Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 129

Tom Williamson’s impressive update of his original book of this title (Manchester University Press, 2000) is a real pleasure to read. The text is lively, stimulating and authoritative, and evidence and arguments are clearly explained. This paperback volume is also a pleasure to look at: the text is printed more clearly than in the original publication, and the 21 new photographs are not only better-reproduced but distributed appropriately throughout the book, rather than bundled in the middle pages.

The book’s central theme is the development of territorial organisation in Hertfordshire between 400 and 1000 AD. The original seven-chapter structure has been retained. The wider geographic and chronological context provided in the first two and last two chapters has been edited and updated, but the three central chapters – which focus on the evolution of early Anglo- Saxon folk-groups into middle Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the development of early medieval extensive estates, and the pre-Conquest origins of medieval settlement and landscape exploitation – have been extensively rewritten and include much new material.

This new look at Hertfordshire stimulates and contributes to any number of research questions, which themselves illustrate how far landscape history has matured in the decade since the book was first published. Just three are explored below to give a brief flavour of the delights to be found by readers of this stimulating trove of evidence, ideas and debates.

Williamson’s central premise lies in his adoption of Everitt’s model of contrasting pays of river and wold as the basis for the emergence of political groupings (Alan Everitt, Continuity and colonization: the evolution of Kentish settlement, 1986). He explains the origins of territorial division in Hertfordshire in terms of control by individual groups over discrete zones defined by river catchments – each area encompassing a range of reliefs and soil types, and thereby providing access to the widest possible range of arable and non-arable resources. This model does not, however, take account of the proposition – based on early medieval sources – that Anglo-Saxon political and cultural identity was based on rights over land, rather than territorial definition. Perhaps, it suggests, early Anglo-Saxon clans or folk-groups identified themselves in terms of rights they shared to specific pastures and woodland rather than in terms of defined physical boundaries. How might this play out in Hertfordshire, one wonders?

A second premise of the book is that differences in settlement pattern and agricultural exploitation between more densely settled, ‘primary’ zones of arable and meadow in river valleys and less densely settled, ‘secondary’ zones of pasture and woodland on less fertile upland wolds can be explained in terms of population growth over time. That is, early peoples preferred to settle in valleys and subsequently gradually colonised the uplands in response to land hunger forced by demographic growth. There are two difficulties with this assumption. From at least the middle Iron Age there is evidence for settlement across all landscape types, which makes it harder to argue that there was much extensive unclaimed land available for settlement in southern England in any period thereafter. The persistence of rights of communal access to pasture, recognised by prehistorians in monuments such as causewayed camps and stock enclosures, and by historians in Anglo-Saxon laws and charters, demonstrates that such ‘secondary’ areas were in fact highly regarded. How might the evidence from Hertfordshire play out if it is instead explained in terms of shifting relationships between equally ancient dominant and subordinate settlements?

Such issues bring us up against a third premise. Upland zones, especially along watersheds, are regarded as ‘marginal’ both because of their distance from the arable ‘core’ and their location near the territorial periphery. The location on pasture of important prehistoric monuments focused on communal events like feasting, and of large numbers of barrow burials designed to be visible from a distance, may mean that such areas were not ‘marginal’ at all, but were central to the identities and practices of the groups that created and used them. Exploration of the distinction between what is ‘distant’ and what is ‘the edge’ might enable contrasts between river and wold (and ‘core’ and ‘marginal’) to be understood in other terms: for example, by seasonal activity which left a different archaeological imprint – like the young men and women of early medieval Ireland who took cattle ‘booleying’ on the uplands each spring, or pastoralism as localised agricultural specialisation in a relatively integrated regional economy, or specialised renders required by an elite. The evidence from Hertfordshire contributes to this debate.

That this book on Hertfordshire generates such questions demonstrates the central relevance of regional studies to the discipline as a whole. The reader who picks up this excellent book will find much more besides: discussions of the possibility of cultural continuity from Iron Age oppidum to Roman vicus to Anglo-Saxon caput, the survival of prehistoric land divisions into the modern period, the fossilisation in territorial and diocesan boundaries of shifts in the balance of power between the emerging Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and so on. This is Williamson at his best and the book deserves to become a classic, standing on academic and lay bookshelves alongside Finberg, Hoskins, Beresford, and Taylor.