My first foray on farming in England between the Romans and Normans was (jointly) published in 1962 (Fowler and Thomas Reference Fowler and Thomas1962) when neither the world nor I knew much about the topic. What a pleasure and a challenge, therefore, fifty-two years later, to review two substantial and important studies which embrace this now somewhat aggrandised field. Although I have had no hand whatsoever in either of these books, nevertheless I have interests to declare, particularly as I am anxious to judge whether the subject has developed, not so much since 1962, but since 2002 when a book of mine covered much of the same ground (Fowler Reference Fowler2002). Half a generation on, surely, there is progress to note? There is indeed, up to a point.

The two new books overlap, not just with mine, but with each other; yet, while sharing a similar genesis in the accumulation over decades of evidence and experience, they are different from each other in focus, methodology and approach. Banham and Faith (henceforward B & F) almost produce two books, one (Part I) by Banham, the other (Part II) by Faith who writes: ‘we have approached the subject very differently. [Banham has] looked at the practicalities of farming; [I] look at how people managed the land and livestock in a variety of regions … broadly the ones identified in Joan Thirsk’s The English Rural Landscape’ (p 141; Thirsk Reference Thirsk2000). They remark that their book ‘may be seen as complementing’ Fowler Reference Fowler2002 (p 6) because, whereas mine is chronologically (and geographically, which they do not mention) broader and ethnically neutral, theirs concentrates ‘on the specific farming practices of Anglo-Saxon time, place and culture’; but they do not cross-reference Hall’s book (though their dust-jacket does), except obliquely by remarking (p 68) that ‘one feature of Anglo-Saxon farming that has received a good deal, not to say a disproportionate amount, of scholarly attention is the … reorganisation of arable land into open fields’. Indeed, they are rather unfairly dismissive of Hall’s (and other current scholars’) work by opining that the Orwins’ The Open Fields (1938) ‘remains the basis of current ideas’ (p 70), despite having previously correctly noted that ‘their views on origins have long been superseded’ (p 7).

Both Hall and B & F share a common stable in OUP’s new, increasingly impressive Medieval History and Archaeology series under the General Editorship of John Blair and Helena Hamerow, a series which already articulates the voice of a new generation of twenty-first-century scholars. In that context, the continuing development of palaeo-botanical, -zoological, -osteological and -environmental research in published studies stands out as, collectively, the single most significant advance. These authors are also able to draw on percipient recently published work by themselves and by the two General Editors and by, for example, Herring, Hill, Loveluck, Thomas, Oosthuizen, Rippon, Williamson and Wrathmell. Actually, judging by the bibliographies, more scholarly dynamism characterises the B & F perspective, as exemplified in the many papers by such as Albarella, Crabtree, Dobney and O’Connor, than Hall’s where comparatively little post-2002 work is quoted in a field still strongly indebted to former major contributors such as Maitland, the Orwins and Salter.

Hall ‘outlines previous thinking about the origins of open fields’ and dismisses some work by early authors because ‘some of their arguments cease to be relevant when all the evidence is brought together and collated with archaeological information’ (p 181). He works from the great strength of his own research. He has for years – his earliest self-reference is 1972 – sought his evidence not only in the printed word but rather in his original research in the field and landscape, and in systematically trawling county Historic Environment Records (HERs) throughout England. The sheer quantity of data assembled in his ‘Gazetteer of field systems’ occupies 128 pages. B & F, exhaustive though their research of the written word has been, cannot compete with this originality in source materials, nor do they read the landscape like Hall: they write like the historians they are. Hall, on the other hand, dealing with a largely historically conceived phenomenon, writes like an archaeologist. He uses graphics similarly: his sixteen colour plates (fourteen of them of Northamptonshire subjects) are visually vivid and integral academically, whereas in B & F illustrations can be mere ornaments, for example, Fig. 9.1, pretty but unhelpful, and Pl. 9.2 with its uncomprehending caption of a much-studied area (Fowler Reference Fowler2002, pl xviii). Fig. 10.3b, an oblique air photograph, is upside down. Landscape archaeology is, relatively, one of B & F’s Achilles’ heels; their gentle feminism is surely too quiet, however, for even chauvinists to regard it as another.

