Commons are an important part of the English landscape. Survivors from a once more extensive network otherwise eroded by the inexorable progress of enclosure, they provide a taste of wildness, crucial habitats for wildlife and valued spaces for recreation. To many people they seem to offer a tangible link with happier, more egalitarian times, when communities controlled the land;or with periods yet more remote, representing fragments of the wilderness of remote prehistory. But commons are shrouded in misunderstanding and myth. They were shaped by local societies that were highly hierarchical in character, and always embedded in inequalities of property and power. Their ecology, moulded by centuries of intensive exploitation – followed in most cases by a long period of dereliction – has only a tangential connection with the truly ‘natural’ habitats of the deep past. And a surprising number of our legally recognised commons are not, in reality, common land at all.This innovative study, which concentrates on the county of Norfolk but ranges widely, is firmly focused on the character of commons as physical environments and places, as landscapes. Using a wide range of documentary, archaeological and ecological evidence, it discusses the development and management of commons from earliest times;explains their morphology, location and distribution;and explores why some examples survived the process of enclosure – and the distinctive traces left by those that did not. Above all, it describes the characteristic physical features of different kinds of common and explains how their ecology has, in innumerable ways, been shaped by history.Highly readable and copiously illustrated, this book will appeal to all with an interest in the English rural landscape, and will be essential reading for those with a particular enthusiasm for common land.

The River Great Ouse in Cambridgeshire has a long history of water milling, stretching back to at least the 10th century and possibly to the Roman period. The authors use remote sensing (LiDAR), cartographic analysis, fieldwork, documents (especially contemporary litigation) and literary sources, to reveal new findings about this fascinating landscape. The Great Ouse’s watermills were recorded as the most valuable in England in the Domesday Survey. All their sites are located, several having been long-lost, and a comprehensive explanation for their national pre-eminence is given. The expansion of activity in the Middle Ages is investigated through a detailed study of the disputes arising from the competing uses of the river and its flood plain for water milling, navigation and farming. Channel features that, hitherto, have either been ignored or attributed to natural processes are shown to be the result of milling activity. The continuing impact of water milling on the landscape until its decline in the second half of the 19th century is analyzed. The authors’ findings have broader implications for the understanding of the development of water milling in lowland river landscapes; the evolution of parish boundaries; and the development of multi-channel river forms. They conclude by advocating a mapping methodology that designates landscape features resulting from water milling as heritage assets, to guide planning decisions.

The Vikings in the Hebrides provides an introduction to the Viking colonization and Norse occupation of the Outer Hebrides. Our knowledge of this period in the Hebrides has until recently been minimal as the historic evidence was negligible and the archaeology limited. However, two recent excavations at Bornais and Cille Pheadair have transformed our understanding of the period in the region. These two excavations will provide much of the information that is set out in this book but there is also a comprehensive review of other important discoveries such as the Lewis Chessmen, the burial at Cnip, Lewis and the silver hoards from Stornoway Castle and Dibidale in Lewis.The excavations at Bornais have transformed our understanding of the Norse settlement of the North Atlantic. It is possible to chart the evolution of domestic houses from the Viking longhouse to the post-medieval croft, to analyze the distribution of finds on the house floors and to critically assess gender relationships over this long period.The excavations have also produced large quantities of finds that demonstrate the links between the Western Isles and the wider world. These include important assemblages of bone combs and comb making debris, which enable a discussion of craft production and the fluctuating relationship of the Hebrides, the Irish Sea zone and Scandinavia. The presence of exotic green porphyry from Greece, amber, Ringerike art, pottery from the Bristol Channel, coins from Scandinavia, England and the Low Countries all provide opportunities to contextualise the settlements and the region in the wider medieval world.This book places the Outer Hebrides at the center of the Viking World and provides a unique contribution to our understanding of the islands’ importance at the critical period when Scotland was emerging as a major medieval kingdom.

