This volume is a shortened reworking of the huge Society for Medieval Archaeology monograph on the Shapwick project published in 2007. It is hardly ‘Shapwick-lite’, weighing in as it does at more than 400 pages, but it presents in more readily digestible form the results of a major landscape archaeology project that began in 1988. The book provides a useful guide for people investigating the development of settlements in a multidisciplinary way. Most attention is paid to the Middle Ages, but earlier and later periods are covered, and it is pleasing to see in this version expanded treatment of the important landscape changes of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The text is very readable and beautifully illustrated, and excellent use is made of field names for identifying archaeological sites and reconstructing the layout of open fields, commons and woods.

Perhaps the greatest strength of Interpreting the English Village is the way the authors convey their enthusiasm for the subject and the pleasure that involvement in archaeology can bring. This is a book to engage the general reader and refresh the student jaded by drier theoretical discussions. There are real people here and we are given a sense of what their lives might have been like. This, as well as the evident camaraderie, must have appealed to the project's many volunteers, whose motives are discussed in an interesting section on the social history of community archaeology (pp 15–19). The authors and their collaborators have done a great service to the furtherance of archaeology, and it is appropriate that the final publication on the project will be a pamphlet for school children and visitors (a fitting memorial to the late Mick Aston, FSA, whose life was dedicated to inspiring everyone to take an interest in archaeology).

The limitations of the book are largely those of any study of a single place. The authors are alert to wider trends and current debates, but this is still essentially an examination of one parish. A more appropriate title would have been ‘interpreting an English village’. Big debates, such as those about the causes of settlement nucleation or the formation of open fields, are more readily advanced by broader thematic studies. The limits of the evidence from Shapwick mean that the narrative shifts in scale, from a view of the surrounding area (in the Anglo-Saxon period) to a close focus on the village itself (in the high Middle Ages), giving a somewhat inconsistent feel. The Shapwick evidence is taken to support an argument for village ‘planning’, here in the tenth century (Chapter 6), but this does not appear wholly convincing; some of the findings suggest dynamic and piecemeal changes to a rather irregular settlement (pp 191, 200, 203). Several other restrictions are imposed by the single-place approach: the environmental evidence from Shapwick is very limited for some periods (p 159); there is little material evidence of church life (p 221); much more could be discovered about peasant houses or possessions through a regional analysis; and the discussion of one particular set of medieval manorial buildings is almost inevitably rather descriptive (pp 225–42). Readers may also be left wanting to know more from historical sources about the economic and social relationships forged between the inhabitants of Shapwick and people from neighbouring rural settlements and towns, or about the impact of late medieval population decline and agrarian change on village society.

It is commendable that the book focuses on ‘what life was like in the past’, how people experienced the village and how they understood their environment (pp 4, 9). The text gives some good indications of the appearance of settlement and farmstead, what people ate and how they dressed, and the way men and women would have traversed the open fields to reach their scattered holdings or to gather resources in the woods and wetland. It reminds us of the mixed use of churchyards and the way church bells were used to regulate life (pp 245–7). Future studies can build on this work through systematic analysis of patterns of association, identification and meaning, drawing on what has been called the ‘social life’ of place names, study of peasant bynames, analysis of movement through houses, settlements and landscapes, and re-creation of the sights, sounds and smells of past activities. In so doing, it may be profitable to focus as much on conflict as on ‘community’.