None of these authors follows Dark (Reference Dark2000) or Fowler (Reference Fowler2002) in treating the first millennium ad as a whole; indeed, B & F specifically criticise my approach (p 6). Nevertheless, all are forced to consider pre-Anglo-Saxon farming in trying to understand farming in the Anglo-Saxon period. B & F’s Part I covers arable farming (crops, tools and techniques) and animal husbandry (livestock, products and production). Both types of farming exist without any thematic treatment of either environment or climate. Part II, much more environment-sensitive, deals with farming in five Thirskonian ‘terrains’ such as woodland and moorland, headed by ‘Farms in their landscapes’ and concluded with ‘Continuities and changes in arable husbandry’. Overall, pp 141–292 are filled with particularly impressive and pleasurable historical writing, authoritative, balanced, illustrated by many studies of particular places and always interested in people.

Much of Hall’s text is, in contrast, dense and more concerned with structure, organisation and process. He devotes the first third of his book to four descriptive chapters, arranged around his basic concept of three open-field regions of England (Fig. 0.1). The chapter headings are ‘Townships and land-use’, ‘Field system types’ in the Central Region (Chapter 2) and the Eastern and Western Regions (Chapter 3), and ‘Open-field structure and management’. Arguably, Chapter 5, ‘Early evidence for settlement and fields’, should have been the first chapter. Chapter 6, ‘Open-field beginnings’, contains three parts: A: ‘Previous theories about the formation of intermixed fields’, which I would have liked to have read near the start (the equivalent in B & F is on their pp 6–8); B: ‘Open-field beginnings and development’; and C: ‘Summary and future research’. B & F do not look ahead in research terms, but their ‘Conclusions’ muse (p 300) on whether ‘Anglo-Saxon farming has lessons for the twenty-first century’. The way things are going, it could have.

Some of B & F’s conclusions are hardly new; for example, their very first one that ‘The landscape and food production of lowland Britain was (sic) in large measure transformed … By the time of Domesday Book, one might have seen something recognisable as the beginnings of “traditional English farming”’ (p 293); and their last: ‘Anglo-Saxon farming was thus not only innovative, but successful’ (p 300). Others are contentious: ‘Given the thinly scattered human population [in immediately post-Roman Britain], livestock farming took on a renewed importance … This “abatement” was the physical context in which Anglo-Saxon settlement took place in the fourth and fifth centuries’ (p 294). That statement takes us to the interpretative core of their early period; and, while the point about livestock farming may be correct, it seems to this reviewer to be misconceived in its demography, its allocation of any Anglo-Saxon settlement to the fourth century and its over-reliance on an ‘abatement model’. Completely au fait, in contrast, is the next sentence: ‘There is no evidence that “our Germanic ancestors” brought new farming methods with them when they arrived in Britain’ (p 294).

Then comes a key conclusion, the lead-in to which is one of the book’s major synthetic strengths: ‘Signs of change become visible around the middle of the Anglo-Saxon period [eighth and ninth centuries]: free-threshing cereals, especially bread wheat, were grown more widely as hulled cereals declined in importance, and arable farming as a whole began to expand’ (p 294). An enormous amount of work has gone into establishing that traditional hulled cereals, emmer wheat, for example, gradually gave way to free-threshing cereals such as bread wheat. Much followed from this floral shift. With varying degrees of probability, requirements now included more land under arable, new tools, for example, a mould board plough, and new techniques, for example, bigger arable fields and more oxen for traction; ‘Growing human populations would also increase the demand for animal food products …’ (p 294). Both authors stress the importance of livestock and its management, and associated practices such as transhumance; they see woodland, pastoral landscape and a wood-pasture economy, in contrast to arable farming, as crucial to many a livelihood; so a trend towards more arable from the ninth century onwards represents a significant evolution from the farming of their early period.

