This is the latest in a long line of studies to address the origins of the medieval countryside and systems of agricultural production that underpinned it. Informed by Oosthuizen’s specialist understanding of medieval field systems, the book was stimulated by a quest to unravel the ancestry of the customary rights governing the exploitation of commons and open fields captured in later medieval historical sources. Whereas the traditional view would have it that such systems were largely (if not exclusively) Anglo-Saxon inventions, Oosthuizen argues that their origins were firmly rooted in the remote Romano-British and prehistoric past. A central theme running through the discussion is the interplay between these enduring traditions and genuine transformations of the Anglo-Saxon period, more specifically transformations of the ‘long eighth century’, which the author identifies as a key turning point in the emergence of the medieval countryside.

There is much in Oosthuizen’s analysis that is bold and refreshing, not least the integration of historical, archaeological, topographic and environmental evidence and its genuinely longitudinal scope synthesising source data from the first farming communities of the Neolithic through until the end of the first millennium ad. It also asks some compelling questions on the nature of the Romano-British/Anglo-Saxon transition. If not the massive demographic and environmental watershed that previous generations of scholars would have us believe, then what level of continuity should we expect to see in the deep structures of landscape and society over the fifth century? Meanwhile, the ‘transformation’ part of Oosthuizen’s argument puts an interesting (though not entirely original) explanatory spin on Middle Saxon rural intensification within England’s ‘Central Province’. For her the driving force behind the process was the political expansion of the kingdom of Mercia, the main social agents being a surplus-hungry ecclesiastical and lay elite who invested capital to keep up with the latest Continental innovations in estate management.

This narrative is certainly thought-provoking, but was the countryside really as conservative as Oosthuizen’s continuity argument would have us believe? That certain landscapes (the Somerset Levels, the moorlands of south-west England) have seen more or less continuous pre-industrial use as extensive tracts of pasturage is uncontroversial, and it is probably safe to conclude that in some aspects at least, the husbandry regimes practised in these landscapes – seasonal patterns of droving, transhumance, animal-penning, etc – may have endured over millennia relatively unchanged. But it is altogether different to argue that such persistence extended to the wholesale transmission of culturally specific idioms, namely the lore, customs, rights and obligations brought to life in vivid detail in the later medieval documentary record and only very sketchily indeed beforehand. As much as Oosthuizen is critically self-aware of this important distinction, one feels that it is never properly negotiated or given the full weight that it deserves in her discussion.

This is a personal (instinctual) reaction to what the author herself admits to be a ‘speculative paradigm’. But how well does the detail behind the conjecture stand up to critical scrutiny? If the handling of the Anglo-Saxon archaeology is in any way representative, then there are certainly weaknesses to be made aware of. Key is the uncritical application of the label ‘nucleated settlement’, the origins of which Oosthuizen firmly ascribes to the innovatory achievements of Middle Saxon (chiefly ecclesiastical) landowners. To describe the domestic settlement excavated within the monastic enclosures of Whitby and Hartlepool as ‘planned towns’ (p 102) is surely anachronistic, as is the broader conception that rural settlements of the Middle Saxon period (irrespective of evidence for boundary demarcation) shared the same scale and formal organisation as medieval villages defining England’s ‘Central Province’. Further problems emerge in the discussion of farming technology. While the recent discovery of a seventh-century plough coulter from Lyminge, Kent, may have prompted us to rethink the origins of the heavy plough in Anglo-Saxon England, or at least in Kent, other evidence cited for the wider ‘Middle Saxon’ use of such technology actually conflates plough shares with coulters (the former having rather different technological implications) and discoveries which are unequivocally Late Saxon in date. Others will have to judge for themselves how well the source evidence is deployed elsewhere in the analysis.

These criticisms aside, Oosthuizen’s book is an enjoyable and stimulating read that reminds us in true Hoskinsonian tradition that the medieval landscape can only be properly understood as a complex palimpsest. What it also unwittingly demonstrates is the need for new analytical applications (archaeobotany, for example) capable of injecting fresh empirical and chronological vigour into reconstructing the dynamics of the Anglo-Saxon countryside.