Medieval Villages in an English Landscape

Beginnings and Ends

Richard Jones and Mark Page

This table gives the books price, published date, ISBN reference and other details
Price:	£20.00
Published:	21 October 2006
ISBN:	1-905119-09-7
Details:	256 pp; illus: 79 b/w

Synopsis

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 consequently become a central concern of landscape historians.

This long-awaited book directly addresses this central problem. It is the end result of a five-year project which has explored a group of twelve parishes on the Buckinghamshire-Northamptonshire boundary formerly lying within Whittlewood Forest, where elements of these two landscapes lie side by side. The authors explore the reasons for the fundamental changes that occurred at Whittlewood between AD 800 and 1400 – changes in how the land was perceived, divided, organised and exploited. Revealing the hard-won testimony of medieval villagers, they ask why different communities developed different forms of communal living.

The result of one of the most detailed analyses ever carried our on the origins of medieval settlement, this book is of fundamental importance to all scholars, students and enthusiasts of landscape history.