landscapes based on methods of boundary construction or hedgerow vegetation (Williamson 2006). Even within a particular region defined by an HLC study, local differences may create very real variations in the ‘feel’ of landscapes that cannot be translated digitally into HLC studies or simply mapped

Many HLC studies are thus too dependent on historical map-based information, and do not pay enough attention to the archaeological evidence and the more detailed social and historical trajectories within HLC study areas. Potential archaeological and palaeo-environmental evidence buried beneath ploughsoils, alluvium and colluvium are particularly badly served by these approaches. Many HLC studies also concentrate far too much on the historical landscape, to the detriment of the prehistoric and Romano-British periods. Yet the earlier periods might have been crucial to the development of the 209

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT trends and changes. Understanding landscapes as a series of dynamic changes and not as objective ‘things’ through interpretation, experience and perception were some of the original guiding principles of HLC (Fairclough, Lambrick and McNab 1999). Yet in many HLC studies, the people of the past are missing, as is the sense of landscapes as dynamic, experiential and experienced realms (cf. Chadwick 2004b). Attempting to understand large-scale and long-term processes of landscape change is laudable, but we also need to bring the people back through archaeologies of inhabitation.

in two dimensions. As archaeologists we must also be aware that HLC projects could have very real future social and political consequences. In future planning decisions, there is considerable danger that a perceived lack of historic or aesthetic value according to some HLC criteria would be used to justify the construction of housing estates, industrial and retail developments and open-cast mining and quarries in particular landscapes, even though these areas may be regarded with considerable affection by the local people who live there. Indeed, some of these may themselves be perceived very differently by those who dwell in those landscapes. People may often experience their landscapes in very different ways to the ‘values’ articulated in HLC studies. It is their identities, knowledge and culture which may often may influence their perceptions and understandings of landscapes, rather than the material or aesthetic character of those areas (Priede 2007).

Inhabiting fields and field systems Many of the current interpretations of land allotment that have emerged in archaeology highlight wider tensions between functional and symbolic approaches. How can we negotiate the differences between environmentally constrained or economic explanations, and symbolic or cosmological understandings of such archaeological phenomena? It is high time we moved beyond such simple functional: symbolic, prosaic: ritual divisions. Field systems, boundaries and land divisions often seem to demand functional explanations, and certainly throughout prehistory and the historical period there were key considerations of soils, slope, aspect and altitude and of managing livestock and plants which were clearly taken into account by past communities through processes of rational decision making (e.g. Evans 2003; Pryor 1996, 1998; Stone 2005; Williamson 2003, this volume). It is important that we do not lose sight of these environmental constraints; or the abilities of people in the past to be competent and innovative in response to them. But many forms of past land allotment do not appear to have conformed to purely functional expectations, whether this consists of the large and extensive prehistoric bank and ditch boundaries on Salisbury Plain, the East Yorkshire Wolds and the Tabular Hills of North Yorkshire, or early modern drystone wall boundaries in Cumbria or north Wales that were built up the sides of near-vertical slopes. Here, something far more than ‘common-sense’ ideas of land division or the enclosure of the best land seems to have been taking place.

There is no doubt that Geographic Information Systems have enormous potential as research tools – for example, digital topographic and archaeological survey data and rectified aerial photographic transcriptions can be linked into the GIS, and some organisations such as RCAHMW are currently experimenting with using such approaches in conjunction with LANDMAP, the Countryside Commission for Wales’ landscape assessment and management methodology (Vince Devine pers. comm.). These could be combined with SMR findspot data and the results of previous archaeological and palaeoenvironmental investigations. There is also great potential for integrated databases that include the contributions of environmental agencies (Rippon 2004; Turner 2006). Where GIS-based HLC studies are combined with further archaeological and historical data, the results can often be extremely interesting and informative (see Peter Herring and Edward Martin this volume for example). Nevertheless, detailed interpretative commentaries and thematic narratives are still necessary if we are to avoid too-reifying and reductive methodologies. Practitioners of HLC must remember that it is an analytical and assessment technique, and that the maps produced are not an end in themselves. As basic assessment and management tools for county and unitary authority planners, current HLC studies are useful and clearly have their place. However, I would argue that when HLC studies are used for archaeological resource management, far more research utilising all of the potential evidence needs to be incorporated within them. Where archaeologists and historians have been able to have much greater input into their development and draw upon much wider evidence, the results have been more notable. Some HLC studies have clearly been more successful than others, and they have inevitably improved greatly over time (Aldred and Fairclough 2003: 27). I feel that the real value of HLC lies in its potential for future research. Unfortunately though, this potential has sometimes been compromised by the methodologies involved. Archaeologists and historians should be trying to understand the everyday lives of people in the past, in addition to long-term socio-economic and landscape

Some approaches have argued that boundaries, including those of field systems, are social constructions that in some respects can be considered in similar ways to prehistoric ritual monuments (e.g. Bradley 1998: 158; Chadwick 1997, 1999: 163, 2004c: 235; Hingley 1990: 100). There is some evidence for shared axes of orientation of fields on the chalk downlands of Salisbury Plain and the Thames basin, which were maintained despite differences in topography (Field 2001: 59; Yates 2002). These shared alignments may have reflected functional or cosmological concerns, the powerful social traditions of the habitus, or a combination of all of these factors. Clearly, this does not exclude their functional importance in controlling the movements of animals, draining fields or minimising soil erosion; or negating the environmental constraints on human agricultural practices. But I believe that it is vital that we consider the 210

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: FIELDS FOR DISCOURSE? can prove highly divisive at times when favours are not reciprocated, equipment is damaged or not returned, and animals are injured or appropriated. Small disputes can quickly become feuds between different individuals or families. Tensions over boundaries and access might increase, and hierarchical leaders or elders and community councils may have to deal with these disputes. Those individuals who remember allotments, rights and previous agreements and disputes are often the arbitrators in many of these debates. This spatial and temporal knowledge might also grant them power and status.

social aspects of land allotment, land division and land use too. Allocating land and constructing field systems and other land boundaries would have often involved entire kin groups and communities, negotiating, discussing and labouring together. This embodied labour would have reinforced people’s ideas of their own identities and those of their kin group or community, and the construction work within the landscape would have reinforced bonds between people, or in other instances caused tensions and disagreements. Finished boundaries would have made statements of tenure, identity and power, and were also bound up with ideas of kinship and inheritance, and all the rights, negotiations and contestations that went along with this. Because of their role in understandings of territoriality or ownership, field systems also help to define what is ‘other’, ‘others’ or ‘them’ as much as they are implicated in understandings of what is ‘us’ or ‘ours’, the close and familiar. Individual and communal rights and beliefs, the biographies of individual fields, livestock, the living and the dead, and conceptions of tradition would also have been extremely important in the past.

Although not always the case by any means, fields may sometimes be associated with more fixed concepts of tenure, property and inheritance, and in agricultural societies this may often lead to hierarchical, patriarchal discrimination (q.v. Brody 2001). Agricultural societies tend to have high birth rates, for larger families are an advantage when the land is worked intensively, but more pregnancies and births might mean higher mortality rates for women. Settled farming can allow the production of food surpluses and increased population, and more potential innovators and inventors within societies. There might also be greater political and social complexity, though ethnographic evidence again cautions against assuming that this is always the case. Food surpluses and food storage may create the potential for control and power by one group over another, and also the conditions for the emergence of more specialised groups within society that do not produce food themselves. These could include ‘full-time’ ritual specialists and social elites. With more rigidly fixed fields, access to the best land and to certain foods may become part of growing hierarchical or status divisions within society. At a fundamental everyday level, the development of field systems and boundaries alters people’s perceptions and conceptions of time and space (Chadwick 2004c: 233). They provide new ways of comprehending area and distance in terms of units defined by field sizes or blocks of fields, and arguably also allow the development of mapping perspectives (q.v. Ingold 2000: 231-233). They may radically change tenurial practices, and alter the structure of spaces and human and animal bodily encounters with the landscape. Existing paths might be turned into bounded tracks and droveways, but in other instances new routeways are constructed, constraining and perhaps even at times proscribing movements of people and animals. The time taken to walk across or between fields, time taken to walk along trackways and droveways, the time taken to dig out ditches or construct walls, create and maintain banks and hedges becomes increasingly important. The time for sowing and harvest, time for lambing and calving, time for watering, fattening and slaughtering is, through the creation and development of fields and field systems, much more closely interwoven with people’s everyday and seasonal routines and practices. Plants, animals and humans are brought together in much tighter spatial, symbolic and temporal relationships.

Figure 3. Abandoned and rusting farm equipment used to reinforce a tumbled-down drystone wall near Monsal Dale, the Peak District, Derbyshire. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

The creation, maintenance and re-working of fields, the way that land was allotted and the ways in which people and animals moved around the landscape and gave meaning to it, were all socially meaningful practices. They were quite literally fields for discourse (cf. Barrett 1988). Close kinship ties may have been strengthened by the communal labour required to construct and maintain field systems, and the subsequent agricultural work within them. At certain times of the year such as the harvest, many different families would have had to work together, with the need to share ploughing equipment and draught animals on occasion. Other communal effort may have been involved in constructing buildings, or rounding up livestock from shared open commons. This established complicated networks of reciprocity amongst agricultural communities, and reinforced relationships between individuals and kin. However, we must also remember the potential negative side of these social bonds. Relationships within small-scale agrarian communities 211

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Figure 4. Location map of Gray Hill (Mynydd Llwyd), Monmouthshire. Source: A. Leaver.

kilometres north-east of Caerwent in a prominent position overlooking the Severn estuary (Fig. 4). A stone circle, several standing stones and prehistoric cairns are part of the known archaeology on the hill (Bagnall-Oakley and Bagnall-Oakley 1889), but only the stone circle and outlying stones had been surveyed in any detail prior to 1999 and they are the only protected Scheduled Ancient Monuments on the hill. In historical times the hill was used as unimproved upland grazing with some stone quarrying, and though much of it is now in private ownership, there are still limited commoner’s rights over it. Since the 1960s no animals have been grazed there, however, and bracken, birch scrub and other trees have progressively invaded areas of the hill. Yet Gray Hill retains remnants of upland heath vegetation, a rare habitat in south-east Wales, and thus it is important for birds, reptiles and mammals. The hill is popular with walkers, but has also suffered from the depredations of motorcycle scrambling, mountain biking and horse riding, which has unfortunately damaged some of the archaeology.

The creation and maintenance of field systems and other systems of land allotment has important implications for people’s understandings of their past, present and future. Through the routine, embodied acts of walking through fields and working in them, people may be continuously reminded of negotiating access to them or laying out the boundaries. They can recall past plantings, harvests, spring births and autumn culls, and the feasts, celebrations or commemorations of these events. They might remember particularly favoured animals, an especially bountiful year, or a long-running boundary dispute, a crop failure and times of hardship. The rhythms of life and of the taskscape are played out within the fields, and their ditches, walls, banks and hedges are caught up both in the routines of everyday existence, but also realms of emotion, belief and belonging. In more than just a metaphorical sense therefore, field systems and boundaries act as cognitive and cosmological clocks, calendars and compasses (Chadwick 2004c: 236). In the following sections I will demonstrate how some of these considerations can be integrated with the results of archaeological fieldwork, in order to advance our knowledge and interpretations of land allotment in the past.

In order to inform future management of the hill, Monmouthshire County Council commissioned an archaeological assessment of the area, which was undertaken during November 1999-January 2000 using map regression, aerial photograph rectification and GPSbased walkover survey (Makepeace 1999, 2000). Many new archaeological features were identified by Graham Makepeace, including a large, D-shaped scarp-edge enclosure that he suggested was Neolithic in date due to its perceived similarities to the example at Gardom’s Edge in Derbyshire (Ainsworth and Barnatt 1998;

Gray Hill (Mynydd Llwyd), Monmouthshire, South Wales Gray Hill or Mynydd Llwyd is a distinctive sandstone hill in south-east Monmouthshire, approximately two 212

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Figure 5. Survey plan of Gray Hill, with additional archaeological features recorded during survey work by UWN staff and students in 2002-2005. The locations of excavation trenches are also shown. Source: A. Leaver.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds 2002; but see Barnatt this volume).2 Further prehistoric cairns were also found, and a series of double-orthostat stone boundaries radiating out from the D-shaped enclosure, which Makepeace suggested were part of a co-axial field system of Bronze Age date (Makepeace 1999). Several recumbent or turfcovered stones also indicated a possible stone row leading north-west from the stone circle to the existing standing stone. Makepeace also found a possible medieval enclosed settlement with a longhouse, and a series of boundaries and enclosures relating to postmedieval and early modern intakes, fields and crofts. Some of these, however, may have re-used earlier stone boundaries.

knowledge and experiences of the landscape and archaeology of Gray Hill, and the implications these have for other landscape projects. One extremely important discovery of the UWN survey work was that the D-shaped enclosure bank did not simply end where it met the scarp-edge on the northeastern side of the hill, as had originally been proposed (Makepeace 1999: 72). More detailed survey by UWN students Daryl Williams and Jonathan Burton, aided by aerial photographic analysis, revealed a pronounced ‘corner’ in the bank where it originally returned to continue along the northern scarp edge (Fig. 5). Much of this feature was hidden in dense birch scrub, and early modern quarrying had also destroyed a large section, but it can be traced once again on the western side of the disturbance. Here, a section of the bank marked on the tithe map of 1847 and as an ‘old wall’ on the 1882 1st edition Ordnance Survey map indicates that some of this structure was probably re-used to form part of a postmedieval intake boundary, although it is clearly of different construction to later post-medieval boundaries. The enclosure bank meets the large cairn on the highest, westernmost point of Gray Hill, but the stratigraphic relationship between them was not clear from the earthwork evidence alone, and one of our last excavation trenches was positioned to investigate this (Trench 8). This established that the D-shaped enclosure abutted and hus post-dated the large cairn, and was thus of Bronze Age or later date; but that at this spot both the cairn and the enclosure bank had been deliberately flattened to form a stone platform. A late Iron Age or Romano-British bronze fibula was found up against the inside face of the enclosure wall at this point, and some possible RomanoBritish tile fragments.

During 2002-2005 Gray Hill formed the focus of more detailed earthwork survey and targeted excavation, initially undertaken by staff and students of the University of Wales, Newport, but then also involving staff and students from the University of Bristol and Cardiff University too.3 In addition, local and foreign volunteers and students from other British universities have also taken part. This mix of people of all ages and experiences gave the project a very special atmosphere, and we explicitly used recording methodologies and working practices that tried to make the fieldwork as inclusive, interpretative and reflective as possible (q.v. Chadwick 2003). Interim reports on this work have been published elsewhere (Chadwick et al. 2002, 2003); but in this section I will summarise some of the results of our survey and excavation, although due to the sudden closure of the archaeology department at UWN and the need for this author to find work elsewhere, detailed postexcavation analyses and report preparation have not yet taken place (Chadwick and Pollard in prep.). Although some Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) dates have been obtained,4 as yet there are no absolute radiocarbon dates available. I feel that it is important to make the results available at this stage though, and to discuss them in light of the approaches we have adopted. I will outline how these approaches have enriched our

Further linear banks, double-orthostat boundaries, cairns and boulder-walled enclosures on the eastern and southeastern slopes of the hill were also identified (Fig. 5), often in areas now covered by extremely dense vegetation. A more detailed survey by Dave Roberts and Samantha Williams of part of the cairn group established that although many were likely to have been the result of clearance, some were probably funerary monuments, matching earlier descriptions of the Bagnall-Oakleys (1889). Of course, many of the so-called ‘clearance’ cairns might well have had several different meanings and uses (q.v. Johnston 2001b). Several cairns had clearly been subject to antiquarian disturbance including one example with a stone-lined cist, with the capstone removed and the contents robbed. Interestingly, this cist contained a nineteenth or early twentieth century horseshoe. As part of the Gray Hill Project there has also been survey of parts of the Penhein estate on the eastern flank of Gray Hill, including post-medieval and early modern features such as a ha-ha and a nuttery, and a series of limekilns (Fig. 1). A possible later prehistoric or Romano-British enclosure associated with roundhouse ring gullies and ditched boundaries were also all identified at Penhein through topographic and geophysical survey. The latter technique worked

2 The proposed Neolithic scarp-edge enclosure at Gardom’s Edge has now been shown through 14C dating to be Bronze Age in date (Barnatt this volume). This might add some support to the notion that the enclosure at Gray Hill was of later Bronze Age or Iron Age date. 3 Staff and students from Bristol University were involved in the Gray Hill project from 2003-2005, following Joshua Pollard’s move from University of Wales Newport to Bristol University. Staff and students from Cardiff University took part in the final season of excavations in 2005. Gray Hill was meant to run until 2006 or 2007, but the decision by senior management at UWN to close the archaeology department and end my contract meant that I was regrettably unable to continue organising the project. This has also delayed post-excavation analyses and report preparation. 4 The OSL analyses by Phillip Toms of the University of Gloucester produced mixed results, but indicated that clearance on Gray Hill was probably underway by the late Neolithic. In addition, soil that had built up against the rubble of a partially collapsed boundary produced a date of c. 500-700 AD, indicating that at least some of the co-axial boundaries had probably fallen into disuse by the late Roman or postRoman period.

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ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: FIELDS FOR DISCOURSE? hills, almost all of them associated with surviving lime kilns used to improve the soils from the eighteenth century onwards. The sandstone on Gray Hill is generally quite smooth with occasional quartz pebbles, and it fractures relatively easily along its bedding planes to produce subrectangular blocks. Along the northern scarp edge, however, much coarser sandstone outcrops, and this is more of a conglomerate or ‘pudding stone’ with numerous quartz pebbles forming inclusions within it. Interestingly, the outer stones of the stone circle on Gray Hill made use of the smoother sandstone, but the two stone uprights set within it, and at least some of the stones in the stone row associated with the stone circle, were of the coarser conglomerate. This had weathered to form distinctive ‘fluted’ shapes on the uprights (Fig. 7). These textural differences may have been highly significant to people in prehistory (q.v. Cummings 2002; Sellier 1991).

especially well at Penhein, as the large house complex had been built on an outcropping limestone shelf.

Figure 6. The existing manor house and ha-ha at Penhein. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

For the purposes of this paper, however, I will concentrate predominantly on the linear boundaries that were surveyed and excavated. The OSL dates from excavation of these proved disappointing. Nevertheless, we still believe that the D-shaped enclosure and the boundaries represent elements of a later prehistoric field system, although future 14C results should clarify this. Towards a grammar of stone From an early stage in our survey work we noticed some unusual features of these stone walls. These cannot easily be quantified in any objective manner, but we feel that these phenomenological observations offer some interesting insights into how these features were built and may have been experienced in the past. Through our own embodied engagements with these features in the landscape, and with the physical acts of dismantling and then rebuilding the walls, we began to see patterns in how people had made use of the materials, and gleaned some impression of this potential ‘grammar of stone’ (q.v. Chadwick 2003: 105-106). This was a phrase and an approach that I first considered when I was assisting with the Gardom’s Edge excavations in Derbyshire (see John Barnatt this volume). It reflected a subjective response to the largely stone-built archaeological features I encountered there, and subsequently on Gray Hill. Apparently deliberate but often subtle distinctions in the size, shape and colours of materials used in banks, walls and cairns could sometimes be identified, and the degree of weathering, lichen cover, fragmentation and spalling visible on the stones was also important. Sections of the context recording sheets that we used at Gray Hill were deliberately designed to note such potentially informative insights. Further detailed fieldwork in the future may be able to assess the validity of these claims.

Figure 7. The distinctive shape and texture of the standing stone by the stone circle at Gray Hill. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

The large D-shaped, scarp-edge enclosure bank would clearly have taken considerable planning, time and labour to build, and it probably represented the work of an entire community rather than an individual household or extended family. In places it appeared to be of doubleorthostat construction with a rubble core, as at Trench 8; in others it might have consisted of a rubble bank behind a facing or revetment of large stone blocks, as in

The Old Red Sandstone on Gray Hill lies in beds that generally tilt to the south and south-east, outcropping along the steepest north and north-west slopes. On Gray Hill’s eastern flank is an outcrop of limestone, on which the estate of Penhein is located. There are many examples of these isolated limestone outcrops along this line of 215

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT enclosing land or constraining livestock, there was also a sense in which the construction was not substantial enough. Unless crowned with a hedge or fence, it would only have deterred cattle and pigs, not sheep or goats, and people could have scrambled over it. It was actually not massive enough to be seen as a potentially defensive structure like late Bronze Age and early to middle Iron Age hillforts, and in any case was very different in form to the hillforts in the local region.

Trenches 2, 4 and 9. The subrectangular sandstone blocks generally used to construct the faces of this bank were sometimes massive and megalithic in form, some being nearly 2m long and 1m high, and these were usually arranged so that the largest blocks were on the downslope face. There was some evidence that in places the bank had been constructed with long but narrow ‘through’ stones in its core in order to tie the structure together, with a face of smaller subrectangular stones forming its internal face. In many sections along its southern extent there was a relatively flat area up to 5m wide behind the bank, partly the result of a natural break in slope, but also in places apparently with the addition of a deliberately created terrace or platform formed from small stones, especially around one of the possible entrances.

Towards the north-east corner of the D-shaped enclosure there is a gap where a pronounced holloway cuts through the natural scarp-edge, on the line of a natural geological fault. It is not clear whether the holloway cut through the enclosure, or, more likely, if the enclosure bank respected a pre-existing feature which has since become deeper over time. On the eastern side of this holloway the bank ends on an especially large block or earthfast boulder, and this prominent natural feature may hint that there was always a deliberate gap left in the bank at this point. Another braided holloway runs through the eastern side of the enclosure, although this is probably a much later feature for it truncates the stonework of the bank. On the south-western side of the hill, the D-shaped enclosure bank was found to extend further west than previously proposed, with a newly identified section of bank on the far side of a wide gap that may be an original entrance. Excavation at this point in Trench 9 confirmed that the bank ended in a deliberate terminal, and that this gap was thus likely to have been an entrance rather than the product of later stone robbing (Fig. 9). Another natural fold in the ground approaches this gap from the southeast, and this seems to have been utilised as a routeway in the past, where people and livestock could climb the hill on a relatively gentle incline, unlike the steep western and northern slopes. This route would have taken them past many of the large cairns, perhaps a deliberate means of placing people and livestock under the watchful and protective eyes of the ancestral dead.

The builders made use of this natural break in slope around the southern slope of Gray Hill, where the ground was generally flat or very gently sloping behind and inside the enclosure bank, on its northern side, but often steeper to the south of it, again on its downslope side. This would have had the effect of emphasising the height of the external face of the wall, although judging from the tumble of collapsed stone that we excavated in several sections across the D-shaped enclosure bank, the original height of the structure was unlikely to have been more than 1.5-1.8m high (Fig. 8). Nevertheless, the face of this enclosure bank would have appeared impressive indeed when viewed by people downslope of it. Along the northern scarp-edge of Gray Hill, the bank seems to have been less substantial, and in places may have consisted of just one or two courses of sandstone blocks laid end to end, a single course in thickness. The natural sandstone outcrops in tabular bedding planes along the scarp-edge, however, and from below it would have been hard to distinguish the placed blocks from the outcropping rocks (cf. Tilley, Hamilton, Harrison and Anderson 2000). This was also one reason (along with the dense vegetation here) why the northern extent of the D-shaped enclosure bank was not recognised during the initial survey (Makepeace 1999). Whether intentional or not, this effect may have caused people looking upslope from below to think that the bank was more impressive in construction than it actually was.

Figure 9. Trench 9, supervised by Gary Robinson, showing one of the terminals of the D-shaped enclosure on the eastern side of the probable entrance gap on the south-western side of Gray Hill. Source: G. Robinson.

Figure 8. The remains of the D-shaped enclosure bank, as excavated at Trench 2. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

Wherever the linear double-orthostat boundaries met the D-shaped enclosure, the sandstone blocks used in the former were often larger than anywhere else in the radial

Although often imposing, and almost certainly representing more than just a functional boundary for 216

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: FIELDS FOR DISCOURSE? link between the land (clearance cairns) and the ancestral dead (funerary cairns)?

boundaries. In every case, it seemed that the boundaries abutted and post-dated the D-shaped enclosure bank, and it is likely that the large blocks were derived from the latter, and had therefore been robbed and re-used. Many of us gained the impression, however, that there was a respect evident in this work that went beyond the functional requirements of simply appending or ‘tying in’ field walls to the earlier structure. It was almost as if the builders of the radial walls were trying to match, mimic or appropriate something of the megalithic qualities of the scarp-edge bank. This may imply a relatively short time period between their construction, so that although representing different stratigraphic phases of build they still nevertheless all formed part of one overall scheme. Alternatively, another interpretation might be that greater time had elapsed, but nevertheless the later builders still wished to respect or copy some aspects of the earlier enclosure, incorporating these into their later walls. There may have been many reasons for this – the persistence of folk memories, stories and myths regarding the enclosure and its builders; an attempt to legitimate the enclosure of an inter-commoning area through referencing earlier monuments, or a new political and/or social group trying to claim descent and lineage from older ancestors. There are many interesting possibilities. Our 14C dates and comparisons with the OSL data may be able to tease out more of the chronology.

Unfortunately, because the wall cores mostly consisted of sandstone rubble and due to later root and animal disturbance and geochemical weathering of the soil, it was rarely possible to identify variations in soil texture and colour within the boundaries. This re-working meant that we could not normally assess whether each boundary was built in one phase, or were themselves each the result of cumulative construction episodes. Variations in construction along individual walls visible in detailed survey, however, did suggest that they were not uniform builds. Especially large orthostat blocks were placed at irregular intervals along their lengths, and these may simply represent the availability of large earthfast boulders nearby that could be utilised. It is also possible that these large blocks represented the end points of certain sections of build, perhaps reflecting a particular period of work, or even the labour of different ‘workgangs’ or families. They were generally abutted by the smaller stones of the walls. An alternative possibility is that the larger blocks represent markers that pre-dated the actual boundaries themselves, used to divide up the landscape prior to construction. It may even be that before the walls were built there was a phase in which these solitary orthostats alone were used as more notional boundaries, in much the same way as some medieval parishes on Dartmoor and in the Peak District and early modern woodland boundaries on Exmoor were marked only by single stones erected at intervals. This phenomenon was also noted with regard to prehistoric boundaries on Skomer Island and St Marys in the Scilly Isles (Evans 1984, 1990).

The radial walls on Gray Hill varied in their construction. The majority were usually of double-orthostat form, each normally comprising two rows of larger subrectangular sandstone blocks with a loose rubble core of smaller stones. As our excavated examples demonstrated, however, in places much larger orthostatic blocks were employed. Sometimes, as in the sections of wall excavated in Trenches 5 and 7 illustrate, these large blocks were arranged lengthways or sideways on across the full thickness of the wall. Smaller sandstone blocks were then placed against them and on top of them. On other occasions the larger orthostat blocks were set on their edges, forming more tabular faces. In other places, walls or certain sections of walls appeared to have been built in courses of smaller stones like early modern drystone walls, as in Trenches 2 and 4, although in the latter a large recumbent orthostat was also used too. In Trench 5, one such orthostat forming part of the western face of a double-orthostat wall was placed on end to form a prominent upright, which then became the focus for a later clearance cairn. Why was this particular place chosen for a clearance cairn? Was this simply the nearest convenient place to dump gathered stones? Did the prominent upright have some subconscious attraction for the people working on this hillside, akin to the way in which certain human constructions seem to attract fly tipping, graffiti or vandalism today? The creation of different textures and shapes of piled stone might have reflected all manner of subconscious associations (Evans 2003: 63-64). Or was this a more conscious process, such as respect or referencing of a local landmark, one that may have provided some mnemonic link to the social process of boundary construction? Or was it a metaphoric

Unless all of the boundaries on Gray Hill had been comprehensively and uniformly robbed for stone for the later post-medieval boundaries on the side slopes, an unlikely possibility in our opinion, then the original height of the boundaries was probably no more than 1.50m. Again, if functional barriers than there may have been hedges or fences along the top of these walls, otherwise more nimble livestock such as sheep and goats could have scrambled across them. At several places on Gray Hill there were gaps between different walls approximately 50m in length, on both the southern and south-eastern slopes. These seem to have been deliberate constructional features rather than the result of later robbing, but the gaps seem very wide to be merely entrances into different blocks of land, and were not associated with any ‘funnels’ or ‘crushes’ used for controlling the movements of livestock (q.v. Pryor 1998). Unfortunately, the project had to finish before we could excavate one of these gaps, to see if there were postholes or stakeholes of fences or other features aligned between the stone walls. Any future work will have to investigate this. These interpretative ideas are all possibilities, and most cannot be proven through existing fieldwork and analytical techniques. OSL dating is currently too coarse to allow different sections of individual boundaries to be 217

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT 10A

10B

10C

Figure 10. Three photographs of Trench 5, looking south-east along the line of the double-orthostat wall. 10A (top) shows the clearance cairn before excavation; 10B shows the linear clearance along the eastern face of the wall; and 10C shows the underlying wall, but also the ‘slighting’ of some of the westernmost stones. The prominent upstanding stone remained a focus for all of this activity. Source: A.M. Chadwick and H. Riley.

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Figure 11. Working shot of excavation in progress on Trench 7, located over an east-west double-orthostat wall. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

placed against the eastern face of the wall. Following this, the small clearance cairn built around the upright orthostat was constructed on top of both the wall and the linear clearance. It is not known if these soil differences and clearance activities reflected arable agriculture, perhaps simple hand cultivation; or much smaller garden plots (q.v. Johnston 2005b), although no clear focus for inhabitation was identified on Gray Hill, with no evidence for roundhouse ‘hut circles’ or platforms.

dated relative to one another, and the chances of finding dateable artefactual or organic material underneath particular stones of stretches of wall are remote to say the least. Rather than interpretative inferences, these must therefore remain speculations. I firmly believe that it is worthwhile speculating on such matters, however, rather than confining ourselves to purely descriptive accounts of survey and excavation work. These features of the boundaries hint at much greater constructional and social complexity, and thus undermine any notion that this field system was laid out in a single phase.

The roughly east-west boundary that was partly excavated in Trench 7 was also aligned on the large ring cairn, but in addition was built across a natural outcrop of imbricated boulders that were initially interpreted as the remains of an earlier cairn pre-dating the boundary, but were probably part of a sub-surface periglacial ‘boulder stream’. The large orthostats were ‘vaulted’ up and over these earthfast stones, but there were often great difficulties in distinguishing placed stones from outcropping examples (q.v. Tilley, Hamilton, Harrison and Anderson 2000). Having worked at Leskernick, Shovel Down and other prehistoric upland sites in Britain, the trench supervisor Gary Robinson was well placed to usually identify the differences, although some stones remained ambiguous. This may also have been the case in the past, however. It is even possible that the builders of the wall also believed that the imbricated stones, many of which gave the appearance of having been set on edge, were actually an earlier anthropogenic feature such as a cairn, and they deliberately sited the boundary to run across them.

Biographies of boundaries Trench 5 also demonstrated another key feature of these boundaries – although apparently simple and regular in large-scale plan, each one had individual stratigraphic (and presumably social) histories that became obvious only through more detailed survey and excavation. The north-south wall at Trench 5 was orientated towards a large ring cairn further downslope, and although straight for much of its length, its southernmost end veered slightly to the south-west in order to abut a smaller cairn, possibly a clearance cairn, that itself abutted the edge of the larger ring cairn. This seems to have been a deliberate architectural referencing of these earlier features. After the wall had been built, two somewhat different deposits formed against its western and eastern faces, perhaps indicating that different land use practices and/or taphonomic factors had been in operation on either side (Helen Lewis pers. comm.), although detailed analysis of soil micromorphology samples will be necessary to confirm this. Loose courses of linear clearance were also 219

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT steeper hillsides and upland areas, on the lowlands much had probably disappeared by the mid-late Iron Age (Bastow and Murray 1990; Berg 2001; Bogaard 2000; Giorgi 2004). Evidence for flooding and increased alluvial deposition in the later Roman period along the valleys of the Rivers Trent and Idle may partly reflect this loss of woodland cover (Eccles, Caldwell and Mincher 1988; Knight, Howard and Leary 2004; Knight and Priest 1998; Samuels and Buckland 1978), which would have resulted in much greater run-off from arable agricultural land. There would have been large areas of drier grassland with damper grassy meadows in the valleys, and heather and heath vegetation on ridges, hilltops and more elevated ground.

Recent upland research projects across Britain have also noted such variations in build and the often subtle relationships between different features, relationships which only very detailed survey and excavation work has been able to draw out. These include investigations at Gardom’s Edge in Derbyshire (Barnatt this volume; Barnatt, Bevan and Edmonds in prep.), Dyffryn Ardudwy and Cwm Ffrydlas in north Wales (Johnston this volume; Johnston and Roberts in prep.), and Shoveldown on Dartmoor (Brück, Johnston and Wickstead 2003). I will return to these themes of stratigraphic and temporal complexity below. The fieldwork at Gray Hill has often felt like it has raised more intriguing questions than answers regarding processes of land allotment, land tenure and land division, and it is a great pity that further work there was so suddenly curtailed. The difficulties of finding absolute dating material and finds on upland sites will be familiar to many researchers. I hope that one day I or other people will be able to return to Gray Hill to carry on the research.

One of the most significant environmental factors was the fact that most river valleys and floodplains were prone to annual flooding. This water would have formed large expanses of shallow standing water or meres during winter and spring, but these same areas providing rich summer and autumn grazing and hay crops. This pattern continued in many places until the extensive drainage schemes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Rivers Don, Thorne, Idle and Trent all drain northeastwards into the Humberhead Levels, an area of once extensive wetlands. The Levels comprised a highly diverse mix of raised mires such as Thorne and Hatfield Moors, in addition to alder carr, peat bog, marsh and standing open water (Van de Noort 2004; Van de Noort and Ellis 1997). Place names such as ‘carr’ and ‘Ing’ reflect areas that were likely to have been standing water or marsh, where reeds, alder carr, willow and birch scrub would have formed the dominant vegetation. Elsewhere, I have argued that the seasonal movement of livestock would have been an important part of the practices of these communities (Chadwick 2007, in prep.). Many features such as trackways, ‘funnels’, enclosures on or near floodplains and pens associated with settlement enclosures were all likely to have been associated with the husbandry of livestock, whilst ‘blank’ areas relatively free of cropmarks on uplands may have formed upland pasture, and floodplains were probably utilised for communal grazing and perhaps even inter-commoning practices, particularly during later prehistory. It is important to recognise that human inhabitation was not solely focused on static settlement enclosures – many enclosures next to floodplains or on hilltops probably served as seasonal livestock corrals and some may have functioned as shielings of a sort, and it is likely that there would have been considerable and complex movements around these landscapes on an annual, seasonal and daily basis. Even enclosures with evidence for buildings within them might not have been inhabited all year round, and the uses of many seem to have changed over time. New enclosures were created, and some older ones abandoned. These were highly dynamic landscapes.

Iron Age and Romano-British land allotment and land use in the north midlands of England My second case study considers Iron Age and RomanoBritish field systems and settlements in Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, a geologically and topographically diverse region which for convenience I term the north midlands, albeit much to the disgust of some Yorkshire people! I initially became interested in these landscapes through my work in commercial PPG 16 funded archaeology with the now defunct South Yorkshire Archaeology Unit, and they have formed the focus of my PhD research (Chadwick in prep.). Aerial photographs of this region have revealed extensive field systems, trackways and enclosures dating to the later Iron Age and Romano-British periods (Cox 1984; Chadwick 1998; Deegan 1996, 2001b; Riley 1975, 1977, 1980; Roberts et al. 2007; Whimster 1989). I have described the principal physical characteristics of the varied landscapes of the region in more detail elsewhere (Chadwick 2004a, 2007, in prep.). The Sherwood Sandstones from the Trent Valley up to the Rivers Don, Thorne and Idle form gentle gravel ridges interspersed with broad, shallow alluvial valleys. To the north and west of the Rivers Trent and Don, the ground rises onto more undulating Magnesian Limestone and Coal Measures landscapes cut by occasional river valleys, with greater topographic contrasts and sharper ridgelines. By the late Iron Age, these landscapes were essentially open in character, with farmsteads interspersed with fields and possibly hedges, and small copses of managed woodland (Berg 2001: 8-9; Buckland 1986: 4; Garton 1987: 67; Garton et al. 1988: 29; Garton and Salisbury 1995: 40-41; Rackham and Martin 2004: 56, 73-74; Wilson 1968: 43-44; Yarwood 1981: 51-52). There is some limited palaeo-environmental evidence for plants associated with hedges that may have formed part of the bank and ditch boundaries (Greig 2005: 13; Wilson 1968: 48). Although some wildwood might have remained on

Unlike upland areas of Britain, little or no trace of most of these field systems and settlements now remains in the modern landscape, apart from a few rare survivals of banks and ditches as low earthworks in woodland. The medieval and post-medieval landscape was generally 220

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Figure 12. Map of the modern counties of Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire, showing sites referred to in the text. Source: A. Leaver.

very different in layout and orientation, although in a few places such as Ledston in West Yorkshire and Scorcher Hills, Burghwallis and Armthorpe in South Yorkshire, some bank and ditch boundaries seem to have influenced the line of later ridge and furrow and/or field boundaries. Overall though, most of these extensive systems of fields and enclosures seem to have been largely abandoned in the immediate post-Roman period.

The relatively late period of these field systems is also notable. Unlike the Yorkshire Wolds or areas of southern England there is no evidence for extensive systems of fields laid out during the middle or later Bronze Age. Some large linear earthworks in West and South Yorkshire may be of early to late Iron Age date (Boldrini 1999; Wheelhouse and Burgess 2001), and segmented, shallow ditches excavated at sites such as South Elmsall

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT aerial photographic surveys carried out by Alison Deegan, who also undertook the Lower Wharfedale mapping project (e.g. Deegan 2000, 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2004). Alison Deegan and Christine Cox also plotted Nottinghamshire cropmarks as part of English Heritage’s National Mapping Programme (Deegan 1996, 1999a). Building on previous small-scale research (Chadwick 1998; Cox 1984), an ongoing project is focusing on the Magnesian Limestone areas of West and South Yorkshire and some of the Sherwood Sandstone region; with funding from the Aggregates Levy and English Heritage (AS WYAS 2006; Roberts this volume; Roberts et al. 2004, 2007). When collated, these projects will provide invaluable aid for archaeologists wishing to study these Iron Age and Romano-British landscapes.

(McNaught 2001) may be earlier Iron Age in date. In general though, most of the evidence points to ditched boundaries, trackways and enclosures established during the middle to later Iron Age in many rolling Magnesian Limestone areas, with further developments during the Romano-British period. In the valleys of the Rivers Trent, Don and Idle, and in some cases on the alluvial floodplains themselves, some pit alignments may be Iron Age in date, though others were apparently dug in the Romano-British period (see Knight and Elliott this volume); and these were followed by ditched boundaries in the Iron Age and after the Roman occupation. Across the flat or gently undulating landscapes of the Sherwood Sandstones, what was probably open unenclosed heathland and grassland was increasingly divided up from the late Iron Age onwards, with an apparent expansion of intakes during the second and third centuries AD (see Roberts this volume). There thus seem to have been very local trajectories and phases of boundary creation.

In previous articles I have suggested that the creation, maintenance and reworking of trackway, field system and enclosure ditches during the Iron Age and RomanoBritish periods was part of the reproduction of personal and community identity (Chadwick 1997, 1999). The acts of digging ditches, of delineating enclosures and of constructing and maintaining field systems, were socially meaningful activities. Field system ditches were often up

Prior to 1990 few of these sites had been excavated, but since the publication of PPG 16 (DoE 1990) there has been a dramatic rise in developer-funded investigations within the region. Some of these have included detailed

Figure 13. Cropmarks of attenuated boundaries and ‘clothes line’ enclosures near Bolton upon Dearne, South Yorkshire, SE 4420 0300. Three enclosures are visible underneath the wing of the aircraft – two in the left foreground, including a double-ditched example; and another possible rectangular enclosure just below the road that runs from left to right across the top of the image. Source: D. Riley, 10/07/1976, Sheffield Library of Aerial Photographs 195.

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ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: FIELDS FOR DISCOURSE? with relatively tightly-bound family groups (Thomas 1997).

to 2 metres wide and 1-1.5 metres deep even after modern plough truncation, and would seem to have often been much larger than would be needed simply to stop animals from wandering (Merrony 1993: 51), particularly when combined with banks and/or hedges. Enclosure ditches were often even larger. Whilst ditch systems at low-lying sites such as Balby Carr in South Yorkshire (Jones 2005; Rose 2003; Rose and Roberts 2006) and Mattersey in Nottinghamshire (Morris and Garton 1998) appear to have been concerned with drainage and the manipulation of water flow, for much of the region drainage is not a problem, and this is particularly the case on the freedraining sands and gravels of the Sherwood Sandstones. Such extensive boundaries would have represented considerable investments of labour and resources. The inhabitants of these landscapes may have increasingly identified and defined themselves through certain places and areas of land (Gosden 1997). Ditches were thus as important to delineating what was ‘inside’ boundaries as they were to excluding an ‘outside’ (Chadwick 1997, 1999; Hingley 1990; Robbins 1998). The trend in the later Iron Age towards enclosed settlements has been suggested as relating to an increasing inward concern

Across most Magnesian Limestone and Coal Measures areas, field systems were either nucleated around enclosures, or are more irregular in pattern. These terms are misleading, however, and a more pertinent (though equally subjective) description might be ‘attenuated’. Trackways and major linear boundaries appear to have been the important structuring features within the landscape, as at Swillington Common, Parlington Hollins, north of Micklefield and at Ledston and Wattle Syke (Deegan 2001b; Webb 2006), at Barnsdale Bar, Lundwood, Adwick-le-Street, Scawthorpe and Scabba Wood (Bishop 2001; Chadwick 1998; Deegan 2000, 2001d; Meadows and Chapman 2004). Many minor field boundaries appear to be infilling areas established between the longer boundaries, with subdivisions seem to have been inserted between the longer boundaries. It is also notable that most of the examples of ‘ladder’ or ‘clothes-line’ enclosures within my study region have been identified on the Magnesian Limestone and Coal Measures, again suggesting linear developments.

Figure 14. Cropmarks of co-axial ‘brickwork’ fields near Edenthorpe, South Yorkshire, SE 6250 0750. The parallel ditches running from left to right across the centre of the image represent a large north-south orientated double-ditched trackway or droveway, with blocks on fields on either side of it arranged at slightly different alignments to one another. Source: D. Riley, 31/07/1977, SLAP 381.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT I will briefly consider two areas of ‘brickwork’ fields that have received more intensive archaeological investigation, for these highlight many of the key issues associated with the Iron Age and Romano-British field systems within the study region, and co-axial field systems across Britain in general. On the north-eastern outskirts of Edenthorpe, excavations of part of the ‘brickwork’ field system north of Far Field Road found that the apparently regular co-axial fields actually displayed great variety in the profiles and fills of the ditches (Atkinson 1994). South of Far Field Road was part of a sinuous north-east to south-west orientated trackway, and field boundary ditches laid out to the north and south of this. On cropmarks (Riley 1980: 90, map 4) and following geophysical survey and topsoil stripping, this appeared to be a relatively simple, planned arrangement.

Clusters of small fields or corrals that were associated with many enclosures suggest a basic infield : outfield arrangement, and are thus perhaps more indicative of mixed farming. It may be that, as in the Yorkshire Wolds, informal paths of movement within the landscape that were in use by people and livestock from the later Bronze Age and early Iron Age became ‘formalised’ during the middle and later Iron Age, and marked by double-ditched trackways (q.v. Fenton-Thomas 2003, 2005, this volume; Giles 2007). Some of the longer boundaries may have run for hundreds of metres and may have constituted kinship or even clan boundaries, although these were probably not the ‘large terrains’ or ‘folk territories’ described by Fleming (1998: 51-52). The blocks of fields themselves may have sometimes acted as the cores of such territories, complicated by the fact that many enclosures and field systems may have had adjacent areas of undivided land that was used for intercommoning grazing and other more communal practices.

A complex series of re-cuts and changes in orientation representing at least four different major phases of activity was identified, however (Chadwick 1995a). The double-ditched trackway was shown to have consisted of several different phases of ditches, many displaying sharp ‘dog leg’ turns to the north and south, and it may have formed a ‘usable’ trackway only during some of these phases. Its regular form as a cropmark thus did not reflect its complex stratigraphic and social history. Re-cutting was especially noticeable at ditch junctions, but due to this repeated activity it is highly likely that not all re-cuts were identified (Chadwick 1995b: 45). Furthermore, the re-cuts that were recorded were those that did not exactly match earlier ditch phases – other phases may not have been detected at all. Intriguingly, many ditches also seem to have been recut only after they had largely silted up. This phenomenon was also noted in some of the ditches north of Far Field Road (Atkinson 1994: 21) and at Nutwell Lane, Armthorpe (Cumberpatch and Webster 1998: 19). This suggests that re-cutting was not necessarily linked to functional, everyday ditch maintenance, and also that the routine maintenance of ditches might often be archaeologically invisible. Indeed, in some instances apparently simple silting sequences might only reflect the final abandonment of ditches that had been regularly maintained over time (Chadwick 1999: 161; Magilton 1978: 72). I have previously suggested in earlier articles that such patterns of silting and recutting might have represented fluctuating rights of utilisation, tenure and access, with fields or blocks of fields falling out of use for periods, only to be renewed by communal practices where boundaries were renewed and recut (Chadwick 1997, 1999). There may have been all manner of functional and social factors entangled in such complex reinscriptions.

Co-axial complexities What little archaeological discussion there has been of these field systems has tended to focus on the apparently more regular, co-axial fields (e.g. Branigan 1989; Buckland 1986; Chadwick 1997, 1999; Roberts this volume). These include the ‘brickwork fields named by Riley, and identified in extensive areas to the north-east and south-east of Doncaster and both between and south of Worksop and Retford, spanning southern South Yorkshire and northern Nottinghamshire (Riley 1980: 1314, maps 1, 14). The ‘brickwork’ fields seem to have extended eastwards to East Carr, Mattersey in the Idle Valley, and have been possibly identified as far south as Ramsdale, approximately 10km north of Nottingham, but they have not yet been recorded in the Trent Valley (Garton, Southgate and Leary 2000; Knight, Howard and Leary 2004: 141), although other co-axial systems existed there. Some of the ‘brickwork’ fields may have been laid out in strips and were then subdivided (Deegan 2007), although as I will demonstrate there was often considerably more complexity at a localised level. Limited areas of co-axial fields have also been identified in West Yorkshire, between Barwick in Elmet and Aberford and at Swillington Common (Deegan 2001b, fig. 4, 9a), at Low Common and west of Castleford and Methley on the interfluve of the Rivers Aire and Calder (Burgess and Roberts 2004; Deegan 1999b, 2007), and perhaps at Normanton. These boundaries were generally more sinuous and less rectangular than in the ‘brickwork’ systems, however. In Nottinghamshire, further co-axial fields have also been recorded in the Trent Valley north of Newark (Garton 2002; Whimster 1989: figs. 60-61), and some of these that were partly buried beneath alluvium were investigated at Lamb’s Close, Kelham (Knight and Priest 1998). Other co-axial field systems have been noted at South Muskham (Garton, Leary and Naylor 2002; Whimster 1989). Although these fields were rectangular in shape, they varied more in size than ‘brickwork’ fields.

The most extensive investigation of ‘brickwork’ pattern fields to date has taken place on the eastern side of Armthorpe, South Yorkshire (see Roberts this volume). Here, although Riley had recorded few cropmarks (1980: 61, map 9), more detailed aerial photographic analysis and geophysical survey in advance of the construction of an industrial estate added more information (Deegan 2001a; Hale 1996). There have been a series of 224

ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: FIELDS FOR DISCOURSE?

Figure 15. Some of the major changes of alignment identified during excavations of ‘brickwork’ fields at Edenthorpe by the South Yorkshire Archaeology Unit. Source: A.M. Chadwick, from Chadwick 1995a, figs. 15-18.

field systems belies their apparent regularity on aerial photographs and large-scale plans.

evaluations and extensive excavations undertaken principally by Archaeological Services WYAS (Burgess and Richardson 2003; Chadwick and Richardson 2007; Gidman and Rose 2004; Richardson 2001; Rose and Richardson 2004), but also by other units (Cumberpatch and Webster 1998; Hughes 2006). Many archaeological features not previously identified on aerial photographs or geophysical plots were found only once areas were stripped of topsoil and left to weather. I do not wish to repeat the more expansive description and discussion already outlined previously in this volume by Ian Roberts (see above), but I do wish to focus on a particularly interesting example of how the complexity of excavated

At Lincolnshire Way and West Moor Park East, Armthorpe (Gidman and Rose 2004; Rose and Richardson 2004), approximately 500m of an east-west trackway was recorded, with field ditches arranged south and north of this, some at 40m intervals, and another at twice this distance (Gidman and Rose 2004). To the east at Lincolnshire Way, an apparently regular junction had trackways leading off in four directions (Area 2), the one to the north joining another north-west to south-east aligned trackway. In the northern part of Lincolnshire 225

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT fields and trackways seem to have been added to each other in stages to expand enclosure to the north and east. It is not yet clear whether these different stages took place over years, decades or generations (I favour decades at least), but the more complicated stratigraphic sequence nonetheless still highlights the greater landscape complexity involved. This process was similar in some respects to Balby Carr in South Yorkshire, where a mid-late Iron Age ‘open’ settlement of scattered roundhouses seems to have gradually been incorporated into a system of nucleated enclosures and a curvilinear trackway throughout the late Iron Age and RomanoBritish period (Jones 2005; Rose 2003; Rose and Roberts 2006). At this extremely interesting site (see Roberts this volume), the low-lying settlement might only have been occupied during summer and autumn, and may have been associated with the seasonal grazing of livestock. There were few indications of arable cultivation and crop processing, which must have taken place on slightly higher, drier ground elsewhere. The gradual enclosure of this landscape might have reflected changes in tenure, perhaps from communal access to increasing claims by particular clans, families or individuals. Again, at Balby Carr there was considerably more stratigraphic complexity and greater time depth than the aerial photographs indicated. These landscapes seem regular only when people examine them at a broad scale and fail to note the discrepancies evident in detail. In contrast to some of the fields on Magnesian Limestone and Coal Measures areas, where later subdivisions often took place within longer linear boundaries established for lengthy periods, on the Sherwood Sandstones individual fields and blocks of fields were added accretively to one another over time.

Way (Area 1), part of another double ditched trackway and fields or enclosures were recorded (Rose and Richardson 2004). In plan and as large-scale illustrations, all these ditches seemed to be regular features that were laid out as part of a cohesive planned landscape, perhaps even in a single phase. This apparent uniformity breaks down under more detailed scrutiny. In Area 1 at Lincolnshire Way, closer examination of plans and sections indicate that the field called Enclosure B was added to the earlier Enclosure A, and the east-west trackway ditch and entrance to the north were only added later, and then in a third phase the northern ditches of Enclosures A and B were also re-cut as a single entity (Ditch 2), forming the southern part of a broadly eastwest orientated double-ditched trackway (Fig. 16A). Variations in ditch width and alignment also suggest greater stratigraphic and temporal complexity. In Area 2, the field of Enclosure I was succeeded by Enclosure J, and then these were once more recut as a single entity to produce Ditch 13, the southern part of another trackway. At this time, or subsequently, Ditch 15 was created as a subdivision to form Enclosure K (Fig. 16B). Trackways only became double-ditched constructs only in the later recuts that were recorded (Rose and Richardson 2004). The east-west trackway formed by Ditches 6 and 13 was also subsequently restricted or blocked in an even later phase. The trackway junctions were ‘staggered’ and clearly not constructed in one phase. Although Enclosure H may have been broadly contemporary with Enclosure I , it is unlikely that Enclosures G and C were. Enclosure F not only post-dated Enclosure I but was also added onto Enclosure E, which had in turn been added to Enclosure D. Given the layout, it seems possible that Enclosures G and C post-dated Enclosures H and I, and that Enclosure C and Enclosure D were then added to extend the system northwards. Enclosures E and F then ‘filled in’ the gap to extend the fields eastwards. That fields were added incrementally to one another also suggests that trackways were important routes before they were eventually ‘formalised’ with double ditches. At West Moor Park East, some of the apparently regularly spaced field boundaries were actually on slightly different alignments to one another (Gidman and Rose 2004), and at least one ditch may have been a later addition. Furthermore, the trackways and field boundaries at Lincolnshire Way and West Moor Park East were only later components in a long-lived landscape. Excavations to the west at West Moor Park revealed late Iron Age and early RomanoBritish nucleated fields, trackways and a trapezoidal enclosure with metalworking evidence (Cowgill 2001; Richardson 2001). At West Moor Park II, several funnelshaped entrances into double-ditched trackways were excavated, along with small enclosures and insubstantial shelters associated with ovens (Chadwick and Richardson 2007).

On Dartmoor and Salisbury Plain, earlier co-axial field systems have sometimes been described as ‘terrain oblivious’, with main boundaries not conforming closely to the natural topography of hills and valleys (e.g. Fleming 1987: 190; McOmish, Field and Brown 2002: 53-55). But once again, detailed consideration of the published plans from Salisbury Plain and Dartmoor suggests this assertion is far too simplistic (Johnston 2001a, 2005a; Wickstead 2007). Within my study region, Alison Deegan and Graham Robbins have both cogently argued that many of the trackways and long boundaries within apparently regular co-axial blocks of fields were orientated towards valleys and rivers (Deegan 1996; Robbins 1998). More recent GIS analyses as part of the Magnesian Limestone Project demonstrate that field systems on both Magnesian Limestone and Sherwood Sandstone areas were actually rather terrain sensitive (Roberts et al. 2007). Co-axial field systems were thus not ‘inherently inflexible’ in their design (contra Fleming 1987: 190). Trackways in particular often made use of slopes and subtle folds of ground. Within the north midlands, the work of Alison Deegan, Graham Robbins and my own PhD research has also clearly demonstrated that most ‘brickwork’ fields were constructed so that they avoided the river valleys, and instead were laid out to follow very subtle ‘ridges’ and ‘peninsulas’ of slightly higher ground. This pattern is so striking that it cannot

The Armthorpe fields thus developed in a (at a very local level at least) relatively piecemeal fashion, albeit probably in line with a longer-term overall goal. The 226

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Figure 16. Detail of Areas 1 (18A) and 2 (18B) excavated at Lincolnshire Way, Armthorpe by Archaeological Services WYAS. The varying ditch widths and the staggered nature of the trackway junctions also indicates a landscape that developed over time. Source: A. Leaver, after Rose and Richardson 2004, fig. 4, fig. 7.

227

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT fields or paddocks associated with these enclosures appear to have been added to one another in an irregular, even piecemeal manner over time. This may again suggest fleeting, possibly seasonal inhabitation. A few enclosures in the region such as an example at Ackton near Pontefract and an enclosure group at Pastures Road near Mexborough had very wide (20-30m), pronounced trackways or droveways approaching them. These may also have had a role in livestock movements, although such impressive ‘avenues’ may also have been caught up in discourses of display and power.

simply be a result of alluviation and peat formation over blocks of fields within river valleys. Furthermore, many areas of co-axial fields seem to have occurred in distinctive ‘blocks’, rather than being surviving fragments of one vast, overall terrain oblivious system. As with some blocks of co-axial fields on Dartmoor therefore (Brück, Johnston and Wickstead 2003; Johnston 2005a), and as GIS-based studies in East Anglia have also demonstrated (see Martin this volume), more detailed excavation and analysis of the field systems, trackways and enclosures in Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire is suggesting that the apparent regularity of even the most regular co-axial field systems is often illusory.

Continuity and tradition, complexity and change Many higher areas on the Magnesian Limestone and Coal Measures areas were not enclosed either, or at least not to the same degree, with blocks of fields occupying the land between the hilltops and ridgelines, and the valley bottoms (Roberts et al. 2007). Elsewhere, boundaries and fields were much more irregular, and very different in nature to the co-axial blocks. At locations such as South Kirkby and South Hiendley in West Yorkshire; and a series of sites located close to one another at Wombwell Wood, Woodhead Opencast Site and Jump all near Barnsley in South Yorkshire, there seem to have been clusters of enclosures linked to trackways, with some of these enclosures being similar in form to the distinctive middle and later Iron Age ‘banjo’ enclosures of southern England (e.g. Cunliffe 2005: 247; Fasham 1987: 8-9). This may suggest a function as upland livestock corrals (Chadwick 2007, in prep.). Few of these more elevated enclosures have been excavated, but those that have been such as an isolated example at Upton (Roberts 1995) and two at Woodhead Opencast Site (Jones 2003) do not indicate the sustained domestic occupation that might have reflected year-round inhabitation. Again, some of these enclosures may only have been occupied on a temporary and/or seasonal basis.

There has been much discussion of why co-axial field systems developed in many different parts of Britain, and during different periods (e.g. Bradley 1978; Fleming 1985, 1987, 1989, 1998; Hayes 1981; Peterson 1990). Peterson (1990: 590) suggested that the idea of co-axial fields persisted throughout the prehistoric and historic past because it ‘met the needs of its users’ when it came to functional and practical considerations of relatively equitable land allotment. Whilst not ruling these factors out, in a cogent article Fleming suggested that social reasons also lay behind the repeated but intermittent emergence of co-axial systems in different periods, and that these were powerful concepts that may have been supported and perpetuated by oral tradition, ideology or even ritual specialists (Fleming 1985, 1987: 197-198). There is clearly a tension in many of these arguments between the possible role of hierarchical authorities and social elites in ‘designing’ such large-scale enterprises, and the part played by communal discussion, planning and organisation in small-scale and (perhaps) more egalitarian and heterarchical communities. As has been suggested for Dartmoor, apparently highly regular field systems may have developed progressively over time through relatively small-scale additions and accretions, yet these developments still took place within a wider social framework or plan of future enclosure (Johnston 2005a). They were the result of traditional, communal practices based on shared seasonal and daily routines (q.v. Robbins 1998). If Hayes’ statistical analyses are accurate (Hayes 1981: 110-111), then the dimensions of many Iron Age and Romano-British ‘brickwork’ fields in particular blocks seem to have been internally similar to one another, but slightly different to those of fields in adjacent groupings. Moreover, some of these differences identified through cluster analysis appeared to be associated with particular enclosures, suggesting subtle variations between different households or families, or perhaps different age grades, generations and other social distinctions. In the future, GIS-based analyses may be able to pursue this possibility further on a much wider scale. For example, as part of the recent Magnesian Limestone Project Alison Deegan has also been able to identify some further groupings of fields based on their size, through GIS analyses (Deegan 2007).

An interesting group of enclosures, fields and trackways has been investigated at at Barnsdale Bar East, where the geophysical survey and evaluation trenching work undertaken to date has revealed few internal features and little Romano-British pottery (O’Neill 1999). The lack of artefacts, palaeo-environmental evidence of arable agriculture or crop processing suggest that there was no focus of ‘domestic’ inhabitation nearby, and also that these fields and enclosures might have been used mostly for pastoral practices. These subsquare and D-shaped enclosures may thus have also been mainly animal pens or corrals, and were situated to the east and south of a more obvious focus of enclosures and fields, on the north-facing slope of a ridge with ground falling away to the north, east and south. They occupied the very edge of the Magnesian Limestone hills, with a flat, low-lying area to the north-east formed by the floodplain of the River Went. This would have been an ideal ecotonal location between the undulating limestone upland pastures and the valley bottom grazing, and may have been where animals were concentrated at key times of the year during their movement on and off the floodplain. The small groups of 228

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Figure 17. Cropmarks at North Muskham in the Trent Valley of Nottinghamshire, SK 7990 6000. Ring ditches/round barrows, pit alignments, trackways, field boundaries, enclosures and roundhouses all indicate extremely complex predominantly later prehistoric and Romano-British inhabitation. Source: D. Riley, 06/06/1976, SLAP 1314.

individuals or families. As is often the case in colonial situations, the development of private land ownership is often accompanied by the confiscation and enclosure of much ‘surplus’ land that may previously have had wider rights of tenure and access (q.v. Sissons 2005). It also often initiates processes of peasantisation and the creation of landless or tied labourers.

Such arguments are not exclusive of course, and it is highly likely that practical considerations of land use, land allotment and land division in previously unenclosed areas of the landscape were also influenced by the habitus and powerful social notions of practice and the right ways of ‘going on’ in the world. Such fields did not require sophisticated methods of measurement and survey (Wickstead 2002; Widgren 1990; contra Peterson 1993, 1997). Whenever communities decided to enclose previously unbounded areas, co-axial field blocks probably allowed a relatively orderly and perhaps more equitable intake of these areas, even if this enclosure perhaps took place over many decades or generations rather than the more rapid construction occasionally envisaged by some authors (cf. Fleming 1988: 107-108; Herring this volume). We must also be aware, however, of the possibility that superficially similar co-axial systems, even those of similar dates in adjoining areas, might have resulted from very different tenurial systems. In the middle and later Iron Age of the north midlands and Yorkshire, it is possible that there was intercommoning of livestock on unenclosed river floodplains and upland heaths, and many blocks of fields may have had access and rights of tenure determined according to kinship and family ties. Following the Roman conquest of the north, although many of these rights might have persisted amongst local communities, for the first time areas of land may have become alienated and capable of being bought and sold and owned by particular

Fleming himself has moved back and forth from hierarchical planning to communal decision making in his explanations for Dartmoor’s reave systems. Some form of long-term planning almost certainly took place in most co-axial systems, and it is possible that relatively few people within a population were making those decisions (elders and perhaps, although less likely, elites). Nevertheless, the variations within even apparently regular field blocks suggests that this planning probably took place at a localised level, as a result of discussions and negotiations amongst communities organised along kinship and clan lines (Fleming 1988: 108; Hannan 1972: 169; Shipton 1984: 616-618; Widgren 1990: 18-19). Here was structure, backed up by the power of leading individuals, lineages or the collective will of communities. Once one or two individuals and families had decided to take in land in such a manner, however, others might then have followed suit. Here too was agency, manifested as dynamic processes within the fields and changes in inheritance and rights of access and tenure. There were renegotiations and reinterpretations, 229

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT identity, land and tenure may have been at work. Furthermore, as discussed above, co-axial field systems and an apparent degree of uniformity need not reflect either a relatively short-lived planning and construction process, nor the existence of a centralised, hierarchical social authority. In seeking to explain the complexity of these field systems, our arguments must not be simplistic, and we must embrace this complexity, rather than being wary of it. A landward resonance5 Fields and field systems were always (and are) far more than functional boundaries and units of agricultural production. The lifeworlds of people and animals were intimately connected to their landscapes through daily and seasonal physical engagements with fields, trackways and settlements. Throughout prehistory and history, the inhabited, enculturated landscape was a complex mosaic of named and remembered places, paths, trackways and constructions, and pragmatically re-used or forgotten features. Field systems were the product of intricate geographies of interlocking or overlapping tenure, interwoven with personal and family biographies and genealogies. Individual and communal identities and ideas of historicity may have been linked to notions of land, ‘blood’, boundaries and the health and well-being of animals (q.v. Bauman 1992; Gray 1999: 450; Lele 2006: 65-66). This could be a source of personal or family and community pride, or alternatively, of despair and the ridicule of others. Aspects of individual people’s identities such as gender, age and status were reproduced through everyday activities, in addition to more ritualised acts such as feasts and seasonal gatherings. Communal and kinship identity was maintained through harvests, animal round-ups and practices such as inter-commoning, and reinforced through the labour and social co-operation necessary in the creation, upkeep and tenure of fields and enclosures. At the same time, however, we must be careful not to produce accounts that invoke a notion of timeless rural practices and romanticised rustic identies. These were very dynamic landscapes, always in flux, with rights of tenure and access, use and disuse all changing over time.

Figure 18. Oscar Aldred standing by a later prehistoric double orthostat stone wall surviving in woodland at Gray Hill, Llanfair Discoed, Monmouthshire, after clearance of scrub. A small clearance cairn has been added to the boundary. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

and some boundaries and fields were maintained or reused whilst others fell out of use. Yet in some archaeological accounts there sometimes seems to be an implicit assumption that field systems represented either an intensification or extensification of agriculture, and that all the area within a demarcated field was utilised, and/or that the fields in a system were all under cultivation or in active use as pasture at approximately the same time. None of these assumptions need be correct (see Helen Lewis and Maria Petersson this volume), and there are useful discussions elsewhere of the many problems in identifying either agricultural intensification or extensification through surviving archaeological features and faunal and palaeobotanical remains (e.g. Van der Veen and O’Connor 1998). Communal rights, negotiations and endeavour were probably more important than centralised planning (Fleming 1994; Johnston 2001a, 2001b, 2005a; Robbins 1998; Wickstead 2002, 2004, 2007). These field systems were not static and cohesive units, but dynamic and diverse entities that varied greatly across time and space. GIS analyses are beginning to show the variations in even the most regular appearing field systems (Martin this volume; Roberts et al. 2007). Given this geographic and temporal span and increasing evidence for considerable complexity, explanations for co-axiality and the appearance of these field systems within the study region are thus most likely to lie in changes of social and tenurial relations, rather than as functional adaptations to particular environmental conditions. The wide range of landscapes in which they appeared across Britain throughout prehistory and history, but also the fact they did not appear everywhere, suggests that they were the product of particular social conditions – such as when previously unenclosed land was divided up over time amongst a community. The social processes influencing these developments might have varied enormously – in some places demographic pressure may indeed have been responsible (Roberts this volume; Shipton 1994), but in other instances more profound changes in notions of

5 This expression is taken from John Lister-Kaye’s Song of the Rolling Earth (2003), an evocative (if slightly romanticised) account of wildlife, human history and work in and around the Aigas Field Centre that he established in 1977 in the Scottish Highlands. In that book, he describes the life and practices of Highland crofters including Bella Macrae, an elderly neighbour of his: Crofters come in many forms… [Crofting]…can combine itself inextricably with community life – the post, nursing, road maintenance, regular trades, forestry and many other activities; but almost inevitably it returns to the land. Agriculture, or at least basic farming, is at the very heart of its origins – a native people living off their land. Bella was never happier than when she was at work on her croft. There was about her an emanation, a landward resonance that pealed like bells, and of which I was deeply envious. The gleam in her eye, the ready smile and the calluses of her old fingers reflected the land as it, in its own way, bowed graciously to the labours of her hands. (Lister-Kaye 2003: 186-187, my addition in parentheses).

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ADRIAN M. CHADWICK: FIELDS FOR DISCOURSE? Roddy Regan, John Roberts, Graham Robbins, Gary Robinson, John Thomas and Nick Wells. It has been a real pleasure working at Gray Hill with Joshua Pollard; and also Mike Hamilton, Paul Huckfield, Jane Masters, Hazel O’Neill, Rick Peterson, Adrian Pigeon, Dawn Powell, Dave Roberts, Gary Robinson, Chris Timmins, Nick Wells, Helen Wickstead and Samantha Williams who all helped supervise students and volunteers at Gray Hill, and contributed much through their recording and their interpretative ideas. Helen Lewis and Phillip Toms have provided insightful specialist comments and scientific analyses. Anne Leaver has been most patient with me over the years in preparing some of her excellent illustrations for the Gray Hill project, and she helped considerably in organising and co-ordinating the fieldwork there.

Earlier traces of occupation and older monuments and boundaries within the landscape were used as mnemonic anchoring points for people’s ‘identity work’ and the stories, songs and myths that ould have been associated with this. In the past, people were not able to calculate population growth or measure climatic fluctuations. Although they would undoubtedly have been aware of their effects, given the length of time over which these changes operated the people who inhabited landscapes were unlikely to have understood their problems in such terms. It is therefore unreasonable to use these alone as archaeological explanations. Similarly, fields, enclosures and trackways were not a static, meaning-less backdrop to the dull miasma of people’s rustic existences, harsh and occasionally brutal as these lives may have been. On the contrary, they were meaning-full and held great social, historical, political and symbolic significance. Archaeologists must not ignore the ordinary lives and taskscapes of the majority of people who created and dwelt within field systems. Tools and techniques such as GIS and HLC undoubtedly have a valuable role to play in researching issues of tenure and access, as long as we do not relegate the beliefs and endeavours of people in the past to overly reductive mapping exercises and dry, functional accounts of agricultural production. Ultimately, it is the complex, embodied taskscapes of these past people that we should be exploring.

Finally, I would particularly like to thank Helen Wickstead. Her work on land allotment and the Bronze Age landscapes of Dartmoor has been a source of continued intellectual stimulation for me. She coorganised the TAG session on The Archaeology of Land Allotment with me at Manchester University in 2002, and has also worked with me on Gray Hill. I have benefited enormously from all of her help, advice and encouragement over the years. Bibliography

Acknowledgements Adams, M. 1991. A logic of archaeological inference. Journal of Theoretical Archaeology 2: 1-11. Ainsworth, S. and Barnatt, J. 1998. A scarp-edge enclosure at Gardom’s Edge, Baslow, Derbyshire. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 118: 5-23. Aldred, O. and Fairclough, G. 2003. Historic Landscape Characterisation. Taking Stock of the Method. The National HLC Review 2002. London: English Heritage and Somerset County Council. Atkinson, S. 1994. An archaeological evaluation at Far Field Road, Edenthorpe. In S.P. Whiteley and C.G. Cumberpatch (eds.) Archaeology in South Yorkshire 1993-1994. Sheffield: SYAS, pp. 19-21. Bagnall-Oakley, M.E. and Bagnall-Oakley, W. 1889. An Account of Some of the Rude Stone Monuments and Ancient Burial Mounds in Monmouthshire. Newport: Monmouthshire and Caerleon Antiquarian Association. Barnatt, J., Bevan, B. and Edmonds, M. 2002. Gardom’s Edge: a landscape through time. Antiquity 76: 50-56. Barrett, J.C. 1988. Fields of discourse: reconstituting a social archaeology. Critique of Anthropology 7: 5-16. Barrett, J.C., Bradley, R. and Green, M. 1991. Landscape, Monuments and Society. The Prehistory of Cranborne Chase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bastow, M. and Murray, M. 1990. Botanical remains. In S. Wrathmell and A. Nicholson (eds.) Dalton Parlours. Iron Age Settlement and Roman Villa. Wakefield: West Yorkshire Archaeology Service, pp. 259-267.

My interest in field systems and land allotment of all periods has benefited enormously from the influence of many people. Andrew Fleming first awoke my curiosity in prehistoric and medieval field systems during a particularly wet and windy two weeks on Dartmoor in April 1988 when I was a young undergraduate student. Bob Sydes and Colin Merrony introduced me to the Iron Age and Romano-British field systems of South Yorkshire when I worked for the South Yorkshire Archaeology Unit in the early 1990s. I had the good fortune then of also meeting the late Derrick Riley, the person who brought these past landscapes in the north midlands to wider attention. Subsequently, Fraser Brown, Andrea Burgess, Chris Cumberpatch, Glyn Davies, Alison Deegan, Vince Devine, Daryl Garton, Kate Howell, David Knight, Louisa Matthews, Jim McNeill, Richard O’Neill, Jane Richardson, Graham Robbins, Ian Roberts, Roy Sykes, Alistair Webb and Paul Wheelhouse have all provided me with useful information and valued discussion. Robert Johnston and Colin Merrony provided access to the Sheffield Library of Aerial Photographs (SLAP), and gave me permission to reproduce copies of Derrick Riley’s photographs. For general inspiration and informative conversation I also owe a great deal to Oscar Aldred, Tim Allen, Bill Bevan, Joanna Brück, Andrea Burgess, Anwen Cooper, Chris Cumberpatch, Mark Edmonds, Chris Ellis, Helen Evans, Duncan Garrow, Catriona Gibson, Melanie Giles, Bob Johnston, Willy Kitchen, Mark Knight, Helen Lewis, Lesley McFadyen, Joshua Pollard, Rachel Pope, 231

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Nineteenth-century drystone-walled droveway near Ysgwbor-newydd, Crickhowell, Powys, looking towards the ‘crush’ and gate at the end of the droveway. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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‘The pleasant land of counterpane’:1 linking site-specific archaeological land use to the landscape of prehistoric field systems Helen Lewis Introduction1

interpretations are engaging and important, but can be problematic in prehistoric landscapes with a limited understanding of ancient land use practices, and thereby how agriculture and agricultural change fit into the picture. In addition, the models generated may produce a rather simplified view, even of large-scale social meanings of the origins of field systems. Work on historic subdivided field development has produced several alternate and interwoven interpretations as to their origins and meanings (see Dodgshon 1981 and Fowler 1981a, 1981b for reviews), and there is no reason to assume that prehistoric systems were any more simple in their social meanings.

The ‘archaeology of land allotment’ is a somewhat simplistic name for a field of study that entails much more complex social decisions and actions than the division and inheritance of land, not that these are simple processes! Field systems are multifunctional and symbolic, and merit study through a wide range of approaches and perspectives. The field as a feature deserves more attention in landscape archaeology, not least because it forces one to address the perceived nature: culture divide, by presenting a spatial and temporal physical entity and cultural construct in which these two categories are conjoined. Fields and field systems are places with a variety of meanings, and our attempts to understand them and their social importance will always be partial if we focus on one set of meanings only.

Although some authors suggest otherwise (e.g. Dodgshon 1980; Doolittle 1984), land allotment, inheritance and division are known historically, and are intuitively felt regarding prehistory, to necessarily relate to land use practices on both local and regional scales. At the very least, major changes in land holding systems and related power structures must have some impact on the way in which agriculture is practised. This approach is supported by ethnographic and historical comparisons (e.g. Chisholm 1962; Goodman and Redclift 1981; Marsden 1988, 1989; Roberts 1996), and has been expressed by several archaeologists with regard to early field systems in Britain (e.g. Bradley 1978b, 1978c; Cunliffe 2004). Many authors have suggested that it was developments in, responses to, or the introduction of agriculture that drove the construction of field systems (Bell 1981; Burgess 1980; Case 1977; Childe 1949; Renfrew 1973, 1976).

The study of fields, and especially field systems, has a long history in the archaeology of Britain (e.g. Bowen 1961; Curwen and Curwen 1923; Feachem 1973; Hall 1981; Taylor 1975, 1981). However, only rarely in early research were fields studied from a perspective that integrated the ‘subsistence’ with the ‘domestic’ and ‘ritual’ arenas, despite the spatial relationships existing between fields, dwellings, pathways, boundaries and burial monuments in later prehistory, and despite the social relationships these presumably represented. This has changed more recently with a developing landscape approach in archaeological research, the increase in contract-based landscape-scale excavations, and the invention and refinement of methods for investigating ancient land use practices.

Some more recent interpretations of prehistoric landscapes still follow this view. For example, Barrett (1994) suggests that in the Wessex area of southern England, there was an increase in arable agriculture from the middle Bronze Age, which was also the onset of field system construction. But what he and other authors are actually discussing is the importance of increasing land tenure to the development of field systems, and the appearance of substantial, semi-permanent buildings as markers of sedentism (Bradley 1980; Whittle 1996, 1997). They have not attempted any complex modelling of local agricultural prehistories. Barrett relies heavily on ethnographic analogies (such as models developed by Boserup 1965 and 1970, and Goody 1976), which relate land tenure and farming practices in ‘universal’ models. Does the archaeological evidence of farming in the area actually support the use of such models? Despite the confidence with which scholars relate agricultural to social changes in ancient Wessex, the archaeological

Approaches to the meanings of field systems – why land use is important Land allotment is only one aspect of the meaning of field systems. There has been an understandable but limiting, architectural focus on the interpretation of field systems regarding typology and the spatial macro-organisation of the landscape, usually within the framework of political organisation and the social implications of field system establishment. The connection between a prehistoric field system and the activities occurring within it has often been lost in discussions of the onset of sedentism, the organisation of economic systems, or the socio-political and symbolic meanings of enclosure. These 1 Quote taken from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses (1952: 33).

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT remains such as ‘domestic’ structures and burials. Recent examples from contract archaeology include excavations at Heathrow (Andrews, Barrett and Lewis 2000; Batt and Gibson 2003), several sites in Cambridgeshire (Evans and Knight 2000, 2001; Knight 2002a, 2002b; Mortimer 1997), sites along the line of the Dorchester bypass (Allen 1997), Reading Business Park (Brossler 2001; Moore and Jennings 1992), and Yarnton (Hey and Bell 1999). Some of these projects have attempted to combine issues of function and meaning in their approaches to and interpretations of fields in these landscapes. More indepth studies (including many of the papers in this volume) have seen field systems as part of the settlement landscape, with a deeper historical approach to change and continuity in the relationships between fields and other archaeological site types. They have also been investigating the relationship between field systems, ancient agriculture, and the historic physical landscape (e.g. Brück, Johnston and Wickstead 2003; Chadwick et al. 2003; Frodsham and Waddington 2004; Topping 2004). Some of these studies have included relatively new site-specific approaches such as soil micromorphology (e.g. the Fenland studies in French 2003).

evidence of land use practices, especially in the periods pre-dating field system construction, is still ambiguous. In order to address this, further research is needed into what practices were carried out in field systems, and what was happening in the agricultural landscape beyond the settlements and monuments before the field systems ‘appeared’. As methodological approaches become more sophisticated, field systems are growing in importance within archaeology, as places to study the interaction between land use and landscape, and nature and culture. Land use is vital to discussions of ‘universal’ social relationships such as those between sedentism and arable farming, and mobility and hunter-gatherer/pastoralist groups. In addition to the social importance of land use practices, understanding what people were doing in the landscape beyond the site is an important part of a phenomenological approach to the archaeological landscape, an approach that aims to explore how past people were ‘engaged with the world’ (Hodder 1999). Fields in the landscape – the growing need to understand land use

However, much work continues to rely heavily on settlement-based evidence, such as the seeds and animal bones found in ‘domestic’ contexts, which inform us only inferentially what was happening in the immediate landscape beyond the site. The limitations of combining this data with regional models of land use and landscape development have become increasingly clear. Where there are few appropriate domestic contexts, as in much of Neolithic and early Bronze Age southern England, one inference may be that any agricultural practices (or changes therein) had a minimal impact upon the landscape. Such an argument might be based on the rarity of structural remains such as field systems and settlements, and consequently, the lack of suitable contexts for archaeobotanical and archaeozoological assemblage preservation. But the lack of such contexts in these earlier periods does not mean that pre-field system agriculture in the region was simple in organisation, or rare in occurrence. Indeed, there is archaeological evidence for predominantly pastoral but also arable land use in existence throughout these periods in many locations (Ashbee, Smith and Evans 1979; Bonney 1978; Evans 1971a, 1971b, 1972; Fowler and Evans 1967; Helbaek 1952; Johnston 1963; G. Jones 2000; M. Jones 1980; McInnes 1971; Smith 1971; Smith et al. 1981). Landscape archaeology should aim to understand this agriculture, and to investigate whether it did change in association with field system construction or consolidation.

There have been some fascinating results from the small number of research studies into land use and fields, and from the increased excavation of prehistoric field systems in Britain through developer-funded contract archaeology. However, there remain very few investigations aimed at relating the establishment, development, decline or continuity of prehistoric field systems to local land use histories. One approach oriented towards the agricultural economy has related the architectural form, typologies and introduction of fields and field systems to labour organisation, technology, production and the sustainability of farming systems, both on microeconomic and macroeconomic scales (e.g. Bowen 1975, Curwen and Hatt 1953; Fenton 1994; Lerche and Steensberg 1980; Payne 1947). Fleming’s seminal work on Dartmoor is particularly influential, dealing with political, social and economic issues (e.g. Fleming 1978, 1985, 1988, 1989a, 1989b, 1994). Many studies have focused on past land use and agricultural goals as a means for understanding land allotment, but most interpretations have been based on little evidence of the actual practices carried out within fields. The shape, size and location of so-called ‘Celtic’ fields for instance, have defined the organisation of Bronze Age agriculture in southern Britain, along with the ‘economic’ evidence found in associated domestic structural remains, and from regional environmental evidence such as pollen (Bradley 1978a, 1980; Drewett 1978, 1982; Fowler 1971; Thorley 1981).

There have been some discussions of how field systems related to ancient arable and/or pastoral farming practices (Allen and Robinson 1993; Entwistle and Grant 1989; Fleming 1978, 1989b), and even whether field boundaries related to agricultural change at all (e.g. Brück 2000; Chadwick 2004; Edmonds 1995; Ralph 1982). The increased evidence for both arable farming and stock

Much work continues to focus on either mapping field systems, providing further information on their distribution and form, or studying the relationships between ancient field systems and other archaeological 240

‘HELEN LEWIS: THE PLEASANT LAND OF COUNTERPANE’ often been limited spatially and temporally however, due to the sometimes poor preservation of early soils and field remains. They have also been theoretically limited, through a divisive disciplinary position separating ‘economic’ from settlement, ritual or monument based interpretations, and through a failure to appreciate that science-based approaches are interpretative and ideagenerating archaeological tools (Bridges and Catizzone 1996; Macphail, Courty and Gebhardt 1990; McGlade 1995).

rearing from the later Bronze Age is surely at least as much related to the presence of suitable contexts for the preservation of palaeo-environmental assemblages, as it is to any change in land use or agricultural production. There is certainly a dramatic change in the social organisation of the landscape, and this must reflect and/or have influenced the agricultural landscape. But the practice of interpreting ancient land use in the landscape on the basis of settlement and structural evidence is an incomplete approach. While these types of data do tell us something about agriculture in society, they do not allow us to closely tie agriculture to the land or to changes of land use in the landscape. They limit our power to investigate land use in situ, and thus to connect people to the land they inhabited, used and perceived.

