The results of Banham and Faith’s extensive studies provide the first comprehensive review of farming in the Anglo-Saxon period. It is, quite literally, a book of two halves. Part one, written by Debby Banham, assesses the products of farming, alongside the processes, tools and techniques that were employed in both arable agriculture and animal husbandry. Part two, by Rosamond Faith, considers how farming was actually practised across different regions of England. The work is drawn from a wide range of source material, including written texts comprising law codes, the few contemporary estate management records, charters, literature, medical texts and chronicles. However, as might be expected from a study encompassing the fifth to eleventh centuries, from which relatively few written sources survive, supplementary evidence is selected from archaeology, linguistics and later medieval art. This material is widely drawn upon, and this is an interdisciplinary study par excellence.

The first part of the book is ordered in a systematic way, dealing initially with detailed evidence for the cereals and legumes produced, followed by a comprehensive breakdown of the processes involved in their production. Significantly more space is devoted to animal husbandry, and this is perhaps because both authors argue that the Anglo-Saxons’ agrarian focus was more firmly on their livestock than the arable. There follows a careful assessment of each animal in turn, considering their relative importance and value, their appearance and some idea of their number. The last chapter of part one offers a detailed look at livestock as working units, as well as a means of producing food, textiles and other by-products such as manure.

The second part of the book assesses the practicalities of farming in diverse terrain, and each chapter generally looks at different landscape regions, including coastal and riverine, wooded, downland, moorland and wold. Again, the key premise is that livestock were more important, and so much of the focus of the following chapters is on pastoral rather than arable farming. Throughout, there is a wide range of examples selected from right across the country, resulting in what is generally a thorough treatment of a large quantity of data. The final chapter of this section focuses exclusively on arable agriculture, largely focusing on bounded strip fields that Faith suggests represent farming regimes characterised by small enclosures – an early example of cooperative farming that pre-dates open-field agriculture.

Overall, this is a very impressive, richly detailed book, which certainly meets its aim of filling a gap in the historiography of medieval agriculture. There are, however, one or two very slight criticisms. The health of livestock in part one is considered too fleetingly. Just one brief paragraph is devoted to animal wellbeing and the treatments outlined in medical texts (p. 127). On the great quantity of young sheep in bone assemblages, this is attributed to a desire for young meat, when it is equally possible that the animals may have died from murrain – disease in livestock is not really considered, despite the fact that chroniclers record it as being a widespread and frequent problem. Again, the supernatural, and in particular field remedies are lacking, although Banham recognises their importance and notes that this is a gap. In the second half of the book, the structure is not quite as tightly defined. This is partly due to a lack of evidence, for example relating to the essentials of the woodland economy. Notwithstanding both authors’ arguments that livestock were more important than plants, it also feels at times as though there is an imbalance between the space devoted to the pastoral and the arable. As both authors assert in the opening chapter, the Anglo-Saxons predominantly lived on what they grew, and in the second part of the book, arable farming is treated fleetingly within the regional studies. Despite these very minor points, this book is an important contribution to the body of work on medieval farming, and should be welcomed by anyone with an interest in the development of English agriculture.