Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), pp. 23–39

The scattered farmsteads of the Pennine foothills of south-west Yorkshire rarely offer visual clues to the antiquity of their sites. Most of their names are first recorded in the early modern period, yet if we examine the surnames that are associated with them we find that many were founded well before the Black Death. This is a much older settled landscape than at first appears. The importance of the hamlet as the basic unit of farming systems is emphasized, and evidence is provided for small arable townfields, divided into doles, and extensive moorland commons whose boundaries are marked by deep ditches that have wrongly been interpreted as linear defences from the Romano-British or Anglian period. 

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