Agricultural History Review, Volume 64 Part 1 (2016), p. 117

Any book with the term ‘ancient woodland’ in the title must expect comparison with the iconic works of Oliver Rackham. The latest contribution to University of Hertfordshire’s Studies in Regional and Local History series by Barnes and Williamson stands up well in that company. The approach taken by this book is to consider ancient woodlands as an integral part of a wider rural landscape, rather than places set aside and protected from the changes going on around them. It is therefore a book with much to offer readers of Agricultural History Review. The writers emphasize their historical and archaeological perspective, but this work is also grounded securely and effectively in the geography of the landscape, considering the relative roles of geology, soil and topography, and uses palaeoecological and neoecological arguments as deftly as human perspectives.

The authors don’t fall into the common trap of setting up a straw man and then knocking it down, preferring to use their case studies as tools to help them explore and develop the ancient woodland concept in a constructive and thought-provoking way. The first chapter concisely and effectively reviews how the concept of ancient woodland arose, and how it has developed within different disciplines and landscapes. This review leads Barnes and Williamson to suggest that the popular conception of ancient woodland as a relatively stable landscape element (that is, surviving largely unchanged over multiple centuries) not only isolates woodland from the wider landscape but in turn leads to a chronological imbalance in many accounts focused on woodland, which tend to skip over the last few centuries, perhaps influenced by the implied stability of the definition of ancient woodland in England as land which has been wooded since 1600. The three predominantly historical chapters of the book redress this balance somewhat by considering the origins of enclosed, coppiced woodlands in the medieval period as part of a process of population increase, agricultural intensification and enclosure spanning the last millennium (Chapter 3), then focusing on the relatively neglected recent past in chapters titled ‘Ancient woodland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (Chapter 6) and ‘The recent history of ancient woodland’ (Chapter 7).

The landscape approach allows the authors to expand and nuance the ancient woodland concept, as well as to explore the extent to which human actions and social changes have affected woodlands to create the remnants seen today. They argue that the apparent dominance of enclosed, coppice-with-standards ancient woods is a product of post-medieval landscape evolution, showing that before the Middle Ages both coppice products and pasturage would have come from more extensive, less intensely managed expanses of woodland. They suggest that some Anglo-Saxon ‘wood names’ actually refer to what landscape historians would now call wood pasture, and that ‘assarting’ may refer to either the grubbing out of closed canopy woodland or the removal of pollards and shrubby stands from grazed common lands to convert them to agricultural fields. Their exploration of the geography of surviving ancient woodlands and their association with former wastes and commons in the context of changing agricultural practices and developing settlement patterns shows how the use and survival of the two landscape elements diverged in Norfolk, and allows the authors to argue convincingly for the survival of wood pasturage in some locations until formal enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Norfolk is an apt study region since it has a marked variety of landscapes and landscape histories, reflecting the considerable diversity of geology, soils and topography, including areas with the characters of both ‘ancient’ and ‘planned’ countryside (in the sense used by Oliver Rackham). The Ancient Woodland Inventory (AWI) provides the starting point for site selection (and for the useful 91-page appendix containing summary case studies and maps of 50 woods visited and researched by the authors), and although the final chapters identify flaws in the Inventory, they are presented as an inevitable consequence of the limited resources and large-scale mission of the AWI. The authors propose the useful corrective of introducing a new category of ‘pseudo-ancient woodland’; in their case studies, almost a fifth of sites fall into this category. They are also careful to spell out the ways in which Norfolk cannot be taken as representative of the rest of the English lowlands and it is to be hoped that this will spur others on to investigate how their ideas and findings hold up in other counties.

Whilst some problems can always be found in any work, those noted here are minor: maps would sometimes benefit from better keys and the researcher ‘Day’ cited on page 154 is not male but female. Overall this is a fresh and readable study, of considerable value both as a regional landscape history and as a contribution to wider debates about the role and story of trees in the landscape. Its relatively short, focused approach makes it accessible to the lay naturalist or non-specialist historian, but the critique of the ancient woodland concept will be useful and thought-provoking for more specialist students of the woodland and landscapes of England over the last 1000 years. This book is thus both a useful contribution to regional landscape history studies in the UK and of wider value to anyone interested in the history of trees and woodland in the rural landscape.