Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 131

online). This is one of three collections of previously published essays by the leading medieval economic historian Bruce Campbell to be issued recently by Ashgate, the others being The medieval antecedents of English agricultural progress (2007) and Land and people in late medieval England (2009). The volume under review comprises 13 pieces which originally appeared between 1980 and 1997. The common concerns of the various chapters are outlined in a useful new seven-page introduction. There is also a very useful index. Although the chapters were written at different times for different purposes, together they form a remarkably coherent book which consistently addresses a set of connected problems. Reading the volume right through offers an interesting opportunity to observe the evolution over a couple of decades of one scholar’s efforts (with the aid, in several cases, of co-authors) to delineate medieval England’s agricultural geography between about 1250 and 1450.

An important theme of this book is that the farming systems practised by medieval landlords were diverse, but subject to clear spatial patterns. Furthermore, the essays maintain that these patterns must be explained not simply in terms of environmental factors, but also in relation to the influence of commercial opportunity and levels of economic rent. The impact of market demand reached its fullest expression in eastern England, and especially Norfolk, the site of a highly productive ‘intensive mixed farming’ regime that prioritized high value grain crops, horses rather than oxen as working animals, fodder cropping, and dairying. Yet institutional factors could also influence preferences for particular types and combinations of crops and livestock. The clearest link between the ‘field systems’ and ‘farming systems’ elements of this book lies in the fact that the common-field arrangements in which agriculture was conducted represented such an important institutional force. Most notably, Campbell describes the origins and character of the flexible, relatively unregulated common-field system of eastern England, which allowed cultivators (including landlords) substantial freedom to innovate.

A particularly notable achievement of the research represented here lies in its approach to medieval sources, and the methods used to analyze them. This volume reveals Campbell as a pioneer in using large bodies of data which relate to broad geographical areas. Some of the earliest essays by date of original publication are essentially micro-studies, but in later chapters the focus is increasingly on sources which offer a national picture. The book is largely based on databases of manorial accounts, and of inquisitiones post mortem extents. The overarching theme of the analysis carried out on these sources is that of classification. Using the statistical technique of cluster analysis, demesne farms are grouped together on the basis of their shared characteristics to provide classifications of farming systems and land use types. The spatial incidence of the different types is then mapped. The fact that classification is also a focus of the essays on field systems (especially in chapter IV, ‘Commonfield origins – the regional dimension’) lends further thematic coherence to the volume. The overall result of these attempts at classification, as Campbell’s introduction observes, is to help provide ‘a systematic spatial framework within which future research into and discussion of the late medieval agrarian economy can be conducted’ (p.xiii).

As this volume and his other two Variorum volumes demonstrate, Campbell was responsible for a very substantial body of work in article and chapter form even before the appearance of his monumental volumes English seigniorial agriculture 1250–1350 (2000) and England on the eve of the Black Death. An atlas of lay lordship, land and wealth, 1300–49 (2006, with Ken Bartley). It is welcome that these important essays, including those in the volume under review, have now been made more conveniently available in reprint form.

At the same time, it is worth noting that several (though far from all) of the topics discussed in Field systems are also among those covered in the two later volumes just mentioned. Arguably, the value of reprinting the earlier essays would be less obvious if their content was largely superseded by that in the later books. This turns out to be a relatively insignificant concern, however. It is true that the classifications of husbandry and cropping types contained in English seigniorial agriculture are often based on fuller data than their equivalents in the reprinted essays, and that the later book sometimes adopts a modified system of organizing this data. However, the 2000 and 2006 volumes omit a full explanation of the techniques that underlie the classifications made. For this, and for a host of insights on advances in medieval agriculture, the reader must turn to the essays reprinted in Field systems.