Overview

Anglo-Saxon farming made England so wealthy by the eleventh century that it attracted two full-scale invasions. In Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming, Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith explore how Anglo-Saxon farmers produced the food and other crops and animal products that sustained England's economy, society, and culture before the Norman Conquest.The volume is made up of two complementary sections: the first examines written and pictorial sources, archaeological evidence, place-names, and the history of the English language to discover what kind of crops and livestock people raised, and what tools and techniques they used in producing them. The second part assembles a series of local landscape studies to explore how these techniques were combined into working agricultural regimes in different environments. These perspectives allow the authors to take new approaches to the chronology and development of open-field farming, to the changing relationship between livestock husbandry and arable cultivation, and to the values and social relationships which under-pinned rural life. The elite are not ignored, but peasant famers are represented as agents, making decisions about the way they managed their resources and working lives.A picture emerges of an agriculture that changed from an essentially prehistoric state in the sub-Roman period to what was, by the time of the Conquest, recognizably the beginning of a tradition that only ended in the modern period. Anglo-Saxon farming was not only sustainable, but infinitely adaptable to different soils and geology, and to a climate changing as unpredictably as it is today.

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9780198855507

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Reviews

readers new to this subject area will especially appreciate the clear and fluently written prose that in less accomplished hands could easily have been encumbered by dense description and technical jargon ... the authors should be congratulated for a highly successful scholarly collaboration that has yielded what will no doubt come to be regarded as an essential text on Anglo-Saxon farming for many years to come. * Gabor Thomas, Antiquity * worthwhile, and will guide researchers to useful sources. * Christopher Dyer, English Historical Review * The authors must be congratulated on a book which will be useful to a wide range of scholars. They assimilate and present material from a variety of disciplines and pack an enormous amount of detail into its pages, yet it is uniformly interesting and enlightening ... this is a fine work, well written and illustrated, and likely to remain the standard textbook for a long time - for both those who know about Anglo-Saxon England and those who know about farming. * Paul Cavill, Medieval Settlement Research * Noting there was no textbook and little secondary literature on the practicalities of Anglo-Saxon farming, Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith set out to fill that gap. They have succeeded brilliantly. Their wide-ranging book offers a detailed account of early medieval agriculture that will provide a point of reference for decades to come. * Susan Oosthuizen, Medieval Archaeology * There has long been a need for a book that focuses specifically on Anglo-Saxon farming ... There is a wealth of useful and interesting information in both parts of this volume, and I will assign this book when I teach medieval archaeology in the future. * Pam Crabtree, American Historical Review *

There has long been a need for a book that focuses specifically on Anglo-Saxon farming ... There is a wealth of useful and interesting information in both parts of this volume, and I will assign this book when I teach medieval archaeology in the future. * Pam Crabtree, American Historical Review * Noting there was no textbook and little secondary literature on the practicalities of Anglo-Saxon farming, Debby Banham and Rosamond Faith set out to fill that gap. They have succeeded brilliantly. Their wide-ranging book offers a detailed account of early medieval agriculture that will provide a point of reference for decades to come. * Susan Oosthuizen, Medieval Archaeology * The authors must be congratulated on a book which will be useful to a wide range of scholars. They assimilate and present material from a variety of disciplines and pack an enormous amount of detail into its pages, yet it is uniformly interesting and enlightening ... this is a fine work, well written and illustrated, and likely to remain the standard textbook for a long time - for both those who know about Anglo-Saxon England and those who know about farming. * Paul Cavill, Medieval Settlement Research * worthwhile, and will guide researchers to useful sources. * Christopher Dyer, English Historical Review * readers new to this subject area will especially appreciate the clear and fluently written prose that in less accomplished hands could easily have been encumbered by dense description and technical jargon ... the authors should be congratulated for a highly successful scholarly collaboration that has yielded what will no doubt come to be regarded as an essential text on Anglo-Saxon farming for many years to come. * Gabor Thomas, Antiquity *

Author Information

Debby Banham is a medieval historian who teaches in the Universities of Cambridge and London. During the 1970s she worked as an agricultural labourer, and when she arrived in Cambridge as a mature student, discovered that farming was the only thing she knew more about than the people who taught her. She has published Monasterialies indicia: the Old English monastic sign language, and Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon England, as well as articles on Anglo-Saxon farming, diet and medicine, and monastic sign language. Rosamond Faith has taught medieval history at the universities of London, Cambridge, and Oxford, and is the author of The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship and many articles on English and French peasants, the rural economy, and the English landscape.

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