Landscape HistoryPub Date : 2024-01-25eCollection Date: 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2023.2284544
Helena Hamerow, Tanja Zerl, Claus Kropp, Amy Bogaard
{"title":"Roman to early medieval cereal farming in the Rhineland: weeds, tillage, and the spread of the mouldboard plough.","authors":"Helena Hamerow, Tanja Zerl, Claus Kropp, Amy Bogaard","doi":"10.1080/01433768.2023.2284544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2023.2284544","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A new model for gauging levels of soil disturbance (i.e. tillage) by analysing arable weed assemblages from archaeological contexts is applied to an extensive Roman-to-early medieval archaeobotanical sequence from the region west of Cologne. It tests the hypothesis that increasing use of the mouldboard plough, especially in a three-field system, would result in increased levels of soil disturbance which would be reflected in the kinds of weeds that grew in arable fields. The results point to clear differences in tillage regimes during the Roman period, providing support for the view that military sites were not provisioned by the same networks that supplied the civilian market. They also reveal generally low disturbance levels for the fifth and sixth centuries, indicating a continuing predominance of ard cultivation in the post-Roman period. The majority of seventh- to eighth-century samples had, however, been grown in 'high disturbance' conditions, a pattern that continued through the eighth and ninth centuries. Although use of the mouldboard plough within a fully developed three-field system may not have become widespread until the tenth or eleventh century, our evidence suggests that a plough capable of turning over the soil was in use in the Rhineland at a much earlier date.</p>","PeriodicalId":39639,"journal":{"name":"Landscape History","volume":"44 2","pages":"5-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10824012/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139643099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Landscape HistoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2023.2196135
Philip Davies
{"title":"The Doctor’s Garden: medicine, science, and horticulture in Britain (Yale University Press, London, 2022)","authors":"Philip Davies","doi":"10.1080/01433768.2023.2196135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2023.2196135","url":null,"abstract":"This volume is the third in a series cataloguing the Duke of Norfolk’s deeds at Arundel Castle in West Sussex, one of the largest private collections of family and estate papers in Britain. It has been prepared (with the aid of a team of cataloguers) by the longstanding castle archivist Heather Warne, and largely concerns the estates in the county of Norfolk acquired by the earliest-known ancestors of the current duke, notably the lawyer and judge William Howard (d. 1308). Around 750 items have been catalogued (i.e. summarised, rather than transcribed in full) for this volume, mostly dating from the period 1200–1600, and readers will be glad to learn that the editor took the decision to translate the most important sections of the originals into English, ‘as few people are taught Latin these days’ (p. xxv). The real interest in this material for the landscape historian lies in the wealth of detail the deeds provide on medieval micro-topography, with hundreds (if not thousands) of minor place-names recited, and frequent reference given to significant landscape features, such as open fields, fenland marshes, deer parks, and even specific buildings. A highlight is a rare specification (giving measurements and materials) dated 1422 for a new roof for the Trinity Guildhall in King’s Lynn. We also learn the name of a ferryboat operating in the town in 1281 — the bawdy-sounding ‘Strudecunte’ — and in reading the deeds of Ingoldisthorpe and Snettisham parishes ‘the reader is transported to the lost landscape of open arable farming in the thirteenth century’ (p. 5). A deed of 1279, for example, specifies the right to graze pigs and geese ‘but not other animals’ in the common marsh of Ingoldisthorpe (p. 31), and saltpans (salinis) are mentioned in North Wotton in 1323 (p. 36). Several deeds throughout the book detail the medieval practices by which lords and tenants consolidated blocks of land in the open fields and eventually enclosed them into private hedged closes. The process was already taking place in thirteenth century Ingoldisthorpe (p. 5), and from Wiggenhall there is a remarkable series of deeds detailing exchanges of strips in the open fields c. 1280–1308 (p. 87). At Hingham in the fifteenth century farmers ‘were slowly steering towards private farming practice in newly acquired fields, referred to in the deeds as enclosures or closes’ (p. 310). The book is divided into ten sections, of which nine concern the parts of the county to which the deeds relate: namely, the areas of King’s Lynn, Wiggenhall, North Walsham, Kenninghall, Banham, Attleborough, Hingham, Hardingham, and Ashwellthorpe. Short introductions are given to each section, before the deeds themselves are presented, giving full details of parties, witnesses, dates, and substance. Some of the deeds and their seals are illustrated with black and white photographs, and there is a helpful glossary as well as two indexes arranged by (1) parties, places and subjects, and (2) surnames. Consi","PeriodicalId":39639,"journal":{"name":"Landscape History","volume":"44 1","pages":"147 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44659430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Landscape HistoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2023.2196124
Ådel Franzén, O. Jacobsson
{"title":"Creation, management and devaluation – examining the workings of the seventeenth-century meadow economy in southern Sweden","authors":"Ådel Franzén, O. Jacobsson","doi":"10.1080/01433768.2023.2196124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2023.2196124","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Meadow land use has been the object of very limited historical research in Sweden, as most studies have focused on ecological or functional aspects. Research on the economy of meadows is rare. This paper addresses this issue by studying the investment in, and management of, meadows in seventeenth-century Sweden considering landesque capital, a concept referring to long-term investments in land through labour. We also examine the local economic institutions developed to handle this type of capital. By analysing seventeenth-century century court records from the districts of Östra, Redväg and Kind, a more complete picture emerges of the processes and contexts in which meadows were created, managed and devalued / revalued over time. Meadow capital was constantly under threat of degeneration due to biophysical processes, and this paper explores the different strategies used to handle this problem. Outlying meadows were often more flexible in terms of ownership and were often used by others when abandoned, either by agreement or surreptitiously, which frequently led to future ownership conflicts. The comparatively limited number of cases relating to meadows nonetheless emphasises the fairly low transaction costs incurred by institutions related to meadow land use at this time. It was often the outlying meadows that appeared in court proceedings, most likely related to these meadows not being contiguous to the rest of the land of the person using them as well as these meadows having a more dynamic owner/usership history compared to infield meadows.","PeriodicalId":39639,"journal":{"name":"Landscape History","volume":"44 1","pages":"83 - 101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45722605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Landscape HistoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2023.2196140
