Windgather Press Books - further information
The gnarled, immutable yew tree is one of the most
evocative sights in the British and Irish landscape, an evergreen impression of
immortality. For hundreds of years it has marked holy places for travellers. In
this book Robert Bevan-Jones paints a many-sided portrait of this extraordinary
tree and the role it has played in history and culture.
He begins by examining the yew's fascinating, poisonous
biology, the origins of its name, and its distribution. He reviews the various
attempts to date ancient yew trees, and concludes that many of them are
certainly over a thousand years old; some of the oldest specimens may even be
linked to the cells of early Celtic saints. Ancient yews survive today most
typically in churchyards. They are also associated with abbeys, springs and
pre-Reformation wells, and serve as ancient markers in the wider landscape at
hillfort and castle sites. Yew has an important place in woodland history, and
provides the formal gardens of many great houses with hedges and topiary. Yew
trees feature frequently in folklore tales, especially from Ireland, and are
often invested with dark or magical associations. The prehistoric archaeological
record is also rich in yew finds.
With photographs and etchings of famous old yews, and with
a gazetteer of the oldest and largest yew trees in Britain, The Ancient Yew is a cultural flora of a single species: a tree
which provides a living botanical link between our own landscapes and those of
the distant past.
Robert Bevan-Jones has been surrounded by foresters, timber merchants and craftsmen since infancy. His father and grandfather both started their own timber firms, and like his brothers, he has considerable experience in the industry, both preparing and selling native timber. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and studied Humanities at the University of Hertfordshire.
A Seventeenth Century Village in Crisis
‘It
is a riveting tale; and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. The strong
personalities and the passionate sense both of self-righteousness and of
injustice burn brightly throughout.’
John
Morrill
In April 1644, with the English Civil
War at its height, a man walked into the coastal town of Walberswick in Suffolk,
got into a fight with some locals, and was killed. The local Justice of the
Peace, Robert Brooke, exacted swift retribution, and the three perpetrators were
hanged. Thereafter, the event become known as ‘The Battle of Bloody Marsh’.
Why did this ‘battle’ happen, and
what does it tell us about what life was really like in an English rural
community in the seventeenth century? Peter Warner reconstructs the causes and
consequences of this violent episode. He unravels a tale of crisis in a social
landscape - a story of rising poverty, enclosure, accusations of rape, and the
brutal confrontation of the landed and the dispossessed.
Like Le Roi Ladurie’s Montaillou
and Gough’s History of
Myddle, the story of Bloody Marsh explores in microcosm great historical
events, and shows how they transformed the lives of real people. Nick
Catling’s photographs also show how the story is grounded in a real place,
where the visitor can sense in an almost visceral way the presence of the past.
Peter Warner is Dean of Homerton College, Cambridge. Nick Catling is a professional landscape photographer.
During the agricultural
revolution, the landowners of Britain carried out a great architectural
experiment. Attempting to fulfil the Enlightenment ideals of beauty, utility and
profit, they constructed an enormous range of picturesque or classical buildings
on their home farms, and on the farms run by their tenants. Many of these still
survive, and in this book Susanna Wade Martins tells the story of this
significant yet unsung aspect of England’s rural heritage.
Drawing on the evidence
compiled during English Heritage’s national model farm survey, the author
examines the architecture and landscape context of the farmsteads themselves.
She also considers the motives behind their construction; since they were
usually built on large estates, documentation linked to their creation often
survives, revealing the thinking of their builders. Built normally as complete
units, as part of a total reordering of the agricultural landscape, model farms
also reflected ideology: the classical aspirations of Whig landowners during the
Georgian period, and, in the nineteenth century, the flamboyant confidence in
scientific progress of the Victorians.
With a wealth of interior and
exterior photographs, plans and a county-by-county summary of the country’s
most important model farmsteads, this book is a survey of a phenomenon unique to
Britain, and a guide to the rich built heritage of the Age of Improvement.
Susanna Wade Martins is a research fellow at the Centre of East Anglian Studies, University of East Anglia and a past chairman of the Historic Farm Buildings Group. She has published widely on agricultural and estate history with a special emphasis on farm buildings and the landscape.
Discovering a Countryside
The countryside is a gigantic
puzzle which contains within its intricate pattern of lanes, woods and
farmsteads the keys to its history. This book takes the reader through the
process of landscape detection, by way of a journey through a fascinating
landscape in the Yorkshire Dales.
Richard Muir shows how
exploring landscape history can be compared to investigating a crime. The
detective analyses different kinds of evidence to construct what happened, when
and why. Along the way he or she has to think logically, to interpret all sorts
of complex evidence, and be prepared to abandon false trails. Gradually, as the
evidence accumulates, the past comes to life.
