Stephen Rippon begins with the big question: why do the settlement landscapes of England vary so much – from the compact villages of the Midlands, to the sprawling greenside cottages of Essex, to the hamlets and farmsteads of Devon? And many more countrysides besides: to the existing shelves-full of books that describe, even if they do not explain, local character (including the Batsford ‘Face of Britain’ series of the 1930s, to cite but one example), recent years have seen a number of more explicitly inquisitive studies published. Some are on particular places (such as Shapwick, in Somerset); others investigate localities (Whittlewood, on Northamptonshire’s border with Buckinghamshire); while several treat particular subjects. What they share is the conclusion that all-embracing answers about the dates, origins and causes of the different types of medieval settlement and field systems are proving elusive. Just how far we have come – whether backwards or forwards is a moot point – especially since the 1970s – is shown by a recent waggish remark that it is now clear that DMVs are not deserted, nor medieval, nor exclusively villages.

However, even if it sometimes seems we know less about medieval settlement than we did before, what there does now seem to be is agreement about two things: firstly (as Professor Rippon proposes), that settlement nucleation started in the Midlands and northern East Anglia in the eighth century and then continued for several centuries before medieval villages finally crystallized in the High Middle Ages; and, secondly, that any hunt for monocausal explanation is misguided, and indeed misleading. But instead of despairing, Rippon presents a series of regional studies (including the English-looking Pembrokeshire, the Gwent Levels, the North Somerset Levels), mostly areas where he has himself conducted survey work and research, to look backwards, asking how late the Romano-British landscape survived, and how far back we can trace the origins of our present countryside. Explicitly, he challenges the notion that the south west, south east and west of England did not see the creation of villages and common fields in the period before the Conquest because, for whatever reason, they ‘experienced some form of arrested development’. Was that because population pressures in those areas were less? Apparently not. Or was it because the trajectory of the Midland champion landscapes had already diverged long before this?

Taking the last point, Professor Rippon is able to tease out what seems to be an over-arching consistency from his landscape laboratories. In Somerset, there is a divide between the central and south-eastern parts of the county – where nucleation and open fields were to be found in the Middle Ages – and the western part of the county – where hamlets and closes were the norm. The former zone, east of the Blackdown Hills, had been well-Romanized, whereas the western part had not. This deep-seated and ancient ‘differentness’ meant that when – for whatever reason – in the eighth century (or the ‘long eighth century’) there was pressure for increased productivity, the former saw open fields and villages as the general response, whereas to the west it came in the shape of convertible husbandry. In East Anglia, there was a similar ancient divide along the Gipping and Lark Valleys, which, in the Iron Age, formed the divide between the Iceni and the Trinovantes, and, later, that between the East Angles and the East Saxons. Later still, this broadly marked the line between open fields and villages to the north and the predominantly enclosed fields to the south.

The same perpetuation of ancient differences is seen later in one of the landscapes that Rippon has made his own, south-east Monmouthshire, which, in the Anglo-Norman period, was divided between two lordships. One, Netherwent, was in English hands; the other, Caerleon, remained Welsh. Both had dry land and extensive coastal marshland, but developed at this time in very different ways. Netherwent saw the development of English-style villages and open fields, whereas in Caerleon the traditional landscape of dispersed settlements and enclosures survived. As to who, in general, were the agents of change – the men or communities who laid out the open fields and the villages, and presumably elsewhere chose not to – Rippon sees the main actors not as the great lords or estates, like Glastonbury Abbey (where, for instance, great variety can be seen in the morphology of its medieval estate villages), but instead the minor local lords, subtenants of the great landowners, and perhaps even local communities.

This is a well-written but fairly densely argued text – the Bibliography runs to more than forty pages – a book more for specialists than for those relatively unfamiliar with medieval settlement studies. It is challenging, and in an intellectual context sometimes brave – ascribing differing countryside types to the fact that the Durotriges, who were conquered by the Saxons, and the Dumnonians chose different land-management practices. But its core message is a convincing one: that those who seek the origins of the medieval countryside, and the differences that still colour our surroundings and make ours surely the best country on earth to live in, need to take far more notice of the inherited, pre-medieval templates of landscape and ethnicity. Here we are in almost exclusively archaeological territory, and one where, so far and for much of the country, there are relatively few certainties. Professor Rippon has started to define a challenging new agenda for medieval settlement studies, one that demands a much closer engagement with those working on much older pasts and countrysides. I think it is one we must take up.