This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the East Anglian Fenland in the early medieval period. The author dispels the idea that the Fens were abandoned at the end of the Roman period and left entirely open to Anglo-Saxon settlers. A continuum of settlement sites has been identified across the region, both on peat and silt lands, especially around Ely and Wisbech. This is also borne out by surviving Brythonic or Late Spoken Latin terms in place names. Newcomers there were, but these were soon assimilated and bilingualism was probably a feature for hundreds of years, as across much of England. The late Professor Darby’s estimates of Domesday population levels can also be shown to be flawed: densities in the northern part of the Isle of Ely are likely to have reached sixteen per square mile rather than 6.1.

The Fenland economy maintained its prosperity through the judicious organisation of common pastures for cattle and sheep, and of fenland resources such as fish, fowl, reeds, peat, sedge and osiers, and even by the management of water levels through the construction of lodes to drain away surplus water. Most important, the pastoral farming depended upon the rigorously managed seasonal movement of herds that was organised through common assembly. Oosthuizen indicates the territories of the intercommoning communities that formed. Many such groups are noted in the late seventh-century Tribal Hidage, although the identification of groups and boundaries in the latter is not without dispute. Ely, particularly, located in the central peat lands, is omitted from this document, something that is closely investigated with the conclusion that this may have been due to its subordination to the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of East Anglia. Assemblies within these units continued to sustain common rights despite the growth of manorial organisation. These linkages between the main settlement foci and their seasonal grazing grounds are based upon medieval documentary evidence studied by others, and more detail on these sources would have been useful (or could even be considered essential).

The book’s strength is perhaps the author’s investigation of how fenland resources were maintained so successfully despite climatic, ecological and cultural pressures. This is partly due to how the stability of the tribal units was maintained: restricting grazing to their own lands and even coping with increasing cattle numbers in the early medieval and high medieval periods. They also ensured the careful management which would have avoided the waterlogging or growth of dense scrub or woodland (carr) that could have resulted from neglect and which maintained the use of a range of cropping regimes, each tailored to a particular micro-ecology that supported specific resources.

This is probably one of the most important books to appear in recent years on the East Anglian Fenland, but the arguments presented here may also hold relevance to an understanding of the cultural background of a much wider area.