Between 1781 and 1787 Edmund Rack visited some 451 parishes in Somerset. He then died. His role had been, in modern terms, that of project research assistant, contracted and paid to assemble topographical and historical information, hundred by hundred and parish by parish, in support of the Revd John Collinson's proposed three-volume History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset, published in 1791. Collinson selectively assimilated Rack's material into the great work and acknowledged his contribution, but Rack's pioneering fieldwork, methodology and original records have otherwise remained largely unknown. Had the material now meticulously laid before us by McDermott and Berry been published in like manner in the late eighteenth century, Rack would stand in his own right as an early and notable Somerset local historian who, neither gentleman, priest nor scholar, nevertheless worked successfully on a scale not previously attempted in the county. He would also have been recognized as a significant contributor to the development of the county-based, English antiquarian tradition epitomized in neighbouring counties by the volumes by Hutchins (Dorset) and Colt Hoare (Wiltshire).

Rack himself came from a humble, Quaker background in Norfolk. His smart move was to marry the owner of the draper's shop in which he worked; he was able to retire at the age of forty to Bath, ‘probably to pursue [his] literary ambitions … and perhaps … also a more comfortable life style’ (p ix). In fact, his retirement proved tireless: as well as riding round the hundreds of Somerset, parish by parish, he wrote and published poetry and essays, actively pursued geological and palaeontological interests, was a founder member of the Bath Philosophical Society, promoted improved farming methods, with a special emphasis on turnips, and became the first Secretary of the Royal Bath and West of England Society (for which he was also paid). ‘Human interest’ incidents he recorded during his survey included riding 45 miles in one day on one occasion; taking (only) a week to survey Portbury hundred; being taken for an American spy; and, at the sign of the Six Bells, the sole public house in Compton Martin, encountering ‘civil treatment, and a bed with one sheet and a 1000 fleas’.

The record itself was typically methodical, including information, broadly in a set order, about topics such as the location of the parish, its setting in the landscape, the settlement pattern, numbers and types of houses, number of inhabitants, soil fertility, crops and farming practices, ending with the parish church and, critically, its internal fittings, memorial inscriptions, churchyard and burials (p xii). The small parish of Cudworth (no. 316) in South Petherton Hundred, for example, ‘is situated three miles east from Chard on a small elevation … the number of houses is 28 and the inhabitants about 150, most of the houses stand in Upper and Lower Were, built of rough stone and thatchd, but here are some large farms’. After briefly dealing with the manor, the living and the ‘tythes’, Rack concludes, in a magisterial prose anticipating that of another writer on churches 200 years later: ‘The church is a small Gothic edifice, 60 ft long and 27 ft wide, consisting of a nave, chancel, north aisle and porch, with a turret 30 ft high with two bells. The church is unceild, dull, gloomy, dirty and ruinous, and contains neither monument nor inscription.’ The entries for many churches, in contrast, bear witness to what must have been many damp, cold hours in eye-straining gloom as lists and transcriptions of inscriptions were painstakingly compiled. Collinson used very little of such minutiae in the History, yet Rack's records of church interiors and graveyards in particular are now especially valuable in the light of the many changes to both over the last two centuries. The same applies to many a country house, especially its interior, park and gardens, often lengthily described, in the interests of truth of course but doubtless also with an eye to persuading the landowner to subscribe to the History.

Landownership is basic to Michael Costen's Somerset of a thousand years earlier (p 94). He argues that to be so from the earlier fifth century through to the mid-eleventh century. He also appreciates that much in post-650 Anglo-Saxon Somerset can best be understood in the light of what happened in the clearly recognizable ‘gap’ of some 250 years between an ‘end’ of Romanitas c ad 400 and, following a phase in which an ‘Old Welsh society’ was dominated by a hill fort-based elite, the establishment of an early English polity in the later seventh century. Costen, unlike most historians, not only appreciates the value of archaeology in such circumstances but has acquired the skill to enable him to use and evaluate archaeological evidence in pursuit of his historical objectives. His pursuit has spanned several decades, for this Anglo-Saxon Somerset is not so much the sequel as the second instalment of his The Origins of Somerset (1992), itself bracketed by earlier and later papers in this field up to 2011. Like Rack, he knows his Somerset parishes well, and consistently much of his understanding of the early medieval county stems from detailed studies of many of them.

His first three chapters bring us up to Middle Anglo-Saxon times via ‘Post-Imperial Politics’, ‘Settlement and Soldiers’ and ‘Settlements and Estates’. Then ‘Eorl and Ceorl’ arrive, to be followed by three pairs of themed chapters: ‘Ancient Agriculture’ and ‘Tenth Century Agriculture’; ‘Early Trade’ and ‘Trade and Town’; and ‘Old Religion’ and ‘The Church Reformed’. Lastly Chapter 11, ‘Conclusions’, provides a clear synthesis of the results of deploying a huge amount of data, of managing some quite dense arguments and of interpreting knowledgeably and widely, well beyond the bounds of Somerset.

Costen provides clear views on several of the main issues arising between ad 400 and 1066. He is, for example, a ‘plagueist’ in the fifth century, seeing a big drop in population and a consequential de-intensification of land use; he is ‘for’ significant continuity in land arrangements, at the level of both field systems and larger units; he is more comfortable with one or two hundred thousand than just a few thousand Europeans arriving in Britain in the mid-first millennium, yet sees the colonization of what was to become Somerset as being essentially by a small ‘warrior society’, which, in the mid-seventh century, took political control of an area where the population remained basically British; he sees ‘status’ as being a consistent factor through these centuries, though with changing criteria, and he sees slavery as being a significant element in social and economic matters. He convincingly argues that the emergence of a land-holding class in the eighth and ninth centuries led to self-identification with a place rather than loyalty to the king or lord, and he sees the development of a proper plough in the tenth/eleventh centuries as the means to more efficient arable farming rather than as a response to a need for more food.

Throughout, after providing a balanced review of the evidence on a particular topic, Costen is not averse to giving a personal view. One of his more categorical statements is: ‘It might appear to be a little cynical to describe the Christianity of the whole period as prospering because it was useful, but nevertheless this must be true.’ The rest of p 233 demonstrates why this is so. His main conclusion is very clear and very simple, as much to do with Britain in 2012 as Somerset in 1012. He introduces it when he says of the ‘earliest post-Roman period’ that its main theme ‘is the enduring power of the elite to bend the system to meet their needs’ (p 114). He elaborates the thought at the start of his ‘Conclusions’: ‘A theme … which can be traced throughout this study is the way in which the elite … organised the world around them to best enable them to maintain themselves …’ (p 225).

Somerset is already blessed with a distinguished bibliography. These two books add to that distinction.