A Medieval Life: William de Felton and Edlingham Castle, 1260–1327 is a biography of a little-known man living in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Britain. William’s precise birth and death dates are unrecorded, his place of origin has for a long time been unclear, and his parentage is still uncertain. Although somewhat wealthy and privileged, William does not represent either the high aristocracy or the ‘great and the good’ of his time, and a central theme of this book is how to write a biography of someone relatively anonymous in the Middle Ages. There are plenty of books about kings, queens and battles; this book offers a different perspective.Its origin lies in archaeological excavations between 1978 and 1982 at Edlingham, Northumberland. The first house here, which grew to be called a castle, was built in the years around 1300. It was abandoned before the 1660s after less than four centuries of habitation, and nearly three centuries before it was uncovered by excavation. This book is not an excavation report, however, nor an architectural survey, but an attempt to ‘excavate’ the buried and concealed life of the castle’s founder, and to understand the unusual building he created. It is a biographical approach to history framed by archaeological and landscape perspectives: the biography of one man, which illuminates the lives of those around him and serves as a biography of a place and landscape.William de Felton’s story can be told because he was unexpectedly well documented. His career as a middle-ranking servant in the royal households of Edward I and Edward II, combined with the bureaucratic habits of the king’s clerks, has bequeathed to historians two hundred documents that mention him. These documents are often individually banal, but taken together, and with other documentary evidence for William’s family, neighbours, friends and colleagues, they enable a reconstruction of his life. They show us William as husband and father, as a landowner, and as a traveller moving with the king’s armies and household from his native Shropshire, widely around England, into Wales, France, Flanders and Scotland, perhaps slightly contrary to the idea that medieval people travelled little. William began his career as an usher in the king’s bedchamber, and for many years was a soldier during Edward I’s ‘forever wars’, the early attempt to create by force a single nation on the British islands. He was an administrator or governor of occupied territories in Wales and Scotland, and later a local official in his adopted Northumberland. He was also a builder, notably for the king in Gascony and other places, but also in his own right, at Edlingham Castle, the centre-piece of this book, now an English Heritage public property.

The valley of the western Rother lies within the South Downs National Park but has a special character based on its Cretaceous geology of sandstones and clays. These give rise to soils that are ideal for agriculture but are extremely erodible. Over the centuries the area has been exploited by humans and partially cleared of forest. In this book, the archaeological history of the Rother Valley is summarized, with particular emphasis on the evidence for Mesolithic, Bronze Age and Roman occupation. Analysis of sediments in ponds adds to the evidence for changes that have happened over the last few hundred years. A notable feature of the cultural landscape is the network of sunken lanes.The Rother Valley contains unique chalk-aquifer fed streams with rare and protected species, such as sea trout and otter. Heathland, floodplain, wet meadows and woodlands are interspersed with agriculture, linked together by hedgerows and ditches. The health of the river is threatened by polluting inputs from farming and sewage. Past weather and hydrological records show the potential impact of climate change on the functioning of the river. The impact of recent changes on water availability for irrigation and human consumption are explored in relation to ecosystem requirements. Soil erosion is a significant problem, with the resulting high river sediment concentrations requiring expensive cleaning for the water to be fit for human consumption and the runoff often causes flooding of roads and properties. Mitigation measures aim to reduce the loss of soil on fields and interrupt connectivity between fields and the river system. We identify sediment sources contributing eroded soil to the river, the function of field-edge sediment traps, in-stream weirs and major reservoirs on sediment storage and connectivity.Finally, the book considers the future of the unique landscape that is the Rother Valley, including plans for restoration of the flood plain. Contributors include planners, researchers and managers of the large estates that are an integral part of the Rother landscape.

The date of the Cerne Giant has long been a matter for debate, as exemplified by a public and televised debate of March 1996, published as The Cerne Giant: An Antiquity on Trial (1999, Oxbow Books). Excavations were conducted in 2020 by the National Trust in the centenary year of its ownership of the Giant. The excavations were limited and targeted in extent and scope, the aim was to date the actual construction of the iconic figure by absolute dating methods (OSL). As the 1999 publication explained, the jury was still out – with advocates for a prehistoric origin, one connected to the period of the Civil War or a more modern one. In the event, the dates were a complete surprise, falling within the Anglo-Saxon period.The research has provided an accurate, scientifically verified date for the Cerne Giant. These unexpected results, together with the land-use history and ominous ‘disappearance’ of the Giant for six centuries, provide the platform for reconsideration and new discussion and debate.Part 1 deals with new research: the historical background and aims, the excavation results, stratigraphic finds, geoarchaeological interpretation, land-use history (environmental/land snails), and discussion. Part 2 is the wider discussion and implications derived from the results and places the Giant in his local and Saxon context. Part 3 begins with summaries of the other two excavated hill figures (the Long Man of Wilmington and the Uffington White Horse) followed by a series of essays from leading archaeologists, historians and experts in early medieval iconography.