A. Harvey-Fishenden
{"title":"Pathways: exploring the routes of a movement heritage (The White Horse Press, Winwick, 2022)","authors":"A. Harvey-Fishenden","doi":"10.1080/01433768.2023.2196140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2023.2196140","url":null,"abstract":"‘tractormen’, and with a case study of conflict between community and ‘expert’ environmental knowledge in relation to the reintroduction of red kites. The final chapter, ‘Challenging environments’, provides a welcome assessment of the experience of old age in a farming community, suggesting that older farmers can continue to play a valued role as mentors even when their physical strength has declined, considering the impact of the closure of so many auction marts on loneliness and balancing this with an assessment of the way social media can allow mainly younger farmers to establish new, sometimes even global, forms of agricultural community. The conclusion underlines the profound role of the Lower Wharfedale landscape and environment in shaping personal and collective identities among the local agricultural community, and returns to the central theme of the compelling intellectual case for bringing agricultural and environmental history perspectives together and the practical policy benefits of doing so, notably in relation to a better understanding of how the agricultural community is likely to respond to different policy regimes and incentives. Like all good books, this admirable work of scholarship prompts many questions. Is the culture of risk taking Rowling describes inseparable from the ‘good life’ so many of her interviewees insist farming has given them? What of those who fell victim to it, losing not just fingers but limbs or even their lives? What were the hidden psychic costs of the highly prescriptive gender roles outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, potentially for all concerned but especially for those who were unable or unwilling to approximate to the normative prescriptions imposed on them? Rowling’s insistence that the environment was an active agent in its own right restores a balance often missing during the heyday of the cultural turn (although it would hardly have surprised Braudel), but where does her thoughtprovoking and well-evidenced observation that farmers and the environment in Lower Wharfedale inflicted mutual violence on each other lead us? Is this still too anthropocentric and abstract a formula, with people construed as standing outside a singular ‘environment’, rather than as one of innumerably many actors within it? Taking this ‘more-than-human’ view, with the farm people, women and men, children and elderly, of Lower Wharfedale considered alongside not only the livestock but also the wildlife, including persecuted ‘pests’ such as rodents, what would it mean for the agricultural landscape truly to be managed for the ‘mutual benefit’ of ‘disparate groups pursuing varied agendas’ (p. 249)?","PeriodicalId":39639,"journal":{"name":"Landscape History","volume":"44 1","pages":"153 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46535304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Landscape HistoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2023.2196119
J. Barrett
{"title":"Burghs in the landscape and the landscape of burghs: conquest, culture and urban design in north-east Scotland, 1150–1230","authors":"J. Barrett","doi":"10.1080/01433768.2023.2196119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2023.2196119","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study considers the planting and planning of burghs in Moray, by kings of Scots, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The king’s burghs were placed in the Moray landscape as a key element in an exemplary Anglo-Norman culture zone created in the coastal lowlands. This study focuses upon the arrangement of internal space within each town: especially exploring the dimensions of burgage plots as evidence of deliberate planning. Design commonalities among the Moray burghs are considered as evidence for stringent royal direction of burgh foundation by a cadre of professional town planners, using a common template and regularised standard measures for urban design.","PeriodicalId":39639,"journal":{"name":"Landscape History","volume":"44 1","pages":"29 - 60"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45886224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Landscape HistoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2023.2194086
J. Haslam
{"title":"Burhs, burghal territories and hundreds in the English central Midlands in the early tenth century. Part 1","authors":"J. Haslam","doi":"10.1080/01433768.2023.2194086","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2023.2194086","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The strategic context of new burhs created by the West Saxon King Edward the Elder in the east and central Midlands, in part documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is examined to determine the ways in which the foundation of these burhs as new fortified settlements was associated with the formation of new burghal territories to maintain their strategic functionality. These burghal territories typically comprised one or more units of around 300+ hides, here termed ‘proto-hundreds’. All of these are argued as constituting elements of a major reorganisation of the administrative landscape as part of the essential infrastructure of burghal formation. These new cadastral redevelopments demonstrate the organisational precocity of the West Saxon state at this period. These ‘proto-hundreds’ were subsequently divided into smaller units of around 100 hides in a new phase of reorganisation which was arguably concurrent with the creation of the shires, formed by amalgamation of the earlier burghal territories, in probably the third quarter of the tenth century. The first part of this paper examines the shires of Buckinghamshire and what is now western Northamptonshire; the second part extends this analysis to Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire.","PeriodicalId":39639,"journal":{"name":"Landscape History","volume":"44 1","pages":"5 - 28"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45214240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Landscape HistoryPub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/01433768.2023.2196134
Simon. Draper
{"title":"The Duke of Norfolk’s Deeds at Arundel Castle: the early Howard inheritance in Norfolk (Phillimore Book Publishing, Bognor Regis, 2021)","authors":"Simon. Draper","doi":"10.1080/01433768.2023.2196134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/01433768.2023.2196134","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":39639,"journal":{"name":"Landscape History","volume":"44 1","pages":"147 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46522608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}