Windgather Press is an imprint of Oxbow Books
Published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by
OXBOW BOOKS
The Old Music Hall, 106108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JE
and in the United States by
OXBOW BOOKS
1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083
Windgather Press and Mark McKerracher 2018
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-91118-831-5
Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-91118-832-2 (epub)
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.
Typeset in India by Lapiz Digital Services, Chennai
For a complete list of Windgather titles, please contact:
United Kingdom
OXBOW BOOKS
Telephone (01865) 241249
Fax (01865) 794449
Email:
www.oxbowbooks.com
United States of America
OXBOW BOOKS
Telephone (800) 791-9354
Fax (610) 853-9146
Email: queries@casemateacademic.com
www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow
Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate group
Cover images: Farmland on Magdalen Hill Down, Hampshire Mark McKerracher
Contents
List of figures
Unless otherwise stated in caption, all maps contain OS data Crown copyright and database right 2017
List of tables
Abbreviations
AOD | Above Ordnance Datum (measure of topographical elevation in the Appendix) |
EHD | English Historical Documents Volume I (Whitelock 1979) |
HAB | Bede, Historia Abbatum |
HE | Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum |
Acknowledgements
This book has its roots in my doctoral project Agricultural Development in Mid Saxon England, undertaken at the University of Oxford between 2010 and 2014, and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. My sincere thanks go to my supervisors, Professors Helena Hamerow and Amy Bogaard, who have given generously of their time and expertise throughout seven years of research, from germination to fruition and beyond. I would also like to thank the examiners of my thesis, Dr Mark Gardiner and Professor Mark Robinson, for their invaluable advice and critique.
It is a pleasure to thank the many kind people who have shared their expertise and data, and facilitated access to unpublished work, including (with sincere apologies for inadvertent omissions): Trevor Ashwin, Polydora Baker, Debby Banham, Angela Batt, Ian Baxter, Paul Booth, Sarah Botfield, Stuart Boulter, Esther Cameron, Gill Campbell, Jo Caruth, Brian Clarke, Pam Crabtree, Sally Croft, Anne Davis, Denise Druce, Brian Durham, Val Fryer, Sally Gale, Dave Gilbert, Jenny Glazebrook, Jessica Grimm, Julie Hamilton, Sheila Hamilton-Dyer, Sarah Howard, Anne-Marie McCann, Maureen Mellor, Mick Monk, John Moore, Jacqui Mulville, Peter Murphy, Andrew Newton, Leonora OBrien, Nigel Page, Ruth Pelling, Colin Pendleton, Steve Preston, Sarah Pritchard, Dale Serjeantson, Kirsty Stonell Walker, Gabor Thomas, Karen Thomas, Fay Worley and Julia Wise.
The maps in this book have been produced using two free resources: the QGIS package (http://www.qgis.org, accessed April 2017) and Ordnance Survey Open Data made available under the Open Government Licence (https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/products/opendata-products.html, accessed April 2017).
Finally, I extend my warmest thanks to my close family to Rachel, Mum and Dad who have been hearing about the book for far too long, and who have smiled patiently when the conversation has turned to mouldboards and manure.
CHAPTER 1
The lie of the land
Farming defined the Anglo-Saxon world. For the most part, its settlements were rural, its labours agricultural. Agrarian matters pervaded law-codes, riddles, miracle stories, educational texts and the reckoning of time. Land was measured less by physical extent than by agricultural capacity. Farming fed the wealth, war, craft and culture of Anglo-Saxon society; its heart beat to agrarian rhythms.
Despite being so central to the lives of Anglo-Saxon communities, agriculture has long been peripheral to Anglo-Saxon studies. A persistent dearth of evidence has rendered farming something of a poor relation, merely an assumed backdrop to greater social, political and economic themes. In particular, the scant evidence from written sources has long failed to provide any real narrative of agricultural change across the Anglo-Saxon period, between the fifth and eleventh centuries AD. It seems improbable that so long a span could have witnessed no development in farming practices but, until recently, any such processes have remained thoroughly obscure, as Hunter Blair observed:
Wherever we look to livestock, to cereals, to root crops, to the orchard or to the kitchen garden, it is difficult to find any evidence, at least from the earlier part of the Anglo-Saxon period, suggesting any notable innovations in comparison with the Romano-British period. (Hunter Blair 1977, 272273)
Over the last 40 years, however, and especially since 1990, the situation has been radically improved by an abundant harvest of new data. These decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth in Anglo-Saxon settlement archaeology, coupled with the increasingly systematic recovery and analysis of animal bones and plant remains. The study of Anglo-Saxon agriculture no longer lies outside the realm of the archaeologist, as it did for much of the twentieth century. On the contrary, a substantial, variegated dataset is now available to the agricultural archaeologist of this period. Already these developments are bearing fruit, and recent scholarship heralds an exciting new phase of research into the early medieval countryside, with landscape and settlement research by Hamerow, Rippon and Blair; seminal work on field systems by Oosthuizen, Williamson and Hall; landmark animal bone studies by Crabtree and Holmes; and the first book-length, overarching survey of the whole topic by Banham and Faith (Hamerow 2012; Oosthuizen 2013a; Williamson 2013; Hall 2014; Crabtree 2012; Holmes 2014; Banham & Faith 2014; Rippon et al. 2015; Blair 2013b).
Nonetheless, to date only a very few studies have closely interrogated the wide-ranging and diffuse archaeological datasets that are now available, each focusing upon a specific category of evidence such as animal bones or field systems. This book is the first systematically to draw together the evidence of pollen, sediments, charred seeds, animal bones, watermills, corn-drying ovens, granaries and stockyards on an extensive, regional scale, weaving together multiple strands of evidence in a view of agricultural development as a whole process. It utilises and integrates a diverse body of archaeological data for the first time, in order to tell a new story of farming transformed in Anglo-Saxon England.
Traditionally, Anglo-Saxon farming has been seen as the wellspring of English agriculture, setting the pattern for a thousand years to come but it was more important than that. This book argues that the fields, ploughs, crops and livestock of Anglo-Saxon England were important not simply as the forerunners of later rural traditions, but as vital parts of the economies, cultures and societies of early medieval Britain. It focuses in particular on changes in farming practices between the seventh and ninth centuries. This period is already well known among historians and archaeologists as the time when Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and lordship became consolidated; when towns returned to the landscape for the first time since the Roman period, accompanied by an escalation in long-distance trade and craft production; and when monasteries proliferated, made wealthy by huge grants of land. This book argues that all of these momentous trends were underpinned and powered by fundamental transformations in farming. Anglo-Saxon England first came of age in its pastures and ploughland.