It is much easier to understand
how the process works if you actually look at a particular landscape. Ripley
township covers only a few square miles, but crams a wealth of features into its
tiny territory. The author finds a ‘lost’ Roman road, reveals field-systems
dating from Anglo-Saxon times, and finds oak trees which may date from the time
of Domesday Book alive in the deer park. He recreates the appearence of deserted
medieval villages, discovers a lost formal garden, and evaluates the impact of
landscaping and Parliamentary Enclosure. He also explores an abandoned church,
and shows how one family created a village around 1400 and completely rebuilt it
in the 1820s. The end result is a chronicle of the past times of Ripley, the
story of a landscape.
One of the great joys of landscape history is that the
techniques employed here can be adopted by any reader who wants to understand
his or her own patch of countryside. This is a book which is sure to stimulate
the imagination.
Dr Richard Muir
is one of Britain’s leading landscape historians. He edits the journal
LANDSCAPES, and is the author of The
New Reading the Landscape
and many other books.
Markets in Early Medieval Europe
Over the last few years collaboration between the
archaeological and metal-detectorist communities has transformed our
understanding of early medieval economies. The great coastal emporia or wics
like Hamwic, Dorestadt and Quentovic have in the past been the centre of
scholarly attention. However, the identification of ‘productive sites’,
mostly through the detection and archaeological analysis of coins, has
increasingly shown how economic and cultural exchange also went on at a myriad
of other places, many of them inland.
This book is the first to survey the evidence for inland
markets and trading sites, in Anglo-Saxon England and across Scandinavian and
Frankish Europe. Historians, archaeologists and numismatists review the latest
evidence for these sites, and for trading relations across Europe and
Scandinavia. Markets, fairs and other high-status settlements were all centres
of exchange, and many of them are examined here for the first time. The
interpretation of productive sites remains controversial, and an important theme
of the book is the role of metal-detection in archaeology. A fierce debate still
rages about the problems and values associated with this mode of recovery.
This interdisciplinary volume represents a milestone in
understanding the complexities of economics and settlement in early medieval
England and Europe. By moving the debate away from analysis of the most
important sites, it offers new insights into the overall patterns of trade and
exchange, and sheds new light on the economic dimension of people’s lives.
Tim
Pestell is Archivist in the Castle Museum for Archaeology at Norwich, England.
and is the author of a forthcoming book on the monasteries of East
Anglia. Katharina Ulmschneider is a Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College,
University of Oxford, and is the author of a recent book on the productive sites
of Hampshire and Lincolnshire.
Contents
Preface
1
Introduction. The Study of Early Medieval Markets and ‘Productive’
Sites
Katharina Ulmschneider and Tim Pestell
I:
History, Numismatics and the Early Medieval Economy
2
Production and Distribution in Early and Middle Anglo-Saxon England
James Campbell
3
‘Productive’ Sites and the Pattern of Coin Loss in England, 600-1180
Mark Blackburn
4
Variations in the Composition of the Currency at Different Places in
England
Michael Metcalf
5
The Hinterlands of Three Southern English Emporia: Some Common
Themes
Ben Palmer
II:
Trading and ‘Productive’ Sites in the British Isles
6
Markets and ‘Productive’ Sites: A View from Western Britain
David Griffiths
7
Markets Around the Solent: Unravelling a ‘Productive’ Site on the
Isle of Wight
Katharina Ulmschneider
8
The Early Anglo-Saxon Framework for Middle Anglo-Saxon Economics: The
Case of East Kent
Stuart Brookes
9
Exceptional Finds, Exceptional Sites? - Barham and Coddenham, Suffolk
John Newman
10
Six Outstanding Middle Anglo-Saxon Sites in West Norfolk
Andrew Rogerson
11
The Afterlife of ‘Productive’ Sites in East Anglia
Tim Pestell
12
Middle Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire – An Emerging Picture
Kevin Leahy
13
Investigations at the Anglian and Anglo-Scandinavian Sites at Cottam,
East Yorkshire
Julian D Richards
III:
Markets and Settlements on the Early Medieval Continent
14
Markets and Fairs in Norway and Sweden Between the Eighth and Sixteenth
Centuries
Peter
Sawyer
15
Manor and Market at Lake Tissø in the Sixth to Eleventh Centuries – A
Survey of the
Danish
‘Productive’ Sites
Lars
Jørgensen
16
Groß Strömkendorf – a Market Site of the Eighth Century on the Baltic
Sea Coast
Astrid
Tummuscheit
17
Tjitsma, Wijnaldum: An Early Medieval Production Site in the Netherlands
Caroline
Tulp
18
The Fate of the Ports of the Lower Seine Valley at the End of the Ninth
Century
Jacques
Le Maho
19
San Vincenzo in the Making: The Discovery of an Early Medieval Production
Site on the
East Bank of the Volturno
Matthew
Moran
‘A wonderful piece of work, Williamson’s best yet. It deserves a wide audience.’