There have been several recent projects where methods generating site-specific land use information have been used to target the link between land use, settlement and monuments (e.g. Cleal, Allen and Newman 1994; French 2003; French and Lewis 2007; French et al. 2001, 2003; French and Pryor 1993; Kooistra and Kooistra 2003). The increased application of such approaches potentially allows us to ‘fill in’ the spatial gaps between settlements, monuments, cemeteries and field boundaries. A further goal is to increase our understanding of the complexity of ancient agricultural systems. The results of such approaches show that changes in agricultural practice do leave impacts in the places where land use was practised, and this data can refine and generate both methodological and theoretical approaches to prehistory.

Studying land use in fields The investigation of ancient field systems and their place in the landscape has benefited greatly from the further development of site-specific scientific applications. These include soil pollen analysis, soil micromorphology, molluscan and phytolith studies, phosphate and other chemical analyses, and refinements in soil and sediment dating. Together with the detailed investigation of the archaeological, pedogenic and sedimentary contexts of ancient fields and land use indicators, these have provided valuable evidence for the construction of local palaeo-environmental and archaeological sequences. Prior to this, there was relatively little that could be done to generate the site-specific data needed for incorporating field system use as well as their form, relative date and spatial distribution into holistic models of ancient social organisation. And there was little chance of directly assessing how landscape changes like the development of co-axial field systems were related to changes in land use, or to changes in ancient concepts of appropriate ways of organising agriculture. Advances in these methods have been mostly brought about through increased application, although there have been some completely new innovations, such as lipid biomarker analysis and the detailed study of phosphates (Englemark and Linderholm 1996; Entwistle, Abrahams and Dodgshon 1998; Evershed and Bethell 1996; Evershed 1997; Liversage et al. 1987; Simpson et al. 1999).

The Wyke Down Project This form of integrated approach was the basis of the Wyke Down Project in Dorset, England (French 2003; French and Lewis 2007; French et al. 2001, 2003) (Figure 1). One of the project’s main goals was to identify changes in the agricultural landscape assumed to relate to the establishment of field systems in the middle Bronze Age, through a major study of site-specific and regional land use indicators such as soil, palaeo-environmental and erosion evidence. In contrast to models proposing a relationship between agricultural change and the development of field systems and associated settlement in the Bronze Age, no major changes relating to land use were evident from the early Neolithic to at least the early Iron Age (contra Barrett 1994). Specifically, there was no evidence for a largely wooded Neolithic landscape, unlike findings from other areas and some previous archaeological models (e.g. Edmonds 1995; French et al. 2003). In addition, no major change in land use practices in the middle Bronze Age was identified; in contrast to previous assumptions about the field system and erosion and pollen evidence elsewhere (e.g. Barrett, Bradley and Green 1991; Bradley 1984; Wilkinson 2003). Instead, the soils, sediments, molluscan and pollen evidence all indicated a long-term, open and largely cropped grassland (or pastoral) landscape throughout the Neolithic and Bronze Age. This only changed during the Iron Age, when wind-blown deposits in ditch fills suggest the presence of bare land, and in the medieval period, when colluvial sediments were deposited in dry valleys. The implication is a sequence of grazing focus during the Neolithic-Bronze

The continuing application of site-specific land use approaches will bring a clearer and more holistic understanding of the history of field systems, and the relationship between agricultural and settlement activities in the past. The most successful applications to date are on historic field systems (Carter et al. 1997; Davidson and Carter 1998; Simpson, Tveraabak and Bryant 1998, Simpson et al. 1999), or on sedimentary deposits assumed to relate to prehistoric agricultural practices (Allen 1988, 1992, 1994b; Bell 1981, 1982, 1983; Wilkinson 2003). Prehistoric fields themselves have also seen some detailed study in this regard (French and Pryor 1993; Gebhardt 1996; Lewis 1998; Liversage et al. 1987; Macphail 1990; Macphail, Courty and Gebhardt 1990). Site-specific investigations of prehistoric fields have 241

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 1. The Wyke Down study area. Source: H. Lewis.

projects it is clear that the assumed relationship between sedentism and arable farming could benefit from reassessment, at least as applied to specific archaeological landscapes. The results from Wyke Down suggest that ethnographically based and regionally assigned largescale models of relationships between field system construction and agricultural land use practices do not seem to hold true at a more scale. We cannot simply assume changing agricultural practices on the basis of field system or house construction. A need to focus on local contexts in order to understand ancient agriculture and other land use practices is also emphasized by other landscape studies. These indicate great variability in local environmental processes within a region, and potential complexity in ancient land use patterns (Allen 1992; French 2003; Limbrey 1992; Macphail 1987; Wilkinson 2003). Variation in cultural practices and decisions regarding land use in different locality is a major issue, and one that has seen little investigation from a sitespecific approach to fields, although it has been addressed

Age), arable influence during the Iron Age, and increased arable influence during the medieval period for hilltop sites in this locale. This is actually the inversion of Cunliffe’s general scheme (Cunliffe 2004: 74) of shifting land use on the chalk soils. What does it mean if no major change in land use is seen to occur with the onset of field systems and the construction of substantial settlements? Does this mean that the appearance of field systems did not reflect changes in agricultural practices (q.v. Brück 2000; Chadwick 2004)? If the evidence suggests that there is no relationship with change in land use practices, does this then support an approach to field systems that disregards local land use and agriculture? These questions are important, and merit much more extensive and detailed study. There are many reasons to argue for the importance of local land use in field system studies. Firstly, from Wyke Down and other local 242

‘HELEN LEWIS: THE PLEASANT LAND OF COUNTERPANE’

Figure 2. The Gussage Cow Down field system. Source: H. Lewis, after Bowen 1990.

It should be noted here that at the onset of the Wyke Down project, the local Bronze Age field system was not targeted for study due to the lack of well-preserved remains (Fig. 2). However, it should now be possible to apply the methodology developed for studying land use from ditch fills to any extant Bronze Age field system ditch fills in the area. The combined molluscan and sedimentary analyses of barrow ditches and Iron Age field ditches were complimentary to one another, and in general agreed with the results coming from buried soils and valley sediment studies (French 2003; French and Lewis 2007; French et al. 2001, 2003).

to some extent through settlement-based studies of agricultural remains (e.g. Stevens 1996). The results from Wyke Down are important, because they mean that instead of relying on landscape architecture to tell us what is happening regarding agriculture, we must actually investigate land use itself. Secondly, with increasing research, the picture of both agriculture and land division in the Bronze Age becomes correspondingly complex. For instance, if field boundaries have little to do with land use changes, how can we explore the influence and impact of new crops and of proposed intensifications of stock rearing practices in the archaeological landscapes beyond settlement sites? At Yarnton (Hey and Bell 1999), there was evidence for buildings of Neolithic date, possibly associated with field boundaries; whilst at Heathrow (Batt and Gibson 2003) there were early Bronze Age dates for the ditches of some of the co-axial field systems. There is clearly a growing need to further explore the relationships between land division, concepts of early sedentism and agriculture.

Along with other recent studies (Allen 1994a; Cleal, Walker and Montague 1995; Entwistle 1994; Richards 1990), the Wyke Down Project has been relatively successful in developing methodologies for modelling local landscape and land use. The use of ditch fills to do this is of great significance, as ditches are often the most widespread manifestation of many British field systems. Ditch fills are also relatively well-preserved, and they are 243

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT in a number of different cultural landscapes and natural settings suggests that larger scale issues can be addressed through both methodology and interpretation. A focus on a holistic understanding of landscape changes over time could provide a firmer theoretical basis for interpreting landscape history in general.

directly related to use of fields, so developing and refining these techniques will be crucial. Since this methodology appears to show significant results, it is important to reconsider the potential of the Bronze Age field system at Wyke Down. Further investigation could attempt to directly access what was happening in the system itself, although the ditch fills would need to be adequately dated in order to fit any data into the current understanding of changes (or lack thereof) in land use history. At the moment, the field system appears to have developed within a largely grazed landscape, and its development does not seem to have impacted on this in any significant way.

Another issue is that of how data is actually collected on a landscape scale. Detailed land use studies necessitate excavation, and targeted investigation has most frequently been carried out through ‘keyhole’ interventions into several well-preserved and relatively dateable locations across a landscape. Excavating small slots in monuments, boundaries and sedimentary deposits seems to provide adequate information for the assessment of local changes over time at specific locations, and in comparison to each other and landscape-scale data, this enables the development of models of local changes over time. This approach fits with increasing heritage preservation concerns. However, the excavations may be too small to allow a better understanding of monuments themselves and their meanings regarding land use, the assessment of variation and complexity in the immediate surrounds, and also to provide a detailed picture of the relationships between soil materials and monument construction. This imposes serious limitations on archaeological interpretation.

Developing land use as a landscape approach – some thoughts regarding fields There are clearly major challenges in many areas, and these are only beginning to be addressed. Although there is a great desire amongst many archaeologists for more wide-ranging interpretations, the site-specific characterisation of land use, and the location and dating of ancient agriculture within the extant physical landscape, still makes this problematic (Carter and Davison 1998). More spatially extensive studies are greatly needed to expand our ability to address and formulate theoretical models. Much study is currently focused on simply identifying ancient agricultural and other land uses. Despite the continued development of methods and applications aimed at understanding how ancient land uses impacted upon soils, sediments and plants, and the refinement of the identification and characterisation of ancient land use types over time, much of this research is still relatively limited in scope and depth. The media for such studies – modern and ancient soil ecosystems and sedimentary microenvironments – are very complex and locally diverse, and many basic interpretative challenges remain. The sheer diversity of context has led this author to conclude that studying ancient fields through the land uses practised within them may have to be locationspecific for many reasons. These include the range of soils, sediments, and preservation and conservation conditions, not to mention variations in ancient cultural practices and decisions. The most impressive studies have resulted from developing an understanding of the complex history of one place or area, its record of land use, and the relationship of this land use to settlement and other archaeological remains.

Recent work at Skelhøj in Jutland, Denmark shows how important it can be to get a wider picture (BreuningMadsen and Holst 1998). Most significantly, this site reveals that large-scale investigation is vital, both for an understanding of monuments themselves, and for an understanding of local land use practices and how these related to monuments. Ongoing full excavation of the Skelhøj barrow, and the assessment of its potential for soil land use and barrow preservation studies, has revealed that a detailed knowledge of soil processes and local soil characteristics was fundamental in barrow construction (Lewis and Hart 2003). Barrow sods were evidently taken from different parts of the local landscape, cut or later grouped by type, and deliberately arranged in a manner that appears to have been effective in creating preserving, anaerobic conditions within the barrow. In addition, a series of successive wetting and possible trampling deposits were found within the lower mound, suggesting knowledge of and conscious construction of layers promoting iron pan formation, presumably in order to create a ‘sealed’ core (M. Holst, H. Breuning-Madsen and M. Rasmussen pers. comm.) (Fig. 3).

Addressing these issues has meant that for the most part, we have been carrying out fairly small-scale archaeology, which needs to be further integrated into regional models and theoretical approaches. The site-specific land use approach needs to be applied extensively, however, so that we can address major archaeological issues, such as the beginnings and spread of agriculture, and the history of, reasons for and impact of changes in practices over time. Nevertheless, the fact that a combination of the approaches mentioned can produce relevant information

The various soil profiles found in the mound sods reflected one basic soil type, acid brown soil, but a variety of local land uses. There were sods made up entirely of thick turfy topsoils, sods comprising a thin turf O layer over a thin A horizon, sods comprising a thin O layer immediately on a leached B horizon, sods with a thin A horizon but no surface turf or O horizon, and ‘sods’ consisting only of B horizon material. Since the barrow appears to have been built relatively quickly, perhaps in just one phase, this variety must reflect the 244

‘HELEN LEWIS: THE PLEASANT LAND OF COUNTERPANE’ locality, this might not actually have been the case. Barrows for example, might have been sited in locations with specific, perhaps very different, meanings and uses in earlier periods, such as forest clearings originally created during the Mesolithic. The soils underneath them may only represent one particular type of land use within the landscape, and/or such locations might have been regarded as ‘special’ long before monument construction took place.

Figure 4. Dr Helen Lewis (right) and Dr Lesley McFadyen (left) investigating the early Neolithic long barrow at Gussage Cow Down. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

At Wyke Down, it was only through studying several types and dates of monuments, and carrying out palaeoenvironmental studies of the entire valley that it became possible to suggest the soils under and within barrow mounds were representative of the wider landscape, and not just ‘special’ places (French and Lewis 2007; French et al. 2001, 2003). For instance, it was only through studies of valley erosion, pollen from palaeochannels and extensive molluscan analyses, all indicating a generally non-forested local landscape in later prehistory, that it was possible to suggest that the grassland soils identified underneath the barrows represented a stable and persistent relatively open landscape during the Neolithic and Bronze Age, and not merely small forest clearings that were kept free of trees.

Figure 3. The Skelhøj barrow under excavation, showing sod types, waterlain lenses and buried soil. Source: Ann-Maria Hart.

state of local soils, and presumably land use practices as well. The presence of B horizon material with only very thin turf lines over the top was especially evocative. This suggested previous turf or heath loss or previous stripping of the A horizon, with the soil just beginning to recover and grow vegetation. Was there a rotation of land use for the purpose of producing sods for barrow construction? The barrow overlay a buried soil, with a turf line itself formed over at least two earlier phases of ard marks. If this barrow had been excavated in a series of small slots, it is certain that this quality of information would not have been collected. Such an important picture of local land uses, their impacts on local soil profiles, and how people produced, understood and used these different materials in the practice of burying their dead, would not have been possible. How can we excavate field systems in order to understand similar complexities?

The fact that there was long-term stable grassland underneath earlier Neolithic long barrows implies that these locations were not chosen for barrow construction because of any particular subsistence land use or vegetational qualities. This might not have been the case during the Mesolithic, however. Local pollen diagrams and some mollusc and soil studies suggest that before the Neolithic, Wyke Down was largely wooded (French and Lewis 2007). But some places, including those sites utilised for the building of long barrows, appear to have had long-term grassland soil development before barrow construction (Fig. 5). As such, they appear not be representative of general Mesolithic land use in the area, but of more specific land use practices involving relatively small maintained clearings. Could these same locales later chosen for long barrow construction have been ‘special’ during the Mesolithic period (q.v. Chadwick 2004: 191-192; McFadyen 2006)? In terms of

I wish to add a further caution. The targeting of upstanding structures, while pragmatic in terms of preservation conditions, could result in misleading interpretations. Studies of buried soils under monuments for instance, reveal information about specific places chosen in prehistory to not be foci for agricultural activity, at least following monument construction. Although it is convenient to think that soils ‘buried’ by monuments represent the standard local land use in the 245

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT methods necessitates evaluation, critique and reformulation of models of how agricultural land use practices and economies influenced and were integrated with ancient social beliefs and practices.

land use at least, do long barrow locations tell us more about significant places in the Mesolithic landscape than in the Neolithic landscape? Site-specific approaches must therefore be integrated with long-term perspectives and with a variety of landscape-scale data and interpretations in order to better understand representativeness, continuity and change.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Department of Continuing Education and Kellogg College at Oxford University, and the Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge for their support. I am grateful to several colleagues regarding field system studies and would like to especially thank Charles French, Mike Allen, Martin Green, Rob Scaife, Ann-Maria Hart, Mads Holst, Marianne Rasmussen, Henrik Breuning-Madsen, Lesley McFadyen, Joanna Brück, Robert Johnston, Helen Wickstead, Joshua Pollard and Adrian Chadwick for their diverse views and collaboration. Funding for Wyke Down research has come from the AHRB, British Academy, McDonald Institute and a private donor. Partial funding for the site visit to Skelhøj was provided by the National Museum of Denmark.

Figure 5. Gussage Cow Down 78 long barrow, with a shallow grassland rendzina soil underneath the mound. Source: C. French.

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Conclusions A focus on the acquisition and understanding of land use data is crucial, but it must not be allowed to take precedence over the major issues that have led many investigators to pursue this research. Studying ancient land use on a site-specific basis still suffers from concentrating on the identification of fields and boundaries, with few attempts made to address the issues of how cultivation related to social organisation, landscape perspectives or even the social use of space. However, I am optimistic that by learning to identify and characterise what is happening in fields and field systems, we can address assumptions of how fields and land use related to ancient landscape perceptions and cultural decisions. New methods of analysis produce information that may force us to reassess our site interpretations, our regional models of archaeological landscapes, and our methodological approaches to understanding ancient agricultural societies. I hope that the increase in land use studies within landscape frameworks will also re-invigorate theories about prehistoric agriculture in general. The goal is to relate the relatively well-studied dots and lines in the landscape – sites, boundaries and pathways – to their surrounds, to develop understandings of how individual features and sites, and types of sites in general were involved with and integrated into their contemporaneous physical and cultural landscapes. In certain regions where there are settlement-poor ancient agricultural landscapes, such as Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Wessex, these new approaches are vital to understanding not only land use, but also settlement itself. The application of these 246

‘HELEN LEWIS: THE PLEASANT LAND OF COUNTERPANE’ Barrett, J.C. 1994. Fragments from Antiquity. An Archaeology of Social Life in Britain, 2900-1200 BC. Oxford: Blackwell. Barrett, J.C., Bradley, R. and Green, M. 1991. Landscape, Monuments and Society. The Prehistory of Cranborne Chase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Batt, A. and Gibson, C. 2003. A Bronze Age landscape between the runways. Paper presented at the 25th annual Theoretical Archaeology Group conference, University of Wales Lampeter, 18th December 2003. Bell, M. 1981. Valley sediments and environmental change. In M. Jones and G. Dimbleby (eds.) The Environment of Man: the Iron Age to the AngloSaxon Period. BAR (British Series) 87. Oxford: BAR, pp. 75-91. Bell, M. 1982. The effects of land use and climate change on valley sedimentation. In A.F. Harding (ed.) Climatic Change in Later Prehistory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 127142. Bell, M. 1983. Valley sediments as evidence of prehistoric land use on the South Downs. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 49: 119-150. Bonney, D.J. 1978. Early fields and land allotments in Wessex. In H.C. Bowen and P.J. Fowler (eds.) Early Land Allotment in the British Isles. A Survey of Recent Work. BAR (British Series) 48. Oxford: BAR, pp. 49-51. Boserup, E. 1965. The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co. Boserup, E. 1970. Woman’s Role in Economic Development. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Bowen, H.C. 1961. Ancient Fields. A Tentative Analysis of Vanishing Earthworks and Landscapes. British Association of the Advancement of Science. London: BAAS. Bowen, H.C. 1975. Pattern and interpretation: a view of the Wessex landscape from Neolithic to Roman times. In P.J. Fowler (ed.) Recent Work in Rural Archaeology. Bradford-on-Avon: Moonraker Press, pp. 44-56. Bowen, H.C. 1990. The Archaeology of Bokerley Dyke. London: HMSO. Bradley, R. 1978a. Prehistoric field systems in Britain and north-west Europe – a review of some recent work. World Archaeology 9 (3): 265-280. Bradley, R. 1978b. The Prehistoric Settlement of Britain. London: Routledge and Kegan and Paul. Bradley, R. 1978c. Consolidation and land use in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. In S. Limbrey and J.G. Evans (eds.) The Effect of Man on the Landscape: the Lowland Zone. CBA Research Report 21. London: Council for British Archaeology, pp. 95103. Bradley, R. 1980. Subsistence, exchange and technology – a social framework for the Bronze Age in southern England c. 1400-700 BC. In J. Barrett and R. Bradley (eds.) Settlement and Society in the British

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‘HELEN LEWIS: THE PLEASANT LAND OF COUNTERPANE’

Gemma Rees standing next to the junction of several later prehistoric stone boundaries at Mynydd y Garn, Brecon Beacons, Powys. The rough pasture across most of this valley has preserved many prehistoric field walls, enclosures, cairns and roundhouse platforms. An abandoned nineteenth and early twentieth century farmhouse and its improved infields can be seen at the upper right, and further prehistoric cairns lie along the ridge in the background. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

251

Mobile and enclosed landscapes on the Yorkshire Wolds Chris Fenton-Thomas increasingly obvious feature of the upland landscapes from the end of the second millennium BC (Barrett 1994: 150).

Introduction Since the publication of Early Land Allotment in 1978, the discussion of past land division has widened to include new and different approaches to the study of territoriality, boundaries and field systems. Theoretical standpoints and ethnographic analogies are now used to move beyond studies of farming and settlement towards an understanding of the social character and symbolic significance of the ancient landscape. It is widely accepted that a distinction exists between the monumental yet mobile landscapes of the Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age, and the bounded agricultural systems of the later Bronze Age and Iron Age (e.g. Barrett 1994; Barrett and Bradley 1991; Bradley 1984, 1993; Brück 2000; Pollard 1999). The differences between land division and monuments are regularly used as a neat way of separating one phase of prehistory from another. To caricature this sequence, a phase of monuments and settlement mobility was followed by a time of mixed agriculture, economic surplus and enclosed settlements (Jones 1986; Parker Pearson 1993). This distinction was initially explained as a process of economic intensification, whereby the population grew and land became scarcer leading to increased organisation of both land and agricultural production (Fowler 1981). This is a deterministic idea, and implies that social and economic changes throughout prehistory were simply caused by the demands of an increasing population or changing conditions for agricultural production. It also assumes that systems of land division were linked only to the economic requirements of the communities that created them. Under this scenario, boundaries were merely functional containers for crops or livestock and there is little interest in viewing them as symbolic expressions of social and cultural life.

I will discuss how the distinction between mobile landscapes and agricultural systems may not actually be as clear cut as Barrett suggests. Using the example of the chalk Wolds of eastern Yorkshire (Figure 1), I will propose that elements of the mobile landscape survived well beyond the Bronze Age. The idea of a mobile landscape between the fifth and third millennia BC in Britain draws heavily on Tim Ingold’s discussion of territoriality within hunter-gatherer societies (1986). He identified how landscapes reflect differences in the ways that hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists deal with territoriality and land tenure. Previously, many anthropologists had misinterpreted territorial behaviour, often assuming that groups actually held jurisdiction over areas of land, when in reality their territoriality belonged to specific sites in the landscape. For instance, among the Pintupi of Australia, “…country (ngurra) names refer to specific features [of the landscape] rather than to areas enclosed with spatial boundaries” (Ingold 1986: 149, my addition in parentheses). This sense of territoriality sometimes extends to the paths that ran between the sites, but it rarely involves control of territories with fixed boundaries. A mobile landscape structured through places and trackways is what many archaeologists now envisage for the Neolithic and early Bronze Age in Britain, where there is evidence for monuments and paths but very little trace of permanent settlements or prominent boundaries (Bradley 1993, 1998; Edmonds 1995, 1999; Pollard 1999). The landscape was not immediately transformed at the onset of the Neolithic into one of sedentary agriculture. Instead, settlement patterns and economies probably remained relatively mobile for many centuries (Thomas 1999; Whittle 1997). Tilley emphasises the importance of symbolic meanings associated with these mobile landscapes and describes a “…sacred, symbolic and mythic space replete with social meanings wrapped around buildings, objects and features of the landscape” (Tilley 1994: 24).

John Barrett has provided a more challenging explanation in suggesting that there was a social fault line within prehistory between the earlier phases of mobile landscapes and the enclosed agricultural systems of the later periods. This distinction was not just about agricultural practices or population levels but involved the mind set and world-view of each member of society. These were reflected in the different ways that groups organised and perceived the landscapes surrounding them. Barrett describes how:

On the Yorkshire Wolds, at first glance, the pattern appears to be consistent with the traditional long-term scheme. An open landscape of monuments gave way in the late Bronze Age to an extensive system of large-scale land division, which led to more intensive occupation and enclosure by the time of the Roman conquest. On closer inspection this hypothetical linear development does not seem to have taken place. Instead, the landscape sequence fluctuated between different levels of mobility and enclosure through a series of rhythmic cycles. In some periods the landscape was densely occupied, enclosed

The earlier pattern of an open and general community was now fragmented, as was the landscape itself, no longer a constellation of sacred sites linked by paths of access, but a landscape which began to be divided by large tracts of cultivated and enclosed land. Common land and resources undoubtedly remained but movement across the land might have been curtailed by the physical barriers, which appear as an 252

CHRIS FENTON-THOMAS: MOBILE AND ENCLOSED LANDSCAPES ON THE YORKSHIRE WOLDS

Figure 1. Map of East Yorkshire showing the location of the Wolds in relation to major towns and cities. The thick line denotes the western and northern escarpment slope of the chalkland. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas and A. Leaver.

and farmed, whilst in others the Wolds were open and crossed by trackways with very few boundaries. I will describe this sequence of landscape history and consider the interplay between the rhythmic change in landscape character, and the long-term persistence of individual linear features and locales. In doing so, it will become clear that the binary distinction between earlier monumental and later agricultural landscape may be overly simplistic.

Settlement on the Wolds Archaeological research on the Yorkshire Wolds has a long and illustrious history. From the meticulous work of J.R. Mortimer in the nineteenth century through the excavations at Wharram Percy to the rich pickings from Iron Age graves at Wetwang and Garton, the chalkland has produced some remarkable discoveries (e.g. Beresford and Hurst 1990; Dent 1982; Mortimer 1905; Stead 1979, 1992). For many years it was seen as the 253

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT the settlements and cemeteries were concentrated along the spring lines of the Wold edge. Only three settlements have been found in the Wolds interior, and these include the two high status occupation sites at Thwing and Cottam (Manby forthcoming; Richards 1999). The Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian burials known from the Wolds are all secondary inhumations in prehistoric monuments, and may not be representative of more normal rites (Lucy 1998). They do not need to be adjacent to settlement sites, but still the view prevails that the distribution of burials must mirror that of settlements:

focus for research in East Yorkshire; an oasis of archaeological riches surrounded by a barren desert where few discoveries were made. New finds and sites, identified in the surrounding lowlands of Holderness, the Hull Valley and the Vales of York and Foulness have overturned these early assumptions (Halkon and Millett 1999; van de Noort and Ellis 1994, 1999, 2000). The Wolds has always been rich in prehistoric monuments, including Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, as well as Iron Age square barrow cemeteries. The density of these archaeological remains has given the impression that the chalkland was densely populated throughout prehistory. The rare evidence for forest clearance suggested an early date for the loss of woodland (Manby 1980, 1988), and the light soils were assumed to be easily cultivated with low technology plough regimes. The lack of settlement sites from the Wolds was always explained away by the flimsy character of prehistoric structures, which would have been lost due to subsequent centuries of intensive ploughing.

Cemeteries still vastly outnumber settlements, even in the Yorkshire Wolds. This is principally because they are easier to see, and arouse interest at all levels. Hundreds of living sites must await discovery…” (Rahtz 2000: 5). The view that the domestic sites on the Wolds are just waiting to be found is no longer tenable, and we need to consider an alternative model for the Wolds landscape in this period. The cemeteries of ‘normal’ inhumation burials lie in the Wold edge zone where settlements are known (Powlesland 1999). The burials on the higher Wolds were different, suggesting that this area was being used and occupied in a different manner (see below). Instead of a landscape of settlement, it would make much more sense if the high Wolds during these two periods (middle Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon/ AngloScandinavian) was a landscape populated mostly by the dead. For the post-Roman period the idea of a largely unoccupied open Wolds is backed up by a host of other evidence from place-names, township patterns and medieval land grants (Fenton-Thomas 2003, 2005).

The traditional model for the Iron Age was that the high density of square barrow cemeteries on the Wolds reflected the settlement pattern. Millett described the Iron Age settlement pattern as “…a predominantly dispersed pattern of settlement…with most evidence represented by burials within square barrow cemeteries” (Millett 1990: 348). Haselgrove’s discussion of Iron Age settlement in the north-east of England also used the distribution of cemeteries on the Wolds as an indication of the settlement pattern (1984). Such assertions always assumed that each cemetery must have lain alongside or close to its own settlement. The excavations at Wetwang Slack appeared to support this, with a cemetery adjacent to a large number of roundhouses (Dent 1982). However, recent work on the surrounding lowlands and Wold edges has produced consistent evidence for Iron Age settlement in areas away from the Wolds cemeteries (Dent 1988; D. Evans pers. comm.; Halkon and Millett 1999). At Heslerton, ‘ladder’ settlements of middle and later Iron Age date (which continued in use into the RomanoBritish period) were closely associated with several middle Iron Age square barrow cemeteries (Powlesland 2004). Groups of smaller ring-ditched features seem to have been used for cremation burials in the late Iron Age and Romano-British periods. Apart from Wetwang and despite the many cemetery excavations, there are no other middle Iron Age settlements known from the high Wolds. The small number of enclosed occupation sites such as Grimthorpe or Staple Howe date from the earliest Iron Age, and all were abandoned before the advent of the square barrow burial rite in the fifth century BC. How much longer can archaeologists accept this marked lack of settlement evidence, whilst still insisting that Iron Age communities were living on the high Wolds during the second half of the first millennium BC (Dent 1995)?

The landscape of the open chalkland Wolds was dominated by trackways rather than boundaries during these times, in contrast to the surrounding lowlands and Wold-edges. The Wolds was used during each period as a place of pasture and burial. In the Romano-British and medieval periods however, the landscape here was occupied. It was divided up and enclosed by boundaries, and was used for mixed agriculture in much the same way as the surrounding vales. There was a cyclical sequence of change, as the landscape rhythmically fluctuated between states of openness and enclosure from the Iron Age to the medieval period and beyond. The nature of territoriality and tenure on the Wolds during these open phases may have had more in common with the relatively mobile landscapes of earlier prehistory than it did with the traditional model of a divided and enclosed countryside characteristic of mixed agriculture after the late Bronze Age. Travelling back in time down the Green Lane The Sledmere Green Lane is a line on the map. The lane today is a broad strip of grass between the hedges and bare chalky soil of expansive arable fields, on a low rolling ridge on the eastern dip slope of the Wolds (Fig. 2). It is both a township boundary and a linear earthwork,

The same arguments have been used for the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian periods (e.g. Allison 1976; Eagles 1979; Faull 1974, 1984; Watkin 1983). Most of 254

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Figure 2. The broad grassy strip is all that remains of the Sledmere Green Lane, preserved in the modern landscape as a right of way between arable fields. This view looks westwards towards the Sykes Monument where Mortimer found a linear Anglo-Scandinavian cemetery aligned along the prehistoric linear earthwork. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

many Anglo-Scandinavian skeletons were unearthed here during the building of the spire (Mortimer 1905).

now ploughed for potatoes. It carries a right of way and is used for access to the woodland of the Sledmere estate, on its northern side. Standing here you can look southeast for many kilometres towards Beverley, over the ground where the clays and gravels of the Hull valley and Holderness mantle the dipping chalk. The nearest village is Wetwang, four to five kilometres below the ridge in the middle distance. Closer still is the broad valley bottom, where gravel extraction has over the years exposed the remains of Iron Age burials and settlements.

The Green Lane runs past this spot, but has more ancient origins. The line it follows has been represented in every period of Wolds history, and the changes it went through reflected those of the wider landscape. When the Green Lane was a trackway, the landscape surrounding it was open pasture. When the Green Lane was a boundary, the area to the south was occupied with farmsteads and enclosures, their ditches ‘hanging off’ the already ancient line. The origins of the Green Lane lie in the Neolithic and Bronze Age landscape of monuments and places, but it endured as boundary and trackway throughout the succeeding millennia. I will examine in detail the changes it went through. It is important to realise that whilst the Green Lane illustrates the changes in the Wolds landscape, it also indicates the capacity for endurance of certain landscape features and places over the long term. Social memory was absorbed by the landscape that surrounded people’s everyday lives. It is here that their history resides.

It is these graves and their ‘chariots’ that the tractor driver talks about, little realising that he has parked on the degraded bank of a linear earthwork probably first thrown up in the late Bronze Age. The car is parked where the grassy lane meets the tarmac road, and here stands a tall stone pinnacle, encrusted with carvings and epitaphs. It is a monument to Sir Tatton Sykes, a former owner of the Sledmere estate who died in 1863. If you believe the words on his numerous commemorative plaques, he was responsible for transforming this area and turning “…the wolds of Yorkshire from an uncultivated waste into a model of fruitful husbandry…” (taken from the inscription on a plaque in Sledmere church). This location was chosen for his towering memorial because it commands such extensive views across the rolling Wolds to the south. It is a place where earlier generations had also built monuments and laid the dead to rest. Indeed,

From medieval track to coach road To understand the prehistoric origins of the Green Lane, we must first appreciate the role it has played in more recent episodes of landscape history (Pickles 1993). The stretch of the lane between Cowlam and Fridaythorpe is no longer used as a thoroughfare except by walkers and 255

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Figure 3. Warburton’s map of the central Wolds from the mid-eighteenth century. This shows the Green Lane as a major routeway. It runs from left (west) to right (east) and passes between the villages of Friday Thorpe and Wetwang. By the end of the century this route had ceased to be used as a long distance thoroughfare. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

routeway. This would have helped the smooth running of the coaches and horses.

tractors. This is probably due to the gentrification of the area by the Sykes family in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (English 1991), and the Green Lane now marks the southern edge of their designed landscape park. The roads through Sledmere village to the north were drastically redesigned by the Sykes family, not only to divert the existing road away from the immediate vicinity of the house, but also to ensure that the main route to Bridlington ran through the new estate village. If we examine the eighteenth century maps they all show the Green Lane as one of the principal routes across the Wolds. Jeffrey’s map of Yorkshire (1772) marks this humble grassy strip as a major thoroughfare. Similarly, Warburton’s map of the mid-eighteenth century records it as the major route between Kilham in the east and York in the west (Warburton n.d.) (Figs. 3-4). The 1st Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1854 gives the Green Lane the name of York Road, a name that indicates its former status. For most of the eighteenth century this was the line of the coach road between York and Bridlington, but it was not simply imposed upon the landscape. The route followed existing tracks and boundaries. In places, it is still possible to see where the new coach road adopted a more direct course than the winding pattern of the old

Apart from these straight stretches, the coach road follows the boundaries of thirteen townships, and it is likely that this line was a trackway before the eighteenth century. The coach road and its predecessor followed the boundaries between townships to avoid crossing arable land. The medieval-pattern open fields were still being used on much of the Wolds in the eighteenth century, and these often stretched right across township areas leaving little room for dedicated pasture grounds (Harris 1969; Harvey 1982, 1983). The boundary line may have been a narrow strip between the arable spread of the open fields, in some cases giving the inhabitants of the townships access to the detached pieces of pasture situated outside their home territory (Harris 1951). The medieval Wolds landscape was well ordered and managed. Nucleated villages were surrounded by open arable fields, and farmed under a co-operative collective system. This occupied and bounded landscape stands in sharp contrast to the situation on the Wolds before the Norman Conquest. In order to explore this phase we now 256

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Figure 4. The line of the Green Lane in the modern landscape. The lane runs from left to right and is marked by a continuous township boundary (dotted line) as well as a track and single hedge field boundaries in places. The tracks are no longer used as roads but retain their great width and hedged boundaries. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

settlements (Eastburn, Kirkburn, Southburn, Elmswell) date back to at least the sixth or seventh centuries AD.

need to wander off the Green Lane for a short while and take account of our surroundings. They belong to the period between the fifth and eleventh centuries AD. What we can see is a landscape of open pasture, with occasional stands of woodland and traces of temporary small-scale settlements. The most enduring features are the long winding trackways that snake their way through the pastures with their livestock.

On the dry chalkland uplands however, the townships tend to be larger in size and later in date. The Wolds townships were probably created between the tenth and twelfth centuries AD when settlement began to encroach onto the open pastures (Harvey 1982; Hurst 1976; Sheppard 1976). The boundaries run in straight sweeping lines without having to negotiate their way around existing signs of occupation such as field boundaries or tracks. Indeed, the only feature that these township boundaries appear to respect is the line of Green Lane. As noted above, this line forms the boundary of thirteen townships, and its unbroken continuity means that it must have existed before the townships were themselves created. There are several other primary lines in the pattern of townships here, and they too belong to long distance trackways striking out across the Wolds in the post-Roman period (Fig. 6). They are usually aligned east to west, and are not easy to follow once they descend from the chalk downland. They compare closely with trackways crossing other areas of wold in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire (Fox 1989), and these areas may

Townships, trackways and pastures in the post-Roman landscape The layout of townships in the heart of the Wolds is still very different from the surrounding lowlands, and this reflects the different landscape histories of the two areas. On the Wold edge, there are bundles of strip-townships that straddle the edge of the chalk, and these tend to be found in the long settled lands on both the eastern dip slope and northern escarpment (Fig. 5). The strip townships probably date back to before the Norman conquest, and some may even have Romano-British origins (Allison 1976). Another group of Wold edge townships occurs around the headwater springs of the River Hull. They are small intricate territories, each with an Old English topographic name suggesting that these 257

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Figure 5. Townships in the central Wolds. This map shows the difference between the large blocky townships in the central Wolds and those townships found on the Wold-edges. The group around Eastburn on the eastern Wold-edge (bottom right) are smaller and more intricate whilst those along the Great Wold Valley (top) are arranged in strips. The larger townships are usually later in date than those on the Wold-edge and many of their boundaries follow cross-Wold trackways. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

also have been zones of open pasture during the preNorman centuries. Fox describes the situation as follows:

century (AD). Yet the evidence for a good deal of woodland and open pasture on the wolds, not to mention their use as seasonal grazing grounds, suggests that permanent settlements were relatively sparsely spread in the seventh and eighth centuries, except in a few favoured spots. At that time these regions were at a low point in one of those cycles of occupation followed by depopulation which they may

…in general ancient (pre-7th century AD) place-names are rare, especially in deep wold country-sides. Their rarity does not point to a total absence of early permanent settlement: here and there isolated farms and hamlets may have been established by the eighth 258

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Figure 6. Townships and trackways in the central Wolds. The trackways that ran across the pasturelands of the post Roman Wolds were used as boundaries for the townships laid out between the tenth and twelfth centuries AD. Some of the pastures survive into the post-medieval period (those marked here by tufts of grass were recorded on enclosure maps) and these appear to have once belonged to much larger pasture zones. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

well have witnessed before in prehistory, and which they were to witness once again in later centuries (Fox 2000: 53).

landscape change. However, the similarities between his generalised view of wold development and that envisaged here for East Yorkshire are striking. Furthermore, the cyclical sequence of settlement contraction and expansion he identifies for the historical period can be traced back to prehistory.

Fox’s work has concentrated on other areas of wold in England, and it would be overly simplistic to assume that all wold zones went through the same sequence of 259

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Figure 7. The pattern of hundreds in East Yorkshire as recorded in Domesday Book. The continuous boundary that runs east to west across the centre of the Wolds is the line of the Sledmere Green Lane. It is clearest between the hundreds of Acklam and Pocklington. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

There are a number of Anglo-Scandinavian burials found along the Green Lane. At one location by the Sykes Monument, a linear inhumation cemetery was inserted into the ditch of a prehistoric linear earthwork, which itself followed the same line as the track/ boundary (Grantham and Grantham 1965; Mortimer 1905). At Huggate Dykes some twelve kilometres away, a single Anglo-Saxon cremation vessel was found within the bank of the same linear earthwork, and at Blealands Nook a group of inhumations was placed within the ditches of adjacent enclosures (Lucy 1998). All three sites lie in significant topographic locales at the heads or junctions of valleys, and the burials all appear to respect the line of the Green Lane. Chris Loveluck (1998) has interpreted the linear cemeteries at Sykes Monument and Garton Station as evidence for the early use of these features as boundaries to the Driffield estate. Both cemeteries also lie on putative cross-Wold trackways. At this time, these trackways may have been gradually changing their role. What had been regarded as a track for several centuries may, during the eighth century AD, have started to be used as a boundary in a landscape where land was becoming more appropriated than before (Bassett 1989). The placement of early medieval burials in the ditch of the prehistoric earthwork could have been one expression of this change, using the potent human dead, but they were also rooting the new role amongst a more ancient, mythic past.

Several studies have suggested that the townships on the Wolds, along with their open fields and villages, were founded as related acts of planning at some point between the tenth and eleventh centuries AD (Harvey 1982, 1983; Hurst 1976; Sheppard 1976). None of the settlement names associated with the late townships in the interior of the Wolds appear to pre-date the tenth century, and the few topographic names that are older do not necessarily relate to settlements (Gelling n.d.; Smith 1937). Fimber and Sledmere for instance, both derive from Old English names for pond, and could have been names of topographic features before any permanent post-Roman settlement developed there. The line of the Green Lane at this time was probably a long distance trackway across the open pastoral landscape, linking the well-watered and occupied lands on the western and eastern edges of the chalkland. This track was used as a line for township boundaries, but may also have been a boundary between the hundreds that are described in Domesday Book for this area (Fig. 7). The Domesday survey lists the townships that formed part of each hundred and the hundred boundaries are assumed to be co-terminous with the boundaries of these groups of townships. This is another indication of the antiquity of this line, and suggests that it served as both track and boundary before the Norman Conquest (Brooks 1986; Faull and Stinson 1986).

260

CHRIS FENTON-THOMAS: MOBILE AND ENCLOSED LANDSCAPES ON THE YORKSHIRE WOLDS with the square barrow cemeteries during the fifth to first centuries BC. During the middle Iron Age the landscape on the chalk was characterised by cemeteries, isolated burials, long distance trackways and occasional long distance boundaries. This system was bound up with large-scale sheep grazing, where pastures and cemeteries acted as symbols of community identity for the groups settled around the margins of the Wolds (Fenton-Thomas 2003, 2005). Towards the end of the first millennium BC this open landscape began to become more enclosed and occupied, a process that took place alongside the demise in the square barrow burial rite.

The layout of the pre-Norman landscape is poorly documented, but there are some names that survive in twelfth and thirteenth century records that may echo memories of the extensive pastures that once spread across the open Wolds. These place-names only dimly survived into the period after the eleventh century as the pasture zones had become redundant by then. Many of the names contain the element wald (Old English for ‘wold’) or haugr (Old Scandinavian for ‘barrow’), and seem to equate the open country with the barrows that were so visible there. Some of them may also have used the haugr element in the form of ‘hill’ (Gelling n.d.; Smith 1937). Names like Hornhouwald are recorded in a twelfth century land grant, whilst several others survive in hundred names (Farrer 1914) (Fig. 8). For instance, Huntow is the name for the hundred surrounding Bridlington and is also the name given to a common pasture shared between neighbouring townships (Allison 1974). Other pasture names may have survived through very small townships such as Burrow and Houwald. Neither of these townships contained a nucleated settlement, and instead may have simply been detached pieces of pasture that survived the encroachment of settlement onto the Wolds in the centuries surrounding the Norman conquest.

With the notable exception of Wetwang Slack, there are no known middle Iron Age settlements on the Wolds. This settlement lay close to the Wold edge on low-lying ground where the valley opens up towards the springs and clays of the Hull Valley. It has proved difficult to establish the Iron Age settlement pattern contemporaneous with the cemeteries, but sites from this period have begun to be identified on the lowlands surrounding the Wolds. It seems likely that communities generally inhabited these areas, but used the Wolds for grazing and burial. These burials were often placed along trackways that gave access to the chalky pastures (Bevan 1997), and were used to cement the relationship between members of communities who did not share large settlements, but did share ownership of large flocks and their pastures. There may have been close symbolic links established between the placing of the community of the dead within the landscape, and ideas of tenure, fertility, death and rebirth (q.v. Bevan 1999; Giles 2004). The radical transformations in the landscape at the end of the Iron Age were bound up with the collapse of this system. Furthermore, the concomitant changes to burial rites, settlement and land division must suggest that they were all closely interconnected to one another.

The landscape of the high Wolds in the post-Roman period was distinct from that of the Wold edges (FentonThomas 2003, 2005). During the period between the fifth to the tenth centuries AD the majority of settlements lay around the fringes of the Wolds amidst the spring lines that surround the chalkland. The extensive Anglo-Saxon settlement of West Heslerton is found in such a location (Powlesland and Haughton 1999; Powlesland, Haughton and Hanson 1986). The few burials from the high Wolds in this period are very different from those along the Wold edges. The former were all secondary insertions into prehistoric monuments. The Wolds may have been the place to dispose of unusual or malevolent deaths and some of the Anglo-Saxon burials in prehistoric round barrows have been interpreted as cemeteries of execution victims (Reynolds 1997; Williams 1998). These were clearly very different from the Wold edge cemeteries, and were not likely to have been placed close to settlements. The use of the Wolds in this way might have reinforced its distinction from the settled lowlands, in the minds of the post-Roman communities who used the chalklands for grazing their livestock. The Green Lane was an integral part of this landscape, as it provided access from the western scarp to the eastern dip slope. When the Wolds began to be divided and more intensely occupied, the line of the Green Lane provided a continuous fixed reference point for the new territorial system of townships.

The late Iron Age is another period like the ninth to eleventh centuries AD when the landscape on the Wolds went through a period of enclosure, and was transformed from open pasture to a bounded and occupied agroscape. The long-term excavations at Wetwang/ Garton Slack took place just over one kilometre to the south of the ridge followed by the Green Lane. In the bottom of the valley there was a large square barrow cemetery with associated settlement remains dating from the middle and later Iron Age. Amidst the numerous Iron Age barrows and roundhouses were earlier funerary monuments from the Neolithic and Bronze Age spread out along the valley floor. Another extensive Iron Age cemetery lay further down the valley to the south-east at Garton Station and Kirkburn (Stead 1987, 1988, 1992). It appears that these Iron Age sites were placed beside a trackway that ran along the valley floor (Dent 1982, 1983).

Sheep farming on the chalklands – landscapes of burial, pasture and enclosure during the middle and later Iron Age The linear earthwork followed by the Green Lane had its origins in the later Bronze Age, and must already have been part of the middle Iron Age landscape contemporary

From the longstanding excavations and the extensive aerial photographic coverage (e.g. Stoertz 1997), the sequence of occupation in this part of the Wolds is comparatively well known and understood. The cemetery at Wetwang was used for about 300 years between the fourth and first centuries BC. Towards the latter stages of 261

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Figure 8. Names of possible pasture zones in the pre-Norman period. Most of these names contain the Old Scandinavian element, haugr meaning either hill or barrow. Several of these names are recorded only in medieval land grants but others such as Houwald and Burrow belong to small townships. Huntow is the name of a hundred but also used for a multi-township pasture that survives into the post-medieval period. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

1983). The Green Lane was being used as a boundary at this time, and was a reference point for a host of smaller enclosures along the south-facing slopes of the valley side. There were very few enclosures or ditches to the north, and this was a zone that remained open, perhaps with a different land-use. The antiquity of the Green Lane as a trackway, earthwork and boundary line must have helped legitimise the new land division system that emerged after the second century BC.

the cemetery’s use, and following the digging of a linear ditch through the middle of the cemetery during the third or second century BC, the square barrows became smaller and the grave cuts deeper. Thereafter, burials were made within the enclosure created by this ditch. This was a large rectilinear area, which used the Green Lane earthwork as its northern boundary. We know that this earthwork was already old when the land north of the cemetery was enclosed, and it continued to act as a boundary throughout the later Iron Age (Fig. 9). The area between the valley floor and the Green Lane became increasingly divided from the first century BC onwards, as further enclosures were created and settlements developed within them. Significantly, the end of the Iron Age at Wetwang saw the landscape become increasingly more divided and occupied whilst at the same time the square barrow cemeteries fell out of use. What is more, this pattern is repeated throughout the Wolds, where a significant number of settlement sites and enclosure systems were laid out in the period between the first century BC and the second century AD.

It seems likely that the processes of social change that brought about the disuse of the cemeteries were also linked to the increase in land boundaries, and the encroachment of settlement onto the Wolds. If the cemeteries were being used partly as claims to pasture lands and trackways, then it is perhaps no surprise that their decline came at the same time as the division of the former open pastures with boundaries. Explaining the disappearance of the square barrow rite and the increase in small-scale land divisions is not easy, but has been most convincingly attempted by Melanie Giles, who has suggested that there was a move towards more localised economies and social organisation (Giles 2000). These communities may have been increasingly fragmented by the interest of individual kin groups and households. People increasingly invested their labour and beliefs into

The plot of cropmarks for this area shows that the Green Lane earthwork was respected by many linear ditches (Stoertz 1997). Where they have been excavated, these all date to the later Iron Age and Roman periods (Dent 1982, 262

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Figure 9. Cropmarks in the central Wolds. Most of these ditches and enclosures to the south of the Green Lane belong to the late Iron Age or Roman period. This plot (adapted from Stoertz 1997) shows that the Green Lane earthwork continued to be used as a boundary into this period. The settlement and cemetery complex of Wetwang Slack is visible in the centre of the plot to the south of the Green Lane. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

was used as a boundary in periods when the surrounding Wolds landscape was occupied and enclosed, but functioned as a trackway in other periods when the Wolds was an open pasture with few boundaries.

the digging of ditches for separate enclosures and field systems, though these were still often centred along tracks or droveways. This is a more likely explanation than the arguments put forward by Dent, who interpreted the changes simply in terms of increasing pressure on land caused by population growth (Dent 1982). It is also possible that in some areas at least, from the late Iron Age cremation burials in small ditched mortuary enclosures began to replace the square barrow rite (q.v. Powlesland 2004).

From mobile to enclosed – boundaries, barrows, ponds and tracks The origins of the linear feature go back even further, to the beginning of the first millennium BC. The line was marked by a long distance linear earthwork that was probably constructed in the later Bronze Age, which consisted of up to three parallel banks and ditches stretching for at least 15 kilometres (Fig. 10). The dating of such linear earthworks is problematic on the Wolds, just as in other areas such as Salisbury Plain, the Marlborough and Berkshire Downs and the North Yorkshire Moors (e.g. Bradley, Entwistle and Raymond 1994; Gingell 1992; Richards 1978; Spratt 1989). The discovery of datable pot sherds in ditch fills is a rare occurrence on the Wolds, and even when pottery is found it cannot always give a reliable date for the actual digging of the ditch. Excavated sections are rare, and the monuments themselves are so long that a secure date for a short stretch of bank or ditch could not be transferred to the rest of the feature without caution. We are only in the early stages of understanding the Wolds linear boundaries, and the region has not had the benefit of focused projects like that on Salisbury Plain (Bradley, Enwistle and Raymond 1994; McOmish, Field and Brown 2002). The publication of the Wolds cropmark evidence by the old RCHME (Stoertz 1997) was very

To summarise, during the second to first centuries BC, there was a period of increased land division as smaller areas were divided up and enclosed within what had been larger swathes of land. This was associated with an increase in settlement activity, which could be explained as a spread of occupation from the edges of the Wolds towards the interior. A landscape of extensive pastures, (primarily for sheep perhaps, due to the lack of large year-round water sources) was gradually settled and enclosed, and used more for mixed farming. There are parallels between this phase and the later AngloScandinavian period, when a similarly open landscape which was crossed by trackways and used for pasture was also gradually enclosed and settled. The interesting aspect of this development is that the same linear features used for trackways were also used for boundaries, and they appear to have survived in use for very long periods of time (a pattern is therefore emerging as we go back in time). The Green Lane acted as both track and boundary, and its function appears to have altered as time passed. It 263

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Figure 10. The layout of linear earthworks in the central Wolds. This map is based on Mortimer’s plan of 1905 and the RCHME cropmark plots (Stoertz 1997). It shows the Green Lane earthwork and the Great Wold Dyke to its north. Sites of excavations are marked as follows: 1. Huggate Dykes. 2. Fimber Westfield. 3. Sykes monument. 4. Wetwang Slack. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

Roman period, and it is also likely that some were constructed in the earlier medieval period (Allison 1976; Rahtz 2000). The pattern of surviving earthworks is complex, but suggests that long distance lines were created first, with later earthworks augmenting the pattern as part of an increasingly intensive division of land. The initial phase of land division probably took place in the later Bronze Age, in keeping with much of the evidence from elsewhere in the country (Bradley 1994).

useful for understanding the overall pattern and distribution of linear boundaries, but the data on the detailed maps was restricted to sites visible as cropmarks from the air. This excluded the many stretches of linear that have survived as earthworks in woodland or grassland. The dating of the linear earthworks across the Wolds depends not just on a small number of excavated sections, but also their relationships with other monuments. There are many examples where the linear ditches appear to have been sited upon early Bronze Age round barrows. In some cases the ditches cut through the centre of the barrow mound, as at Vessey Pasture near Wharram, but there are other places like the three nearby sites at Aldro, where the ditches diverge in order to incorporate the barrow within their line. Two stretches of linear ditch, both forming the township boundaries of Garton, were used as inhumation cemeteries in the Anglo-Scandinavian period. These monuments clearly do not belong to a single chronological horizon. We know that some ditches and banks were created during the later Iron Age and

Later Bronze Age pottery was found in association with the primary ditch fill from a long distance earthwork at Thwing, and with the make-up of the bank of a similar feature at Sykes Monument (Grantham and Grantham 1965; Manby 1980). The latter example follows the line of the Green Lane. The Green Lane earthwork is one of the primary lines in the overall pattern suggesting that it belongs to the late Bronze Age horizon. Another example of a multiple ditch and bank from Fimber Westfield produced late Bronze Age metalworking moulds from a pit inserted into the bank (Mortimer 1905), and the Great Wold Dyke to the north is also likely to date from within 264

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Figure 11. Looking east at the head of Horse Dale, Huggate. This marks the eastern edge of the neck of land bridged by the Huggate Dykes, strung out from valley head to valley head. A single earthwork bank can be seen running along the upper edge of the daleside in the distance. Source: C. Fenton-Thomas.

Aldro. This too has often been suggested as a major early route, giving access to the flint sources on the east coast. It was also followed by linear earthworks for part of its course, and by township boundaries for most of its length (Hayfield 1987). In places it shadowed lines of round barrows, and adopted a ridgeway position for much of its line (Pickles 1993). There is no firm evidence for this route either, but the way this line followed the topography and behaved as a trackway does support the claim.

this phase. Together, they define a large block of land, and follow the natural lines of the topography along ridges and the lines of dry valleys. The Green Lane earthwork was the first physical expression of this line in the landscape, and formed the basis for the persistence of this monument as a trackway and/or boundary for subsequent centuries. The stretch of earthwork between Sykes Monument and Huggate Dykes provides an easy route across the Wolds. It followed the line of a dry valley at Middleham Dale, and then climbed up the end of the valley onto the higher ground at Huggate Dykes (Fig. 11). Here the earthwork crossed the neck of land between the two valley systems, before descending towards the springs around Millington and the Wold edge. At the eastern end of the linear boundary, it descended from Sykes Monument to follow the line of the valley of Warren Dale. It seems plausible that the linear earthwork constructed during the later Bronze Age followed the line of an existing trackway across the Wolds at this point (Fig. 12). This route has long been claimed as a prehistoric way (Allison 1976; Cole 1888, 1899; Hayfield 1987; Pickles 1993), although there is little direct evidence to support the suggestion. The surveys carried out by Herman Ramm in the 1960s are not published, but references to them suggest that he thought a holloway was the earliest phase amongst the earthworks around Huggate Dykes (Challis and Harding 1975). Another putative prehistoric ridgeway is found to the north, running close to Sledmere, Towthorpe and

The possibility that the linear earthworks followed elements of the earlier landscape such as tracks, is supported by their tendency to use round barrows as markers, either by engulfing them within the multiplicity of their banks or cutting through them with their ditches (Mortimer 1905). There is also a strong relationship between the pattern of linear boundaries and the location of water sources. In several instances, such as at Fimber and Fridaythorpe, they enclose areas of land containing ponds, and in others like Birdsall they lead towards springs on the Wold edge (Fenton-Thomas 2003; Manby 1980). The link between tracks and ponds is also evidenced by the work of Wagner and Hayfield. At Vessey, they found Neolithic and Bronze Age flint debitage in the ploughsoil around the site of a former pond, located on the ridgeway that extends from Vessey to Towthorpe and Sledmere (Hayfield, Pouncett and Wagner 1995).

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Figure 12. Dry valleys of the central Wolds and their relationship with possible prehistoric trackways. It is these tracks that are likely to have been followed by the earliest long distance linear ditches in the later Bronze Age. Sites marked are as follows: 1. Blealands Nook. 2. Sledmere Green Lane. 3. Towthorpe ridgeway. 4. Huggate Dykes. 5. Vessey ponds. 6. Warren Dale. Source: C. FentonThomas.

notion that these later land divisions respected earlier landscape features.

The Neolithic and earlier Bronze Age landscape containing these tracks, ponds and barrows thus conforms to Ingold’s model of a mobile landscape with patterns of territoriality based on paths and places, rather than enclosed areas of land. The transformation from a relatively mobile yet monumental landscape to one of enclosure and boundaries has not been adequately investigated. It is easy to identify the two different landscape forms, but much harder to understand the social and economic processes that led from to another. It has been suggested that the advent of boundedness represented a break with the past, and a remoulding of the existing landscape with a new imposed scheme (Barrett 1994; Barrett and Bradley 1990). However, Bradley now acknowledges that his initial view of discontinuity between the ‘monumental’ and ‘agricultural’ landscapes in areas such as Cranborne Chase may have been too strong (Bradley 1998: 149). On the Yorkshire Wolds, if the Green Lane linear earthwork followed an earlier trackway then it was obviously not imposed on the landscape at all. Rather, it monumentalised a pre-existing path of movement, one which may not have been marked out deliberately but was instead maintained by the movements of people and animals and the agreements made between different communities. The relationship between linear boundaries and barrows also reinforces the

If we accept that there was gradual change, whereby the builders of the linear earthworks were sensitive to existing features and their social meanings, then we are faced with the question of when this line was first recognised as a boundary, rather than as a track. This might also have happened quite gradually though, and need not have corresponded exactly to the creation of the banks and ditches. It is possible that the trackway had already become recognised as a boundary before the construction of the earthworks. Their construction may simply have reflected more notional boundaries between different communities, or different areas of social and agricultural practice, in more permanent physical form. Trees, lines of ridges and breaks of slope, remembered events and visual sightings may have been cognitive markers used to maintain territorial space. Similarly, once the linear boundaries had been constructed, they could have continued or begun to act as axes of movement through the landscape. Livestock for example, would have quite naturally walked beside such boundaries as they were being herded along. There are certain places along the route of the Green Lane earthwork where it was built in a more elaborate 266

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Figure 13. Looking west from Huggate Dykes down into Tun Dale. Part of the Huggate Dykes can be seen on the left of the picture, beneath the tree. To the left of the tree another earthwork bank runs off along the upper edge of the valley side. Source: C. FentonThomas.

land division was very close to the layout and meaning of the earlier mobile landscape of tracks and places. In the same way that the construction of barrows made permanent the cultural meanings of ‘natural’ places, then the linear earthworks transformed notional boundaries that had evolved out of trackways, into fixed physical markers. They should therefore be seen primarily as monuments, rather than as functional or economic barriers.

and monumental form, Huggate Dykes being an example (Fig. 13). Here, up to six parallel banks and ditches stretched across a neck of land between two different valley systems, over a distance of some 600 metres. The same was true at the eastern end of the boundary, where the arrangement of banks and ditches also altered at the head of another valley system. Here, the triple banks and ditches traced a near ninety-degree bend at the head of the valley. Short stretches of multiple linear earthworks occur all across the Wolds, and they are invariably at significant topographic places. This again suggests that the builders of the earthworks were paying their respects to the existing importance of these locales, through the design of the boundaries. It shows that although the nature of territorial awareness may have been changing from trackways to boundaries, the layout and understanding of the land was born out of existing perceptual frameworks.

Long term landscape history Persistent places The long term endurance of the line of the Green Lane is remarkable. It has survived as an important feature of the landscape for more than three millennia (Fig. 14). This is all the more significant as its role appears to have altered, revolving between trackway and boundary. Awareness of the antiquity of this line must have helped its endurance, as it could have been used as a legitimising force when new systems of land division were laid out. Particular instances of this occurred during the later Iron Age and the Anglo-Scandinavian period, when the Wolds landscape was divided and apportioned. We know from other studies elsewhere that during the early medieval period, ancient monuments were often respected in various ways because they were known to be part of the long-term past (Cardwell 2003; Semple 1998; Williams 1998). Many round barrows and trackways were used for

The linear earthworks could also be seen as mimicking the ‘natural’ topography, both in the way that they resembled the dry Wolds valleys, and in the way that they changed their form depending on their topographic context. The construction of the boundaries therefore may not have represented the imposition of a revolutionary, anthropogenic order on the landscape, but rather they expressed the potency of the natural topography and the encultured places and paths in a newer, more permanent physical form. There is no doubt that the linear earthworks were used as boundaries, but this system of 267

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Figure 14. The different forms of the Sledmere Green Lane. It is here shown as linear earthwork, coach road and continuous township boundary. The black triangles denote the sites of Anglo-Saxon burials placed along the line of the track. Source: C. FentonThomas.

barrows, Iron Age cemeteries, and Anglo-Saxon inhumations placed along the line of a linear earthwork. This area lies at the eastern end of another important and enduring long distance trackway across the Wolds (Fenton-Thomas 2003), and the locality may also have been used as the medieval meeting place for the whole of the East Riding, when it was known as Crakou (Smith 1937). This shows how long special places can persist in the local landscape.

burial in this period for example, both on the Wolds and across the rest of England. Ancient features of the landscape were so old in people’s minds that they had become part of the sacred topography. In some cases this may have been done to legitimise new power structures with reference to the indigenous past (Bradley 1987). However, this relationship with the past could also have operated at a more local level, through people whose ancestors had inhabited the same area for many centuries. Under this scenario, the retention of ancient features in a contemporary landscape was part of the persistence of place, and the local mythic histories attached to such places and passed down from one generation to the next (Roymans 1995). As well as the barrows, ponds and other discrete places, linear features would then also have in turn become part of stories and myths, having been woven into the physical and social fabric of the landscape through naming and storytelling (Chadwick 2004; Gosden and Lock 1998).

There is a pond in the centre of Fimber village, but during the nineteenth century it had a neighbour that is now dried up and grassed over. The ponds were natural features where pockets of clay provide a seal for surface water (Hayfield, Pouncett and Wagner 1995). The village was named after the pond, which was itself given this name at least as early as the seventh century AD. The block of land containing the ponds was enclosed by massive linear banks and ditches in the later Bronze Age, and these earthworks appear to have respected the ponds themselves. The ponds must have been part of the mobile landscapes of the Neolithic and early Bronze Age, providing a valuable source of surface water in an otherwise dry land. There is a round barrow from the earlier Bronze Age alongside the ponds, and this monument also contained Anglo-Saxon inhumations. This locale was persistently used and venerated over many centuries. A Victorian church now stands on the mound of the barrow, but there was a Norman predecessor to this building, and also some evidence of structural activity on the barrow during the Roman period (Mortimer 1888).

We have already noted certain topographic locales where the linear earthworks were constructed in multiple forms, probably reflecting the existing importance of these valley-head locations. The Green Lane runs between two such places, and they appear to have maintained their importance over the centuries. In the eighth or ninth centuries AD a linear inhumation cemetery was inserted into the ditch of the linear earthwork at Sykes Monument close to the valley-head, reflecting the persistent importance of this locale. A more dramatic example occurs at Craike Hill on the edge of the eastern dip slope of the Wolds. Here, there was a unique concentration of monuments including Neolithic and early Bronze Age

268

CHRIS FENTON-THOMAS: MOBILE AND ENCLOSED LANDSCAPES ON THE YORKSHIRE WOLDS have been used to explain its origins. Conversely, the lack of monumental additions to places such as Craike Hill and Kemp Howe during the Roman and medieval periods might indicate that engagement with history and myth was rather different during those periods. At various times there were different perceptual frameworks available to people to enable them to explore, explain and understand their landscapes and their mythic pasts.

Mythic histories The reproduction of long-term social memory in the landscape has been discussed by Chris Gosden and Gary Lock. They acknowledge that for many non- literate societies, “...the landscape is the main locus of social memory with both history and myth inscribed in it” (Gosden and Lock 1998: 5). The landscape is employed in the production of social histories, both through the construction of features like ditches and monuments, but also through less tangible actions such as gatherings, the naming of places or the regular maintenance of boundaries. A more familiar example might be the practice of ‘beating the bounds’ around an English medieval parish. This engagement with the past is carried out as either mythic or genealogical history.

The character of the Yorkshire Wolds landscape revolved rhythmically between states of openness and enclosure. After the later Bronze Age it was probably never again fully mobile, without boundaries or land ownership. The landscapes of the middle Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian periods were nevertheless much more fluid and sparsely populated than their Roman or later medieval counterparts.

Sites and features of the landscape can be seen as engines for the creation of time, through the repetition at them of ritualised acts. These acts may have been aimed at the maintenance and reworking of elements of the landscape with known antecedents, these falling within the scope of genealogical history. More ancient features could allow for more latitude in evoking the past in the present. This we call mythical history. (Gosden and Lock 1998: 6).

But despite their similarities, there were also many differences between the two phases of open landscape, and these are best expressed through differences in the way that the Wolds was perceived by the populations living around its edge. During the Iron Age the Wolds was used for the upland, possibly seasonal grazing of sheep and cattle, but may have also been viewed as some kind of ancestral homeland, a place where the dead resided and to where the dead were taken. During the post-Roman period however, it was mainly bad deaths that were disposed of here, suggesting that the place held a more fearful liminality. The two linear cemeteries placed in the ditches of linear earthworks at Garton Station and Sykes Monument were both strung out along cross-Wold trackways, lines which were later used as boundaries for the township of Garton. These burials probably do not represent execution victims or criminal deaths and as such are different to from other Wolds burials from this period. They may belong to a transitional phase when the open landscape was beginning to be divided, the dead being placed along the tracks as a means of affirming the transformation of these features into boundaries.

The distinction between mythic and genealogical history is useful for understanding the relationship that societies had with their past. Gosden and Lock recognise that both forms of history could be present at the same time in the minds of the same people. An ancient feature in the landscape, whose original meaning had been lost but which retained a mythic potency, might nonetheless be drawn into the present and associated with elements of more recent ancestral connotations, evoking known individuals and events. Their discussion makes clear that a consciousness of the past was always present in the landscape as well as in people’s minds. The two forms of history may serve as an explanation for the presence of both continuity and change in the landscape. In the case of the Wolds, we are faced with a changing sequence of landscape history where the use and meaning of the area was altered considerably over the late prehistoric and early historic periods.

Lessons from the Wolds? The distinction between the monumental landscapes of the Neolithic and Bronze Age and the later prehistoric landscapes of enclosures and settlements has therefore been overstated. The differences between the two general periods have been extended to include economic, social and cultural distinctions, through a ‘fault line’ drawn sometime during the middle of the Bronze Age (Barrett 1990; Brück 2000). The strength of these differences is based on a contrast – between an earlier symbolic landscape ordered by places and paths, with relatively mobile populations; and a later agricultural landscape that was occupied and bounded, and which was appropriated by specific, settled groups. Admittedly, this model was developed with examples largely from southern England rather than Britain as a whole, but this is still a coarse distinction, which does not fit with the long-term sequence we can see in the Yorkshire Wolds. Here, there was no neat, evolutionary linear progression

Amidst all of the changes in the Wolds landscape there were some more enduring features that were used throughout many periods. The continued, albeit probably intermittent use of places such as Craike Hill, Fimber or Kemp Howe/Burrow seems to reflect this. The placing of Iron Age square barrow burials for example, amongst early Bronze Age round barrows, was expressing an awareness of the mythic history of the place. However, the presence of the remembered dead amongst the mythic ancestors drew the locale into the more recent genealogical past. The relationship between mythic and ancestral history was also present in the persistent linear features like the Green Lane. This feature was repeatedly drawn into current systems of land division, which must have been bound up with ideas of tenure, kinship and ancestral lineage. The antiquity of the line extended way before genealogical memory, where only myth would 269

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Table 1.

Period

Green Lane

Wolds landscape (main features)

Neolithic and Early Bronze Age

Track

Burial monuments, tracks, ponds, special topographic locales

Later Bronze Age and Early Iron Age

Linear earthwork

Long distance linear earthworks based on features of earlier landscape divided land into large swathes. Enclosed settlements.

Middle Iron Age

Track and boundary

Square barrow cemeteries and tracks. Large scale sheep pasturage. Settlement on vales and Wold-edge.

Later Iron Age and RomanoBritish

Boundary

Settlement encroaches onto Wolds. Former pastures divided and enclosed by ditches. Mixed agriculture.

Anglian

Track

Wolds used as open pasture crossed by trackways. Settlement around Wold-edge. Some burials placed along tracks and in ancient monuments.

AngloScandinavian

Track used as boundary

Settlement encroaches onto Wolds. Tracks used as boundaries. Foundation of townships, villages and open fields.

Medieval

Boundary used as track

Villages surrounded by extensive open fields. Pasture on fallow lands.

Post-Medieval

Boundary used as track

Contraction in settlement. Some villages deserted. Some arable land reverts to pasture.

18th century

Coach road

Many townships enclosed by act of parliament.

19th to 20th century

Redundant road

Enclosure continues. Loss of open fields.

Note: The use of the traditional cultural/ historical periods is for convenience only and has been adopted here to keep the chronological boundaries between the periods as fuzzy as possible. This is by no means a satisfactory chronological scheme as the transition from one landscape character to another could take as long as 200 years.

histories. In the late eighteenth century the lane was drawn into an extreme form of genealogical history, based on hereditary landownership linked to a classbased social system and a rapidly expanding capitalist economy. At the same time as a lavish stone memorial to a recently dead elite patriarch was raised here, the physical and social landscape surrounding the Green Lane was radically altered. This took away the role of the lane as boundary or track, and finally stripped it of its mythic roots, but not its long and eventful history.

whereby a mobile landscape became more enclosed and settled. Instead, the sequence traces a series of cycles oscillating between the mobile and enclosed phases. It shows that for this area of England at least, the distinction between monumental/mobile and agricultural/bounded landscapes may not have been so fundamental after all. The Sledmere Green Lane has been in existence for approximately four millennia as a landscape feature, and it combined a territorial role with mythic credentials echoing from an ancient past. The functions and meanings of the Green Lane have not remained static, but as it quite literally held a significant place within the minds of the communities who lived and worked in its vicinity, its presence has persisted. This landscape was their ancestral and mythical map, and the Green Lane was both a marker of, and a way into, these different

Acknowledgements The ideas that lie behind this paper have been developed over several years from talking to people and reading their work. The different pieces of work carried out by Bill Bevan, Mel Giles and Harold Fox have been 270

CHRIS FENTON-THOMAS: MOBILE AND ENCLOSED LANDSCAPES ON THE YORKSHIRE WOLDS particularly useful. Andrew Fleming and Mark Edmonds both acted as supervisors for the PhD research from which the paper was drawn. I have learned a lot from watching them both look at landscapes, and hearing what they have had to say. The text of the article itself has benefited greatly from comments by Adrian Chadwick and Claire Coulter.

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the Fourth to the Ninth Centuries AD. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 1-10. Reynolds, A. 1997. On execution sites and cemeteries. In G. de Boe and F. Verhaege (eds.) Death and Burial in Medieval Europe. Zellik: IAP, pp. 34-41. Richards, J. 1999. Cottam: an Anglian and AngloScandinavian settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds. Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 156: 1-110. Richards, J.C. 1978. The Archaeology of the Berkshire Downs: an Introductory Survey. Reading: Berkshire Archaeology Committee. Roymans, N. 1995. The cultural biography of urnfields and the long term history of mythical landscapes. Archaeological Dialogues 2: 2-25. Semple, S. 1998. A fear of the past: the place of the prehistoric burial mound in the ideology of middle and later Anglo-Saxon England. World Archaeology 30: 109-126. Sheppard, J. 1976. Medieval village planning in northern England: some evidence from Yorkshire. Journal of Historical Geography 2: 3-20. Smith, A. H. 1937. The Place-names of the East Riding of Yorkshire and York. Cambridge: EPNS. Spratt, D.A. 1989. Linear Earthworks of the Tabular Hills of Northeast Yorkshire. Sheffield: Department of Archaeology and Prehistory. Stead I.M. 1979. The Arras Culture. York: Yorkshire Philosophical Society. Stead, I.M. 1987. Garton Station. Current Archaeology 9 (8): 234-237. Stead, I.M. 1988. Kirkburn. A Yorkshire chariot burial – with a coat of mail. Current Archaeology 111: 115117. Stead I.M. 1992. Iron Age Cemeteries in East Yorkshire. English Heritage Report 22. London: English Heritage. Stoertz, C. 1997. Ancient Landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds. Aerial Photographic Transcription and Analysis. Swindon: RCHME. Thomas, J. 1999. Understanding the Neolithic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilley, C. 1994. A Phenomenology of Landscape. Places, Paths and Monuments. London: Berg van de Noort, R. and Ellis, S. 1994. Wetland Heritage of Holderness: an Archaeological Survey. University of Hull. van de Noort, R. and Ellis, S. 1999. Wetland Heritage of the Vale of York: an Archaeological Survey. University of Hull. van de Noort, R. and Ellis, S. 2000. Wetland Heritage of the Hull Valley: an Archaeological Survey. University of Hull. Warburton, J. n.d. 96, 000 acres of the Wolds of Yorkshire. London: Warburton. Watkin, T. 1983. The Archaeology of Anglian East Yorkshire. East Riding Archaeologist 7. Williams, H. 1998. Monuments and the past in early Anglo-Saxon England. World Archaeology 30: 90108. Whittle, A. 1997. Moving on and moving around: Neolithic settlement mobility. In P. Topping (ed.) 273

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A stone bank and managed beech hedge trees at Sweetworthy on Exmoor, Devon, which formed part of the boundary of a deserted medieval hamlet and a later farm abandoned in the nineteenth century. In addition to the medieval and post-medieval remains, the earthworks of three late prehistoric enclosures are nearby. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Stone walls in west Östergötland – their dating and its consequences Maria Petersson extent on twigs and shoots, that trees and bushes are seriously decimated and forest gives way to open land” (Lagerås and Regnell 1999: 265). In the transitional zone in west Östergötland, I have previously identified traces of a well-organised grazing regime (Petersson 2001a, 2001b). The animals were guarded by herders, a practice that left traces in the form of hearths, and these people probably spent the nights out in the pastures with the livestock. Certain aspects of the grazing organisation seem to have remained the same throughout the period until the late first century BC or early first century AD, including grazing rights, which probably developed in conjunction with the new grazing organisation. The fact that the same places were repeatedly visited throughout the period suggests a certain measure of stability in this respect.

Introduction On excavations and other archaeological fieldwork, and in off-site or post-excavation analyses, it is we the archaeologists who create our own source material, through a combination of manual labour and theory, of physical engagement and interpretation (q.v. Chadwick 2003; Molander 2000; Schön 1983). By consciously designing our archaeological fieldwork we can affect the quality of the source material, but certain critical problems with this evidence can also be minimised. We can thus create a source material that is particularly well suited to illuminate certain problems. In this article, I will discuss the result of a long term project encompassing several excavations. The project originally set out to address some methodological problems connected with the excavation of fossil fields, but has since developed and expanded into dealing with the wider landscape outside of obvious sites, and with a much longer-term perspective. The particular problem I am addressing here is the dating of ancient stone walls, and I briefly outline how the dates which have recently been obtained do not conform to earlier research, and how this affects our understandings of the prehistoric landscape, economy and the daily lives of people. The setting is west Östergötland in southern Sweden (Fig. 1).

Table 1. The Swedish archaeological periods referred to in this text. Note that the early Iron Age encompasses the pre-Roman and Roman Iron Age. The late Iron Age encompasses the Migration Period, the Vendel Period and the Viking Age. The Christianisation of Sweden is marked by the onset of the medieval period.

Landscape and settlement in western Östergötland The stone wall system which is the focus of this article is situated immediately south of the municipality of Väderstad in west Östergötland. It is in the undulating transitional zone between the Östergötland plain, which has some of the best farmland in Sweden, and the forest lands to the south of it. The archaeology of this transitional zone is almost entirely dominated by early Iron Age remains, with some late Bronze Age burials. The traces of human activities from the period prior to the late Bronze Age are not relevant for my discussion regarding stone walls, and will not be considered further here.

An even greater period of expansion seems to have occurred during the transition between the late Bronze Age and the early Iron Age, between 600–400 BC (Hedvall 1995: 34). A large number of new, dispersed settlements were established, but few of the existing habitations were abandoned. Areas at the periphery of established communities were settled, and new settlements were founded in between older ones, but the previous settlement pattern was not really disrupted. Both large, dominant farms and smaller subordinate ones were established. The excavated Abbetorp settlement with one big and one small farm in close vicinity is an excellent example of this (Petersson 1999b, 2004). The expansion was followed by a period of consolidation, when only a few new settlements were created. A further period of expansion followed from the third to the late first century BC, or early first century AD (Hedvall 1995: 34). Within the Väderstad area, the settlements established at the end of this period seem to have been small farms, subordinate to the larger, earlier ones, as at Lugnet for example

The transition between the early and late Bronze Age seems to have been one of the periods of greatest expansion in Swedish prehistory (Table 1). Several new settlements were established, as well as new cemeteries (Hedvall 1995: 34; Nilsson 1987: 94 f). From the late Bronze Age onwards, the landscape of west Östergötland, and indeed large parts of southern Sweden, was transformed into progressively more open grazing lands, as indicated by pollen analyses (Göransson 1989; Ranheden 1999). Lagerås and Regnell maintain that this expansion of grasslands can be taken to indicate extensive winter grazing, as “It is probably above all as a result of winter grazing, with livestock living to a great 275

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Figure 1. Map of Östergötland, showing places mentioned in the text. Source: A. Leaver and M. Petersson.

pattern (Göthberg 2000: 147; Myhre 2002). The abandonment of settlements had its counterpart in the abandonment of cemeteries (Nilsson 1987), but the reasons behind this are poorly understood.

(Ericsson and Österström 1999). During the roughly 400 year period following this second wave of Iron Age expansion, very few settlements were built. It has generally been considered that the stone wall systems – large systems of enclosures – in Östergötland were in use during the period AD 100–600 (Pedersen and Widgren 1998: 301; Widgren 1997: 40). In the period AD 400–650, the majority of excavated settlement sites that had existed from the early Iron Age in Östergötland were abandoned (Hedvall 1995: 34), and only a few new settlements were established in the following centuries. This phenomenon is known from large parts of south and middle Sweden, as well as other parts of Scandinavia, and represented a period of major changes in settlement

Excavations of medieval village tofts indicate that these were first settled during the centuries around 500 AD (Carlsson, Lindeblad and Nielsen 2001; Lindeblad and Nielsen 1997; Lindgren-Hertz 1997; Nielsen forthcoming). It is assumed that the previously dispersed farms were now concentrated in the tofts or their vicinities. Several new cemeteries were established in the eight century AD, and cemeteries of late Iron Age date and village tofts were frequently associated with each other, another indication that the early Iron Age 276

MARIA PETERSSON: STONE WALLS IN WEST ÖSTERGÖTLAND – THEIR DATING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES settlements moved to more nucleated village tofts at the beginning of the late Iron Age. Few tofts have been excavated, so the late Iron Age settlements represent a lacuna in knowledge. There are no known surviving fields or traces of enclosures in west Östergötland dating to the late Iron Age and early medieval period. It has been assumed that the fields of this period are to be found in the same places as those of the early modern period and of today. In southern Sweden it can be deduced from survey maps that in the late Viking or early medieval villages each farm had its separate fields, situated by the farmhouses (Riddersporre 1995). This pattern also seems valid for Östergötland. In the early medieval period open fields were introduced into the villages of southern Sweden, and according to pollen diagrams, there was an increase in arable cultivation and possible clearance fires in west Östergötland at the same time (Göransson 1989: 405). The stony moraine areas south of the plain were now utilised for swidden cultivation. This is reflected in the archaeology, and excavations in these areas indicate extensive systems of land use where cultivation of outfield areas for a year or two resulted in the improvement of the land, which was followed by a long period of grazing (Ericsson 2004; Petersson 2001a, 2004). This extensive cultivation was particularly frequent in the period AD 1450–1650. Stensträngar – ruined stone walls Figure 2. Stone wall A54848 at Abbetorp under excavation. Source: M. Petersson.

Stensträngar is the Swedish archaeological term for a particular type of ruined stone wall. The term is purely descriptive and typological, and simply refers to the appearance of these ruined stone walls, as they look like a row of stones laid end to end. During the last thirty years stone walls and stone wall systems have been regarded as typical of the Roman Iron Age and the Migration Period, circa. AD 100–600 (Lindquist 1968; Widgren 1983). The expression stensträngar was coined in the 1920s, and is used in the Register of Ancient Sites and Monuments (Selinge 1969). In this article the English term ‘stone wall’ is used to denote these ruined walls.

When stone walls are excavated, they often appear as one row of larger stones laid end to end, with rubble or smaller stones on either side (Figs. 2-3). Gert Franzén has attempted reconstructions of these stone walls (Franzén 1994). In doing so, he has tried to identify archaeologically the depressions where the stones were originally set. Stone walls made up of one row of stones have been reconstructed in two fashions. The first type – ställd enkelmur, were made up of a base of erected boulders, locked in position by carefully placed stones,

Figure 3. Section through stone wall A54848 at Abbetorp. Stratigraphy: 1. Greyish brown, sandy moraine. 2. Sterile moraine. 3. Light brown, silty sand. Source: M. Petersson.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT on top of which rows of smaller stones were piled (Fig. 4). The reconstructed original height of these walls was 0.8-0.9 metres. The second type – staplad enkelmur, were more simple constructions consisting of smaller, more loosely piled stones (Fig. 5). The latter type of wall has been in use until modern times (ibid.).

Figure 4. Reconstruction of stone wall of the type ställd enkelmur. Source: Franzén 1994: 17.

Figure 5. Partly ruined stone wall of the type staplad enkelmur. Source: Franzén 1994: 17. Figure 6. The stone wall A1758 forming part of a pen at RAÄ 166, Hogstad parish, Östergötland. Note the double rows of foundation stones in the northern part of the wall. Also note the clearance stones heaped along the sides of the wall. Source: Petersson 2001a: 29.