Monarchs, no less than their subjects, want to impress their guests. This book is about gardens as one aspect of creating favourable impressions – soft power – in particular through the royal gardens of England in Tudor and Stuart times. It addresses the backdrop of palaces, parks and gardens that were unspoken statements of authority and cultural achievement that gave status and credibility to the country’s representatives. Garden history from this perspective has been neglected hitherto; neither have the royal gardens been assessed as a collection in which monarchs favoured chosen sites for indulging their stylistic passions. Research on their forms and designs have in the past been accumulated piecemeal, without any sense of overview.This book contains a new analysis enabled by gathering information from numerous archaeological investigations, historic texts and the available visual material, together with extensive original research in the National Archives and elsewhere. Reconstruction drawings flesh out the narrative in the early years when maps, drawings and prints were so very scarce and are reproduced alongside the available material and the more abundant prints and paintings as the Stuart era draws to a close.Radical new understandings of the medieval garden in England serve as the starting point for a fresh narrative of the history of internationally significant English gardens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will be of interest to architectural, garden design, social and political historians of the period and to a wide readership of those fascinated by how statecraft, foreign influences, and native innovation interwove for two centuries in our royal gardens and parks.

Throughout history, rivers have been a hub for human settlement and have been a key part of local livelihoods, history, and culture, as well as still playing a present-day role in providing services and leisure to people who live around them. It is no coincidence that all four of the earliest human civilisations were formed on great rivers: the Nile, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow rivers all saw great human aggregation along them. The most ancient and vital architectural structures linked to the use of rivers are bridges. There are a wide variety of medieval bridge structures, ranging from some very simple in their construction to amazing triumphs of design and engineering comparable with the great churches of the period. They stand today as proof of the great importance of transport networks in the Middle Ages and of the size and sophistication of the medieval economy. These bridges were built in some of the most difficult places, across broad flood plains, deep tidal waters, and steep upland valleys, and they withstood all but the most catastrophic floods. Yet their beauty, from simplistic to ornate, remains for us to appreciate.Medieval Bridges of Middle England has been organised geographically into tours and covers the governmental regions of East of England, East Midlands, and West Midlands. There are 63 bridges featured and beautiful full colour photographs of each bridge are included. A brief history is incorporated with each bridge. Additionally, information about the construction, materials used, and unique features are related, as well as historically relevant documents and images. Directions to each bridge and local attractions are also given.There are literally hundreds of bridges in England that meet the criteria for inclusion in this roll of honour for senior bridges. They vary vastly in size, style, and materials. Most are stone and a very few are brick. We have lost many of our older bridges to the ravages of time and the modern practice of culvertisation and urban development. A few of our older bridges remain though, and their beauty and pivotal role in our history is starting to be recognised.

This book shows how analysis of Scandinavian-influenced place-names in their landscape contexts can provide crucial new evidence of differing processes of Viking migration and settlement in East Anglia between the late ninth and eleventh centuries.The place-names of East Anglia have until now received little attention in the academic study of Viking settlement. Similarly, the question of a possible migration of settlers from Scandinavia during the Viking period was for many years dismissed by historians and archaeologists – until the recent discovery by metal-detectorists of abundant Scandinavian metalwork and jewellery in many parts of East Anglia. David Boulton has synthesised these two previously neglected elements to offer new insights into the processes of Viking settlement.This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Scandinavian-influenced place-names in East Anglia. It examines their different categories linguistically and explores the landscape and archaeological contexts of the settlements associated with them, with the aid of GIS-generated maps. Dr Boulton shows how the process of Viking settlement was influenced by changes in rural society and agriculture which were then already occurring in East Anglia, such as the late Anglo-Saxon expansion of arable farming and the associated recolonisation of the inland clay plateau. These developments resulted in patterns of place-name formation which differ significantly from some of the previously accepted, orthodox interpretations of how Scandinavian-influenced place-names (especially those containing the bý and thorp elements, and the ‘Grimston-hybrids’) came into being in the Danelaw.In view of these discrepancies, David Boulton proposes an innovative, hypothetical model for the formation of the Scandinavian-influenced place-names in East Anglia, which explores differing patterns and phases of Viking settlement in the region and the possible pathways of migration that preceded them.

