There survive in the National Archives, London, for eight years from 1292, and for a further few short stretches of years in the 1300s, 1310s, 1330s, and 1340s (until 1349), fairly detailed accounts for the silver mining operations carried out by the crown a few miles to the north-west of Bere Ferrers, close to the south coast of Devon. These accounts provide the historical underpinning of a study of the landscape of both Bere Ferrers and the site of the mining operations. The study is not really a work of economic history; it is intended as an interdisciplinary piece of work that moves “beyond traditional studies of industrial archaeology and mining history towards a more integrated understanding of the landscape” (7).

Economic and numismatic historians may be tantalized that the use made of the crown’s accounts is, in fact, comparatively limited (although there is a useful English translation of an amalgamated summary account of silver receipts, 1292–97 [55–59; from PRO, E 101/260/6]). The authors’ archival work seems to have faded out in the later Middle Ages, and for the 1440s (when figures are again available from accounts in the National Archives) some details of production are given (66) that are maddeningly underreferenced. Occasional slips, such as “monochorum” for “monachorum” (61, 107, 135), minierie for mineirie (48), and a reference to Richard de Wigorniâ (185; and cf. 63) suggest that the authors were not at ease with medieval Latin texts. Their English is at times also so obtuse as to make their meaning unclear, as at page 19: “Hatcher’s and Blanchard’s model of those involved in ‘dual occupation’ is someone who is neither year-round miner nor year-round farmer (for a detailed discussion of this model see ‘Tin’ below). As such, involved in a year-round mining calendar, it is difficult to picture the miners of Bere Ferrers as being involved in farming.” Plain common sense might also have stopped the authors’ occasional statements of the obvious, as in the observation that “the Abbots of Buckland and Tavistock, as well as John de Ferrers, none of whom had direct capital gains from the produce of the mines, would have been opposed to the complete clearance of their woodland as once it was diminished there was no future income to be made” (104–5).

Considered more narrowly, however, as a work of landscape history, the book has distinct merits. Its authors conclusively demonstrate the origin of the sixteen-kilometer-long Lumburn Leat (constructed in the late fifteenth century in connection with the mechanized, water-powered pumping of the mines) (114–19), and they use elaborate and detailed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mappings of Bere Ferrers to show how settlements were founded by the mining community (which, they also show, was drawn in part from the Peak district of Derbyshire). As a pioneering attempt to show how medieval mining operations have left a variety of marks upon the landscape, this is a useful short monograph—one that should be considered alongside such other publications as the substantial collection of essays on Waterways and Canal-Building in Medieval England, edited by John Blair (Oxford, 2007).