There are also stone walls that, when excavated, appear as double rows of stones. Franzén though believes that these are just single row walls of the ställd enkelmur type. He suggests that in these cases large sections of wall have simply collapsed to one side or the other, and that this is the reason why they now appear as double row walls. Franzén maintains that with these examples, one of the stone rows will be found at a higher level than the other. Additionally, there will be only one row of depressions where the stones were originally set in the ground, and these depressions will be associated with the deepest row of stones (Franzén 1994). However, there are stone walls with double rows of stone. A stone wall like this was excavated at RAÄ 166 in Hogstad socken for example (Figs. 6-7). Here, it was obvious that the construction had originally included two rows of stones that had been set equally deep in the ground. These stones must have functioned as foundations for a wall, or as the support for some kind of wooden superstructure (Petersson 2001a). Similar observations were also made during the excavations in the eastern part of the Väderstad stone wall system (Petersson 2004).

excavation, the clearance stones might be mistaken as part of the collapsed wall. The Swedish landscape also contains many ruined stone enclosures or stenmurar that were built as a result of the Enclosure Movement in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These however, were often shell walls in the sense that they consisted of two rows of larger stones that made up the face of the wall, with smaller stones heaped in between. The later walls belonging to the Enclosure Movement are not included in the features I describe here. However, it has been shown that walls of similar construction may date to the early Iron Age (Häggström, Baran, Ericsson, and Murray 2004). Other stone walls may have had wooden fencing along the top, as was the case in Estonia until recently (Fig. 8). The term stensträngssystem, here translated as ‘stone wall system’, refers to a concentration of stone walls, with each wall having a distance of no more than 50 metres to the nearest neighbour (Selinge 1969). Again, this is a

Often clearance stones have been heaped along the sides of the stone walls, or even on top of them. Without 278

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Figure 7. Section through the stone wall A1758. Stratigraphy: 1. Turf 2. Ancient plough soil 3. Sterile moraine 4. Greyish brown sand with humus, the divide between layer 3 and 4 is not sharp (never ploughed). Source: Petersson 2001a: 48.

possible that some stone walls were set on ancient boundaries and even borders between different communities, though there is no evidence for such an interpretation. It has also been suggested that stone walls in some instances originally had magical purposes, connecting the prehistoric farm house to the graves of the ancestors (Cassel 1998). In Östergötland extensive systems of stone-walled enclosures traverse the central part of the province. Three areas in particular stand out, in the centre, and to the west and east. In the eastern area, excavations carried out in the 1960s were crucial to the interpretation of the phenomenon (Lindquist 1968). In the western area, the first excavations of stone walls were conducted in the 1990s in advance of large-scale road works (Ericsson, Petersson and Ranheden 1999; Larsson, Jönsson, and Widgren 1995; Petersson 1999a, 2001a, 2004). The new E4 high road was going to cut through a large and wellpreserved stone wall system south of Väderstad, and so research and theories concerning stone walls were once again brought to the fore. As I will outline however, the dating of the stone walls is one thing, but determining the date and character of land use is another. It is seldom easy to establish any relationship between the two. East Östergötland – earlier stone wall research Figure 8. Stone wall with wooden super structure in Österby, Estonia. Source: G. Jakobsson, 1922. National Museum of Cultural History.

In eastern Östergötland, the landscape is undulating and there is a mixture of hillocks of glacial moraines, valleys and plains. Here, stone walls generally formed a boundary between different types of subsoil. Within the stone wall field systems there are also remnants of graves and burial grounds, house foundation terraces, fossil arable fields, droveways and sunken roads.

typological term derived from the National Register of Ancient Sites and Monuments. I want to emphasise that the term only refers to the ruined stone walls. Thus, it does not refer to a particular system of land use, nor is it the name of a particular kind of field system. Sometimes the stone wall systems cover large areas, and one can speculate about the rationale behind their construction. Research suggests that the original stone walls restricted the movements of domestic animals, keeping them out of arable and meadow, and they sometimes also delineated arable fields (Lindquist 1968; Widgren 1983). It is also

The Halleby site at Skärkind parish in east Östergötland was excavated as a joint project between cultural geographers and archaeologists in the 1960s. The cultural geographer Sven-Olof Lindquist’s interpretation of the site became a model of how stone walls were viewed (Lindquist 1968). At Halleby there were traces of three 279

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Figure 9. Stone walls and settlement in the Halleby area. Source: Lindquist 1968: 39.

same time as the cultivation of the arable subdivisions had started. Yet another assumption was that the earthen bank subdivisions delineating the fossil fields were contemporary to the cultivation, and that charcoal from underneath the earthen banks would date the onset of cultivation and thus also the construction of the larger encircling stone walls. Lindquist thus dated the stone walls to the Roman Iron Age and Migration period (Lindquist 1968).

farms, forming a small village (Fig. 9). According to Lindquist, each farm had been surrounded by a boundary in the form of a stone wall. The infields or inmarken comprised two large enclosed fields or gärde that had belonged to the village, with subdivisions of arable plots as well as meadows. The arable fields were mostly rectilinear or block shaped, and separated by earthen banks. Three cattle droves led from the village toft, one to a water hole and the remaining two to the unenclosed grazing grounds or utmarken (ibid.). The houses at Halleby were dated from the very end of the first century BC to AD 700, with an emphasis on the late second to late sixth centuries AD. The construction date of the stone walls at Halleby was established through indirect means. Lindquist assumed that there had been a functional and temporal correlation between the settlement and the stone walls, and that the stone walls encircling the two large fields had been erected at the

The archaeologist Evert Baudou, who also took part in the Halleby excavation, was however very critical of Lindquist’s dating and interpretation of the site (Baudou 1973). This critique focused on Lindquist’s series of assumptions outlined above, which, if incorrect, would mean that the whole dating scheme for the walls was incorrect. Baudou claimed that it had not been proven that the enclosure walls surrounding the two large fields 280

MARIA PETERSSON: STONE WALLS IN WEST ÖSTERGÖTLAND – THEIR DATING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Figure 10. Reconstruction of the settlement and land use in the Fläret area during the early Iron Age (c. 100 BC to 600 AD). Source: Pedersen and Widgren 1998: 329.

(Widgren 1983: 67). These settlements had been abandoned by around AD 600. Widgren also tried to get direct dating of stone walls. Some archaeological deposits ran underneath some stone walls, and he also collected charcoal from under the walls, assuming that this was derived from clearance activities. The date range fell within the late pre-Roman Iron Age to the fifteenth century AD. Features that were stratigraphically superimposed to the stone walls were dated 100 BC to AD 300. Widgren dated the main period of construction and use of the stone walls to AD 100–600 (ibid.: 129).

were contemporary with the earthen banks demarcating the arable fields, or that all parts of these stone walls were built at the same time. There was also no necessary functional correlation between settlements and stone walls, and they might not have been contemporary. Baudou also criticised Lindquist’s methodology of reconstructing large portions of the stone walls’ original extent through the use of early modern survey maps. Badou’s studies of the maps suggested that some stone walls coincided with boundaries which were still functional features of the landscape at the time of mapping, and that the stone walls were primarily connected to the formation of the historical villages (Baudou 1973: 121). A lively debate followed. Lindquist’s interpretation was criticized for being too heavily modelled on historical conditions, and the use of the world gärde already brought to mind a familiar historical system of land use (Näsman 1979: 160 f). Ultimately however, it was to be Lindquist’s interpretation which became dominant (Ambrosiani 1968; Helmfrid 1968, 1969; Näsman 1976; Winberg 1982).

Many scholars maintain that the stone wall systems of east Östergötland were associated with a specific system of land use that was introduced at this time, around AD 100 (Lindquist 1968; Pedersen and Widgren 1998; Widgren 1983). Janken Myrdal coined the expression agrartekniskt complex, which refers to a series of connected innovations in agricultural techniques that may have been introduced simultaneously (Myrdal 1985). The infields were enclosed by stone walls, within which the arable fields and meadows were situated. Cattle droves, with stone walls along their edges, led from the farm tofts through the infields to the outlying lands used for communal grazing, and the animals were thus prevented from damaging crops and hay. Animals were kept in byres during the winter in order to facilitate the collection of manure. This was spread on the fields which, from this period onwards, were permanent and tilled in a system of annual cropping. Haymaking and meadows are also

Lindquist’s interpretations were reinforced by the cultural geographer Mats Widgren’s investigations at Fläret, Askeby parish, only some 10 kilometres from Halleby (Widgren 1983). Like Lindquist, Widgren dated the stone walls on the assumption of a functional and temporal connection between settlement and encircling stone walls. Charcoal from the lowermost layers of the settlements was dated from the very late first century BC to AD 200 281

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT plain and the forest lands to the south of it. Within this zone, which is roughly 500m wide, there is a mosaic of rocky outcrops, glacial tills alternating between gravels, silts and clays, and wetlands (Fig. 11). Stone walls seem to have separated these different types of soil, as in eastern Östergötland, but they also cut through areas of similar soil and land use. The enclosed areas of the western systems are considerably smaller than those of their eastern counterparts. Even the general layouts of the systems differ between east and west Östergötland. Within the stone wall systems of western Östergötland there are droveways, graves and cup-marked stones. Built-up terraces with house-foundations, which are found in the eastern systems, have not been identified here. Land survey maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries show that the area where the Väderstad stone wall system is found was used primarily for grazing, and to a lesser extent as meadows. Aerial photos indicate that this land use was still practised in the 1940s.

regarded as innovations of this period, possible because of the introduction of a new, more efficient scythe (Lindquist 1968; Pedersen and Widgren 1998; Widgren 1983). Mats Widgren believes that the conditions for animal husbandry were radically changed by the construction of stone wall systems, and he has suggested that they represented a period of agricultural expansion when a surplus was created from animal husbandry, a surplus targeted for the Roman market (Widgren 1998: 292). Widgren reconstructed the early Iron Age landscape of the Fläret area, using the stone wall systems (Fig. 10). Five farms were connected by a droveway and a stone wall system. He argued that the farms were all part of a hägnadslag, a communal organisation aimed at the maintenance of the shared stone walls. Widgren also postulated the existence of a higher level of organisation, where grazing rights on the commons were laid down (Widgren 1983). Later however, Widgren abandoned this unstratified model of early Iron Age society. He now proposes the existence of a dominant farm within each stone wall system, each with subordinate farms, and with another lower social level of workmen and serfs (Widgren 1998).

In advance of the widening and rerouting of the E4 highway through west Östergötland, a series of archaeological excavations were undertaken. South of Väderstad, there was a large and well preserved stone wall system approximately 4km by 1-1.5km in extent (or roughly 400ha), which the new road was going to cut through (Fig. 12). This stone wall system was characterised by a number of long stone walls orientated roughly north–south and east-west, with droveways having the same orientation. A characteristic of the

West Östergötland – extending knowledge about stone walls In western Östergötland there are several large stone wall systems in the transitional zone between the Östergötland

Figure 11. The transitional zone between the Östergötland Plain (Östgötaslätten) and the forest country to the south of it. Note the grain silo of Väderstad in the middle of the picture. Source: Jan Norrman, National Heritage Board (RAÄ).

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Figure 12. The stone wall system south of Väderstad. Source: Ericsson 2004: 47.

likely land use. The Väderstad stone wall system seems to have been related to the needs of domestic animals, rather than arable farming.

system were ‘corridors’ connecting the plain with the forested and unenclosed areas to the south. The terrain here is very stony, indicating that grazing, primarily of cattle, was probably the main land use. Within the stone walled system there were also smaller enclosed areas, 0.3-3ha in size. These sometimes contained fossil fields, but these were also found elsewhere. Excavations have shown that most of these fields belong to the medieval period (Ericsson 2004; Petersson 2001a, 2004).

A primary aim of the excavations in question was to date all stone walls within the road transect. One reason for this was that so few stone walls had so far been dated by direct methods in Östergötland (in 1995 only about ten), and secondly, the dated stone walls were all in east Östergötland, not in the western part of the landscape. Since the layout of stone wall systems differs between the east and the west, there is no reason to assume similar dating. A third reason was that the possibility of acquiring 14C dates for stone walls had increased since the Halleby and Fläret excavations with AMS-dating techniques, where even small quantities of charcoal can be dated. The excavations in the Väderstad stone wall system should not be seen in isolation however. They were part of the aforementioned, long-term project concerning the development of methods to excavate fossil fields and associated features. The dating of the stone walls at Väderstad is based heavily on insights from earlier excavations (Elfstrand 2001; Petersson 1996, 1999a, 2001a).

Particularly in the south part of the system, there were oblong enclosed areas about 5-7ha in extent. One such area was a large oblong enclosure situated west of Abbetorp. Within this enclosure were graves, and a heap of fire-cracked stones, the latter indicating nearby settlement. It has been suggested that these represented an early phase of the stone wall system, and that each enclosure contained the infields and meadows of a farm (Ericsson 1999: 10; Widgren 1996: 27). This interpretation is influenced by Lindquist’s reconstruction of Halleby. Historical maps show that the land use within the transitional zone has, with few exceptions, been grazing and hay-meadow. There are stone walls that encircle wet areas where hay-meadow seems the most 283

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Figure 13. The excavated and dated stone walls of the eastern part of the Väderstad stone wall system (note the hamlet of Abbetorp for orientation). Source: M. Petersson.

Väderstad system apart from the Mesolithic and Neolithic sites was the Abbetorp site, 14C dated to the period 400 BC-AD 400, with the period 400 BC–AD 100 as a very clear early phase (Peterson 2004). The Ryd settlement site also seems to have had a similar chronology (Helander and Zetterlund 2001). The Lugnet settlement site dates to the Roman Iron Age and Migration Period, or roughly AD 120–550 (Ericsson and Österström 1999: 7 f). Using the same kind of argument as for Fläret and Halleby, the Väderstad stone wall system should theoretically have been in use from about 400 BC until AD 400/550.

In the following section I will discuss the different dating methods that were applied to the Väderstad system and the results obtained. The most detailed discussions concern the eastern part of the system, with which I am particularly familiar since I headed those excavations (Ericsson and Petersson 1999: 24 ff; Petersson 2004: 28 ff). In this part of the system nine stone walls were excavated (Fig. 13). The excavations in the western part of the Väderstad stone wall system have not yet been published. When the results are fully analysed, there may be further evidence to support or critique certain interpretations. However, the major points that I wish to make in this paper are sufficiently supported by the evidence from the eastern part of the Väderstad stone wall system, and the other stone wall systems of west Östergötland.

There is a distinct trend in the Väderstad area and other westerly stone wall systems in Östergötland for solitary graves and cemeteries to be concentrated within the confines of the stone wall system (Ericsson 2001: 91; Petersson forthcoming). The oldest of these are cairns built around big boulders (mittblocksgravar), generally dated to the late Bronze Age, whilst the youngest are stone circles (domarringar) dating to the Migration Period. This association would therefore date the stone wall system to approximately 1100 BC–AD 550. Within the surviving stone wall system there are the remains of

Dating through spatial association In past decades the most common method to date stone walls was by association, whereby categories of monuments often found together were considered to be of similar date. Stone walls were thus usually dated by the settlements they enclosed (Lindquist 1968; Widgren 1983). The earliest known settlement within the 284

MARIA PETERSSON: STONE WALLS IN WEST ÖSTERGÖTLAND – THEIR DATING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES numerous fossil fields, often enclosed or demarcated by stone walls. Often the edge of a field follows the curving shape of a stone wall, and the two types of features may thus be closely linked stratigraphically and spatially. The majority of the fossil fields represent short lived but extensive cultivation, dating to medieval and modern times (Ericsson 2004, Petersson 2001a, 2004).

stone wall one wishes to date. And although the disuse of a stone wall can sometimes be dated by overlaying features, charcoal from underneath clearance stones positioned beside the stone wall cannot date the wall itself. In the Väderstad system it was difficult to find charcoal underneath the stone walls, either from features under the walls or from an assumed clearance fire – one or two samples from each stone wall often had to suffice. A possible explanation for the absence of charcoal could be that there was no clearance by fire prior to the construction of walls. This in turn might indicate that the area was already intensively grazed and fairly open. If such a landscape was cleared by fire there might not have been all that much charcoal deposited. Another possible explanation for the lack of charcoal might be that the stone walls were dug down in order to have a more stable foundation, so that even if there was clearance by fire prior to construction, charcoal would not have survived underneath the lowest stones. In the eastern part of the Väderstad stone wall system however, no such foundation trenches were observed, and it would appear that the lowermost stones of the stone walls were laid directly onto the ground surface. However, if adjacent areas were cultivated charcoal might be found in the ploughsoil. If the cultivation could be linked to the construction of stone walls, than this would be another means of dating the walls. This emphasises the need for large-scale open area excavation when investigating the stone walls.

If we were therefore to try and date the stone wall system in Väderstad by association with other archaeological features, this would produce a very wide date range from the late Bronze Age to the modern period, with an apparent gap in the Vendel and Viking Period of AD 550–1050 AD. The dating would differ depending on which of the different kinds of associated monument category one decided to use. This method is thus clearly not very useful as the sole means of determining the original periods of construction, use and abandonment for the stone walls in the area. I have argued elsewhere that the common denominator of the area in question is not the stone wall system but the land use, namely grazing (Petersson forthcoming). Radiocarbon dating The most difficult problem associated with 14C dating of stone walls is of course the origin and context of the charcoal. Was the charcoal connected to any one event related to a stone wall? Charcoal from a feature underneath a stone wall will provide a terminus ante quem, but such charcoal cannot be assumed to have a close contextual connection with the stone wall. Charcoal is sometimes found adhering to the underside of the lowest stones in a wall, and in such cases it has often been proposed that the area was cleared by fire immediately before the stone wall was built. A close connection between charcoal and stone wall is thus assumed. Reconstructions of stone walls illustrate the importance of understanding the original construction, in order to be able to properly evaluate the context of the charcoal (Franzén 1994), and often there is no charcoal found in contextually unambiguous positions. In order to more carefully assess the 14C context of the charcoal, it is necessary to excavate large areas, and it is only when a series of 14C samples are processed that it is possible to determine whether the charcoal came from clearances or not. Ideally, there should be a series of samples from each

From the eastern part of the Väderstad system thirteen C dates were obtained to try and establish the period of construction of the stone walls (Tables 2-3). Seven of these date features found directly underneath stone walls. Of these features five were hearths or cooking-pits dating to the late Bronze Age or pre-Roman Iron Age, one feature was early Neolithic and one late medieval. The remaining six samples were assumed to be clearance charcoal. Two of these produced Mesolithic dates and were thus residual, one was dated to the Migration Period, and three to the late medieval or early modern period. To summarise, the attempts to date the stone walls through 14C techniques were not altogether successful due to contextual problems, and a shortage of suitable 14

Table 2. Table of 14C-datings associated with stone walls in the eastern part of the Väderstad system.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Table 3. Diagram showing the 14C-datings associated with stone walls in the eastern part of the Väderstad system (from table 2).

charcoal. However, when the 14C dates from the whole of the Väderstad system are examined, six out of a total of thirty dates belong to the Roman Iron Age and Migration Period, generally considered to be the period when stone walls were in use. Fifteen of the dates belong to the medieval and modern periods.

built on archaeological layers dating to the late Roman Iron Age and Migration Period (Fig. 14). The earliest possible date for these two stone walls is the Vendel Period. Stone wall A48256 was built on an old ground surface and was overlain by a heap of fire-cracked stones (Fig. 15). This stone wall enclosed an area of the Abbetorp settlement site that had been used for special purposes such as smithing, brewing and grain-drying, and which had been utilised during the Roman Iron Age, from the very end of the first century BC to AD 400. There is no doubt that the stone wall was functionally connected to this very specific area, and from the stratigraphy it was clear that it had been built at the beginning of the aforementioned period.

Medieval and modern dates derived from positions underneath stone walls are not restricted only to the Väderstad system. In recent years a large part of the Järnstad stone wall system was excavated, as well as stone walls not forming part of any system at RAÄ 166 and RAÄ 171 in Hogstad socken in west Östergötland (Björkhager, Ohlsén and Ranheden 2002; Petersson 2001a). At these excavations the focus was on fossil fields and their associated features. Similar methods were employed, including the stripping of large areas. In all these cases the stone walls produced late dates. Thus, the general trend among the 14C dates does not conform to the prevailing paradigm that stone walls date to the Roman Iron Age and Migration period. Granted, there are contextual problems connected with sampling charcoal under the stone walls. Nonetheless, I interpret the results as indicating that stone walls may be of later date than previously thought. To overthrow the existing paradigm however, one needs more substantial evidence.

In the eastern part of the Väderstad stone wall system therefore, only one out of nine stone walls could be securely dated with regards to both construction and abandonment. For two more, a terminus ante quem could be given. These last two are both interesting and important since they point towards a date of construction no earlier than the Vendel period (AD 550–800). Dating with the aid of map regression In this section I shall discuss comparisons between the Väderstad stone wall system and survey maps from the same area. The earliest maps of the area are the so called geometrical maps (Geometriska jordeboken) from 16381639, which mostly depict the infields. The outlying areas where the stone wall systems were preserved were usually not mapped until the late eighteenth century. According to the earliest maps the Väderstad system was found within the farmsteads (ensamgård) of Abbetorp

Stratigraphic dating Using stratigraphic methods, some of the contextual problems associated with 14C dating of stone walls can be avoided. In the eastern part of the Väderstad system, stone wall A54848 was superimposed on a cemetery that was in use around AD 200-550. Stone wall A55181 was 286

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Figure 14. Stone wall A55181 at Abbetorp built on top of cultural layers from the Roman Iron Age and Migration Period. Source: Karin Lindeblad.

Figure 15. Stone wall A48256 at Abbetorp built on an old surface and overlain by a heap of fire cracked stones. Source: Göran Gruber.

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Figure 17. Abbetorp. The spatial relation between stone walls and land-use 1638 – 39. The survey map of 1638-39 has been rectified. Source: M. Petersson.

An example of this phenomenon is found around Abbetorp, which in the 1630s was a farmstead (Figs. 1617). This farmstead is thought to have been established away from the larger hamlets on the edge of the plain, during the early medieval period (Widgren 1996: 23). The place-name suffix –torp may support such a view, but this could also have happened in the Viking Age. The 1638-1639 map depicts the toft, the infields, a meadow and roads leading to the toft from different directions. When the area was thoroughly surveyed prior to the detailed planning of the new E4 highway, a stone wall surrounding the southern part of the infields, and a droveway connecting to the road leading up to the toft from the south were found. A cattle drove leading from the north-east corner of the infield area, and another immediately to the west of the Abbetorp infield, which might also have branched off to the toft, were also found while surveying. These stone walls and their relation to features on the 1638-39 map are depicted in Figure 17. Abbetorp is a good example of correlations between historic maps and the archaeological evidence of stone wall systems. Because the establishment of the farmstead can probably be dated to the Viking Age or early medieval period, this is also the terminus ante quem for these stone walls.

Figure 16. The single farm of Väderstad. Survey map of 1638 – 39. Source: Lantmäteriets arkiv, Gävle.

and Bosgård and the hamlets (by) of Vistad, Väderstad, Vallsberg and Östad. I have compared the droveways of the stone wall system with the roads and tofts of the survey maps. The droveways of the stone wall system south of Väderstad were mainly orientated north-south, and they converged in the northern part of the system. There are several examples of how such cattle droves, lined with stone walls, led to the little roads depicted on the old maps. These roads in turn led to the village tofts. There were cattle droves leading to five of the seven village tofts, indicating a strong connection between the stone wall system and the historical settlement structure. The general trend in Östergötland seems to have been that early Iron Age settlements were abandoned in the period AD 400-600, and the dispersed farms moved to what was to become the medieval village tofts. Recent excavations indicate that west Östergötland conforms to this picture (Carlsson et al 1996; Ericsson and Österström 1999; Larsson 1997; Sundberg 2000). This means that the droveways linked to the village tofts ought not to be older than AD 400-600, and they could very well be of an even later date.

In the Väderstad system the stone walls near to the tofts enclosed smaller areas than those further away. For instance, the historical maps show that the pasture was more finely divided close to the tofts than further away. This too could indicate a close connection between the stone walls and the historical villages. So too could the fact that there were several instances where boundaries 288

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Figure 18. The stone wall system of Särstad, Rinna parish, Östergötland. Note the main drove way, which coincides with forms on an eighteenth century map and connects to a road on this map leading to the village toft. Source: M. Petersson.

Complex contextual dating It is far better of course, to try and date the boundaries using the widest possible range of evidence, including both archaeology and documentary sources. As an example of this I shall discuss the dating of the stone wall A45199 in area 9 at Abbetorp (Petersson 2004: 28 ff). This is the excavated stone wall most securely dated to the medieval period. This result is partly due to the fact that the dating of stone walls was an explicit aim of the excavation project design, and also a result of the fieldwork methodology, which had been developed in earlier excavations (Petersson 1999a, 2001a). Not only were all visible features above ground surveyed in detail, including relevant earthworks in adjacent areas, but then long profiles through the fossil fields were excavated for purposes of sampling and stratigraphic control, followed by the mechanical stripping of topsoil over the whole area of the field system. The area was photographed from above with the aid of aircraft, and this was combined with detailed study of the existing historic map sources and documents (Fig. 20).

Figure 19. The main droveway of the Ryckelsby stone wall system, Ekeby parish, Östergötland. Source: M. Petersson.

marked on the survey maps coincided with the stone walls south of Väderstad, particularly in the eastern half of the stone wall system. Similarly, I have analysed the stone wall systems of Särstad, Ryckelsby and Valla in west Östergötland. They have the same kind of link to the historical villages – the main droveways of the stone wall systems either coincide with small roads marked on the survey maps, or they connect to the village tofts in the manner described above (Figs. 18-19) (Petersson forthcoming).

On a gentle eastern slope near Abbetorp there was a Dshaped fossil field, about 55m long and 35m wide (Fig. 21). Its lower edge was delineated by a terrace, and its upper edge by a stone wall (A45199). The stone wall separated areas of different subsoil – cultivated sandy soil on one side, and a rocky area with small patches of soil which could never have been cultivated on the other. Along the edges of the field, several clearance cairns 289

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Figure 20. Aerial photo of the fossil field in area 9 at Abbetorp, during excavation. Photo: METRIA. Source: Petersson 2001a: 69.

layer may therefore date the time when the field was first opened up, whilst the abandonment of cultivation in the area can be estimated from the historic maps. This gives a maximum period of cultivation of around 250 years. Two of the dates might also indicate a later cultivation episode. The stone wall delineating the field to the west may have been constructed when cultivation began, in order to keep out grazing animals in adjacent areas. The terrace defining the field to the east contained large stones, but was affected by later cultivation. It is possible that the field was originally surrounded by stone walls both to the east and the west, but the western stone wall was later destroyed. There were enough stones in the clearance cairns on the terrace for this to be plausible.

were identified. About 4m from the stone wall there was a negative lynchet, which followed the bowed shape of the stone wall, and this suggested a likely functional relationship between past cultivation and the stone wall at some point in time (Fig. 22). There were a total of seven 14C dates obtained from charcoal within possible old ploughsoil; three of these from positions underneath the stone wall (Table 4). They all date to the late medieval and early modern periods, and are thought to represent clearance by fire. All dates bar one fall into the period AD 1480-1660, and the other within the range AD 1380-1660. There were no dates from the Roman Iron Age and Migration Period though, which was previously considered to be the exclusive period of construction and use for stone walls. The Dshaped field in question is found on a historic map of 1638-1639 (Fig. 23), marked as F. On a map from the late eighteenth century however, the area appeared to have been converted to pasture, and was used for grazing until recent times. The charcoal recovered from the old plough

The period of construction and use of the Väderstad stone wall system In this section I will bring together the evidence presented above to evaluate the chronology of construction and use 290

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Figure 21. The mapped and excavated features of the fossil field in area 9 of the Abbetorp excavation. Note the curving stone wall to the left. Source: Petersson 2004: 70.

15m. The earliest stone walls in the area may thus have been the boundaries of fairly small areas, with very specific uses. No excavations were carried out in the large ovate areas, thought to have contained both arable and meadow, which have been proposed as early elements of the Väderstad stone wall system (Ericsson 1999: 10; Widgren 1996: 27). On the evidence of what has been published at present it is impossible to say whether this interpretation is correct or not. They could represent early Iron Age enclosure, but could equally have been large enclosures used for grazing and meadow in later periods.

of the stone walls in the eastern part of the Väderstad system (Table 5). The earliest stone wall in my study area seems to have been built around the very late first century BC or early first century AD, and might have been in use until about AD 400 at the latest. It bounded an area of approximately 15 by 20m on the Abbetorp settlement site. This area was set aside for particular activities, and contained traces of smithing and a small, simple structure, perhaps just an outbuilding, connected to craft activities. Another early stone wall (A58561), in use during the late Roman Iron Age and Migration Period, marked out a grave-field with a maximum area of 30 by 291

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Figure 22. Section through the stone wall A45199, area 9, Abbetorp. Stratigraphy: 1. Sand, reddish brown (not ploughed); 2. Like 1 but browner; 3. Sand with humus, loose material; 4. Sand, reddish gray; 5. Turf ; 6. Ancient plough soil, greyish brown sand; 8. Sterile, reddish brown sand; 10. Ancient plough soil, sand mixed with humus and a little charcoal; 13. Sterile sand. Source: Petersson 2004: 163. Table 4. The 14C-datings relating to the fossil field in area 9, Abbetorp. Source: Petersson 2004: 72.

Four of the excavated stone walls belonged to the long, north-south orientated stone walls, and all were dated to the medieval period. In one case (area 9), I believe that the dating is very secure. In two cases, dating is based on stratigraphic relationships, indicating that these two boundaries were decidedly later than the Migration Period, and very likely medieval. This could mean that the north-south orientated walls that form the grid of the system were medieval phenomena. The droveways in the stone wall system led up to the medieval village tofts, where settlements were established in the period AD 400-

550, when the early Iron Age settlements in the Väderstad system were deserted (Ericsson and Österström 1999; Helander and Zetterlund 2001; Petersson 2004). The fact that at least some stone walls were associated with late Iron Age and medieval settlement indicates that the surviving stone wall system contains elements from a much later date than previously assumed. How will this revised dating of the stone walls affect our views of the landscape, settlement history and animal 292

MARIA PETERSSON: STONE WALLS IN WEST ÖSTERGÖTLAND – THEIR DATING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES husbandry during different periods? It is now impossible to maintain that all stone walls belonged to the Roman Iron Age and Migration periods, and that all stone wall systems represent a fossil landscape from those periods. This in turn means that fundamental assumptions concerning the farming economy need to be modified. For example, the claim that the stone wall systems represent a particular form of farming that was practised around AD 100-600, where animal husbandry and arable agriculture were more closely entwined than previously (Pedersen and Widgren 1998: 301 ff), can no longer be supported. In the Väderstad area there are traces of an intensive and well-organised grazing regime operating during the period 1000 BC-AD 0 (Petersson 2001b). The animals, mainly cattle, were herded by people who sometimes stayed overnight in the grazing grounds. The solitary hearths and hearth groups are the most frequent archaeological features connected with these practices. Such locales have been found all around Östergötland, indicating that similar grazing regimes were practised across the region. There are remains of byres in only a very small number of the excavated late Bronze Age and pre-Roman houses in Östergötland, which I believe means that domestic animals were still in most cases kept outdoors all year round (Petersson forthcoming). This would not be feasible without herders to guard against predators and possible livestock thieves. In the early first century AD however, these hearth locales within a relatively open grazing landscape disappeared. Only few solitary hearths and hearth groups have been found from later periods across Östergötland, refuting any notion that grazing in its old form simply

Figure 23. The village of Väderstad. Survey map of 1638 – 39. Note field F by the arrow. Source: Lantmäteriets arkiv, Gävle.

Table 5. In the table different kinds of dating evidence is brought together. It shows that there are stone walls of varying dating of construction in the eastern part of the Väderstad system.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT winter stalling of animals in Sweden with leaves or moss as the main fodder has been discussed, and very convincingly ruled out (Carlie 1999). It may be that the large-scale introduction of haymaking and winter stalling of animals was associated with an early medieval intensification of animal husbandry.

moved to unenclosed areas. Before I had fully considered the results of the Väderstad excavations, I assumed that the disappearance of the hearth locales was connected to the first large-scale enclosure in this area. I believed that the domestic animals were now penned, and herders no longer needed. With the late dates of stone walls from the eastern part of the Väderstad system though, and supporting results from other stone wall systems in west Östergötland, I no longer consider this to be a likely possibility for the area. Since on the whole the land continued to be unenclosed, it is likely that the domestic animals continued to be herded. Nevertheless, hearth building did cease, and may point to a change in animal husbandry strategies, such as a greater stress on milk production. Animals could have been brought to the settlements each evening to be milked, and kept in the vicinity of the settlement overnight, to be milked again in the morning. This would have resulted in great changes in the everyday lives of the people. At present however, neither the nature nor the causes of these changes can be identified.

I want to emphasise that the dating of large parts of stone wall systems to the late Iron Age or the medieval period applies primarily to west Östergötland. Apart from the Väderstad stone wall system, I have also examined other stone wall systems in west Östergötland, and they show similar traits to the Väderstad system, and may also have contained later elements. As previously mentioned, many stone wall systems in west Östergötland have a different layout from those in east Östergötland. One must therefore be cautious in transferring the results from the western part of the region to the east without similar in depth investigations. Nevertheless, there are some stone wall systems in east Östergötland with the same kind of layout as in west Östergötland (Widgren 1983: 103). And at Halleby and Fläret, there were a considerable proportion of medieval and early modern dates amongst the 14C results from fossil field contexts and charcoal underneath stone walls that was assumed to derive from clearance by fire (Lindquist 1968; Widgren 1983). As some of the stone walls in west Östergötland were clearly connected to this cultivation phase, these results indicate that a later date for the establishment of some of the stone walls might also be a possibility for east Östergötland. Evert Baudou for one interpreted the stone walls at Halleby in east Östergötland as primarily connected to the formation of the historical villages (Baudou 1973: 121), and it is probable that he was at least partially right.

Conclusions One interesting consequence of the revised dating of the stone wall systems of west Östergötland is that we now have remains that can be seen to relate to the settlement structure and land use of both the late Iron Age and medieval periods. Until recently, there was a total lack of archaeological recognition of fossil fields and enclosures dating to this period. The stone walls now suggest a process of increasingly more fine-grained enclosure, where each area had its special purpose. Extensive cultivation alternated with long periods where land was used for grazing or as meadows. Much of the stone wall systems related to animal husbandry, not arable farming, and a considerable proportion of the preserved features in west Östergötland date to the medieval period. My revised scheme of landscape development means that the landscape was unenclosed until a later date than previously assumed in west Östergötland. The basic interpretation of the system still stands – it was geared towards animal husbandry - but most of it was constructed at a later period, and some elements may have been in use over a long span of time.

There is no doubt that parts of the Väderstad system were connected to the historical settlement structure that was established in the late Iron Age. There were no traces of any earlier large scale enclosures in the eastern part of the Väderstad area, although there is still the possibility that such features existed in the so far unpublished western part of the system. When comparing stone wall systems from different areas and regions, we must bear in mind the possibility of regional differences in dating. There are indications that the surviving stone wall systems on the island of Öland may contain elements later than previously assumed (Fallgren 1993). There was much greater complexity to the development of stone wall systems in southern Sweden than was previously thought. Whilst many of the surviving boundaries now appear much younger in date than earlier models suggested, some others were in use for much longer periods. Clearly, there is much basic morphological and chronological work still to be undertaken, and more nuanced and contextual landscape archaeological studies in the region are only just beginning.

Wet meadows and haymaking were previously thought to have become widespread around AD 100. If we accept that the domestic animals were kept outdoors all year round in the Väderstad area well into the late Iron Age or medieval periods, as the archaeological evidence suggests, there is no reason to assume large scale haymaking. The haymaking from dry meadows has been assumed to start in the early middle ages (Widgren 1983). This hay is of higher nutritional value than hay from wet meadows, and it is possible that the enclosures of Väderstad might be associated with this innovation. The link between haymaking and winter stalling made by Widgren is probably valid, but it might now perhaps be placed in the medieval period rather than the Roman Iron Age, at least in west Östergötland. General prehistoric

Acknowledgements I am particularly indebted to the many colleagues who took part in the excavations where the source material I 294

MARIA PETERSSON: STONE WALLS IN WEST ÖSTERGÖTLAND – THEIR DATING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Öst 1999 45: 7-10. Ericsson, A. 2001. Järnålderns hägnadssamhälle. In Hemmet – trakten – världen. Arkeologi i Östergötland. Meddelanden från Östergötlands länsmuseum: 83-106. Ericsson A. and Petersson, M. 1999. Områdesbeskrivningar. In A. Ericssson, M. Petersson, and H. Ranheden Stensträngssystem söder om Väderstads samhälle. Arkeologisk förundersökning, del 2. E4, delsträckan Väderstad – Stora Åby, Väderstads och Rinna socknar, Mjölby och Boxholms kommuner, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Öst 1999 45: 16-35. Ericsson, A. 2004. Medeltida odling på utmarker:krisfenomen eller överskottsproduktion? Tidskrift, arkeologi i sydöstra Sverige 2004 (4): 4170. Eriksson, A., Petersson, M., and Ranheden, H. 1999. Stensträngssystem söder om Väderstads samhälle. Arkeologisk förundersökning, del 2. E4, delsträckan Väderstad – Stora Åby, Väderstads och Rinna socknar, Mjölby och Boxholms kommuner, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Öst 1999: 45. Ericsson, A. and Österström K. 1999. Lugnet. Boplatslämningar från äldre järnålder och mesolitikum. RAÄ 280, Väderstads socken, Mjölby kommun, Östergötland. Arkeologisk undersökning – Väderstadsprojektet. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar. Rapport UV Öst 1999: 13. Fallgren, J-H. 1993. The concept of the village in Swedish archaeology. Current Swedish Archaeology 1: 59-86. Franzén, G. 1994. Stensträngen som arkeologiskt objekt. Exemplet Tinnerö i Östergötland. Uppsats i påbyggnadskurs i arkeologi. Stockholms universitet. Göransson, H. 1989. Dags mosse - Östergötlands förhistoriska kalender. Svensk Botanisk Tidskrift 83: 371-407. Göthberg, H. 2000. Bebyggelse i förändring Uppland från slutet av yngre bronsålder till tidig medeltid. OPIA 25. Uppsala. Hedvall, R. 1995. Agrarbebyggelse i Östergötland under järnålder och medeltid. Medeltida agrarbebyggelse och exploateringsarkeologi - kunskapspotential och problemformulering. Artiklar från seminariet på Lövsta Bruk, november 1993. Riksantikvarieämbetet, UV Stockholm, Rapport 1995 20: 33-37. Helander, A. and Zetterlund, P. 2001. En boplats i stensträngsbygdens utkant. Ryd 1:4, RAÄ 281, Väderstads socken, Mjölby kommun, Östergötland. Arkeologisk undersökning – Väderstadsprojektet. Dnr: 421-3277-1997. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Öst 2001: 1.

discuss in this article was created. I am also indebted to Karin Lindeblad and the late Ulf Stålbom, for many thought provoking discussions during years of fieldwork and report writing. Lars Östlin helped with illustrations, and Alf Ericsson commented on an early draft of this article, for which I am grateful. I would also like to thank Adrian Chadwick for his highly pertinent comments, and for suggesting alternative English words or phrasing. Bibliography Ambrosiani, B. 1968. Recension av Lindquist, S-O. Det förhistoriska kulsturlandskapet i östra Östergötland. Hallebyundersökningen I-II. Fornvännen 63: 301306. Baudou, E. 1973. Arkeologiska undersökningar på Halleby. Del 1. Hallebyundersökningen II. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Studies in NorthEuropean Archaeology 3. Björkhager, V., Ohlsén, M. and Ranheden, H. 2002. Järnstad ett fossilt odlingslandskap. RAÄ 73, Stora Åby socken, Ödeshögs kommun, Östergötland. Rapport 5: 2000.Linköping: Östergötlands länsmuseum. Carlie, L. 1999. Bebyggelsens mångfald. En studie av södra Hallands järnåldersgårdar baserad på arkeologiska och historiska källor. Hallands Länsmuseers Skriftserie 10. Lund. Carlsson, T., Kaliff, A., Molin, A. and Sundberg, K. 1996. Hulje. Boplats, skärvsten och gravar. E4-syd, RAÄ 89, Högby socken samt RAÄ 234 – 236 och 246, Mjölby socken, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet. Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar. Rapport UV Linköping 1996: 63. Carlsson, T., Lindeblad, K. and Nielsen A-L. 2001. Boplats och by. Bebyggelseutveckling i Stora Ullevi 200 – 1600 e Kr. Arkeologisk undersökning. Linköpings stad och kommun, Östergötland. Dnr: 421-1461-1998. Riksantikvarieämbetet. Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar. Rapport UV Öst 2001: 5. Cassel, K. 1998. Från grav till gård. Romersk järnålder på Gotland. Stockholm Studies in Archaeology 16. Stockholms universitet. Chadwick, A.M. 2003. Post-processualism, professionalisation and archaeological methodologies. Towards reflective and radical practice. Archaeological Dialogues 10 (1): 97-117. Elfstrand, B. 2001. Egeby. Förhistorisk odling i ett kamelandskap. Slutundersökning inför utbyggnaden av E4 vid RAÄ 239 och 247 a+b, Egeby, Mjölby 40:1, Mjölby socken och kommun, Östergötland. Dnr:421-2088-1995, 421-2547-1996. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapprot UV Öst 2001: 15. Ericsson, A. 1999. Stensträngssystemet söder om Väderstad. In A. Ericssson, M. Petersson, and H. Ranheden Stensträngssystem söder om Väderstads samhälle. Arkeologisk förundersökning, del 2. E4, delsträckan Väderstad – Stora Åby, Väderstads och Rinna socknar, Mjölby och Boxholms kommuner, 295

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Nilsson, C. 1976. Fornlämning 4, del av gravfält, stensträng och boplatslämningar, Röby, Slaka sn, Östergötland. Arkeologisk undersökning 1973. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Uppdragsverksamheten, Rapport 1976 B 28. Nilsson, C. 1987. Gravundersökningar i Östergötland åren 1967-84. In T. Andrae, M. Hasselmo and K. Lamm (eds.) 7000 år på 20 år. Arkeologiska undersökningar i Mellansverige. Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet, pp. 79-108. Näsman, U. 1976. Recension av Baudou, E., Arkeologiska undersökningar på Halleby. Del 1. Hallebyundersökningen II. Fornvännen 71: 66-67. Näsman, U. 1979. En arkeologs syn på kulturgeografisk grävningsmetod: med exempel särskilt från Mellansverige. In H. Thrane (ed.) Fra jernalder til middelalder. Beretning fra et symposium 17 - 19 maj 1979 afholdt af Odense Universitet. Skrifter fra Historisk Institut/ Odense universitet, 27. Odense, pp. 152-176. Pedersen, E-A. and Widgren, M. 1998. Järnålder, 500 f Kr – 1000 e Kr. In E-A. Pedersen, S. Welinder and M. Widgren. Det svenska jordbrukets historia. Jordbrukets första femtusen år. Borås: Natur och Kultur/LTs förlag, pp. 239-459. Petersson, M. 1996. Arkeologiska förundersökningar av agrara lämningar. Väg E4 Mjölby – Väderstad. Mjölby, Hogstads och Väderstads socknar, Mjölby kommun, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar. Rapport UV Linköping 1996: 43. Petersson, M. 1999a. Ancient fields excavated. Journal of European Archaeology 2 (1): 57-76. Petersson, M. 1999b. Abbetorp – an initial presentation. In C. Fabech and J. Ringtved (eds.) Settlement and Landscape. Proceedings of a conference in Århus, Denmark, May 4-7 1998. Jutland Archaeological Society: Århus, pp. 395-404. Petersson, M. 2001a. Tre åkerundersökningar i Östergötland. Arkeologiska undersökningar av fossil åkermark, gravar och boplatslämningar från äldre järnålder. RAÄ 166, Hogstads-Mörby 1:2 och 1:3, Hogstads socken, RAÄ 170, Stora Ljuna 4:1, Hogstads socken, RAÄ 171, Hogstads-Mörby 4:4, Hogstads socken, RAÄ 234, Lundby 1:3, Väderstads socken, Mjölby kommun, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar. Rapport UV Öst 2001: 33. Petersson, M. 2001b. Grazing and hearths in west Östergötland 1000-1 BC. In T. Darvill and M. Gojda (eds.) One Land, Many Landscapes. Papers from a session held at the European Association of Archaeologists Fifth Annual Meeting in Bournemouth 1999. BAR (International Series) 987. Oxford: BAR, pp. 125-146. Petersson, M. (ed.) 2004. Abbetorp – ett landskapsutsnitt under 6000 år. Arkeologisk undersökning av en boplats, ett gravfält, en offerplats, stensträngar och fossil åkermark.RAÄ 288 m fl, Abbetorp 1:2 och 1:10, Rinna socken, Boxholms kommun.RAÄ 241 m fl, Väderstad 1:2 och 5:1, Väderstads socken, Mjölby kommun, Östergötland. Dnr 421-3277-1997, 421-

Helmfrid, S. 1968. Recension av Lindquist, S-O. Det förhistoriska kulturlandskapet i östra Östergötland. Svensk Geografisk Årsbok 44: 192-193. Helmfrid, S. 1969. Nya metoder inom bebyggelseforskningen. Recension av Lindquist, S-O. Det förhistoriska kulturlandskapet i östra Östergötland. Historisk tidskrift 1969: 101-108. Häggström, L., Baran, J., Ericsson, A. and Murray, A. 2004. The dating and interpretation of a field wall in Öggestorp. Current Swedish Archaeology 12: 43-60. Lagerås, P. and Regnell, M. 1999. Agrar förändring under sydsvensk bronsålder. En diskussion om skenbara samband och olösta gåtor. In M. Olausson (ed.) Spiralens öga. Tjugo artiklar kring aktuell bronsåldersforskning. Riksantikvarieämbetet. Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar. Skrifter nr 25: 263-276 Larsson, L., Jönsson, B. and Widgren, M. 1995. Arkeologisk förundersökning, del 1. Kartering av stensträngssystem söder om Väderstads samhälle. E4 delsträckan Väderstad – Stora Åby. Ryd, Abbetorp, Väderstad och Vallsberg i Väderstads och Rinna socknar, Mjölby och Boxholms kommuner, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Linköping 1996: 28. Larsson, M. 1997. En järnåldersgård vid Hogstad. RAÄ 172, Lilla Ljuna 3:1, Hogstad socken, Mjölby kommun, Östergötland. Arkeologisk förundersökning. Riksantikvarieämbetet Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Linköping 1997: 49. Lindeblad, K. and Nielsen, A-L. 1997. Kungens gods i Borg. Om utgrävningarna vid Borgs säteri i Östergötland. Arekologisk slutundersökning, Borgs säteri 6702, RAÄ 276, Borgs socken, Norrköpings kommun, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Linköping 1997: 12. Lindgren-Hertz, L. 1997. Farm and landscape. Variations on a theme in Östergötland. In H. Andersson, P. Carelli and L. Ersgård (eds.) Visions of the Past. Trends and Traditions in Swedish Medieval Archaeology. Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet, Almqvist and Wiksell International, pp. 43-72. Lindquist, S-O. 1968. Det förhistoriska kulturlandskapet i östra Östergötland. Hallebyundersökningen I. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Studies in NorthEuropean Archaeology 2. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell. Molander, B. 2000. Kunskap i handling. Uddevalla: Daidalos. Myhre, B. 2002. Landbruk, landskap og samfunn 4000 f Kr–800 e Kr. In B. Myhre and I. Øye Norges landbrukshistorie I. 4000 f Kr – 1350 e Kr. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, pp. 11-213. Myrdal, J. 1985. Medeltidens åkerbruk. Agrarteknik i Sverige ca 1000 till 1520. Nordiska museets handlingar 105. Borås. Nielsen, A-L. forthcoming. Under Biltema och IKEA – Ullevi under 1500 år. In G. Tagesson and A. Kaliff (eds.) Från vad till stad – arkeologi från järnålder och medeltid i Linköping. Riksantikvarieämbetet. 296

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800-1998. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar. Rapport UV Öst 2002: 43. Petersson, M. forthcoming. Boskapsskötsel och betesdrift i västra Östergötland. PhD thesis: Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Uppsala. Ranheden, H. 1999. Vegetationsutvecklingen i Väderstadsomtådet – pollendiagrammet från Nyhem. In A. Eriksson, M. Petersson, and H. Ranheden 1999. Stensträngssystem söder om Väderstads samhälle. Arkeologisk förundersökning, del 2. E4, delsträckan Väderstad – Stora Åby, Väderstads och Rinna socknar, Mjölby och Boxholms kommuner, Östergötland. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Öst 1999 45: 48-56. Riddersporre, M. 1995. Byamarker i backspeglen. Odlingslandskapet före kartornas tid. Meddelanden från Lunds Universitets Geografiska Institutioner, avhandlingar 24. Schön, D. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. Selinge, K-G. 1969. Inventering av fasta fornlämningar. Riksantikvarieämbetet. Fornminnesinventeringen. Arbetsföreskrifter. Stockholm: Riksantikvarieämbetet. Sundberg, K. 2000. Rondellen. Boplatslämningar från mesolitikum – neolitikum samt äldre järnålder invid torpet Bergslund. RAÄ 144, Väderstads socken, Mjölby kommun, Östergötland. Arkeologisk undersökning – Väderstadsprojektet. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Öst 2000: 4. Widgren, M. 1983. Settlement and Farming Systems in the Early Iron Age. A Study in Fossil Agrarian Landscapes in Östergötland, Sweden. Stockholm Studies in Human Geography 3. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Widgren, M. 1996. Stensträngssystemet i södra delen av Väderstads socken – en landskapshistorisk analys. In L. Larsson, B. Jönsson, and M. Widgren Kartering av stensträngssystem söder om Väderstads samhälle. E4 delsträckan Väderstad – Stora Åby. Ryd, Abbetorp, Väderstad och Vallsberg i Väderstads och Rinna socknar, Mjölby och Boxholms kommuner, Östergötland. Arkeologisk förundersökning, del 1. Riksantikvarieämbetet, Avdelningen för arkeologiska undersökningar, Rapport UV Linköping 1996: 28. Widgren, M. 1997. Fossila landskap. En forskningsöversikt över landskapets utveckling fårn yngre bronsålder till tidig medeltid. Kulturgeografiskt seminarium 1/97. Kulturgeografiska institutionen, Stockholms undiversitet. Widgren, M. 1998. Kulturgeografernas bönder och arkeologernas guld – finns det någon väg till en syntes? In L. Larsson and B. Hårdh (eds.) Centrala platser centrala frågor. Samhällsstruktur under järnåldern. En vänbok till Berta Stjernquist. Uppåkrastudier 1. Lund: Almqvist and Wiksell International, pp. 281-296.

Unpublished sources Lantmäteriets arkiv in Gävle and Linköping.

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The drystone walls of straight-edged, regular post-Enclosure fields on the limestone plateau of the White Peak of Derbyshire, in winter snow. The small copses and isolated field barns are typical of many farms in the area. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Unfamiliar landscapes: infields, outfields, boundaries and landscapes in Iceland Oscar Aldred Introduction Boundaries in the landscape are a means by which land is defined, demarcated or divided for specific activities or uses, for individuals or communities. At the same time, these expressions of territoriality may be imbued with conflict and discord, with histories based on memory and traditions, or may be the tangible physical results of co-operation. Furthermore, their location may relate to specific processes both in a physical sense such as landuse, or in a cognitive sense, such as liminality. The form, materiality and scale of boundaries also differ widely, and they do not always hold a physical presence, but can be a product of mental imagery and ideas (Figure 1). In this paper, I will provide an overview of land allotment and boundaries in Iceland (Figures 1 and 2), with special reference to their place in the landscape. I will focus on the nature of the material evidence itself, such as the types of boundaries, and will provide some explanations for the variations seen between different locations and periods of time. This will then form the basis of some wider observations and remarks connected with current research and archaeological approaches to the study of land allotment and boundaries in Iceland.

Figure 1. Reykjadalur and Fljótsheiði in north-east Iceland. Note the linear

earthworks running along the higher ground. Source: Árni Einarsson, Before the main discussion, I Náttúrurannsóknastöðin við Mývatn. May 2003. need to make some general points. Iceland has had a strong research tradition, but not much research, particularly studies of the earliest settlement has been published in English, and therefore references to phase of Iceland – the landnám, the historical, sociomany of these debates have been kept to a minimum. As economic and legal contexts of land allotment before the will become apparent to the reader, there has been thirteenth century have not been explored in any detail in relatively little research on boundaries in Iceland, and this this paper. To do so would require a much longer article. paper provides an outline of the archaeological evidence. However, acknowledgement of this context is important Furthermore, because of the rich literary tradition of

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Figure 2. Location map of Iceland and places mentioned in the text. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands. 1. Bergþórshvoll, 2. Akureyri, 3. Akranes, 4. Akurey, 5. Hofstaðir, 6. Höfðagerði, 7. Skarðagerði, 8. Við Viðiker, 9. Seltjarnarnes, 10. Garður in Aðaldalur, 11. Saltvík, 12. Húsavík, 13. Klofasteinar, Hrafnagilshreppur (SMR No: EY-331:025), 14. Melar,mSvarfaðardalshreppur (SMR No: EY-148:020) 15. Gálgagil (SMR No: ÁR-423:014), 16. Gálgagil (SMR No: ÁR-427:011), 17. Reykjavík, 18. Neðri-Ás, 19. Steinbogi.

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OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND four to five hundred years after the events they describe. Two other sources that refer to the early history of Iceland and the circumstances of the settlement of Iceland are Íslendingabók or the Book of Icelanders, written by Ari Þorgilsson in 1122-33, and Landnámabók, the Book of Settlement, dating from the late thirteenth century. Íslendingabók is an account of the history of the Icelanders from the settlement period or landnám through to the early twelfth century; and Landnámabók is a description of the settlement of Iceland by the original settlers in the ninth century. For the study of boundaries, and in particular land allotment, these sources provide genealogies of individuals as well as historical contexts concerning the role of individuals and their influence on the development of the landscape in Iceland’s formative years, such as the establishment of land claims.

when attempting to develop a preliminary understanding of land allotment and boundaries in Iceland. Although this paper cannot provide a comprehensive overview, readrs are referred to several key studies for this (Friðriksson 1994; Friðriksson and Vésteinsson 2003; Karlsson 2000). Land management practices have had a profound effect on the development of the Icelandic landscape, in particular the creation and use of boundaries for land allotment and land division. It is important to consider these aspects in the study of boundaries, especially in regions where only subtle changes in practice may nonetheless have been catalysts for change. This paper has not attempted to provide a detailed history of land management practices in Iceland, but rather to make comments on them where applicable. These comments are largely generalisations derived from others’ research (Aðalsteinsson 1990; Amorosi 1992; Sveinbjanardóttir 1992; Thomson 2003).

As these documents describe events several centuries after they took place, their validity for archaeology must be questionable, and they should be treated with considerable caution. Indeed, it has recently been suggested that “…the overall view of the landnám and Icelandic society in these early sources was clearly a scholarly construct” (Friðriksson and Vésteinsson 2003: 141). Later sources on the other hand, especially those that refer to land taxation from the eighteenth century onwards, give a glimpse into post-medieval land management and landscape organisation which, at least in part, is reflected by property boundaries. Similarly, the earliest law texts such as the Grágás and Jónsbók, as well as the agrarian guidelines in Búalög, make reference to laws associated with boundaries and outline their construction methods (Búalög 1915-1933; Dennis, Foote and Perkins 1980, 2000; Jónsbók 1902; Þorláksson 1991).1

As the title suggests, the Icelandic landscape was unfamiliar to the first settlers, when it began to be divided up from the late ninth to early tenth centuries AD. Gordon Childe when visiting Iceland suggested (rather facetiously) that archaeologists should ‘dig deeper’ to find traces of earlier occupation (Karlsson 2000: 13). However, there has been no substantial archaeological evidence found underneath the landnám tephra layer, scientifically dated to AD 871 (Grönvold et al. 1995; Vésteinsson 2000b). Compared to continental Europe, this may seem a short chronology. Nevertheless, I will demonstrate that the complexities of past patterns of land division in Iceland, and the archaeological remains of boundaries from many different periods, are the product of a rich and eventful history.

Archaeological research in Iceland has also been traditionally very site-specific. Comprehensive projects like the National Mapping Programme in England have not existed in Iceland and it is only recently that interest in wider landscapes and boundaries has initiated landscape projects such as the Landscape of Settlements project (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002; Vésteinsson, McGovern and Keller 2002). The human impact on the landscape in Iceland is currently a major research theme of a Leverhulme funded research project entitled Landscapes circum landnám: Viking Settlement in the North Atlantic and its Human and Ecological Consequences. As well as these landscape-scale projects, a national programme of field survey is currently taking place that is generating a wealth of information about the archaeological record of Iceland. This paper draws heavily on these recent projects and sources.

The research context The relative lack of investigation of land boundaries in Iceland is partly the result of past approaches towards archaeology. In particular, archaeology in Iceland has found it difficult to escape from the overarching influence of documentary evidence, which in the past was accepted very uncritically (Friðriksson 1994; Friðriksson and Vésteinsson 2003). As a result of this literary tradition, archaeology was for a long time used merely to verify the written sources, as was the case for historical archaeology in Britain between the 1950s and 1970s (Austin 1990; Johnson 1996; Moreland 1991, 2001). Much current research in Iceland by contrast, has been using documents in conjunction with archaeology, as part of a self-critical, dialectical process (Friðriksson 1994; Friðriksson and Vésteinsson 2003; Vésteinsson 1998a).

1

The first part of Grágás is reputed to have been written in 1117-1118, though it is now preserved in two manuscripts dating from the mid to late thirteenth century. It was the law text for the Commonwealth, abolished in 1271 (Karlsson 2000: 21). Jónsbók was ratified in 1281 and is preserved in 200 manuscripts (Karlsson 2000: 90-91). Búalög contains information about regulations and standards that start in the twelfth century, and continue to the nineteenth century (Þorláksson 1991).

The source contexts of special interest for the archaeology of boundaries are those connected with the initial colonisation phase of Iceland’s settlement. The Sagas of the Icelanders recount events that took place between AD 850-AD 1050. These were written from between the thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries, some 301

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Figure 3. Transcription mapping in north-east Iceland. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands and Náttúrurannsóknastöðin við Mývatn based on Aldred, Hreiðarsdóttir, Lárusdóttir and Einarsson 2004.

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OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND areas unaffected by recent landscape changes, such as farm hinterlands or upland pasture areas between the farmland and the highlands, generally between 200-400 metres in altitude. The main farmland areas in Iceland are still located immediately around farms in cultivated land zones, though many farms have undergone considerable land improvements that make identification of archaeological features difficult.

Any investigation of the archaeology of boundaries will thus need to focus on the materiality of the evidence in the landscape itself (Fig. 3). Such an approach will be followed in a new research project which leads on from earlier pilot studies (e.g. Aldred, Hreiðarsdóttir, Lárusdóttir and Einarsson 2004), that is mapping boundaries from aerial photographs and satellite imagery, which will then inform more detailed field survey and small-scale excavation. This work will take place along a transect in north-east Iceland between 2004–2006.

The Icelandic landscape and early settlement and agriculture Existing research on land allotment and landscape history

Pollen analyses suggest that the Icelandic landscape prior to settlement consisted of lowland birch woodland, interspersed with wetland flood plains, and heathland and wooded uplands (Hallsdóttir 1987). The Íslandingabók also states that the landscape was one of woodland ‘from the mountains to the coast’ (Mathíasson 1982), though this may be an exaggeration. Place-name and palaeo-environmental evidence suggests extensive land clearances following landnám settlement. Tree felling for timber, fuel and land clearance, intensive grazing and deteriorating climatic conditions, were probably all key factors in a countrywide process of erosion that may have led to extensive topsoil degradation and erosion. Initial studies in the north and south of Iceland using environmental modelling of land cover, microclimates and tephra chronologies, have also demonstrated an increase in erosion during the early sixteenth century (Dugmore et al. 2001).

Research on landscape history in Iceland has concentrated on accounts and commentaries from settlement, laws and historical sources and land management practices, all of which have been connected with boundaries in one way or another (Schönfeld 1902; Thoroddsen 1919). Where boundaries have formed the focus of research, emphasis has been placed on either isolated examples, usually accompanied by excavation, or preliminary observations on networks of large systems of boundaries (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002; Róbertsdóttir and Jóhannesson 1986; Þórarinsson 1982). Of these approaches, the latter provides an archaeological place of departure for this paper. The study of boundaries and land allotment in Iceland is important for several reasons. Firstly, examining extensive and large-scale human impacts creates a wider context within which to understand all archaeology. It also generates contextual material drawn from the archaeology itself, rather than documentary sources, and allows study of the broader issues connected with landscape-scale interpretation and meanings. Secondly, the study of boundaries within a landscape with relatively continuous settlement can be used to highlight discontinuities, reworkings and replacements of systems. Changes at the site scale are often not obvious, and the understanding of chronologies may not be discernable from documentary sources or from modern surveys of visible remains. However, changes as opposed to continuities are more likely to reveal themselves when distributed over large areas, as is the case with boundaries. The relative, stratigraphic chronology of boundaries can inform understandings of wider landscape development (Banning 2002; Bowden 1999).

There is some early documentary evidence for the establishment of arable agriculture in Iceland, as well as in later church records. Archaeological evidence for arable farming in the form of barley and cereal pollen has also been found on several sites in Iceland (Byock 1990: 81; Sveinbjanardóttir 1992: 13-14). A relatively small number of structures associated with processing crops, such as granaries and dry kilns, as well as wider palaeoenvironmental evidence, indicate a limited arable impact on the landscape. The excavation at Bergþórshvoll in 1927 recovered unthreshed grain (Eldjárn and Gestsson 1952), but pollen analyses in southern Iceland suggests some evidence for arable farming shortly after landnám (Hallsdóttir 1987). There are some place-names such as Akureyri, Akranes and Akurey with an arable farming element (akur or arable field), which appear in early documentary references. However, it is thought that as the climatic conditions deteriorated from the fourteenth century, arable farming diminished and did not continue again until the modern period (Guðmundsson 1996; Sveinbjanardóttir 1992). Regional variations in agricultural practices however, may have resulted in different farming approaches, such as increased specialisation or changes from arable to animal husbandry. The emphasis for the majority of agriculturalrelated boundaries was on pasture management and the control of animal movement, as well as intermittent arable set within an extensive landscape. This is in direct

The survival of boundaries in Iceland today is dependent on a number of factors, such as environmental conditions and the extent of human impacts on the landscape. Land improvements were often localised to the land immediately around farms, with manuring, small-scale drainage and irrigation often being carried out before the early modern period. From the late nineteenth century, the digging of drainage channels slowly increased, and has remained at a high level since the 1930s, which has significantly affected the survival of archaeological features in these areas (Jónsson and Magnússon 1997: 270-275). Extensive boundary systems survive best in 303

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Figure 4. An enclosure boundary surviving as an earthwork at Saltvík near Húsavík in north-east Iceland. Source: Árni Einarsson, Náttúrurannsóknastöðin við Mývatn. May 2003.

needed. Cattle were generally grazed close to the farm in summer and during winter, but fodder could also be collected from wet-meadows (Vésteinsson, McGovern and Keller 2002: 119). In winter they could be stalled indoors in byres. Sheep were grazed further from the farm, often around shielings, but lambs or older sheep being bred for slaughter were sometimes kept closer to the farm. The main sheep grazing areas were upland and highland pastures that could be either communal or privately owned. It is likely that changes in farm practices over time affected the development of land allotment and land management systems. This paper will not go into any great detail on the development of regional farming practices though.

contrast to many other European countries, such as strip agriculture and its later enclosure in lowland England (Williamson 2000). The earliest settlements therefore had mixed farming systems, based on sheep, cattle and small-scale arable farming. Wild resources such as fish and wildfowl were also important, and fish bones are common in archaeozoological assemblages from Viking sites in Iceland (McGovern, Perdikaris and Tinsley 2001; Vésteinsson, McGovern and Keller 2002: 108-113). Cattle farming may have been a predominant farming practice in many parts of Iceland during the settlement period, particularly in those regions with extensive meadows for grazing. From the thirteenth century onwards, sheep farming became increasingly important, though this was also regionally variable (Amorosi 1992; Sveinbjanardóttir 1992; Thomson 2003: 18). In 1703, there were estimated to have been 35 860 cattle, 278 994 sheep and 26 910 horses in Iceland, and in 1900 at least 23 569 cattle, 469 189 sheep and 41 654 horses (Jónsson and Magnússon 1997: 279-285).

Boundary types It is possible to distinguish different boundary classes in Iceland, the two main types being linear features and enclosures. Linear features usually, but not always, transect open landscape areas. They were most often associated with property boundaries, or sub-divisions of land into distinct parcels in outfields (úthagi). Sometimes they were not physical constructions at all however, but were based purely on lines of sight or notional divisions, and were thus often the product of negotiation and agreement. When they were physical boundaries, they were often linked to natural features in the landscape such

Differences in farming husbandry between the early settlement and later periods should be considered when distinguishing differences in land management, particularly grazing land. Cattle farming required different land management compared to sheep husbandry, both in terms of farming practices and the type of land 304

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Figure 5. Infield arrangements in Skilmannahreppur, west Iceland (above), and Svarfaðardalur, north-east Iceland (below). Source: Adolf Friðriksson and Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

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Figure 6. Infield size (sq. m.) and livestock correlative analysis of farms in Skilmannahreppur, west Iceland; derived from Table 1. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

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OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND Icelandic homefields may also contain a number of structures such as sheep and cow shelters, and other outbuildings for storage. Some farms or shielings had more complex boundary features, such as Dúnlágand and Skarðagerði that had double or triple boundaries. These are atypical, and perhaps suggest that such sites may have been carrying out more specialised activities.

as ravines, rivers, lakes and hills. Their distribution is varied and widespread, and they probably extended across more places than the currently known regions of Suður-Þingeyjarsýsla, Eyjafjörður, Snæfellsnes and Borgarfjörður (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002: 71). Enclosures are usually associated with infield or homefield areas (tún), or at places used for specialised activities, such as shielings. They too occasionally used natural features as part of their boundaries. At Hofstaðir in Mývatnssveit, north-east Iceland for example, the farm was partly defined by the course of the river Laxá to the west and south, and smaller rivers and bodies of water to the east and north-east. The only part of the boundary that was physically constructed was the western half of the northern boundary. The distribution of enclosures is intimately connected to settlement places across Iceland, which includes present-day farmsteads as well as those in hinterland areas that are now abandoned. The character of physical boundaries will be discussed first, followed by their relationships with frameworks for land allotment, settlement arrangements and land management practices, as well as their association with existing and extant features in the landscape.

At the beginning of the twentieth century a countrywide survey of all tún was carried out, involving scaled drawings of each infield, as well as outbuildings and farm dwellings. This is a useful source, but it is often difficult to analyse the earlier boundaries, and their morphology and layout. Many farms added new land with improvement schemes, and these often contain no upstanding boundaries, as the infield areas were levelled and replaced with drainage ditches that bear no relation to the original layout. The majority of modern farms do not have good examples of upstanding infield boundaries, whereas the farms abandoned in the medieval or early post-medieval periods usually have well-preserved boundaries, either in their original layouts, or those contemporary with abandonment. In Iceland, individual settlement areas were usually dispersed enough for core infield farm lands not to come into contact with one another. Iceland has remarkable continuity in its infield-outfield practices, as well as in the physical form and layout of this. Only the latter was disrupted in the late nineteenth century with land improvement schemes such as increased drainage, irrigation and re-organisation of farm land, which in some instances replaced or moved the original focus and features of infields (Jónsson and Magnússon 1997: 270275; Vésteinsson pers. com.).

The materials used in pre-industrial boundaries were primarily associated with their geographic location – boundaries that ran through lava fields used lava blocks, and boundaries across open heathland used earth and turf. All boundaries that are post-medieval or earlier in date were constructed from turf, earth or stone, or combinations of these. It is unknown if wood was used during the initial phases of settlement. The documentary sources suggest that there was wood available, but it quickly became a scarce material which no doubt encouraged use of other natural resources.

The arrangement of nineteenth and early twentieth century infields in Skilmannahreppur (hreppur meaning district) in south-west Iceland shows a regular distribution of farm and infield systems that occupied the low-lying land (Fig. 5). These areas are relatively dry today, though a large part of the land between the upland and sea was once wetland, and there are numerous twentieth century land drainage and irrigation schemes. There was some variation in the size and shape of the infields. These differences may have had some correlation with the productive capacity of the farms, and their ability to produce winter fodder for the number of livestock they sustained. Figure 5 suggests a correlation with the number of cattle in 1707, and the size of infield, as calculated from the countrywide farm survey in 1918.

Boundaries as expressions of land allotment and landuse Infields The infield or homefield (tún) is an area of land around a farm for intensive grass cultivation, which is fertilised and used to grow hay for winter fodder. The boundary associated with the infield defines this area from the outfield, and they were often semi-circular or subrectangular in plan. In Iceland, this arrangement is thought to have been the general practice from the ninth century to the present day. This is a field arrangement that was also once more common elsewhere in Europe than is apparent today, for example in England (Astill 1988: 63, 68-69, 76-78; Rippon 2002). In Britain some remnants of these field patterns survive in ‘marginal’ regions such as the Somerset Levels, and upland areas such as Bodmin, Dartmoor and Exmoor, the Peak District, Northumberland and Cumbria, and parts of Scotland and Wales (Austin 1985; Bevan this volume; Emery 1989; Johnson and Rose 1994: 100-114; Muir and Muir 1989; Rippon 2002; Whittington 1973; Williamson 2003).

A similar arrangement of infields like Skilmannahreppur is seen in other regions of Iceland, as in Svarfaðardalur (Fig. 5). The infields are also distributed equally with the settlements, although the identification of more than one infield in some farm land areas suggest additional enclosures around animal structures such as shielings, byres, weaning folds and winter houses for sheep. In general, infield areas that relate directly to farms were larger than other enclosures that were used for specialised activities in the outfield areas; for example, compare 307

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Table 1. Infields area [sq. m], taxation value [hundreds] and livestock on farms in Skilmannahreppur between 1707 and 1918 (Jarðabók 1927; Túnakort 1918). Farm name Arkarlækur Bekansstaðir Fellsalarkot Galtarholt Galtarvík Gröf Hvítanes Kjalardalur Klafastaðagrund Klafastaðir Litla Fellsöxl Litli Lambhagi Ós Stóra Fellsöxl Stóri Lambhagi Ytri Galtavík

c. 1918 Infield area (sq m) 51 276 34 536 22 840 54 164 22 704 38 628 73 155 36 000 31 486 43 055 34 377 77 861 44 417 51 838 48 797 43 838

1707 Tax value (h) 20 10 10 10 16 24 20 30 10 10 16 15 16 20 15 16

1707 Cattle 5 5 6 12 10 11 11 8 5 10 8 13 4 13 12 7

1707 Sheep 22 52 8 82 43 23 66 28 68 72 22 93 41 79 153 36

Table 2. Enclosures associated with abandoned farms and shielings in Skagafjörður (calculated from Sveinbjarnardóttir 1992). Place Öxl, Austurdalur Svartibakki, Austurdalur Brekkukot, Austurdalur Stafn, Vesturdalur Hringanes, Vesturdalur

Type Shieling Shieling Shieling Farm Farm

Origin date Pre-1300 Pre-1300 Pre-1300 Pre-1104 Pre-1104

Enclosed space (sq. m) 1 760 3 510 2 050 c. 14 300 c. 5 300

Figure 7. Enclosure boundary earthworks at Höfðagerði, north-east Iceland. Source: Árni Einarsson, Náttúrurannsóknastöðin við Mývatn. May 2003.

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OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND such as the weaning of young lambs from their mothers, shearing, or the sorting of animals after they were brought down from open pasture. For example, on the farm Skarðagerði, in north-east Iceland (Fig. 8), there was a complex arrangement with two larger enclosures, several smaller ones with different spatial configurations; and even smaller enclosures or pens within the larger enclosure or attached to the outer boundary. Outfields were also used as additional cultivation areas, and for turf and peat cutting. The enclosed spaces created hierarchies of land quality. Their proximity to shared land (afréttur) suggests that one of their main uses was to provide controlled grazing within the farmland boundaries but outside the infields, perhaps for specific animals, such as older sheep that were to be slaughtered. The difference between outfields and afréttur is not always apparent today, as some physical or natural boundaries are not always distinguishable. But in any case, there might have sometimes been similar use of farmland such as outfield and afréttur that allowed activities to overlap between the two types of area. Shielings Transhumant practices in Iceland were often confined to upland areas. Semi-permanent structures such as shielings and sheep shelters were placed in the uplands, but within the farmland, usually in the outfield areas. There has been little research carried out on shielings in Iceland, and only one study has examined the relationship between shielings and farms (Sveinbjarnardóttir 1990, 1992). Many sites may have been a farm or a shieling at different times, and not all shielings were associated with enclosures. However, when there are enclosures around shielings, they tend to be smaller than the average infield (see Tables 1 and 2).

Figure 8. Double boundary around shieling, Skarðagerði, northeast Iceland (SMR number: SÞ-322: 025). Source: Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

shieling and farm infield enclosures between Table 1 (infields) and Table 2 (the shielings). There have been a limited number of excavations through infield boundaries. Hofstaðir and Höfðagerði, both located next to the river Laxá in the north east of Iceland (Fig. 7), demonstrated a 1477 terminus post quem, though both boundaries hinted at earlier dates. The Hofstaðir boundaries fell out of repair some time before the falling of the 1477 tephra, and Höfðagerði was originally constructed shortly after the falling of the landnám tephra and before 1300 (Aldred 2004: 26-27; Lucas 1999: 50). Several other excavations through infield enclosures also demonstrate early enclosure dates – Neðri-Ás, pre-1104; Steinbogi, pre-1158; Brenna, pre-1158; Oddstaðir, pre1300; and Við Víðiker (a shieling), pre-1158 (Vésteinsson 1998b, 2003, pers comm). When compared to other excavated boundaries elsewhere, for example in Skagafjörður (see Table 2), similar dating suggests enclosure construction during or before the early twelfth century (Sveinbjarnardóttir 1992).

Linear boundaries in the landscape Linear boundaries were most often used to define the limit of land belonging to one farm, as well as to define distinct areas within the outfields. Many of these boundaries were and are discontinuous however, and this appears to be not merely a product of their survival, or their partial identification. Many were also very irregular and sinuous in plan. Again, such boundaries were often combined with natural boundary features such as ravines, inaccessible slopes, water bodies and rivers, which together, formed more continuous boundaries. A transect area in north-east Iceland that extends from the Tjörnes peninsula in the north down to the end of Laxárdalur in the south has been mapped using aerial photographs (Fig. 10). Additionally, a more detailed study of a smaller area in Aðaldalur and environs has transcribed the boundaries into a GIS using both single and multi-band SPOT 5 satellite imagery (Aldred et al. in prep.; Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002; Aldred, Hreiðarsdóttir, Lárusdóttir and Einarsson 2004). In this larger transect area, the majority of linear boundaries lie beyond the modern core farming areas, in the hinterland and upland pastures connected to these farms. These

Outfields and other enclosures The land outside the infield was also utilised, and is generally referred to as the outfield. It contained other types of enclosures, which could be either within or adjacent to the enclosed spaces, and were occasionally joined to the boundaries themselves. These other enclosures may have been connected to the movement and the segregation of animals for particular activies, 309

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Figure 9. Göngugarðar or garðar on the upland area above Núpar farm, north-east Iceland, looking south-east. Source: Árni Einarsson, Náttúrurannsóknastöðin við Mývatn. May 2003. Table 3. Linear boundaries dated by tephrochronology (Edvardsson 2003; Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002; Róbertsdóttir and Jóhannesson 1986; Vésteinsson pers. comm.; Þórarinsson 1982).

boundaries are commonly banks between 2-7 metres wide, usually with two ditches on either side between 17m wide (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002: 70, table 2). These linear banks and ditches are mainly of two types – those that cut across contours, and those that follow them. The topography in the region of this area in Suður-Þingeyjarsýsla – (sýsla or county) – is made up of low-lying and upland pasture areas, broad valleys, and low-lying plains. The lower lying pasture areas are below 200 metres in altitude, outside the main farm areas and away from the confines of the valleys. These contain the highest proportion of boundaries, particularly combinations of both cross and contour linear features.

Place Þrælagarður, Biskupstungur Bjarnagarður, Landbrot Seltjarnarnes Laxárdalsheiði Saltvík Fljótsheiði Hofstaðir (northern boundary) Þverá, Öxarfjörður

Concentrations of boundaries in some areas such as the northern part of Fljótsheiði and in the upland areas of Reykjahverfi (Figs. 10 and 11), may be due to the quality of pasture there and the close proximity of lower lying farmland. They may have been formed in order to regulate the utilization of the grazing land by separating areas into discrete units, perhaps for individual farms. Aðaldalur is a relatively wide floodplain that, like Skagafjörður, in north-west Iceland, was probably an intensively settled area, making land management particularly important, especially low-lying grazing areas like Fljótsheiði and Reykjahverfi. The areas between the valley-side and plain may have had complex systems of land management and extensive network of boundaries to ensure regulated access to resources.

Date c. 900 c. 1200 Pre-1226 Pre-1477 Pre-1477 Pre-1158 Pre-1300 Pre-1262

It is difficult to date the linear boundaries in the transect area, as well as in other regions of Iceland. Documentary sources referring to specific boundaries are relatively scarce, and there has been little archaeological investigation. Some work has been done on establishing relative chronologies within the layout of the systems (see Table 3 above). In the transect area, it is possible to suggest dates for three boundaries. The linear boundary running down from Fljótsheiði and cutting across the contours is mentioned in a late thirteenth century description of the farm Garður in Aðaldalur (Diplomatarium Islandicum II: 3-5) (Fig. 11). Erosion faces have been examined across two boundaries in the area; one on Laxárdalsheiði and another running past Saltvík, south of Húsavík. Both demonstrate disuse long before 1477 (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002: 70). 310

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Figure 10. Tjörnes to Laxárdalur, north-east Iceland, transcription. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

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Figure 11. Aðaldalur, north-east Iceland, transcription. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

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OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND 2000: 591-592). There was also a tendency for burials to be sited close to tracks, often at junctions. It is possible that kuml were transformed into boundary markers through memory, oral traditions and place-names, and they became an integral part of the boundary landscape.

The boundaries in the transect area suggest a number of different arrangements in boundary types and division of the landscape. There is also some suggestion that the landscape was utilised in different ways at varying periods. Some of the boundaries, particularly those on the southern end of Fljótsheiði and on Múlaheiði, overly earlier boundaries, and there are stratigraphic palimpsests of several different linear features. However, this ‘layering’ effect suggests existing boundaries were adapted, remodelled or extended, not that orientations changed markedly or that entire boundary systems were completely replaced.

Vegir (roads) as well as tracks, formed boundaries within the landscape which defined limits between activities, such as the infield edge. They also controlled access and grazing in outfield areas next to shared or communally used land, in addition to creating relationships to features such as réttir and kuml. Cairns (varða and dys) were constructed along many roads and tracks, and the lines of sight between them assisted safe travel. This was particularly important across open land during winter, or in low light. A good example is at Mýrdalssandur in south Iceland (Fig. 12). As well as serving as way markers, or linked to kuml, cairns also acted as landamerki (boundary markers). Not only was there variation in their use between different regions, but each cairn may itself had had many different functions and meanings over time, and they were probably multivalent. There may also be variations in how they have been identified in the field.

There is some complexity, and the evidence for possible different uses of boundary types within specific local topographies. For example, the valley areas of the upper Láxadalur region have a number of boundaries that cut across contours, in a manner that defines the valley into units of land holding, each accompanied with a farm. Each parcel of land thus contained valley bottom and valley side zones. But there are also boundaries running parallel to the contours, which perhaps defined individual farm land from communally held land. In the combined valley and plain area in the lower Láxadalur, linear boundaries cut across contour boundaries, and made use of natural features such as ravines or streams. These boundaries divided the upland areas of Reykjahverfi into a number of different units not obviously connected to individual farms. The differences between these areas may be connected to different patterns (and proportions) of land ownership and shared land.

Aftökustaðir (execution sites) were often situated on or close to boundaries, between farms or at the extremities of utilised land. They are often known because of their place-names, such as Gálgagil or Gálgaskora (gálgi meaning gallows). Klofasteinar in Hrafnagilshreppur, an execution site on the farm of Melar in Svarfaðardalshreppur, both in Eyjafjarðarsýsla in north Iceland, as well as two sites called Gálgagil in Grímsneshreppur, in Árnessýsla in south Iceland, were located immediately adjacent to or on the boundaries between farms. This strongly suggests that these boundaries had liminal associations, and is highly reminiscent of the use of prehistoric barrows and linear boundaries in northern England as the sites of AngloScandinavian cemeteries, execution places and criminal or ‘deviant’ burials (e.g. Fenton-Thomas this volume; Reynolds 1997; Semple 1998).

Other features as boundaries in the landscape The main agrarian features, such as farms and shielings, used boundaries that helped determine their specific functions and roles in the landscape. Other features within the landscape also made use of, or were attached to, boundaries. Réttir (animal folds), where sheep or horses were rounded up and sorted after the summer grazing from the afréttur (shared land), often lay midway between farms, and next to boundaries or close to tracks, usually at the lower ends of the farm property areas (Aldred forthcoming). It is not known if réttir were nodal points for boundary creation, or were built after the main boundaries in the landscape had already been laid out. Further research on these relationships would be interesting, particularly when seen from the perspective of boundaries as expressions of community.