Jutting out some thirty miles into the Irish Sea, from the western edge of Snowdonia, the Llŷn Peninsula, in north-west Wales, is renowned for its stunning beaches and countryside, with much of its landscape designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The peninsula is also home to a remarkable and abundant collection of archaeological sites and monuments, some of national importance, which bear witness to the ancient societies who once inhabited this narrow finger of land on the western fringe of Britain. This abundantly illustrated book examines this rich corpus of archaeological evidence, beginning with the faint but fascinating traces that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers have left in the landscape of the Llŷn Peninsula and ending in the early medieval period, with about 9,000 years of human habitation thus covered in its pages. In the course of the book, we will encounter a wealth of fascinating archaeological evidence, which includes impressive megalithic tombs and an axe ‘factory’ from the Neolithic; burial mounds and mysterious standing stones from the Early Bronze Age; rural settlements and magnificent hillforts occupied in the Iron Age and Romano–British period; and memorial stones erected by early Christian communities. Much more besides will be found in the pages of this volume, which throws considerable light on the ancient peoples of the Llŷn Peninsula, and the rich archaeological heritage of this special part of the United Kingdom, which has much to offer those who are interested in the distant lives of our ancestors.

Based on a decade of archaeological investigation and historical research, this book tells the story of the Copes of Hanwell Castle in north Oxfordshire and the creation of a garden with links to the development of scientific thinking in Oxford in the late seventeenth century. New research using Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire as a starting point has uncovered details of a remarkable family and their rise and tragic downfall, their social circle, that included some great names in the development of early scientific thinking, and their garden that in effect became a place dedicated to the wonders of technology. The complex tale weaves together the activities of a royalist agent, Richard Allestree, a prodigious musician, Thomas Baltzar, John Claridge, a Hanwell Shepherd with a penchant for weather forecasting, and Sir Anthony Cope who in an atmosphere of secrecy and distrust began to gather together a community that eventually was named by Plot as The New Atlantis, a reference to a book published earlier in the century by Sir Francis Bacon in which he suggests a model for a Utopian science-focused society. The book also chronicles the programme of archaeological excavation that has uncovered several unusual garden features and, most significantly of all, describes in detail the unique collection of seventeenth-century terracotta garden urns, an assemblage that is unparalleled in post-medieval archaeology. This collection was destroyed in a single episode of vandalism around 1675 and has been preserved in deeply buried deposits of mud and silt. Their analysis and reconstruction is opening new insights into the decorative schemes of seventeenth-century gardens. There is coverage of other gardens of the period and their surviving features as well as an examination of early science and how gardens impacted on its development in many ways.

Throughout history rivers have been a hub for human settlement and have long been a key part of local livelihoods, history and culture, as well as still playing a present-day role in providing services and leisure to people who live around them. It is no coincidence that all four of the earliest human civilisations were formed on great rivers: the Nile, Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers all saw great human aggregation along them. The most ancient and vital architectural structures linked to the use of rivers are bridges. There are a wide range of medieval bridge structures, some very simple in their construction, to amazing triumphs of design and engineering comparable with the great churches of the period. They stand today as proof of the great importance of transport networks in the Middle Ages and of the size and sophistication of the medieval economy. These bridges were built in some of the most difficult places, across broad flood plains, deep tidal waters, and steep upland valleys, and they withstood all but the most catastrophic floods. Yet their beauty, from simplistic to ornate, remains for us to appreciate. Medieval Bridges of Southern England has been organised geographically into tours, and covers the governmental regions of Southwest England, London, and Southeast England. There are exactly 100 bridges included. There is an introduction and background information about the medieval period of English history at the beginning and there are beautiful full colour photographs throughout the book.