Christopher Taylor
To explain the rich, complex patterns in the English
landscape today, we have to understand how the land was farmed in the medieval
period. Some regions had large villages with extensive open fields; others had
scattered hamlets and less communal forms of agriculture. These differences are
still with us - in the shape of fields, the form of settlement, and the
character of hedges and woods.
Archaeologists, historians and geographers have long argued
about when, why and how these variations developed. In this radical and
important book Tom Williamson overhauls many of the ideas about how they came
about. Some scholars have argued that geographical differences in customs and
culture, in the strength of lordship, and in population pressure were involved.
Williamson in contrast argues that the overriding determinant was the
practicality of working the land. Using a wealth of evidence from from the
Thames to the Wash, he shows how subtle differences in soils and climate shaped
not only the layout of fields and farms, but the very structure of the societies
that farmed them.
This is a book which puts the environment back where it
belongs - at the centre of the historical stage. It will be essential reading
for all those interested in the history of the English landscape, social and
economic history, and the way life was lived in the medieval countryside.
Tom Williamson is one of Britain’s leading landscape archaeologists and historians. His many books include Suffolk’s Gardens and Parks: Designed Landscapes from the Tudors to the Victorians (Windgather Press, 2000), and The Transformation of Rural England (University of Exeter Press, 2002). He co-edits the journal Rural History and is lecturer in Landscape Archaeology at the University of East Anglia.
Designed Landscapes from the Tudors to the Victorians
Suffolk deserves a special mention in garden and landscape history. Some of the greatest names in English
landscape architecture, such as ‘Capability’ Brown, Humphry Repton, William
Andrews Nesfield and Sir Charles Barry, were instrumental in creating the
county’s gardens and parks. In this book Tom Williamson explores how the
landscapes we admire today at places such as Ickworth, Shrubland, and
Somerleyton came into existence. He explores the fashions that determined their
design, and shows how they reveal much about the past: as expressions of the
landed elite’s world-view, and as evidence of the economy and society which
produced them.
Williamson takes the
reader through a fascinating history of garden and park design and creation,
from the Renaissance precision of Elizabethan Melford Hall to the drama of
Bawdsey Manor, laid out on the windswept coast early in the twentieth century.
The story has many themes: the influence of continental fashionon the
Restoration garden; the proliferation of parks in the mid-eighteenth century,
culminating in ‘Capability’ Brown’s work at Ickworth; Humphry Repton’s
development of his picturesque style at estates such as Glenham; the magnificent
new Victorian gardens at Shrubland and Somerleyton; and the impact of the
‘Arts and Crafts’ style on Suffolk’s gardens. The author also explains the
domestic economy of the Victorian garden, where small armies of gardeners and
nursurymen laboured with implements and techniques that are unfamiliar to us
today, and the kitchen garden supplied the house with fresh food.
The book not only
shows how trends in garden and landscape design were played out in a particular
corner of England; it also sheds light on parks and gardens as symbolic
landscapes, proclaiming and reinforcing social divisions in a very unequal
world.
Tom
Williamson is Lecturer in Landscape Archaeology at the Centre of East Anglian
Studies, University of East Anglia. His many books include Polite Landscapes, The Origins
of Norfolk and The
Norfolk Broads: A Landscape History.
Changing Medieval Settlements in Central England
Available for the first time in
paperback, this volume is one of the most important and controversial studies of
medieval settlement and landscape to have been published in the last ten years.
The authors address a question that has fascinated and perplexed landscape
historians: when and why did the nucleated village and its associated common
field system arise, and why did it emerge in some areas and not in others?
Drawing on their detailed study
of a group of shires in central England, the authors date the origin of the
nucleated village to the period 850-1200. They identify a ‘village moment’,
when, in some areas of extensive arable farming, settlement was reorganised.
These villages were planned, the result of a deliberate decision: population
pressure, resource depletion, market forces, or the initiative of a lord may all
have influenced their builders. Nucleation
was invariably associated with the introduction of a common field system, and
has to be seen in the context of the wider regularisation of law and custom in
the medieval world. Villages were created as institutional communities: tofts,
tithes, taxes and tenancies were all connected in a new economic system.
In other areas a transformation of the landscape along these lines was
never deemed necessary or desirable, and though the settlement pattern was
changed, its dispersed character persisted and flourished. After 1300, as the
famine and Black Death took hold, most villages contracted, and in some cases
the internal and external pressures led to their desertion.
Carenza Lewis
is a Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and a Presenter of Time
Team; Patrick Mitchell-Fox was a
Research Fellow in the School of History, University of Birmingham. Christopher Dyer is Professor of Medieval Social History, University
of Birmingham and President of the Society for Medieval Archaeology.