In Iceland, there were and indeed still are many sites associated with legends and folklore, such as stones in which elves lived, or features linked to stories about trolls, ogres, human outlaws and feuds. They tend to be prominent, visually striking or unusually shaped natural and anthropogenic places that have become repositories of human memories and folklore. Not all of these sites lay on or near to boundaries, but many defined areas that were to be avoided. The Icelandic family sagas or Íslendingasögur are particularly vivid and evocative tales. It has been recently argued that landscape features not only set the scenes and fixed the locations for these stories, but that they had distinct narrative functions associated with specific topographic terms (Wyatt 2004). Ice, the sea, rivers and lakes, woods, rocks, hills and mountains, craters, fumaroles and geysers – all acted as material metaphors, and descriptions of these features encoded a variety of allusions and narrative devices.

Cognitive boundaries derived from oral traditions, memory and remembrance were just as prominent in the Icelandic landscape as constructed, material boundaries that acknowledged folklore and oral traditions. Kuml (pre-Christian Viking burials) had a direct association with many different boundaries, but were themselves physical markers that in some cases may have had liminal connotations. Kuml were probably originally located on or near to prominent natural landscape features, at the extremities of utilised land, and may have served as markers for some original land-claims. In the medieval period and later, kuml were generally located outside infield areas, but still close to farms (Eldjárn 313

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Figure 12. Way marker across the Mýrdalssandur sands, south Iceland. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands. June 2004.

different means and meanings of land allotment and division.

It is notable that many of the site types discussed above were located next to conjectural or physical boundaries between farms. Some sites have become incorporated into the boundary landscape because of their form, such as kuml or vegir which provided physical markers, whilst the location of others were themselves influenced by boundaries, as with réttir or aftökustaðir.

Boundaries in the landscape The spatial distribution and temporal differences of boundaries and processes of land allotment can be discussed within the context of two hypotheses. First, I will argue that in Iceland the natural landscape has had a strong influence on the form of human exploitation of the land, and that this has governed the use of boundaries as well as the types of socio-political power that have developed. Secondly, changing attitudes towards boundaries from the Viking to the medieval period have influenced the utilisation of the landscape to the extent that one system of land allotment and land use was substituted with another.

The functions of different boundaries Boundaries therefore defined infields, outfields and shared land, and through the distribution of boundary types, it is possible to discern indications of land use. The two main types of boundaries, enclosures and linear features, were all contained within the farm land, within infield or outfield areas, and not on shared land. The segregation of outfields from communal land was also usually marked by property boundaries, though the location and form of these often changed, both during the agricultural year, and over time. This was also affected by how the land beyond farm boundaries was owned and organised, as not all unenclosed land was communal for example. The land may have been a detached portion owned by a single farm, or was subdivided between farms giving a defined area to each. The differences between land that was communally held and those areas that had more defined ownership may have resulted in

In an attempt to explain the development and utilisation of the landscape in Iceland, it is hard not to accept the over-arching influence that the natural landscape would have had on the first settlers and later communities. Although the duration of landscape use is relatively short, the archaeological record within the Icelandic landscape is actually clearer than in other countries. Iceland was 314

OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND unfamiliar and seemingly opportunity-rich environment. The only real limitations to this process, besides social relations, were restrictions in topography and access to available resources. The theory therefore suggests that the three categories of landscape governed the conditions for the development of power bases in Iceland. The three landscape types influenced the form and organisation of boundaries, because the allocation of land was topographically defined, and in the Viking period, as elsewhere in Europe, land was integral to the distribution of power.

settled de novo, without there being any previous cultural impacts on the landscape. Although reconstructed on the basis of a thirteenth century text that recorded events which took place centuries earlier, the Landnámabók suggests that the original land-claims used natural features for their boundaries and divisions (Matthíasson 1982). However, these accounts may have been a product of the ruling classes in the thirteenth century claiming legitimacy and rights to the land. The impact of the environment in conditioning human activty is nonetheless evident by the fact that most settlements and human impacts were largely restricted to an area below 200m in altitude. Some settlement existed above this zone, but notably around natural resources that could sustain settlement, as around Lake Mývatn in the north-east of Iceland for example.

The fjord landscapes (Fig. 13) produced farms with only two boundaries with their neighbours. Lowland areas towards the fjord base were at a premium, and each farm would have had to secure as much of that land as possible. In valleys, each farm had boundaries with at least three farms – on either side, and across the valley. Similar to fjord landscapes, the lowland areas at the base of valleys were the most sought after, though good access to pasture land was also important. On plain landscapes, there were no extensive topographic restrictions, but access to some resources, particularly grazing lands and fresh water, could be difficult.

Those resources that were essential to sustain settlers varied in their distribution, and became even more localised over time through a combination of environmental and human factors (Dugmore et al. 2001). It is argued that specific topographic conditions have resulted in different approaches to the exploitation of land, particularly for its control and regulation. These different approaches have been influenced by several other factors, but for the purposes of this discussion the main emphasis is on topography, with reference to others such as human agency, consolidation of land ownership, and land management practice.

Figure 14 Valley landscape spotted with regular spaced deserted farms in Öxnadalur, north Iceland. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

In fjord landscapes there was less communication, with greater distances between the few farms in each fjord. As a result, it is likely that there was less social friction, with each farm having its own resources within its own boundaries. In valleys (Fig. 14), communication was easier, perhaps due to similar routes through the landscape, and this resulted in greater opportunities for the development of more stratified social structures, such as the establishment of assemblies and chiefdoms. On plains (Fig. 15), the restrictions connected with access to resources may have provided more complex systems of land management, particularly in contested landscape scenarios. The growth and the unbalanced distribution of power were more apparent in these latter areas, particularly during the first few centuries of settlement.

Figure 13. Fjord landscape in Hvalfjörður, west Iceland. Source: Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

It is possible to distinguish three main categories of topography for landscape-scale research – fjords, valleys and plains, as well as combinations of the three. Each has influenced the development of different arrangements of land division, settlement patterning and social organisation. The observations here are based on recent discussions of the way in which the land was settled, and how this affected the socio-political systems within varying parts of Iceland (Vésteinsson 2000a: 11-15). The land management systems, and therefore the conditions necessary for boundary creation, are based on a model of the human drive to expand, especially in a new, 315

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Figure 15. Plain landscape from Hellisheiði looking over Hveragerði, south-west Iceland. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

boundaries for land allotment, and this notion is supported by examination of the original settler’s landclaim areas in Landnámabók (Matthíasson 1982). Both at larger territorial scales as well as on individual farms, the use of natural boundaries in dividing land within the farm areas was quite common. The placing of land claim or community boundaries along natural features was perhaps an attempt at creating relative stability in a unifying approach to land utilisation.

The process of land allotment and the construction of boundaries were integral to land management, which was itself connected to socio-political organisation and the availability of resources in the natural landscape. Although there is still much research to do, this does seem to correlate well with the known distribution of boundaries, although on the highly contested plains more complex solutions may have evolved, perhaps through more communication and the concentration of powerful individuals. Within more mixed topographies, such as the valley-plain landscapes of north-east Iceland (see Fig. 10), no overall dominant power bases were established, and the land management systems which were created were more varied and changeable. This geographic variability in the socio-political structures of the earliest period in Iceland’s history may account for the differences of boundary density, which do not appear to have been due to differential preservation, land improvement or environmental conditions.

Social changes in attitudes towards boundaries Documentary sources thus suggest that the original land claims were based on natural features in the landscape, and Íslandingabók and Landnámabók state that the limited number of settlements established in the colonisation period claimed large areas of land that were later subdivided into smaller land parcels. The boundaries between land-claims, and perhaps even individual farms, may have been based on the relationships farmers had with the goðar (chief). The goðar played a central role in the administration of the justice system, as law-makers and judges for local communities (Karlsson 2000: 24-25). Any disputes relied on the intervention of the goðar, who had personal ties to individuals based on kinship, loyalty

Many natural places would have soon become familiar markers in an initially new landscape. Rivers, waterfalls, hills and other natural features were given toponymic names, such as á, foss, hóll, hlíð and höfði, occasionally with personal names attached. It is therefore likely that the natural landscape was integral to the development of 316

OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND space. They have specific descriptions and functions attached to them, such as göngugarðar (walking boundaries), reiðgarðar (riding boundaries), rekstrargarðar (drove boundaries), and engjagarðar (meadow boundaries) (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002: 61; Hansson 2002).

or reciprocity. The division of the land and access to resources would have relied on the goðar, perhaps in agreement with other settlers in the land-claim area. This land management system may therefore have relied on self-governance within communities that had common ties to the goðar, and did not need physical demarcation. Natural markers in the landscape served just as well, and were themselves given meaning over time through memory and remembrance, stories, disputes and agreements.

As these references were probably made or at least dictated by people who lived and worked within the landscape, and owned it, it is possible that they do relate to actual use, rather than being the products of an official administrator. Different emphases on particular boundaries are also evident between Grágás and Jónsbók. On the one hand Grágás stresses the maintenance of property boundaries, whereas Jónsbók places its emphasis on infield boundaries. This correlates with archaeological evidence that indicates some property or linear boundaries were falling into disrepair before the advent of the 1477 tephra (see Hofstaðir, Laxárdalsheiði and Saltvík above).

However, an increase in settlements and population created physical and social pressures on land-use and access, and the process of land allotment became much more connected with rights of access to resources within a contested landscape. It is possible that misuse of the land from over-grazing and clearance, and deteriorating climatic conditions, also influenced land allotment. It may then have become necessary to establish visible markers in the landscape that demarcated land areas for specific uses. The system of self-governance was based on goðar being unifying figures in communities, but it was prone to abuse. The growing social elite became more powerful, leading to imbalances in the distribution of resources and rights of access (Karlsson 2000: 83, 89). This may have been a significant factor influencing the shift towards more controlled land allotment and the construction of boundaries.

Such changing attitudes were not universally associated with all boundaries, and this is also expressed in the law texts. Infields and other enclosures were relatively unaffected by changes until the eighteenth century (Vésteinsson pers. comm.). Similarly, property boundaries continued to be built. Changes in emphasis mostly affected sub-divisions of the outfield areas, as well as those boundaries that segregated the outfield from the communal land. It is not yet known which boundaries became redundant altogether. These shifts in attitude were a consequence of social and political changes, population increases or decreases, changes in the environment and land management practices, and perhaps, familiarity with the landscape.

The historical sources referring to boundaries are laws, letters and disputes written down between 1150-1621 (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002: 61; Hansson 2002). They outlined where boundaries should be built, such as between infield and outfield, and between farmland and common land. The first references to boundaries concern building methods, dimensions and estimated times for construction or maintenance per year. This emphasis on construction and its subsequent re-emphasis in new laws may mean it was seen as important for farmers to comply. For example, for three months a year, two in the spring and one at the end of the summer, boundary construction had to be given priority over other tasks (Jónsbók 1902: 282). The construction of boundaries involved communities and workers from neighbouring farms, so they had to decide on the location of the boundaries and the allocation of labour involved. However, these laws did not necessarily always filter from the alþing (main assembly) at Þingvellir to the regional þing (assembly), and down to the communities who would take part in the boundary construction.

Although there was growing disuse and abandonment of boundary systems previously used to divide and demarcate land into defined units of land, a new system was perhaps integrated into the existing one, which encouraged more community-based utilisation of the landscape, particularly in animal husbandry. The demarcation of grazing land seems to have been one of the main reasons for dividing the land with boundaries, especially lower lying pasture areas. This is supported by an amendment of 1294 to an earlier law regarding boundary construction, stating that the lack of boundaries between farms was no longer a legal defence for unlawful grazing on another’s land (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002: 71; Jónsbók 1902: 282). A landscape based on common activities such as grazing and the gathering of animals would have required less investment and participation in boundary construction in order to keep animals in and out. A landscape populated by followers and people with personal ties to the chieftains and local justice system who established the division of resources, would also have less use for physical expressions of land division and tenure through boundaries. This may account for some of the variation in the distribution of known boundary systems. Boundaries in some areas and social contexts were unnecessary, but

As previously mentioned, thirteenth century families may have used Landnámabók to legitimise their claims to the land, and this may have been due, in part at least, to growing problems with the boundary-based system of tenure. Boundaries may have become outdated (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002). This is supported by differences in legislation between the law texts, Grágás and Jónsbók with regard to boundaries. For example, in references after 1300 boundaries are mentioned as more than simply markers or divisions of 317

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT The changes in attitude towards boundaries were perhaps also accompanied by changes in peoples’ perceptions of both bounded and unbounded space. For example, kuml had previously been located at the edges of or outside utilised land at the time of their construction, but over time they became incorporated within used land and the boundary landscape. The memories associated with them were no longer as relevant to people, or had been forgotten entirely. The treatment of kuml became more irreverent over time, and many burials excavated in recent decades were clearly disturbed in antiquity by grave robbers (Friðriksson in prep.). Local landscapes became well known, and changed from something to be discovered and utilised, to something requiring ownership or rights of access for economic benefit.

in other places were created as a result of contested landscapes and difficulties in the ownership of land and resources. In north-east Iceland, research into systems of land management supports the notion that many boundaries were becoming outdated by 1300 (Einarsson, Hansson and Vésteinsson 2002: 71). The system that followed would have to be less labour intensive for landowners, but would also need to build on the qualities that already existed within the communities that worked the land. For example, the land management system for sheep grazing would work best if it operated within a landscape that was free of boundaries, where animals were able to graze unrestricted between the farm land outfield and the communal land. This may be why many boundaries fell out of use. It is possible that at the same time, new practices produced either greater or lesser specialisation in the use of outfield land, such as shielings with enclosures around them, depending on location and whether boundaries had been previously commonly used in land management.

The increased use of materials such as wood, steel, concrete, and plastic in the construction of boundaries today further demonstrates changing attitudes towards boundaries. Boundaries today are concerned with more narrowly defined capitalist ideas of property and ownership, rather than in the past when they may also have been considered as expressions of community, labour, tenure, power and identity.

Evidence from a survey of farm abandonment in Eyjafjallasveit in south Iceland, and at Skagafjörður in the north and Berufjörður in the east, suggests variation in the occupation and adandonment of shielings (Sveinbjarnardóttir 1992). The results suggest that in many places, construction and occupation of shielings was established in the twelfth century. However, the identification of shieling sites is difficult, as many sites were reused as farms in later periods, and archaeological investigation is often just a single test pit across an enclosure or a structure. These places do not have much known evidence for boundaries such as that in the northeast of Iceland. Although there is little archaeological evidence to support this, it is conceivable that with the development of a more ‘open’ system of land management over a bounded or ‘closed’ one, greater specialisation within outfields took place. By the early fourteenth century, new land use practices had adapted the earlier boundary landscape.

Conclusions – changes in the land, changes in society Boundaries link a series of meanings and social practices, such as in and out, excluded and included, bounded and unbounded, and centre and periphery. At the same time, boundaries are also associated with other features in the landscape, and these relationships are integral to their meanings and our understandings of them. Boundaries cannot be divorced from the landscapes that they were constructed in, nor can they be studied in isolation from settlements and society. This paper has been concerned with providing an overview of boundaries in Iceland, and providing an assessment of socio-political structures within different topographic landscapes which may have also influenced changes in land-use. These factors all influenced the establishment and development of land allotment and landscape division. Extensive and intensive archaeological landscape survey is still in its early stages in Iceland, but collaborative, multi-disciplinary research such as the Landscape of Settlements and Landscapes circum landnám projects are already adding much to previous knowledge. Furthermore, a mapping and transcription project in north-east Iceland, funded by the Icelandic Research Council (Rannís), will contribute important archaeological results for further study. These projects will add much to our knowledge of Icelandic landscape development, through archaeological techniques that include walkover and detailed field survey, the study of aerial photographs and satellite data, plus wide ranging palaeo-environmental sampling and analyses.

The establishment of animal folds (réttir) in the landscape would have been a necessary component of an open system, as they formed foci in the landscape for community-based activities such as gathering and shearing (Fig. 16). Like boundaries, archaeological research about sheep folds is only at a preliminary stage (Aldred forthcoming). Initial observations suggest that sheep folds used for sorting were well placed within the landscape, with good access to and from grazing lands, as well as being located on or very close to lower farm property boundaries, and between farms as well as on access routes. Perhaps the social identity, status and power gained from boundary construction and notions of ownership and tenure was replaced with the status and identity connected with communal activities revolving around the driving and gathering of livestock, and having good sheep folds for the sorting of animals.

Any visitor to Iceland will be struck by the enormity of the landscape, with little density of occupation or activities in any one place. This land appears open, empty, and unaffected by human agency. But ongoing 318

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Figure 16. Rettir – sorting sheep by farms at a sheep fold in Þjórsadalur, south Iceland. Source: Oscar Aldred, Fornleifastofnun Íslands.

Dynamics of Northern Societies conference, NABO/SILA Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2004. Aldred, O., Chadwick, A.M., Nicol, S., Sanmark, A., Marttila, J.M., Krivogorskaya, Y., Þórvaldsson, L., Lárusdóttir, B. and Hreiðarsdóttir, E. in prep. Landscape transcription project results. In Landscape of Settlements Project 2003. LML project report. Aldred, O., Hreiðarsdóttir, E, Lárusdóttir, B. and Einarsson, Á 2004. Forn garðlög í Suður Þingeyarsýslu/A system of earthworks in NE Iceland Interim report 2004. Unpublished report. Fornleifastofnun Íslands and Náttúrurannsóknastöðin við Mývatn. Amorosi, T. 1992. Climate impact and human response in north-east Iceland: archaeological investigations at Svalbarð, 1986-1988. In C.D. Morris and D.J. Rackham (eds.) Norse and Later Settlement and Subsistence in the North Atlantic. Glasgow: Department of Archaeology, pp. 103-138. Astill, G. 1988. Fields. In G. Astill and A. Grant (eds.) The Countryside of Medieval England. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 62-85. Austin, D. 1985. Dartmoor and the upland villages of south-west of England. In D. Hooke (ed.) Medieval Villages. Oxford: Oxford University Committee for Archaeology Monograph 5, pp. 71-80. Austin, D. 1990. The ‘proper study’ of medieval archaeology. In D. Austin and L. Alcock (eds.) From the Baltic to the Black Sea. Studies in Medieval History. London: Unwin Hyman, pp. 9-42.

archaeological research is demonstrating that there has been significant historical human impact in many areas, recorded through vegetational changes, and the presence of land allotment boundaries. With tracks, cairns and land boundaries, and their associated memories, myths and stories, people and communities gave meaning to their world. It is likely that many more such boundaries will be discovered in the future. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Orri Vestéinsson, Birna Lárusdóttir and Oddgeir Hannson for reading early drafts of this paper. Many thanks also in general to my work colleagues at the Institute of Archaeology, Iceland (Fornleifastofnun Íslands) for fruitful and lively discussions. Also thank you to Chad for reading my drafts and suggesting alternative wordings, and for providing additional reference material for my research. All errors, however, remain my own. Bibliography Aldred, O. 2004. Archaeological investigations, Höfðagerði, Núpar 2003. Framvinduskýrsla/Interim report. Unpublished report: Fornleifastofnun Íslands. Aldred, O. forthcoming. Réttir in the landscape. A study on the context of focal points. Paper delivered at the 319

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Guðmundsson, G. 1996. Gathering and processing of lyme-grass (Elymus arenarius) in Iceland: an ethnohistorical account. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 5: 13-23. Hallsdóttir, M. 1987. Pollen Analytical Studies on Human Influence on Vegetation in Relation to the Landnám Tephra Layer in Southwest Iceland. Lundqua Thesis 18. Lund: Lund University. Hansson, O. 2002. Garður er granna sættir. Unpublished BA dissertation: Háskóla Íslands. Jarðabók 1927. Jarðabók Árna Magnússonar og Páls Vídalíns IV. Copenhagen. Johnson, M. 1996. An Archaeology of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Johnson, N. and Rose, P. 1994. Bodmin Moor: An Archaeological Survey: Volume 1 The Human Landscape to c.1800. London: English Heritage and RCHME. Jónsbók 1902. Jónsbók. Kong Magnus Hakonssons Lovborg for Island, vedtagest paa Altinget 1281, og Réttarbætr, de for Island givne Rettarbøder af 1294, 1305 og 1313 Ólafur Halldórsson. Copenhagen: S. Møllers Bogtrykkeri. Jónsson, G. and Magnússon. M.S. (eds.) 1997. Hagskinna. Sögulegar hagtölur um Ísland. Reykjavik: Hagstofa Íslands. Karlsson, G. 2000. Iceland’s 1100 years. The History of a Marginal Society. London: Hurst and Company. Matthíasson, H. 1982. Landið og Landnáma I-II. Reykjavik: Örn og Örlygur. McGovern, T.H., Perdikaris, S. and Tinsley, C. 2001. Economy of landnám: evidence of zooarchaeology. In A. Wawn and Þórunn Sigurðardóttir (eds.) Approaches to Vinland. a conference on the written and archaeological sources for the Norse settlements in the North-Atlantic region and exploration of America. Reykjavik, Sigurður Nordal Institute Studies 4, pp 154-165. Moreland, J. 1991. Method and theory in medieval archaeology in the 1990s. Archeologia Medievale 18: 7-42. Moreland, J. 2001. Archaeology and Text. London: Duckworth. Muir, R. and Muir, N. 1989. Fields. London: Macmillan. Reynolds, A.J. 1997 The definition and ideology of Anglo-Saxon execution sites and cemeteries. In G. De Boe and F. Verhaeghe (eds.) Death and Burial in Medieval Europe. Papers of the Medieval Europe Brugge 1997 Conference. Volume 2. Brugge, pp. 3341. Rippon, S. 2002. Infield and outfield: the early stages of marshland colonisation and the evolution of medieval field systems. In T. Lane (ed.) Through Wet and Dry: Essays in Honour of David Hall. Sleaford: Heritage Lincolnshire, pp 54-70. Róbertsdóttir, B.G. and Jóhannesson, H. 1986. Þrælagarður í Biskupstungum. Náttúrufræingurinn 56, 213-234. Schönfeld, E.D. 1902. Der isländische Bauernhof und sein Betrieb zur Sagazeit nach den Quellen dargestellt. Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprach- und

Aðalsteinsson, S. 1990. Importance of sheep in early Icelandic agriculture. Acta Archaeologica 61: 285291. Banning, E.B. 2002. Archaeological Survey. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Bowden, M. (ed.) 1999. Unravelling the Landscape. An Inquisitive Approach to Archaeology. Gloucester: Tempus. Byock, J. 1990. Medieval Iceland. Society, Sagas and Power. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Búalög 1915-1933. Búalög. Um verðlag og allskonar venjur í viðskiptum og búskap á Íslandi. Reykjavik. Dennis, A., Foote, P. and Perkins, R. (eds. and trans.) 1980. Laws of Early Iceland. Grágás: the Codex Regius of Grágás with Material from Other Manuscripts. Volume 1. Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press. Dennis, A., Foote, P. and Perkins, R. (eds. and trans.) 2000. Laws of Early Iceland. Grágás: the Codex Regius of Grágás with Material from Other Manuscripts. Volume 2. Manitoba: University of Manitoba Press. Diplomatarium Islandicum eða Íslenzkt fornbréfasafn IXVI. Kaupmannahöfn og Reykjavík 1857-1972. Dugmore, A., Newton, A., Mammi, Z., McGovern, T., Perdikaris, S., Simpson, I., Thomson, A. and Vésteinsson, O. 2001. Landscape change in the Mývatn area. Unpublished paper. AEA & NABO Conference: Atlantic Connections and Adaptations, March 2001, University of Glasgow. Einarsson, Á., Hansson, O. and Vésteinsson, O. 2002. An extensive system of medieval earthworks in north east Iceland. Archaeologia Islandica 2: 61-17. Eldjárn, K. 2000 [1956]. Kuml og Haugfé (2nd edition, edited by A. Friðriksson). Reykjavík: Mál og menning. Eldjárn, K. and Gestsson, G. 1952. Rannsóknir á Bergþórshvoli. Árbók Hins íslenska fornleifafélags 1951: 5-75. Emery, F. 1989. The landscape. In D.H. Owen (ed.) Settlement and Society in Wales. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, pp. 57-71. Friðriksson, A. 1994. Sagas and Popular Antiquarianism in Icelandic Archaeology. Worldwide Archaeological Series 10. Aldershot: Avebury. Friðriksson, A. in prep. The topography of pagan burials in Iceland. In G. Guðmundsson (ed.) Current Issues in Nordic Archaeology. The Proceedings of the 21st Nordic Archaeological Conference, Akureyri, Iceland, 6th-9th September 2001. Reykjavík: Society of Icelandic Archaeologists. Friðriksson, A. and Vésteinsson, O. 2003. Creating a past: a historiography of the settlement of Iceland. In J.H. Barrett (ed.) Contact, Continuity and Collapse – the Norse Colonisation of the North Atlantic. Studies in the Early Medieval Ages Vol. 5. Belgium: Brepols, pp 139-162. Grönvold, K., Óskarsson, N. Johnsen, S.J., Clausen, H.B., Hammer, C.U., Bond, G. and Bard, E. 1995. Ash layers from Iceland in the Greenland GRIP ice core correlated with oceanic and land sediments. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 135: 149-155. 320

OSCAR ALDRED: UNFAMILIAR LANDSCAPES: INFIELDS, OUTFIELDS, BOUNDARIES AND LANDSCAPES IN ICELAND Kulturgeschichte der germanischen Völker 91. Strassburg. Semple, S. 1998. A fear of the past: the place of the prehistoric burial mound in the ideology of middle and later Anglo-Saxon England. World Archaeology 30: 109-126. Sveinbjarnardóttir, G. 1992. Farm Abandonment in Medieval and Post-medieval Iceland. Oxbow Monograph 17. Oxford: Oxbow. Thomson, A. 2003. A Modelling Approach to Farm Management and Vegetation Degradation in Premodern Iceland. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Stirling. Thoroddsen, Þ. 1919. Lýsing Íslands III. Landbúnaður á Íslandi Sögulegt yfirlit I. Hið íslenzka Bókmentafélag. Copenhagen. Túnakort 1918. Skilmannahreppur. Þjóðskalasafn Íslands. Vésteinsson, O. 1998a. Patterns of settlement in Iceland: a study in prehistory. Saga-book of the Viking Society 25: 1-29. Vésteinsson, O. 1998b. Fornleifarannsókn á Neðra Ási í Hjaltadal 1998. Reykjavík: Fornleifastofnun Íslands. Vésteinsson, O. 2000a. The Christianisation of Iceland. Priests, Power and Social Change 1000-1300. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vésteinsson, O. 2000b. The archaeology of Landnám. Early settlement in Iceland. In W. Fitzhugh and E.I. Ward (eds.) Vikings. The North Atlantic Saga. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, pp. 164174. Vésteinsson, O. (ed.) 2003. Fornleifarannsókn á Steinboga í Mývatnssveit 2002. Reykjavík: Fornleifastofnun Íslands. Vésteinsson, O., McGovern, T.H. and Keller, C. 2002. Enduring impacts: social and environmental aspects of Viking Age settlement in Iceland and Greenland. Archaeologia Islandica 2: 98-136. Whittington, G. 1973. Field systems in Scotland. In A.R.H. Bake and R.A. Butlin (eds.) Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 530-579. Williamson, T. 2000. Understanding enclosure. Landscapes 1 (1): 56-79. Williamson, T. 2003. Shaping Medieval Landscapes. Settlement, Society, Environment. Macclesfield: Windgather Press. Wyatt, I. 2004. The landscape of the Icelandic Sagas: text, place and national identity. Landscapes 5 (1): 55-72. Þorláksson, H. 1991. Vaðmál og verðlag. Vaðmál í utanlandsviðskiptum og búskap Íslendinga á 13. og 14. öld. Reykjavík. Þórarinsson, S. 1982. Bjarnagarður í Landbroti. Árbók Hins íslenska fornleifaflélags 1981, 5-39.

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The strip lynchets of medieval fields surviving as earthworks at Challacombe, Dartmoor, Devon, and associated with a nearby deserted medieval village of the same name. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Field-names in reconstructing late Anglo-Saxon agricultural land-use in the Bourn Valley, West Cambridgeshire Susan Oosthuizen following half-century. This land was so difficult to plough that it was never cultivated again, and modern farmers cannot believe that it was ever used for growing crops, despite the evidence of ridge and furrow (which has only survived into the present century because it is on marginal land).

Introduction This study complements work already published on the persistence of prehistoric field boundaries and huge, preopen field greens and commons in the medieval open fields of the Bourn Valley, a tributary of the River Cam, west Cambridgeshire (Figure 1), as well as the discovery of a possible middle Anglo-Saxon proto-open field system in the valley (Oosthuizen 2002b, 2003 and forthcoming). It uses pre-enclosure field and furlong names to reconstruct late Anglo-Saxon agricultural practice at the time – probably in the tenth or eleventh centuries AD – that open fields were extended across the parishes of west Cambridgeshire.

This landscape of fully cultivated open fields was recorded in a range of mostly post-medieval documentary sources including charters, terriers, accounts, maps, enclosure awards and so on. The many field-names recorded in these documents are both rich and vivid. For example, the extract below from an eighteenth century terrier for Great Eversden describes the landscape of Brook Field, one of the two great open fields in the parish (CUL QC15/23): The upper and lower new close abutting Toft way on the west and on Toft brook east… One land on fowlmire leys on the north One land in red land abutting on Toft Brook in the north… One land abutting on fullbrook east and foulmore lay balk north One land of sward land called the marsh… One land called dead dowl piece abutting upon Comberton brook One land abutting on offils way west, a way walk on both sides… The information given in this terrier describes two landscapes. Firstly, the eighteenth century landscape of open field strips, of small streams and access ways, of arable converted to pasture leys, of land which may always have been pasture, and of soil colour. The names themselves, however, seem to record an older landscape: ‘sward land called the marsh’ (my emphasis) had once presumably been marsh, and Dead Dole may have been the site where ancient burials had been found. Fowlmire recorded the muddy water that flooded this area from the Full (foul) Brook; and Offil is a contraction of ‘old’ and ‘feld’, perhaps indicating ancient common (Oosthuizen 2002a).

Figure 1. Location map of study area. Source: A. Leaver.

By AD 1300, ‘classic’ open field farming was wellestablished in the parishes of the Bourn Valley (Postgate 1964; Fig. 2). Almost all of the available land of each parish lay under the plough. In some parishes like Kingston and Toft, the arable was divided into two fields; in others like Comberton and Bourn, it was divided into the classic three. Land hunger had become so intense that even land along watercourses which was constantly under threat of flooding was taken into cultivation, only to be abandoned in the climatic and population downturn of the

David Hall has suggested that the more ancient landscape revealed by these names may record the character of the landscape at the time that the furlongs of the open fields were first taken into cultivation. He has argued that fieldnames are likely to ‘reflect ancient topography, such as the presence of heaths, moors, or woodland’ because furlong names containing these elements must be 323

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Figure 3. The Bourn Brook in flood at Toft, October 2000. Source: S. Oosthuizen.

referring to a pre-arable landscape. Their names would be different if they referred to the landscape of the open fields themselves (Hall 1982, 1985). If this is the case, then an analysis of field-names ‘would allow a fairly precise reconstruction of a county’s landscape in the later Saxon period’ (Hall 1985: 63). This is the premise underlying the work reported here. Sources and methods Field-names are numerous, local in use and derived from local conditions. They describe soil, drainage, vegetation, ownership and usage, location, productivity, archaeology or even an event. Their meanings may remain continuously fresh (referring to soil, drainage, location or crop), or may become archaic (describing archaeological finds, the original vegetation at the time of being taken into cultivation, or ownership).

Figure 3. The Bourn Brook in flood at Toft, October 2000. Source: S. Oosthuizen.

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Figure 4. Locatable pre-Parliamentary enclosure names of furlongs, closes, fields, woods and watercourses in the Bourn Valley. Source: P. Judge.

before the time that open field agriculture spread across each parish.

They appear to be a relatively reliable source for exploring the character of the later Anglo-Saxon landscape since they can persist for centuries. Puttokeswell in Kingston for example, was mentioned in a charter of about 1189 and again in a terrier of 1786 (Hassall 1949: 81; CUL QC 17/16-22). Puttockesrou Field in Hardwick was noted in 1251 and had the same name in 1639 (CUL EDR G3/27 and EDR H1). This conclusion is supported by work elsewhere, such as at Sherington in Buckinghamshire, where 75% of names in use in the open fields in 1300 were still in use in 1580 (Baines 1996: 167-168). As a result, “…inferences [about the origins of field-names] from the ample documentation of the thirteenth century to the illiterate settlement period may not appear too hazardous. The medieval records [of Sherington] appear to reflect an agrarian situation which had stabilised before the Norman Conquest” (Baines 1996: 172, my additions in parentheses).

Woodland The mapping of surviving woodland together with fieldnames denoting lost woodland and/or assarts may illuminate the extent of woodland regeneration in the valley before the late Anglo-Saxon period. It may also demonstrate the extent to which the landscape of the valley was cleared in the late Anglo-Saxon period when open fields were first created. The ancient woods of the Bourn Valley – Bourn, Eversden, Hardwick, Kingston and Swansley (Caxton) Woods – mostly lie on the flat, poorly-drained boulder clay plateaux which bound the valley to north and south (Figs. 6-10). The only exception is Hardwick Wood, which lies half way up the valley slope on a flat spur between two tributaries of the Brook. Their locations confirm Rackham’s statement that ‘woods are not on land that was good for growing trees, but on land that was bad for anything else’ (Rackham 1986: 98).

The method followed here was to identify and map as far as possible all the names of furlongs, closes, fields, woods and watercourses in the study area (Fig. 4), since they might record, however opaquely, land-use at or just

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Figure 5. Toft, Cambridgeshire, looking south. There is medieval ridge and furrow in the foreground, in an area whose furlong names refer almost exclusively to arable cultivation. In the middle distance lie the meadows of the Bourn Brook. The medieval northern boundary of the meadow is now followed by a modern fence, below the ridge and furrow. The medieval fields of Great Eversden lie on the slopes in the distance. Source: S. Oosthuizen.

Figure 6. Bourn Wood before 1820. Drawing: P. Judge, after ChC parish map of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Source: C., CCRO Q/RDc35.

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SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN: FIELD-NAMES IN RECONSTRUCTING LATE ANGLO-SAXON AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE

Figure 7. Caxton Wood in 1750. Source: P. Judge, after CUL r.b.; CCRO 124/P39.

woodland of limited extent’ – typical of areas where woodland was a relatively scarce resource (Hooke 1989: 121; Wager 1998: 10-11, my addition in parentheses).1

There is a little evidence for the existence of other small (now lost) groves or woodland scrub in other parts of the valley during the medieval period. It is possible, for example, that a wood called Brockholt (broc ‘badger’ plus holt ‘wood’) lay towards the north-west of Caxton, where an ancient freehold estate with the same name had been created by 1154 (Palmer 1927: 63, 65; Victoria County History 5: 29). Lost woods in Caldecote are indicated by the name of William ate Wode, who lived somewhere in the parish in 1327, and by Mitchell’s Wood in the same parish (location unknown), which may be related to a Robert Michel who was living there in 1341 (Evelyn-White n.d.: 52; Reaney 1943: 327-328). But these appear to have been small, managed groves rather than part of an extensive belt of woodland.

Of fourteen estates in the Bourn Valley where woodland was recorded in DB, all but one contained woods classed as nemus. Only part of Eversden Wood was called silva. It is possible that there may have been one more – although DB and IE both referred to Picot’s woodland in Bourn as nemus, ICC referred to it as silva (DB 32:23; IE 88-89; VCH 1: 425). This impression of limited areas of managed woodland rather than extensive acres of wildwood and wood pasture in the valley is supported by their use, recorded in DB, for fencing, houses or fuel rather than for pannage. These rights sometimes persisted: as late as the midnineteenth century. The inhabitants of Hardwick for example, still had the right to cut ‘ringe’ (one bundle of fencing or the amount collected from ⅛ acre), and to collect underwood in Hardwick Wood (CCRO Q/RDc 51; PC H.I.11; Rackham 1967: 83 n.3). By contrast, not one wood in the Bourn Valley in 1086 was estimated in terms of the number of pigs who might pannage within it.

Although there is no definitive evidence about the forms of woodland in the valley in 1086, something can be inferred from the Domesday Book and its contemporaries, ICC and IE (Inquisition Comitatus Cantabrigiensis and Inquisitio Eliensis). All three sources made a distinction between silva or ‘wood’, and nemus or ‘grove’. Silva, particularly where it was enumerated in terms of pigs, appears to have indicated woodland that was so extensive that it included both dense unmanaged woodland and areas of wood pasture for grazing, that is grassland scattered with pollard trees; whereas nemus seems to have been used for ‘specific areas of [managed]

1 Managed woodland usually includes standard trees, generally oak, among coppice trees cropped every eight to thirteen years (Rackham 2000). Animals are incompatible with managed woodland since they graze on the new shoots of coppiced stools.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 8. Eversden Wood in 1811. Source: P. Judge, after CCRO Q/RDc 19.

name suggests that it was probably more like ‘sheep pasture characterised by isolated stands of wood’ than the ‘relatively lightly-spread woodland’ generally implied by ‘wold’ (Fox 2000: 51; Hooke 1978: 333-334).

The evidence of Domesday Book therefore suggests that by the late eleventh century, such woodland as survived was a small and carefully managed and limited resource; it seems likely that almost all the land of the valley was arable or pasture.

This conclusion is supported by the fact that there seems to be very little evidence of assart in field boundaries and furlong names. Except in the immediate proximity of the existing woods, there are few names indicating assarting on these plateaux, and most furlongs near ancient woods tend to be large and regular, rather than small and irregular. Those field boundaries and names that do indicate assart suggest that, at their largest, these woods were probably not much more than about two or three times their present area (Figs. 6-10). Generally, the woods of the Bourn Valley seem to have achieved their

An analysis of field-names leads to a similar conclusion. A continuous band of pasture seems to have lain along the higher ground in the valley when the open fields were introduced (Fig. 4). The We(a)ld, an area of managed, often intensively grazed, pasture, was preserved in a number of field-names running westwards along the claytopped plateau of the northern ridge from Hardwick (The Weald 1615), across Caldecote (weld 1597) and Bourn (Burneweld 1464) to Caxton (Chakestunesweald circa. 1150) (CUL EDR/H1; Reaney 1943: 54; VCH 5: 29). The 328

SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN: FIELD-NAMES IN RECONSTRUCTING LATE ANGLO-SAXON AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE

Figure 9. Hardwick Wood before 1837. Source: P. Judge, after CCRO 124/P51 A-C, 152/P12 and Q/RDc 51.

For example, the sinuous character of footpaths east of Kingston Wood and the way in which they appear to perpetuate former boundaries of the wood boundary seem to reveal an earlier, maximum extent of the wood not very far east of the present boundary of the wood (Fig. 10). The regular pattern of field boundaries further east between Kingston Wood and Eversden Woods suggest that this area had been open country for millennia.

present size, more or less, by the eleventh or twelfth centuries (Postgate 1964; Rackham 2000).2 2

The extent of these woods varied significantly over the medieval and post-medieval periods. For example, there is medieval ridge and furrow under parts of both Eversden and Kingston Woods, and Hardwick Wood can be shown to have been a fraction of its present size at enclosure in 1856 (.; CCRO Q/RDc 51; PC H.II; Rackham 1980: 138139; P. Reynolds pers. comm.). Bourn Wood, which measured 19½ acres by the early nineteenth century, may have covered only 10 acres in 1279 (ChC Survey 1820; Rot. Hund. ii.: 524, 523).

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 10. Kingston Wood in 1720. Source: P. Judge, after CCRO R52/12/5/1.

reuniting Great and Little Needhams (1720) into one furlong, and the portions of Bendoles (ben ‘bean’ plus dāl ‘portion or share of land’ 1720) (CCRO R52/12/5/1; Reaney 1943: 318-319). The boundaries which had subdivided these furlongs may have been created in the climatic downturn of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – in 1326, some of these poorly-drained clay fields ‘lay frisca et inculta’ (overgrown and uncultivated), at the same time that demesne meadow and pasture increased on the estate (VCH 5: 115-6).

Figure 11(a) shows the field boundaries of the Kingston Wood estate as they were in 1720. Fig. 11(b) is a map regression that shows the effect of removing those boundaries which are assumed to be the latest to be created, in the later medieval or early modern periods when arable was converted to pasture, and open field furlongs were subdivided into closes. They have been identified by the way in which they abut against longer, more continuous boundaries, at a T-junction (Oosthuizen 2003). Their removal reveals the characteristic aratral (or ‘reversed-S’) curved boundaries of open field furlongs, 330

SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN: FIELD-NAMES IN RECONSTRUCTING LATE ANGLO-SAXON AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE

Figure 11a-d. Deconstruction of the pattern of pre-Parliamentary field enclosure boundaries within the Kingston Wood estate as it was in 1720. Source: P. Judge, after CCRO R52/12/5/1.

331

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Hardwick might be derived from haga ‘an enclosure [within woodland] fenced off’ for ‘hunting [especially deer] as a reserve or as the boundary of a heath or wooded area’ (CUL EDR H/1 and G3/27; Hooke 1989: 123-125, my additions in parantheses). The element is most commonly found on heavy clayland, a description that fits Hardwick and Caldecote well (Hooke 1997: 40).

Figs. 11(c) and 11(d) are further map regressions which show the effect of taking out a second and third stage of abutting boundaries. What emerges is a regular pattern of continuous boundaries either aligned on or parallel to Mare Way (a possible prehistoric ridgeway), or to Crane’s Lane (a long distance route of unknown date). These continuous boundaries are part of a valley-wide arrangement of similar alignments and are almost certainly prehistoric in origin. The fact that they survived into the later Anglo-Saxon period to be re-used in open field furlong boundaries probably means that the area in which they lie was most unlikely to have been wooded for some millennia. This suggests that there was little or no regenerated woodland in the valley, since it seems more difficult for such boundaries to survive under regenerated and then cleared woodland, than in country that was continuously grazed and/or ploughed (Oosthuizen 2003).

Hunting was, of course, a well-accepted aspect of high status land-holding in the Anglo-Saxon period and at least two ‘parks for woodland beasts’ are known to have existed in east Cambridgeshire in the late eleventh century (DB 14:78; 41:1). Aelfric’s late tenth century hunter described how: I weave myself nets and set them in a suitable place, and urge on my dogs so that they chase the wild animals until they come into the nets unawares…I catch stags and wild boars and roe-buck and does, and sometimes hares (Swanton 1993: 170).

Nor does there appear to have been very much reversion of arable land to scrub, as there are just three field-names in the valley that might refer to this kind of cover: Brace [Dean] (brash ‘small branches, twigs’ 16th C.) and Brimble [Barrow Hill] (brēmel ‘brambles’ 16th C.) might be indicative of neglected arable or overgrown ground in the central parts of Bourn (ChC Bourn M; Gelling and Cole 2000: 69; Reaney 1943: 313, 342). Snour Hill (sno(w)e ‘brushwood’ 1504), a furlong in on the eastern side of Comberton adjoining Wood Field in the neighbouring parish, suggests overgrown grazing or arable land rather than managed woodland or wood pasture (QC 13/3; Reaney 1943: 333). This evidence supports that from other parts of southern England which suggests little or limited woodland regeneration except in marginal areas (Bell 1989; Hooke 1988: 136, 2001: 166).

The existence of Short Hartes Furlong in Caldecote (hart ‘deer’ 1597) against Hardwick Wood and close to the two Hayes is certainly suggestive (CC Safe B 38/5 and 39/8; Reaney 1943: 323). In the valley itself, there may have been hunting parks at Kingston and Bourn. The Kingston place-name is often derived from the presence of Anglo-Saxon royal hunting lodges, and the ancient wood there may provide a more precise location for the park (G. Foard pers. comm.). It is possible that there may have been another early park at Bourn. The Hall, park and Bourn and Stocking Woods are contained within two sinuous roads, and the Hall lies within the earthworks of a Norman motte and bailey castle, perhaps overlying a late Anglo-Saxon manorial centre (Fig. 5; 16th C., ChC Bourn M). The date of the park is unknown, although it was there by the midsixteenth century when it appears in two field-names – pales [hoke] and palys [hyl] (pale ‘a park fence or paling’ 16th C.). The suggestion that it has an eleventh-century origin is more contentious however (ibid.; Field 1993: 28).3

The character of these eleventh century pockets of woodland in the valley is sometimes illuminated by fieldnames. For example, Puttockdean, a stream which runs northward from the western side of Eversden Wood, derives its name from the buzzard or red kite. This species had a preference for nesting in mixed deciduous woodland sited near grasslands (puttockes ‘buzzard or red kite’ c. 1189) (C. Bibby pers. comm.; Hassall 1949: 81; Reaney 1943: 331). Traditions of woodland exploitation may be revealed by the presence of particular tree species (Rackham 1986: 212). For example, Crabbyshe [Hill Furlong] (crab ‘crabapple’ 1695) lay in Wood Field, Caldecote, not far from Hardwick Wood – crab-apples may be the exception to a general rule that thorn trees occur ‘well away from woodland’ (ChC Caldecot L; Field 1993: 66; Rackham 1986: 147, 212). Lime trees, ‘the commonest tree of [some] ancient woods’, presumably once stood in Linwood Close (lind ‘lime-tree’ n.d.) also in Caldecote (Rackham 1986: 102; Reaney 1943: 366).

3 There is no direct evidence for a late Anglo-Saxon park at Bourn, although the site appears to conform to at least some of the criteria from which a park might be inferred (Fig. 3). A motte-and-bailey castle was built here immediately after the Norman Conquest, perhaps on the same site as a late Anglo-Saxon manorial hall since the pre-Conquest holder was a royal thegn whose estate included a minster church (DB 32:23). It has been suggested that ‘the building of a [Norman] castle over an existing [Anglo-Saxon] manor house was a deeply symbolic act that affirmed the legitimacy of the new lord’ (Liddiard 2000: 44, my parentheses). Both the castle and the Anglo-Saxon hall are likely to have lain within a landscape which reflected their status. Since the castle lies at the interface between woodland and cleared land, an early park seems likely. Many Norman castles lay within such landscapes, and the current view is that parks for hunting “…seem, to have been widespread…in Britain by the twelfth century, perhaps even by the eleventh” (Taylor 2000: 46-48). The morphology of the area under discussion around Bourn Hall is certainly similar to that of demesne blocks which might have included some parkland (M. Satchell pers. comm.).

There is some evidence to suggest that hunting may have been a part of late Anglo-Saxon woodland exploitation in the valley. The names of [Hedding] Hayes [Furlong] (1615) in Caldecote and Hay [Common] (1251) in 332

SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN: FIELD-NAMES IN RECONSTRUCTING LATE ANGLO-SAXON AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE Bradleh (brad ‘broad’ plus lēah 1251 (CUL EDR G3/27). Hardwick’s own place-name suggests substantial areas of grazing. Heord ‘herd’ plus wic ‘stock farm’ (1086) is usually taken to indicate a specialist farm for grazing sheep. However, Fox has remarked that modern collective nouns usually refer to ‘herds of cattle’ but ‘flocks of sheep’, although herds of sheep are also possible (DB 5: 36-37; H. Fox, pers. comm.; Reaney 1943: 162 and 308). Whether for sheep or cattle, it seems that Hardwicks are ‘commonly found in wooded or grass pasture regions’ – just the sort of environment that might be inferred from the field-names (Hooke 1998: 134).

The evidence for Anglo-Saxon woodland in the Bourn Valley therefore suggests that the boundaries of the ancient medieval woods may have enclosed areas a little larger in the eighth or ninth centuries than they were by the high middle ages, but not very much. It seems unlikely that there were any continuous belts of woodland along the plateaux which bounded the valley at any time in the historic period. Instead, woodland appears by the eleventh century to have been discrete and managed, with occasional enclosures for hunting, and as a result assarting appears to have been generally small-scale and fairly limited. These conclusions echo those of Rackham that this was a period of ‘relatively stable woodland’ (Rackham 1994: 8).

The suggestion that Hardwick was part of a huge area of pasture is supported by the multiplicity of names relating to grasslands both in the parish and on the other northern slopes of the valley (Fig. 13). Wood Field (c. 1837) lay north of Hardwick wood, but its earlier name – Puttockesrou [Field] (puttockes ‘buzzard or red kite’ plus rou ‘rough ground’ 1251) – may be more revealing (CCRO 152/P12; CUL EDR/G3/27; Reaney 1943: 331, 316). These wooded commons probably extended right up to the settlement, where Stocking Close lay next to the village street (stocc ‘tree stump’ 1837) (CCRO Q/RDc51; Reaney 1943: 345). Hay Common, the site of the possible haga, lay immediately north of Puttockesrou Field. They were augmented by Wood Green [Common] (c. 1837) on the northern edge of Hardwick Wood, and Intercommon [Furlong] just east of the wood (PC H.I.1; Fig. 9).4 Further east, Stockwell [Dean Field] (stocc ‘stump’ plus wielle ‘spring possibly forming a small pool’ 1639) suggests a spring in an area of pasture cleared from woodland – the possibility that it was used for grazing animals is supported by the name of Hardle [Dean] (heord ‘herd’ plus wielle 1602) in the same field (CUL EDR/H1; CCRO R53/13/41-3; Hooke 1998: 134; OED Reaney 1934: 345, 350).

Pasture, commons and meadow Despite the silence of Domesday Book, which omits almost all mention of pasture in the Bourn Valley, there are many field and furlong names referring to grazing of one kind or another in these parishes (Fig. 4). Wood pasture was grassland scattered with pollard trees, on the edge of more dense woodland. An area called ‘wetherley’ (wedra ‘wether or castrated ram’ plus lēah ‘wood pasture’ 1086) appears to have lain along the top of the ridge which formed the southern boundary of the Bourn Valley (DB 1: 6; Gelling 1984: 198; Hooke 1988: 145; Rackham 2000: 41; Reaney 1943: 69). Its local importance is signified by its use as a hundred name in the valley (Reaney 1943: 69). Wetherley seems to have lain at or near the Wetherley hundred moot, just northwest of the junction between the Mare Way and the Roman road (the modern A603), where the parishes of Orwell, Harlton, Little Eversden and Wimpole meet (Meaney 1993: 90; Reaney 1943: 69).

The heord element in Hardwick is recurs in a plethora of field-names running from the northern parts of Caxton and Bourn, across the central parts of Caldecote, Hardwick and Comberton. They include Heard Common (Caxton 1661), Herd Common and Hardman’s Dean (Bourn 1635 and 1820), the Cold Hard Common (Caldecote 1854), Hardle Dean (Hardwick 1602) and Harborough Field (Comberton 1518) (GCC XXXII.29; ChC Parsonage and *Ac; CCRO R60/24/2/11 and R53/13/41-3; Reaney 1943: 360).5 4 The latter is unlikely to have been arable land at the time that Hardwick was separated from Toft in the mid to late eleventh century. This is because it was common to both of the two parishes thereafter, and because it is the only place in Toft where the parish boundary remained undefined until 1836. Its boundaries are aligned with Woodway. The furlong was intercommonable wood or wood pasture assarted by both the men of both Toft and Hardwick, since both had rights over it. The right before enclosure of the lords of the Manor of Hardwick to ‘Soil of the Common in the Intercommon’ even though it lay in Toft, is specifically mentioned, and supports the case that it originated as common grazing land (PC H.I.1). 5 Reaney suggested that this field-name derived from here ‘army quarters’, but this seems unlikely, particularly since more recent scholarship has indicated that other similar names originate in heord Gelling 1984: 285; Mills 1991: 157; Reaney 1943: 160). Reaney also suggested that here plus beorg ‘barrow or barrow-shaped outline of

Figure 12. Coton, Cambs., looking south-east. The photograph is taken from the heavy clays along the plateau bounding the Bourn Valley to the north, and looks north-east towards the confluence of the Bin Brook (a minor stream running along the north-eastern part of the Bourn Valley, in the middle ground) and the River Carn (to the left in the distance). The names of the furlongs on these heavy soils are derived predominantly from words relating to pasture. They lie on heavy clays which can remain waterlogged for months in the colder parts of the year. Source: S. Oosthuizen.

There were more wood pastures in Hardwick, particularly in the area around the Wood, whose earlier name was 333

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT and Cow Pasture (1635), Great and Little Common (1820) in

Figure 13. Pre-Parliamentary enclosure field and furlong names in Toft, Hardwick and Caldecote. Source: P. Judge.

These extensive mid- and upper-slope pastures were added to by Cow and Sheep Pastures (1750) in Caxton,

Parsonage; CCRO Q/RDc49; ChC Wa, *Ac and 1820). Several greens lay among the furlongs of Damms Field in Caldecote (dammr ‘a pond or pool’ 1695) including the Dairy (1854) and Locken Green (lock ‘magpie’1854) (CC Safe B 39/8; CCRO R60/24/2/11; Cameron 1996: 6; Field 1993: 58).6

hills’ might be related to the known barrow just west of Comberton parish church in the South Field of the parish. However, since Harborough Field is a field in its own right in the centre of the parish and at some distance from the barrow, this also seems unlikely. The beorg was either an unknown barrow, or the prominent hill with a barrow-shaped silhouette near the parish boundary with Barton, and visible to the north of the present road to Barton.

6 It should, however, be noted that these areas were colonised by medieval ridge and furrow (RAF 106G/UK/1490 and CPE/UK/2024).

334

SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN: FIELD-NAMES IN RECONSTRUCTING LATE ANGLO-SAXON AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE Their diversity of meadows may be illustrated by the extensive list of those located just in Great Eversden, but there were just as many in the other parishes in the valley. These include Rounsells (perhaps ronsi ‘riding horse’ 1681), Chicken Pasture (1764), Paintells Meadow (1681), Bell Pit (early 16th C.) and the Holmes (early 16th C.) (CUL QC 15/3, 15/23, 15/13, 13/3). Bourn, Comberton, Toft and Eversden each contained a Holme [Meadow] (holmr ‘marshy meadow’) (ChC P&M; Liber Memorandum Ecclesie de Bernewelle, 294; OED). Ffenmedowe and Grenemede in Caldecote lay along the Bourn Brook in 1597 (CC Safe B 38/5). The area called Le Marsh (14th C.) in Little Eversden was probably near the present Marsh Close (Reaney 1943: 160). Other meadows lay along the tributary streams that ran down from the watersheds, like Lord’s, Great and Little Meadows (all 1815) along Kingston Brook (CCRO Q/RDc 25; J. Wilkinson pers. comm.). Stockwell [Meadow] (1815) lay along Stockwell Dean just north of the church in Toft, and just south of the Moor (1602) (CCRO Q/RDc 23 and R53/13/41-3).

There was also a large moor (mor) which lay across the whole of the northern part of Hardwick and was later ploughed up to become Hatchmore [Dean Field] (1639) (CUL EDR/H1). The usual interpretation of mor refers to marsh or the ‘barren uplands’ of the Pennines – landscapes far removed from the lowland hills of the Bourn Valley (Gelling 1984: 54). However, the combination of the tendency of rain to pool on the heavy soils on the top of the flat clay ridge in Hardwick may explain the name – Dam[brook Furlong] (dammr 1615) is one of the subdivisions of Hatchmore Dean Field and, of course, the name of the northern field of Caldecote (CUL EDR/H1). Whatever its precise local meaning, the use of mor in the context of the upper plateaux of the valley is still more likely to indicate that an area of pasture rather than wood or arable. The many field and furlong names derived from pasture or grazing on the upper and middle slopes of the valley are supplemented by many other names relating to drainage and pasture on the lower slopes of the valley. This is particularly where the land was relatively flat and difficult to drain below the spring line. These areas of ‘hummocky ground’ were waterlogged to within 0.12 metres of the surface until very recently (P. Clelow, pers. comm.; Oosthuizen 2002c). For example, Red Meadow (1811) (perhaps hrēod ‘reed’) in Little Eversden lies just below the spring line and just west of Bullall (early 16th C.) (bull plus halh perhaps ‘an enclosure for cattle’ on ‘slightly raised ground isolated by marsh’) (CUL QC15/35 and 13/3) (Gelling 1984: 100; Mills 1991: 270). Further west, He(a)rd Common (16th C.) in Great Eversden lay near Foulmire (1681), Waterbalk (1681) and Betwixt the Holmes (early 16th C.) (holmr ‘marshy meadow’) Furlongs (CUL QC 15/2, 15/13 and QC 13/3; Reaney 1943: 332).

Aerial photographs show that the high tide of medieval ridge and furrow had lapped into these meadows (as onto the commons along the tops of the ridges) (RAF CPE 2024/3005). These arable lands seem to have been abandoned, perhaps due to a deteriorating climate, sometime in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries (e.g. Simmons 2001: 90-91). The precarious nature of arable cultivation of these areas was vividly illustrated by the many floodings of these meadows along the Brook in the heavy winter rains of 2000 and 2002. This emphasis on herding and pasture in the field and furlong names of the valley may be reflected in the dedications of its churches. It has been suggested that communities chosen patron saints for their churches whose protection could be invoked for the dominant aspects of the community’s income (G. Jones pers. comm.). The day of the saint’s feast would be the most potent. So parishes which depended heavily on their flocks and herds would be more likely to choose a saint for the parish church whose feast fell in the spring or autumn when flocks left for or returned from their summer pastures. Parishes that depended on arable cultivation would be more likely to adopt a saint whose feast fell during the harvest months.

Some of the oldest of these pastures may have been the Offals/Offils (1250) (ald ‘old’ and feld ‘an open space within sight of woodland’) at Comberton, Little Eversden, Harlton and Haslingfield (CUL QC 15/12, 15/36, 15/52; T. Legge, pers. comm.; Oosthuizen 2002a; Rackham 1994: 8; Reaney 1943: 74, 78). It seems that feld was ‘a prolific name-forming term in the early Anglo-Saxon period’, and the significance of this cluster of names in close proximity to Haslingfield itself may indicate how much of the valley bottom was used for communally-managed grazing (Gelling 1984: 237-239).

If the dedications of the churches of the Bourn Valley are correctly interpreted, they suggest that herding was still an important part of the local economy in the tenth or eleventh century when these dedications were first agreed (Table 1). They are noticeably skewed to autumn dates, often quite late in the year, when thanks would have been given for the return of the flocks from their summer pastures. For example, St Helen and St Michael are believed to mark home and summer pastures respectively, so the dedication to St Helen of the mother church at Bourn, and the dedication to St Michael of its daughter chapel at Caldecote are particularly interesting, especially since the Caldecote place-name (1086) indicates “…the

Finally, there were further opportunities for grazing in the many natural water-meadows along the meanderings of the Bourn Brook and the streams that drained into it. These meadows provided hay and grazing for the community’s cattle and sheep, and also the watery grasslands on which wild birds like crane, swans and teal depended. Bones of these birds have been found for example, at the middle Anglo-Saxon settlement at West Stow, Suffolk, where they might have been killed for food and for their feathers and/or down (Crabtree 1994: 42).

335

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Table 1. Earliest known medieval church dedications in the Bourn Valley (VCH Volume 5, parish essays; RCHME 1968, parish essays; www.catholic.org/saints/saints/helen.html)

Date of festival May 22nd

Parish

Bourn Little Eversden

May 22nd June 24th June 24th th

August 15 August 15th September 8th September 8th September 21st and November 1st November 1st November 1st And 30th November 30th November 30th November 30th

Dedication

First documentary reference to church

First known recorded

St Helen

1086

date of dedication Before 1348

St Helen

1229 By 1086

1341 Not known

Barton Coton

St Peter St Peter

Comberton Harlton Great Eversden Hardwick Caldecote

Not known

The Assumption The Assumption St Mary St Mary St Michael and All Angels

By 1198 1092 1092 1092 1217 1092

Not known Not known 13th century Not known Not known

Haslingfield Kingston

All Saints All Saints and St Andrew

1086 1092

Not known Not known

Caxton

St Andrew

By c. 1145

Grantchester Toft

St Andrew St Andrew

12th century By 1086

Not known 13th century 1267

Saxon period of increasing numbers of sheep and pigs and fewer cattle and horses in East Anglia is reflected in the high proportion of sheep kept on the valley demesnes in 1086 (Crabtree 1994: 42; fig. 2). Nevertheless, Wetherley in Little Eversden and Sco(u)per [Dean] (16th C.) (possibly sceap ‘sheep’) in Caldecote appear to be the only place-names in the valley referring specifically to sheep, and the VCH has concluded that ‘the heavy clay soil makes the land unsuitable for extensive sheep farming’ (DB 1: 6; CC Caldecote E; Reaney 1943: 69, 343). The possibility that there was sufficient shepherding in Caldecote to affect field-naming is particularly interesting since only about 24% of the available land of that parish appears to have been under arable cultivation in 1086 (Table 3).

parcelling up of regions of marginal pastureland…[these] estates often remained dependent manors or chapelries of more major units located in more favourable areas” (DB 14:50; Hooke 1998: 189). This is an accurate description of the relationship between Bourn and Caldecote during the eleventh century, and seems to be confirmed by the apparently low percentage of arable land in Caldecote in 1086 (below, Table 3). The siting of the churches dedicated to St Helen at Bourn and Little Eversden near a spring and, in the case of Little Eversden, not far from the Offil, underlines the importance of access to water for communities with large herds. By contrast, dedications to St Mary and St Peter, whose festivals occur in the summer months around the time of the grain harvest, bear some correlation in the Bourn Valley with parishes where other evidence suggests an emphasis on arable agriculture. This is especially true of Comberton and Barton, whose place-name indicates a specialised grain render (Hooke 1988: 125; Oosthuizen forthcoming).

The great variety of field-names for different kinds of grazing across the valley suggests that grassland was extensive, differentiated and specialist. It depended both on physical factors like underlying geology, drainage and relationship with watercourses, and on cultural factors like communal management and seasonal access. This determined its place in the wider agricultural economy of both the individual parish and its wider region. Many of these names occur precisely in those areas in which archaeological investigation has concluded that RomanoBritish farmers had been ‘pursuing a stock raising economy’ within a system of ‘quite complex land management’ (Wessex Archaeology 1998: 15; 1999: 3). This may just indicate that the late Anglo-Saxon pastoral traditions of the Bourn Valley had their roots in much older farming practices.

On the other hand, the ‘summer’ dedications of Hardwick and Coton are anomalous and contradict the likelihood, suggested both by their position on the poorly-drained upper boulder clays and by their secondary place-names, that their economies were originally predominantly pastoral. The dedication to St Andrew at Toft is also anomalous since Toft appears to have had more arable in 1086 than anywhere else in the valley. Perhaps though, the dedication was made before Hardwick became independent of Toft. What of the flocks and herds which grazed these pastures? The long-term trend identified for the Anglo-

336

SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN: FIELD-NAMES IN RECONSTRUCTING LATE ANGLO-SAXON AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE Table 2: The relative proportions of sheep, pigs and plough-cattle on the demesnes of the Bourn Valley in 1086 (ICC 400-427).

Animals on the demesnes of the Bourn Valley in 1086

28%

2% cattle sheep 70%

pigs

Note: Data from Bourn, Caldecote and Caxton are missing from the ICC. This figure therefore includes evidence drawn from Barton, Comberton, Eversdens, Hardwick, Grantchester, Harlton, Haslingfield and Kingston. There is no information about flocks and herds outside the demesnes.

would cultivate, and every parish has field-names referring to beans, which were commonly grown on poor soil for their nitrogenous qualities (ChC Survey of Parsonage Farm 1795; Field 1993: 157). Starvegoose Closes in Great Eversden (1738), Comberton (1806) and Hardwick (1854) vividly characterise the soils near the tops of the ridges – the land in these areas apparently did not produce enough to feed a goose (CUL QC 15/36, 15/40; CCRO R53/16/30 and Q/RDc 51). Pudding Lane at Caxton End (1820, Bourn) referred to the heavy stickiness of the clay (CCRO Q/RDc 35). Hardwick was known as ‘Hungry Hardwick’ in the nineteenth century, and the VCH notes the ‘unyielding qualities of the heavy soil’ and ‘the infertility of the land’ there (Field 1993: 41; VCH 5: 99).

Arable The survey of the distribution of field-names relating to wood and pasture might suggest that arable cultivation in the Bourn Valley just before the introduction of open field farming was very limited. It is clear, however, from field-names and other evidence that arable farming was an early introduction, especially into those parts of the valley that lay near the Bourn Brook where field and furlong names are almost exclusively related to arable cultivation (Oosthuizen forthcoming). Arable cultivation or at very least, intensive grazing of the lower slopes of the valley may be inferred from Ellon Furlong (ellern ‘elder’ 1723) and Thornpitt Leys (1638, both Comberton), and Thorns Furlong (1597, Caldecote) (MRO H1/ST/E/107/1 and 2; CUL EDR/H1; CC Safe B 38/5; Reaney 1943: 333). In Rackham’s view ‘thorn...and elder are especially associated with lack of woodland’, and with arable cultivation (Rackham 1986: 212). Furthermore, the parish boundaries on the northern side of the valley are only indented along the furrows of open field selions on these lower slopes, by contrast with the upper slopes where these boundaries are smooth and only slightly sinuous.

The extent of arable cultivation in the valley in 1086 might be quantified on the basis that in Cambridgeshire the record of plough teams provides a reasonable index of the arable land of the Cambridgeshire villages in the eleventh century. This is because the Domesday Book formula was quite precise: ‘terra est x carucis’, ‘there is (arable) land for x ploughs’ (Darby 1952: 287). If 60 acres is assigned to each plough-team (following Darby’s calculations for Norfolk in 1086), this can then be multiplied by the number of plough-teams in each vill (Darby 1977: 115).7 The result, as a percentage of the modern acreage of each parish, may reveal the approximate amount of arable land in 1086. (Small adjustments to parish boundaries, generally at enclosure,

Even so, it is evident that arable cultivation had some problems. There are many field-names which show that drainage was a persistent difficulty, particularly as numerous streams ran through the arable lands. Waterlond [Furlong] (mid 16th C.) and Slade Close (1820) (both Bourn) lay on the arable lands (ChC Bourn M and *AC). A Sowerditch [Hill] (‘waterlogged, badly drained’ 1615) lay in Brook Field, Caldecote, and another in Kingston (1663) (CUL EDR/H/1). Polmorway (pōl ‘pool’ plus mor ‘marsh’ 16thC) crossed Caldecote, and Scumpitt [Furlong] lay in Hardwick (CC; CUL/EDR/H1; Field 1993: 42; Gelling 1984: 54; Reaney 1943: 343, 360).

7 The figure of about 60 acres per ploughland (2 ploughs per 120 acre carucate) in 1086 suggested by Darby for Norfolk and Suffolk is not very different from that suggested by Campbell, who concluded that ‘there were on average 78.5 sown acres per demesne plough in the period 1250-1349 [when arable cultivation was at its most intense], which declined by 15.5% to 66.6% sown acres per plough in the period 1350-1449’ [when population pressure was less severe] (Darby 1977: 115; Campbell 2000: 121, my additions in parantheses). It also suggests that the 120 acre ploughland common in Domesday Book for other parts of England may have included the approximate third of arable that lay fallow each year.

The quality of the land was also often poor. Bellam Piece (1795, Bourn) may have been land that only a madman 337

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT will mean that these figures may be slightly inaccurate, but not by a significant order of magnitude).

It is important to bear in mind that this portrait of arable cultivation in the Bourn Valley depicts the situation at or near the beginning of open field farming. The severe pressures of population of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries had yet to come. The extent to which arable cultivation increased between 1086 and the midfourteenth century may be implied by the 325.25 acres of commons and meadows in Comberton in 1830 (excluding at least 34 acres of Offal). This was just 16.6% of the total acreage of the parish, suggesting that perhaps between 60 and 70% of the parish was arable by that date (CCRO R53/13/8; CUL MS Plans r.a.2). The same growth can be demonstrated in Hardwick, where land under arable cultivation increased from 24.6% in 1086 to 54% in 1251 (CUL EDR/G3/27; VCH 5: 101). Furthermore, once land now lying underneath modern roads and settlement is taken into consideration, these proportions may be more substantial than they first appear).

The results are shown in Tables 3 and 4.8 These show that between 30% and 40% of each parish may have lain under the plough by the late eleventh century. This varied in the Bourn Valley from about 24% in Hardwick and Caldecote (already identified as parishes with a preponderance of pasture), to 45% in Toft. The mean of 34.9% for the valley is consistent with the figure of between 32% and 37% for Suffolk in the same period (Hesse 2000: 25). There were 62.9 sheep per 1000 acres in the valley in 1086, just slightly above the average for the county of 60 sheep per 1000 acres. It thus seems that the balance between pasture and arable here was not very different from that elsewhere in the county (M. Hesse pers. comm.). Table 3. Ploughlands as a percentage of the total acreage of each parish, averaged by hundreds in west Cambridgeshire and in the Bourn Valley in 1086 (DB; VCH parish essays).

Longstow Hundred (all parishes)

Ploughlands as % of parish area 31.8

Wetherley Hundred (all parishes)

35.8

Thriplow Hundred (all parishes)

38.8

Armingford Hundred (all parishes)

41.4

Bourn Valley parishes

34.9

Longstow Hundred without Bourn Valley parishes

30.7

Wetherley Hundred without Bourn Valley parishes

34.4

Mean of hundreds only

36.9

Hundred or other unit

Conclusion

Table 4. Ploughlands, parish acreages, and ploughlands as a percentage of parish acreages in the Bourn Valley in 1086 (DB; ICC; VCH 5, parish essays) parish

Ploughlands

Barton Bourn Caldecote Caxton Comberton Eversden Grantchester Hardwick Harlton Haslingfield Kingston Toft Mean

12 23.5 4 12 12 13.375 12.875 6.125 7 20 10.56 10

parish % ploughlands of acreage total acres, if ploughland = 60a 1834 39.2 3995 35.2 1007 23.8 2169 33.1 1954 36.8 2190 36.6 2527 30.5 1438 24.6 1261 33.3 2573 46.6 1907 33.2 1285 46.6 34.9

This survey of field and furlong-names in the Bourn Valley demonstrates the large extent of intensive grazing and rough pasture in the valley in the later Anglo-Saxon period, just before or at the time that open field farming was introduced. Woodland was limited in extent, although it continued to be assarted into the high middle ages. The most extensive areas of arable appear to have been limited to the lower slopes. Perhaps more importantly, the combination of field- and furlong-name analysis with archaeological and documentary evidence has enabled a reconstruction of patterns of farming in the tenth and eleventh centuries which is illuminating, accessible and inexpensive to undertake. This technique should assist the analysis of research questions requiring archaeological investigation and/or developer-funded excavations, and may provide instructive support for the results, particularly since the opportunities for excavation for research purposes alone are often limited and expensive. Acknowledgements Robin Glasscock and Harold Fox kindly read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also grateful to Glen Foard, Tony Legge and Graham Jones for their helpful comments and suggestions. Colin Bibby (Clare Farm, Caldecote), Paul Tebbitt (Red Farm, Great Eversden) and Philip Clelow (Chapel Lane, Great Eversden) offered useful local information. Phillip Judge kindly drew the maps. Any mistakes and misconceptions remain my own. Abbreviations used in the text

8

The ploughland in Dorset might have been 120 acres (Rackham 1986: 333). However, a 120 acre ploughland would result in an arable acreage of 90.6% for Toft in 1086, which would be worryingly high. This suggests that ploughlands in the Bourn Valley were more likely to be about 60 acres in extent, like those of Norfolk and Suffolk.

CC CCRO 338

Clare College, Cambridge. Cambridge County Record Office.

SUSAN OOSTHUIZEN: FIELD-NAMES IN RECONSTRUCTING LATE ANGLO-SAXON AGRICULTURAL LAND-USE ChC CUCAP CUL DB EDR GCC ICC

IE LE LMEB OED

OS PC QC RAF

Rot. Hund. VCH

Christ’s College, Cambridge. Cambridge University Committee for Aerial Photography. Cambridge University Library. Domesday Book: Cambridgeshire. Rumble, A. (ed.) 1981. Chichester: Phillimore. Ely Diocesan Records. Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Inquisition Comitatus Cantabrigiensis in Victoria County History of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, Volume 1. Salzman, L.F. (ed.) 1938. London: Institute for Historical Research. Inquisitio Eliensis. Blake, E.O. (ed.) 1962. Camden Third Series Volume 92. London: Royal Historical Society. Liber Eliensis in Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis. Hamilton, N.E.S.A. (ed.) 1876. London: Murray. Liber Memorandum Ecclesie de Bernewelle. Clark, J.W. (ed.) 1907. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary On Historical Principles. Onions, C.T. (ed.) 1978 (3rd rev. ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ordnance Survey. Pembroke College, Cambridge. Queens’ College, Cambridge. Royal Air Force Aerial photographs 9th May 1946 (in collection of C.C. Taylor): 106G/UK/1490 nos. 4020-31 and 42284236; CPE/UK/2024 nos. 3045-3049 and 4045-4055. Rotuli Hundredorum 1279 Volume 2. 1818. London: House of Commons. Victoria County History of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, Volume 5. Elringham, C.R. (ed.) 1973. London: Institute for Historical Research.

Darby, H.G. (ed.) 1952. A Domesday Geography of Eastern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Darby, H. G. 1977. Domesday England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Evelyn-White, C. (ed.) n.d. The 1327 Lay Subsidy for Cambridgeshire. Private printing. Field, J. 1993. A History of English Field Names. London: Longman Fox, H. S. A. 2000. The Wolds before 1500. In J. Thirsk (ed.) The English Rural Landscape. An Illustrated History of the Landscape. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 50-61. Gelling, M. 1984. Place-Names in the Landscape. London: Dent. Gelling, M. and Cole, A. 2000. The Landscape of PlaceNames. Stamford: Tyas. Hall, D. 1982. Medieval Fields. Princes Risborough: Shire. Hall, D. 1985. Late Saxon topography and early medieval estates. In D. Hooke (ed.) Medieval Villages. A Review of Current Work. Monograph 5. Oxford: Oxford Committee for Archaeology, pp. 61-70. Hassall, W.O. 1949. Cartulary of St Mary Clerkenwell. Camden Third Series, Volume 71. London: Royal Historical Society Hesse, M. 2000. Domesday land measures in Suffolk. Landscape History 22: 21-36. Hooke, D. 1978. Early Cotswold woodland. Journal of Historical Geography 4 (4): 333-341. Hooke, D. 1988. Regional variation in southern and central England in the Anglo-Saxon period and its relationship to land units and settlement. In D. Hooke (ed.) 1988. Anglo-Saxon Settlements. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 123-151. Hooke, D. 1989. Pre-Conquest woodland: its distribution and usage. Agricultural History Review 37 (2): 113129. Hooke, D. 1997. Lamberde leie, dillameres dic: a lost or a living landscape? In K. Barker and T. Darvill (eds.) Making English Landscapes: Changing Perspectives. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 26-45. Hooke, D. 1998. The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Hooke, D. 2001. Mercia: landscape and environment. In M.P Brown and C.A. Farr (eds.) Mercia: an AngloSaxon Kingdom in Europe. Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 161-172. Liddiard, R. 2000. Population density and castle building: some evidence from East Anglia. Landscape History 22: 37-46. Meaney, M. 1993. Gazetteer of Hundred and Wapentake meeting-places in the Cambridge region. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 82: 66-92. Mills, D. 1991. A Dictionary of English Place Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oosthuizen, S. 2002a. Medieval greens and moats in the central province: evidence from the Bourn Valley, Cambridgeshire. Landscape History 24: 73-88. Oosthuizen, S. 2002b. The Origins of the Rural Landscape of the Bourn Valley, West Cambridgeshire

Bibliography Baines, A. 1996. The longevity of field-names: a case study from Sherington. Records of Buckinghamshire 38: 163-174. Bell, M. 1989. Environmental archaeology as an index of continuity and change in the medieval landscape. In M. Aston, D. Austin and C. Dyer (eds.) The Rural Settlements of Medieval England. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 269-286. Cameron, K. 1996. The Scandinavian element in minor names and field-names in north-east Lincolnshire. Nomina 19: 5-28. Campbell, B. 2000. English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250–1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crabtree, P. 1994. Animal exploitation in East Anglian villages. In J. Rackham (ed.) Environment and Economy in Anglo-Saxon England. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 89. York: CBA, pp. 40-54. 339

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT c. 400–1100 AD. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Cambridge. Oosthuizen, S. 2002c. Unravelling the morphology of Litlington, Cambridgeshire. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 91: 55-62. Oosthuizen, S. 2003. The roots of the common fields: linking prehistoric and medieval field systems in West Cambridgeshire. Landscapes 4 (1): 40-64. Oosthuizen, S. forthcoming. New light on the origins of open field agriculture. Medieval Archaeology. Palmer, W.M. 1927. Notes on Cambridgeshire Villages No. 2: Caxton. Cambridge, reproduced from the Cambridge Chronicle. Postgate, M.R. 1964. The Open Fields of Cambridgeshire. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Cambridge. Rackham, O. 1967 The history and effects of coppicing as a woodland practice. In E. Duffey (ed.) The Biotec Effects of Public Pressures on the Environment. Private printing. Rackham, O. 1980. Ancient Woodland. London: Edward Arnold. Rackham, O. 1986. The History of the Countryside. London: Dent. Rackham, O. 1994. Trees and woodland in Anglo-Saxon England: the documentary evidence. In J. Rackham (ed.) Environment and Economy in Anglo-Saxon England. Council for British Archaeology Research Report 98. York: CBA, pp. 7-11. Rackham, O. 2000. Woodland in the Ely Coucher Book. Nature in Cambridgeshire 42: 37-67. Reaney, P.H. 1943. Place-Names of Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simmons, I.G. 2001. An Environmental History of Great Britain: from 10,000 Years Ago to the Present. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Swanton, M. (ed.). 1993. Anglo-Saxon Prose. London: Dent. Taylor, C. C. 2000. Medieval ornamental landscapes. Landscapes 1 (1): 38-55. Wager, S. 1998. Woods, Wolds and Groves. BAR (British Series) 269. Oxford: BAR. Wessex Archaeology. 1998. Cambourne New Settlement, Cambridgeshire. Archaeological Evaluation Site 13: Phase 1 Landscaping Western Boundary. Unpublished report 33220. Salisbury: Wessex Archaeology. Wessex Archaeology. 1999. Cambourne New Settlement, Cambridgeshire. Archaeological Evaluation. Unpublished report 45970. Salisbury: Wessex Archaeology.

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A pleshed or dreshed tree and nineteenth century stone field wall near Dyffryn, Brecon Beacons, Powys. The ‘plashing’, ‘pleshing’ or ‘dreshing’ of saplings to create hedges on top of walls was a common form of boundary management in South Wales and southwest England in the post-medieval and early modern periods. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

341

Not so common fields: the making of the East Anglian landscape Edward Martin It’s a waste of time studying field systems in East Anglia as all the evidence has gone. divided into a series of strips in which there were two sets of furrows. One set would all be ploughed in the same direction, and therefore with the soil cuts overlapping, whilst the adjacent set would all be ploughed from the opposite direction. The finished result was therefore a pair of clashing furrows (called a ‘head’ or a ‘top’) in the centre where the two sets meet (having been ploughed from opposite directions), flanked on either side by a series of overlapping cuts, and finished with open furrows for drainage on the two outer edges. A stetch most commonly consisted of a head and three flanking furrows on each side, making eight furrows in all. Depending on the land and local custom, the stetch could contain more or fewer furrows (Evans 1960: 30-36; Trist 1971: 183-4).

This is how one landscape archaeologist (who shall remain anonymous) greeted the prospect of an English Heritage-sponsored project on the historic field systems of East Anglia, the assumption being that the great arable revolution of the twentieth century had removed all intelligible traces of earlier field systems. Many agrarian historians have also been less than enthusiastic about East Anglia, acknowledging its importance for the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century, but before that considering it just a pale and imperfect imitation of the Midlands. In the Midlands there were clearly recognisable two- and three-field systems, but in East Anglia there were just infuriatingly ‘irregular’ systems, having too many fields and too little organisation. H.L. Gray, in his great survey of English field systems, expressed this dissatisfaction with the eastern region when he noted that the “…early field system of few English counties is so difficult to describe as that of Essex” (Gray 1915: 387).

This method is of course, very similar to ridge and furrow, but the key difference is the height and permanence of the ridges. In ‘classic’ ridge and furrow, the ridges were high and permanent, and were described as ‘great Lands...with high ridges’ in 1598, and as ‘high backs’ in 1847 (Jonas 1847: 55; Skeat 1882: 132). In stetch ploughing the ridges were low and could be ‘broken’ at each ploughing, simply by splitting the central head. The two methods could be described as ‘high’ and ‘low’ ridge and furrow. Stetch ploughing was recorded by name as early as 1610 and in a description of 1598, and there is every reason to believe that it was the main medieval ploughing technique of the region (Folkingham 1610: 48; Skeat 1882: 132). A similar technique was also known in Denmark and a lack of ridge and furrow in parts, at least, of the Netherlands may be due to its use there too (Lerche 1994: 15-19; Renes 1988: 161 and 167, n.5). The low ridges of stetches were easily obliterated by weathering or by later ploughing, which explains why archaeologists have had such difficulty in locating ridge and furrow earthworks in East Anglia (Cushion and Davison 2003; Kain and Mead 1977; Silvester 1989). A recent attempt to suggest that ridge and furrow was more prevalent in the region (Liddiard 1999), fails however to fully understand the nature of stetch ploughing.

