Overview

The village - one of the keystones of the English rural landscape - has a powerful hold on the imagination. The origin of nucleated and dispersed settlements - the countryside of villages and the countryside of hamlets - has since become a central concern of landscape historians. This book directly addresses this central problem. The end-result of a 5 year project which has explored a group of 12 parishes on the Buckinghamshire-Northamptonshire boundary where elements of these two landscapes lie side by side, it looks at the reasons for fundamental changes in landscape that occurred in the parish of Whittlewood between AD 800 - 1400. Changes in how the land was perceived, divided, organised and exploited are examined to reveal the testimony of medieval villagers and answer the pressing question: Why did different communities develop different forms of communal living?

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9781905119097

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Reviews

admirably illustrated with frequent maps, diagrams and air photographs.' -- John Steane Oxfordshire Local History 2008 The authors are to be congratulated on an opus whose ability to leaven dense information and complex concepts with an accessible writing style makes this a major contribution, not only to medieval settlement studies but also, we must hope, to much wider theoretical debates on the importance of regionality and agency in change in the past.' -- Carenza Lewis Landscape History Vol. 29 2007 ...an important addition to the literature on medieval settlement which can be read by the specialist and non-specialist alike.' -- David Roffe, University of Sheffield The Medieval Review 2008

Author Information

Dr Richard Jones is Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Cardiff. Dr Mark Page is Assistant Editor for the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire. During the course of the Whittlewood project they were both Research Fellows of the Universities of Birmingham and Leicester.

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