Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 278

This attractive new historical atlas covers some 221 square miles of northern Northamptonshire, encompassing the entirety of the royal Forest of Rockingham as defined in the late thirteenth century, as well as additional historically wooded areas to its south. It is an area with huge potential as a testing ground for theories about historic landscape evolution – a zone firmly within ‘village England’, but heavily wooded until the later medieval period, with open fields surviving until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and excellent conditions for earthwork preservation.

This is an eye-catching, colourful, large-format volume that will be valued for its superb visual material as much as its textual content. The mapping that forms the centrepiece of the volume is derived from methodical field surveys and scrutiny of available documentary sources, combined with systematic use of Ordnance Survey mapping and earlier cartographic sources. The work builds on David Hall’s meticulous mapping of open fields in the 1960s, enhanced by the application of Geographical Information System technologies. Following a concise introduction to the area’s topography and medieval administrative structure, readers are afforded a useful overview of the Forest and its hunting landscapes and woodland management; the development of the area’s open fields and the pattern of enclosure are also summarized. Especially detailed is the section on the origins and character of medieval settlement. Characteristic planforms in the region include villages that developed in linear fashion along valley sides (including some notable ‘paired’ settlements on opposite sides of valleys), and others that grew by infilling broad droving routes. The authors like to see manorial sites and churches inserted into settlements at the same time as Saxon estates were fragmenting, although in most cases direct evidence for the dating of village origins is tenuous at best. Some of the accompanying historic map extracts are spectacular, and the full-colour production does them justice; in particular, features of the elite landscape, such as parks, lodges, castles and mansions, leap out at the reader.

Maps for three different periods (c.1300, c.1700 and the 1880s) are spread over many pages and form the core of the volume; the first two map types are in full colour and the last takes the form of compiled black and white OS sheets. With this quality of mapping it can only be wondered how a nasty grainy image found its way on to the front cover. That large chunks of the entire data set are available online (at http://www. rockingham-forest-trust.org.uk/) poses interesting questions about publication in the traditional form of an historic atlas. Digital technologies, affording the user the ability not only to pan across and zoom into seamless maps, but also to overlay different sources, means that some might question whether traditional publication is, indeed, the ideal medium for a data set of this sort. At the end of the volume a handy gazetteer is ordered by township, and serves well to bring up to date earlier work published in the 1970s by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England.

It is refreshing to be able to avoid the customary quibble about the price of such an elegantly produced volume: at £20 it represents exceptional value for money. Overall, the level to which diverse data sources are integrated and analysed is remarkable and the entire exercise is a model that deserves future application to other contexts.