Old orchards have an irresistible appeal. Their ancient trees and obscure fruit varieties seem to provide a direct link with the lost rural world of our ancestors, a time when the pace of life was slower and people had a strong and intimate connection with their local environment. They are also of critical importance for sustaining biodiversity, providing habitats, in particular, for a range of rare invertebrates. Not surprisingly, orchards and the fruit they contain have attracted an increasing amount of attention over the last few decades, from both enthusiastic bands of amateurs and official conservation bodies. But much of what has been written about them is historically vague, romanticised and nostalgic. Orchards have become a symbol of unspoilt, picturesque rural England. This book attempts, for the first time, to provide a comprehensive review of the development of orchards in England from the Middle Ages to the present day. It describes the various different kinds of orchard and explains how, and when, they appeared in the landscape – and why they have disappeared, at a catastrophic rate, over the last six decades. Chapters discuss the contrasting histories of fruit growing in different regions of England, the complex story of ‘traditional’ fruit varieties and the role of orchards in wildlife conservation. In addition, a chapter on researching orchards provides a practical guide for those wishing to investigate the history and archaeology of particular examples.

The Domesday Book, commissioned in December 1085 by order of William The Conqueror, is generally thought to have been used to assess wealth and assets to collect taxes, and represents an incredible wealth of information on land-use, local economies, and even land disputes between neighbours. This innovative analysis of the Domesday book from the perspective of a professional land surveyor and valuer aims to calculate a timetable for its creation, along with analysing the survey’s purpose, the nature of the data collected, and how it was used. By reverse-engineering the survey, Simon Keith proposes that while the document was an outstanding administrative success as a survey, it was in fact a fiscal failure which was never used directly to collect any taxes. This fascinating study examines the foundation of the well-established, successful and sophisticated hidage assessments upon which the Domesday book was built, discusses the likely timeline of the survey, and examines the logistical problems which are universal to surveyors throughout history.

Renowned environmental historian I.G. Simmons synthesises detailed research into the landscape history of the coastal area of Lincolnshire between Boston and Skegness and its hinterland of Tofts, Low Grounds and Fen as far as the Wolds. With many excellent illustrations Simmons chronicles the ways in which this low coast, backed by a wet fen, has been managed to display a set of landscapes which have significant differences that contradict the common terminology of uniformity, calling the area 'flat' or referring to everywhere from Cleethorpes to King's Lynn as 'the fens'.These usually labelled 'flat' areas of East Lincolnshire between Mablethorpe and Boston are in fact a mosaic of subtly different landscapes. They have become that way largely due to the human influences derived from agriculture and industry. Between the beginning of Norman rule and the advent of pumped drainage, a number of significant changes took place.The author has accumulated information from Roman times until the beginnings of fossil-fuel powered drainage, bringing together both scientific data and documentary evidence including medieval and early modern documents from the National Archive, Lincolnshire Archives, Bethlem Hospital and Magdalen College, Oxford, to explore the little-known archives of regional interest.

This volume aims to restore the reputation of Thomas White, who in his time was as well respected as his fellow landscape designers Lancelot 'Capability' Brown and Humphry Repton. By the end of his career, he had produced designs for at least 32 sites across northern England and over 60 in Scotland. These include nationally important designed landscapes in Yorkshire such as Harewood House, Sledmere Hall, Burton Constable Hall, Newby Hall, Mulgrave Castle as well as Raby Castle in Durham, Belle Isle in Cumbria and Brocklesby Hall in Lincolnshire. He has a vital role in the story of how northern English designed landscapes evolved in the 18th century.The book focuses on White's known commissions in England and sheds further light on the work of other designers such as Brown and Repton, who worked on many of the same sites. White set up as an independent designer in 1765, having worked for Brown from 1759, and his style developed over the next thirty years. Never merely a 'follower of Brown', as he is often erroneously described, his designs for plantations in particular were much admired and influenced the later, more informal styles of the picturesque movement. The improvement plans he produced for his clients demonstrate his surveying and artistic skills. These plans were working documents but at the same time works of art in their own right. Over 60 of his beautifully-executed coloured plans survive, which is a testament to the value his clients placed on them. This book makes available for the first time over 90% of the known plans and surveys by White for England. Also included are plans by White's contemporaries, together with later maps, estate surveys and contemporary illustrations to understand which parts of improvement plans were implemented.