However, as I hope to show in this paper, the study of the field systems of East Anglia has proved to be very rewarding and has produced important new data on medieval farming systems in the region, on landscape continuity and on cultural divisions. The paper also puts forward some new ways of defining field systems and enters into the debate on the origin of common fields. Medieval ploughing techniques in East Anglia Before launching fully into this study, a word of explanation is needed concerning the way fields were cultivated in East Anglia. As will be explained, the local technique, known as stetch or stitch ploughing (Figure 1), differs from the ‘classic’ ridge and furrow found in the Midlands and leaves little evidence in the form of earthworks. This apparent absence of evidence is one of the major reasons why previous researchers have considered the region to be of little value for the study of medieval field systems. The term stetch or stitch was still in use in the twentieth century and derives from the Old English stycce ‘a bit, a piece’, and was used in the sense of a group of furrows that combine to make a strip of ploughed land (Smith 1956: 165). The need for groups of furrows stems from the nature of the standard medieval plough with a single, fixed, mouldboard. This always threw the soil in the same direction (normally to the right), and therefore furrows ploughed from one end of a field would always fall in the opposite direction to those ploughed in the reverse direction. To avoid numerous narrow ridges and furrows, and to make turning the plough easier, the land was

The Historic Field Systems of East Anglia Project (2000-2004) This project was commissioned by English Heritage as part of its Monument Protection Programme. The aims were to analyse the origin, evolution, operation, morphology, distribution and survival of the historic field systems of East Anglia, and to provide a strategy for their future beneficial management. In the first half of the project English Heritage provided funding for the employment of Dr Max Satchell as a project officer, working within the Archaeological Service of Suffolk 342

EDWARD MARTIN: NOT SO COMMON FIELDS: THE MAKING OF THE EAST ANGLIAN LANDSCAPE

Figure 1. Traditional stetch ploughing in Suffolk. The land to be ploughed is divided into strips called stetches. A ‘head’ or ‘top’, consisting of two clashing furrows, is created in the centre of each stetch, other furrows are then ploughed to overlap the head from both sides; finally, the outer edges of the stetch are defined by open ‘water furrows’ to facilitate drainage. This method of ploughing produced low broad ridges that were regularly ‘broken’ by splitting the centre. The impermanence and lowness of the ridges contrasted with the fixed ‘high ridges’ of Midland ridge and furrow. Source: E. Martin.

County Council. The supervision of the project, its completion and the interpretation of the results were undertaken by the author, based in the same archaeological service.

studies, the land in each place was classified and quantified on the basis of eight principal ‘land types’, which were further divided into eighteen sub-types. Land types can of course change and evolve over time, so the policy was to envisage what could be termed the ‘climax medieval’ situation, where the farming system was well developed but had not yet undergone significant postmedieval changes. These lands types were:

For the project, twelve detailed case studies were undertaken in an area that is perhaps best described as ‘greater East Anglia’ – that is Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, north-eastern Hertfordshire and south-eastern Cambridgeshire (Fig. 2).1 In each place, the documentary and physical evidence for the medieval and later field systems was examined. The guiding aim was to establish retrogressive links between the modern landscape and the earliest recorded farming system in each area. The detailed results of this work will be presented in the project report (Martin and Satchell forthcoming), so here I intend only to present some of the ideas and conclusions that arose out of that work.

1. Block demesne. Blocks of exclusively demesne land – subdivided into: 1.1. Core block demesne. Block demesne that abutted or encompassed the hall of the manor to which it belonged, as opposed to ‘detached’ block demesne, which was separated from its hall (see land type 1.2). ‘Core’ therefore refers to the halldemesne relationship, not to the location of the block demesne within the overall parish area. In terms of land-use, core block demesne includes arable, pasture and farm yards, but excluded demesne meadow, woods and parkland (see types 5.1, 7.1 and 8). 1.2. Detached block demesne. Block demesne that was separated spatially from the manorial hall to which it belonged. It excluded demesne strips in common fields, as well as demesne meadow, woods and parkland. In terms of land-use,

The case studies were selected to obtain as extensive coverage as possible of the local regions identified through the national settlement mapping work of Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell (Roberts and Wrathmell 2001). To enable comparative studies between the case 1

The case studies were: Norfolk:– Worstead, Swanton Morley, Scole (with Frenze, Thelveton and Thorpe Parva); Suffolk:– South Elmham St Michael, Worlingworth, Sutton, Walsham-le-Willows; Essex:– Great Henny, Felsted, Ingatestone; Hertfordshire:– Ardeley; and Cambridgeshire:– Dullingham.

343

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT

Figure 2. Map showing East Anglia’s place within England and an enlarged area showing the location of the case studies of the Historic Field Systems of East Anglia Project. Source: E. Martin.

distributed across the fields. Ridge-and-furrow is a ‘type-fossil’. Enclosure was normally brought into effect through parliamentary acts. Type 2. Like Type 1, this type was usually the dominant arable farming system within individual settlements and the systems frequently needed parliamentary acts to extinguish them. However the number of fields was very variable and there was often confusion in the terminology between ‘fields’ and their subdivisions. Ridge and furrow only sporadically occurs. This lack of ridge and furrow is not so much the result of erosion, but of different methods of ploughing, particularly ‘stetch’ ploughing, which produced low ridges that were not permanent features (see also the discussion above). Within this type it is possible to further distinguish two sub-types: Type 2A: In this sub-type the strips belonging to individual holdings tend towards an equal distribution across the fields. It also tended to have some form of communal cropping and folding arrangements. This sub-type was found in eastern Cambridgeshire, northern Hertfordshire, the Breckland, western Norfolk and parts of the Waveney valley.

detached block demesne included arable, pasture and farm yards. 2.

Tenement blocks. Blocks of land that abutted or encompassed the house and yards of tenements. In this they resemble core block demesnes, but are, of course, not manorial in status. Tenement blocks could either occur individually or be part of agglomerations of several similar blocks. Scattered strips in common fields are not included in this type. In terms of land-use, tenement blocks included arable, pasture and farm yards, but excluded (where definable) meadow and woods in severalty (see types 5.2 and 7.2).

3. Common fields. Arable land internally subdivided into unfenced strips that were held by a number of different individuals. The single term ‘common field’ does, however, conceal wide and important variations in farming practice. I therefore subdivided common fields into three further types: Type 1. This was the archetypical system of the English midlands, where the arable land of settlements lay in two or three large fields, subdivided into furlongs and cropped and folded on a communal basis. All holdings, including demesne and glebe, consisted of strips equally 344

EDWARD MARTIN: NOT SO COMMON FIELDS: THE MAKING OF THE EAST ANGLIAN LANDSCAPE 5. Meadow. Enclosed grassland that was mown for hay in the summer and then used for pasturing animals. Subdivided into:

Type 2B. In this sub-type the strips belonging to each holding tend to be clustered in the vicinity of the holder’s house and there is less evidence for communal cropping and folding arrangements. This sub-type was found in eastern Norfolk and eastern Suffolk. Type 3. This type is much more difficult to categorise. In many places it had largely disappeared by the sixteenth century and the surviving records are often imprecise about its nature and prevalence. The common field(s) also usually formed a minority part of the farmland of individual settlements, normally well under 50% of the parish areas. It seems to have had poorly-developed communal cropping and folding arrangements, with a tendency for holdings to be concentrated in the fields nearest to the farmstead to which they belong, rather than being evenly distributed across all the fields. The impression is frequently one of subdivided closes rather than true common fields. There was little consistency or uniformity in the naming of the units, some may be called fields in one document, but could appear as furlongs or even closes in others. Parliamentary acts were seldom needed to end this type of common field. Ridge-and-furrow virtually never occurs. This sub-type occurred in north-central Suffolk, south-east Norfolk, the extreme southwest of Suffolk and the Stour valley, northern Hertfordshire and perhaps in north-east Essex.

5.1. 5.2. 5.3.

6. Heath. Areas of dry pasture characterised by poor grassland when on chalky soils and grassland and/or heather (principally Calluna vulgaris) when on acidic soils. Mainly used for sheep grazing, or, if very poor, rabbit warrens. Subdivided into: 6.1. 6.2.

7.1.

Demesne woodland. Woodland that was held directly by a manorial lord, for his exclusive use. 7.2. Several woodland. Woodland that was held by individual tenants for their own exclusive use. 7.3. Common woodland. Woodland that was held in common. 8. Parkland. Semi-natural areas of mixed grassland and woodland, used principally for the keeping of deer. This type excluded the landscape parks established in post-medieval times.

Common pasture. Grassland used for common grazing. Subdivided into: 4.1.

4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5.

Several heath. Heath held by individual owners (manorial lords and tenants) for their own exclusive use. Common heath. Heath subject to common grazing.

7. Woodland. Subdivided into:

There is a linear progression in these types – Type 1 > Type 2A > Type 2B > Type 3; and a one-stop variation will often be difficult to appreciate, but a two-stop one will be much more apparent. 4.

Demesne meadow. Meadow that was owned and exclusively used by a manorial lord. Several meadow. Meadow that was held by individual tenants for their own exclusive use. Common meadow. Meadow that was divided into separately owned strips for the purpose of mowing for hay, but was otherwise subject to common grazing.

Droves. Broad roadways that have strips of pasture flanking one or both sides of the metalled surface. The pasture was often held in common and droves frequently form links between greens or other areas of pasture. The meaning is ‘a road on which cattle were driven’. Small greens. Areas of common pasture that were less than 2 hectares (5 acres) in size. Medium greens. Areas of common pasture between 2 and 20 hectares (5 to 49 acres) in size. Large greens. Areas of common pasture that were greater than 20 hectares (50 acres) in size. Riverside commons. Extensive areas of common pasture located beside rivers. This land type seemed to have been used for animal pasture, rather than as mowing meadows.

Identifying trends By calculating the different percentages of land types in each area, it was possible to distinguish significant trends. Principal amongst them was the differing importance of block holdings and common fields. High percentages of common fields were recorded in Worstead (62%), Swanton Morley (67%), Scole with Frenze, Thelveton and Thorpe Parva (56%) and Dullingham (63%). There were moderate amounts in Walsham-le-Willows (38%), Sutton (25%), Great Henny (23%), and Ardeley (48%); but low amounts in South Elmham St Michael (11%) and Worlingworth (15%); and none in Felsted and Ingatestone. When viewed spatially (Fig. 3), it can be seen that there was significant patterning to this data. The areas that had large amounts of common fields lay principally to the north and west of a diagonal line that runs through the middle of the study area from the southwest to the north-east, taking in Dullingham, Walshamle-Willows, Scole, Swanton Morley and Worstead. Common fields were absent in the southernmost part of 345

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Figure 3. The percentage of common fields in the twelve HFSEAP case studies extended to their Roberts and Wrathmell local regions (as in An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England 2001). Source: E. Martin.

In order to try and gain a better definition of these trends, an attempt was made to forge a link with the Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) mapping that is being carried out in East Anglia, also sponsored by English Heritage. As the HLC mapping was most complete for Suffolk (which was also conveniently centrally placed in the study area), this was used as the testing ground. The HLC mapping of Suffolk identified thirteen major landscape character types, which were further subdivided into fifty-five sub-types. Of these, two types were of particular significance for this study – fields resulting from ‘pre-eighteenth-century enclosure’, and fields resulting from ‘eighteenth century and later enclosure’. A third type, defined as ‘post-1950 agricultural landscape’, was also significant as its sub-types were related to the original character of the fields. For the accompanying map (Fig. 5), the following landscape character types were selected:

the study area, as at Felsted and Ingatestone. The area in between was not however, just a gradual change between these two extremes. Instead there was a more complicated semi-inversion, with more common fields in a belt along the Essex-Suffolk border than in north-east Suffolk. Conversely, indicators of land held in severalty, and normally enclosed, were the two types of block demesne holdings and the block tenements. When amalgamated as a general class of ‘block holdings’, their percentages in the case studies were revealing. Low percentages occurred at Worstead (6%), Swanton Morley (7%) and Dullingham (8%); moderate amounts in Scole (25%), Sutton (30%), Ardeley (34%), Walsham-le-Willows (44%) Great Henny (46%); and large amounts in South Elmham St Michael (83%), Worlingworth (76%), Felsted (86%) and Ingatestone (84%). This distribution (Fig. 4) produced a reverse pattern to that seen for common fields.

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Figure 4. The percentage of block holdings in the twelve HFSEAP case studies extended to their Roberts and Wrathmell local regions (as in An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England 2001). Source: E. Martin.

some trends are more strongly marked than others. It should be stressed that the HLC mapping is still very new, and as refinements are made to it, the derived boundaries may need revising in the future. However, the maps do seem to indicate significant landscape trends.

1.1 pre-eighteenth century enclosure: random fields 1.2 pre-eighteenth century enclosure: rectilinear fields 1.3 pre-eighteenth century enclosure: long co-axial fields 1.4 pre-eighteenth century enclosure: irregular coaxial fields 2.1 eighteenth century and later enclosure: former common arable or heathland 3.1 post-1950 agricultural landscape: boundary loss from random fields 3.2 post-1950 agricultural landscape: boundary loss from rectilinear fields 3.3 post-1950 agricultural landscape: boundary loss from long co-axial fields 3.4 post-1950 agricultural landscape: boundary loss from irregular co-axial fields 3.5 post-1950 agricultural landscape: boundary loss from post-1700 fields

Not unexpectedly, fields defined as resulting from eighteenth century and later enclosure show a clear correlation with the distribution of common fields enclosed by parliamentary acts, as in north-west Suffolk (Fig. 6).2 The areas with fields defined as resulting from pre-eighteenth century enclosure however, present more of a challenge to interpretation. The evidence from the three Suffolk case studies with this type of landscape – South Elmham St Michael, Worlingworth and Walshamle-Willows – suggests that their medieval farming systems had some broad similarities. In all four there 2

The HLC mapping was based on field morphology, as shown on Ordnance Survey maps. It was not derived from the enclosure awards themselves, which would lead to a circularity of argument. The data on the distribution of common fields came from the lists specifying ‘open’ field arable in Tate and Turner 1978.

Taking this data a step further, lines were drawn around the major trend changes to facilitate further comparative work. These boundaries vary in their precision because 347

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Figure 5. The East Anglian Historic Landscape Characterisation map (as completed for Suffolk, Essex and Hertfordshire in 2003). A dashed line delineates the major trends. The differences are clearer on the original colour map from which this hatched version has been derived. Source: E. Martin.

systems. Their disappearance did not therefore necessarily mean that the farming systems were radically altered.

were subdivided fields, but only limited evidence for truly communal farming practices, and strong indications that these subdivided fields formed only a part of the farmland in each community – all in all this suggested common fields of Type 3. In each place there was also evidence for medieval block holdings, both of demesnes and tenements. The term ‘block’ is preferred to ‘consolidated’ because the latter carries the implication that they resulted from the amalgamation of formerly separate pieces, or in other words that they were once pieces of common fields.

In much of Essex and south Suffolk the situation seems to have been even more extreme, for in that area there is even less evidence for a phase of common fields predating the block holdings. Here there was a tendency for the agricultural holdings to consist wholly or mainly of blocks of land in individual ownership or occupation (severalty) (Fig. 7). These blocks could be demesne land, glebe or ordinary tenements, with the demesne blocks standing out by being noticeably bigger and situated on the best available land. The large fields of block demesnes provide a challenge for the unwary because they can look uncannily like common fields. Yet they were exclusively demesne, and not part of any common farming system.

There has been a tendency for agricultural historians to assume that common fields were universal in lowland England, and that what the Essex cleric, William Harrison, characterised as woodland areas in 1587 (in distinction to ‘champaign ground’ or common fields) were the result of the early enclosure of previously existing common fields (Edelen 1994: 217). Such a view seems to underpin Wordie’s study of the ‘chronology of enclosure’ and led Holderness to state authoritatively that “…in the woodland clays medieval field systems had been extinguished before 1650” (Holderness 1984: 205; Wordie 1983). But the case studies demonstrate that much did survive from the medieval layouts, and that the subdivided fields were only one part of these farming

The areas characterised in the HLC mapping as preeighteenth century enclosure must have, on the evidence of the case studies, contained areas with Type 3 or quasicommon fields, but must also have included the areas with predominantly block holdings as well. There is a close correspondence between the boundary of the preeighteenth century enclosure areas and the distribution of 348

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Figure 6. The distribution of parliamentary enclosure acts that specified common field arable, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 5). Source: E. Martin, based on data derived from Tate and Turner 1978.

clay soils derived from boulder clay or till (Fig. 8), indicating that both landholding systems were related to clay soils. The question therefore was whether or not HLC mapping could be used to distinguish them. Interestingly, the HLC data did suggest two groups were present, which had largely, but not completely, complementary distributions. Occupying most of south Suffolk up to a line just north of the River Gipping, and then swinging eastward in a narrow band towards the River Alde, were field systems mainly defined as ‘random’ – they had no obvious patterning. To the north of this line, running up to the county boundary in the north, were fields that were mainly defined as ‘long coaxial’, or ‘irregular co-axial’. By themselves, the two groups did not have clear-cut links to either quasi-common fields or block holdings. Luckily, through another data set it was possible to see a way ahead. This was David Dymond’s work on the distribution of block glebes, as revealed by seventeenthcentury glebe terriers – for where there were block glebes there were also likely to be block demesnes and

Figure 7. Aerial view of a field system resulting from medieval block holdings in Hitcham, south Suffolk. Many of the dispersed farmsteads seen here, including one with a moat, are traceable back to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Surrounding them were their own groups of enclosed fields. The pattern of these fields is still discernible, despite twentieth century boundary losses. The straighter boundaries on the left hand side result from the nineteenth century removal of a medieval demesne wood. Source: E. Martin.

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Figure 8. The Suffolk Historic Landscape Characterisation map and the distribution of clay soils. (Source: adapted from Soil Survey of England and Wales 1983 1:250 000 Soil Map of England and Wales). Source: E. Martin.

Figure 9. The distribution of early seventeenth century block glebes in West Suffolk, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 5). Source: E. Martin, data from Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds, E14/4/1-4.

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Figure 10. The distribution of early seventeenth century glebes with common field terminology in West Suffolk, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 3). Source: E. Martin, data from Suffolk Record Office, Bury St. Edmunds, E14/4/1-4.

tenements (Dymond 2002: 82 and Map 2).3 The terriers for the parishes of West Suffolk showed that there was a clear concentration of these in the area south of the Gipping line suggested by the HLC mapping (Fig. 9). Conversely, common-field terminology was much more common in the glebes to the north of that line (Fig. 10). This raised the very real possibility that the ‘random’ field area was linked to block holdings, and that the area with fields belonging to the ‘co-axial family’ had significant associations with quasi-common fields of Type 3.

water tended to remain and pool, keeping the soil cold and either rotting the seeds or malignly affecting the growth. Where plenty of sloping land was available, arable farming was possible over a wide area. Where there was limited sloping land, the potential for successful arable land was also limited. In south Suffolk it seems that the abundant availability of sloping land meant that block holdings were quite feasible, as most of the blocks were likely to contain some suitable land for arable crops. But in the flat areas of north Suffolk, the land suitable for arable farming must have been in short supply. This would give a reason for the presence of relatively small areas of common fields – a sharing out of the limited supply of suitable land. The case study of South Elmham St Michael seems to bear this out. There, the strongest evidence for common fields was at the northern end of the parish, where the land slopes down to a stream. The remaining flat lands would have been more suited to the growing of grass for cattle. It comes as no surprise then to find that these flat lands of north Suffolk were identified as being ‘the seat of the dairies’ by Arthur Young in 1786 (Fig. 12; Young 1786). The abundance of pasture here would also help to explain the poorly developed folding arrangements on the common fields. Worlingworth lay within Young’s dairying region, and Jonathan Theobald has recently

Another important factor separating these two areas was their different topographies. Rosemary Hoppitt has produced a map of relative relief for Suffolk, showing not the actual height of the land, but changes in relief per kilometre square (Fig. 11; Hoppitt 1989). This therefore shows where the land is sloping and where it is flat. The area south of the Gipping line is mainly sloping, but north of the line it is mainly flat. This would of course have had an enormous effect on medieval farming. A slope was vitally important for arable farming in clay areas, to ensure that water drained away, thus preventing the soils from becoming waterlogged. Where the land was flat the 3 I am grateful to David Dymond for allowing me to use his notes on the original terriers of 1613-4, 1635 and 1638, contained in the Suffolk Record Office at Bury St Edmunds (E14/4/1-4).

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Figure 11. Rosemary Hoppitt’s map of relative relief in Suffolk, overlain by the HLC trend boundary. Source: based on Hoppitt 1989: 81. © R. Hoppitt, used with permission.

and feeding, contenting themselves onely, with so much tillage as will sattisfie their own expences”. In contrast, the “…midle parts [by which he seems to mean southcentral Suffolk] although enjoying much meddow and pasture, yett far more tillage doe from thence raise their chiefest maintenance” (Hervey 1902: 29, additions in parentheses).

suggested that both Walsham-le-Willows and South Elmham St Michael should also be considered part of this region (Theobald 1999). Improvements to the drainage of these flat clays lands, whether through more effective ditches, more efficient furrowing methods or, from the second half of the eighteenth century, through under-draining, would have lessened the need to rely on a limited number of sloping common fields for arable crops. As their relative value lessened through the wider availability of arable land elsewhere, there would have been a tendency for them to slip out of communal use into severalty. This could well be the main reason why common fields of Type 3 disappeared without any great difficulties, and much earlier than those of Type 2. Their limited extent, combined with poorly developed communal cropping and folding arrangements, meant that there were few barriers to their conversion to severalty.

The different farming regimes on either side of the Gipping also find a physical expression in the distribution of surviving timber-framed aisled barns of medieval and early post-medieval date (Fig. 13). Aisled barns had a greater volume than normal for the storage and processing of crops, and are therefore indicative of areas where there is an emphasis on arable farming. They occur in the south-west quarter of the county, but are rare north of the Gipping (Aitkens 1999). Furthermore, most small barns, with up to three bays, are to the north-east of the Gipping line, while those with seven or more bays are predominantly to the south of the line (Aitkens and Wade Martins 1998, Map 5).4 The small barns would only have

Robert Ryece, writing in circa. 1605, gives support to these deductions about the varying availability of land that was suitable for arable crops. In “…those parts inclining to the east commonly called high Suffolk [by this he seems to mean north-central and north-east Suffolk], do especially and chiefly consist upon pasture

4

This shows listed barns only, and is likely to be under-representing barns in south-central Suffolk due to the lack of recent listing work in that area. Most of Suffolk was re-listed between 1983 and 1987, but the lists for the old rural districts of Clare, Melford and Cosford date from the 1970s.

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Figure 12. The dairying region of Suffolk, c. 1800, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 3). Source: Dymond and Martin 1999: map 60.

Figure 13. The distribution of aisled barns in Suffolk, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 3). Source: Dymond and Martin 1999: map 80; aisled barn drawing © P. Aitkens, used with permission.

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Figure 14. The distribution of vernacular buildings with raised-aisle and queen-post roofs in Suffolk, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 5). Source: Dymond and Martin 1999: map 82; queen-post diagram © P. Aitkens, used with permission.

hall (Aitkens and Wade Martins 1998: 29; Walker 1998: 9). There were also differences in the location of inserted sixteenth-century chimneys in former open halls. In south Suffolk, the fireplaces heating the halls were often positioned at the low end, against the cross-passage, but in north Suffolk the fireplace was usually placed at the high end, between the hall and the parlour (and contained within the parlour). These north Suffolk parlours were often remarkably small, and in the smaller houses were unheated. In the seventeenth century the high-end stack became the universal type in both areas (Aitkens and Wade Martins 1998: 29).

had a single threshing floor, but two or more occur in the larger barns. There are strong indications that the Gipping line was also an important cultural division. This is strikingly illustrated by the vernacular architecture of the region. Queen-post roofs dating from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries have a distribution in Suffolk that almost exactly mirrors that of the dairying region discussed above, with very few examples south of the Gipping line (Fig. 14; Colman and Barnard 1999). They are almost unknown in Essex, but common in much of Norfolk (Aitkens 1998: 45; Heywood 1998: 48). In contrast to the queen-post roofs, crown-post roofs and coupled-rafter roofs were more popular in Suffolk to the south of the line, and crown-posts were the dominant type in Essex from 1300 to the end of the medieval period (Aitkens and Wade Martins 1998: 29; Colman 1999; Walker 1998: 9). The Gipping divide also shows up in techniques of bracing the wooden frames of buildings – to the north ‘upward’ braces were usual, while to the south ‘downward’ braces were the norm (Aitkens 1998: 44).

Greens and woods The divide is also graphically illustrated in the distribution of the term ‘tye’ as a descriptor for a green. This term is derived from Old English teag, ‘a close, an enclosure’, but here was used in its later sense of ‘a common pasture’ (Smith 1956: 177). Although greens are widely distributed on either side of the Gipping, tyes are only found to the south of it – in south Suffolk, Essex and Kent, though apparently absent from Hertfordshire and Middlesex (Fig. 15; Martin 1999b; Reaney 1935: 569). There is also a suggestion of a difference in some of the words used in the medieval period for ancient woodland in the two areas. To the north, the term haugh/haw, from the Old English haga or Old Norse hagi (the two are largely indistinguishable), was found, whilst to the south

There were also significant variations in house plans. To the north of the line the majority of timber-framed houses had an ‘in-line’ plan (with all of the rooms contained under one axial roof), whereas to the south (in both south Suffolk and Essex) there was a much higher incidence of houses with the parlour and service rooms in cross-wings, which were roofed separately and at right-angles to the 354

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Figure 15. The distribution of the term ‘tye’ (meaning a green) in Suffolk, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 5). The inset map of Battisford Tye in 1783 gives some idea of the form of these tyes. Source: E. Martin, after Dymond and Martin 1999: map 26; J. Hodskinson, Map of Suffolk 1783).

hay/hey, from the Old English (ge)haeg, seems to have been more usual. Reaney noted that in Essex (ge)haeg was ‘a name for an enclosed wood or a forest enclosure’, and that it was relatively common (more so than in Hertfordshire) with some sixty examples, but that haga was rare (Reaney 1935: 586). The terms are etymologically linked, but the preference for the different forms suggests differences in people or at least in dialect, or perhaps differences in the actual form of the woods in the two areas.

Gipping line shows up as the division between an area with dense and large swine assessments to the north of the line, and an area with more scattered and smaller assessments to the south of it. The distribution becomes denser again in Essex, and in the small strip of clayland on the south-east side of Cambridgeshire. This last change may be related to different assessment methods in different counties, but the change at the Gipping line does seem to indicate something significant. The Gipping divide also shows up in the modern distribution of Ancient Woodland, but in an inverse way to what might have been expected. Ancient Woodland is now found mainly to the south of the line, extending on into Essex. To the north of the line there is a much lighter and dispersed pattern of woodland, which continues into Norfolk (Spencer and Thomas 1992; Rackham 1999). Part of the explanation lies in the Domesday Book, which shows that the places where the wood assessment was greater in 1066 than in 1086 lay overwhelmingly to the north of the Gipping line (Rackham 1999). This indicates that woodland was being actively reduced in north Suffolk, but not in the south. One reason could be a difference in the type of woodland being recorded. It may be that in north Suffolk the woodland was more in the nature of wooded high clayland ‘waste’, grading into wood-pasture. In the south, the Domesday woodland probably resembled the woods that survive today – smaller, but with clearly demarcated and managed areas

Discussion of the evidence for woodland in East Anglia, as recorded in Domesday Book, is complicated by the arcane way it was recorded. In East Anglia the size of the woodland was not expressed in terms of acres, but as wood for ‘x number of swine’. Oliver Rackham has shown that although it is possible to construct an approximate correlation graph, there are indications that in some cases at least, the swine-assessment was not proportional to the size of the wood (Rackham 1980: 1201, fig. 9.4). The distribution of woodland does however, show a clear link with the clay soil areas. Areas of sandy soils in the Breckland, north-west Norfolk, and south-east Suffolk, together with the Flegg loams of north-east Norfolk, were largely devoid of woods (Rackham 1980: 122).5 Within the Suffolk part of the clayland, the 5 See also the maps of ancient woods available on the English Nature web-site: www.english-nature.org.uk/pubs/gis/GIS_Register.asp.

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Figure 16. The occurrence of Borough English tenure (inheritance by the youngest son) in Suffolk, overlain by the HLC trend boundary (see fig. 5). Source: E. Martin, after various original sources.

in their Atlas of Rural Settlement in England, as they formed an important part of the research strategy of the HFSEA project (Fig. 18). At first glance there seems to be quite a lot of divergence between the two sets of regions, but this is perhaps to mistake the lines of both as sharp boundaries rather than as trend indicators. When viewed in this light, it is possible to see that the two maps frequently reflect similar trends, even if the exact boundaries vary. At a detailed level, the eastward bulge of common fields along the Stour valley shown on my map finds an echo in a similar bulge on the map of Roberts and Wrathmell. Similarities in the trends of lines can also to be seen in south-east Essex, north-west Essex, east Cambridgeshire, east Suffolk and in parts of south Norfolk. However, there are some important differences. The ‘Gipping divide’ is not reflected in the Roberts and Wrathmell map, and there is room to debate whether the correct boundaries on their map have been characterised as being of provincial, sub-provincial or local region importance.

defined by banks and ditches, and set in an enclosed landscape. This characteristic may have made them more resistant to incidental damage through animal grazing. That the Gipping divide has a cultural significance is further suggested by the higher frequency of Borough English tenure (inheritance by the youngest son), in the clayland of Suffolk to the north of the divide (Fig. 16; Corner 1859; MacCulloch 1986: 31, map V). The fact that the custom appears to have been absent from the Type 2 common field area to the west suggests that although there were and are important differences between the claylands north and south of the Gipping divide, there were even greater differences between the claylands and the areas with Type 2 common fields. Interpreting the trends By taking the data derived from the HLC mapping, and comparing it to information from the case studies and parliamentary enclosure records, it is possible to create a new map (Fig. 17) showing the likely extent of the various medieval farming systems that have been discussed above. The map does not purport to be definitive, but it does provide a vehicle for debate and further research. One obvious point of debate is the correlation between the regions on this new map and those put forward by Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell

If an equation is made between Roberts and Wrathmell’s Central Province and common fields of Type 1, the evidence from Ardeley suggests that there should be a buffer zone with fields of Type 2A to the north of Ardeley before the start of the Central Province. I believe that a line following the weight of the distribution of ridge and furrow might give a truer indication of the province boundary. This would include western 356

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Figure 17. The farming system regions of East Anglia, as suggested by the Historic Field Systems of East Anglia Project. Source: E. Martin.

has provided some new information to stimulate and inform that debate.

Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire, but would exclude most of northern Hertfordshire. If it were argued that both Types 1 and 2A should be included in the Central Province, the boundary would have to be redrawn to include most of Cambridgeshire, north-west Suffolk and the western half of Norfolk. If the provincial boundary was left more or less in its present position, I would suggest that the eastern sub-provincial boundary of EWASH(E) should be moved to reflect the occurrence of common fields of Type 2A – the western half of Norfolk, north-western Suffolk (excluding the eastern bulge of the sub-provincial boundary that now includes Walsham-leWillows), and most of eastern Cambridge (excluding the extreme south-east). The EANGL sub-province should perhaps be two sub-provinces. The first of these would be a northern and eastern zone that comprises the areas with Types 2B and 3 common fields – east Norfolk, east Suffolk, east Essex, the Stour valley and the extreme south-east of Cambridgeshire, and south-west Suffolk. The second would be a southern zone characterised by block holdings, but divided into two segments by the Stour valley; the two parts being south-central Suffolk and central Essex. Discussion of provincial and other boundaries is doubtless just beginning, but this project

Another important point of comparison is with the map of farming regions in East Anglia prepared for The Agrarian History of England and Wales in 1984 (Fig. 19; Thirsk 1984: 198). The comparison again shows numerous differences, but also some shared trends. There is a predominance of arable regimes in a broad band that runs across Cambridgeshire, north-west Suffolk and across most of Norfolk, except the south-east. This approximates to the areas of Type 2A and 2B common fields, though the extent of the ‘W. Suffolk fielding’ region is too extensive in the light of this project’s findings. There is also a failure to recognise the complexity of the Stour valley area, but a reasonable correspondence between the ‘High Suffolk’ pastoral area in north-east Suffolk and south-east Norfolk, and the area of Type 3 common fields. The small ‘Yare valley’ zone, with its mixture of arable and dairying, was clearly an intermediate zone and this is reflected by the indented boundary of the new map. There is a shared recognition that south-central Suffolk had a higher arable component than the north-east. However, on the Thirsk map the boundary is shown 357

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Figure 18. The HFSEAP farming system regions (see fig. 17) compared to the Roberts and Wrathmell local regions (see An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England 2001). Source: E. Martin.

remains of a co-axial field system covering some 35 square kilometres in the Scole-Dickleburgh area of Norfolk, and noted that the Roman ‘Pye Road’ cut obliquely across it, suggesting that the field system was earlier. He further identified a similar system covering 20 sq. km in the Yaxley area of north Suffolk, 7 km to the south, which he also thought predated the same Roman road. He also saw a smaller system to the east of the River Gipping in the Stonham Aspal/Crowfield area of Suffolk. He proposed though that the most striking coaxial landscape in Suffolk, that in the South Elmham/Ilketshall area, was laid out in relation to a preexisting Roman road and was therefore later, possibly even Saxon in date. This landscape had attracted attention before, as a possible example of centuriation (Adams 1976: 4; Bigmore 1973; Hoskins 1967: 142-143; Scarfe 1972: 116). Oliver Rackham was the first person however to suggest a link with the Dartmoor reaves, and thus a possible Bronze Age date for it. He suggested that the Roman road had been ‘insinuated along one of the main axes’ of a pre-existing system (Rackham 1986: 158). Williamson disagreed with this idea. Among his doubts about this early date was the fact that the system was “…virtually coterminous with two groups of parishes –

considerably to the south of the ‘Gipping divide’ that was identified through the HLC mapping. The continuation of this ‘intermediate’ corn/pastoral area into Essex is shown though. Along the eastern coastal fringe there is another ‘intermediate’ zone illustrated, with significant amounts of sheep in the Suffolk ‘Sandlings’ and cattle in the ‘Saltings’ of Essex and the Broads of Norfolk. This corresponds in a generalised way, without the complex indentations and projections, to the areas of Type 2B and Type 3 common fields. The overall impression is that the two farming region maps are picking up on similar trends, with the new map providing a greater degree of definition of the boundaries. The Agrarian History map is also a timely reminder that the differences in the organisation of field systems were also often accompanied by important differences in the arable/pastoral balance. Co-axial systems In 1987 Tom Williamson drew attention to co-axial patterns on the claylands of Norfolk and Suffolk (Williamson 1987: 419-431). Williamson identified the 358

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Figure 19. The HFSEAP farming system regions (see fig 15) compared to the farming regions suggested in The Agrarian History of England and Wales vol. V, 1640-1750 1984: 198. Source: E. Martin.

within the grid would, almost by default, tend have a planned appearance (Rippon 1991: 49).

twelve in all – which share two names: the four Ilketshalls and the eight South Elmhams”. He thought these represented ‘a single large middle or late Saxon estate’ (Williamson 1987: 428-429).

Two of the case studies, the Scole area and South Elmham St Michael, included areas of co-axial fields. The evidence from them therefore has a direct bearing on this debate. The Scole study indicated that the large coaxial system that Williamson identified is not in fact a continuous entity, but consists of a number of separate ‘panels’ that relate to particular drainage systems. The study has also put into question the validity of using a relationship with a Roman road as a means of dating a field system. Although there is undeniably an unconformity between the orientation of the Roman road and that of much (though not all) of the claimed co-axial system, it is also true that the two were functionally distinct. The road lies at an angle to the natural drainage and there would probably have been little functional advantage in using it as the basis of a field system, and it is clear that post-Roman farmers were quite capable of accommodating unconformable elements into their farming systems.

Although Williamson described the co-axial systems as ‘terrain oblivious’, it is very clear that the main axes were more or less at right angles to the main watercourses (Martin 1999c: 56; Williamson 1993: 25). In addition, the field pattern often seems to have been fitted into a preexisting framework of roads and tracks, rather than being a planned unity. Peter Warner has observed that the “…distinctive elements of Williamson’s co-axial field systems are the long lanes and drifts…”, and that “…the essence of the coaxial pattern is not so much the grid pattern of fields, but the linear pattern of boundaries running in parallel” (Warner 1996: 46-51). He has also pointed out the more widespread evidence for co-axial lanes in Norfolk and Suffolk. Rippon has, with regard to Essex, stressed that where there was a pre-existing grid of roads and tracks, the subsequent development of fields

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT The last point is well illustrated by a late sixteenth century map of Scole that shows another road, identified in fifteenth-century surveys as the ‘king’s highway to Beccles’, cutting across numbered strips in Heye Oke Furlonge in a clear a case of unconformity between road and field. Two other lesser roads, Thorpe grene waie and Seewaye, are also shown crossing field strips in a similar way.6 This suggests that the farmers found these ‘interrupting’ roads less of a challenge than we might think. The croft and field boundaries on either side of the Roman road certainly share common alignments (either parallel or at right-angles to the main drainage), but there is no real evidence of individual field units being truncated by its ‘imposition’. The triangular area that resulted from the unconformity between the road and the co-axial system was in fact conveniently used to accommodate a manorial complex and a series of crofts with associated houses.

woodland in the nine parishes that formed the South Elmham episcopal estate in 1066 (Rumble 1986: 19.3). This is entered under Homersfield, the then head of the estate, but as this 1005 acre parish also contained 720 acres of farmland, it is clear that the woodland must have been elsewhere on the estate, and clayland plateau areas like St Michael are the most likely. This woodland had been reduced to about 500 acres by 1086, indicating a significant clearance phase that is perhaps connected with the creation of new farmland. The appearance of the coaxial field pattern could well be associated with this phase. An early medieval date for the system would accord with the observation that most of the co-axial boundaries at the southern end of South Elmham St Michael appear to have stopped at Le Franchisemere, the parish and hundred boundary. The principal axis of the co-axial system lay at right-angles to the main watercourse, suggesting that drainage was the primary concern of the people who constructed the system. Drainage problems on the whole of this clay plateau in north Suffolk gave rise to a reliance on grassland, and historically this was an area of dairy farms.

There is good palaeo-environmental evidence which indicates that woodland in the Waveney valley, in the southern part of the Scole area, was being cleared in the Bronze Age, and that cereal crops were grown in the vicinity in a continuous sequence from the Iron Age onwards (Wiltshire and Murphy 1999: 141-148; Wiltshire forthcoming). It is therefore likely that the core arable areas identifiable in the medieval documentation were probably the same as those used in prehistory. With similar needs for soil drainage and stock movement, it might not be surprising if their fields shared a common alignment. The admittedly limited evidence from excavations suggests that this was indeed the case, as at Stuston (opposite Scole on the south side of the River Waveney) where a series of ditches of late Bronze Age or Iron Age date, that run either parallel or perpendicular to the river, were identified in 1994 (Tester forthcoming). It does not however prove that the existing field boundaries were prehistoric in origin, only that they were probably on a similar alignment to the prehistoric land divisions. But there must be a probability that some boundaries at least were established in prehistory, even if their present appearance owes more to later periods. From this, it can be argued that where a co-axial field system lies on land that has a high potential as a ‘core’ arable area, with fertile soils and adequate drainage), then the alignment of field boundaries, and possibly some of the actual boundaries themselves, may be prehistoric in date.

The pattern of co-axial roads and lanes that accompanied and framed the field systems in the South Elmhams ran from the edges of the gravel terraces beside the River Waveney and up on to the clay plateaux, where it became more distinct. In effect, these trackways appear to have linked well-drained areas with good arable potential on the terraces, with a clay hinterland that had a predominantly wood/pasture function. These lines of communication may also have served as property or rights boundaries, and could have an ancient history. However, at present it is difficult to ascertain their date. There is a growing body of evidence for early settlement on the river terraces, as nearby at Flixton, but on the clay plateaux the evidence remains thin (Boulter 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2002; Martin 1999c: 56; Selkirk and Boulter 2003). It may however suggest that the field systems between the roads were a later development. The case study evidence indicates that it is a mistake to regard the East Anglian co-axial field systems as a single monument type, with a similar origin and date range. A common archaeological obsession with morphological studies, rather than locational analyses, has given a false identity to systems that are superficially similar, but which had different functions and dates. It is unfortunately true that the enthusiasm for finding centuriation in the first part of the twentieth century has been replaced by a similar obsession with co-axial fields, as an undoubted indicator of the capacity of our distant ancestors to plan landscapes on a vast scale. The evidence from Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as Essex, is that while co-axial systems certainly did exist, they were not vast terrain-oblivious entities, but were made up of smaller panels closely related to the drainage pattern. They were also not all of the same date, and most have probably undergone a long sequence of development, rather than being single planned events. Freeing the search for early fields from the co-axial obsession enables a more balanced view to be taken of other areas where this study

The circumstances at South Elmham St Michael were different however. Here the co-axial field system was most apparent on an area with heavy, poorly-drained clay soils, not on the core arable area. The study produced evidence to suggest that the co-axial system occurred in an area that contained appreciable amounts of woodland in the late Saxon period. This is deducible from the occurrence of a number of haga names here (Bordeshagh, Frythagh, Hushagh and Skulnehagh) for in East Anglia this term was used for woodland (for this usage see above and Warner 1987: 20-21 and 57, n. 36). The Domesday evidence also points to about a thousand acres of 6

Suffolk Record Office (Ipswich) HD 417/61.

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EDWARD MARTIN: NOT SO COMMON FIELDS: THE MAKING OF THE EAST ANGLIAN LANDSCAPE comprehensive criticism of the method, see Williamson 2002: 77-81). The evidence presented here suggests that some ‘medieval’ hedges could be older than has previously been thought.

Figure 21. Waveney Valley at Scole, Norfolk. Palaeoenvironmental evidence suggests an unbroken use of the good quality sloping land of the valley sides for cereal growing from at least the Iron Age. In the Middle Ages the area in the foreground formed part of the common-field land of Scole and a late-sixteenth century map shows it still subdivided into strips. Source: E. Martin.

Figure 20. Hedge at Acton, south Suffolk, which coincides with the location of an ealdan hege or ‘old hedge’ mentioned in a charter of AD 1000-1002. The species composition could be taken as indicating a broadly ‘medieval’ date; however, the charter reference raises the possibility that it could be far older. Source: E. Martin.

has suggested that they might occur. Prominent among these are the parts of Essex and south Suffolk where blocks holdings predominated. In these areas there is little evidence of an intervening period of medieval common fields. Just what was the date of origin of these field systems?

Figure 22. Chelmer Valley at Felsted, Essex. In the medieval period this good quality sloping land on the valley side formed part of one of the large, exclusively demesne fields belonging to the manor of Felsted Bury. The building near the base of the slope was the manorial watermill. Source: E. Martin.

Although there is a lack of Anglo-Saxon charters with boundary clauses, or other landscape descriptions, for East Anglia there are some that contain references to hedges. Interestingly, a boundary clause in a charter of 1000-1002 for Acton in south Suffolk, refers to an ealdan hege or ‘old hedge’ (Whitelock 1930: 39-40, no. XV, will of Ælfflæd, widow of Ealdorman Brihtnoth). This can be identified as the hedgeline that marks the north-east boundary of Acton, running from a point just north of Balsdon Hall south-eastwards for 1.5 km to the Melford Road. The existing hedge has seven shrubby species in a 30m length – blackthorn, elm, dogwood, hawthorn, field maple, wild plum and wild rose (Fig. 20). Yet despite being ‘old’ a thousand years ago, the species score for this hedge boundary is an average one for the area, and the hedge is similar in form to others. This underlines the conclusion that hedgerow dating, as originally proposed by the ecologist Max Hooper in the 1970s, can only be a very rough guide to the age of a hedge (for a

The evidence indicates that the landscape of south Suffolk and Essex contained hedged and ditched fields by the late Saxon period, and that elements of these probably survive in the modern landscape. The existence of considerable amounts of woodland in Essex in the eleventh century indicates that the patterns were not yet complete, but locational analysis does provide a pointer to those areas where ancient fields are most likely to be found. In the case studies, there were parallels to the panels of optimum arable land on the valley side at Scole (discussed above) in the areas of block demesne identified at Felsted and Ingatestone (Figs. 21 and 22). These block demesnes occupied the best available land in their parishes, and are likely to have had continuous histories as arable land, stretching back to late Saxon times and possibly beyond. This does not mean that they 361

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT ones. In Denmark and Sweden, common fields appeared between the late tenth century and the beginning of the twelfth (Göransson 1961; Porsmose 1987: 276, 1993: 265; Randsborg 1980: 67-8; Tesch 1993: 140). The cause is plainly more complex, and probably due to a combination of factors rather than any single one.

have survived unchanged, but they are likely to contain alignments and probably some actual boundaries that are very old. This comparison between Scole and Felsted/Ingatestone is very revealing, for it indicates that although these areas developed different farming systems, they started from a similar basis. At Scole, common fields developed on the optimum arable land, but at Felsted/Ingatestone similar areas developed into block demesnes. There were clearly important cultural factors behind these two diverging paths. Discerning exactly what those differences were is not an easy task though, as this touches upon one of the most important questions in English medieval landscape studies – how and why did common fields arise in some areas, but not in others?

The earliest evidence for common fields, in fact, comes from the Frankish areas of the Continent in or around the eighth century (Nitz 1988a: 249-273; Renes 1988: 164; Slicher van Bath 1966, Ch. 3). In the Lechfeld area of south Germany, it has been suggested that common fields (Gewannen) were introduced by the Merovingian state after the Frankish conquest, c. AD 743, as part of the reorganisation of the landscape for Frankish ‘peasantsoldier colonists’. It has further been suggested that the origins of the system should be sought “…in the Frankish royal domain or domains of the imperial church (Reichskirche), especially in the large royal monasteries (Reichsklöster) which were closely linked to the crown” (Nitz 1988b: 156-157). This re-organisation also saw the introduction of standardised farming units called mansi or hufen (Schlesinger 1987: 587-614). These contained 30 morgen of land – the standard west German morgen containing 120 square rods (the rod there being 16 feet or 4.67m). The term mansus occurs as a synonym for the hide in England, but there are perhaps closer size parallels with the 30-acre virgate (quarter hide) units (Nitz 1983: 124-125 n. 22).

Common fields and the Viking intervention Currently, there seems to be general agreement that common fields were in existence by the twelfth century, but were not in evidence before the eighth century. The earliest charter reference to gemænan lande, ‘common land’, occurs in a charter of AD 849 for Cofton Hackett in the wooded and pastoral region of north Worcestershire, but the earliest likely reference to subdivided arable land comes in a lease of Alveston in Worcestershire, dated 966, where there is mention of ‘every other acre in the divided hide’ and ‘every third acre of open land’ (Hooke 1981: 58, 1988: 128). David Hall has suggested an eighth century origin for the common fields in Northamptonshire, by linking the creation of the fields with the abandonment of some settlement sites overlain by the fields, as at Raunds where sites appear to have been abandoned before about 850 (Hall 1995: 130-131, 137). Other authors have preferred a more cautious ninth or tenth century date for what Tony Brown and Glenn Foard have termed the ‘great replanning’ of the late Saxon landscape (Brown and Foard 1998: 65, 76; Fowler 2002: 290-291; Fox 1981; Harvey 1985: 43; Hooke 1998: 121).

The origin of the English common fields is thus complex, and probably due to a combination of reasons rather than a single one. Recent research has suggested a number of possible factors that could have played a part in the emergence of common fields in the late Saxon period:

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Many authors have drawn attention to the fact that this period coincides with the upheavals caused by the Viking invasions and settlement (Brown and Foard 1998: 82; Dark 2000: 157; Fowler 2002: 291; Roberts and Wrathmell 2002: 135-136). Comparisons between maps showing areas with common fields and the distribution of place-names of Scandinavian origin reveal that there are significant correlations between the two, in the region stretching from Northamptonshire northwards to Yorkshire, though not in the counties running southwestward from Oxfordshire. The division between these two areas was the boundary between the Danelaw and the Anglo-Saxon lands, as established in a treaty between Guthrum, the Danish king, and Alfred the Great c. 886890 (Hart 1992: 7; Roberts and Wrathmell 2002: figs. 5.4 and 5.6). However, it is not a simple case of common fields being introduced by the Vikings. The available evidence indicates that in the Viking homelands, common fields appear to have been slightly later than the English

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Climate. From the Middle Anglo-Saxon period there seems to have been a trend towards an increasingly warm and dry climate, which reached its peak in the so-called Medieval Warm Epoch of 1000-1250 (Dark 2000: 157-158, 171; Simmons 2001, 53, 70). This climatic amelioration may have facilitated an agricultural expansion by enabling cereals to be grown in areas that were formerly unfavourable. Population. Population figures are notoriously difficult to estimate because the figures depend heavily on the extent to which sites are ‘archaeologically visible’ at different periods (see Roberts and Wrathmell 2002: 40-44 for a recent discussion of the pitfalls and problems in estimating population trends). The Anglo-Saxon period is a case in point, as the early pottery is significantly less durable than the late material, therefore the apparent rise in the number of sites from the early period to the late may just be the product of greater archaeological visibility. However, taken at face value, this rise in the number of ‘archaeologically visible’ sites in East Anglia across the Saxon period does suggest that there was a growing population and presumably

EDWARD MARTIN: NOT SO COMMON FIELDS: THE MAKING OF THE EAST ANGLIAN LANDSCAPE a concomitant pressure to find additional farmland (Newman 1992: 34).

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villages, and there can be little doubt that these two major landscape changes were linked. The sites that disappeared were often minor, outlying settlements, and the emerging villages can sometimes be shown to have been locally important places from an early phase (Brown and Foard 1998: 76; Hall 1995: 131). By removing some settlements, greater areas of land were made available for re-allocation into common fields. Within Northamptonshire, the majority of the townships had over 85% of their land in arable common fields (Hall 2001: fig. 1).

Social and political. Although the extent to which England was settled by Scandinavians has been heavily disputed, there was considerable upheaval caused by the Viking invasions, and financial drains on Anglo-Saxon settlements from the massive Danegeld payments (Dyer 2002: 43-45; Fellows Jensen 1975, 1981; Gelling 1978: 219-236; Sawyer 1958). The Anglo-Saxon re-conquest of the Danelaw brought substantial social changes in its wake, including the re-establishment of the church hierarchy and monasteries. The English administrative apparatus also appears to have been significantly reformed in the first half of the tenth century, with new shires being formed in the Midlands and hundreds making their first certain appearance in the Hundred Ordinance of c. 939-961 (Hart 1992: 294-303; Hill 2001: 144159; Reynolds 1999: 75-81; Whitelock 1996: 429-430). Hart has also argued that this period saw the transformation of the hide from an actual agricultural unit to an assessment unit based solely on arable capacity, and that furthermore, these new hides were divided into virgates which became sub-units of geld assessment (Hart 1994: 294-303). Frankish influence on political organisations and the church was considerable throughout this period, and the concept of standardised farming units as administrative and taxation aids could well have been a Frankish import (Bullough 1991: Ch. 7). The framework of standardised units made a major contribution to the way common fields were organised, but the concept was also applied to block holdings. Technological improvements. There does seem to be some evidence for the more widespread adoption of the mouldboard plough from about the tenth century AD. Although there is some evidence for mouldboard or ‘proto-mouldboard’ ploughs in the Roman world and in north-west Europe from the first century BC, the main weight of evidence suggests that simple ard ploughs were the norm before the tenth century (Fowler 2002: 187, 194, 199-202; GringmuthDallmer 1983: 207-209; Haarnagel 1979: 265; Manning 1964, 1985: 44; Rees 1981: 65-69; White 1967: 123-145). Mouldboard ploughs, by turning the soil in a single pass, removed the need to cross-plough in order to prepare a seed bed, as was required with an ard. This allowed greater areas of land to be ploughed in the same time, and also favoured the development of long plough lands or fields. In long fields, the turning of the plough was kept to a minimum, saving both time and effort.

The establishment of these fields seems to have ended a tendency for Anglo-Saxon settlements to ‘shift’ in the landscape, for villages often overlay their late Saxon predecessors. This earlier shifting practice was well demonstrated by excavations at Mucking (Hamerow 1993: 86-87). There, the movement, although not great, was sufficient to give a series of separate settlement clusters of different dates. Similar Wandersiedlungen or ‘wandering settlements’ are known in the Continental homelands of the Anglo-Saxons and were part of a tradition that stretched back to the Iron Age (Hamerow 1991: 1-17, 2002: 104-105; Hedeager 1992: 190-191). In Denmark, ‘wandering settlement’ also ceased around the time when common fields were introduced (Näsman 1989: 174; Porsmose 1989: 174, 1993: 265). The implication is that in England, these agricultural landscapes were on a scale and permanence that was totally new to the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has a clear statement that in 880 King Guthrum, after concluding a treaty with King Alfred, led his Danish army “…into East Anglia, and settled there and shared out the land” (Whitelock 1961: 50). Despite this however, many authors suggest that the evidence for an influx of a substantial number of Scandinavian settlers is weaker here than in other parts of the Danelaw (Davis 1955; Dyer 2002: 47; Hart 1992: 28; Whitelock 1961: 50; Williamson 1993: 107). Although the place-name evidence for Viking settlement in East Anglia is certainly not as strong as it is in the central and northern Danelaw, some names are reasonably numerous and they do have an interesting distribution (Fig. 23; Cameron 1969: 75-86). They are most common in Norfolk, where there were forty Domesday vills called thorp (‘outlying or dependant settlement’), and around twenty-one containing the element -by (‘farmstead or village’), as well a number of other names containing Scandinavian terms such as kirkja ‘church’, lundr ‘grove’, thveit ‘clearing’, and toft ‘house site or homestead’ (Williamson 1993: 109-110 – his map unfortunately does not include the thorp names). In Suffolk, there are about nineteen thorp names (some no longer current), only three certain -by names and a small number of other names incorporating other Scandinavian elements (Martin 1999a). These names are found predominantly to the north of the ‘Gipping divide’ previously discussed. In Essex the list is even smaller, with five thorp names and one -by name, mainly in the

In the midlands of England, the appearance of common fields coincided with the nucleation of settlement into 363

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Figure 23. The distribution of place-names indicative of Scandinavian influence, overlain by the HFSEAP farming systems boundaries (see fig. 17). Source: E. Martin, for the isophone, see Kristensson 1995: map 14; for the names, see the text.

control throughout the period of the Danish kingdom of East Anglia. From a detailed study of the Anglo-Saxon ealdormen, he has suggested that from 825, when the last native East Saxon king was expelled by King Egbert of Wessex, until 946, Essex formed, together with Surrey, Sussex and Kent, a single administrative unit subordinate to the kings of Wessex. This was initially a subkingdom but then, from 860, was an ealdordom. Hart believes that the Danes only succeeded in settling the north-east corner of Essex, perhaps reaching as far south as Witham, but that the rest of Essex remained under West Saxon rule (Hart 1992: 125).

north or near the coast (Hart 1992: map 3.1; Reaney 1935: xxvii-xxviii). This suggested distinction between an Anglo-Saxon south and a Scandinavian north seems to find some confirmation in a linguistic study by Gillis Kristensson, of the differential pronunciation of an initial fricative (‘f’) as a voiced (‘v’) sound (Kristensson 1995). The isophone (or ‘zone of pronunciation’) for this runs across the southern end of Cambridgeshire in the vicinity of Dullingham, and then across southern Suffolk to the east coast near Aldeburgh, coming close to the northern boundary of block holdings as identified in this study (Fig. 20). In the area to south the fricative is voiced, but not to the north. Kristensson has shown that the voicing of initial fricatives occurred in late Old English, but in areas of Scandinavian influence, the tendency towards voicing was ‘counteracted and forestalled’ (Kristensson 1995: map 14, 1997).

This conclusion is of great significance, because it seems to fit with the place-name and linguistic evidence discussed above. Moreover, the limited Scandinavian place-name evidence in Essex occurs in just the areas where there is some evidence for common fields, such as in the north along the Stour and in the coastal fringe. On the Suffolk coastal fringe there is again a correlation between evidence for common fields and Scandinavian place-names. In the rest of Essex and in south-central Suffolk, where there are few Scandinavian place-names,

Although normally considered a part of the Danelaw, Cyril Hart has produced some very interesting evidence to suggest that most of Essex remained in Anglo-Saxon 364

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Figure 24. The distribution of free peasantry (free men and sokemen) in East Anglia, as recorded in Domesday Book, compared with the HFSEAP farming systems boundaries (see fig. 17). Source: E. Martin, data derived from Darby 1971 and Kirby and Oosthuizen 2000: map 34.

It has long been recognised that the greatest densities of free men and sokemen recorded in the Domesday Book were in the former Danelaw areas, and that this suggests a link between a high density of free men and Scandinavian settlement (Ekwall 1945: 26-28; Faith 1997: 121-125; Stenton 1971: 515-517). This idea has been criticised however, both in terms of whether Domesday Book was consistent in its recording of free men and sokemen, and regarding the origin and meaning of the term ‘sokemen’ (Davis 1955; Fellows Jensen 1975; Sawyer 1958). Debate raged as to whether sokemen were the descendants of Vikings, or if they were the result of social changes that occurred following the Viking intervention. There are also problems regarding the differences between free men and sokemen, not to mention the exact meaning of the vague term ‘soke’. For the purpose in hand, I propose to accept that there appear to have been valid differences in the distribution of free men and sokemen within the

there is strong evidence for block holdings. Interestingly, in view of the political links that Hart has suggested between Essex and Kent, similar block holdings occur there too (Baker 1965). If, as suggested, there was a link between Scandinavian settlement and common fields, how and why did they establish them in England, when as already noted, there is no evidence that the Vikings had common fields in their own homelands at this time? One important factor might have been the Scandinavian notion of the free peasant – a man who owned and farmed his own land. Although not all Scandinavians were free men, they do seem to have cherished the idea, and free farmers played an important part in their society (Jones 1969: 150). Equally important was the disruption that the Vikings caused to the land laws, social customs and hierarchical organisation that had previously prevailed (Hart 1992: 4). 365

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT making the block demesnes available for re-allocation on a more equal or ‘common’ basis. Thus, while the best land remained locked in block demesnes in Essex, similar land in north Suffolk and Norfolk was shared out between wider groups of peasant farmers. While some of these may have been Scandinavians, it is probable that many others were native Englishmen taking advantage of the breakdown in the social order to acquire better shares of the best land. Whatever re-distribution took place, there are likely to have been substantial additional changes following the English re-conquest, as titles to land were either challenged or confirmed (Abrams 2001: 139). The formal arrangements of medieval common field systems may well have developed in the post-conquest phase and, in their final form, owe more to Frankish concepts adopted by the English royal administration than to Viking ones. The fact that some of the earliest common fields on the Continent are associated with areas of Frankish conquest must alert us to the possibility that post-conquest re-organisation may be an important factor in England too. Overall, the Viking intervention should perhaps be seen as a catalyst for change rather than a cataclysmic event, or even as fundamentally about the immigration of new people.

context of eastern England, and that their freer status set them apart from the other peasants recorded in Domesday Book. Darby studied the densities of the ‘free peasantry’ aggregated up to the hundred level and, in the absence of any more detailed plotting, his figures have been used here (Darby 1971: fig. 105). Although by using hundreds as the basic units there is a lack of precision in the boundaries, they are still very revealing compared to the place-name evidence for Scandinavian settlement (Fig. 24). In Norfolk and Suffolk there is a very close correlation between the place-names and the high figures for free men and sokemen, indicating that the two were inter-related. By contrast, the southern ‘English’ areas were characterised by a low proportion of free men, as well as a low incidence of Scandinavian names. This suggests a possible scenario as to how and why block holdings and common fields developed as contrasting farming systems. Taking the Anglo-Saxon area of Essex first, its wealth of woodland, as revealed by Domesday Book, is often seen as indicating that it was an area of late settlement. However, locational analysis suggests that although woodland was certainly present on the heavier, poorlydrained soils, there were substantial areas of slope soils in the valleys that probably had a history of arable cultivation stretching back into prehistory. Finds of Roman agricultural tools and equipment (Fig. 25) are concentrated in south-east England including Essex, making it likely that arable farming was most developed in that region during the Romano-British period (Jones and Mattingly 1990: 230, map 6.47). The distribution of Roman villas in East Anglia, and in particular those with mosaic floors, is also heavily weighted towards south Suffolk and Essex, suggesting either greater economic prosperity or a greater adoption of the Roman way of life. Either way, this would suggest a developed agricultural economy rather than an undeveloped forested region.

A complex mix of Viking and post-Viking land allotments and re-organisation could provide one explanation for the complex pattern of landholding types seen in eastern England, especially in Suffolk and Norfolk. Even in the midland counties, David Hall has demonstrated that some block demesnes do occur, noting that the manors that had them were often of some local importance and in some cases lay “…in an area of demonstrable ‘old’ settlement, as at Wollaston Hall manor where the demesne incorporates a Roman villa…as well as substantial early Saxon remains” (Hall 1995: 73). This suggests that the owners of some block demesnes were better than others at resisting subdivision.

Palaeo-environmental studies are not yet detailed enough to provide a clear view, but there is certainly widespread evidence for cereal crops on all soil types in Roman Essex (Murphy 1996: 175). Two sites in Essex – Mucking and Springfield Lyons – have produced evidence for early Saxon cultivation of spelt, the major wheat type of the Iron Age and Roman period (Murphy 1994: 27, 37, 1996: 177). At Springfield Lyons there is also evidence for late Saxon spelt and some emmer, suggesting continuities with Romano-British arable farming. With no period of Scandinavian rule, it is likely that the prime agricultural land developed relatively continuously from Iron Age and Romano-British farming practices into the block holdings seen in the early medieval period. These communities might also have had hierarchical social structures that gave precedence to the rights of chieftains or lords to have the greatest share of the best land, as witnessed by the block demesnes.

Conclusions – fields of change Overall, it is clear that by the end of the tenth century significant changes had occurred that were to profoundly affect the farming landscapes for the next thousand years. One key factor must have been the greater adoption of the mouldboard plough. This must not only have made ploughing more efficient, thus stimulating an expansion of the arable areas, but also influenced the shapes of fields, making them longer and thinner. A gradual climatic improvement would have encouraged expansion by making some of the wetter land more suitable for arable crops. The expansion of arable seems to have decreased the tendency of settlements to shift. This was most extreme in the Midlands, where settlements coalesced into nucleated villages, allowing the reorganisation of most of the landscape into large open fields. In East Anglia, the trend towards nucleation was reduced, probably due to the larger amount of land unsuitable for conversion to arable, either through being poorly drained clayland or dry and sandy heath. A

In the Scandinavian settled areas however, the evidence suggests that the established social order was disrupted, 366

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Figure 25. The distribution of Roman villas and Roman agricultural tools in East Anglia, compared with the HFSEAP farming systems boundaries (see fig. 17). Source: E. Martin, data derived from Bedwin 1996: 96; Dymond and Martin 1999: map 16; Jones and Mattingly 1990: maps 6:39, 6:47 and 7:6.

continuing demand for arable expansion on the clayland did however lead to the emergence of green-side settlements in the former wood-pasture ‘wastes’ during the twelfth century.

them may in fact be a product of English royal policy in the tenth century. However, the trends towards arable expansion and the creation of large ‘open’ arable fields could be considerably earlier.

It is important here to stress that ‘open’ fields do not necessarily mean ‘common’ fields, as the large demesne fields identified in Essex and south Suffolk are variants of ‘open’ fields, in the sense of large arable units. The occurrence of a ‘middle furlong’ at Roydon in Norfolk c. 1030 suggests that ‘open’ and probably ‘common’ fields were present by that date in the Waveney valley (Whitelock 1930: 68-69, 179). This study has shown that that part of the Waveney valley lies on the interface of the Type 2A and Type 3 common field zones. It is against this background of agricultural expansion that the Viking interventions can be viewed. They provide an explanation for the development of common fields in the northern and western parts of the region, for their reappearance along the east coast and for their appearance along the Stour valley. This implies a late ninth century date for the origins of common fields, though the systemisation of

By changing the established social pattern, and by placing increased emphasis on the more equitable sharing of better land, Scandinavian settlement triggered the development of common fields. It is not necessary to envisage a massive influx of Scandinavian immigrants, as even a small proportion of the overall population might have acted as catalysts for change. Although there were undoubtedly earlier underlying cultural and environmental factors that contributed to the development of the different farming systems identified in this project, it is the correlation with the evidence for Scandinavian settlement or influence that is compelling. The ramifications of the project have thus spread beyond the original regional remit, to embrace wider national questions such as the origins of common fields. There are even international implications, for large numbers of the emigrants to New England in the seventeenth century 367

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Aitkens, P. 1998. Mid-Suffolk houses, 1250-1530. In D.F. Stenning and D.D. Andrews (eds.) Regional Variation in Timber-Framed Building in England and Wales Down to 1550. Chelmsford: Essex County Council, pp. 40-46. Aitkens, P. 1999. Aisled barns. In D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.) An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, pp. 176177. Aitkens, P. and Wade Martins, S. 1998. The Farmsteads of Suffolk: A Thematic Survey. Suffolk: unpublished report for English Heritage. Baker, A.R.H. 1965. Some fields and farms in medieval Kent. Archaeologia Cantiana 53: 152-174. Bedwin, O. 1996. The Archaeology of Essex. Proceedings of the Writtle Conference. Chelmsford: Essex County Council. Bigmore, P. 1973. Suffolk Settlement: a Study in Continuity. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Leicester. Boulter, S. 1999. Flixton. Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 39 (3): 373-374. Boulter, S. 2000a. Flixton Park Quarry. An assessment of the archaeology recorded in the areas excavated as FLN 013. Unpublished report: Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service. Boulter, S. 2000b. FLN 053 and Flixton Park Quarry (FLN 059). Interim report. Unpublished report: Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service. Boulter, S. 2002. Flixton. Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 40 (2): 222-225. Brown T. and Foard, G. 1998. The Saxon landscape: a regional perspective. In P. Everson and T. Williamson (eds.) The Archaeology of Landscape. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 67-94. Bullough, D.A. 1991. Carolingian Renewal: Sources and Heritage. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cameron, K. 1969. English Place Names. London: Methuen. Colman, S. 1999. Crown-post roofs. In D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.) An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, pp. 178179. Colman, S. and Barnard, M. 1999. Raised-aisled halls and queen-post roofs. In D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.) An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, pp. 180-181. Corner, G.R. 1859. On the custom of Borough English. Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology 2: 227-241. Cronin, W. 2003. Changes in the Land. Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill and Wang. Cushion, B. and Davison, A. 2003. Earthworks of Norfolk. East Anglian Archaeology Report 104. Darby, H.C. 1971. The Domesday Geography of Eastern England (3rd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dark, P. 2000. The Environment of Britain in the First Millennium AD. London: Duckworth.

came from East Anglia, including John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, from Groton in south Suffolk. American scholars have perhaps been more aware than many English ones of the strong tradition for ‘enclosed-farm’ holdings that the East Anglian settlers took to America, derived from their inherited notions on farmland allotment and organisation (Cronin 2003: 74; Sumner 1963: xvii, 60). The settlers also took a spirit of independence that arose from managing their own farming regimes, and there is now considerable scope in comparing the areas of East Anglia where block holdings dominated with the American field patterns and historical information on settler origins. No study can ever hope to give a definitive and unchallengeable interpretation of the historic landscape, but it is hoped that this project on the historic field systems of East Anglia has suggested some new ways of analysing complex landscape evidence, and through the integration of new techniques with more traditional forms of analysis, to enable fresh models to be developed. Some of the speculative ideas I have outlined may be proved wrong in the future, but undoubtedly many patterns have emerged that challenge existing views on farming systems, landscape evolution and cultural groupings. By showing that existing county boundaries are not necessarily the strongest cultural boundaries, the study has produced new units for reviewing a whole range of data – agricultural, archaeological, palaeo-environmental, architectural, historical and linguistic, and has demonstrated the potential for such multi-disciplinary analysis. Acknowledgements I owe a great debt to my fellow worker on this project, Max Satchell, for assembling much of the case study data and for providing a great deal of stimulating thoughts and ideas. However, any errors of interpretation are mine. I am also grateful to the many people who provided help and advice for the project: Philip Aitkens, Brian Ayers, Helen Bamford, Nigel Brown, Stewart Bryant, David Buckley, Alan Davison, David Dymond, Lynn DysonBruce, Paul Everson, Graham Fairclough, David Hall, Rosemary Hoppitt, John Hunter, Matthew Johnson, Peter Murphy, Sue Oosthuizen, Judith Plouviez, Deborah Porter, Deborah Priddy, Tim Reynolds, Brian Roberts, David Stocker, Keith Wade, Susanna Wade Martins, Philip Walker, Peter Warner, David Went, Tom Williamson and Stuart Wrathmell. Bibliography Abrams, L. 2001. Edward the Elder’s Danelaw. In N.J. Higham and D.H. Hill (eds.) Edward the Elder, 899924. London: Routledge, pp. 128-143. Adams, I.H. 1976. Agrarian Landscape Terms. A Glossary for Historical Geography. London: Institute of British Geographers Special Publication no. 9. 368

EDWARD MARTIN: NOT SO COMMON FIELDS: THE MAKING OF THE EAST ANGLIAN LANDSCAPE England 20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-17. Hamerow, H. 1993. Excavations at Mucking. Volume 2: The Anglo-Saxon settlement. London: English Heritage. Hamerow, H. 2002. Early Medieval Settlements. The Archaeology of Rural Communities in North-West Europe 400-900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hart, C. 1992. The Danelaw. London: Hambledon Press. Harvey, M. 1985. The development of open fields in the central Vale of York: a reconsideration. Geografiska Annaler 67 B: 35-44. Hedeager, L. 1992. Iron Age Societies. From Tribe to State in Northern Europe, 500 BC to AD 700. Oxford: Blackwell. Hervey, F. (ed.) 1902. Suffolk in the 17th Century. The Breviary of Suffolk by Robert Reyce, 1618. London: John Murray. Heywood, S. 1998. From aisles to queen posts: medieval timber framing in Norfolk. In D.F. Stenning and D.D. Andrews (eds.) Regional Variation in Timber-Framed Building in England and Wales Down to 1550. Chelmsford: Essex County Council, pp. 47-50. Hill, D. 2000. Sulh – the Anglo-Saxon plough c. 1000 A.D. Landscape History 22: 5-19. Hill, D. 2001. The shiring of Mercia – again. In N.J. Higham and D.H. Hill (eds.) Edward the Elder, 899924. London: Routledge, pp. 144-159. Holderness, B.A. 1984. East Anglia, the Home Counties and south-east England. In J. Thirsk (ed.) The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. V.I, 1640-1750. Regional Farming Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 197-238. Hooke, D. 1981. Open-field agriculture – the evidence from pre-conquest charters of the West Midlands. In T. Rowley (ed.) The Origins of Open Field Agriculture. London: Croom Helm, pp. 39-63. Hooke, D. 1988. Early forms of open-field agriculture in England. Geografiska Annaler 70B (1): 123-31. Hooke, D. 1998. The Landscape of Anglo-Saxon England. London: Leicester University Press. Hoppitt, R. 1989. A relative relief map of Suffolk. Transactions of the Suffolk Naturalist’s Society 25: 80-85. Hoskins, W.G. 1967. Fieldwork in Local History. London: Faber. Jonas, S. 1847. On the farming of Cambridgeshire. Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society 7: 35-72. Jones, B. and Mattingly, D. 1990. An Atlas of Roman Britain. Oxford: Oxbow. Jones, G. 1969. A History of the Vikings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kain, R. and Mead, W.R. 1977. Ridge and furrow in Cambridgeshire. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 67: 131-137. Kirby, T. and Oosthuizen, S. 2000. An Atlas of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire History. Cambridge: Anglia Polytechnic University. Kristensson, G. 1995. A Survey of Middle English Dialects 1290-1350: the East Midland Counties. Lund: Lund University Press.

Davis, R.H.C. 1955. East Anglia and the Danelaw. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (5th series) 5: 23-39. Dyer, C. 2002. Making a Living in the Middle Ages. The People of Britain 850-1520. London: Yale University Press. Dymond, D. 2002. The Parson’s Glebe: stable, expanding or shrinking? In C. Harper-Bill, C. Rawcliffe and R.G. Wilson (eds.) East Anglia’s History. Studies in Honour of Norman Scarfe. Woodbridge: Boydell, pp. 73-91. Dymond, D. and Martin, E. 1999. An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council. Edelen G. (ed.) 1994. The Description of England by William Harrison [1587]. Washington and New York: Dover. Ekwall, E. 1945. The proportion of Scandinavian settlers in the Danelaw. Saga Book of the Viking Society 7: 19-34. Evans, G. Ewart 1960. The Horse in the Furrow. London: Faber. Faith, R. 1997. The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Fellows Jensen, G. 1975. The Vikings in England: a review. Anglo-Saxon England IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 181-206 Fellows Jensen, G. 1981. Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw. Proceedings of the Eighth Viking Congress. Odense: Odense University Press. Folkingham, W. 1610. Fevdigraphia. The Synopsis or Epitome of Svrveying Methodized. London. Fowler, P. 2002. Farming in the First Millennium AD. British Agriculture Between Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, H.S.A. 1981. Approaches to the adoption of the Midland system. In T. Rowley (ed.) The Origins of Open Field Agriculture. London: Croom Helm, pp. 64-111. Gelling, M. 1978. Signposts to the Past. Place-names and the History of England. London: Dent. Göransson, S. 1961. Regular open-field patterns in England and Scandinavian solskifte. Geografiska Annaler 43 (1-2): 80-104. Gray, H.L. 1915. English Field Systems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Gringmuth-Dallmer, E. 1983. Frühgeschichtliche Pflugspuren in Mitteleuropa. Zeitschrift für Archäologie 17: 205-21. Haarnagel, W. 1979. Die Grabung Feddersen Wierde Bd. II: Methode, Hausbau, Siedlungsund Wirtschaftsformen Sowie Sozialstruktur. Wiesbaden: F. Steiner. Hall, D. 1995. The Open Fields of Northamptonshire. Northamptonshire Record Society 38. Northampton. Hall, D. 2001. Turning the Plough. Midland Open Fields: Landscape Character and Proposals for Management. Northampton: Northamptonshire County Council. Hamerow, H.F 1991. Settlement mobility and the ‘Middle Saxon shift’: rural settlements and settlement patterns in Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon 369

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Nitz, H-J. 1988a. Settlement structures and settlement systems of the Frankish central state in Carolingian and Ottonian times (8th to 10th centuries). In D. Hooke (ed.) Anglo-Saxon Settlements. Oxford: pp. 249-73. Nitz, H-J. 1988b. Introduction from above: intentional spread of common-field systems by feudal authorities through colonization and reorganization. Geografiska Annaler 70B (1): 156-7. Porsmose, E. 1987. De fynske landsbyers historie, Odense: Odense University Studies in History and Social Sciences 109. Porsmose, E. 1993. Rural settlement. In S. Hvass and B. Storgaard (eds.) Digging into the Past. 25 Years of Archaeology in Denmark. Copenhagen: Royal Society of Northern Antiquaries, pp. 265. Rackham, O. 1980. Ancient Woodland. Its History, Vegetation and Uses in England. London: Edward Arnold. Rackham, O. 1986. A History of the Countryside. London: Dent. Rackham, O. 1999. Medieval woods. In D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.) An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, pp. 64-65. Randsborg, K. 1980. The Viking Age in Denmark. The Formation of a State, London: Duckworth. Reaney, P.H. 1935. The Place-Names of Essex. English Place-Name Society Vol. 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rees, S. 1981. Agricultural Implements in Prehistoric and Roman Britain. BAR (British Series) 69. Oxford: BAR. Renes, J. 1988. Some aspects of open fields in the southern part of the Province of Limburg (the Netherlands). Geografiska Annaler 70B (1): 161-167. Reynolds, A. 1999. Later Anglo-Saxon England. Life and Landscape. Stroud: Tempus. Rippon, S. 1991. Early planned landscapes in south-east Essex. Essex Archaeology and History 22: 46-60. Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S. 2001. An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England. London: English Heritage. Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S. 2002. Region and Place. A Study of English Rural Settlement. London: English Heritage. Rumble A. (ed.) 1986. Domesday Book, Suffolk (2 volumes). Chichester: Phillimore. Sawyer, P.H. 1958. The density of the Danish settlement in England. University of Birmingham Historical Journal 6: 1-17. Scarfe, N. 1972. The Suffolk Landscape. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Selkirk, A. and Boulter, S. 2003. Flixton Park Quarry, a royal estate of the first Anglo-Saxon kings? Current Archaeology 187: 280-285. Silvester, R. 1989. Ridge and furrow in Norfolk. Norfolk Archaeology 40 (3): 286-296. Simmons, I.G. 2001. An Environmental History of Great Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Skeat, W.W. (ed.) 1882. The Book of Husbandry by Master Fitzherbert. London: English Dialect Society. Slicher van Bath, B.H. 1966. The Agrarian History of Western Europe, AD 500-1850. London: E. Arnold.

Kristensson, G. 1997. The voicing of initial fricatives revisited. In A.R. Rumble and A.D. Mills (eds.) Names, Places and People. An Onomastic Miscellany for John McNeal Dodgson. Stamford: Paul Watkins, pp. 186-194. Langdon, J. 1988. Agricultural equipment. In G. Astill and A. Grant (eds.) The Countryside of Medieval England. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 86-107. Lerche, G. 1994. Ploughing Implements and Tillage Practices in Denmark from the Viking Period to about 1800 Experimentally Substantiated. Herning: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters’ Commission for Research on the History of Agricultural Implements Publication 8. Liddiard, R. 1999. The distribution of ridge and furrow in East Anglia: ploughing practice and subsequent land use. Agricultural History Review 47: 1-6. MacCulloch, D. 1986. Suffolk and the Tudors, Politics and Religion in an English County 1500-1600. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Manning, W.H. 1964. The plough in Roman Britain. Journal of Roman Studies 54: 54-65. Manning, W.H. 1985. Catalogue of Romano-British Iron Tools, Fittings and Weapons in the British Museum. London: British Museum Press. Martin, E. 1999a. Place-name patterns. In D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.) An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, pp. 50-51. Martin, E. 1999b. Greens, commons and tyes. In D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.) An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, pp. 62-63. Martin, E. 1999c. Suffolk in the Iron Age. In J. Davies and T. Williamson (eds.) Land of the Iceni. The Iron Age in Northern East Anglia. Studies in East Anglia History 4. Norwich: Centre of East Anglian Studies, pp. 45-99. Martin, E. and Satchell, M. forthcoming. Wheare most Inclosures be. East Anglian Fields: History, Morphology and Management. East Anglian Archaeology. Murphy, P. 1994. The Anglo-Saxon landscape and rural economy: some results from sites in East Anglia and Essex. In J. Rackham (ed.) Environment and Economy in Anglo-Saxon England. CBA Research Report 89. London: CBA, pp. 23-39. Murphy, P. 1996. Environmental archaeology. In O. Bedwin (ed.) The Archaeology of Essex. Proceedings of the 1993 Writtle Conference. Chelmsford: Essex County Council, pp. 168-180. Näsman, U. 1989. The Germanic Iron Age and Viking Age in Danish archaeology. Journal of Danish Archaeology 8: 159-87. Newman, J. 1992. The late Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlement pattern in the Sandlings of Suffolk. In M.O.H. Carver (ed.) The Age of Sutton Hoo. The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe. Woodbridge: Boydell, pp. 25-38. Nitz, H-J. 1983. The Church as colonist: the Benedictine Abbey of Lorsch and planned Waldhufen colonisation in the Odenwald. Journal of Historical Geography 9: 105-126. 370

EDWARD MARTIN: NOT SO COMMON FIELDS: THE MAKING OF THE EAST ANGLIAN LANDSCAPE Excavations at Scole, 1993-4. East Anglian Archaeology. Wiltshire, P.E.J. and Murphy, P. 1999. Current knowledge of the Iron Age environment and agrarian economy of Norfolk and adjacent areas. In J. Davies and T. Williamson (eds.) Land of the Iceni. The Iron Age in Northern East Anglia. Centre of East Anglian Studies, Norwich, pp. 132-61. Wordie, J.R. 1983. The chronology of English Enclosure, 1500-1914. Economic History Review 36: 483-505. Young, A. 1786. Minutes relating to the dairy farms &c of High Suffolk… Annals of Agriculture 27: 194-195.

Smith, A.H. 1956. English Place-Name Elements. English Place-Name Society Vols. 25-26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spencer, J. and Thomas, R. 1992. Inventory of Ancient Woodland (Provisional). Peterborough: English Nature. Stenton, F.M. 1971. Anglo-Saxon England (3rd edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sumner, S.C. 1963. Puritan Village. The Formation of a New England Town. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Tate, W.E. and Turner, M.E. 1978. A Domesday of English Enclosure Acts and Awards. Reading: University of Reading. Tesch, S. 1993. Houses, Farmsteads, and Long-term Change. A Regional Study of Prehistoric Settlements in the Köpinge Area, in Scania, Southern Sweden. Uppsala: Department of Archaeology, Uppsala University. Tester, A., forthcoming. Excavations south of the Waveney: The ‘Maltings’ (Stuston Area 6). In T. Ashwin and A. Tester (eds.) Excavations at Scole, 1993-4. East Anglian Archaeology. Theobald, J. 1999. Changing agriculture in Suffolk, 1650-1850. In D. Dymond and E. Martin (eds.) An Historical Atlas of Suffolk (3rd edition). Ipswich: Suffolk County Council, pp. 134-135. Thirsk, J. (ed.) 1984. The Agrarian History of England and Wales Vol. 5, 1640-1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trist, P.J.O. 1971. A Survey of the Agriculture of Suffolk. London: Royal Agricultural Society of England, County Agricultural Surveys no. 7. Walker, J. 1998. Essex medieval houses: type and method of construction. In D.F. Stenning and D.D. Andrews (eds.) Regional Variation in Timber-Framed Building in England and Wales Down to 1550. Chelmsford: Essex County Council, pp. 5-15. Warner, P. 1987. Greens, Commons and Clayland Colonization : The Origins and Development of Green-side Settlement in East Suffolk. Leicester: Department of English Local History Occasional Papers (4th series) 2. Warner, P. 1996. The Origins of Suffolk. Manchester: Manchester University Press. White, K.D. 1967. Agricultural Implements of the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitelock, D. (ed.) 1930. Anglo-Saxon Wills. Cambridge Studies in English Legal History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitelock, D. (ed.) 1961. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Williamson, T. 1987. Early co-axial field systems in East Anglia. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53: 419-431. Williamson, T. 1993. The Origins of Norfolk. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Williamson, T. 2002. Hedges and Walls. London: National Trust. Wiltshire, P.E.J. forthcoming. Palynological assessment and analysis. In T. Ashwin and A. Tester (eds.) 371

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Kate Howell standing by a Bronze Age cairn near Reynoldston, the Gŵr/Gower peninsula, Pembrokeshire. The unenclosed upland heath was used as commons grazing in medieval times. In the far distance is coastal salt marsh, also used for communal grazing. Also in the distance, the fields around Llanrhidian represent medieval and post-medieval intakes of the grasslands and some drainage and reclamation of the marsh, whilst the slope in front of Kate preserves the traces of further intakes that were subsequently abandoned to the heath. Source; A.M. Chadwick.

