It may be thought slightly improper for this writer to review these two books, given that I declined an invitation to contribute to the first (hereafter Allotment), a book moreover which, in its title, nods towards ‘a seminal volume’, ‘the classic 1978 Early Land Allotment in the British Isles BAR volume’ (p 1), edited by Collin Bowen and myself. Similarly, it is difficult to be completely objective about the second (hereafter LAASE) when it discusses some of the topics and material contained in a book of my own published in 2002.

I arrived in this field just as Collin Bowen – one of my first professional colleagues and now one of our oldest Fellows – was preparing his classic Ancient Fields (1961), so I can at least view the progress encapsulated in these new books from the perspective of half a century's research. For me, it began with Crawford's ‘Celtic fields’ and elided into Bowen's ‘tentative analysis of vanishing earthworks and landscapes’, introducing my generation to the idea that we were dealing with landscapes, not just monuments or sites, and that this primary evidence was being destroyed without adequate record. The study next absorbed new concepts such as ‘co-axial’, as applied to field systems and whole landscapes, and quickly adjusted to new technologies in surveying and air photographic interpretation. It calmly accepted a new chronology, which saw ‘Celtic fields’ jumping from the OS map of Roman Britain to the second millennium bc, and then saw the questions asked about the physicality of fields, their crops and their dating refocus on to ‘softer’ issues of community expression and what it felt like to be a farmer in his early field.

Fenton-Thomas comments on the change: ‘theoretical standpoints and ethnographic analogies are now used to move beyond studies of farming and settlement towards an understanding of the social character and symbolic significance of the ancient landscape’ (Allotment, p 252). Peter Herring expresses a particular significance about that change when he remarks that ‘prehistoric landscape archaeology has moved towards generally more subjective approaches than the largely functional ones of the 1970s and 1980s’ (p 73). Among the several examples in Allotment which could illustrate this shift, Eleanor Breen provides a vivid one: ‘a key theme in [my] paper is the impact of motivation on the sensory experience of movement, and in considering motivation I intend to explore the experiences of recent visitors to Scilly, myself included’ (p 97).

LAASE, in contrast, is much more ‘old-fashioned’ and generally less explicit in its theoretical trajectory. Tom Williamson writes of ‘the environmental contexts of Anglo-Saxon settlement’: little scope for ‘sensory experience’ there; but, unlike other contributors, he overtly signals his theoretical position by asserting ‘that many of the spatial patterns apparent in Anglo-Saxon England were, in fact, structured by environmental and topographic influences’ (LAASE, p 135). ‘The landscape and economy of the Anglo-Saxon coast: new archaeological evidence’ sees Peter Murphy similarly pursuing a ‘functional’ approach appropriate to his subject and its state of development as a research field. Most papers in LAASE either take a specific subject, for example, David Hill's ‘Detail of the wheels’ on the Anglo-Saxon plough (pp 169–74, a curious paper), or a broad, if characteristically localized, topic such as those treated in two substantial essays, Stephen Rippon's ‘Landscape change during the “long eighth century” in southern England’ (pp 39–64) and Stuart Brookes's ‘Population ecology and multiple estate formation: the evidence from eastern Kent’ (pp 65–82).

Susan Oosthuizen does not limit herself geographically in her title, ‘Medieval field systems and settlement nucleation: common or separate origins?’ (pp 107–31), and writes widely of much of southern and central England. She comes, after a voluminously referenced discussion, to a conclusion that deserves to be printed in flashing lights: ‘Open-field layouts appear to have evolved from prehistoric or Romano-British field systems … The process of settlement nucleation appears to have begun in the Middle Anglo-Saxon period and continued for several centuries thereafter … In a yet later period, open field systems in the “central province” evolved into, or were replaced by, common fields’ (p 131). Carenza Lewis, focusing on currently occupied East Anglian rural settlements in which she has caused 420 test pits to be dug (pp 83–105), echoes the long-inferred point about settlement in her own conclusion, notable for being based contextually on a new range of evidence: ‘Generally, the late Anglo-Saxon period appears to be one when many new sites, ranging from nucleated village clusters to dispersed farms, arrive in the landscape, and these seem generally prone to continue and expand in the post-Norman Conquest period’ (pp 104–5).

Allotment has no chronological limits, so it is no surprise to see two of the star ‘Anglo-Saxon authors’ re-appearing in it: Oosthuizen this time deals with the particular, field-names in her beloved Bourn valley, Cambridgeshire (pp 323–40), and Williamson tackles the origins of medieval landscapes (pp 383–99). Three other papers are on medieval or later topics, including a substantial piece of work by Edward Martin, ‘Not so common fields: the making of the East Anglian landscape’ (pp 342–71); and two are about fields and landscapes in Sweden and Iceland respectively. But the bulk of the volume, a dozen or so papers, deals with prehistoric land allotment in one way or another, and three further, more discursive, essays are also based on pre-Roman material.

Despite all the work on lowland archaeology in recent decades, most of the evidence discussed comes from the uplands – Cornwall, North Wales, Cumbria, the Peak District and the Yorkshire Wolds. The first three of those areas were also in the 1978 Allotment, but the main areas to dominate then – Dartmoor, Wessex, Sussex and the Bristol region – hardly show here. Landscapes on gravel are also almost absent, a ‘bounded landscape’ in the Trent valley alone representing that locale. The pioneer work of Derrick Riley in south Yorkshire and north Nottinghamshire, summarized in the 1978 Allotment, is followed up in a sequel in Allotment 2008 (Ian Roberts, ‘Late prehistoric and Romano-British land division in south and west Yorkshire: an overview of the evidence’, pp 185–203). Another overview brings us up to date with pit alignments (John Thomas, pp 144–58): still enigmatic despite a huge increase in their number and the number of excavated examples; better understanding of them will come, of course, from more and better excavation and, apparently, by seeing them as ‘dynamic areas of social intercourse rather than simply peripheral areas or static boundaries’ (p 154).

Each of these two books marks an important stage in the development of their field; each contains material of varying quality, including some papers that benchmark particular themes or topics for the time being. Probably LAASE is a more significant landmark in its period than is Allotment for landscape studies; but although both contain new material and some new approaches and interpretations, new at least to this reviewer, much of the content of both is in general very familiar. Even Allotment's editor agrees that ‘in theoretical terms very little has changed in field system and linear boundary studies .. since .. 1978’ (p 205). It is nevertheless good to see, particularly with Allotment, that a completely new generation of workers has taken over: the future of the subject is clearly secure and the omens look propitious for its proponents for, should they be interested in such things, all bar four or five of their thirty precursors who wrote the 1978 Allotment were, or became, Fellows of our Society, and nine became professors.

Bowen, H C 1961. Ancient Fields: a tentative analysis of vanishing earthworks and landscapes, London: British Association for the Advancement of Science

Bowen, H C and Fowler, P J 1978. Early Land Allotment in the British Isles, BAR Brit Ser 48, Oxford: British Archaeological Reports

Fowler, P J 2002. Farming in the First Millennium AD: agriculture in Britain between Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press