Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 313

This beautifully produced and profusely illustrated book is the latest product of a scholarly career spanning many decades and several disciplines. With chapters on the historical development of woodland, the sources for studying woods and the history of modern forestry, as well as on the properties of trees and woodland ecology, it will appeal to historians, botanists and foresters alike. Woodlands contains a good deal that is familiar, but it is not an attempt at a definitive summation of the author’s past publications. Some new topics are interspersed among old favourites, and there is more emphasis than previously on comparing British woodlands with those of other countries, particularly Greece, Japan and North America. Just as significantly, here the author is concerned more with ‘investigations’ than ‘results’, and has ‘no particular theory to promote’ (p.ix). The nagging question for many readers will be whether this book pushes the conceptual bounds established by Rackham’s earlier work.

Woodlands includes some 22 chapters on a variety of topics. The first two chapters outline the properties of trees, followed by several on woodland history. A slightly isolated chapter on wood-pasture (or ‘savannah’) is succeeded by four on sources. These chapters discuss archives, archaeology, pictures, photographs and fieldwork, pollen analysis having been treated with the woodland history earlier on. Later subjects include the uses of wood and timber, woodland plants, highland and lowland types of woodland, and the pathology of trees. Some chapters are analytical in approach (like those on forestry), others more descriptive (studies of Blackmoor Forest in Somerset and Scottish pinewoods). The free rein given throughout to ‘investigations’ proves a useful antidote to gliding over uncertainties in difficult areas, but it does not always help to sustain a strong sense of direction. There are few obvious errors, though the misdating of the Black Death and of the important accounting day of Michaelmas (29 September) appear to be unfortunate typos (pp.66, 173). The index-cum-glossary is excellent, but the bibliography is notably short and does not include everything cited in the footnotes.

It is a strength of Rackham’s approach that he seeks to understand woods as an active ecological force, not simply a plastic and finite resource moulded by human intervention, and this is elegantly summed up by a description of landscape history as ‘the history of human default as much as of human action’ (p.184). But at the same time, historical readers at least might have liked to have seen more analysis of the human dimension: perceptive passages on the significance of cultural attitudes and economic circumstances in shaping man’s exploitation of woods could have been extended and tied in more closely with the treatment of ecology. More could have been said, for instance, about how the development of woods has been affected by regional and local differences in access to rivers and markets. There is some fresh new thinking on the impact of modern forestry and on conservation and future prospects. The extended treatment of highland as well as lowland woodlands broadens the East-Anglian basis of much of his research, while the brief excursions overseas suggest future lines of enquiry for comparative studies.

One or two of Rackham’s longstanding views, such as those on medieval parks and hunting, are coming to be challenged by recent research, and it would have been interesting to see more of a response from him to this. The work of landscape historians, for instance, is increasingly suggesting an early and widespread interest in establishing parks both as hunting grounds and as landscapes designed to convey a sense of grandeur around high-status residences. This interest seems to have been shared by kings, lords and gentry, and to have influenced the choice of sites for parks and the way they were managed, including perhaps the cutting of clearings (or ‘trenches’) in woods, which Rackham appears to view solely as anti-highwayman measures (p.208). It may not, therefore, be adequate to distinguish forty medieval ‘country-house parks’ from what he sees as the usual ‘deer-farm parks’ of that period (p.138). Likewise, research on hunting is making it less tenable to characterize the twelfth to fifteenth centuries as a lull between peaks of royal and noble participation (pp.158–9); hunting was a leisure activity which developed in sophistication and social meaning over the course of the middle ages.

This book is a trove of information and insightful comment. Those familiar with Rackham’s previous publications will come across a few new ideas, while newcomers will find this an enticing introduction.