372

The co-axial field systems of Pembrokeshire revisited: towards an ekistic explanation Jonathan Kissock Landscapes can be self-consciously designed to express the virtues of a particular political or social community. (Schama 1995: 15). More recently, further co-axial field systems have been identified on St David’s Head in Pembrokeshire (Murphy 2001: 95-97), and on Gray Hill near Llanfair Discoed in Monmouthshire (Chadwick this volume b; Chadwick et al. 2003, 2004; Makepeace 1999).

Introduction In 1988 in Pembrokeshire I discovered, most unexpectedly, a series of what, elsewhere in Britain, were being termed co-axial field systems (Kissock 1990: 6062). These were subsequently published (1993: 190-197), but were then largely forgotten. At the time I was searching through large numbers of Ordnance Survey maps for regular, planned landscapes as part of a wider study of village origins in Ssouth Wales. Hence I ignored what I thought were probably ‘fossilised’ elements of a prehistoric landscape underlying the principle medieval features of the landscape – castles, villages, towns and monasteries – which had been laid out upon and amidst them. This short paper reintroduces these landscapes, argues for a new date for them and uses the concepts of ekistics to examine their origin, function and subsequent demise. In many regions of Europe the debate on early land allotment has developed beyond simple considerations of date and function. However in southwest Wales the last fifteen years have seen almost no consideration of these landscapes, let alone any attempt at their re-interpretation in the light of work elsewhere.

Ekistics: a theory for explaining the co-axial systems Ekistics was developed by the planner and urban geographer Constantine Doxiadis in the 1940s as a methodology for the study of human settlement. The basic principal of ekistics is that all human settlement is the product of the content (society) and the container (the settlement), both are human-made and the key focus of the methodology lies in the study of the interconnected relationship between them. Five elements of human society are recognised. The content is divided into man and society, with the content comprising the natural environment, shells (or structures) and the networks which facilitate the functioning of the whole. All are influenced by the recognition of the need to examine the function and evolutionary forces behind them (Doxiadis 1968: 21-22, 40). Through its formulation of specific laws ekistics offers a way of overcoming some of the perceived weaknesses of traditional approaches in that precise criteria for the viability, efficiency and survival of settlement systems are established.

Apart from the planned and planted medieval villages regularly laid out landscapes can be found in four areas of Pembrokeshire: at Maenclochog, in and around Manorbier, at Templeton and – covering a considerable area – at Ambleston (Figure 1). On first inspection they seem to be similar to the co-axial field systems, noted by Andrew Fleming on Dartmoor and elsewhere (Fleming 1987, 1988, 1989). Co-axial field systems were defined by Fleming as those which had been laid out with respect to one predominant axis. Boundaries either followed these axes or ran at right angles to them; the former were termed axial boundaries and the latter transverse boundaries. Axial boundaries sometimes ran to terminal boundaries which delimited one edge of a co-axial system, and the latter were therefore termed terminal boundaries. Co-axial systems were usually extensive and Fleming proposed 100 hectares as a reasonable lower limit for defining an area as a co-axial field system. Related to the large size of the co-axial field systems was their ‘terrain oblivious’ character. The field boundaries did not follow local relief and topography, but ran across a variety of major and minor physical features without altering their orientation. In his 1980s studies Fleming could provide no Welsh instances of co-axial field systems in his listing of examples, although Flatrés’ ‘terroirs orientés’ in the western Vale of Glamorgan probably justified inclusion (Flatrés 1957: 553-558).

Doxiadis offers fifty-four ‘precepts’ (my term and perhaps one preferable to his use of ‘laws’) for the study of settlement (1968: 288-316). Of these the first five have an obvious impact on this study as they relate to the creation and development of settlement systems. They read: Law 1. A human settlement is created in order to satisfy certain needs expressed by different forces, needs of both its own inhabitants and others…Law 2. Following the creation and operation of a settlement new functions are added… and consequently the settlement has to satisfy the initial as well as the additional needs…Law 3. The ultimate goal of human settlements is to satisfy the needs of its inhabitants…Law 4. The satisfaction of the inhabitants cannot be ensured unless all their needs – economic, social, political, technological and cultural – are largely satisfied…Law 5. Human settlements are created by their inhabitants and their existence depends upon them. (Doxiadis 1968: 288-291). 373

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Figure 1. Location map. Source: A. Leaver.

Precept 47 also has clear relevance in the discussion of co-axial field systems:

The next two precepts relate to the demise of settlements: Law 6. A human settlement is created only when it is needed, and lives only as long as it is needed, that is only as long as there are needs expressed by forces strong enough to justify its existence…Law 7. The development and renewal of human settlements is a continuous process. If it stops, conditions leading to death are created; but how long the actual death will take depends on many factors. (Doxiadis 1968: 291).

Law 47. Another force which exercises an influence on the form of settlement is the tendency towards an orderly pattern (Doxiadis 1968: 313). In the first set of precepts the idea of needs is forcefully made and frequently repeated. Fleming considered that co-axial systems were needed because they provided an effective way of organising the colonisation of newlyacquired, marginal and perhaps previously unsettled land (1987: 193). He also argued that they may have been an assertion of the confidence of a community and of its potential for expansion when environmental conditions, usually restricting the use of marginal lands, were better than usual. Alternatively, he proposed that the adoption of co-axial principles as a necessary response of a community in critical need of land, perhaps following their loss of lands elsewhere. In his critique of Fleming’s work, Petersen regards the boundaries as a purposeful (as opposed to ritually symbolic), and argued that they were

As our focus should be on the dimension of time, precepts 13 and 14 also have relevance. They state: Law 13. Time is a factor necessary for the development of settlements. As such it is inherent in settlements and is physically expressed in them…Law 14. Time is not only necessary for the development of settlements, but also for their existence. Therefore, time, along with the three physical dimensions, becomes a fourth dimension, indispensable to the settlement. (Doxiadis 1968: 294 -296). 374

JONATHAN KISSOCK: THE CO-AXIAL FIELD SYSTEMS OF PEMBROKESHIRE REVISITED: TOWARDS AN EKISTIC EXPLANATION furthermore, they seem to have remained in use (even if partially rebuilt, reworked and altered) for considerable lengths of time. One of the key factors in dating the Pembrokeshire co-axial fields is the relationship between the field systems themselves and the villages (especially the planted and therefore dateable villages). Another important factor is the spatial relationship between the co-axial systems and early territorial units, most notably those established prior to the Norman annexation of the region.

needed as a tool to support land management (1990: 549550). Tom Williamson also followed this line of thought. His premise was that co-axial planning was the result of a need to partition areas prior to their more intensive settlement and/or use (Williamson 1987: 429-430). These areas may once have been used at a relatively low degree of intensity by a variety of different communities and population pressure was suggested as underlying these changes. Both Petersen and Williamson therefore shared a common functional explanation for the origins of co-axial systems of land division. In ekistic terminology co-axial field systems were therefore the product of and a means of satisfying a need and in doing so they display the orderly tendency of Doxiadis’ forty-seventh precept. In his discussion Fleming raised the likelihood that the adoption of co-axial systems was probably ‘the strategy of communities rather than the tactics of individual farms or hamlets’ (Fleming 1987: 191, his emphasis), and went on to ask whether or not systems of this nature were developed by local communities or imposed upon them (1987: 197, again his emphasis). In the context of the origins of most of the Pembrokeshire systems, it is at present impossible to determine whether or not they were the result of community action or individual desire, although it is possible that the Ambleston-Wallis was an imposition, and this will be discussed below. The demise of the systems is however clearer – it was a part of what might be termed ‘landscape cleansing’, a process that marked a preparatory stage in the imposition of Norman rule over south west Wales.

When the initial study was carried out there appeared to be four possible sets of circumstances which could have led to the creation of the regularly laid out landscapes in Pembrokeshire. In reverse chronological order they are as a result of Parliamentary enclosure in the nineteenth century; plantation following the enforced settlement of a Flemish community in the area c. 1110; plantation after the Norman conquest of c. 1090; or the widespread survival of prehistoric boundaries. This re-evaluation of the co-axial systems of Pembrokeshire will also suggest a fifth date – in the ninth, tenth or eleventh centuries CE. Selective excavation of a number of these boundaries is now clearly needed so as to place the boundary systems in a relative and, hopefully, an absolute chronological framework. The most recent possible date is after Parliamentary enclosure in the early nineteenth century. Parliamentary enclosure usually led to the creation of a particular type of field pattern which can easily be distinguished from earlier enclosure for, as elsewhere in Britain, Parliamentary enclosure fields were normally laid out in rectilinear networks with straight sides and right angled corners. However, Parliamentary enclosure is relatively rare in Pembrokeshire and indeed in Wales as a whole. There are only seven enclosure acts listed for Pembrokeshire (Bowen 1914: 46-56). Two of the acts relate to north Pembrokeshire areas where regular landscapes are depicted on the Ordnance Survey maps.

Landscape stratigraphy – a methodology for dating the co-axial systems Ascribing a date to the origin of the co-axial systems is not straightforward. Nevertheless, the technique which Williamson has called ‘topographic analysis’ or landscape stratigraphy offers some possibilities (1987: 420). Just as excavation provides relative stratigraphic relationships for features by examining those that cut into or overlie them, and those which they themselves cut into or overlie, so the elements which make up the landscapes can be examined in a similar way. Landscape features such as boundaries, roads, tracks and settlements can thus be placed in a relative chronological order, and in many circumstances a terminus ante quem can be assigned on the basis of the relationship of a co-axial system to a dated element. In this way, Williamson (1987: 427) argued that the co-axial system of the ScoleDickleborough area, on the Norfolk-Suffolk border ‘underlay’ a Roman road and was therefore prehistoric in date (but see Martin this volume.). Elsewhere, however, in nearby Bungay and Halesworth two co-axial systems were shown to be later than Roman roads, and hence likely to have a middle or late Saxon date at the earliest (1987: 428).

Maenclochog and Letterston were enclosed by Parliamentary Acts in 1815 and 1856 respectively. The area of the enclosures in Maenclochog was noted as comprising several ‘large and extensive commons, commonable lands and wastes’ on the border between Maenclochog itself and the neighbouring parishes of Llangolman and Llandilo (House of Lords Record Office Original Act, 55 George III, no. 163). The purpose of the enclosure was to bring the land concerned into cultivation. It can be said with certainty that this Act dealt with the enclosure of waste far away from the village, and beyond the confines of the co-axial system described below. It is not possible even to speculate on the area that was enclosed at Letterston. The enclosures were carried out under a general act, the Second Annual Enclosure Act of 1856 (House of Lords Record Office Printed Act, 1920 Victoria, chapter 106). No details are therefore available in the Parliamentary sources. There are no enclosure acts for other areas where such regular field systems exist, and these cannot therefore be the result of Parliamentary enclosure.

It appears that the origins of co-axial field systems can have a variety of dates ranging from prehistory onwards; 375

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT boundaries preserving the lines of much earlier ones. It is also possible that some or all of the boundaries physically lie on top of the earlier ones. Only excavation, now especially desirable, will resolve this.

The second possible set of circumstances concerns plantation following conquest. Invasions were once commonly invoked as agents of social change. Whilst this is thankfully no longer routinely done, they ought to be considered in certain circumstances where they appear to be justified. For example, Brian Roberts has used the Norman conquest and the subsequent military campaigns in northern England to ‘explain’ the regular settlement patterns of Co. Durham and Cumberland (1987: 173175); yet this is somewhat unsatisfactory as he makes no attempt to discuss why this should have happened. The use of a series of ethnographic analogies does, however, seem to justify his argument. In a range of areas where regular landscapes are found, from eastern Europe, via India to southern Australia, conquest or colonial annexation was usually a prelude to the deliberate foundation of regularly laid out villages and landscapes (Kissock 1997: 124).

Manorbier and Jameston Another area of co-axial field system lies on the coast of south Pembrokeshire at Manorbier (Fig. 2). The system can be divided into two distinct areas. The smaller one, which is about 80 hectares in extent (and so below Fleming’s 100 hectare threshold), lies immediately northeast of the village of Manorbier itself. The larger one of about 300 hectares lies a little further west, between and around the villages of Manorbier Newton and Jameston. Between the two areas many, but not most, of the boundaries run parallel to the axis of the rest of the system. The smaller area ends at a clear transverse terminal boundary which appears to extend both east and west of the area of co-axially laid-out field. The larger area again has the apparently terrain oblivious character of co-axial fields. The geological trend of the bedrock runs from east to west, and as the boundaries run northsouth they cross a wide variety of land types and qualities. The system runs over gently undulating land, ignoring small streams, springs and wells before ascending 60 metres to end on the Manorbier Ridgeway. Here the northernmost edge of the system is marked by an immense hedgebank; it is impossible to see over this feature when driving or walking along the Ridgeway itself. The Ridgeway also marks the limit of the AngloNorman manor of Manorbier.

A careful and considered approach to settlement plantation in Pembrokeshire yields interesting results. The most likely occasions when regular landscape foundation could have followed settlement were after either the Norman or the Flemish settlement in c. 1090 and in c. 1110 respectively. When the Norman earl Arnulf de Montgomery seized his Welsh lands and made them into the Norman lordship of Pembroke, he deliberately encouraged settlements. The villages represent the foundation of centres for his followers, who were obliged to support him with military service. Elsewhere in Pembrokeshire, in the former cantrefi of Rhos and Daugleddau, Henry I is believed to have deliberately settled a Flemish community, perhaps to replace de Montgomery's followers who had fled into exile with him following the Bellême rebellion and so to render permanent a border across which the lifestyle was unstable, precarious and vulnerable (Owen 1875: 96105). The process was probably entrusted to locators – men who made a profession of creating villages.

That the system does not extend beyond the Ridgeway is significant – it implies that the co-axial system was laid out after the establishment of this boundary. Whilst this boundary was certainly in use after the Norman Conquest, many of the manors of Norman Wales were based upon earlier territorial divisions. The existence of the commote of Manorbier probably predates the establishment of the commote of Penfro (Pembroke), of which it was later to become a part. B.G. Charles considers Manorbier to have been the caput of an ancient territorial unit, with the name deriving from the Welsh mainaur or maenawr (one division of a commote) and the personal name Pir or Pyr (1992: 671, 697-698). Manorbier and the adjacent parish of Penally formed one unit in the early medieval period. Indeed, Manorbier seems to have extended much further east than it presently does to include Caldy Island, the Welsh name of which (Ynys Byr) includes the same, albeit mutated, personal name element.

The co-axial field systems of Pembrokeshire Maenclochog At Maenclochog nearly 200 hectares of a co-axial system run from the valley of the Allt Fawr up over a spur of land which separates this stream from another. The boundaries cross this second stream and continue to run east-north-east up this valley and over another spur before appearing to end on the far side of a third spur. There is no clear terminal boundary here. The system is clearly terrain oblivious and ignores both local drainage and relief and also the village of Maenclochog itself. The boundary banks cannot be followed through the village in their entirety, yet they certainly run through it in a discontinuous form. It is possible to trace stretches of coaxial boundary which, whilst broken in places, establish the fundamental form of the contemporary village plan. This pattern is depicted in the Ordnance Survey map made in the early twentieth century, although the boundaries are thought to have been established well before this, and are therefore almost certainly modern

Penally was certainly the focus of a pre-Conquest religious community and is reputedly the birth place of Saint Teilo. There were four early Christian monuments here, all of ninth or tenth century date. The Book of Llandaff mentions certain properties in this area; an area which included Longbury Bank, probably the best archaeologically known early medieval site in this region (Campbell and Lane 1993: 15-29). The copies of charters 77 and 125b (in Wendy Davies’ edition) relate to lands hereabouts. Neither was strictly a charter, nor was ‘charter’ 253 which listed other ecclesiastical properties in the area (Davies 1979: 95-96, 376

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Figure 2. Boundaries around Manorbier and Jameston. Source: Drawn by A. Leaver.

Ambleston Common and Wallis Moor By far the largest area of co-axial field system in Pembrokeshire lies around Ambleston Common and Wallis Moor in the north of the former county (Fig. 3). The land covered by the system measures over five kilometres by three kilometres and its total area is therefore in excess of 1000 hectares. The densest concentration of axial boundaries appears to run towards the irregularly-shaped Wallis Moor at the centre of the system. More axial boundaries are to be found to the west where they run from Ambleston Common across the unenclosed land either side of Spittal Brook, before finally terminating some hundreds of metres to the south of the stream. Some of the longest, most continuous boundaries can be found on the easternmost extremity of the system, where they run uninterrupted for a kilometre or more. Again the system takes little account of variations in terrain – the boundaries run over both gentle and steep slopes and through saddles between hills, they cross streams and climb up and down valley sides.

126). All of the places mentioned lay on the River Ritec or south of it, along the coast towards Manorbier. It is possible that the group of settlements granted away in ‘charter’ 77 formed the known pre-Conquest territorium of terra Pennalun. Within the Manorbier system the village of Jameston is laid out on one axis and the surrounding co-axial fields on another. The strips of the large co-axial system run on a north-south axis, whilst those which are associated with the village seem to run out from its centre. The chronological relationship between the two has already been the subject of debate. Brian Roberts (1987: 64) has argued that Jameston is a settlement of early medieval origin set within a field system of Anglo-Norman date. David Austin however claims that the co-axial system is Bronze Age in date, and that it is the village which is a Norman plantation within an earlier framework (Austin 1988: 22). It appears to me that Jameston was inserted into a pre-existing area of co-axial fields, which was thus older than the village itself. However, the village need not be a Norman foundation, and Howells (1971: 16) considers Jameston to be a secondary settlement founded on less fertile land in the late thirteenth or fourteenth century. The morphology though does suggest a pre-Conquest origin for the village (Kissock 132-135). Once again, excavation of selected boundary junctions might help resolve the pattern by demonstrating the relative chronology of the various components. Of key importance is the realisation that both village and co-axial system postdate the establishment of the territorial unit within which they once lay – and from the charter evidence this could have been before c. 1025.

The Ambleston-Wallis system is possibly dateable by landscape stratigraphy. What is traditionally thought to be a Roman road – the line of which is preserved in a modern minor road – appears to cut through some of the boundaries. The system should therefore be earlier than it. There is however nothing beyond local tradition for the date of the road, and indeed a proportion of the co-axial elements seem to have run to and terminated at this road rather than continued beyond it. Austin has considered the date of this system too (1988: 202). He has claimed that the system may have its origins in the Bronze Age and that the boundaries are preserved ‘reaves’. He notes that the strips focus on Wallis Moor and suggests that this 377

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Figure 3. Boundaries around Ambleston Common and Wallis Moor. Source: Drawn by A. Leaver.

place and as twelfth century Welsh society was far from egalitarian there is no reason why the elite should not have acted quickly and imposed this system on their downfallen peoples. An alternative model can also be proposed, whereby this enforced and rapid dislocation of the indigenous community was accompanied by the loss of the elite element in society, who might have been discredited after defeat or perhaps just simply ‘liquidated.’ Actions of this nature are known elsewhere in south Wales. In 1175 William de Breos took the advantage of a Christmas truce to murder a group of unarmed Welsh princes and nobles at Abergavenny castle. The dead included Seisyll ap Dyfnwal, lord of Upper Gwent, and both his sons – Gruffydd and the seven year old Cadwaladr.

name indicates the survival of a Welsh community here. This view is presumably based on the widely accepted idea, clearly stated by Cameron (1979: 34), that names with the form Wal- indicate the survival of the indigenous population in parts of Britain which were subject to conquest and subsequent settlement. This would date the name to a period after the Norman settlement, which began c. 1090, and the subsequent widespread adoption of the English language. Alternatively, it is possible that the name Wallis may not have referred to a residual Welsh community, but rather to a rath which stands on the Moor. It is thought probable that the name of another nearby village – Walton East – could have been derived from the personal name Wale (Charles 1992: 397, 454). That the system appears to focus on the rath may again suggest a date for the origin of the system in the preConquest or immediate post-Conquest period rather than in prehistory. The name Ambleston, however, is not thought to be Welsh, but rather to derive from the Old French personal name Amelot (Charles 1992: 595).

In such contexts the adoption of co-axial principles of land allotment by a leaderless society can be viewed as an example of Fleming’s argument for the adoption of coaxial systems as a strategy of communities. A curious version of Doxiadis’ thirteenth precept is visible here – time is inherent in the evolution of all settlements, yet here a long time depth is not always possible. The adoption of a co-axial form of land partition is a necessary, straightforward and swift way of dividing up lands amongst the community.

A set of unusual circumstances may lie behind the adoption of a co-axial system at Ambleston and Wallis – it could be the response of a community being forced to move swiftly into a new area, and so having a need to rapidly divide up the land outside of the main core of settlement. The Norman Conquest of Pembrokeshire led to the creation of an Englishry and a Welshry. The new Norman lords and their followers seized the fertile south of the county (the Englishry) and forced out the previous Welsh community. The dispossessed Welsh were forced into the less productive areas in and around the Prescelli Hills (the Welshry.) This displacement of the native population and the adoption of this particular form of settlement pattern could be indicative of swift imposition rather than evolution over time. There is, however, limited time depth within which evolution could take

Templeton, Narberth A further area of co-axial field system lies in Narberth, just north of the village of Templeton (Fig. 4). Most of the boundaries within the 150 hectares of the system run north-south, but at least a quarter, which form a spatially distinct group, follow a different axis (north-north-east to south-south-west). A clear terminal boundary can be identified on the northern edge of the larger co-axial system. This lies just beyond the crest of a hill and is therefore out of sight of much of the system itself. The 378

JONATHAN KISSOCK: THE CO-AXIAL FIELD SYSTEMS OF PEMBROKESHIRE REVISITED: TOWARDS AN EKISTIC EXPLANATION

Figure 4. Boundaries around Templeton, Narberth. Source: Drawn by A. Leaver.

boundary runs eastwards, and as it does so it neither follows nor runs at a consistent angle to the gently sloping contours of the area. The southern boundary of the system is marked by a stream and by areas of marshy ground, rather than by a linear boundary, suggesting that here at least the system was not totally terrain oblivious. The smaller system has a clear terminal boundary which runs north-south behind all the plots on the western edge of the village.

pre-existing landscape. The main thoroughfare of the village runs uphill from south to north and the boundaries of the village plan run perpendicular to this. The co-axial system appears to lie under the village and should therefore predate its foundation at the end of the eleventh or first years of the twelfth century. On the western edge the boundary of the village has been laid over the co-axial field boundaries, ‘shaving’ off at a peculiar angle the corner of one of the strips that comprise the co-axial system, and where once again excavation could provide interesting results. Hence Sentence Camp, an AngloNorman castle ringwork and a possible precursor of the village, appears spatially divorced from it. The co-axial system predates the plantation of the village and so a terminus ante quem for its origins could be put at c.1090.

Landscape stratigraphy only clearly demonstrates that the co-axial system predates a branch of the Great Western Railway! Here however the village was laid out on a different axis to the co-axial system, and thus may not have respected a pre-existing landscape. The village might have been laid out at the behest of Stephen Perrot, one of the main lieutenants of the first Norman earl of Pembroke.1 No respect is shown by the village plan to the

Time is essential in an examination of Templeton. The landscape here has evolved as new practices were imposed within the existing framework (precept 2). The characteristic double right-angled shape of paths are visible amongst the strips of medieval fields, most

1 With the exception of the name, there is nothing to link the origins of Templeton to the Knights Templar.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Chadwick, A.M., Pollard, J., Peterson, R., Hamilton, M. and Wickstead, H. 2003. The Gray Hill Landscape Research roject. Past 44: 1-3. Chadwick, A.M., Pollard, J., Peterson, R., Hamilton, M. and Wickstead, H. 2004 [2003]. Gray Hill (Mynydd Llwyd), Llanfair Discoed (ST43609360). Archaeology in Wales 42: 101-103. Charles, B.G. 1992. The Place-names of Pembrokeshire. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales. Davies, W.E. 1979. The Llandaff Charters. Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales. Doxiadis, C.A. 1968. Ekistics: an Introduction to the Science of Human Settlements. London: Hutchinson and Co. Flatrès, P. 1957. Géographie rurale dans quatre contrées celtiques: Irlande, Galles, Cornwall et Man. Rennes: Librarie Universitaire, J. Plihon. Fleming, A. 1987. Co-axial field systems: some questions of time and space. Antiquity 61: 188-202. Fleming, A. 1988. The Dartmoor Reaves. Investigating Prehistoric Land Divisions. London: Batsford. Fleming, A. 1989. Co-axial field systems in later British prehistory. In H.A. Nordstrom and A. Knape (eds.) Bronze Age Studies. Stockholm: Statens Historika Museum, pp. 151-162. Howells, B.E. 1971. Open fields and farmsteads in Pembrokeshire. Pembrokeshire Historian 3: 7-27. Kissock, J.A. 1990. The Origins of Villages in South Wales: a Study in Landscape Archaeology. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Leicester. Kissock, J.A. 1993. Some recent examples of co-axial field systems in Pembrokeshire. Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 40: 190-197. Kissock, J.A. 1997. ‘God made nature and men made towns’: post-Conquest and pre-Conquest villages in Pembrokeshire. In N. Edwards (ed.) Landscape and Settlement in Medieval Wales. Oxbow Monograph 81. Oxford: Oxbow, pp. 123-137. Makepeace, G.A. 1999. Gray Hill (Mynydd Llwyd), Llanfair Discoed (ST4393). Archaeology in Wales 39: 71-72. Marx, K. 1973. Grundriβe der Kritik der Politischen Okonmie (edition edited by D. McLellan as Marx’s Grundriβe). London. Murphy, K. 2001. A prehistoric field system and related monuments on St David’s Head and Carn Llidi, Pembrokeshire. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 67: 85-99. Petersen, J.M.W. 1990. Why did the idea of co-axial field systems last so long? Antiquity 64: 584-591. Roberts, B.K. 1987. The Making of the English Village: a Study in Historical Geography. Harlow: Longman. Sahlins, M.D. 1972. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock Publications. Saunders, T. 1990. The feudal construction of space: power and domination in the nucleated village. In R. Samson (ed.) The Social Archaeology of Houses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 181-196. Schama, S. 1995. Landscape and Memory. London: Harper Collins.

notably close to the northern edge. Whilst the village has slighted the co-axial layout of the landscape, enough of the boundaries must have survived to influence the shape of the later field system. Doxiadis’ sixth and seventh precepts relate to the end of the need for a system and its subsequent ‘death.’ In the case of Templeton this ‘death’ may have been swift – again as a result of the Conquest, and perhaps a desire to remodel elements of the landscape. Conclusion In summary, it can be seen that in many of these systems the villages and co-axial fields were laid out on different axes. There is growing – and I would argue persuasive evidence – to place the origin of these systems in the centuries immediately prior to the Norman and Flemish settlement of the region. Williamson’s method of landscape stratigraphy helps establish these dates, whilst Doxiadis’ ekistic precepts point clearly to the origin of such systems as a necessary response to clearly defined circumstances. At Jameston, perhaps at Maenclochog and most clearly at Templeton, when villages were established they slighted the pre-existing landscape layout. Villages may have appealed to the Normans as they allowed for a much greater social control of communities (Saunders 1990), and there is plentiful ethnographic evidence that once brought together the organisation and command of people is easier and that individualistic, even anarchistic, leanings of some curbed (Marx 1973: 26; Sahlins 1972: 140). The creation and maintenance of the co-axial landscapes may have served as markers of the identity of the Welsh communities and hence their deliberate repudiation by the Norman incomers can be seen as part of a system which aimed to re-enforce conquest and subjugation.

Acknowledgements The initial research into the co-axial field systems of Pembrokeshire was funded by the Research Board of the University of Leicester. Bibliography Austin, D. 1988. Review of B.K. Roberts ‘The making of the English village: a study in historical geography’. Journal of Historical Geography 14: 201-9. Bowen, I. 1914. The Great Enclosures of Common Lands in Wales. London: Chiswick Press. Cameron, K. 1979. The meaning and significance of the Old English Walh in English place-names. The English Place-names Society Journal 12: 1-34. Campbell, E. and Lane, A. 1993. Excavations at Longbury Bank, Dyfed, and early medieval settlement in south Wales. Medieval Archaeology 37: 15-77.

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JONATHAN KISSOCK: THE CO-AXIAL FIELD SYSTEMS OF PEMBROKESHIRE REVISITED: TOWARDS AN EKISTIC EXPLANATION Owen, H. 1875. The Flemings in Pembrokeshire. Archaeologia Cambrensis 92: 96-105. Williamson, T. 1987. Early co-axial field systems on the East Anglian boulder clays. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 53: 419-431.

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The South Ring Drain at Cantley Low Common, South Yorkshire. Many low-lying parts of South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire were alder carr and wetlands, probably used for communal seasonal grazing until the advent of post-medieval drainage schemes, some undertaken by Dutch engineers. Large parts of the East Anglian Fens and the Somerset and Gwent Levels have seen extensive rainage and reclamation, sometimes since Roman times, and are now used for intensive arable production and improved grazing. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Woodland and Champion: farming, ‘the social’, and the origins of medieval landscapes Tom Williamson the late-enclosed former champion lands, characterised by rectilinear fields defined by species-poor hawthorn hedges – and the ‘ancient countryside’, with its abundance of old, species-rich hedges, and with many more ancient woods and commons (Fig. 2) (Rackham 1976: 17, 1986: 4-6).

Introduction Historians and archaeologists have long pondered the origins of the classic medieval landscape of nucleated villages and extensive open fields (Figure 1). In these, the holdings of farmers took the form of numerous unhedged strips, intermingled across the whole area of the township. Highly communal systems of agriculture were enforced, and in most townships a continuous third or half of the arable lay fallow each year, to be grazed by the village flocks and herds (Hall 1982). Researchers have also puzzled over the related question of why such arrangements were not universal in lowland England. In some regions more dispersed patterns of settlement were the norm, associated with multiple and irregular openfield systems, in which the holdings of farmers were more clustered; or with land that was farmed in severalty, in enclosed fields (Roberts and Wrathmell 2002: 147170). This distinction between ‘champion’ and ‘woodland’ areas continued into the post-medieval period, and had important knock-on effects on the development of agrarian systems (Williamson 2003: 192196). Even today these differences can be seen in the distinction between Rackham’s ‘planned countryside’ –

Different authors have mapped the distribution of the ‘two landscapes’ in different ways. All agree that the medieval farmers dwelling in a broad band running across the Midlands from the north-east to the Channel, generally farmed their land more co-operatively, and were more likely to live together in nucleated villages, than their contemporaries living in the south-east of England, or in the west (Fig. 3). Terms like ‘planned countryside’ or ‘champion’ are nevertheless misleading oversimplifications. In reality, many districts had agrarian arrangements falling uncomfortably between these neat models, while areas of ‘woodland’ landscape could be found deep within ‘champion’ districts, and vice versa (Taylor 1995). Moreover, these terms can serve to mask an important range of variation within the landscapes so designated. Thus in some ‘woodland’ districts open fields of ‘irregular’ form were widespread in the middle ages

Figure 1. Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire: a nucleated village set in its open fields, as shown on a map of 1635. Source: Leicestershire Records Office, used with permission.

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Figure 2. Ancient countryside – the claylands of south Norfolk from the air, showing a typical combination of irregularly shaped fields, scattered settlement, and small woods. Source: T. Williamson.

(Fig. 4), whereas in others enclosed fields in individual occupancy dominated the landscape. The particular mix of settlement forms also displayed much variety, with differing proportions of isolated farmsteads, set in their own fields; small green-side hamlets; and large commons, with associated girdles of settlement.

Explaining regional differences Explanations for the regional differences in the medieval landscape have, to a large extent, followed the fashions prevailing more widely in history and archaeology. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they were generally framed in tribal and ethnic terms (see Wickstead this volume a). Howard Gray, in his seminal study of English Field Systems published in 1915, saw the ‘champion’ landscapes (his ‘Midland System’) as a direct importation from the Saxon homelands in northern Germany and southern Scandinavia. Their concentration in the Midlands was a reflection of the ‘thorough Germanisation’ of this part of England during the fifth and sixth centuries (Gray 1915: 415). In contrast, in both Kent and East Anglia existing Romano-British systems of landholding had been taken over wholesale by AngloSaxon settlers, subsequently fragmenting into ‘irregular’ open fields through the effects of partible inheritance – as farms were repeatedly shared between co-heirs in an equitable manner, each field became subdivided into a number of narrow strips. But later developments in these two regions diverged as a consequence of the Danish invasions of the ninth century, which in East Anglia produced a high density of free tenures, and more complex systems of manorial organisation. Other historians have offered their own ethnic interpretations – Homans suggesting that the field systems of East Anglia owed their distinctive features to Frisian settlers, and Joliffe arguing that those in Kent were of Jutish origin (Homans 1969; Joliffe 1933).

Similarly, there were important distinctions between those ‘champion’ landscapes found in areas of light, porous soil – on the chalk downlands of Wessex and the south, on the wolds of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, to some extent on the Cotswolds, and on the sands of western East Anglia – and those which characterised the central area of the Midland clays. On the lighter soils, extensive tracts of heath and calcareous grassland were usually retained, in order to supply the feed required by the great flocks on whose manure the maintenance of the fertility of these light, leached lands depended (Williamson 2003: 79-80). In these ‘sheep-corn’ districts, the rhythm of agriculture beat to the regular movement of the sheep, from daytime grazing to the night time fold on the fallows. On the heavier soils of the Midlands in contrast, there was by the thirteenth century very little in the way of grazing. The ploughlands of each community often extended all the way to the boundaries of the vill, as much as 90% of the area might be in tilth, and the only permanent grassland took the form of hay meadows, located in the floors of the major river valleys (Hall 1995: 3).

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Figure 3. While different authorities have mapped the distinction in different ways, all agree that the ‘champion’ areas of Midland England were characterised by more nucleated patterns of settlement, more regular open-field systems, and later enclosure than the ‘woodland’ areas lying to either side. (a) the boundaries of Gray’s ‘Midland System’; (b) Rackham’s landscape regions; (c) the intensity of settlement dispersion in the nineteenth century, as mapped by Brian Roberts and Stuart Wrathmell. Sources: Gray 1915, frontispiece; Rackham 1976: 16; Roberts and Wrathmell 2002: 9.

In the 1920s and 1930s historians began to propose interpretations of medieval landscapes more rooted in the practicalities of farming life, and in the physical processes of colonisation and land reclamation. In 1935 Bishop suggested that the intermingled strips which were the hallmark of open-field agriculture resulted not only from partible inheritance, but also from the process of land clearance, or ‘assarting’, carried out by groups of

cultivators. Newly-won land was divided in the form of strips between those who had shared in the arduous task of reclamation, and those who had formerly grazed their livestock over it (Bishop 1935). Three years later, in their book The Open Fields, the Orwins emphasised the importance of ‘co-aration’ (joint ploughing) in the development of nucleated villages and intermixed arable, as well as the more general necessity for close co385

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Figure 4. Langley in Norfolk, as shown on an undated map of c. 1700. Although well within the area of Rackham’s ‘ancient countryside’ Langley, like most clayland parishes in East Anglia, once had extensive open fields which disappeared gradually, through the process of informal piecemeal enclosure. Source: private collection.

strongly regional character of the variations in the medieval landscape, and it was only in the 1960s with the work of Joan Thirsk, that this problem was firmly addressed.

operation amongst farmers living in an insecure environment (Orwin and Orwin 1938: 37-44). They argued that the form of intermixed parcels as strips arose directly from the use of heavy mouldboard ploughs, which were difficult to manoeuvre in small, square fields – the ‘Open Fields could only have attained their final form in association with the mouldboard plough’ (Orwin and Orwin 1938: 39). Few peasant farmers possessed sufficient oxen to make up their own plough team, and they were thus obliged to combine with their neighbours for ploughing, something carried out more conveniently if they lived in close proximity, in nucleated villages. And the equal contribution which each made to the plough team was reflected in the even distribution of their holdings across the landscape, on good and bad, near and distant land (Orwin and Orwin 1938: 12-14, 51-52).

In a seminal 1964 article, Thirsk argued that the field systems encountered in early documents had gone through a series of phases of development, and that many of the regional variations discussed by Gray and others really represented arrested stages in a single process (Thirsk 1964, 1966). The ‘Midland system’, with its nucleated villages and extensive, highly communal open fields, was a relatively late development. Most such systems only came into existence in post-Conquest period she suggested, through the remodelling of earlier, less ‘regular’ arrangements. The reason why this final, ‘mature’ stage was reached in some areas but not in others was related to population pressure and the availability of resources, principally reserves of pasture. Demographic growth led not only to the disintegration of holdings into strips, through partible inheritance and assarting, but also to the contraction of reserves of pasture and a consequent crisis in grazing. Medieval arable farming depended on the maintenance of sufficient livestock to provide both traction for the plough and manure for the soil, and as pasture dwindled farmers were obliged to make more intensive use of the marginal grazing offered by the aftermath of the harvest, and by the fallows. But where arable land lay intermingled, in

Such ‘practical’ explanations were not universally accepted by historians. As Homans pointed out, farmers could surely have shared teams, and ploughs, without cultivating their land in intermingled strips or living cheek-by-jowl in tightly clustered settlements (Homans 1941: 81). Moreover, large plough teams of six or eight oxen appear to have been in use throughout England by later Saxon times. Why then, did ‘regular’ open fields and nucleated villages become the usual mode of agrarian organisation in some districts and not in others? ‘Practical’ and ‘agrarian’ approaches, and in particular the concept of co-aration, thus failed to explain the 386

TOM WILLIAMSON: WOODLAND AND CHAMPION: FARMING, ‘THE SOCIAL’, AND THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES unhedged strips, it was hard to utilise these resources unless neighbouring cultivators timed their operations in concert. One farmer could hardly graze his lands while those of others, lying adjacent, still lay under crops. Farmers were thus drawn inexorably into increased levels of co-operation, a process which culminated in the institution of a continuous fallowing sector which occupied a half or a third of the land of the village.

Thirsk. The same was true of most documentary historians. In particular, Harold Fox’s detailed examination of charter evidence concluded that the ‘Midland system’ had, in fact, generally been adopted in the pre-Conquest rather than the post-Conquest period (Fox 1981). He also argued that a contributory factor in its development were important social and tenurial changes.

Thirsk’s article came at a time when a host of local and regional studies were being undertaken, many of which appeared in Baker and Butlin’s edited volume Studies in British Field Systems (Baker and Butlin 1973). This book vividly displayed the bewildering variety of British field systems, a range greater than Gray had ever assumed. On the whole, the contributors favoured demographic rather than cultural or agrarian explanations, most implicitly or explicitly adopting some version of Thirsk’s powerful model. The editors in particular followed Thirsk in seeing ‘regular’ or Midland style agriculture as developing out of the more ‘irregular’ systems, of the kinds found outside the Midland zone (Baker and Butlin 1973: 635656). In addition, several contributors argued that in most ‘woodland’ districts the dispersed elements in the settlement pattern – the isolated farms and small hamlets lying away from parish churches and primary manorial complexes – were the consequence of late assarting of woodland and waste. This process had produced a proliferation of dispersed settlements, rather than simply adding new furlongs to the village fields, because of legal and social changes which occurred in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which culminated in the Statute of Merton of 1236. The waste land in any manor was increasingly seen as the property of its lord, who could grant it to individuals in the form of ring-fence farms, for rents assessed outside the traditional fiscal framework of the vill. In Brian Roberts’ words, “…the rise of the doctrine of the lord’s ownership of the waste during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the provision of defence against Novel Disseisin by the Statute of Merton…are key factors in explaining the swing to individual colonisation and emphasis on personal rather than communal rights” (Roberts 1973: 229).

A number of researchers, most notably Glanville Jones, had recently suggested a new model for the development of early medieval territorial organisation (Jones 1976). In early and Middle Saxon times, they argued, this had been based on very large estates that were much more extensive than later vills and manors. Such units generally contained within their boundaries specialised areas, and specialised settlements, devoted to the exploitation of arable, woodland or grazing. Such large territories gradually fragmented in the course of the later Saxon period, and as they did so, a new class of independent local lords emerged. Fox suggested that this process, and the consequent severance of townships from distant, ancestral grazing grounds, effectively thrust farmers into the kind of resource crisis described in Thirsk’s model. The multiple estate, it can be suggested, was no seedbed for the development of a type of field system whose distinguishing feature was a rigorous integration of arable and common pasture (Fox 1981: 100). Tenurial factors were also invoked by the historical geographer Bruce Campbell as a major reason for regional variations in medieval field systems (Campbell 1981). In the early medieval period some areas of England came to be characterised by strong lordship – by vills in which there was only one manor, and in which all the tenants were of unfree status. Others displayed more manorial complexity, and/or included large numbers of individuals who held their land by free tenure. Such differences to some extent correlated with the character of field systems. Lordship was an important determinant of agrarian arrangements because “There are several reasons for doubting whether the co-ordination and systematisation of common fields progressed quite as smoothly, and were quite so directly related to population growth, as the Thirsk model postulates” (Campbell 1981: 119). It was unlikely that peasant communities would themselves have been able to bring about changes in landholding of sufficient magnitude. For this, the hand of lordship was required, if only to ‘hold the ring’, and to act as arbiter of the new dispensation, and thus “…strong and undivided lordship would have been most favourable to the functional development of the commonfield system” (ibid.: 127).

The 1970s and 1980s saw a number of important contributions to the debate from archaeologists. In particular, work by Glenn Foard and David Hall served to confirm that nucleated villages (and therefore the highly communal field systems with which these were associated) had not been introduced by Germanic settlers in the fifth and sixth centuries, as earlier ‘ethnic’ explanations had assumed (Foard 1978; Hall 1981, 1982). Instead, early Saxon settlement had continued, in attenuated form, the essentially dispersed character of the Roman period. Nucleated villages had only emerged in the course of the middle or later Saxon periods. While a few archaeologists, notably Christopher Taylor, emphasised that in some districts true villages had only developed in post-Conquest times (Taylor 1983), most now favoured an earlier chronology for village formation, and open-field creation, than that originally suggested by

The 1980s and 1990s produced many other important contributions to the debate which cannot be discussed in detail here, most notably from David Hall, Robert Dodgshon and Eric Kerridge. Hall combined fieldwalking campaigns with systematic surveys of surviving ridge and 387

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT placed particular emphasis on the transition from joint rights in land, shared by members of extended families or tribal groups, to more individualised forms of tenure, and on “…the hutting of slaves, the planting of colonists, and the distribution to them of lands in common fields…” (ibid.: 49). Once a system of small intermixed holdings had come into existence, degrees of communal organisation inevitably followed, as people combined together to form common ploughs, or for the management of livestock (ibid.: 47).

furrow and documentary research to argue that many Midland open field systems had originally been planned, often in the form of furlongs much longer than those which appeared on the earliest maps, the initial layouts having undergone later alteration. Open fields, Hall concluded, “…do not seem to have been laid out by the early Saxons, but rather later, nor do they seem to be subdivided early private holdings, but a strip system ab initio…”, created when small settlements of early Saxon times had been nucleated into villages, a process which had begun as early as the eighth century AD (Hall 1981: 36-37).

Kerridge and Dodgshon thus introduced a range of more subtle and nuanced arguments into the debate about open field origins. But for the most part historians, and in particular archaeologists, have adhered to the demographic/resource crisis model proposed by Thirsk in the 1960s, albeit acknowledging to varying extents the importance of lordship, and changes in territorial organisation, in the evolution of landscapes. The ‘Midland’ system emerged during the middle and later Saxon period because of population pressure and a crisis of grazing resources. But it was also associated with the break-up of large estates, the emergence of local lords and the proliferation of demesne economies. One of the most recent studies of the topic, an investigation of the east Midlands carried out by Christopher Dyer, Carenza Lewis, and Patrick Mitchell-Fox published as Village, Hamlet and Field in 1997 (Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer 1997), placed its main emphasis on that familiar mix of rising population, subdivision and intermixture of holdings through inheritance and exchange, and dwindling supplies of pasture. Together, these led to a crisis in farming and recurrent disputes amongst cultivators.

Dodgshon’s frame of reference was rather wider than Hall’s, embracing the whole of the British Isles. He argued that open fields and subdivided arable had once, in various forms, been ubiquitous. But he eschewed the kind of linear developmental sequence accepted, implicitly or explicitly, by Thirsk and many other writers. He noted that open fields – or at least, intermixed arable strips – could be found in a range of tenurial contexts. In medieval Wales, for example, they were a feature both of settlements inhabited by bond tenants, and of townships occupied by free kindreds, or gwely (Dodgshon 1980: 3678). Subdivided fields arose in part, he conjectured, from the decay of more ancient systems in which resources had been jointly held and exploited by extended families and communities. But they also developed through partible inheritance and piecemeal colonisation (ibid.: 35-53). Far from being distinct explanations, these were all manifestations of a single deeper cause – the need to define property and rights more stringently, as the amount of free land was reduced by population growth and the expansion of cultivation, and as the growth of lordship and the elaboration of feudalism required the more careful calibration of land held in return for particular services (ibid.: 68-69). The development of intermixed holdings and the problems these posed for the organisation of farming led to the creation of new kinds of farming community, composed of individuals holding their own portions of land. The growth of lordship was an important factor in all this, and especially in the emergence of the Midland system, something which Dodgshon, following Thirsk, saw as a consequence of the need for more effective management of the grazing on the harvest stubble and fallows, as reserves of pasture dwindled (ibid.: 77).

A peaceful option for a long-term resolution of their difficulties involved the inhabitants reorganising their numerous farms and hamlets into common fields where the problems of competition would be minimised. The animals of the whole community were pastured together on the land which lay fallow or awaited spring cultivation. The land was subject to a cycle of fallowing which gave it a chance to recover some fertility (Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer 1997: 199). The change might, or might not have involved lordly coercion, and was encouraged not only by demographic growth but also by the need to produce a marketable surplus, which could be exchanged for the wide variety of commodities increasingly available as trade expanded. Only where population levels were relatively low, and resources of pasture extensive, did dispersed forms of settlement remain the norm (Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer 1997: 199-200).

Eric Kerridge, in his somewhat neglected book The Common Fields of England (1992), placed more emphasis on the practicalities of farming, while not neglecting social and demographic factors. In this respect his book marks a return to the concerns of pre-War scholars like the Orwins. Population growth he argued, was an insufficient explanation for the development of subdivided fields (Kerridge 1992: 48-50). Instead, they arose from the proliferation of farms, something which was only loosely correlated with demographic expansion and which could have come about in a number of ways “…from the division and allotment accompanying the creation of service-tenancies, the dissolution of large family holdings and inheritance, sale and purchase”. He

Problems with current interpretations The contention that areas in which nucleated villages and ‘regular’ open fields developed were ones of high population density and/or strong lordship, is thus widely 388

TOM WILLIAMSON: WOODLAND AND CHAMPION: FARMING, ‘THE SOCIAL’, AND THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES accepted by historians and archaeologists. But the evidence to support it is conspicuous by its absence. In particular, there is nothing in the statistics provided by the Domesday Survey to suggest that ‘champion’ areas were, in general, more densely populated than those characterised by dispersed settlement (Darby 1977) (Fig. 5). Lincolnshire does appear to have been full of people, but most of the more densely settled regions were outside the champion belt – in East Anglia, Essex and east Hertfordshire especially. These areas, and adjacent parts of the south-east, continued to be the most densely populated districts throughout the middle ages, to judge from the available evidence (Williamson 2003: 31-33). It is of course possible that in earlier centuries the champion Midlands was, in relative terms, the more densely populated region, but there is nothing in the archaeological fieldwork evidence to suggest this, and little in the landscape which might lead us to expect it. The distribution of population indicated by Domesday is perfectly explicable in terms of environmental factors which are unlikely to have changed significantly, or to have been moderated to any significant degree by technological change, during the previous two centuries or so. Population levels were thus lowest in areas of high rainfall where both cultivation, and the germination of crops were often delayed by waterlogged conditions, and cereal yields were therefore poor; or where soil fertility was often low because of the leaching from the soil of lime and nutrients; and where sporadic harvest failures caused by wet summers led to periodic dearth. Away from the wetter north and west, population levels tended to be low in areas of acidic soils, because low levels of lime produced poor cereal yields. Conversely, population densities were highest in areas best suited to cereal cultivation, on the more fertile and calcareous clays and loams in the drier east of England. The similarity between the map of Domesday population densities produced by Darby, and the distribution of arable land recorded by the Land Utilisation Survey in the 1940s, is striking (Fig. 5). The idea that dispersed settlement patterns per se can be explained, in any straightforward way, in terms of the late clearance of waste in areas formerly only sparsely settled, and by changes in tenurial conditions culminating in the Statute of Merton in 1236, is also questionable. In all areas of lowland England the mobile and scattered settlements of early Saxon times appear to have become fixed in the landscape, usually at sites later occupied by parish churches or major manorial foci, during the course of the middle Saxon period (Davison 1990; Foard 1978; Hamerow 1991). In ‘champion’ areas, such sites generally developed into nucleated villages. In some ‘woodland’ districts, rather more of these middle Saxon settlements seem to have existed, going on to form manorial halls or hamlets in the medieval landscape. But many hamlets and outlying farms were established during a subsequent phase of settlement dispersal, the precise chronology of which evidently varied from region to region. In some, settlement remained sparse well into the post-Conquest period, and the scattered pattern of farms and small hamlets can indeed be associated with large-

Figure 5. Top – Domesday population density, showing recorded individuals per square mile (after Darby 1977: 91). Centre – the distribution of arable land in England and Wales in c. 1940 (after Stamp 1950: 156). Bottom – free men and sokemen as a percentage of the recorded Domesday population. Source: T. Williamson, after Darby 1977: 67.

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Figure 6. Extensive commons, common-edge settlements, and isolated churches in the area around Wymondham on the claylands of central Norfolk, as shown on William Faden’s county survey of 1797. Although this was one of the most densely-populated areas in medieval England, large areas of unploughed land survived into the modern period. Source: William Faden’s Survey of the County of Norfolk, 1797.

in the champion Midlands. Moreover, the distribution of place-names containing elements relating to woodland suggests that this had also been true in the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries (Roberts and Wrathmell 2000: 88). Indeed, the distinction was maintained into the postmedieval period. Most champion areas remained landscapes of unrelieved arable as late as the eighteenth century, while ‘woodland’ districts had more diverse environments, with large areas of common grazing, numerous deer parks, and much managed woodland (Fig. 6). Yet at the same time it is quite clear that these differences had no necessary implications for agricultural productivity. The expansion of ploughlands on the Midland clays, and the wholesale destruction of woodland and grazing, did not necessarily allow a higher population to be fed here than in other kinds of countryside. Whatever the origins of such ‘champion’ landscapes, they evidently produced less food per acre than many, perhaps most, of the alternative ways of organising settlement and fields.

scale assarting as late as the twelfth or thirteenth century (Dyer 1991). In others, as we might expect given the population densities suggested by Domesday, a significant proportion of the isolated farms, manorial halls and small hamlets were of pre-Conquest origins. In northern East Anglia especially, the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the development of extensive green-edge settlements, a process which might involve the wholesale abandonment of older sites established in the middle Saxon period, leaving parish churches isolated from the principal foci of settlement (Fig. 6) (Davison 1990; Rogerson 1995; Williamson 2003: 91-114). In many ‘woodland’ districts in other words, the majority of dispersed farms and hamlets seem to have come into existence by the later twelfth century. This is not to deny that ‘woodland’ areas remained, in general, more wooded than ‘champion’ ones in the later Saxon period. Domesday shows quite clearly that woodland generally survived better in such districts than

390

TOM WILLIAMSON: WOODLAND AND CHAMPION: FARMING, ‘THE SOCIAL’, AND THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES typical valley pattern of Domesday England: evidently a significant shift of settlement took place during the last quarter of the first millennium AD (Cunliffe 1972: 5).

Woodland and champion were not therefore correlated in any obvious way with variations in early medieval population density. Nor is there any evidence that they were correlated closely with differences in lordly power. This is a subject where there is less straightforward evidence, but the distribution of free men and sokemen indicated by Domesday does not match the divide between champion and ‘woodland’ areas. Indeed, it is closely comparable with the patterns of population density implied by the same source, implying that this was a result of environmental conditions rather than a result of the intensity of Danish settlement in the ninth or tenth centuries, as is often argued (Fig. 5). Multi-manorial vills also tended to cluster in these same eastern and north-eastern areas. Lincolnshire was, as Domesday suggests, a relatively ‘free’ county, but was characterised nevertheless by nucleated villages and regular open field systems. Eastern Hertfordshire was highly manorialised, but had a dispersed pattern of settlement, and irregular field systems (Williamson 2000: 183-193).

This development may have been associated with technological change – with the adoption of larger ploughs, pulled by larger teams of oxen, which needed to be adequately fed and watered. Clustering of farms intensified in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, leading to the kind of infilling of damp grazing areas, and the emergence of tightly-nucleated villages that has been described by Oosthuizen on the chalklands of south Cambridgeshire (Oosthuizen 1994). In such circumstances any equitable division of land, whether through partible inheritance, or as holdings were allocated to colonists or bond tenants, was likely to take the form of intermixed parcels, rather than enclosed and discrete blocks. This was because the land lying at a distance from each farm tended to be less fertile than that closer at hand. This was partly because in many regions the land on lower ground was naturally more fertile than the poorer, thinner and more acidic soils on the intervening uplands, and partly because the land nearer the settlement tended to receive more farmyard manure than that located at a distance. The latter is attested to in the medieval period at least by the distribution of pottery sherds recovered by fieldwalking (e.g. Rogerson 1997: 26-27). In addition, the land nearest the settlement was more conveniently reached than that found at a distance, and people and equipment could be got on to it with greater speed, especially at harvest time.

The practice of farming – the light lands Early medieval England thus boasted a range of agrarian landscapes in which the degree of settlement dispersion and nucleation, and the relative extent of woodland and grazing as against permanent arable, were largely independent of either population density or structures of tenure and lordship. Some areas were evidently farmed more effectively, from the point of lords or tenants, from dispersed farms and small hamlets, others from compact villages. In some regions, extensive reserves of pasture or wood pasture were retained, while in others it was possible to expand the arable to the limits, but with no obvious implications for agricultural productivity. To understand such variations we clearly need to think not only in demographic, social and tenurial terms, but also in terms of the practice of agriculture – we need to consider the benefits that might accrue to lords or peasants from particular modes of agrarian organisation, in particular environmental circumstances.

It is thus easy to see how the character of settlement in these districts, and its relationship to soils and topography, would have generated patterns of intermixed holdings when land was being allocated according to some equitable scheme. But in addition, as cultivation expanded during the later Saxon period, further areas of intermixed arable would have been created, in the manner proposed by Bishop (1935). Farmers who had formerly used an area of heath or downland as common grazing, and who worked together to convert it to arable, would have divided it between them in the form of strips.

The emergence of champion landscapes is perhaps easiest to explain in agrarian terms in areas of light, freelydraining soil. Geographers have long emphasised the physical constraints on the distribution of settlement in such districts, and in an early medieval context at least, their arguments have been supported by the evidence of archaeological field surveys (e.g. Cunliffe 1972; Davison 1994; Gaffney and Tingle 1991; Rogerson 1997). During the middle and later Saxon period, farms came to cluster more and more along spring lines or beside major watercourses, where there were abundant reserves of lush pasture and good supplies of running water. What Cunliffe wrote about the chalklands of the Chalton area in Hampshire in 1972 is true of many other light soil regions:

The emergence during later Saxon times of a landscape of intermingled strips would have necessitated some degree of communal organisation of agriculture. As already noted, the heaths and downs in these districts, far from being under-utilised ‘wastes’, would have functioned as nutrient reservoirs, essential for keeping poor soils in cultivation (Kerridge 1967: 42-45, 1992: 74-86). The most efficient way of ensuring that the land was well manured was to pen sheep tightly together each night in moveable folds (Fig. 7). But this would have been prohibitively expensive in labour and time, if all farmers had moved their own small flocks each day to folds erected on their own scattered strips. As Kerridge observed, farmers, as well as driving their sheep daily from grazing to tillage and back again, “…would also have had all the lambing and shearing to attend to. All this would have preoccupied

The hill-top settlements belonging to the period between the fifth and the eighth centuries contrast dramatically with what we have come to accept as the 391

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Figure 7. The Sheep Fold by George Linnell, showing clearly the practice of close-folding sheep on light arable land. Source: Wolverhampton Art Gallery, used with permission.

manure. More importantly, because the land was heavy and moisture retentive, the flocks could not be close-folded for large parts of the year for fear that they might contract foot-rot, or poach the soil thereby making it harder to cultivate in the spring. Folding was thus often limited to the period from late summer into late autumn (Fox 1984: 130-133). In short, the factors responsible for the emergence of champion landscapes in light soils districts did not apply to any real extent in the Midlands, and many researchers have been puzzled by the adoption here of what appears to be a form of settlement and farming unsuited to heavy land.

him [sic] to such an extent as to leave him little time for growing cereals” (Kerridge1992: 26). It was inevitable that common flocks would develop, controlled by communal shepherds (ibid.: 27). In turn, this would have necessitated the imposition of various forms of communal crop regulation over the lands of the village. The need to allow easy movement of the flock across the arable doubtless encouraged the removal or neglect of fences or hedges as holdings were laid out in the form of strips, and as partible inheritance led to the progressive fragmentation of holdings. Stage by stage, perhaps with different chronologies in different regions, light lands thus inexorably developed ‘champion’ landscapes of communally-organised open fields, farmed for the most part from nucleated villages.

In Kerridge’s memorable phrase, such districts “…were, so to speak, torn from the body of the woodland and forcibly annexed to the champion” (Kerridge 1973: 28); for over large swathes of the south and east of England very similar clay soils carried landscapes of dispersed settlement, irregular field systems and enclosures. Indeed, most ‘woodland’ areas were associated with heavy clays, especially the London clays of south Hertfordshire, south Essex and Middlesex, and the chalky boulder clays of east Hertfordshire, north Essex and East Anglia. Such an apparent independence of human landscapes and the natural environment has lent encouragement those who view fields and settlement patterns as the spatial and physical manifestation of social and political forms; or of ancient ethnic habits, fossilised and inherited from the deep past (e.g. Homans 1941: 21). But this impression is to a large extent the consequence of a failure to consider closely the subtleties of the natural environment, or to engage in an imaginative way with the lives of early medieval farmers, and the particular problems which different environmental circumstances posed for them.

The practice of farming – the claylands The principles laid out above have been described by a number of historians, and the model broadly supported by the available archaeological evidence. What is less easy to explain is the emergence of champion landscapes on the Midland clays. In this region there was no need for settlement to remain clustered as population rose in the course of the Saxon period. Water was freely available in the form of streams and ponds, and farms could have dispersed across the landscape as new land was brought into cultivation, each surrounded by its own ring-fenced fields. Moreover, while folds and folding arrangements were a feature of medieval agriculture on clay soils, they lacked the central significance that they possessed in districts of light, porous soil. Most heavy soils were not so nutrient ‘hungry’, and thus needed less regular inputs of 392

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Figure 8. Ridge and furrow near Quainton in Buckinghamshire – medieval and post-medieval farmers ridged their open-field strips in this way largely to improve drainage on heavy clay soils. Source: T. Williamson.

Associations, were probably almost impossible to cultivate with the kinds of technology available to medieval farmers. The period of time during which they can be worked in the spring, even with modern technology, is extremely limited. In the case of the Ragdale soils, for example:

Clay soils suffer from seasonal waterlogging, something which delays farming operations and slows down germination, and thus lowers yields. It is this characteristic which has received most attention from researchers (Robinson 1949: 36-37). Both the archaeological and the documentary evidence shows that medieval farmers were acutely aware of the need to drain heavy land, either with field ditches or through various methods of ridging, of which ‘broad rig’ - the classic ridge and furrow of the Midland counties – is the most familiar (Hall 1999) (Fig. 8). But there were and are other ways in which clay soils cause difficulties to farmers. In particular, they are prone to puddle; that is, to form a sticky mess when wet, which adheres to ploughs, harrows and other implements; and which then dries to a hard, brick-like mass, difficult to cultivate and inimical to the growth of cereal crops (Seymour 1996: 14-16). Clay soils thus require particularly careful, and carefully timed, cultivation. The aim of the farmer is to encourage flocculation – to get the microscopic particles of clay to coalesce together in larger grains. Exposure to air and frost, incorporation of humus and lime, and improved drainage all encourage this process. Conversely, working clay soils when wet encourages puddling, and needs to be avoided at all costs.

When cultivations are carried out under wet conditions, the resulting structural damage reduces the already low porosity and causes prolonged waterlogging, often to the soil surface, and the death or retardation of seedlings due to lack of oxygen (Hodge et al. 1984: 295). Such problems are, however, rather less serious with nonpelo soils, those with sandy or loamy upper horizons, such as the Beccles 1 and 2 and the Burlingham Associations; or with the more calcareous pelosols, such as those of the Hanslope Association, especially where such soils occur in drier areas with less than 700mm rainfall per annum, as in the east of England. While clays might suffer to varying degrees from puddling and waterlogging, most also offered considerable benefits to early medieval farmers. As already noted, they are less prone to leaching of lime and nutrients than the lighter and more porous soils. Only where clay soils occur in areas of high rainfall (more than 700mm per annum), and/or have parent materials poor in lime, as across the Weald of Kent or on the London clays in south Hertfordshire, south Essex or Middlesex, are soil acidity or nutrient loss a problem. Not surprisingly, such

All clay soils are prone to puddling, but some rather more than others, especially the less calcareous pelosols and the pelo-stagnogleys, soils which are clayey or silty in their upper horizons. Such soils, most notably those classed by the Soil Survey of England and Wales as the Ragdale, Denchworth, Dunkeswick and Clifton 393

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Figure 9. Environmental factors in the distribution of ‘champion’ countryside – soils. 1) Areas of light, sheep-corn land with limited water supplies and soils requiring regular folding; 2) areas of moderately fertile or fertile clay soil, prone to puddling and compaction and with restricted opportunities for spring cultivation (principally those of the Denchworth, Ragdale, Dunkeswick, Foggathorpe, and Clifton Associations). This excludes areas of similar but less fertile, more acidic soils (such as those of the Essendon Association), and districts with more than 700mm rainfall per annum, both of which carried low population densities in the early middle ages. Source: Soil Survey of England and Wales.

areas generally carried low population densities at the time of Domesday and in most cases, throughout the medieval period. For the most part, however, clay soils carried medium to high population levels and they

dominated the broad band of well-settled countryside which Domesday shows extending across the Midlands and the east of England (Fig. 5).

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TOM WILLIAMSON: WOODLAND AND CHAMPION: FARMING, ‘THE SOCIAL’, AND THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES ‘organic’ layouts might themselves be recast in more regular form at a later date. In either case, intermixture of properties reflected the fact that each shareholder expected to benefit as much from the joint teams as their neighbours. As in light soil districts, the emergence of landscapes of intermingled holdings would have obliged farmers to organise folding and grazing in common, leading to the development of communal forms of agriculture.

What is particularly striking is that within this band of territory the distribution of ‘woodland’ and ‘champion’ landscapes was closely correlated with quite subtle variations in the character of clay soils. Champion countryside was found in areas which, with average rainfall of less than 700mm per annum, was well-suited to cereal cultivation; but where a high proportion of the soils take the form of pelo-stagnogleys or the less calcareous pelosols (Hodge et al. 1984; Jarvis et al. 1984; Ragg et al. 1984; Soil Survey 1977) (Fig. 9). Conversely, ‘woodland’ landscapes characterised areas dominated by non-pelo stagnogleys or by calcareous pelosols, particularly those of the Beccles, Burlingham and Hanslope Associations.

The management of meadows There were other environmental circumstances in which the need to respond to a narrow ‘window of opportunity’ in the farming year might encourage a clustering of peasant farms. Hay was the principal although not the only form of winter fodder in medieval England, and the hay harvest a crucial point in the farming year. Haymaking with traditional tools required good weather, abundant labour, and the careful timing of farming operations – ‘make hay while the sun shines’. When first cut, grass contains around 75% water, and to ensure good-quality hay this needs to be reduced to about 15% before stacking. This is achieved through the combined action of the wind and the sun’s heat (Robinson 1949: 286). To encourage drying the cut herbage has to be repeatedly turned over and shaken out to expose as large a surface as possible to the air, a very labour-intensive operation, and one vulnerable to unexpected downpours which can dampen and ruin much of the crop. In the ‘fickle English climate, haymaking is always a hazardous practice and the produce is always subject to serious losses in feeding values’ (ibid.). Hay meadows operated best when large amounts of labour could be turned on to them at short notice, and many crops were saved by rapid carting and stacking. It is thus unsurprising to find that ‘champion’ areas broadly correlate with those regions in which Domesday suggests meadows were common and, more clearly, with those in which the fourteenth century Inquisitions Post Mortem, as mapped by Bruce Campbell, suggest they were most abundant (Fig. 10). Meadows remained in relatively short supply in the east and west of England, but:

Within areas of moderate or high population density, classic ‘champion’ clayland landscapes were found in areas in which relatively few days were available for cultivating the land, especially in the spring. Conversely, more dispersed patterns of settlement were found in those clayland areas in which, because of the mineralogical properties of the soil and the character of the climate, the window of opportunity for spring cultivation was rather less restricted. I noted earlier that a number of historians in the pre-War period, most notably the Orwins, emphasised the importance of co-aration in the development of communal systems of agriculture; whereas more recent writers have generally ignored or rejected such ideas, on the grounds that co-aration was practiced in all areas, and that the need to share ploughs did not necessarily make it necessary for farmers to dwell in close proximity. However, such objections fail to take account that there were circumstances in which the speedy assembly of plough teams would have been particularly advantageous to peasant farmers or demesne managers. Where full advantage had to be taken of every hour in which soils are suitable for ploughing or harrowing, plough teams needed to be assembled with particular rapidity. This was obviously much easier to achieve where farms stood in close proximity in nucleated villages, rather than scattered across the landscape. In areas of dispersed settlement it might take an hour or more of vital time to send a message to a neighbouring farm, and for the farmer to arrive with their beasts. Co-aration on certain kinds of clay soil was thus more likely to encourage nucleated patterns of settlement than on others.

From Somerset and east Devon in the south-west to the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire’s north Riding in the north-east…in the clay vales of this broad diagonal band of country … meadowland was most consistently represented. Except on the wolds, few demesnes were without at least some meadow…’ (Campbell 2000: 75-6).

Moreover, where the time available for cultivation was limited, it was a matter of critical importance whether land was located near to, or far from, the farms clustered in a village. Variations in slope, aspect, and in the mineralogical qualities of the soil itself also ensured that some pieces of land might be available for cultivation for a longer period of time than others. Where bond tenants were being allotted land according to some equitable scheme, then intermixed properties both widely and evenly scattered would have been an obvious choice. And where farms were being divided by inheritance there would be an understandable desire to divide the property within each field, rather than by field, again leading in time to the development of intermixed holdings. Such

Meadows were most easily created on the broad gravel or alluvial flood plains of the great Midland rivers such as the Nene, Ouse, Trent and their tributaries. Here, lush summer growth of hay could be achieved by the simple expedient of preventing livestock from grazing it. In most woodland regions in contrast, meadow tended to be less abundant, and generally distributed in smaller parcels along narrower river valleys (Williamson 2003: 170-173). In some regions, as across much of northern East Anglia, 395

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Figure 10. Environmental factors in the distribution of ‘champion’ countryside – the availability of meadow land. The ratio of arable to meadow land in England in the early fourteenth century, mapped from the Inquisitions Post Mortem. Meadow was generally more abundant in ‘champion’ than in woodland’ regions. Source: T. Williamson, after and courtesy of Bruce Campbell.

Extensive commons, large areas of woodland, isolated farms and sprawling common-edge settlements were all, of course, characteristic features of ‘woodland’ landscapes, both in the medieval period and for long afterwards. The extent and configuration of meadow land, in other words, was another powerful factor in the generation of diversity in settlement patterns, and in other aspects of the medieval landscape.

it was in even shorter supply because the peaty nature of the flood plain soils encouraged the development of fen vegetation, dominated by reeds and sedge, unsuitable for hay. In such circumstances good quality meadows could only be created, if at all, through systematic embanking and drainage, and well into the nineteenth century agriculturalists bemoaned the poor state of meadow land in this district (ibid.). Large concentrations of meadow land, and the need to mobilise labour to cut and turn the lord’s hay, might thus encourage the development of a nucleated pattern of settlement. Conversely, where meadow lay in smaller, scattered parcels, and was less important in the agrarian economy, we might expect settlement to take a more dispersed form. We might also expect to find the retention of more wood-pasture and pasture, in order to provide grazing later into the year; and anticipate that peasant farms would be placed on the margins of such areas, to allow for more efficient livestock management.

Conclusion – the spatial and the social Variations in population density were one factor underlying the marked regional differences in settlement patterns and field systems in medieval England. In regions with high rainfall and/or poor soils, settlement often remained sparse in the Saxon period. When expansion occurred in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it did so in the context of a change in the relative power of lords and communities, involving a 396

TOM WILLIAMSON: WOODLAND AND CHAMPION: FARMING, ‘THE SOCIAL’, AND THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES eloquently discussed the developing morphology of the village of Raunds in Northamptonshire in terms of ‘the feudal construction of space’, whereby feudal social relations were “…set within a particular spatial framework”, and “…the spatial morphology of the medieval nucleated village was…an essential element in the lord’s extra-economic means of coercion” (Saunders 1990: 185, 187). But in other parts of England, equally manorialised societies lived in very different settlements and farmed very different kinds of fields. This was true of central Essex for example, where demesnes were particularly large (300 sown acres or more), and labour services heavy (Campbell 2000: 86). Local lordship developed and the new ploughing technologies were adopted throughout lowland England in the period between the eighth century and Domesday. But their impact was refracted through the prism of the environment, as lords and peasants made rational choices about the most efficient ways of organising their farms and fields.

shift to more individualised forms of colonisation. The result was the establishment of numerous isolated farms, set in their own fields. But for the most part, the distinctions between ‘woodland’ and ‘champion’ regions were not directly related to population density. Instead, they reflected differences in the organisation of farming which developed during the later Saxon period, differences which were themselves a response to aspects of the natural environment. To assert the importance of such factors is, of course, to invite accusations of environmental determinism. But these variations in settlement, and field systems, would not have arisen in all historical circumstances. They were generated by the emergence of particular forms of social organisation, and particular forms of agrarian technology, in the course of the middle and later Saxon periods. As Faith and others have argued, the period between the eighth and the twelfth centuries saw the proliferation of local demesnes and service-tenancies throughout lowland England (Faith 1997). And while the precise chronology with which the heavy mouldboard plough, pulled by a team of eight oxen, was adopted during this same period remains a matter for debate, there is no doubt that by the eleventh century such ploughs were a standard feature of agriculture, at least on the heavier soils (Hill 2000; Langdon 1986). It was with the advent of these specific social and technological forms that the factors and influences I have described in the previous sections came into play.

Pred has emphasised that ‘power relations are at the heart of social relations’, and are thus the prime agents in the creation of spatial form (Pred 1985: 343). But the argument outlined in this short chapter suggests that particular modes of social organisation can in fact be manifested in a wide range of spatial forms, and that the relationship between the social and the spatial is mediated through the environmental and the agrarian. Moreover, the arguments outlined above indicate that patterns of settlement and forms of agrarian organisation can be shaped by very seasonal, short-term ‘bottlenecks’ in the farming year, as much as by more obvious and more easily measured continuous variables such as population density. These in turn might be related to quite subtle, scarcely noticeable aspects of the natural environment. It would be surprising if these observations did not have a wider relevance for our understanding of the field systems and settlement patterns of earlier periods.

Heavier ploughs encouraged settlement to become fixed in the landscape by allowing the permanent cultivation of specific plots of land, but this in turn meant that more systematic folding was required, especially of the lighter soils. The adoption of larger ploughs increased the importance of oxen in the economy, and thus ensured that settlements, especially those in areas of lighter soils, clustered beside moist pastures and good supplies of water – something which in turn had implications for the allotment of the surrounding arable. Where large areas of low-lying grassland could be managed as hay meadows, providing winter fodder for the oxen and reducing the need for pasture, the pressure towards nucleation was intensified because of the requirement of demesne managers to ensure that labour could be speedily mobilised for haymaking. And on the more tenacious clays, the need for farmers to assemble plough-teams with particular rapidity to plough both their own land, and that of the demesne, likewise encouraged a nucleated pattern of settlement, which again would have had implications for the allotment of the surrounding arable land. In different regions, different factors encouraged or discouraged nucleation of settlement, but their overlapping influence moulded the broad distinction between ‘woodland’ regions, and ‘champion’, with which we are here concerned.

Acknowledgements Many thanks are due to the Leicester Records Office, for permission to reproduce Figure 1; to Wolverhampton Art Gallery for permission to reproduce Figure 7; and to Bruce Campbell for permission to reproduce Figure 10. Bibliography Baker, A.R.H. and Butlin, R.A. (eds.) 1973. Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bishop, T.A.M. 1935. Assarting and the growth of the open fields. Economic History Review 6: 26-40. Campbell, B.M.S. 1981. Commonfield origins – the regional dimension. In T. Rowley (ed.) The Origins of Open-Field Agriculture. London: Croom Helm, pp. 112-129. Campbell, B.M.S. 2000. English Seigniorial Agriculture, 1250-1450. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Strongly nucleated forms of settlement and highly regular field systems are often seen as manifestations of ‘strong lordship’ in early medieval England, symbolic as much as practical in function. Saunders, for example, has 397

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Jones, G.R.J. 1976. Multiple estates and early settlement. In P.H. Sawyer (ed.) Medieval Settlement: Continuity and Change. London: Arnold, pp. 15-40. Kerridge, E. 1967. The Agricultural Revolution. London: Allen and Unwin. Kerridge, E. 1973. The Farmers of Old England. London: Allen and Unwin. Kerridge, E. 1992. The Common Fields of England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Langdon, J. 1986. Horses, Oxen, and Technological Innovation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, C., Mitchell-Fox, P. and Dyer, C. 1997. Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Midland England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Oosthuizen, S. 1994. Saxon commons in south Cambridgeshire. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 82: 93-100. Orwin, C.S. and Orwin, C.S. 1938. The Open Fields. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pred, A. 1985. The social becomes the spatial, the spatial becomes the social: enclosure, social change and becoming of place in Skåne. In D. Gregory and J. Urry (eds.) Social Relations and Spatial Structures. London: Macmillan, pp. 337-365. Rackham, O. 1976. Trees and Woodlands in the British Landscape. London: Dent. Rackham, O. 1986. The History of the Countryside. London: Dent. Ragg, J.M., Beard, G.R., George, H., Heaven, F.W., Hollis, J.M., Jones, R.J.A., Palmer, R.C., Reeve, M.J., Robson, J.D. and Whitfield, W.A.D. 1984. Soils and their Use in Midland and Western England. Harpenden: Soil Survey of England and Wales. Roberts, B.K. 1973. Field systems of the West Midlands. In A.R.H. Baker and R.A. Butlin (eds.) Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 188-231. Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S. 2000. Peoples of wood and plain: an exploration of national and local regional contrasts. In D. Hooke (ed.) Landscape: the Richest Historical Record. London: Society for Landscape Studies, pp. 85-96. Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S. 2002. Region and Place: a Study of English Rural Settlement. London: English Heritage. Robinson, D.H. 1949. Fream’s Elements of Agriculture (13th edition). London: John Murray. Rogerson, A. 1995. Fransham: an Archaeological and Historical Study of a Parish on the Norfolk Boulder Clay. Unpublished PhD Thesis: University of East Anglia. Rogerson, A. 1997. An archaeological and historical survey of the parish of Barton Bendish. In A. Rogerson, A. Davison, D. Pritchard and R. Silvester Barton Bendish and Caldecote: Fieldwork in South-West Norfolk. East Dereham: East Anglian Archaeology 80. Saunders, T. 1990. The feudal construction of space: power and domination in the nucleated village. In R. Sampson (ed.) The Social Archaeology of Houses. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 181-96.

Cunliffe, B. 1972. Saxon and medieval settlement patterns in the region of Chalton, Hampshire. Medieval Archaeology 16: 1-2. Darby, H.C. 1977. Domesday England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davison, A. 1990. The Evolution of Settlement in Three Parishes in South East Norfolk. East Dereham: East Anglian Archaeology 49. Davison, A. 1994. The field archaeology of Bodney, and the Stanta Extension. Norfolk Archaeology 42: 57-79. Dodgshon, R. 1980. The Origins of British Field Systems: an Interpretation. London: Academic Press. Dyer, C. 1991. Hanbury: Settlement and Society in a Woodland Landscape. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Faith, R. 1997. The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Foard, G. 1978. Systematic fieldwalking and the investigation of Saxon settlement in Northamptonshire. World Archaeology 9: 16-29. Fox, H.S.A. 1981. Approaches to the adoption of the Midland system. In T. Rowley (ed.) The Origins of Open-Field Agriculture. London: Croom Helm, pp. 64111. Fox, H.S.A. 1984. Some ecological dimensions to English field systems. In K. Biddick (ed.) Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Europe. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, pp.129-58. Gray, H.L. 1915. English Field Systems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hall, D. 1981. The origins of open-field agriculture: the archaeological fieldwork evidence. In T. Rowley (ed.) The Origins of Open-Field Agriculture. London: Croome Helm, pp. 22-38. Hall, D. 1982. Medieva1 Fields. Aylesbury: Shire. Hall, D. 1995. The Open Fields of Northamptonshire. Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society. Hall, D. 1999. The drainage of arable land in medieval England. In H. Cook and T. Williamson (eds.) Water Management in the English Landscape: Field, Marsh and Meadow. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 28-40. Hamerow, H. 1991. Settlement mobility and the ‘Middle Saxon shift’: rural settlements and settlement patterns in Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon England 20: 1-17. Hill, D. 2000. Sulh – the Anglo-Saxon plough c. 1000 AD. Landscape History 22: 7-19. Hodge, C., Burton, R., Corbett, W., Evans, R., and Scale, R. 1984. Soils and their Use in Eastern England. Harpenden: Soil Survey of England and Wales. Homans, G.C. 1941. English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Homans, G.C. 1969. The explanation of English regional differences. Past and Present 42: 18-34. Jarvis, R.A., Bendelow, V.C., Bradley, R.I., Carroll, D.M., Furness, R.R., Kilgour, I.N.L and Ling, S.J. 1984. Soils and their Use in Northern England. Harpenden: Soil Survey of England and Wales. Joliffe, J.E.A. 1933. Pre-Feudal England: the Jutes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 398

TOM WILLIAMSON: WOODLAND AND CHAMPION: FARMING, ‘THE SOCIAL’, AND THE ORIGINS OF MEDIEVAL LANDSCAPES Seymour, J. 1996. The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency. London: Dorling Kindersley. Soil Survey of England and Wales 1977. Map of Winter Rain Acceptance Potential. Harpenden: Soil Survey of England and Wales. Taylor, C.C. 1983. Village and Farmstead: a History of Rural Settlement in England. London: George Phillips. Taylor, C.C. 1995. Dispersed settlements in nucleated areas. Landscape History 17: 27-34. Thirsk, J. 1964. The common fields. Past and Present 29: 3-29. Thirsk, J. 1966. The origins of the common fields. Past and Present 33: 142-147. Williamson, T. 2000. The Origins of Hertfordshire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Williamson, T. 2003. Shaping Medieval Landscapes: Settlement, Society, Environment. Macclesfield: Windgather Press.

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The deer park at Powderham Castle, near Kenton, Devon. The specimen trees, including some exotic species, have been retained to enhance the aesthetic pleasure of viewing the fallow deer (visible in the background). Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Parks and perceptions of parkland Richard Muir Places have multiple existences. Only one of these is their objective existence, fixed in time and space, while countless other existences are found in the minds of their beholders and the imaginations of some strangers. Here, an attempt is made to marry objective and subjective approaches to landscape interpretation. Geographers and archaeologists concerned with the interpretation of landscape evolution employ the most ‘scientific’ methodologies available and they have tended to undervalue the fact that cultural landscapes are the creation of irrational beings who are likely to be guided by personal sentiments and deflected by false perceptions. The changes to cultural landscapes were not made according to scientific guidelines. They were the results of human choices that resulted from subjective processes of decision-making. The most convincing scholarly interpretations may be those that attempt – despite all the obvious difficulties – to visualise and appraise settings as those who changed them envisaged them to be. However, culture, technology, individuality and the broader context of existence will all help to ensure that no two people respond to a setting in exactly the same way.

People of wealth and influence went to great lengths to have landscapes re-shaped, and they had clear ideas about what they sought to accomplish. In this respect, the explanation must be encoded in the artefact, though attempts at interpretation will, to some degree, be clouded by the imperfect perceptions of the interpreter. The discussion that follows focuses on recreational landscapes, particularly medieval deer parks. One could make a loose distinction between ‘working landscapes’ which are organised for economic considerations, like food production, and ‘recreational landscapes’, which are organised for pleasure. The distinction is far from perfect though, for rivers are both drains and fisheries, most village cricket pitches are winter pastures, and pheasants are shot amongst standing root and kale crops in autumn. The numerous activities gathered under the heading of ‘recreation’ also vary immensely in their environmental requirements. Some, like cross country running, are extremely adaptable, but bowling greens can only be constructed on level sites. Cycling requires a network of suitable roads, while roads across golf courses are most unwelcome. To gain an understanding of deer parks, the meagre and generally unhelpful character of the documentation demands that other, much less precise sources of information must be explored.

