All too often history is written through the lens of the elite in society, as most of the written sources were produced by or for the ruling class. This makes it difficult to understand the past from the perspective of the rural communities who farmed the land and created the countryside of today, but Peasant Perceptions of Landscape is an ambitious attempt to do just that. There are several other eye-catching aspects of this study: its strongly interdisciplinary approach – embracing archaeological, architectural, documentary, cartographic, field- and place-name evidence – and its diachronic timeframe that takes us across three periods that all too often have been studied separately (the early medieval, later medieval and post-medieval periods). The study area is Ewelme Hundred, in south Oxfordshire, that is bounded by the Thames (and Wallingford) to the south, the Thame to the west and the Chiltern Hills to the east. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the study extremely well, including the philosophy behind the research, the study area and the sources and methods that were used.
Chapter 3 explores the ‘Early to Middle Saxon period, 500–800’, with a structure – echoed in later chapters – comprising a two-fold division between discussion of the physical structure of the countryside and then a consideration of how people experienced the landscape. Ewelme appears to have been a region that saw the survival of a substantial native population, and the consideration of their relationship with perhaps a relatively small number of Anglo-Saxon immigrants is an important contribution to our understanding of identity in this period.
Chapter 4 covers the ‘Late Anglo-Saxon Period, 800–1100’, when we see clear differences in the structure of the landscape between countryside characterised by villages and open fields in the lowlands and more dispersed settlement and predominantly enclosed fields up on the Chiltern Hills. Landmarks used in the boundary clauses of charters suggest a ‘more closely apportioned landscape’ (p 127) in the lowlands than appears to have been managed in a more communal way, while the use of personal names in landmarks suggests that ‘land-owners were colonising the mental landscape’ (p 131).
In Chapter 5, ‘The High Middle Ages, 1110–1350’, the idea of space within the medieval landscape being divided between ‘public’ (eg roads and churches), ‘communal’ (eg common fields and common pasture) and ‘private’ (eg houses) is used to good effect, with differences between the Chiltern Hills and the lowlands to the west becoming even clearer, both in the physical structure of the landscape (eg figure 5.2 showing the extent of the open fields) and the ways in which communities, their settlements and their field systems were structured. Overall, the lowlands were richer and had better connected and more diverse village-based communities within which there were clear hierarchical structures, while the Chiltern Hills saw less integrated and less variegated societies with far less communal space.
Chapter 6, ‘The Late Middle Ages 1350–1530’ shows how the two areas responded somewhat differently to the devastating loss of life caused by the Black Death, with some villages bouncing back to pretty much how they were before, but others shrinking greatly in size as tenements were amalgamated by a small number of increasingly prosperous surviving tenants. This differentiation continued into the early modern period, 1530–1650 (covered in Chapter 7), when a new source of information — a significant number of surviving domestic houses — reflects this growing wealth of the middling members of society. Overall, this is an engaging and well-illustrated book that tells the story of a particularly well-documented landscape within which the communities of two contrasting countrysides experienced rural life in significantly different ways.