B & F argue overall for an attractive perspective of gradualism, diversity and both regional and local variety, in general taking an interpretative position close to those of Rippon (Reference Rippon2008) and Roberts and Wrathmell (Reference Roberts and Wrathmell2002), and especially so on the question of the origin of open fields (pp 283–4). Yet, disappointingly, their ‘Conclusions’ perhaps lack a decisiveness that might have been anticipated from so much scholarly effort; for example, ‘The pace and geographical spread of change remains (sic) something of a conundrum … In many cases, we can only say that what was the case at the beginning of our period had changed by the end’ (pp 294–5). I sympathise: the nature of the subject and its evidence will not yet lend themselves to certainty or clarity, a thought my own not dissimilar conclusions anticipated.

Hall runs into the same reality: his pp 205–13 contain some basic, hard-won conclusions but the first three, although now firmed up, are not unfamiliar: ‘Central Region field systems were organised and extensive, and were developed during the late Saxon period [tenth and eleventh centuries] … they developed on landscapes that were relatively planar, had fertile soils, and a climate dry enough to favour cereal production’ (pp 205–6); ‘… the Eastern and Western Regions remained largely unchanged in the Late Saxon period in terms of general structure … Field systems were small and irregular, but not static’ (p 206); ‘There were at least two types of development: that associated with dispersed settlement and irregular fields, contrasting with extensive and physically planned systems often found in the Central Region’ (p 206).

The Central Region, indeed, enjoys new insights. There, Romano-British fields do not seem to form satisfactory antecedents to large-scale medieval fields; pre-fifth-century ad fields are rarely extensive (p 207, an extraordinary statement given the now overwhelming evidence, appreciated by B & F, for extensive systems of pre-fifth-century fields over a far wider area than that later covered by England’s open fields). ‘The early occupation pattern is similar to that of the other two regions in the first phase of Anglo-Saxon settlement [c 400–700]. In contrast, from the twelfth century onwards, Central Region field systems … had characteristics not found in the outer regions …’ (p 209). In some places, Middle Saxon-period sites (c 700–850) underlie organised field systems (p 210) which, generalising from a complex argument, incorporated township pastures converted to arable on a large scale, though not at one particular time: ‘It probably took place from about the eighth to the eleventh century’ (p 211). Regular two-field systems existed in the twelfth century but ‘there cannot be any single mechanism that will explain the origins of all English field systems’ (p 212).

That conclusion is incontrovertible. It should also cover field systems other than the English, sensu Anglo-Saxon, ones, and extend to all times throughout the thousand years or so embraced by these two volumes in considerable detail up to Domesday Book and beyond. That great survey emerges, not as a beginning or end of any phase or period (contra Fowler Reference Fowler2002, p 293) but as a snapshot of an agrarian society changing from the ‘ancient’ agricultural way of life that Anglo-Saxons inherited and to which basically they came to an accommodation, to ‘medieval’ farming and society based on land-ownership, status, rights, co-operation and the fear of God (religion is omitted by the two volumes). Future research will, one hopes, pursue a range of evidence on issues to do with the pace of change and its nature in a variety of farming regimes and places. Archaeology still has much to contribute across its scope from landscape level, particularly around the concepts of vertical and horizontal succession, to the detail of tools and hand-techniques – the currently unique Lyminge coulter, even if ‘ritual’ rather than aratral, will not be the last shock to the system. Mechanical techniques, too, will need constant review: there is virtually nothing in these two books, for example, on mills, let alone their seigneurial implications. Nor has the documentary resource been anything like exhausted: for example, as Hall almost lasciviously remarks (p 214), ‘outstanding medieval and later records are preserved relating to the estates of early established Oxford and Cambridge Colleges’.

These two ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ volumes, by three authors who have together spent about a hundred years of research to produce them, provide a well-founded model for farming in England in the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman periods. Overall, the model is not significantly different from mine, though it is better researched and now more secure. Much more research will be required to change it, though change it will. ‘Perhaps Anglo-Saxon farming’s time has come at last’ (B & F, p 8): these volumes go far to make that so. Travelling by different routes through the later twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the three authors and, now trailing in their wake, this reviewer, reach a measure of agreement, up to a point.