Having devoted much of the first half of the twentieth century to an increasingly fatuous debate about the relative merits of environmental determinism and possibilism, geographers then became concerned with the issue of optimising versus ‘satisficing’.1 Crude models had been built around ‘economic man’ who, it was assumed, would operate on the basis of rational choices (which presumed inter alia access to all relevant information). Later, it was realised that hosts of real people were content to obtain satisfactory rewards from their endeavours rather than pursuing maximum gains. These and other insights were incorporated into more effective behavioural models of the relationship with the environment.

Landscape taste Convincing explorations of why particular types of landscape should be liked and reproduced are not numerous. With regard to medieval deer parks the following possibilities, not mutually exclusive, come to mind: • Landscapes of lawns, trees and groves are simply ‘nice’ and will always be liked; • Parkland was a functional landscape derived from wood pasture that happened to be well-suited for the conservation and hunting of deer; • Deer parks had immense symbolic significance being, like battlemented walls, de rigeur attributes of the estates of those claiming or aspiring to aristocratic status; • They had additional symbolic significance in that the relic plough ridges and hedgebanks within the exclusive enclosure symbolised the imposition of aristocratic control upon the lay population. The strong barrier of the pale served as a metaphor for the isolation of the ruling elite from the rest of local society; • In creating the characteristic deer park landscapes, those responsible were sub-consciously reproducing biologically favourable settings.

In relating the aspects of perception, subjective decisionmaking and satisficing behaviour to the evolution of cultural landscapes, another important variable has to be considered – the temporal instability of values. If taste is likened to a pendulum it is a pendulum of a most peculiar kind, for it can swing in all dimensions. Not only can facets of landscape that were favoured become unfashionable and unwelcome as the pendulum shifts, but that which has fallen from favour in one context can simultaneously become or remain fashionable in another, as the discussion on pollards below will show. 1

Satisficing is a more pragmatic alternative to optimisation, in situations where there are multiple and competitive objectives, and where one abandons any idea of achieving a ‘best’ solution. Satisficing objectives are therefore ‘good enough’, but the satisficer will still seek solutions that exceed these somewhat lower aims.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT If we look at these explanations of why the type of countryside associated with deer parks might be found appealing, then we see that there are three essential justifications. Firstly, functional explanations assume that hunting is something which landowners like to do, and that the aesthetic attractions of parkland are self-evident. The resultant landscapes can then be related to the need for open ground for chasing and coursing game; for sheltered areas where the deer and their young feel secure; for pollards which could be lopped to give leafy fodder, and boundary works that would provide entrance points for deer yet prevent their escape. Explanations of the second type stress the symbolic significance of deer parks. It can be argued that the numerous episodes of park-breaking were often calculated assaults on the status of the park owners concerned, whose experiences of such lèse-majesté were far more painful than any loss of game involved.

Figure 1. Areas of the landscape such as woodland margins may provide both aesthetic pleasure and subconscious reassurance and attraction, according to Appleton’s habitat and prospectrefuge theories. Source: R. Muir.

The third class of explanation is psychological, and is rooted in the work of ethologists who derived their inspiration from Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) in the 1930s. They considered that psychologists had given too much influence on the influence of learning on behaviour. Where humans were concerned, they emphasised the importance of the mental inheritance from the animal kingdom. They argue that the evolution of society and of technology has immeasurably outstripped the ability for biological adaptation, so that humans are ill-equipped to inhabit the world of their creation. These ideas were expressed accessibly by Desmond Morris in his Human Zoo of 1969, where it was demonstrated that much of our modern socio-political behaviour is derived from prolonged experience of life in hunter-gatherer clans.

secretly survey the panorama of tree-studded lawns, where the grazing herds subconsciously signal feasts of venison, while fishponds and coneygarths send similar messages. Appleton (1996:171) noted that the “…most potent refuge symbol associated with the garden is the garden wall, but the sensation of refuge is often intensified by the careful placing of shrubs, bushes and trees”. This must also be true of the park wall, boundary earthworks or pale, similarly often lined by trees and woodland. Also, hunting towers were frequently placed on the highest ground in a deer park, and their prospect symbolism is compelling. Debates surrounding the theories have obvious parallels with the nature versus nurture debate. Since the stimuli which encourage us to like or dislike landscape derive from our animal past and operate through the subconscious, it would be extremely difficult to test the validity of the arguments by questionnaire or interview. One might argue that as efficient vehicles/venues for game conservation and ‘sport’, and as means of claiming social status, deer parks were validated irrespective of any psychological associations. The proponent of such a case would then need to explain why, if not motivated by instinct, people would want to engage in the ritual of the hunt rather than the simpler unpleasantness of the abattoir? Equally however, one can maintain that given the nature of human origins and the technological revolutions that have catapulted our species unprepared into a world of intense social and technical complexity, it would be amazing if we did not retain visceral or instinctive responses to different settings. That these responses exist is demonstrated by the fact that any country ramble becomes a pageant of changing sensory and emotional tableaux, even though we cannot precisely articulate the feelings experienced or pronounce on where they came from. While personally despising blood ‘sports’ the author considers that such civilised views do not remove the need to interpret landscape as accurately as possible.

Similar ideas were translated into a landscape context by the geographer Jay Appleton, with ‘prospect-refuge theory’ (1975). The ideas concerned are controversial, and the substitution of instinct for intellect in the establishment of landscape taste did not appeal to many of those who approached landscape from aesthetic standpoints. According to prospect-refuge theory, humans, having existed for countless formative generations as both hunters and the hunted, respond most favourably to settings that provide them with the opportunity to prospect without themselves being seen. Associated with this theory is Appleton’s ‘habitat theory’, which maintains that we derive aesthetic satisfaction from scenic components which seem to indicate conditions favourable for survival, irrespective of their real nature (ibid.). Thus orchards, hop fields, herds of dairy cows and so on will stimulate positive aesthetic appreciations because of their associations with feeding. Considered in terms of the two linked theories, the deer park landscape would seem to be packed with positive symbolism that is likely to interact with the subconscious to an exceptional degree. Parklands abound with marginal, ‘edge-of-the-wood’ locations, where the advantages of the vantage point and the sheltered retreat are juxtaposed. From the shadows of a thicket one can 402

RICHARD MUIR: PARKS AND PERCEPTIONS OF PARKLAND provided a different hunting experience, with the social life and amenities of the castle or manor close by and spectators admiring prowess displayed.

Recreating deer park landscapes Given the sparse character of the documentation, the reconstruction of deer park landscapes is bound to be difficult, but the following techniques can be applied: 1. Psychological approaches concerned with attempts to inhabit the minds of park-makers; 2. Perusal of archival materials for direct descriptions; 3. Exploration of archival materials for indirect evidence relating to secondary uses; 4. Consideration of contemporary pictorial material; 5. Inspection of archaeological evidence in the field.

The concept of a zoning of the aristocratic landscapes occurs quite frequently in Leland’s Itinery. Far more an itemiser of roadside features than a distiller of scenery, his pattern of recording is indicative of attitudes and perceptions. For example, he wrote of the fortified house, Wressle Castle, near York: The garde robe yn the castelle was exceedingly fair. And so wer the gardens withyn the mote and the orchardes withoute. And yn the orchardes were mountes opere toparia written about with degrees like turninges of cokilshilles [cockleshells], to cum to the top without payn. The ryver Darwing rennith almost hard by the castelle…There is a parke harde by the castelle (Toulmin Smith 1907: 53-54, my addition in parentheses).

Psychology I have already advocated attempts to visualise a landscape as its makers saw it. As Barrell has pointed out however, “There is no word in English which denotes a tract of land of whatever extent, which is apprehended visually but not, necessarily, pictorially” (Barrell 1972: 1, original emphasis). Despite the shortcomings that affect language as well as the documentary shortages, for the men (and very few women) that had caused the deer parks to be created, these were not merely places outlined on maps. Rather, they must have been associated with visual images and powerful sensations – fleeing hinds, careering horses, riders ducking beneath out-stretched boughs, hounds baying at the kennels’ gate, the stench of blood and so on. They were also associated with journeys; sensation-laden passages through space and time – the ride from the hall to the park gate, the hounding in the park or the pursuit of released game across ridged ploughland and sodden meadow. Aristocratic hunters must have experienced and perceived deer parks in terms of images such as these, and it is via such images that we may hope to fathom their designs.

Thus the different amenities were arranged concentrically, with the aristocratic house at the centre. This medieval arrangement of designed landscapes with deer parks near the home, and other hunting territories further out, was exemplified at Barnard Castle: There belong 2 parkes to this castelle; the one is callid Marwood, and thereby is a chase that berith also the name of Marwood, and that goith on Tese ripe [river Tees] up into Tesedale (Toulmin Smith 1907: 77). Similar perspectives were applied at Castle Raby: Ther long 3. Parkes to Raby whereof 2. Be plenishid with dere. The middle park hath a lodge in it. And thereby is a chase bering the name of Langeley, and hath falow dere; it is 3. Miles in length (Toulmin Smith 1907: 53).

By attempting to reconstruct such experiences and perceptions we may be able to improve our interpretations of landscape. For example, it has been suggested that deer parks tended to be established within voids in the cultural landscape where elements of wilderness had endured. Extensive work by the author in the Yorkshire Dales reveals a quite different pattern. The thinly-peopled terrain of the upper dales, headwaters and high interfluves served as open Forests and chases, but the enclosed deer parks were not sited in relative wildernesses, but within the more populous middle and lower valleys. Ready access to the controlling castles and manor houses governed the choice of sites, and the location of these ‘central places’ seems to have been strongly influenced by the presence of Carboniferous Limestone or Magnesian Limestone (Muir forthcoming). Thus in the minds of the northern huntsman, Forests and chases will have been associated with long journeys to the vast, open hunting grounds. These forays, involving baggage trains and servants, roadside meals and visiting, must have resembled the progresses between dispersed manors, although as the hunting grounds became closer, so the landscape generally became rougher and more open, with fewer habitations. Meanwhile, the deer parks

Direct documentation For much of the medieval period, writing was largely confined to the recording of legal information and accounts. The appearance of named parks in documents demonstrates their existence at the time concerned, and where licenses to empark can be found they may contain brief topographical impressions of the park. About 1388 Ralph de Neville gained a license to empark his wood in Raskelf, North Yorkshire, and three deer leaps in the perimeter were specified (Calendar of Charter Rolls 12&13 Ric. II no.21). The license for Beningbrough in 1284 reveals the master and brethren of the house concerned emparking 56½ acres of woodland and 100 acres of adjoining demesne lands, in a part of the Forest of Galtres said to have been abandoned by wild deer (Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-92:158). Later in the medieval period, topographical information began to be recorded for its own sake. Leland’s Itinery made numerous references to deer parks, but the adjectival content was sparse and terse. Not surprisingly, he regarded parks as attractive places, frequently 403

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT by Sir John Yorke’s retainers, whilst visiting Appletreewick Fair to buy lean sheep to fatten in the Skipton castle parks (Whitaker 1878: 513). The events at Wilstrop, a little over a century earlier, resulted in detailed descriptions of the boundary works destroyed by enraged members of the local community following the emparking of their common. We learn of a pale composed of boards, quickthorn hedges, the cutting down of young walnut and apple trees as well as the vandalising of warrens and slaughter of deer (Beresford 1957: 205). Records of hunting practices made no concessions to humane or ‘sporting’ values. They imply extensive open lawns where deer could be coursed on horseback and with greyhounds; open, elevated spaces where they could be shot from hunting towers with arrows and bolts, and also thickets where roe deer could be trapped in ‘springles’ or nets. The woods that provided timber, pannage and holly fodder also provided the deer with seemingly ‘secure’ places to breed and hide.

prefixing ‘park’ with ‘praty’ or ‘fair’. He often provided a rough measurement of their ‘cumpace’, and tended to mention boundary works if the park was ‘waullid in stone’. However, his descriptions of their interiors, when given, mainly concerned the presence or absence of deer and whether they were ‘well woddid’ or ‘meately well woddid’. Fairness and well-woodedness were often mentioned together, and Leland seemed to regard the latter as an attribute of the former. Leland also mentioned a fact evidenced by other documents – the existence of agricultural enclosures, even farmsteads inside some deer parks. The Bishop of Durham hath a praty square pile on the north side of Were river [the river Wear] caullid Westgate, and thereby is a park rudely enclosed with stone of a 12. or 14. Miles in cumpace: it is xvj miles up in Were Dale from Akeland Castle. There by, as I hard, sum litle ferme holdes in this park (Toulmin Smith 1907: 70).

Pictorial material Medieval paintings, sketches and manuscript illuminations have important roles in studies of art history, but they are also fascinating historical documents. It is too easily assumed that their art is merely naïve, almost childlike in character, despite being layered in symbolic meanings that we may not recognise today (q.v. Camille 1992, 1998; Cherry 1991; Eco 1986). The allegorical influences may be important, but studious, representational influences were also strong. Medieval artists frequently depicted trees in ‘lollipop’ forms, as in paintings by children. This is not an expression of naïveté: this is what many medieval trees were actually like. The contemporary illustrations demonstrate that for field and hedgerow trees, pollarding was the norm. The Boarstall map of 1444 in the Boarstall Cartulary (held in the Buckinghamshire County Record Office), was regarded by Beresford and St Joseph as being probably the earliest surviving English village map (1979: 109110). The (former) village and its fields were shown in an area abounding in woodland names and with much remaining woodland. Numerous trees were depicted, apparently standing in pasture, and all of them pollards. Queen Mary’s Psalter dates from early in the previous century, and is now held in the British Library. In one cameo, wild boar-like swine were illustrated feeding on pannage, with two swineherds using cudgels to dislodge the acorns. We know that the pigs are eating acorns since the artist carefully drew the oak leaf-forms on trees, which again were pollards. Subject matter and execution had changed little since a similar topic was executed in another (British Library) manuscript illustration of the ninth century (Fig. 2). In this case, the newly pollarded tree on the far right is unmistakable.

Less direct documentation If direct contemporary accounts of deer park landscapes are of modest assistance, the indirect evidence is abundant, allowing considerable detailed landscape reconstruction by inference. Much of value can be obtained from accounts relating to operational deer parks, for these indicate the uses to which the parks were being put and the things needed for their maintenance. In the north of England, and probably elsewhere, agistment, the renting of summer grazing at a fixed price per head, was extremely lucrative. In Haya park, near Knaresborough, in 1358-9, for example, between 3rd May and Michaelmas, 126 beasts were pastured at a rate of 1s (5p) per head and 30 were wintered there after Michaelmas at half this rate, along with the 38 cattle and two horses belonging to John atte Hall, the park keeper, which grazed free of charge. (M.A.E.C.: John of Gaunt’s Register 1372-76 vol. 1: 271 and Jennings 1970: 48). Timber and pannage also featured in deer park accounts and reveal the significance of park trees and woodland. For example, in 1612, Francis, Earl of Cumberland, ordered a comparison of Skipton deer park yields with those recorded in the reign of Edward II (1307-27). Wood sales from the Haw park which had been ii s. (10 pence).had risen to vi s. viiid (33p.). Pannage was available in parks, though swine were removed at the time when pregnant hinds and fawns were vulnerable. Hollins were common in northern parks and, perhaps surprisingly, coppiced woods were sometimes found (Stapleton 1990: 74-5), despite the vulnerability of the springs to browsing (Michelmore 1981:147). Accounts for new works and maintenance also mentioned the boundaries of parks. For example, new and repaired hedges and patched walls were commissioned to define Cotescue park near Middleham Castle after it was created by an exchange of land between the Crown and Coverham Abbey in 1465-7 (Calendar of Patent Rolls 1476-85: 506). Records of local turmoil may reveal evidence of park use, as when around 1610 Clifford shepherds were set upon

Scenes such as this must have been seen in hundreds of parks, while hunting itself was a favourite topic for illustrators working for superiors who were ecclesiastical or aristocratic huntsmen. A fourteenth century manuscript of Phoebus contained a remarkably informative illustration. The quarry is a fox, and it was shown running 404

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Manuscript illustration of the ninth century that in addition to its portrayal of pannage also includes a clear representation of a newly pollarded tree (far right). Source: British Library. D. Earthworks and other features dating from the post-hunting era, such as serpentine lakes, prospect mounds, carriageways, temples and grottoes.

through a group of pollards, mainly oaks but also including what may have been a horse chestnut and an ash. A pack of large hounds, mounted huntsmen and servants on foot were in close pursuit. Herb-spangled pasture was shown growing between the trees, denoting that the locale was not woodland but parkland/wood pasture. Moving on to the end of the medieval period, one could not find a better representation of coppice-withstandards woodland than is given in Simon Benninck’s December hunting scene from the early sixteenth century (British Library). In the foreground, hounds were depicted tearing at the body of a boar that lay in a newly coppiced hag beneath standards of around fifty or so years in age, two having been felled. Beyond, the coppiced underwood was apparently coming to the end of its cycle, while the distant presence of buildings, which could be a large manor house and a lodge, suggest that the scene may well have been set in a park.

These features may not easily be sorted in chronological order, but most parks exist as valuable ‘open-air museums’ that predate emparking (see Fig. 3), as once the ploughing was excluded many earlier landscape features were preserved. When all the different sources of evidence are considered, a visualisation of the deer park can be constructed – and this picture is much more complex than that of the simple, strongly bounded deer enclosure of common imagination. On entering the medieval park, as well as the lawns, groves and lodge, one was likely to find agisted2 cattle browsing in the thickets and even flocks of sheep grazing amongst the deer on the lawns. This was not a wholly private place. The seclusion would not only be broken by the parker and his servants but also by swineherds exploiting the mast3 and pannage, and woodsmen working with the springs, pollards and standards. Particularly if the aristocratic owner was in need of funds, his or her park might include land rented out for agricultural use, and the lessees might even have their homesteads there. The silence could be broken by quarrymen splitting slabs from exposed strata, or even by the clatter from watermills and the pounding of forge hammers. Attempts to divert roads were not always successful, as at Ripley in North Yorkshire (Muir 2001: 93-94), so that travellers of many kinds could progress through the confines.

Field survey Field survey may identify features unrecognised in archival research and may also confirm, locate and inform understandings derived from the archives. The information from earthworks is by no means confined to boundary features. One should also remember that like some woodlands, drystone walls that frequently stood independently of any earthworks bounded many northern deer parks. Earthworks encountered in deer parks are likely belong to the following categories: A. Traces of earlier land-uses preserved within the lawns, such as strip lynchets, holloways, hedge banks, marl pits and quarries; B. Earthworks relating to the confinement and hunting of animals, such as boundary banks and ditches, deer leaps, moated hunting towers and kennels sites; C. Evidence of non-recreational uses practised alongside the hunting functions, such as internal enclosures, farmsteads, horse studs and quarries;

2 Agistment was the renting out of land for cattle grazing, often yearround, and purchased at so much per beast. 3 Mast was the commoners’ right of feeding acorns or beech nuts to pigs to fatten them up for slaughter, through practices of pannage (Stamper 1988). The two autumn mast months were between mid-September and mid-November.

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Figure 3. A section of the deer park at Ripley, North Yorkshire, one of only a few surviving medieval deer parks, showing landscape relics from many ages. Note how trees from the fifteenth century countryside have been augmented by sweet chestnuts, beeches and other tree species. Source: R. Muir.

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RICHARD MUIR: PARKS AND PERCEPTIONS OF PARKLAND time and it is well known that this can be at once bawdy yet concerned with religious, mythical and allegorical themes which were also familiar to illiterate audiences. References to the physical environment frequently occur, as one might expect given the outdoor character of most people’s daily life. However, lengthy passages of landscape description were not allowed to interrupt narratives concerned with emotions, duty, morality, reward and retribution, relationships and the weaving of plots. One senses audiences that were intimately involved with the physical setting, as evidenced by the following passage from the Gloria in excelsis section of the ‘Lover’s Mass’, thought to be the work of an anonymous cleric.

However, though traditional parks normally supported a variety of prosaic functions, not all of them operating without causing disturbances, the deer park does also seem to have been perceived as an inviting, indeed idyllic setting. After passing through its gates and past the lodge, those privileged to be the owners of a park or their guests left the demanding realms of domesticity and obligation behind. Behind them too lay the monotonous scenes of feudal tillage and the stench of villages, while before them were harmonious scenes of visual beauty juxtaposed with events of extreme cruelty. Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) had little to say about workaday scenery, and his colourful accounts of places concerned those lodged in romantic legends and fantasy. The rather magical attributes of the park were described in The Franklin’s Tale. In the course of the story, Aurelius visits the house of a magician, who conjures wonderful visions: knights jousting; his lady dancing, but first of all there was a hunting scene:

And after wynter wyth his shourys God send hem comfort of May flourys After gret wynd and stormys kene The glade sonne with bemys shene may appese To yive hem lyght affter dyrknesse (Chambers 1964: 119).

Before they supped. The magician made appear Forests and parklands full of running deer, Among them harts with antlers towering high, The biggest ever seen with human eye; Aurelius saw a hundred killed by hounds, While others bled from cruel arrow-wounds (Wright 1959: 374).

However, there seems to be no notion of recording a scene for posterity, and tales and poems were for the ‘here and now’. As the medieval period drew to its close, topographical writing began to find favour. Modern readers are able to form clearer appreciations of landscape values, and these can be related to the particular characteristics of deer park landscapes. Camden (1551-1623) is the most notable of these early topographers, and although he did not share Leland’s commitment to record the deer parks that he passed in his travels, he did employ a much more varied adjectival palette. He was a Londoner by birth, and though he does not seem to have been poorly disposed to the northern counties, he did display a horror of upland wildernesses. Such antipathy was normal, however, until late eighteenth and nineteenth century Romantics and devotees of the Picturesque lay the foundations of modern landscape taste. Of the western marches of North Yorkshire, where he had travelled in 1582, Camden wrote in his Britannia:

Parks were regarded in a somewhat Eden-like manner, but to discover how they were appreciated one needs to explore the transient and unstable realms of taste. Medieval landscape taste Ideas about landscape beauty are the products of an interaction between two sources: the observer and the scene (Laurie 1975). Scenery evolves and changes with the passing of time, but so too do human values. Where scenery coincides with the current aesthetic preferences of the observer then beautiful landscapes are perceived. Where the two are discordant, the scenery is regarded as bad. However, objective evaluations are not involved, for place, time and culture govern taste. Sufficient documentary evidence exists for us to know that, as well as being a game reserve, a larder and a hunting ground, the medieval park landscape was regarded as ‘pretty’ and ‘fair’. The basis for these preferences is less clear. Gardens, which were deliberately contrived to gladden the eye and perfume the air, were compact, detailed, and layered with symbolism and allegorical references. Grapes symbolised not only Bacchus but also autumn, and when juxtaposed with ears of grain, the Eucharist. A fountain could be a reference to eternal life and the Virgin, while a dandelion was an emblem of bitter grief (Hall 1974). Gardens were also furnished with features such as bowers, turf benches, and even open air bathtubs, associated with dalliance and courtly love.

Where the Shire touches upon the County of Lancaster, the prospect among the hills is so wild, solitary, so unsightly, and all things so still, that the borderers have call’d some brooks that run here, Hellbecks, that is to say Hell or Stygian rivulets; especially that at the head of the river Ure, which, with a bridge over it of one entire stone, falls so deep, that it strikes a horror into one to look down to it (Camden 1695: 759, original emphases). Perhaps the ‘hells’ described were hills or else flat stones in the beds of the becks, but there is no doubting the dread that the setting evoked. This may be more easily be understood if we remember that the uplands had relatively sparse populations and few if any roads suitable for wheeled traffic. The less threatening and now much loved landscape of the North York Moors and North Yorkshire coast was also described in hostile terms:

The spacious and more naturalistic parks must have appealed to rather different areas of aristocratic taste. Some useful clues can be gained from the literature of the 407

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT of the prosperity of its agriculture and the abundance of its other resources. Thus, as in the passage above, parks could sit comfortably in a list of economic attributes. Camden described the countryside beyond Roseberry Topping (which he regarded as a lofty mountain) in terms that clearly equated beauty with fruitfulness.

That which lyeth East and towards the Sea, is call’d Blackamore, that is a land black and mountainous, being with craggs, hills, and woods up and down it, rugged and unsightly (Camden 1695: 749). In contrast, the adjacent county of West Yorkshire was regarded by Ralph Thoresby, one of the ‘most knowing gentlemen’ who contributed additions to the 1695 edition of Britannia, in the most favourable of terms:

And from hence, the valley round it, the grassy hills, green meadows, rich pastures fruitful cornfields, fishy rivers, and the creeky mouth of the Tees, low and open shores yet free from inundation, and the sea with ships in it, render the prospect very delicate (Camden 1695: 753).

Not far from hence [i.e. near Sherburn in Elmet] is Haslewood which has a pleasant prospect; the two Cathedrals of York and Lincoln, 60 miles asunder, may there be discover’d. The County within 10 miles, Dr Tonstal Bishop of Durham affirm’d to King Hen.8. (when he made his progress to York, An.1548) to be the richest valley that he ever found in all his travels through Europe, there being 165 manour-houses of Lords, Knights and Gentlemen of the best quality, 275 several woods (whereof some contain 500 acres) 32 parks and chases of deer; 120 rivers and brooks, whereof 5 are navigable, well-stor’d with salmon and other fish, 76 water-mills for corn, 25 cole-mines, 3 forges for melting iron, and stone enough for the same; within these limits also as much sport and pleasure for hunting, hawking, and fishing, as in any place of England beside (Thoresby 1695: 730-731, my addition in parentheses).

In this view of landscape, uplands were not necessarily repulsive, though wildernesses usually were. An upland area could be redeemed by geographical variability resulting from various useful resources. In the Lake District, for example: The Country, tho’ the northern situation renders it cold, and the Mountains, rough and uneven, has yet a variety which yields a prospect very agreeable. For after swelling rock, and the crowding mountains big (as it were) with metals (between which are Lakes stor’d with all sorts of wild Fowl) you come to rich hills cloath’d with flocks of sheep, and below them are spread out pleasant large plains, which are tolerably fruitful. The Ocean also which beats upon this shore, affords great plenty of the best fish and as it were upbraids the Inhabitants with their idleness, in not applying themselves closer to the fishing trade (Camden 1695: 819).

One does not need to read very far before it emerges that sixteenth and seventeenth century writers shared a largely utilitarian view of landscapes. The beauty of an area of countryside was at least partly, if not entirely, a function

Figure 4. Part of Ripley Park in North Yorkshire. On the left is the depression of a metalled holloway. On the right are the earthworks of a medieval hunting tower. Source: R. Muir.

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RICHARD MUIR: PARKS AND PERCEPTIONS OF PARKLAND members of society in all parts of the country persisted in their enthusiasm for the old blood sports. The example for this was set at the highest level. Writing on the 2nd May 1686 Sir John Reresby recorded: I went to New Hall in Essex, the Duke of Albemarle’s house, the king having promised that duke to go and stay two days there to hunt, which he coming the day after performed accordingly. These two days his Majesty killed two stags he was indefatigable at that sport, loving to ride so hard that he usually lost his company (Cartwright 1875: 362). At the other end of the country, the hunting of park deer was still commonplace, as evidenced by entries like the following from Sir William Ingilby’s almanac:

Figure 5. The widespread notion that uplands were terrible, desolate places persisted in writings until the nineteenth century. Source: R. Muir.

1 Sept 1665: I killed a Black Bucke out of the Parke at Rypley…another (?) before 3 fawnes this year count ten is all left…2 bucks killed out of the paddock this year (Ingilby MS. 3590).

The tendency to regard what we consider to be cherished wildernesses, modest fells or bracing uplands as terrible places persisted. In 1725 for example, Defoe wrote an account of the Lake District which exactly reflected the utilitarian view of landscape employed by Camden in the sixteenth century and by the authors of the Additions in the seventeenth century. Not only were the Lakeland Fells high and formidable;

In many cases, deer parks were converted into landscape parks during the post-medieval centuries. However, cartographers such as Speed in 1610 and Morden in 1695 did not feel any need to distinguish between the two forms. For years to follow, the conventional symbol of a round or oval space enclosed by a pale was employed for both. It has long been recognised that the scenery of the landscape park was contrived by modifying that of the traditional deer park. Consequently, the two kinds of park reveal great similarities. Writing on Fountains Abbey home park, Beresford remarked that:

…but they had a kind of unhospitable terror in them. Here were no rich pleasant valleys between them, as amongst the Alps; no lead mines and veins of rich ore, as in the Peak; no coal pits, as in the hills about Halifax, much less gold as in the Andes, but all barren and wild, of no use or advantage to man or beast (Defoe 1989: 195).

The best preserved portions lie on the edge of the wood north-west of the great lake which looks like the work of some ambitious landscape gardener of the eighteenth century but is in fact the creation of monks who dammed the valley with a great earthen bank (Beresford 1957:195).

The message was as plain as in previous centuries – rugged territory could aesthetically be redeemed if it contained commercial resources. Deer parks, in contrast to many Forests and chases, were not features of the wilderness, and where they occurred within the broad bounds of wilder regions they were very largely situated in the floors and lower flanks of pleasant valleys. It was only around the 1770s that marked changes in landscape taste began to become apparent and wilderness became pristine and romantic places. Garden landscapes were regarded as idealised places that were intricately detailed and carefully contrived to provide lyrical settings for dalliances and pleasures of a more refined kind. But deer parks were subjected to a more utilitarian evaluation, which saw beauty in their resources of woodland, pasture, hunting, venison and even their industrial assets.

The changes to an existing deer park would vary with fashion. The opening-up of tree cover near the house to create broader prospects was common. In the late seventeenth century straight avenues could be driven across parks, while grottoes, serpentine lakes and tasteful ruins were often introduced a century later. There has been much written about the ways in which landscape taste was influenced by the Italianate depictions of idealised landscape in the works of painters like Claude Lorrain (d. 1682), Salvator Rosa (d. 1673) and Nicolas Poussin (d. 1675). The degree to which aristocratic commissioners of landscaping works in the eighteenth century were enthused by these painters cannot be gauged. It is, however, certainly the case that most of the shaped by Kent, Repton and their kind were at least as deeply rooted in the medieval deer park as in the Arcadian creations of the painters. These painters had included Classical buildings, often ruined, in their works. Temples, hermitages, belvederes and a variety of follies punctuated the lawns and groves of the landscaper designers’ creations. Deer parks too had their landscapes

The deer park legacy The notion that deer parks were disparked or were converted to vaccaries during the medieval period while those that survived became landscape parks; is misleading. Particularly in northern England, deer parks of the traditional kind often persisted until long after the end of the medieval era (Muir forthcoming). Aristocratic 409

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Could hardly pierce, a wel-built Lodge, from whence The watchful Keepers careful diligence Secures their private walks, …(Chamberlayne 1659).

punctuated by buildings of an aristocratic nature. The towers and battlements of the associated castle or the gables of the manor house might be seen overlooking the trees beyond the entrance to the park, while inside, viewing towers and hunting towers may have added vertical elements to the scene. Pioneering travellers in North America commented on the important scenic deficiencies caused by the absence of historic buildings, like distant church towers: “Look round in every quarter of the compass, and there you are as if on the ocean- not a landmark, not a vestige of anything human but yourself” (Marryat 1839: 86).

Painters like Claude Lorrain and l’Orizonte did not paint lifeless scenes, but punctuated their canvases with solitary human figures and small groups of people, while nibbling herbivores were tastefully placed to wander their ways across the lawns and glades. Similarly, in traditional deer parks, fallow deer, wild cattle and other beasts of the chase populated the scenery, along with livestock whose presence resulted from agistment, stock breeding and fattening programmes. The Arcadian landscapes were represented as being neither open nor closed by woodland. Lawns provided unobstructed lines of vision leading to distant features, such as snaking rivers, bridges, ruins or other foci (for example, the Studley Royal park was aligned on Ripon Minster). Clumps and carpets of trees swathed and masked-out other parts of the scene, whilst solitary trees, dramatically positioned and posed, gave height and foreground interest. Appleton has noted that “…almost all the paintings of Claude Lorrain can be seen to owe something to the landscapes of Apennine Italy, but they became almost ‘placeless’ models for a kind of universal, idyllic landscape style” (1986: 36).

The boundary works that had trapped deer and excluded poachers could, in the new landscape park, also exclude all unwelcome and plebeian interlopers. Often, pales replaced stone walls. Parks were symbols of a stratified society in which activities were still segregated and different social classes largely kept apart. To royalists around the time of the Civil War in England, the monarchy was associated with rural joy and abundance. In Nature’s Pictures of 1671, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), wrote: Where chrystal Brooks run every Field between; Where Cowslips growing, which makes Butter yellow And fatted Beasts, two inches thick with Tallow; And many Parks for fallow Deer to run, Shadow’d with Woods, to keep them from the Sun; And in such Kingdomes, Beasts, Fowl, Fish, have store, Those that industrious are, can nev’r be poor (Cavendish 1671). Deer parks were aristocratic preserves, but in a world permeated by symbolism they were additionally symbols of the harmony associated with an ordered and rigidly stratified society. To their owners and users, and to supporters of traditional values, parks were harmonious places, united under one ownership and unsullied by the squabbles, commotion and ravenous paupers associated by them with lands held in common. Land enclosed under a single ownership expressed moral virtues, and a pale could symbolise a mind confined by moral strictures and standards and prevented from unseemly wanderings (Grant 1956: 47). In his Pharonnina of 1659, William Chamberlayne described a panorama extending around him in a full circle. It included the intimidating world of a city, the rocky fastnesses of a mountain, and the inviting territory of the deer park which lay before his father’s castle. The last was a place of gentle and orderly beauty where: The Dayes bright Curtains, in a spacious Green, Which Natures curious Art had spread between Two bushy Thickets, that on either hand Did like the Fringe of the fair Mantle stand, A timerous herd of grazing Deer, and by Them in a shady Grove, through which the eye

Figure 6. A gnarled and ancient pollard. Such trees, once viewed from a largely utilitarian medieval perspective, later provided aesthetic interest within post-medieval ‘polite’ park landscapes. Source: R. Muir.

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RICHARD MUIR: PARKS AND PERCEPTIONS OF PARKLAND have destabilised the wood pastures during the medieval period, with timber production being moved from the formerly wooded commons to spring woods and hedgerows (Muir 2000). The owners of deer parks would have been familiar with wood pasture. It provided deer with grazing and a degree of shade and security, for it resembled the woodland edge settings where the animals were accustomed to feed at dawn and dusk, allowing them to retreat into the shadows beneath the woodland canopy if danger threatened. Some parks would have been formed directly out of wood pasture, but elsewhere parkland resembling wood pasture was encouraged to develop.

However much these painters may have drawn from the scenery of the Apennines, and whatever the degree to which park makers may have been influenced by these painters, two other things are perfectly clear however. Firstly, the British parks conformed perfectly to the demands of prospect/refuge theory and secondly, they restated the main landscape characteristics associated with traditional deer parks. In fact, they did this more faithfully in the eighteenth century under naturalistic, Picturesque influences than in the seventeenth, when elaborate gardens and geometrical canals, avenues and woodland breaks were in fashion. There is no doubting the influence of medieval ‘venison farms’ on the landscapes of the parks that succeeded them. Far less clear are the formative influences on the original deer park landscapes. It would seem most unlikely that the scenery of lawns and groves was merely the creation of park owners, and that it materialised without predecessors. With some parks we do know something of the character of the preceding countryside. To take some northern examples, Hornby Castle park is thought to have been created by William, Lord Conyers about the end of the fifteenth century, and he ‘caste downe 40 husbandries to make it’ (VCH North Riding Vol. 2: 131). Swineherds and others appear to have been dislodged in the creation of Haverah Park near Knaresborough early in the thirteenth century. In 1225 King Henry III ordered the archbishop of York, his custodian in the area, to allow the king’s men in surrounding communities to have access to the old common pastures (Jennings 1970: 46). The park at Raskelf, Easingwold, resulted from a licence granted to Ralph de Neville in 1388, allowing him to enclose his manorial wood (Calendar of Charter Rolls 12 and 13 Ric. II no. 21). The controversial eviction of villagers and the commandeering of their arable and common land preceded the creation of the park at Wilstrop near Leeds (Beresford 1957: 205). Cotescue Park at Coverham was formed about 1465 in working countryside, and a spring wood and fishpond were noted among its landmarks (Calendar of Patent Rolls 1476-85: 506; VCH Yorkshire Vol. 1: 218). It is clear that deer parks were established on a wide variety of terrain types, some wooded but some quite densely populated.

It has been assumed that wood pasture was a human product, created to meet the needs for woodland and pasture products. However, recent work has questioned this, and suggests that ancient woodland was not dense ‘wildwood’, but had a parkland character (Vera 2000). After the last glaciation, herbivores re-colonised landscapes ahead of trees, and played a substantial part in shaping the development of the subsequent woodlands. Consequently, the ‘natural’ vegetation of the European lowlands is park-like in character. Spaces grazed by wild horses, deer and cattle and churned over by wild boar are colonised by thorny shrubs. The resultant thorn scrub then protects the seedlings of forest trees from the herbivores, and as these seedlings grow tall and create a canopy, the scrub is shaded out. When trees age, die and fall, light floods in and the cycle begins again. Vera believes that closed canopy forest reserves are unnatural anachronisms. Analysis of the meaning in the context the regulations [of Merovingian and Frankish kings from the seventh century onwards] show that the terms “Forst”, “foreest”, “forêt”, “woud”, “weld”, “Wald” and “weald” did not imply a solid cover of trees. They implied the uncultivated “outside”, the wilderness that consisted of a park-like landscape like the wood pasture (Vera 2003: 39, my additions in parentheses). If these ideas are correct, then prospect/refuge theory is somewhat strengthened by the implication that humanity’s formative experiences of the post-glacial landscapes of Europe took place in such open woodland. Furthermore, the efforts of later park designers such as Repton and Brown could be seen as the culmination of a process of parkland creation that extended back through medieval deer parks, prehistoric woodland pastures and into the Mesolithic. Some awareness of the antecedents of park landscapes may have existed. Early in the nineteenth century, Whitaker was pleased by the decay of formal designs at Moseley Wood, West Yorkshire. The wood, he wrote, “…so celebrated a century ago for its geometrical lines and centres, has happily lapsed into something approaching its primeval state, the silva pastura [wood pasture] of Doomsday” (quoted in Sheeran 1990: 31, my addition in parentheses).

In creating a deer park therefore, quite dramatic transformations of the landscape might be involved, as evidenced by the ridged ploughland and the sinuous hedge banks that are often preserved in parkland. However, a standard for the essential parkland landscape had existed for hundreds or even thousands of years in the form of wood pasture, which was grassland patterned by trees. This form of land use was widespread at the time of the Domesday Book, when woodland and wood pasture probably covered around 15% of England (Rackham 1986: 76). It comprised a very close series of practices for the production of timber, leaf fodder and grass. The trees, pollarded rather than coppiced so that their fronds and poles grew above the reach of browsers, had to be sufficiently well-spaced so as not to shade-out the pasture. Pressures from a rising population appear to

Where the emparking of working countryside was concerned, it has been argued that relics of agriculture 411

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like plough ridges would be destroyed to erase memories of previous uses, and also that they were deliberately preserved in order to symbolise the dominion of the local dynasty (Taigel and Williamson 1993: 19-22). I take the view that the earthworks tended to remain because this involved less effort than their removal. Mature trees, normally pollards, were welcome recruits from the old hedgerows. By grubbing-up the intervening hedgerow shrubs, the retained trees provided new parks with a semblance of maturity, and hedgerow pollards were to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from free-standing parkland trees.

The future Future directions are not easy to predict, and perhaps the long and varied tradition of parkland creation ended with the decline of the park-girt mansions. Some deer parks endured as parkland, and eventually became municipal parks, such as the Kirkstall Abbey home park in Leeds. Yet although a measure of continuity exists, with macadamised paths, park benches and high human densities – to say nothing of light railways – the parkland ethos is a casualty of mass-use. Urban woodland, much of it with a park-like character, is far more extensive than is generally imagined (Burgess, Harrison and Limb 1988). However, modern levels of vandalism may mean that the development of parkland ‘countryside’ within or adjacent to towns is often impractical. The psychological associations of parkland have changed quite drastically too. If the prospect/refuge attributes once endowed these settings of lawns and groves with senses of well-being, a succession of murders, rapes and assaults now makes these places potentially threatening, particularly for women and mothers with children. The more unregulated, under-policed and self-focused a society becomes, the more that places conferring the abilities to prospect without being seen will be regarded as alien and intimidating.

Figure 7. Pollarded beech trees within woodland. Source: R. Muir.

There is however a peculiar anomaly in the fact that in the post-medieval period, while pollards were still being encouraged in parks, they were being perceived as anachronistic in the hedgerows of the surrounding fields. In Nidderdale, clear evidence for the removal of what were probably the last vestiges of wood pasture can be found for the first third of the eighteenth century (Ingilby MS 2826 and 2831), and similar clearances on estates were doubtless proceeding elsewhere. During the eighteenth century, agricultural cognoscenti and apostles of agricultural reform united to decry hedgerow pollards. With these, as with other features of traditional farming that were criticised, one must ask why, if they were so undesirable, they had been part of farming for many centuries? In his works of 1796 for example, William Marshall attacked hedgerow pollards for their low branches, which he believed shaded adjacent field crops, for their roots, which purportedly interfered with the plough, and their fallen leaves, which injured grass yields (Marshall 1796a and 1796b). Gnarled, twisted and often ancient, the pollards of the English farmland were now perceived as emblematic of the ignorant, bucolic and anachronistic character of peasant farming. Wood pasture pollards had been sold off as poor quality timber in the years around 1700, and the attack on hedgerow pollards increased in pace in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. In parkland however, pollards seem still to have been welcome. In the nineteenth century park at Nidd, North Yorkshire for example, mature hedgerow pollards were commandeered from emparked fields. Wherever there were unsightly gaps in their patterns and

A statute of Winchester of 1285 concerned the cutting back of roadside cover to leave only trees of commercial significance standing. If this assault on cover was regarded as a means of dealing with crime on the highways, it might signify the fate of parkland areas in urban settings. Meanwhile, in the countryside proper, it is hard to envisage non-recreational uses for park-like scenery, in areas divided between mass food production and set-aside functions. If parkland is to be conserved, particular attention must be paid to those extensive areas where the traces of preceding working countryside are preserved. This strategy is particularly apt in times when estate owners are pressing to have to convert their inheritances of landscape into income-generating schemes. The inventory of archaeological features of all periods in parks is woefully incomplete.

References Appleton, J. 1975 [1996]. The Experience of Landscape. New York: Wiley. Appleton, J. 1986. The role of the arts in landscape research. In E. Penning-Rowsell and D. Lowenthal (eds.) Landscape Meaning and Values. London: Allen and Unwin, pp. 26-47.

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RICHARD MUIR: PARKS AND PERCEPTIONS OF PARKLAND Stamper, P. 1988. Woods and parks. In G. Astill and A. Grant (eds.) The Countryside of Medieval England. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 128-148. Stapleton, T. (ed.) 1990. The Plumpton Correspondence. Gloucester: Alan Sutton. Taigel, A. and Williamson, T. 1993. Parks and Gardens. London: Batsford. Toulmin Smith (ed.) 1907. Leland’s Itinery in England and Wales in or about the Years 1535-43. London: George Bell. Vera, F. 2000 Grazing Ecology and Forest History. CABI 2000. The Hague: Ministry of Agriculture, Strategic Policies Division. Vera, F. 2003. Oak, the footmark of ghosts. Proceedings of the Working and Walking in the Footsteps of Ghosts conference. Sheffield: Sheffield Hallam University, pp. 37-41. Whitaker, T.D. 1878. History and Antiquities of Craven. Leeds: Joseph Dodgson. Wright, D. (trans.) 1959. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Barrell, J. 1972. The Idea of Landscape and Sense of Place, 1730-1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beresford, M.W. 1957. History on the Ground. London: Methuen. Beresford, M.W. and St Joseph, J.K.S. 1979. Medieval England (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burgess, J., Harrison, C.M. and Limb, M. 1988. People, parks and the urban green: a study of popular meanings and values for open spaces in the city. Urban Studies 25: 465-473. Camden 1695. Britannia. Camille, M. 1992. Image on the Edge. The Margins of Medieval Art. London: Reaktion Books. Camille, M. 1998. Mirror in Parchment: the Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England. London. Chambers, E.K. 1964. English Literature at the Close of the Middle Ages. London: Oxford University Press. Cherry, J. 1991. Medieval Decorative Art. London: British Museum Press. Defoe, D. 1989 [1724-6]. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1989 edition eds. P. Rogers, P. Webb and P. Bower). Exeter: Webb and Bower. Eco, U. 1986. Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. London: Yale University Press. Grant, D. (ed.) 1956. William Cavendish, The Phanseys. Hall, D. 1974. Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. London: John Murray. Jennings, B. (ed.) 1970. A History of Harrogate and Knaresborough. Huddersfield: Advertiser Press. Laurie, I.C. 1975. Aesthetic factors in visual evaluation. In E.H. Zube, R.O. Brush and J.G. Fabos (eds.) Landscape Assessment: Values, Perceptions and Resources. Stroudsburg, Pa.: Halstead Press, pp. 102117. Marryat, F.A. 1839. A Diary in America, with Remarks on its Institutions. London: Longman, Orme, Green and Longmans. Marshall, W. 1796a. The Rural Economy of Yorkshire. London. Marshall, W. 1796b. Planting and Rural Ornament. London. Michelmore, D.J.H. (ed.) 1981. Fountains Abbey Lease Book. Yorkshire Archaeology Society Series vol. 160. Morris, D. 1969. The Human Zoo. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Muir, R. 2000. Pollards in Nidderdale: a landscape history. Rural History 11 (1): 95-111. Muir, R. 2001. Landscape Detective. Macclesfield: Windgather Press. Muir, R. forthcoming. (Publisher not finalised). Muir, R. and Amos, J. 1998. Nidd, the death of a village. The Local Historian 28 (4): 208-216. Rackham, O. 1986. The History of the Countryside. London: Dent. Sheeran, G. 1990. Landscape Gardens in West Yorkshire 1680-1880. Wakefield: Wakefield Historical Publications.

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The Cwm Sorgwm valley near Llangorse, Brecon Beacons, Wales. The enclosed post-medieval intakes form improved pasture, with open unimproved moorland beyond. Several prehistoric cairns are located along the ridgelines. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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Parliamentary Process: the creation of farming landscapes in eighteenth and nineteenth century Buckinghamshire Hannah Sackett Some of the largest Chiltern towns, including High Wycombe (Buckinghamshire) and Berkhamsted (in Hertfordshire), are located in these valleys.

Introduction When archaeologists encounter fields created by Acts of Parliament, they are generally more interested in the remains of medieval fields and settlements preserved by the enclosure process, than in the eighteenth and nineteenth century fields which succeeded them (although notable exceptions to this include Johnson 1996, Taylor 2000 and Williamson 2000, 2002a). This is perhaps unsurprising, since the unbending lines of parliamentary hawthorn hedges are a familiar aspect of the English landscape. It is possible to dismiss them as dull, capitalist impositions of straight lines and regularised fields. Nevertheless, the process of parliamentary enclosure has long been an area of study for economic and social historians and historical geographers. This paper examines the variation in parliamentary enclosure in a single county, and seeks to demonstrate that parliamentary enclosure, as a historically specific way of seeing and shaping the landscape, is also worthy of study by archaeologists.

The Chilterns (Fig. 3), are home to extensive woodlands – some of them ancient, some of them relatively recent (Morris 1999: 13). In addition to areas of woodland, large numbers of trees are also found in the hedgerows of this area. The Chilterns were mostly enclosed via clearance from woodland and piecemeal enclosure, and the majority of parishes in this area were enclosed prior to the introduction of parliamentary enclosure. Roden notes the importance of piecemeal enclosure from the midsixteenth century onwards, with the common fields reduced by “…individual strip amalgamations and by private arrangements between a few men…” (Roden 1973: 366). This means that the hedge lines are mostly sinuous, and are made up of many different tree and plant species. A large number of sunken lanes wind between these hedgerows. The settlement pattern is scattered, with isolated farms and hamlets in the hills and small towns and villages often located in the valleys (Roden 1970). While it is easy to contrast the Chilterns and the clay vales, it is important to recognise that they do not exist in isolation from one another. This is especially clear in the area of the Chiltern escarpment, where the hills meet the Vale of Aylesbury. In Buckinghamshire, and along the Chiltern escarpment into Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire, this area of the landscape has been notable for a long line of ‘strip’ parishes that took advantage of both the hills and the lower lying area of the clay vale. Such parishes incorporated woodlands, wastes, commons and early enclosures. However, many of the parishes on the edge of the Chilterns also maintained areas of open fields into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hepple and Doggett 1994: 193-195). For this reason many of the scarp-edge parishes were subject to parliamentary enclosure, which was used to enclose remaining areas of open field and common land and waste.

Buckinghamshire: hill and vale The focus of this paper is on the Buckinghamshire Chilterns and the clay vales to the north of the hills often referred to as the Vale of Aylesbury (see Figure 1 for a map of the study area). The Vale of Aylesbury (Fig. 2) displays many of the features used to identify champion landscapes (Rackham 1997: 4-5). A great many of the parishes are focused around nucleated villages, and a large number of these villages lay within two or threefield open field systems until the period of parliamentary enclosure. This means that a large part of the farmland is now characterised by straight hawthorn hedges planted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and there are only small areas of woodland in the clay vales. The clay vales are made up of Oxford and Kimmeridge Clays, but between the northern and southern areas of clay is an area where hills are formed from Portland Beds – for example, at Long Crendon, Brill, Ashendon and the Winchendons (Reed 1979: 28). Some of the Portland Beds are overlain by Purbeck Beds (for example at Oving and Whitchurch), or by Lower Greensands (as at Bierton, Bishopstone, Hartwell, Stone, Bill and the Brickhills). At the southern-most area of the Vale of Aylesbury lies the Gault, a zone of stiff, calcareous clay. Rising from the flat, low-lying region of the Vale of Aylesbury are the chalk hills of the Chilterns, capped with clay-with-flints. The steep, scarp edge of the hills faces north-west, while the dip slope falls away gently to the south-east, and the dip slope is pierced by several steep-sided river valleys.

Parliamentary Enclosure in Buckinghamshire A large part of Buckinghamshire was enclosed by Act of Parliament during the 1700s and 1800s, especially in the Vale parishes (Sackett 2004; Tate 1946; Turner 1973). A large proportion of these parishes had maintained their open fields and common land until the mid-eighteenth century, and as a result the Enclosure Acts involved the re-planning and redistribution of land across the entire parish. The earliest parliamentary acts included Ashendon in 1738 (awarded 1739), its neighbouring parish Wooton Underwood in 1742 (awarded 1743), and the hamlet of 415

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Figure 1. Location map of the study area and the geology of Buckinghamshire. Source: H. Sackett, after Reed 1979: 30.

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Figure 2. Straight hedges in the vale, viewed from the scarp edge at Stokenchurch. Source: H. Sackett.

Figure 3. Woodland and tree-rich hedgerows in the Chilterns. Source: P. Sackett.

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RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT common fields made sufficient support for an Act of Parliament difficult to secure, explaining the late enclosure of some of these parishes (Hepple and Doggett 1994: 193). Several scarp edge parishes were not enclosed until the 1850s, while the parish of Crowell in the Oxfordshire Chilterns was not enclosed until 1882. At the far end of the Chiltern escarpment, the strip parish of Totternhoe (Bedfordshire) held onto its open fields until 1891 (ibid.: 194).

Shipton in Winslow cum Shipton in 1774 (awarded 1775). A large proportion of the newly enclosed land was turned over to pasture. The earliest of the private acts, almost all those put through parliament in the eighteenth century, relate to the enclosure of parishes to the north of the Chilterns. The enclosure of a sizeable number of parishes in the vale looks, on paper, to have been a relatively straightforward procedure. Most early Acts of Enclosure for the vale were followed by an award the following year, suggesting that there were no lengthy objections to the act or protracted disputes over land rights. Turner’s work suggests that these easily enclosed parishes were those where one or a small number of wealthy landowners held sway (Turner 1973: 87). However, in those vale parishes where there were a large number of medium and small-scale landowners, enclosure was more of a struggle. From around 1800 onwards, enclosure in the vale and on the scarp edge became a more protracted and more bitterly fought affair. For example, small landowners in the parish of Quainton successfully opposed an Enclosure Bill in 1801 (ibid.: 184).

While the large numbers of landowners and smallholders may have slowed down the process of passing an Act for Enclosure, this does not fully explain why these parishes which lay partly in the hills, and that had already enclosed sizable areas of arable land, had not completed the process. It seems that the scarp-edge parishes, as well as reaching physically into the hills and the vale, also sought to hold on to the farming traditions of both areas. They underwent piecemeal enclosure, while simultaneously holding onto common lands and hilltop woods and wastes, as well as substantial areas of open fields in their flatter, lower-lying regions in the vale and valley bottoms. Since many parishes in the hills had been fully enclosed long before the mid-eighteenth century, enclosure acts in this region were far less numerous and also less extensive. A few of these acts were concerned with the enclosure of the areas of open field which had survived in the hills. In 1816 an award was granted for the enclosure of 900 acres of open fields in Amersham. Much smaller areas of open fields were enclosed in Chalfont St Peter (61 acres) in 1847, and Little Gaddesden (52 acres) in 1836. The main type of enclosure carried out in the hills was the enclosure of common land. These commons had survived earlier periods of enclosure since they were used by many people in the parish, who had various rights such as grazing and turbage over the common land. Common wastes were also utilised by brickmakers, tilemakers and potters, as well as providing grazing and the possibility for encroachment for those with little or no land (Hepple and Doggett 1994: 195-196). These numerous claims on the common wastes, and the fact that the inhabitants of more than one parish sometimes held rights over a common (as in the case of Wycombe Heath and Berkhamsted Frith) meant that many of them had not been enclosed by the period of parliamentary enclosure.

The earliest of the scarp-edge parishes subject to a Parliamentary Act was Wendover in 1777. This Act was passed in order to confirm an exchange of lands in the open fields which had already taken place. Subsequent Acts for Wendover date to 1794 (awarded 1795) and 1855 (awarded 1857). Other Acts relating to scarp edge parishes include Great Kimble, Little Kimble and Ellesborough in 1803 (awarded 1805), Bledlow 1809 (awarded 1812) and Aston Clinton in 1814 (awarded 1816). A late group of scarp-edge parishes to have their open fields enclosed were Pitstone, Cheddington and Ivinghoe, and Edlesborough (all awarded in 1857). This late enclosure has been attributed to the ownership of almost all the open fields in these parishes by the Ashridge Estate (Turner 1973: 60), creating the unusual situation of the open fields being mostly privately owned. The strip parishes generally posed a greater challenge to surveyors and commissioners. They had to deal with a large number of landowners, with areas of enclosed fields as well as open fields, and with common lands, woods and wastes over which people had a variety of rights. Most of the scarp-edge parishes had a gap of at least two years between act and award, reflecting the increased complexity of the commissioners’ work. Substantial objections and resistance surrounded the enclosure of some of these parishes, notably Princes Risborough (Act 1820; Award 1823) and Monks Risborough (Act 1830, not Awarded until 1839).

However, numerous areas of common land were enclosed in the hills in the second half of the nineteenth century. Enclosures were awarded for Penn, Wycombe and Holmer Heath in 1855, Denner Hill in 1855, Wigginton in 1854, Stokenchurch Common in 1861 and Radnage and Andridge in 1862 (Hepple and Doggett 1994: 197). Hepple and Doggett have suggested that the reason for such enclosures lay in the abuse of common rights by local people, and by business men from further afield, including London, cutting down trees and taking stone and other resources to which they were not entitled. It is interesting to note that the common land subject to such enclosure awards was often of poor quality, and as a

The scarp-edge parishes comprise a clear group in the list of parishes enclosed by parliamentary enclosure and, unlike their neighbours in the hills, they maintained significant areas of open fields and common wastes well into the eighteenth and even nineteenth century. The strip parishes were often home to large numbers of landowners and smallholders, and it has been suggested that the claims of such large numbers of landowners over the 418

HANNAH SACKETT: PARLIAMENTARY PROCESS: THE CREATION OF FARMING LANDSCAPES to work with the local topography. Commissioners and surveyors drawing up the new allotments on paper also had a choice of how much information they transferred from the surveyor’s field notes and sketches onto the map which would reshape the parish. They had the choice of using the old roads and existing enclosures as a framework for the new appearance of the parish, or they could transfer the minimum of information from the existing landscape, such as the area covered by the settlement and the parish boundary. In the latter case, the parish became a blank space to be rewritten any way the commissioners saw fit. They were often distanced from the landscape itself, and could not see the existing open field strips or the topographical features that caused the roads or field edges to bend this way or that.

result only the edges of the common were actually fenced off. The small number of Acts for the Chiltern Hills shows that not all common land was enclosed by Parliamentary Act. The Commons Returns for 1874 shows substantial areas of common land and open field still surviving in Buckinghamshire at this date. While Tate argued that this source of information is unreliable and often over exaggerated (Tate 1946: 27), it does demonstrate that common land in many parishes survived the main period of parliamentary enclosure. One large area of common at Burnham Beeches in the south of the county demonstrates a changing attitude towards common land in the late nineteenth century. This land was purchased by the Corporation of the City of London in 1880, in order to preserve open spaces on the outskirts of the city and to provide day trippers with a refuge from the grime and bustle of the metropolis. Rather than providing local people with resources, this common became a site for recreation.

Parliamentary enclosure in the Midlands was often characterised in terms of large, rectangular fields and straight lines of hawthorn hedges and roads cutting insensitively over the ridges and furrows of the open fields (Hoskins 1985: 188-190, 204-207; Taylor 2000: 140-141). Associated with this process were the dispersal of farms into the landscape and the gradual abandonment of central villages. By closing down numerous pathways and roadways, parliamentary enclosure has been seen as limiting movement around the landscape and making the landscape less open and more ordered (Johnson 1996: 74). According to such views, a newly enclosed parish can be held up as a clear example of a capitalist landscape; one ordered from a rational perspective; a blank space on a piece of paper carved up to maximise production and allow new, improved methods of farming to be employed; a landscape in which sight is prioritised; a landscape stripped of history and familiarity.

The survival of areas of common land demonstrates the difficulties of enclosing land over which people had many and varied rights and claims. In some cases attempts to enclose common land and waste were strongly contested. The enclosure of the waste, known as the Hillock, was fought over in the parliamentary process of enclosing Monks Risborough on the scarp edge. Meanwhile, an episode of enclosure on Berkhamsted Frith (Hertfordshire) provoked active protest from local inhabitants (Cowell 2002). Shaping the landscape

The social impact of enclosure has also been widely discussed. Much debate has centred on the fate of the small owner-occupiers and the poor of the parish (e.g. Birtles 1999; Chambers and Mingay 1966; Hammond and Hammond 1911; Neeson 1993; Shaw Taylor 2000; Turner 1973), while some studies have explored the impact of enclosure on the status and economic activity of women and children (Humphries 1990). Turner’s examination of pre- and post-enclosure landownership patterns in Buckinghamshire support Chambers and Mingay (1966) to some extent, by demonstrating that small landowners continued to exist as a class following parliamentary enclosure. However, Turner’s work also supports Hammonds’ more pessimistic perspective, since he demonstrates that the individuals holding small plots of land prior to enclosure gave them up at the time of, or shortly following, enclosure (1973: 145). Shigetomi’s study of the impact of enclosure in Weston Turville similarly shows a relatively high rate of turnover of original landowners following enclosure (1999: 360-1). The resident landowners in particular appear to have been affected by the enclosure, with the sixteen landowners falling into this category just prior to enclosure in 1800, falling to just eight by 1832 (1999: 361).

Parliamentary enclosure was generally carried out through the creation of a written Award and an associated map, detailing the form and location of the newly allocated land. These maps laid out the future shape of the local environment. The commissioners’ and surveyors’ choices of how to allocate the new allotments could mean a landowner keeping the fields he or she had, and acquiring a few new plots which had been carved out of the open fields and commons. Alternatively, they could see a wholesale reorganisation of the parish, with farmers being allocated groups of fields away from the village centre, prompting the building of new farms and a dispersal of settlement across the parish. Crucial to the role of these maps in shaping the landscape is that they are two-dimensional. Maps are a very particular way of viewing the landscape (e.g. Harley 1988, 1992). They create a view of land as space and commodity, rather than viewing it as a lived landscape. Enclosure maps do not emphasise topographic variation, so the land becomes apparently featureless and open to being rewritten. Enclosure commissioners and surveyors often used rulers to draw out the lines of new roads and field boundaries. In some cases these could create hedge lines which cut across slopes and dips at odd angles, in contrast to earlier roads and field boundaries which tend

The historical evidence (much of which comes from the study of land tax returns), demonstrates that enclosure, in 419

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Figure 4. Padbury before and after Parliamentary Enclosure. Source: H. Sackett, based on Reed 1979: 176, 203.

challenge this Midlands-based characterisation of the enclosure process? And how does this contrast to the parliamentary enclosure of the strip parishes and the more limited enclosure in the Chilterns?

particular parliamentary enclosure, had a substantial impact on the smaller landowners, in particular those making a living from their own land. While the pattern of landownership may not have changed dramatically, enclosure would have had a major impact on the local community. Some local landowners were reduced to the status of tenants or labourers, while other long-standing residents of a parish may have been forced to sell up and move (Shigetomi 1999: 360). For the people involved in enclosure it was the impact on individual families, rather than the shifting numbers or categories of landownership; that were of immediate concern. The impact of enclosure in Buckinghamshire should not be taken as a template for the rest of the country however, and detailed regional studies from other parts of England have demonstrated the highly varied effects of parliamentary enclosure. Whilst the enclosure and subsequent conversion to pasture of land in Warwickshire led to unemployment and emigration (Martin 1979), Barrell’s examination of the fate of labourers following the enclosure of the poet John Clare’s parish of Helpston found that there was an increased level of work following enclosure (Barrell 1972: 208-215).

Beginning with the parishes in the vale, and then moving on to the scarp edge parishes and the parishes in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns, it is possible to examine the range of approaches taken by surveyors and commissioners, and to discover whether parliamentary enclosure always resulted in the creation of a more ordered and more restricted landscape. The sources and reference numbers for the maps discussed in the following section are listed at the end of the paper. Parliamentary enclosure in the Vale The enclosure of the parish of Padbury (Awarded 1796), lying in the far north of the study area, is an extreme example of what the commissioners could achieve if they were so minded. It is a clear case of the redistribution of land being worked out on an almost blank sheet of paper. The commissioners and surveyors appear to have been more concerned with the mathematics of enclosure than they were with the practicalities of realising their plans. Moreover, they evidently had little consideration for the people of Padbury, whose familiar landscape was destined to be changed in a dramatic and unsettling fashion. As Michael Reed has described, the surveyors “…Davis and Russell laid their rulers straight across the map of Padbury producing a landscape of long, unbending hedgerows and rectangular fields…” (Reed 1979: 202). Straight lines radiated from the village centre

And while these issues are of vital importance, the focus of this paper is on the physical form taken by enclosure. The aim is to examine the range of parliamentary enclosure across a single county, and to understand the reasons behind this variation. Buckinghamshire parishes north of the Chilterns escarpment are generally grouped alongside other Midland areas, including Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. How does a detailed examination of the enclosure of the parishes within the vale section of the study area uphold or 420

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Figure 5. Adstock Enclosure map. Source: CBS: IR/11.

421

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Figure 6. Weedon Enclosure map. Source: CBS: IR/99.

rectangular in shape with ruler-straight edges. Roads were straightened, and given the simplicity of the road network, the number of roads and routeways around the parish were likely to have been substantially reduced. The impact of parliamentary enclosure in parishes such as Padbury and Adstock would have been extreme. The rapid change from open to enclosed fields, the imposition of straight lines on the landscape and the new alignment of the roads would have meant that many people saw the removal of, or loss of access to, many locations that had been significant places in their lives or in the history of their community. Enclosure could mean the removal of landmarks such as trees, as well as a loss of access to places associated with local customs or gatherings (Bate 2003: 48-50). The enclosure of the common land and waste often brought to an end annual celebrations or fairs,

to give new structure to the landscape (Fig. 4). The new, angular fields made very little use of previous boundaries, routeways or landscape features. The only irregular features on the map are the boundaries of the old home closes which were retained by the surveyors. Several of the main roads out of the village were straightened; the Whaddon Way which had run between East Field and Hedges Field was demoted to the status of a footpath, while other roads were completely closed down. One consequence of the enclosure of Padbury was that several new farms were built away from the village in order to be near their lands in the newly enclosed fields. The adjacent parish of Adstock was treated in a very similar fashion (Figure 5). Apart from the home closes which were retained, the new fields were mainly 422

HANNAH SACKETT: PARLIAMENTARY PROCESS: THE CREATION OF FARMING LANDSCAPES enclosed landscapes tended to be more linear, with regular enclosures and straightened roads connecting the parish to other places (1972: 103).

as was the case following the enclosure of Berkhamsted Frith in the mid-nineteenth century (Cowell 2002: 154). In enclosed parishes the landscape had also lost some of its dynamism. Under the open field system, the major turning points in the year were marked by the movement of the livestock onto the meadows and commons in the spring, and their return into the open fields after the harvest in the autumn. Once the whole of a parish had been enclosed though, the great seasonal transformation of the parish from crop to pasture had come to an end. The lines of the fields were now fixed and bounded, pinned down by ditches, banks and hedgerows. Local inhabitants would have been acutely aware of the speed with which the landscape was changing. As the new roads and the new allotments were staked out, and fences put up, ditches dug and hedgerows planted, the landscape must have had a ‘raw’ appearance. For those who had lived in the parish for many years, any changes in the orientation of the main roads would have give them a subtly different view of the landscape as they entered or left the village, giving them a sense of things being slightly out of kilter which would perhaps have initially been disorientating. Meanwhile, other views, footpaths and areas of the landscape may have been denied to them completely. As the hedgerows grew in size year by year, views along the road and the general appearance of the parish would have a very different feel to the old open field layout – more prescriptive (in the ways people could move through it), and more restrictive (in a visual as well as a physical sense). Barrell has described the open field landscape as a circular one, focused on the village, while

The enclosure of Padbury and Adstock conforms in a great many ways to the generalised pattern of parliamentary enclosure which has already been described. This is no surprise, since the parishes north of the Chilterns form part of the Midlands area used to generate this model for enclosure. Various factors facilitated the wholesale reordering of many Midlands parishes in this way. The flat or gently rolling nature of the countryside meant that the straight lines drawn on the page could be transferred without great difficulty onto the land itself. Early piecemeal enclosure was not the norm in the Midlands. This means that there were few existing hedges and only small areas of woodland (also in part due to the fact that prior to enclosure, in the later medieval and early post-medieval periods these were often quite open, ‘champion’ landscapes). The consequence of this was that there were few major obstacles which needed to be negotiated by the enclosure surveyors and commissioners. Padbury and Adstock do differ in one respect to the general Midland pattern in that, while some farms were built out in the newly enclosed fields, the nucleated villages at the heart of these parishes were not dispersed. The maintenance of a central village and the old home closes may have done something to temper the sense of disruption and disorientation which the local people must have felt when the planned changes were made real on the ground.

Figure 7. Long Crendon, view of surviving home closes. Source: H. Sackett.

423

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT rectangular form. The reworking of Weedon was nowhere near as extreme as the reshaping of Padbury. On the map for Slapton and Horton, large fairly regular fields were fitted in and around the home closes and existing winding roads of the parish. The maintenance of some of these older features meant that the landscape was not given an overly ordered appearance. One of the more unusual cases of enclosure in the vale is that of the parish of Long Crendon (Fig. 7). Long Crendon had a central village surrounded by home closes, and the fields surrounding the village had been subject to some early enclosure. By comparing the 1593 maps with the enclosure map, it is possible to examine the ways in which the enclosure surveyor chose to use or ignore the existing boundaries in the landscape. Obviously, some changes to the landscape were likely to have been made between 1593 and 1827. However, the new parliamentary enclosures are clear from the straight lines drawn across the map, while enough of the old boundaries shown on the 1593 maps survive onto the enclosure map to demonstrate that the landscape had not changed beyond all recognition since the sixteenth century. Many of the old boundaries and land plots preserved at the time of enclosure were the home closes. The substantial hedges of these small fields are still flourishing around Long Crendon today (Fig. 7). A number of early enclosures marked on the 1593 maps were also retained, including fields which were marked on the 1593 maps as being bounded by hedges. The existence of substantial hedge boundaries may have made it impractical for these old enclosures to be absorbed into the new fields. However, some of the private closes shown on the early map, including several of the small, squarish fields shown near the boundary with Haddenham, were subsumed within larger parliamentary enclosures. Many stretches of trackway shown on the early map were transformed into field boundaries or footpaths. The boundaries of the old water meadows were not shown on the enclosure maps, and appear to have been absorbed into the new enclosures (Fig. 8). One of the effects of enclosure in Long Crendon was the building of new farmhouses away from the village centre in the newly formed enclosures. Much of the land sold during the process of enclosure was bought up by people from outside the community, who raised rents and were the focus of some resentment (Donald 1979). The commissioners and surveyor created large, parliamentarystyle fields across the parish, and transformed the appearance of the parish from one of mixed open fields and small enclosures to a more ordered, regular landscape. It is notable that not all of the old fields were preserved. This differs to the treatment of some of the parishes on the Chilterns scarp edge, where most existing fields were preserved on the enclosure maps (see below).

Figure 8. Changing field boundaries in Long Crendon: water meadows shown on map from 1593 (Source: CBS: MaR/1/8) (above), new fields on Parliamentary Enclosure map (Source: CBS: IR95/3) (below).

The home closes were also maintained on the enclosure map for Weedon (1802, Fig. 6). One of the surveyors involved in the enclosure of Weedon was Michael Russell, who was also involved in the enclosure of Padbury. The other surveyor at Weedon was William Collisson, who produced maps for other Buckinghamshire Enclosure Awards as well as serving as an enclosure commissioner in the county. At Weedon, following enclosure the small fields were clustered around the village, while the surrounding fields were much larger. The new enclosures were drawn with straight lines, but they did not always take a regular,

On the enclosure map for Aylesbury, the landscape is divided up into a series of large long fields and smaller, sub-rectangular and square fields. Such a division shows the existence of numerous landowners with average sized landholdings in the parish, as well as a large number of 424

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Figure 9. Enclosure map of Great Horwood 1842. Source: CBS: IR 39.

the overall appearance of the landscape was uneven, due to the difference between the large and small fields.

local people holding one or two small allotments. Although the new layout of the parish would have been a clear departure from the landscape of open fields and meadows that once existed in the parish, the new fields were not of a uniform shape and size, while several of the small fields seem likely to have been based on the outline of single strips or groups of strips in the old open fields. A similar pattern of large parliamentary fields and numerous small enclosures can be found on the map for Great Horwood (1842, Fig. 9). The enclosure map shows a few very large and medium sized enclosures mixed in with a very high number of small fields which are mostly clustered around the village and the main roads. Although the new enclosures were drawn with straight lines and took, where possible, the forms of squares and rectangles,

The layout of Aylesbury and Great Horwood parishes draws attention to the way that the size of the population and the nature of landholdings in a parish could have a direct impact on the shaping of the landscape at enclosure. Commissioners and surveyors striving for a landscape of neat, regular fields could not achieve their goal if there was a great disparity between the large and small landowners in the parish. Potentially galling for any neat-minded surveyor must have been parishes with large numbers of individuals who owned just one or two strips in the open fields. In such instances clusters or blocks of very small fields were inevitable, unless these 425

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT smallholders decided to sell up instead of undergoing the cost of enclosure. This problem may explain why the old, irregular lines of the home closes were retained in parishes such as Padbury, which were otherwise transformed into landscapes of straight lines and regular shaped and sized fields. The surveyor may have preferred to keep the old, small home closes, rather than creating new, small enclosures, albeit of a more regular appearance. Another consequence of enclosure was that the divisions between rich, middling and poor, which had to some extent been ‘masked’ by the scattering of strips among the open fields, all became much more apparent on enclosure maps and in the new field patterns. Such a distinction is very clear on the map for Wing (1798, Fig. 10), where a vast area of the parish is shown to be the property of ‘The Right Honourable Earl of Chesterfield’. Indeed, this map did not even include the whole of the parish, since the entire part of its south-west corner was taken up by the ‘Earl of Chesterfield’s OldInclosures’, which the surveyor and commissioners saw no need to represent or reallocate. Eight medium-sized landowners were allocated parcels of land in the parish and were named on the map itself, and around 70 other landholders in the parish each had freehold or copyhold over a few small plots of land. In a great many cases the entry on the table on the right of the enclosure map reads only ‘Cottage & Garden’ or ‘Cottage & Close’. Some of the parishes situated in the vale at the foot of the Chilterns had more in common with the scarp edge parishes than with the vale parishes further to the north. One example is the parish of Stoke Mandeville. Old fields can be seen on the enclosure map (1798, Fig. 11), and were especially abundant in the area around the village and the southern corner of the parish. They can also be seen in the separate woodland section of the parish where the small, assarted fields are likely to have dated back to the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. Where the open fields and wastes had been enclosed there were few ruler-straight lines, and the allotments have the appearance of being based on the old open field divisions. Some of the larger, more regular fields may actually have been formed in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century, rather than at the time of parliamentary enclosure.

Figure 10. Enclosure map of Wing, 1798. Source: H. Sackett, after CBS: IR 30/1.

Earl of Chesterfield who worked the land in question. It would have been paid agricultural labourers who now would have had most access to much of this land, while some of the new enclosures may have been rented out to local farmers. Nonetheless, the reduction of roadways and footpaths through many parishes along with the reallocation of land may have meant that the parishioners found that their daily and seasonal activities were concentrated in certain areas, rather than being spread out across the parish. As already noted, enclosure often brought an end to seasonal shifts from arable to pasture, while the enclosure of common land many have closed off access to areas once used for social gatherings such as dances, fairs and markets. This loss of freedom in moving around the landscape would have been keenly felt by the parishioners (Williamson 2002a: 47). Thompson observes that “…within the space of a year or two the labourers’ world shrank suddenly, from ‘our’ parish to a cottage which might not be their own (1991: 179).

Of the three landscape zones in the study area, the impact of parliamentary enclosure was greatest in the vale. Enclosure of landscapes in parishes where there were no early enclosures and old hedges, save the ones around the home closes, always had the potential to make dramatic changes to both the landscape and the social dynamics of a parish. The imposition of boundaries and private land where previously everyone had had access to the main part of the parish would have dramatically changed people’s movements around and experiences of the landscape. This was especially the case in parishes such as Wing, where one large landowner owned a vast proportion of the land. The exclusion of people from large areas of the parish should not be over-exaggerated, since it was most certainly not individuals such as the 426

HANNAH SACKETT: PARLIAMENTARY PROCESS: THE CREATION OF FARMING LANDSCAPES perhaps would have been the impact of the shift from communal farming and the loss of commons. The inhabitants of the vale parishes which had not experienced any early enclosure had to make the greatest adjustments to their new working practices, their changed relationships with their fellow parishioners, and their ability to subsist or survive financially in the newly enclosed landscape. The scarp edge Enclosure maps from the scarp-edge parishes of the Chilterns show that a great deal of information was sometimes transferred from working maps onto the final enclosure maps. These parishes were complex, comprising mixtures of small, enclosed fields and several small areas of open field strips, as well as plots of waste, woodland and common land. To some extent the existence of old enclosures, the highly fragmented nature of the landscape and the more extreme topography made the job of creating a neat and highly ordered landscape impossible. The history and topography of this area forced the commissioners and surveyors into compromises. Some maps do give a promise of an ordered landscape which was not always fulfilled on the ground. Michael Russell and William Collisson’s 1795 map of Wendover for example (Fig. 12), presents a landscape where the old open fields have been divided into rectangular enclosures, and some of the old enclosed areas appear to have been opened up to create large fields. However, their survey ignored the subdivisions within a single landowner’s holdings. If all the old enclosures had been transferred onto this map, the overall appearance of the landscape would have become much more cluttered, with the lines of the newly enclosed open fields contrasting more clearly with the old irregular enclosures. By choosing to omit all of the old field boundaries, many of which still exist today, Russell and Collisson produced a map of a landscape which appears more uniform than it really was. One notable feature of the Wendover map is that it shows the ease with which old open field strips could be subdivided into rectangular, parliamentary style fields (Fig. 13).

Figure 11. Stoke Mandeville Enclosure map. Source: CBS: IR 9/2.

Ellesborough was another parish surveyed by Michael Russell (1805). The map’s title referred to ‘Old Inclosures and New Allotments’, and it does appear that a large quantity of old enclosures were preserved in the creation of the enclosure map. The field and wood boundaries in the area of the parish climbing up the Chiltern scarp were large but irregular, suggesting that they predated parliamentary enclosure. Some of the fields in this part of the landscape were edged by wide strips of trees or hedgerows indicating that they were most likely cleared from woodland in previous centuries. In the lowlying area of the parish there are still a large number of small fields with irregular boundaries, suggesting that the parish experienced a process of piecemeal enclosure over a long period of time. A few plots were subdivided with

The method of using existing lines of field strips and furlongs as a template for the new enclosures, as noted in the enclosure of Wendover and Ellesborough (see below), could easily have been employed in the parishes of Padbury , Adstock and Long Crendon, as well as other vale parishes. That it was not indicates deliberate choice on the part of the surveyors and commissioners. They wanted to create a more regular landscape, and one which removed itself from the past system of open fields, of strips and furlongs abutting one another at odd angles. They wanted to do away with curving field edges and bring straight, clean lines into the landscape. Whatever the physical impact of enclosure on the landscape and movements of local people, of far greater concern 427

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Figure 12. Wendover Enclosure map, 1795. Source: CBS: IR/26.

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Figure 13. The transformation of open field strips (1794) into enclosed fields in Wendover (1795). Source: H. Sackett.

compare the detailed working maps created by the surveyors at the time of parliamentary enclosure with the enclosure maps themselves. The working maps show a mixed landscape with old enclosures, several plots of open fields and upland woods and wastes. A substantial area of this parish had already been enclosed via piecemeal enclosure over the centuries, and the remaining areas of open field were small. The old fields in Princes Risborough, many of which are bounded by substantial hedgerows, would have been difficult to remove. As a result, the existing enclosed fields were transferred onto the enclosure map (Fig. 14). Unlike the enclosure map for Wendover, the surveyor Richard Collisson included all of the existing field boundaries on the new map.

straight lines by the surveyor, while some allotments look as though the surveyor used old divisions in the open field to create new boundaries. In general, the enclosure map gives the impression of a parish which was substantially enclosed prior to the parliamentary process. An Act of Parliament was a convenient way for the landowners of this parish to ‘tidy up’ the remaining areas of open field and waste, and to formally recognise the enclosures laid out in previous centuries. The enclosure maps for numerous other scarp-edge parishes show evidence of early enclosures surviving into the new landscape layout. These include the map for Bledlow (1812), which shows a large quantity of old enclosures. They were mostly small and roughly rectangular in shape, but without ruler-straight edges, and most probably date to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The new fields laid out on this map were much larger than the old fields, but were not overly regular. For the parish of Princes Risborough, it is possible to

There was a general ‘tidying up’ of the landscape around Princes Risborough, with some of the trackways which once laced the parishes disappearing, and some of the old roads being closed down or rerouted (Fig. 15). On the areas of old open fields the division of land into new 429

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Figure 14. Extract from Parliamentary Enclosure map (CBS: IR/87Q). Many of the small fields are old enclosures.

the rights of the poor of the parish to compensation at the enclosure of the Hillock. This plot of land also highlights the complexity of enclosing common land, since rights over wastes and commons could be held by people from more than one parish.

fields did not jar too much with the surrounding landscape. Some of the old furlong divisions were sometimes used as guidelines for the new enclosures, and although straight lines were used to form the boundaries of the new fields, the map does not indicate an overt concern with creating rectangular or regularised enclosures. The greatest change to the landscape was in the upper section of the parish, where the old waste land at the Hillock was divided into a series of large enclosures, while Abbots Wood and High Wood appear to have been amalgamated. The old area of open field known as ‘Middle Field’ was divided into two large enclosures.

The enclosure of Monks Risborough was finally awarded in 1839, the Act for enclosure being passed in 1830. There are several notable features on this enclosure map. As with Princes Risborough, this long strip parish was divided into upper and lower sections. In the lower part of the parish most of the old enclosures appear to have been transferred onto the enclosure map . The old road system of curving lanes also provided a framework for the landscape. Among the old irregular fields and curving lanes, the open fields and common land were divided up into neat, largely rectangular fields. On the ground these fields can be distinguished by the straight lines of their hawthorn hedges, which often abut the older and multispecies hedges of the old enclosures. The changes to the upper part of the parish were more dramatic. A large part of this area, including the Hillock and the adjacent woods, were allocated to the Earl of Buckinghamshire, while an area of woodland at the very top of the parish was owned by the Earl of Burlington. A few small farmsteads survived in the woods and on the edges of the Hillock, but this upper area of the parish seems to have

One interesting feature of the Princes Risborough working map is that it shows three small fields close to the Hillock which were labelled ‘Monks Risborough Poor’. These allotments are also shown on the enclosure map and are described in the award itself. The description in the award notes that this land was given into the hands of the Trustees for the poor of Monks Risborough “…in lieu of freehold lands and common rights”. Rights over access to the Hillock, which spreads into Monks Risborough parish, caused a prolonged dispute during the enclosure of Monks Risborough parish (Sackett 2004: 187-193; Turner 1973: 205-209), so it is notable that the enclosers at Princes Risborough had already established 430

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Figure 15. Closure of roads in Princes Risborough parish, at time of enclosure. Source: CBS: IR/22.2R.

the parish (Fig. 16) that were allotted to the poor of the parish in compensation for their loss of access to the resources, such as grazing and firewood, in the upper part of the parish.

become an elite landscape, and was now off bounds to the majority of the parishioners. It was this allocation of the former woods and wastes to the Earl of Buckinghamshire which caused the dispute in the parish, as local people had claimed customary rights over the Hillock, including the right to cut and gather wood. Such rights would be denied if the Earl of Buckinghamshire gained outright ownership of the woodland. The very name Hillock seems to support the parishioner’s claim, since Reed (1979: 102) has argued that this name derives from the term ‘hillwork’ which was used in the Chilterns to refer to local people’s rights to take wood for fires, fencing and repair work from the common woodlands. However, the rights of the poorer members of the community were based on tradition and practice rather than any legal basis. Moreover, the Earl of Buckinghamshire’s agent, James Grace, claimed that many local people were abusing their common rights, as individuals living in the hills had been gathering fuel and selling it to people living in the vale section of the parish (Hepple and Doggett 1994: 195; Turner 1973: 206). A special commissioner appointed to deal with the dispute decided that the poor of the parish were to be compensated for the enclosure of the Hillock. The enclosure map bears the eventual outcome of the dispute – a series or eight small allotments in the lower section of

The other interesting features of the Monks Risborough map include a small plot labelled ‘Churchwarden – for Recreation’. The problems in terms of exercise and recreation created by the loss of common land following enclosure were much debated at the time. In 1840, the year after the Monks Risborough Award was granted, parliament ruled that provision should be made for open spaces for exercise and recreation for local people when parliamentary enclosure was undertaken, although in many cases the space granted was very small (Hammond and Hammond 1947: 77-78, 84-85). This was certainly the case at Monks Risborough, where the small and sloping area of land today provides an unusual and challenging location for the local cricket ground. The call for land for recreation was especially strong in areas where there had been large-scale loss of common land. It was also notable in the vicinity of towns and cities that were rapidly expanding or undergoing industrialisation, such as London and Sheffield. The other plot singled out for special treatment at Monks Risborough was an enclosure surrounding the prominent 431

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Figure 16. Allotments for Trustees of the Poor In Monks Risborough from Enclosure map. Source: CBS: IR 94/Q.

local landmark ‘White Cliff Cross’, now known as Whiteleaf Cross (Fig. 17). This large chalk cross cut into the hillside is visible from a long distance away, and formed a noted landmark for travellers approaching the hills from the Vale of Aylesbury. The Cross was first recorded by antiquarian Francis Wise in 1742, though the original date of the chalk figure is still uncertain. The entry within the award describes how the Cross was allotted seven acres of land in order to keep it ‘conspicuous’ in the landscape, and the commissioners ruled that the land around the cross must not be enclosed for farming or planted with trees. The Earl of Buckinghamshire was placed under an obligation to renew and repair the cross. This clause to renew and repair the cross is significant, since it shows that the process of parliamentary enclosure was not simply a straightforward rewriting of the landscape. While commissioners and surveyors were keen to see the end of the old open field system, they did not wish to wipe out all traces of the history and distinctive features of the landscape.

expensive and troublesome to remove. Added to this was the efficiency of leaving land which was already privately owned by an individual in the hands of that same individual. In general, the existing layout of the landscape seems to have guided the commissioners and surveyors’ hands, and the new enclosures which sat amongst the old ones simply added to the general pattern of small and middle sized fields. Some of the surveyors and commissioners working in this region showed considerable sensitivity to the landscape. They used their detailed maps of the parish to maintain features of the landscape. The enclosure of the scarp-edge parishes had therefore far less impact on the appearance of the landscape and access through it than the enclosure of parishes such as Padbury and Adstock. However, the removal of the open fields and the enclosure of the woodlands, wastes and commons would have had substantial social consequences for the poorer members of society, with the loss of grazing or access to vital resources such as firewood.

In general, the scarp-edge parishes saw less brutal treatment than the parishes in the vale. This was principally because they had already undergone substantial enclosure, and the hedges and banks surrounding the existing enclosures would have been

The Chilterns Enclosure Acts and Awards for parishes in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns themselves are far less common. This is because most of the open fields had 432

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Figure 17. ‘White Cliff Cross’ on Monks Risborough Enclosure map. Source: CBS: IR 94/Q.

areas affected by enclosure, not the whole parish. A common element of these enclosure maps is the depiction of numerous small fragments of waste land. Many of these small pieces of land ran alongside roads or were located at road junctions. The inclusion of even tiny fragments of waste shows the thoroughness with which the surveyors and commissioners undertook their task. Cobbett noted that squatters and the poorer members of the parish sometimes took refuge on the wide road verges following the enclosure of the parish commons:

already been enclosed prior to the introduction of parliamentary enclosure. The few exceptions include Amersham, Chalfont St Peter and Hughenden. In general, where parliamentary enclosure was employed in the hills it was to enclose remaining areas of common land. The enclosure of common lands in the Chilterns took place towards the end of the period of parliamentary enclosure, with many parishes employing the Annual General Acts which were introduced in 1836, 1840 and 1845. Examples of such enclosure include Penn (Award 1855), Great Missenden (Award 1855) and Chepping Wycombe (Award 1869).

It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the roadside (Cobbett 1830, cited in Munby 1977: 183).

Apart from a small area of Hyde Heath in Chesham parish, which was enclosed using a Timber Act in 1807, the first parish in the Buckinghamshire Chilterns to be affected by parliamentary enclosure was Amersham in 1815, followed by Chalfont St Peter (Award 1847). The other Chiltern parishes within the study area to make use of an Act of Parliament were all given their Awards in the 1850s and 1860s. Tiny fragments of open fields did survive in other parishes, and were noted on tithe maps, but were extinguished by private agreement during the nineteenth century (Hepple and Doggett 1994: 195).

In a parish where even the small refuge provided by the roadside was denied to them, the poor may have had little choice but to leave the parish altogether. One of the notable features of these maps is that the former areas of common land were divided up using very neat and straight lines. The open nature of the common land may have facilitated the surveys. Such regular, rulerstraight enclosures can be seen on the map for Amersham, drawn up in 1815 (Fig. 18), as well as the later maps for parishes such as Great Missenden (Fig. 19), Penn and Hughenden, all of which were Awarded in 1855. Few allowances for either the topography or local

The maps created for the enclosure of the Chiltern parishes often had a fragmented appearance as they dealt with strips and bundles of land which tended to be at the edges of the parish. In most cases the maps show only the 433

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Figure 18. Scribbled notes on Amersham Enclosure map. Source: CBS: IR/12a.

landmarks seem to have been made by the surveyors dividing up the common land.

Hughendon (1862) sought a further Act of Parliament to enclose remaining patches of common land which had not been enclosed under an earlier Act. For those individuals in the Chilterns wishing to enclose their common land, the process of parliamentary enclosure must have been a welcome. Everyone in the parish would have had an interest in the common lands, waste and woodland, and may have disputed the manner of division of these lands. In such a case the official sanctioning and

As already noted, the decision to enclose the common land of a parish may have been due to disputes emerging over the appropriate use of this land, or because people from outside the parish were exploiting the common’s resources (Hepple and Doggett 1994: 197). This may explain why parishes such as Wendover (1857) and 434

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Figure 19. Extract from Enclosure map for Great Missenden. Source: CBS: IR/12a.

is predominantly beech and hawthorn, and has been planted with regularly spaced beech trees (see Sackett 2004 Appendix I). Both these sections of hedge are likely to have been planted following the Enclosure Award of 1795. Other tree-punctuated hedgelines likely to date from, or shortly after, the time of enclosure, include the boundary near Wellhead Farm and another hedgeline between Boddington Hill and the Hale. The hedge near Wellhead Farm has been grubbed out, but the evenly spaced ash and oak trees remain (Figure 20). Meanwhile, other parliamentary enclosures running off the Hale Lane have been planted simply with hawthorn.

unquestioned legality of the Enclosure Acts would have helped to reinforce the status of the new enclosures. That is not to say that the enclosure of the commons favoured everyone in the community. Enclosure on the ground Across much of the study area, in particular the Vale of Aylesbury, enclosure boundaries usually took the form of straight, single species hawthorn hedges. Parliamentary divisions are clearly recognisable today in the scarp-edge parishes, such as Monks Risborough, where they run up to the lines of earlier hedgerows. Meanwhile, views from high points along the Chiltern escarpment, such as Coombe Hill, show the straight lines, angles and rectangles of the parliamentary fields and roads cutting through the landscape. In some of these parishes, for example Cuddington and Long Crendon, late eighteenth and nineteenth century farmhouses have been built amongst the fields on the outskirts of the parish.

Individual landowners were clearly making active choices about how to enclose their new fields. The ability to plant trees along the line of a new boundary might be indicative of the wealth of the original landowner, and it may also have signalled their support for the enclosure process and the idea of improvement, as well as having practical and economic benefits. The variable nature of enclosure hedges in this one parish suggests that Rackham may have overstated the distinction between hedgelines from early parliamentary enclosure, which he thought were likely to be more elaborately fenced, hedged and planted with trees; and later, nineteenth century examples of parliamentary enclosure which he proposed were more likely to have been planted with

Evidence from Wendover parish however, shows that parliamentary and post-parliamentary field divisions were not always uniform. A section of hedge on London Road is predominantly beech, while the stretch of hedge running from this up to the bottom of Little Barcroft Field 435

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Figure 20. Post-enclosure field boundary near Wellhead Farm, Wendover parish. Source: H. Sackett.

case of Stoke Mandeville, situated at the foot of the scarp edge, which was reorganised in a manner more akin to the neighbouring strip parishes.

simple hawthorn hedges (Rackham 1997: 190). Sometimes smaller landowners could save money by planting whatever tree species they might find in local woods and older hedges (Williamson 2002b: 79-80). While there might have been a general shift over time, the example of Wendover demonstrates the importance of individual landowners and local context in determining the nature of the new enclosures.

Whilst there were recognisable differences between the enclosure of parishes in the three landscape zones, there were also differences within the zones. For example, the Award map for Wendover (1795) sought to bring a greater order to the scarp-edge landscape, while the Princes Risborough map (1823) presented the full complexity and history of enclosure in the parish. Meanwhile, in the Vale commissioners and surveyors could choose to maintain characteristic features of the local landscape, such as the winding roads (as in the map for Slapton and Horton, 1812), or they could rewrite the shape of the landscape in a more dramatic way, as the surveyors chose to do in the parish of Padbury (1796). Such differences highlight the agency of the individual surveyors and the commissioners, but also demonstrate that while there was a highly organised method of carrying out enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the exact nature and eventual appearance of that enclosure was not tightly controlled.

Enclosure: hill, scarp and vale The analysis of enclosure across the three landscape zones of the study area reveals that there were differences in the way that enclosure took place in the Vale, on the scarp edge and in the Chilterns. These differences highlight the importance of the history of an area and the topography of the landscape. The Vale parishes which had not been subject to early enclosure and which lay on gently undulating ground were much easier to divide into regular blocks and new formations than the complex, hilly, hedge, bank and tree laden parishes of the scarp edge and the hills. The study also shows that the treatment of a parish by the parliamentary commissioners and surveyors could be influenced by the nature of enclosure in neighbouring parishes. The parish of Long Crendon, for example, had substantial areas of early enclosure, and yet the surveyors chose to absorb some of the early fields into the new, more ordered landscape. Had Long Crendon lain alongside the scarp edge, it may have been treated differently. This is demonstrated by the

It is clear therefore that the very generalised, Midlandsstyle parliamentary enclosure that is described in many landscape histories cannot be used to describe parliamentary enclosure as it was carried out in the Chilterns, scarp edge and the Vale. Even in parishes such as Padbury and Adstock which were subject to extreme changes, there were variations on the ‘norm’, since the 436

HANNAH SACKETT: PARLIAMENTARY PROCESS: THE CREATION OF FARMING LANDSCAPES surveyors chose to retain the nucleated villages and home closes which formed the hearts of these parishes, and so enclosure did not result in the dispersal of settlement and the decline of the villages. It also meant that some familiar landmarks were retained in the landscape. Although Buckinghamshire north of the Chilterns is generally included in discussions of Midlands enclosure, the findings of this study (supported by Turner 1973: 3) reveal that enclosure in this region does not fit neatly into the hypothetical model of Midlands parliamentary enclosure. And even in the supposed ‘core’ area of Midlands enclosure, here too there were also many localised variations created by different types and periods of enclosure (Williamson 2002a: 43-44).

Conclusions The commissioners and surveyors involved in parliamentary enclosure reshaped a large percentage of the English landscape, and the choices they made had a massive impact on the survival of earlier field systems and land divisions, as well as significant monuments and features in the landscape such as Whiteleaf Cross in the Chilterns. Enclosure Awards and maps can tell us a great deal about contemporary attitudes towards the landscape, as well as providing detailed information about the ownership of land at the time of enclosure. In addition to the Awards and maps, the working papers of the enclosure commissioners and surveyors can also reveal many insights about the nature of bureaucracy by the eighteenth century, and the increased need for the legitimisation of ownership rights in writing (see Sackett 2004 for further discussion).

The parishes on the scarp edge are unlike the planned Midlands landscapes. Surveyors and commissioners working in these parishes were forced into compromises by the local topography and by the substantial banks and hedges created around many of the early enclosures. The very high numbers of small resident landowners in the scarp-edge parishes may also have acted as a restraining hand on the surveyors’ desire to tidy up the landscape. In the Chilterns, there was so little unenclosed land and such an abundance of woodland and substantial hedgerows that the surveyors and commissioners would have found it extremely difficult to impose order across a whole parish. They had to content themselves with the orderly division of small scraps and patches of open field, common and waste. The existence of substantial early enclosure in the study area meant that highly ordered, ‘capitalist’ landscapes were hard to establish. In numerous cases the commissioners and surveyors displayed an awareness of the extant landscape by allowing old routeways, enclosures and the old lines of the furlongs and strips in the open fields to give a framework for the new allotments. The special case made for the chalk cross in Monks Risborough also shows that the commissioners and surveyors could be sensitive to the history and character of parishes. Parliamentary enclosure did not succeed in imposing uniformity across the study area.

This paper has demonstrated that there was and is much more to parliamentary enclosure than straight lines and hawthorn hedges. Considerable variations in the form of enclosure can be seen within a single county. The history of settlement and farming, the topography and geology, and the attitudes of the individuals in charge of the enclosure process meant that each region of England had its own distinctive characteristics, differences which can still be seen in the modern landscapes today. While the aesthetics of straight lines and regular sized fields may have been an aspiration during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were not always realised in practice. The field boundaries created during parliamentary enclosure do much more than simply framing or fossilising earlier landscapes, and can be used to tell their own stories. Acknowledgements Many thanks are due to the staff of the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, in particular Roger Bettridge, for providing access to the enclosure records and for giving me permission to reproduce images from the archives. The contents of this paper are derived from my PhD thesis The Remaking of the English Landscape: An Archaeology of Enclosure. Thanks to my PhD supervisor Sarah Tarlow for her support and advice, and to my examiners Tom Williamson and Mark Gillings for their comments on my work. I am also very grateful to Liz Sackett who helped with the fieldwork.

However, no matter how sensitively enclosure of the landscape was handled, any case of large scale parliamentary enclosure meant upheaval and expense. Some people stood to gain a great deal, while others might decide the expense was too great and to sell up, or they might have had to shift from subsisting as a small landholder to working as a wage labourer. In any parish in which the commons and waste were enclosed, the poorer members of the community would certainly suffer from a loss of valuable resources, and this is an area of extensive discussion and debate (e.g. Birtles 1999; Hammond and Hammond 1911; Mingay 1997; Neeson 1993; Turner 1973, 1980, 1984; Sackett 2004; Snell 1985; Williamson 2000, 2002a).

Enclosure documents and maps CBS = Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies CBS: IR/11. Enclosure Award and map for Adstock. CBS: IR/12a. Enclosure Award and maps for Amersham (1816). CBS: IR/19A. Enclosure map for Aylesbury (1778). CBS: Q/RX/7. Enrolled Enclosure Award for Bledlow (1812). CBS: IR/46R. Enclosure map for Bledlow (1812). 437

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT CBS: IR/42a. Chepping Wycombe Enclosure map (1869). CBS: IR/39. Enclosure Award and map for Great Horwood (1842). CBS: IR/91Q. Enclosure Award and map for Great Kimble, Little Kimble and Ellesborough (1805). CBS: IR/83Q+A. Enclosure Award and map for Great Missenden (1845). CBS: IR/ 80. Hughenden Enclosure Award and maps (1853). CBS: Ma R/1/8-11.T. All Souls College Estate in Long Crendon. Four maps (1593). CBS: IR/95Q. Enclosure Award and map for Long Crendon. Seven parts – NW, NE, SE, SW, Tittershall wood, village (1827). CBS: IR/94Q. Monks Risborough Enclosure Award. Original plan in book, 1839. Inrolment vol.10; Act II Geo IV (c. 17-1830). CBS: IR/M.8/1-10. Minute Book of the Enclosure Commissioners for Monks Risborough covering meetings from 17 V 1830 > 14 III 1834(incomplete) Bound together with the printed act. CBS: IR/M/8/9. Inclosure Bill and Act for Monks Risborough, petition against inclosure, claims and objections. CBS:IR/M/8/7. Draft award for Monks Risborough. CBS:IR/M-8/8. Plan of Monks Risborough parish in 1831 showing public and private roads and ways set out under the inclosure act, including memoranda of objections and amendments. CBS: Q/H/83. Stopping up of footpaths and Highways related to enclosure of Monks Riborough parish (1833). CBS: IR/94Q; IR/21A; IR/21. Enclosure Maps of Monks Risborough parish, partially coloured; A -Lower B Upper; Award 23rd September 1839. Surveyors: Edward Rasleigh and R. Collisson. CBS: IR/4i. Padbury Enclosure Award and map (1796). CBS:PR/163/26/1. Enclosure map for Penn (1855). CBS: D42/G2.T. Map of old enclosures and field names for Princes Risborough (c.1821). CBS: IR/22.2.R. Enclosure map of Princes Risborough showing roads, 1821. Surveyor William Rutt, surveyed 1810. Shows open fields and furlongs. CBS: IR/87Q. Princes Risborough Enclosure Award and Upper and Lower inclosure maps 1823 Surveyor: R. Collisson of Brackley. CBS: IR/M/I/1-10. Complete working papers of Inclosure Commissioners for Princes Risborough. CBS: IR/48a+b. Enclosure map and Award for Slapton and Horton (1812). CBS: IR/9. Award and map for Stoke Mandeville (1798). CBS: IR/99/Q. Enclosure Award and map for Weedon (1802). CBS: IR/26. Enclosure Award and map for Wendover (1795). CBS: IR/30/1+ 2Q. Enclosure map and Award for Wing (1798).

Bibliography Barrell, J. 1972 The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: an Approach to the Poetry of John Clare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bate, J. 2003. John Clare: a Biography. London: Picador. Birtles, S. 1999. Common land, poor relief, and enclosure: the use of manorial resources in fulfilling parish obligations, 1601-1834. Past and Present 165: 74-106. Chambers, J.D. and Mingay, G.E. 1966. The Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880. London: A. and C. Black. Cowell, B. 2002. The Commons Preservations Society and the Campaign for Berkhamsted Common, 186670. Rural History 13 (2): 145-161. Donald, J. (ed.) 1979. Letters of Thomas Hayton Vicar of Long Crendon, Buckinghamshire, 1821-87. Aylesbury: Buckinghamshire Record Society. Hammond, J.L. and Hammond, B. 1911. The Village Labourer. London: Longmans and Co. Hammond, J.L. and Hammond, B. 1947. The Bleak Age. West Drayton: Penguin. Harley, J.B. 1988. Maps, knowledge and power. In D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape. Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277-312. Harley, J.B. 1992. Deconstructing the map. In T. Barnes and J. Duncan (eds.) Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge, pp. 231-247. Hepple, L.W. and Doggett, A.M. 1994. The Chilterns. Chichester: Phillimore. Hoskins, W.G. 1985 [1955]. The Making of the English Landscape. London: Hodder and Stoughton (1985 edition Harmondsworth: Penguin). Humphries, J. 1990. Enclosures, common rights, and women: the proletarianisation of families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Journal of Economic History 50(1): 17-42. Johnson, M. 1996. An Archaeology of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Martin, J.M. 1979. The small landowner and Parliamentary Enclosure in Warwickshire. Economic History (2nd series) 32 (3): 328-343. Mingay, G.E. 1997. Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to its Causes, Incidence and Impact 1750-1850. London: Longman. Morris, J.K. 1999. History in Chiltern Woods: A Guide to the Identification and Management of Woodland Archaeological Features. High Wycombe: The Chiltern Woodlands Project. Munby, L. 1977. The Hertfordshire Landscape. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Neeson, J.M. 1993. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rackham, O. 1997. The History of the Countryside. London: Phoenix. Reed, M. 1979. The Buckinghamshire Landscape. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 438

HANNAH SACKETT: PARLIAMENTARY PROCESS: THE CREATION OF FARMING LANDSCAPES Roden, D. 1970. Changing settlement in the Chiltern Hills before 1850. Folk Life 8: 57-71. Roden, D. 1973. Field systems of the Chiltern Hills and their environs. In A.R.H. Baker and R.A. Butlin (eds.) Studies of Field Systems in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 325376. Sackett, H.K. 2004. The Remaking of the English Landscape: an Archaeology of Enclosure. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Leicester. Shaw Taylor, L. 2000 Abstract of thesis. Journal of Economic History 60: 508-511. Shigetomi, K. 1999. English Parliamentary Enclosure: a Study of a Buckinghamshire Parish. Tokyo: KeisoShobo Publishers. Snell, K.D.M. 1985. Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tate, W.E. 1946. A Handlist of Buckinghamshire Enclosure Acts and Awards. Aylesbury: Bucks County Council. Taylor, C. 2000. Fields in the English Landscape (revised edition). Stroud: Sutton. Thompson, E.P. 1991. Customs in Common. London: Merlin Press. Turner, M.E. 1973. Some Social and Economic Considerations of Parliamentary Enclosure in Buckinghamshire, 1738-1865. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Sheffield. Turner, M.E. 1980. English Parliamentary Enclosure. Dawson: Folkestone. Turner, M.E. 1984. Enclosures in Britain 1750-1830. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Williamson, T. 2000. Understanding enclosure. Landscapes 1 (1): 56-79. Williamson, T. 2002a. The Transformation of Rural England. Farming and the Landscape 1700-1870. Exeter: Exeter University Press. Williamson, T. 2002b. Hedges and Walls. London: National Trust.

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Panoramic view of Eskdale in the Cumbrian Lake District. In the foreground are buildings and sled tracks associated with postmedieval stone quarrying. In the valley are improved pasture fields, whilst beyond are more irregular and piecemeal intakes of rougher pasture. Beyond these is the open grazing land of the upland fells. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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The irregularity of fields: historic piecemeal enclosure and dispersed settlement in upland England at the Upper Derwent, Peak District, and Great Langdale, Lake District Bill Bevan Villages and open fields are substantial physical entities, solid and tangible; their monumentality dominates the local landscape, and so provides significant material remains for the field techniques of the archaeologist to be employed. They can be readily surveyed, investigated, measured and, as a result, clearly bounded research areas can be delineated. Ridge and furrow lends itself well to aerial photography, while plans of village layouts look good on the text book page. One can be compared with another, morphological types can be identified and codified, and any individual village or open field can be slotted into its place based on its physical characteristics. As such, villages and open fields have allowed archaeologists to investigate rural settlement as if they were hillforts, henges, Roman forts or the other highvisibility earthwork ‘sites’ that came to be defined as the subject of field archaeology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Introduction The medieval and post-medieval rural landscape of England has often been characterised as a country of two halves (Fox 1932; Rackham 1986) (Figure 1). On one side are the lowlands of the south, east and midlands, and on the other are the uplands of the north and west. Though there can be no absolute division of the medieval and post-medieval landscapes of England, three very broad and simplified, landscape characters can be identified. Dispersed farmsteads and hamlets associated with irregular patterns of walled or hedged fields, with villages and open-fields present, dominate the uplands in some areas. Large areas of the lowlands also comprise dispersed settlement and irregular enclosed fields, especially in the south-east, southern East Anglia and parts of the Fens, areas south of the Bristol Channel, and in the west midlands, the north-west and the Vale of York. Rackham (1986: 6) has called these areas ‘ancient countryside’. Nucleated settlement with open fields are mostly concentrated in a swathe of land running from Northumberland and Yorkshire in the north, through Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Warwickshire in the midlands to Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Gloucestershire in the south. This region has been termed ‘planned countryside’ (Gray 1959; Rackham 1986; Roberts 1997).

Villages and open fields also have major attractions for historians too, whether their specialities are social, economic, and landscape history, or place-names. Villages were spatially well-defined entities, their concentrations of population often attracting documentary record. Many villages appear as familiar names in the Domesday Book of 1085, although more dispersed settlements were often left out due to the numbers that were peripheral to the centres of Norman baronial control. The practical modes of open field operation lend themselves to grand hypotheses and various systemic analytical methods of understanding. Discussions of the presence and internal workings of two, three or four-fold rotation systems became the bedrock for English agrarian history. If Domesday is one bookend, Parliamentary Enclosure is another. Most open fields were enclosed by Acts of Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, resulting in the production of further documentary materials that historians can use as descriptive tools, which form snapshots of the fields at the end of their common lives.

Landscape historians and archaeologists specialising in medieval rural landscapes have long concentrated much of their efforts on villages and open fields of the ‘planned countryside’ (e.g. Astill and Grant 1988; Baker and Butlin 1973; Fox 1981; Gray 1959; Lewis, Mitchell-Fox and Dyer 1997; Seebohm 1890; Taylor 1981, 1983; Williamson 2003). This can be seen in Rackham’s treatment of the upland and lowland regions in his introduction to The History of the Countryside (1986: 45). The uplands are given two sentences in a two-page section that is actually headed ‘The Two Landscapes of Lowland England’. There are a number of highly valid reasons for this focus on the village and open field landscapes of medieval England. It is of course completely justifiable to study the nucleated/open field landscapes of England, which form important and fascinating research topics of relevance to large swathes of the English countryside (and, therefore, to its population). What I am attempting to do however, is to place this research in context so that we can appreciate this somewhat biased focus of attention, before moving on to show that landscapes of irregular enclosure are also productive and worthwhile areas of study.

Village formation appears to have a chronological origin horizon, another tangible that can be discussed and debated. Planned countryside is now generally accepted to have first originated during the early medieval period, in the centuries surrounding the eighth or ninth centuries AD. The combination of physical presence, documentary records, potential for systemic analysis, and a chronological origination point has produced a series of evidential and interpretative trajectories. These trajectories have combined, resulting in open field, village landscapes being conceived of as single, tangible 441

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Figure 1. Oliver Rackham’s landscape zones of the English countryside and locations of study areas. Source: B. Bevan, after Rackham 1986.

2000). Landscape historians have preferred to study the ‘well-organised’ bread-producing, cultivated open fields to the irregular walled pastures, woodlands and rough grazing. Dispersed landscapes of irregular enclosure are the backwoods’ cousin of medieval rural studies, invited to their urban relatives’ society wedding, though the family is a little bit embarrassed that they are rarely able to enter the same satisfying dialogues. Their rough and ready ways are a primitive throwback that cannot quite be understood!

entities, and, as a result, they have become the ideal vehicles for big archaeological and historical research projects. Villages have also attracted attention because they are the quintessential ideal of the English landscape. The village is so embedded in attitudes about what constitutes the English countryside, and therefore what it is to be English, that researching village formation appears to get right at the heart of the history of England. In effect, village-dominated landscapes have come to stand for the rest of England, and, by default, what is outside of these areas are not representative of the real England. There is also a possible Classical influence, right back to Caesar’s descriptions of civilised and barbaric in Britain in his Gallic Wars. He equated the south and east of Britain as being more civilised because of the predominance of grain growing, while the north and west was a more primitive landscape of pastoralists. Caesar’s comments on an archipelago he barely visited have remained ingrained in our psyche ever since, and like other Classical influences, they became part of eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century dominant social discourses of imperialism, improvement and progress (q.v. Hingley

Dispersed settlement nevertheless dominated extensive areas of England, including the Pennines, the Lake District, the Scottish and Welsh Marches and the southwest peninsula (Roberts 1997). Dispersal was also common in the lowland areas of the south-east, west and north, where hamlets and isolated farmsteads existed alongside villages (Rackham 1986). Common fields were sometimes associated with dispersed settlement (Williamson 2003), a hamlet or a number of farms sharing an unenclosed field to grow crops in summer and pasture livestock in winter. Elsewhere, common fields were completely absent, and the farmed landscape was divided between individual farmsteads, with irregular 442

BILL BEVAN: THE IRREGULARITY OF FIELDS: HISTORIC PIECEMEAL ENCLOSURE AND DISPERSED SETTLEMENT uplands. Some areas appear to have had a settlement history embedded in post-Roman or earlier landscapes, while others originated later, in some cases contemporary with or even later than villages that were created in the same region. Common fields and irregular enclosures belonging to individual farmsteads both occur, and in places they appear together.

enclosed ‘fields’ used for a mixture of hay meadow, arable and pasture. Such enclosed landscapes were often created over long periods of time as families at each farmstead progressively enclosed more fields in a piecemeal fashion. In upland areas, beyond the enclosures and limited numbers of open fields, the higher ground comprised extensive areas of rough, common land. This was used for summer pasture, as well as a large range of resources, such as peat, bracken and stone.

The Peak District The non-nucleated, non-open field landscapes are often conceptualised in the lowlands as an unchanging continuation of Roman and post-Roman settlement patterns. Questions about their existence have often been couched in terms of why these areas ‘failed’ to develop into planned village/open field landscapes (Williamson 2003). In the uplands, the answer is often seen as being the result of marginality, with the land not being productive enough to support large village communities with extensive communal fields. These were the bits of the landscape that were ‘left over’, because they were not good enough to be turned over to villages and open fields in the early medieval period.

The Peak District is a case in point. Overall, the Peak District is a region of great variety in terms of historic period rural settlement and land allotment, despite it usually being placed within the upland zone. The region can be divided into the three settlement/enclosure zones that originated in the early medieval period: nucleated, dispersed and a mix of the two (Barnatt and Smith 1997) (Fig. 2). The Staffordshire Moorlands and High Peak comprised dispersed settlement, characterised by small hamlets and isolated farmsteads associated with small, enclosed fields. Nucleated villages and open fields dominated much of the limestone plateau and the valleys to the south. In some places, such as south of the River Wye, villages are situated at distances of two or three kilometres apart, and open fields nearly abut one another. The remainder of the plateau, the Derwent Valley below Bamford, the Hope Valley, the Eastern Moors and the valleys along the south-west of the region, comprised a mix of nucleated villages with common fields and dispersed hamlets or individual farmsteads with irregular enclosures.

However, a number of interpretative studies of land allotment have been undertaken in the uplands. Angus Winchester has looked closely at the medieval Lake District as part of a wider, historical, review of the region (1987). Here, most valleys changed character along their lengths – the lower valleys and more open low altitude areas often had villages, some with common fields, but dispersed farmsteads and hamlets mainly occupied the valley heads of the Central fells. Valley bottoms were usually common fields enclosed within a single boundary, and the land outside was open common waste. In Swaledale, North Yorkshire, Andrew Fleming has demonstrated that medieval land-use was dominated by common land. Much of the land was divided into communally used upland pastures, cow pastures, wood pastures and meadows, although villages with open fields were present in the lower dale (Fleming 1997, 1998). The various commons were progressively walled and hedged into irregular enclosed fields from the later medieval period onwards.

The majority of villages comprise a similar pattern of farmsteads spaced along a single street, such as Chelmorton or Wardlow. There are also a number that developed around a market square or green, for example Hathersage or Monyash, and others that are loose aggregations of buildings (Barnatt and Smith 1997). The presence of villages in the medieval period was neither static nor constant. Some villages grew and expanded while others were abandoned. A small number of villages recorded in Domesday were abandoned or shifted location at an early date, while others were abandoned in the late medieval period. Each village had an associated large common field, physically divided into strips by ridge and furrow or lynchets. There were usually extensive tracts of unimproved common pasture beyond the fields, on which livestock could be grazed in the summer before returning to the fields and byres during the winter. An individual’s land holdings in the field were clustered near to the farmstead, and the three-field system was not so important (ibid.). Many of these fields were enclosed over a long period of time in piecemeal fashion, by agreement between farmers, probably beginning in the later medieval period, rather than according to Act of Parliament or an overall plan imposed from above. This has resulted in a landscape of narrow, sinuous walled enclosures that follow the lines of ridge and furrow, so fossilising the strip arrangements of the common fields.

Various English Heritage backed landscape character projects, some of individual regions such as Cornwall and the Peak District, as well as Roberts and Wrathmell’s overview of the whole of England (2000), have addressed the variations in historic landscapes at a broader level. They developed an observation first made by Rackham (1986) that the more communally managed ‘planned countryside’ correlated with open landscapes that had been cleared of woodland before Domesday, while the more individualistic ‘ancient countryside’ was associated with heavily wooded areas (Roberts and Wrathmell 2000). What they also reiterated was the lack of hardand-fast boundaries between nucleated and dispersed landscapes. What we also see is a variety in terms of landscape organisation, field layout and history of enclosure in the 443

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Figure 2. Medieval settlement zones in the Peak District. Source: B. Bevan, adapted from Barnatt and Smith 1997.

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Figure 3. The Upper Derwent from the south. Source: R. Manley.

same in size and topographical location as the Edale booths, they had communally organised open fields. Larger villages, including Hope, Bradwell and Castleton, also had common fields. The first two were already in existence by the date of Domesday, while Castleton was founded after the Norman Conquest by William Peveril as a planned market town in the valley below his castle (Hart 1981). The common fields were enclosed piecemeal, though the preservation of strip field organisation by boundaries was more fragmentary than on the limestone. Many enclosures formed small, irregular fields that bore no physical alignment to ridge and furrow. At Bamford, the whole of the common field was realigned in this way during enclosure.

There is variety in the dispersed landscapes too. There are some areas, such as Edale, Longdendale and the Upper Derwent, that were solely occupied by isolated farmsteads and hamlets. In Edale, settlement was in existence by the late eleventh century and was listed in Domesday as a berewick or outlying farm of the manor of Hope (Morgan 1978). Between 1199 and 1216, at least five vaccaries, known as Booths, were established by the Crown along Edale’s south-facing slopes (Barnatt 1993). These developed into farming hamlets, each numbering four or more farmsteads, which were granted to freeholders in the late sixteenth century. Each booth had transects of land across the valley that incorporated valley bottom, valley side and moorland. Individual farmsteads also exist on the north-facing slopes, though these may have been founded in the post-medieval period (ibid.). The wide expanse of valley-bottom land in Edale comprised heavy, water-retaining soil only suitable for pasture until the introduction of underground drainage systems in the early post-medieval period (Williamson 2002). This was originally enclosed with hedges rather than walls. There also appears not to have been extensive woodland in the medieval period, unless it was systematically and extensively removed (Barnatt 1993). Above the enclosed land were open cow pastures, which were enclosed only in the post-medieval period.

This brief discussion of the Peak District hopefully highlights something of the variety in settlement and land allotment that can exist in a single region. Moving on to two particular areas of dispersed settlement and irregular enclosure in greater detail, I will interpret the history of settlement and enclosure to explain why patterns of irregular enclosure developed, and to discuss the social relations that are ultimately connected with such landscapes. Upper Derwent, Derbyshire/Yorkshire

The Hope Valley contained a number of villages, hamlets and individual farmsteads. Many of the villages and hamlets had common fields and were recorded in Domesday. While the hamlets were approximately the

The Upper Derwent is located in the High Peak area of the Peak District (Bevan 2003, 2004) (Figs. 1, 3). The area comprises the upper reaches of the Derwent Valley, 445

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Figure 4. Post-Norman Conquest land-owning divisions of the Upper Derwent. Source: B. Bevan.

636m A.O.D. to the west (Kinder Scout) and 628m A.O.D. to the north (Bleaklow).

situated north of the village of Bamford, and its tributary – the Ashop or Woodlands Valley. Outcropping rocks are Carboniferous and comprise the Kinderscout Grit group of the Millstone Grit series and the Edale Shales (Stevenson and Gaunt 1971; Woodcock and Strachan 2000). Rivers and tributary watercourses have formed steep-sided valleys and cloughs. Soils are generally thin on the higher ground and valley sides, and the underlying gritstone outcrops form tors and scarp-edges. Deeper soils are found in the valley bottoms and the lower, gentler valley sides. The two main valleys are wider and gentler adjacent to and upstream of the confluence between the rivers Ashop and Derwent. Flat and gently sloping land is largely restricted to long, narrow terraces suspended above the floodplain, and to discrete areas such as the confluence of the Derwent and Ashop rivers, south of Abbey Brook and the lower end of Alport Dale. Most of the valley sides occupy heights lying between 200 and 350 metres above Ordnance Datum (A.O.D.), with these elevations becoming progressively higher towards the heads of the valleys. Along the east side of the Derwent Valley the moorland forms a series of shelves immediately above the valley side lying at between 350 and 450m A.O.D. Steep gritstone scarps, notably Derwent and Howden Edges, rise above these shelves to between 480 and 540m A.O.D. The two valleys are separated by a narrow ridge, one kilometre long and approximately 350m A.O.D., which gives way to higher ground situated above 400 metres that forms a broad moorland plateau extending to the north west. To the north, east and west of the two valleys the land rises to high, undulating, peat-covered moorland which reaches up to 546m A.O.D. to the east (Margery Hill),

After the Norman Conquest, the Upper Derwent lay within three large manors, which were also ecclesiastical parishes: land to the west of the River Derwent was in Hope, while land to the east was divided between Bradfield in Yorkshire and Hathersage in Derbyshire (Byford 1981; Cox 1877) (Fig. 4). While King William gave all three manors to loyal barons, the Saxon Royal Manor of Hope also lay within the Royal Forest of the Peak (Barnatt and Smith 1997). The Forest covered the western side of High Peak as far north as Longdendale, the Hope and Edale valleys, Chapel-en-le-Frith and the north-east corner of the limestone plateau, and therefore included the whole area west of the River Derwent (Cox 1905; Kerry 1893). By the seventeenth century, the Upper Derwent was divided between Derwent and Hope Woodlands townships, and part of Bradfield township – known as Howden. Hope Woodlands was based upon Earl John’s grant to Welbeck, and Howden may have been another land parcel granted to the Abbey by the Lord Furnival of Sheffield in the thirteenth or fourteenth century (Byford 1981). Hope Woodlands and Howden became centralised manorial estates after the Dissolution of the monasteries, and estate maps were drawn in the early seventeenth century to facilitate estate management (Harrison 1637; Senior 1627) (Figs. 5-6). Settlement The Upper Derwent was colonised after a period of apparent settlement absence, or at least low-level nonintensive land-use, during the thirteenth century AD. 446

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Figure 5. Upper Derwent settlement, field boundaries and land use in Howden and Hope Woodlands townships. Source: B. Bevan.

Figure 6. The typical pattern of valley side enclosed fields in the Upper Derwent, with the open moorland above. Source: B. Bevan.

447

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT woodlands in the medieval Forest is a good example. The Crown, through the officers of the Royal Forest, wanted to maintain woodland to provide cover and food for deer and other wild game, to be served at royal banquets or bestowed as gifts. The Crown also harvested timber for building work. Preserving the Forest was ultimately bound up with the Crown authority and maintenance of its social position. Those trying to sustain livelihoods by farming in the Forest thus regularly and progressively damaged the Forest woodland – by clearing it to make way for fields, allowing livestock to compete with game and taking wood for fuel and buildings. It was the Crown that enabled settlement in the Forest, first by granting land to Welbeck Abbey and then through the Forest officers, who allowed the buildings and enclosures of settlers to remain upon payment of a rent, hidden under the nomenclature of a fine (Cox 1905). In such a wooded Forest landscape, dispersed settlement made the least impact, and so would have been preferred by both settlers and Forest officers. If the new farmers came from villages elsewhere in the manors, perhaps related to people who had used pastures and meadows before they were granted to Welbeck Abbey, they were consciously creating a new settlement pattern in relation to local land owning and environmental conditions.

Thirteenth century land grants suggest that there were existing pastures and meadows, which may have been used by occupants of the manors settled in villages further to the south. Encroachment in the Forest is documented in the thirteenth century too. For example, there were 22 cases of illegally creating enclosed, cultivated land recorded in 1216, and 131 cases of illegal building recorded in 1251 (Cox 1905). Though illegal, these enclosures and settlements were allowed on payment of a fine. The Premonstratensian abbey at Welbeck, Nottingham, acquired land in the Upper Derwent with a series of grants beginning with a late twelfth century AD endowment by John, Earl of Montaigne – later King John. The abbey founded at least one grange, at Crookhill (Bagshaw 1869-70; Kerry 1893; Kirke 1925). This appears to have included all of what was to become Hope Woodlands township, Howden and a single landholding in Derwent. None of the grants describe extant buildings, and the granted land is either called pasture or meadow, which suggests use of those areas but not settlement. Farmsteads were founded elsewhere on the Abbey’s estate, as evidenced by the association of thirteenth century (and later) pottery with a number of farmstead sites (Bevan 2004). Welbeck may have been involved in colonisation of the area, and the Order rented many of their estates to tenants, rather than directly managing them with lay brothers (Bond 1993; Wheeler 1996). The settlement pattern that was created by this colonisation was one of dispersed, individual farmsteads and cottages occupying a range of topographies, including the valley bottoms, a variety of altitudes up the valley sides, and the low-lying moorland plateaux. An important structuring element was the desire to be located close to water, with all farmsteads lying within 50 metres of a water source.

Ceramics found by fieldwalking around the edges of the Derwent reservoirs show that all farmsteads identified in the thirteenth century continued to be occupied until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The ceramics are typical of domestic medieval assemblages used throughout Britain for the storage, serving and cooking of food and drink (McCarthy and Brooks 1988). Many of the decorated or glazed wares in the Upper Derwent are serving jugs and pots to be used at the table, while storage and cooking vessels are mainly plain and undecorated, though some are glazed. Ceramic tablewares are rare and other materials such as wood and leather, which were marginally cheaper, would have been used. Exceptions to this include the presence of Cistercian ware at a number of farms, and seconds in a Coal Measures ware at Nether Ashop – indicating a household keen to use tablewares, even when opportunities or finances enabled only the purchase of imperfect examples. These finds suggest that changes in drinking habits and, perhaps, social behaviour were occurring in the Upper Derwent contemporary with much of northern England (Cumberpatch 2003). The single pipkin sherd recovered, and the absence of dripping trays and basting dishes suggests that roasting meat was uncommon.

The exception to this was the small Derwent hamlet, which developed on the line of a long-distance packhorse route as a service centre for the whole area. Welbeck Abbey built a mill and a chapel there, despite the township lying outside of their estate, and there were a number of inns by the sixteenth century for travellers (Byford 1981). In Alport Dale, there was a group of four farmsteads, built adjacent to each other on the western side of a circular walled enclosure. Initial analysis and radiocarbon dating of environmental evidence from a peat core taking on the upper valley side, approximately 500m from the farmsteads, indicates that an open, grassland landscape was consistently maintained from the postRoman period until the present day (Norbert 2003). This suggests the continuation of pasture throughout the early and later medieval periods, perhaps associated with settlement, though it is possible that animals were grazed here from farms or villages further down the Derwent Valley. The organisation of enclosures in Alport was also different to the rest of the township, which again may hint at a different settlement history.

Into the fields: enclosure and walls Enclosure was partially complete by 1627 in Hope Woodlands township and by 1637 in Howden (Harrison 1637; Senior 1627) (Fig. 5). It appears that during the medieval period, land was enclosed by individual farmsteads by clearing land within woodland. No shared common fields were created during this period, and the pattern of enclosure recorded in the early seventeenth century was one of small, irregular fields throughout the two valleys (Fig. 6). Boundaries generally followed

The interactions between the structures of land ownership and inhabitation through land tenancy created the dispersed settlement pattern. Landowners and tenants both had demands on the landscape. The place of 448

BILL BEVAN: THE IRREGULARITY OF FIELDS: HISTORIC PIECEMEAL ENCLOSURE AND DISPERSED SETTLEMENT irregular courses related to topography, the nature and location of agricultural activities, and the rights to place a boundary along a certain line as negotiated between tenants and landlords. Farmers worked with local topography, seeking out the better soils, the more level ground or the least boulder-strewn areas available to them at the time. Within this overall arrangement there was some local variation (Bevan 2003). Farmsteads in Hope Woodlands township usually had one or two largish oval enclosures looping out along the contour to one or both sides, beyond which were numerous smaller and more rectangular fields. Ronksley House was the exception to this, possibly because of the absence of gently sloping land in its vicinity. Here a small group of large enclosures quickly gave way to moorland grazing. East of the River Derwent, farmsteads on the steeper slopes were mostly immediately surrounded by small fields that tended to radiate out from the farm buildings before giving way to a more irregular pattern of enclosures. There was also a distinctive group of fields with curving boundaries when seen in plan, which ran across the valley side. These can still be seen between Mill Brook and Grindle Clough in Derwent township (Figs. 6, 7) and east of Crookhill in Hope Woodlands. It was following the contours of the valley sides that created the lines of the curving boundaries, where the sides formed rounded shoulders of land caused by the erosion of the underlying rock by cloughs. On closer inspection, the boundaries and fields are little different to other more rectangular though still comparatively irregular fields in the survey area, which also have contour-following boundaries. In South Ashop, farmsteads are surrounded by more rectangular-shaped fields arranged in blocks. In Alport Dale, the four farmsteads were located at the upper end of the belt of improved inbye, which ran along the dale bottom. Fields of the different farmsteads were intermingled with each other within this inbye, rather than occupying distinct and discrete blocks as elsewhere in the township.

Figure 7. Field enclosure patterns and dispersed settlement in Derwent township. Source: B. Bevan.

by agreement between tenants and landowners while some may have been instigate by tenants without any prior agreement. Enclosing land in Hope Woodlands was not simply a case of progressively working further and further outwards from each farmstead (Fig. 8). In 1627, Rowlee farm comprised six adjacent fields surrounding the farmhouse and two isolated enclosures nearby, which were separated from each other by woodland (Senior 1627). By the beginning of the nineteenth century all of the woodland was cleared and divided with walls into small fields, the individual patches of agricultural land in the seventeenth century becoming a cohesive block (Potter 1808). It appears from Senior’s descriptions of land quality that the earlier fields occupied the better-drained land, and the intervening woodlands covered steeper and boggier ground. Enclosure after 1627 may have been undertaken with the development of better drainage techniques in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More striking is the development at Two Thorn Fields, located to the west of Crookhill. The farmstead is first documented in 1623, four years before Senior surveyed Hope Woodlands, when he referred to the farm buildings as being ‘ancient’ (Senior 1627). Situated just above the steep side of the

In principle there would be little to prevent a farmer enclosing a large circuit to define the full extent of their landholding in one act, and then successfully using the space within for agriculture without so many subdivisions. While dividing up the land does facilitate agricultural activities, to some extent this could be effectively undertaken with three to four enclosures to keep livestock from arable, and provide the means to separate livestock for shearing, mating and sale. Woodland could be protected from grazing by defining large areas that were off-limits to clearance, and which could be enclosed within a single boundary. This would require some level of overall direction by the landowner or between tenants, from the early phases of settlement. The Upper Derwent field pattern suggests that land was enclosed by piecemeal over substantial periods of time, not as the product of the landowners’ planning or the result of communal farming. Successive generations of occupants at individual farmsteads probably enclosed small areas of land at a time by building on what already existed, and adding to it. Some enclosure may have been 449

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Figure 8. The dynamics of post-medieval enclosure in Hope Woodlands, 1627-1808. Source: B. Bevan.

reduction gives the impression that they were more keen to see the amount of farmland expand, which would increase the value and therefore the rents of each farm, compared to the documented reservation of woodland to the Crown in the medieval period. The higher valley slopes, areas of moorland common pasture, were enclosed so that they could be improved. This intaking took new land into the rented farmland, either by agreement between the tenant and landlord or undertaken unilaterally by the tenant.

Woodlands Valley, the farmstead was located in between two large oval enclosures, with woodland below and moorland pasture on the ridge above, described as heath and turf moss. Most of the farm’s fields were situated on the other side of this ridge in Derwent Valley. By the early nineteenth century the oval enclosures were subdivided into smaller fields, the woodland was cleared and the open land walled to make small enclosures, and the moorland was split into three blocks by two straight walls. Here the dynamism of clearing and enclosing the land for agriculture is very evident, and was mostly carried out after 1627.

Agricultural land-use The majority of fields were used to pasture livestock, with some fields being reserved from grazing during spring and early summer to produce hay. Field barns, livestock folds, sheep creeps, and gateways enabled the situating of agricultural practices and movement across the farmed landscape. We can gain an impression of the nature of agricultural land-use in the seventeenth century by returning to Senior’s and Harrison’s estate maps of

The expansion of farmland that the farmers at Rowlee and Two Thorn Fields were undertaking is seen throughout Hope Woodlands township (Bevan 2004). At least half the woodland present in the early seventeenth century was replaced with pasture and arable by the early nineteenth century. It is unclear how the post-Dissolution landowners considered woodland at this time. Its rapid 450

BILL BEVAN: THE IRREGULARITY OF FIELDS: HISTORIC PIECEMEAL ENCLOSURE AND DISPERSED SETTLEMENT farmhouses on the backs of wooden sleds. Though pasturing is referred to as ‘stinting’ in Hope Woodlands, the highly defined division of the moorland meant that the way it was used was similar to land after Enclosure, rather than as common land, and most farmers separated their outpastures from each other with dry-stone walls. Use of the commons was therefore well organised and allotted to individual farms, much as the enclosed farmland was below.

Hope Woodlands and Howden (Fig. 5), and by looking at inventories of wills deposited in Lichfield Record Office (Anon 1639, 1640, 1679, 1686, 1697, 1719). These sources indicate that farming was not exclusively pastoral, though livestock were prominent, and that arable was grown on most farms in the area. Sheep were the most common domestic animal recorded in wills, but most farms also had pigs, cattle, and oxen and horses for draught and transport. Most farmers had one or two ploughs and a harrow to bequeath on their death. Most farms had a combination of pasture, meadow and arable in their inbye land, and these were intermixed on a single landholding, without any form of zoning of agricultural land-use.

Great Langdale, Westmorland Great Langdale is one of the major valleys of the central fells of the Lake District, now in the county of Cumbria (Fig. 1). It is a sinuous, steep-sided valley, which runs along an approximately east-west axis. The study area comprises the valley and fellsides to the west of Chapel Stile. Outcropping rocks are overlying bands of hard volcanic tuffs. The valley was originally created as the result of glacial movement away from the Lake District dome carving out faults and lines of weaker rock. Great Langdale Beck, the major watercourse, runs along a broad floodplain, and is joined by tributary streams running down the valley side. The beck’s course has changed over time, and there has been movement of considerable amounts of rock during fierce storms. Glaciation and floodwaters have both deposited vast quantities of stone on the valley floor. The floodplain comprises level to gently sloping land containing the most fertile and deepest soils (Fig. 9). The valley sides rear steeply above this flood plain, sometimes as precipitous cliffs and rocky outcrops, to form mountain ranges rising to over 800 metres A.O.D to the south (Lingmoor Fell), 880m A.O.D. to the north (Langdale Pikes), and to 1079m A.O.D. to the west (Bowfell, Crinkle Crags, Pike of Blisco). There are some high areas of level, peat-covered ground, especially to the northwest, but mostly the high land is mountain crags that vary from boulder-strewn thin soils to outcropping bedrock. In most places the contrast between valley bottom and sides is dramatic in both slope and stoniness.

Integral elements of agricultural practices undertaken in the enclosed inbye were field barns, used for stores and shelter, and livestock folds for managing, sorting and washing animals. Barns were dispersed amongst the fields. Twenty-eight field barns were located in Hope Woodlands township for example, and over half were built before 1627 (Senior 1627). In two-storey barns, livestock were stalled on the ground floor during winter, with hay stored above. They allowed farmers to manage livestock across their holdings without having to concentrate activity around the farm buildings, or continually move stock and feed between fields and their farmsteads. Through routine use the field barns became locales of activity for farmers, and they physically identified the farmsteads across the landholdings. Like field walls, barns formed part of the built expression of the transformation of the wider landscape into farmland. Folds were mostly located on the edge of the enclosed land, at the boundaries between field and moorland common. The remains of multi-compartment folds are found at suitably slow-moving and deep stretches of watercourses, where sheep could be dipped in the water, and the clean ones separated from the dirty prior to shearing. Commons Farmers moved on to the common directly via gates in the top walls of their enclosed farmland. Individual farmsteads did not have walled lanes running through enclosed land, with hollow-ways running through enclosures formed by the regular use of ‘desire lines’. Rights to the moorland originated in the medieval period, and included pasturing sheep and cattle, cutting peat, quarrying stone, cutting bracken, heather harvesting, moss gathering, and cranberry and bilberry picking. In Hope Woodlands and Howden, by the seventeenth century, each farmstead had a well-defined area of common reserved solely for its use (Harrison 1637; Senior 1627) (Fig. 5). Areas above the valley side, and nearest the inbye, were called heys, while the more distant moorland was known as outpastures and sheepwalks. In the heys, tenants were able to cut peat and graze cattle and sheep, and heys were divided from the outpastures – where only sheep pasturing was allowed – by banks and ditches, dykes or walls. Each farmstead was connected to it’s hey by defined sledways, that were created during the transport of peat down from cuts to the

After the Norman Conquest the whole of Great Langdale was a manor within the Barony of Kendal (Millward and Robinson 1970). In 1216, part of the manor known as Baysbrown was granted to Conishead Priory by William de Lancaster, and was subsequently managed separately outside of the manor (West 1774). The Ring Garth – the line drawn in the ‘sand’ In Great Langdale, the ring garth was the ‘primary boundary’. It was already in existence in AD 1216, when the ‘enclosed land of Great Langden’ is referred to in the land grant to Conishead Priory (West 1774). It is unknown how much older than the early thirteenth century that the garth may have been. The ring garth was not simply the first documented boundary in the valley, and that itself would not be evidence for primacy. However, survey of wall junctions by the National Trust Historic Landscape Survey in the late 1980s demonstrated that all other enclosure walls in the valley, 451

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Figure 9. Head of Great Langdale, showing the contrast between the level valley bottom and the steep valley sides, with clouds descending over Bowfell in the background. Wall End farm is on the foreground and Stool End Farm is amongst the trees at the bottom of the ridge in the mid distance. Source: B. Bevan.

Ring garths were a common feature of the medieval enclosed landscape of northern England and Scotland, and are variously known as head garths, head dykes, fell dykes, moor dykes, ring fences and ring dykes (Robertson 1949; Winchester 1987). They were social, legal and practical boundaries, all combined in one line lain across the land. Legally, a ring garth separated the tenanted land from the lord’s waste. Inside lay the land that the tenants paid rent to use, known as the townfield in Great Langdale, and which might be officially associated with sole use by individual farms. Outside was demesne, the rough fellside land that the lord directly controlled and on which tenants could only claim common rights for such activities as pasturing livestock and cutting peat. Enclosing such land was certainly not an option, officially at least.

both subdivisions of land inside and enclosure built outside, abut against and therefore post-date the ring garth. Much of the line of the ring garth can be traced, and it follows the approximate break of slope between the flood plain and the valley side (Bevan, Dearlove, Stanley and Webster 1990) (Fig. 10). In places near the head of the valley, the boundary survives as a substantial dry-stone wall approximately two metres high. In other places its line survives in varying degrees of build and tumble, and its line has not been securely identified towards the mouth of the valley. There is a great deal of consistency in the wall-building style of the ring garth, whether standing or ruined, which also contrasts with many of the valley’s other walls. The ring garth is mainly constructed of large, worn boulders that would have probably been obtained during initial acts of ground clearance. It is set on foundations measuring over a metre wide that incorporate huge boulders, although the wall itself was only loosely coursed, and there were no coping stones to complete it on the top. Other enclosure walls tend to be built with more courses, and tied together at regular intervals with through-stones. This is not to say that where upstanding, the ring garth preserves the craft of the medieval wall-builder. Walls fall down and are rebuilt continuously, and in the early sixteenth century the manor courts of Crosby Ravensworth and Helton ordered the ring garth to be rebuilt as a substantial stone wall (Winchester 1987).

Tenants grew hay and crops within the garth during summer, when the garth prevented livestock from straying onto the cultivated land. In winter, after having been grazed on the surrounding common waste, livestock were allowed on the townfield, where they could be kept on more sheltered land closer to the farmsteads, and would manure the arable/meadow land. In some respects, this infield-outfield system was similar to agrarian practices in the open fields associated with villages on the limestone plateau of the Peak District. Social significance was connected with the legal designation and practical use, the land on either side of the garth being perceived differently by both tenants and lords of the manor. The 452

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Figure 10. The field enclosure pattern in Great Langdale was based upon the Ring Garth, the valley’s ‘primary boundary’. The line of the Ring Garth is unclear in the south-east of the valley. It could have taken either of two routes, one along the valley bottom that would have ran towards Harry Place, or alternatively it could have kept to the break of slope towards Baysbrown. Source: B. Bevan.

fellside was taken out of manorial demesne and township common, to be used solely by the grange. As a result, a large dry-stone wall was built to delimit the boundary of the grange outside of the ring garth, and to enclose the whole of the landholding in a single, complete circuit.

social identity of individual tenants and the whole township would be spatially grounded in the agricultural routines carried out within the garth. Here, the tenant’s tenure could be defined and bounded, and was claimed by payment of a rent. Outside the garth, tenure was more general, claimed by common right, and was legally identified as being shared at the township level. In practice individual tenants, because of the locations of routeways and the ‘hefting’ abilities of sheep, often claimed use of the specific areas of the commons. Maintenance of the physical build of the garth boundary itself also brought individual households together in shared township labour, so creating interplays and dialectics between individuals and community.

It is not until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the more widespread settlement pattern can be identified from documentary records. There have not been the same reservoir-enabled fieldwalking opportunities in Great Langdale that provided the artefactual evidence with which the thirteenth century settlement pattern has been interpreted in the Upper Derwent. We can guess that the post-medieval pattern of dispersed farmsteads in Great Langdale originated in the medieval period. All of the farmsteads had a highly structured relationship with the landscape, with all but one located right on the line of the ring garth, on the boundary between the two landscapes in the valley. The only exception was Wall End, which lies within the ring garth near the head of the valley.

Dispersed settlement Dates for the origins of farmstead settlement and the ring garth in Great Langdale are unclear, as indeed they are in many places of Domesday-absent Cumbria and Northumberland. Place-names suggest Scandinavian occupation in the central fells during the ninth and tenth centuries AD, perhaps with transhumant use leading to more permanent occupation (Baldwin and Whyte 1985). By the thirteenth century there were two vaccaries in Great Langdale, one at Baysbrown documented in 1216 and another, unnamed and unidentified vaccary recorded in the 1230s (Bevan, Dearlove, Stanley and Webster 1990). Baysbrown was a grange specialising in cattle and because it had been granted to the Priory, the rough

Some of the farmsteads comprised multiple households, with five tenements at Stool End in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and between two and four tenements at Wall End for example (Bevan, Dearlove, Stanley and Webster 1990). Occupation of these multiple farmsteads was dynamic, and varied between members of an extended family holding the same surname, and households with different surnames. Griggs, Wilsons and 453

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT locating a specific, routine, activity on its edges. The presence of the pollards also emphasised the line of the wall in the landscape. By removing branches, tenants were working within the legal limits of manorial control. However, in doing so they were drastically reducing the timber value of the tree because pollarding encourages the trunk to hollow-out over time, as heart wood dies. Pollards were an arena for the tenants to contest, subvert and resist the landlord’s position of social power over them.

Dixons occupied tenements at Stool End in the early seventeenth century, and then all came into the hands of different members of the Grigg family by the end of the century. The farmstead was finally consolidated under single occupancy by the end of the nineteenth century (ibid.). Each farmstead had its own walled farmyard, around which the buildings were arranged. At both township and farmstead levels, inhabitation of the farmed landscape was defined by movement between domestic occupation located on peripheries, and agricultural tasks undertaken in the centre, whether farmyard or townfield. This also involved passage between differently conceptualised notions of private and public space. Households would move between the private farmhouse and the, often, shared farmyard, between the farmstead and the communal townfield.

Intakes Another physical element of the tenant-landlord social dynamic was the enclosing of land from outside the ring garth. Known as intaking, walling areas of common demesne land was an important way for farmers to expand their landholdings. Intakes on lower ground nearest the ring garth could often be improved by stone clearance, paring and liming. While the ground in those further up the valley sides were usually too steep and stony to improve, the enclosing of plots gave greater control over stock handling and cattle grazing. Intaking was a linear, progressive activity in Great Langdale in contrast to the Upper Derwent, with farmers working outwards and upwards from their farmsteads. Subsequent enclosures were tacked onto existing ones, so that over time the landholding was actively expanded away from a central point. This created an irregular enclosure pattern on the valley sides, with the steep slope being used as the major axis for boundary layout. Intaking is often thought to have only begun in the fifteenth century in the Lake District (Millward and Robinson 1970; Winchester 1987).

Townfield The ring garth-enclosed townfield was originally a common field for the whole township, and is recorded as such in sixteenth to eighteenth century documents (Bevan, Dearlove, Stanley and Webster 1990). Most of the townfield was enclosed, and the irregular pattern of ‘closes’ coupled with the chronological relationship of wall junctions, suggests that enclosure was undertaken progressively over time in piecemeal fashion. The presence of large linear stone heaps, and wide ‘consumption’ walls, indicates that clearance of surface stone was an essential element of land improvement. Wall building may have been a necessary method of using cleared stone, as well as a way of defining the limits of individual’s common rights. It seems that initially a household had a number of individual closes that were scattered and intermingled with those of neighbouring households, though they were loosely grouped near the farmstead. Over time, these became consolidated into single landholdings. By the end of the eighteenth century, this resulted in the highly defined use of specific areas by individual farmsteads. Farmers were able to buy and sell, bequeath and inherit named and walled closes within the townfield. While still common in name, use and ownership of the townfield was, in effect, similar to the inbye of the Upper Derwent. Two small areas of the valley were still common and ‘open’ in the nineteenth century, when they were known as the Great Langdale High and Low Common Field, and were enclosed by Act of Parliament in 1836 (anon. 1836).

Individual outgangs and shared common Walled lanes were an integral element of the enclosed land of both townfield and intakes. A number of farmsteads, including all of those in the middle part of the valley, had walled lanes that led into and across the townfield to restrict movement and prevent livestock from wandering. These may have been constructed before the townfield was extensively enclosed, and such areas used solely by individual farms. They allowed the management of movement through communal land, and those that connected farmsteads with moorland common grazing were known as outgangs. Some were narrow lanes left between enclosures, while others were funnelshaped tracts of land that widened upslope. The importance of outgangs lay in taking livestock to specific areas of the common. Though this land remained technically a shared township resource, in practice areas of moorland became closely associated with the farmsteads that used a particular outgang. There are a series of sixteenth and seventeenth century disputes between tenants submitted to the manor court that dramatically demonstrate this division of the common (Bevan, Dearlove, Stanley and Webster 1990). These disputes were not over the common itself, but over the use of outgangs for grazing sheep and driving livestock out onto the moorland.

Pollards were a common element of the townfield wallscape, and still survive in numbers at the head of Great Langdale. Pollards provided winter fodder for livestock and fuel for domestic fires, tenants being allowed within manorial custom to ‘lop and top’ trees for their own use but not to take the timber of the trunk, which was reserved to the lord of the manor. Intertwined with this practical use were the negotiation of social relations between individual tenants, between tenant and landlord, and the definition of social identity. In placing the pollards on wall boundaries, farmers were maximising grazing in the enclosed field but were also underlining their right of access to the enclosure by 454

BILL BEVAN: THE IRREGULARITY OF FIELDS: HISTORIC PIECEMEAL ENCLOSURE AND DISPERSED SETTLEMENT Discussion – structuring space in irregular ways The patterns of small, irregular enclosed fields and enclosure that developed in the Upper Derwent and Great Langdale were embedded in the social relations and practices of people living and working in those two areas (Fig. 11). Resident farmers built the field walls. Enclosures expanded the amount of inbye land for individual farmsteads in the Upper Derwent, and subdivided existing enclosed, communal inbye in Great Langdale. Enclosure or intaking of surrounding common waste also enlarged the sizes of individual landholdings in both areas. Farmers not only increased the productivity of agricultural practices through enclosure, but also staked claims to the plot of land lying within their boundaries. Both the boundaries and the improved nature of the ground relative to unenclosed waste were the products of obvious practical needs, but also signified that someone had claimed the land. The initial acts of wall building, woodland or stone clearance and then improvement did not happen overnight, and it took time to complete and embed the plot into the farmed landscape. Depending on the social conditions this was undertaken within, this might have been a risky period when the landowner or neighbouring tenant could contest acts of enclosure and prevent their completion. Alternatively, a landowner may have actively encouraged enclosure, to increase rents from his estate. The latter may be suggested by the lack of early post-medieval documents relating to disputes over field boundaries or damage to woodland, in both the Upper Derwent and in Great Langdale townfield. In Hope Woodlands, the landlord stipulated it as a requirement of tenancy during the late eighteenth century (Bevan 2004).

Figure 11. Enclosures hewn from rock. Typical wall building style in a field boundary and attached outbuilding. Source: B. Bevan.

disagreements over boundaries in many rural townships was to ask elder members of the community to give witness about the presence of boundaries, the right for that boundary to exist in that location, or who had built it. This can be seen in a boundary dispute between tenants of Bradfield and Derwent townships beginning in the sixteenth century and only ending in the eighteenth century (anon. 1724). In Langdale, ‘elders’ were asked as witnesses to outgang disputes by stating who had customary right to use those routes and the grazing they led to. In such cases, oral testimony, embodied social practice and the memory of individuals and communities were still considered important. But in the post-medieval period there were significant social, political and economic changes in how land and land rights were regarded, some associated with the development of capitalism (Johnson 1996; Thomas 1983).

Once the relevant landowners had accepted the existence of enclosures, boundaries could have decreased disagreements over who was included within and who excluded from that land, by their association with particular farmsteads or landowners. The farming landscape was literally set in stone. There may have been friction points, where different farmers saw the same area of land as being theirs to enclose next. Adjudicating over such arguments might have been the role of the landowners’ estate officers in the Upper Derwent and the manor court in Great Langdale, and sometimes ‘getting there first’ may have been enough. By having Hope Woodlands surveyed and mapped in 1627, the Duke of Devonshire created a baseline from which further enclosure could be measured. With a map, the landlord or his agent could more readily identify any new enclosure and encroachment onto moorland in a seemingly more objective way.

The social importance of boundaries in such enclosed landscapes can be seen in both the Upper Derwent and Great Langdale. At Hagg Farm, Hope Woodlands, a number of walls had one face that was constructed to a much neater and well-finished appearance (Roberts 1996). Where phasing of enclosure was identifiable, the neater sides were the outside faces of enclosures in relation to the farmstead. In effect, the farmer responsible for enclosure at any one time was presenting statements

This reflects wider social developments, as during the post-medieval and early modern periods maps were increasingly used as tools of legitimisation and control (q.v. Harley 1988). After the Devonshires made their estate maps, they began reorganising the arrangement of landholdings, including carving new ones out of existing farms – forcing new layouts on the physical walled landscape. Prior to this, the main method of sorting out 455

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Figure 12. A walled lane runs through woodland in the Upper Derwent, defining patterns of movement through the enclosed landscape. Source: B. Bevan.

the lines of these longer-distance trackways. Direct routes rarely connected farmsteads to each other. Privacy in the landscape of the Upper Derwent may have preceded notions of privacy within the household. In Great Langdale, most farmsteads were located adjacent to through routes, and were only connected to each other via these routes, rather than by a network of local trackways.

about land tenure, the craft of wall building and the quality of agricultural practice to others. These ‘others’ would have been the people moving around the local landscape, mainly neighbouring farmers, estate workers and the landlord’s agents. However, less occasionally, people also travelled along the packhorse route that passed through the farmholding, and connected the Derwent-Sheffield and Glossop-Hope routes. Here, competence and ownership was being advertised to a wider audience. In Langdale, the importance of field boundaries was heightened by the placing of pollards along them, pollarding on peripheral locations being a form of boundary re-establishment similar to the ‘riding’ or ‘beating’ of township and parish bounds.

Movement between farm and common was an act of physical exertion, an ascent onto higher ground. The farmer would climb out of a heavily managed landscape, where the farmer spent most time associated with agriculture, onto more open and exposed land. Going onto the common was therefore a passage between landscapes. People moved from a landscape that was ‘built’ and intensively occupied, to others that were ‘ranged’ over. These were not so actively worked by the input of labour to manage the land, although the open conditions below the treeline, at approximately 550m A.O.D., was a human-made landscape maintained by the presence of grazing livestock.

The compartmentalisation of the land created by irregular enclosure both enabled and constrained movement along certain directions. As enclosure progressively took in more land, specific areas were blocked, forcing or encouraging people to move along restricted pathways to avoid trespass. The politics of space, wealth and class were thus played out across the landscape. But this was contested too, and rights of way developed hand-in-hand with the creation of the enclosed landscape. At some locations, boundaries followed existing trackways, while at others routes developed in relation to boundaries. This can be seen in the number of walled lanes and outgangs which tightly defined rights of way through enclosed land (Fig. 12). Patterns of movement around the landscape can also be seen in the relationships between farmsteads and through-routes. In the Upper Derwent, most farmsteads were set back from the public rights of way to which they were connected via access lanes, though some were on

Within the farms, farmers would move beyond their farm buildings into the surrounding fields to work the land. Within individual landholdings, walled lanes are rare in the Upper Derwent but common in Great Langdale, and this appears to be a direct result of the difference between individualistic organisation of land in the former and the communal organisation of the town field in the latter. Gateways and stiles were placed to best allow movement between fields, so creating desired lines for movement across the land without having formal routeways. Enclosures were the places where farming families spent 456

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Figure 13. Wall junctions are boundaries within boundaries. They demarcate the border of wall building and repairing responsibilities between neighbouring farmers. Source: J. Roberts.

between individual and communal came to emphasise the individual more. The potential for antagonism between individuals is highlighted by the outgang disputes that could only be resolved by recourse to the higher authority of the manor court. Of course, the practice and organisation of agriculture was only one social sphere where community and individual identities could be reinforced or reworked. Other arenas for the expression of community identities would have existed beyond farming. For example, both areas had chapels originating in the medieval period, and attending religious services would have brought together the dispersed, individual households on a regular basis. But even here, and especially during the medieval period, there would have been a spatial politics to the seating within the chapels, based on gender and social status (q.v. Graves 1989).

most time outside of the farmstead, in their daily routines of tending livestock, and growing crops and hay. Hay making, grazing and arable cultivation was carried out in different fields. The positioning of field barns (though these are rare in Great Langdale), sheepfolds and sheep washes also gave a spatial dimension to the carrying out of different tasks, many of which were related to certain time of the year. Age, experience and gender would also have structured these daily and seasonal routines and practices. The personal and familial connection to the farmstead was reinforced through the regular toil needed to manage the land, and to build and repair the physical field boundaries. Agricultural work was dispersed across the farm, and the naming of individual fields indicates that some were associated with specific tasks such as horse pasture, meadow and hay, arable, flax, calving, pigs and wool drying (Bevan, Dearlove, Stanley and Webster 1990; Senior 1627). Across years and generations, fields become identified with the same activities over and over again, so embedding certain routines of farming practice and labour at different seasons in specific locales in the landscape.

Conclusions It is clear from looking at the Upper Derwent and Great Langdale that landscapes of dispersed settlement and irregular enclosures were not simply the stagnant remnants of the first millennium AD. Nor is this broad characterisation an indicator that such landscapes are the result of identical histories of settlement and enclosure. Instead, these were dynamic landscapes that developed over-time as a result of the interaction between landowner and tenant at a township level. In the Upper Derwent, this was a new landscape that developed from the thirteenth century onwards. As such, it was ‘newer’ than many of the villages and open fields in the region, and was created by individual households within the context of the Royal Forest of the Peak, a monastic estate and secular lords of the manor. Dispersed settlement and small enclosures rather than nucleation and large open

These connections with the land were strongly identified with the household in the Upper Derwent, because each household had defined and bounded lands which were spatially separate from other landholdings. Communal activities in the Upper Derwent were restricted to specific tasks and times of the year, notably hay harvesting and sheep washing. This may have also been the case in Great Langdale, though there was originally (or additionally) the shared identity that came from the township-wide ring garth and townfield. As the townfield was progressively enclosed, and common grazing on the moorland became closely linked to individual farmsteads, the relationship 457

RECENT APPROACHES TO THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF LAND ALLOTMENT Anon. 1629 Probate Inventory, John Yeallot of Derwent. Lichfield Record Office. Anon. 1639 Plan of Castleton Commons. Public Record Office, PRO MPC 15. Anon. 1640 Probate Inventory, Edward Hall of Alport. Lichfield Record Office. Anon. 1679 Probate Inventory, Edward Barber of Ronksley. Lichfield Record Office. Anon. 1686 Probate Inventory, Henry Balguy of Rowlee. Lichfield Record Office. Anon. 1697 Probate Inventory, William Greaves of Crookhill. Lichfield Record Office. Anon. 1719 Probate Inventory, William Greaves of Rowlee. Lichfield Record Office. Anon. 1724. Papers Relating to William Jessop’s Award as to Moscar Common. Sheffield Archives ACM S60. Anon. 1836. Enclosure of Great Langdale High and Low Common Field. Kendal CRO WQR/E-56. (Award 1853). Astill, G. and Grant, A. (eds.) 1988. The Countryside of Medieval England. Oxford: Blackwell. Bagshaw, B. 1869-70. The chapelry of Derwent. Reliquary 10: 91-96. Baker, A.R.H. and Butlin, R.A. (eds.) 1973. Studies in Field Systems in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baldwin, J.R. and Whyte, I.D. 1985. The Scandinavians in Cumbria. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Barnatt, J. 1993. Edale Valley Archaeological Survey 1993. Unpublished report: Peak Park Joint Planning Board. Barnatt, J. and Smith, K. 1997. Peak District. Landscapes Through Time. London: Batsford. Bevan, B. 2003. The Upper Derwent: Long-term Landscape Archaeology in the Peak District. Unpublished PhD thesis: University of Sheffield. Bevan, B. 2004. The Upper Derwent. 10,000 Years in a Peak District Valley. Stroud: Tempus. Bevan, W., Dearlove, G., Stanley, N. and Webster, A. 1990. Great Langdale: History of Land Use. Unpublished report: National Trust. Bond, J. 1993. The Premonstratensian Order: a preliminary survey of its growth and distribution in medieval Europe. In M. Carver (ed.) In Search of Cult: Archaeological Investigations in Honour of Philip Rahtz. Woodbridge: Boydell, pp. 153-185. Byford, J.S. 1981. Moorland Heritage. Wood Cottage, Bamford: James S. Byford. Cox, J.C. 1877. Notes on the Churches of Derbyshire. Vol. 2: the Hundreds of the High Peak and Wirksworth. Chesterfield: Palmer and Edmunds. Cox, J.C. 1905. Forestry. In W. Page (ed.) The Victoria History of the Counties of England. Derbyshire. Folkestone and London: Dawsons, pp. 397-426. Cumberpatch, C.G. 2003 The transformation of tradition: the origins of the post-medieval ceramic tradition in Yorkshire. assemblage 7. Worl Wide Web http://www.shef.ac.uk/assem/issue7/cumberpatch.htm l.

fields were probably the result of tenants, landlords and Forest officers wishing to minimise and restrict the impact of what was effectively illegal colonisation. In Great Langdale we know much less about when the ring garth-based landscape originated, although it was already in existence by the early thirteenth century and is likely to have been older. The original infield-outfield organisation of land allotment allowed the obvious limitation of tenant land by the landlord, while settlement dispersal might have been seen as a way of better managing restricted resources and keep households away from the floodplain. Small, irregular enclosures were a way for farmsteads to take individual control of areas of both the communal townfield and the lord’s waste. In each region, the enclosed landscape developed over time as a result of individual households’ needs, working within the wider structure of township organisation. Though both areas look superficially similar with small, irregular enclosures, there is a greater cohesion to the overall pattern in Great Langdale, because of the division of the landscape into township-wide areas: townfield, common waste and the ring garth. And walls did not simply embed the landscape into a static pattern. Changes still occurred, as evidenced by the presence of blocked gateways and disused stiles. These indicate that the movement of people and animals changed over time, which would have been the result of changing landholding patterns, and a continuous series of tensions and negotiations between individual households, and between tenants and landlords. Irregularly enclosed landscapes were therefore as dynamic as they were variable.

Figure 14. The end of the line. In the highly defined landscape of irregular enclosures, old routeways may be blocked, new ones opened up. This is part of the reworking of the same landscape over time by different generations working within different social conditions. Source: B. Bevan.

Bibliography Anon. 1603 Probate Inventory, John Christopher of Derwent. Lichfield Record Office. Anon. 1624 Probate Inventory, Robert Barber of One Man’s House. Lichfield Record Office.

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BILL BEVAN: THE IRREGULARITY OF FIELDS: HISTORIC PIECEMEAL ENCLOSURE AND DISPERSED SETTLEMENT Fleming, A. 1997. Towards a history of wood pasture in Swaledale (North Yorkshire). Landscape History 19: 57-74. Fleming, A. 1998. Swaledale. Valley of the Wild River. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fox, C. 1932. The Personality of Britain: Its Influence on Inhabitant and Invader in Prehistoric and Early Historic Times. Cardiff: National Museum of Wales. Fox, H.S.A. 1981. Approaches to the adoption of the midland system. In T. Rowley (ed.) The Origins of Open-Field Agriculture. London: Croom Helm, pp. 64-111. Gray, H.L. 1959. English Field Systems. London: Merlin Press. Graves, C.P. 1989. Social space in the English medieval parish church. Economy and Society 18 (3): 297-322. Harley, J.B. 1988. Maps, knowledge and power. In D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds.) The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 277-312. Harrison, J. 1637. Exact and Perfect Survey of the Manor of Sheffield with the Mannors of Cowley and Ecclesfield. Sheffield Archives S75/76. Hart, C.R. 1981. The North Derbyshire Archaeological Survey. Chesterfield: North Derbyshire Archaeological Trust. Hingley, R. 2000. Roman Officers and English Gentlemen. London: Routledge. Johnson, M. 1996. An Archaeology of Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Kerry, C. 1893. A History of Peak Forest. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 15: 67-98. Kirke, H. 1925. Monastic settlement in the Peak Forest. Derbyshire Archaeological Journal 47: 222-33. Lewis, C., Mitchell-Fox, P. and Dyer, C. 1997. Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McCarthy, M.R. and Brooks, C.M. 1988 Medieval Pottery in Britain AD 900 – 1600. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Millward, R. and Robinson, A. 1970. The Lake District. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Morgan, P. 1978. Domesday Book: Derbyshire. Chichester: Phillimore. Norbert, S. 2003. Vegetation History of Cranberry Bog, Gussett Moor and Alport-1: Three Palynological Sites from the Peak District. Unpublished MSc dissertation: University of Sheffield. Potter, P. 1808. Map of the District, or, Hamlet, of the Woodlands. Chatsworth: Chatsworth House Archives. Rackham, O. 1986. The History of the Countryside. London: J.M. Dent. Roberts, B.K. 1997. Landscapes of Settlement: Prehistory to the Present. London: Routledge. Roberts, B.K. and Wrathmell, S. 2000. An Atlas of Rural Settlement in England. London: English Heritage.

Roberts, J.G. 1996. Upper Derwent Wall Junction and Fabric Survey. Unpublished report: Peak District National Park Authority. Robertson, I.M.L. 1949. The head-dyke: a fundamental line in Scottish geography. Scottish Geographical Magazine 65: 6-19. Seebohm, F. 1890. The English Village Community. London: Longmans, Green. Senior, W. 1627. Duke of Devonshire's Woodlands Estates. Chatsworth Archives. Stevenson, I.P. and Gaunt, G.D. 1971. Geology of the Country around Chapel en le Frith. Memoirs of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, England and Wales. London: HMSO. Taylor, C. 1981. Archaeology and the origins of openfield agriculture. In T. Rowley (ed.) The Origins of Open-Field Agriculture. London: Croom Helm, pp. 13-22. Taylor, C. 1983 Village and Farmstead: a History of Rural Settlement in England. London: George Philip. Thomas, K. 1983. Man and the Natural World. Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800. Harmondsworth: Penguin. West, T. 1774. Antiquities of Furness. London: T. West. Wheeler, P. 1996 Beauchief Abbey: its Building and Lands, with Special Reference to the Granges. Unpublished dissertation for Certificate in Archaeology: University of Sheffield. Williamson, T. 2002. The Transformation of Rural England. Farming and the Landscape 1700-1870. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Williamson, T. 2003 Shaping Medieval Landscapes. Macclesfield: Windgather Press. Winchester, A.J.L. 1987. Landscape and Society in Medieval Cumbria. Edinburgh: John Donald. Woodcock, N. and Strachan, R. 2000. Geological History of Britain and Ireland. London: Blackwell.

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Nineteenth century drystone wall built across a large earthfast boulder, near Ladybower Reservoir, Peak District. Source: A.M. Chadwick.

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