Finally a chance to collect my thoughts about the fascinating Farming in the First Millennium AD: British Agriculture between Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror by Peter Fowler.

There are two strong initial messages – the first the surprise about just how much evidence survives about this apparently obscure subject, even if very little of it is written “history”. There is a fascinating map of field boundaries through which a Roman road slices like a knife – absolutely clear evidence that the boundaries pre-date the road. There’s archaeology of course – the odd surviving plough, and records of settlement patterns and storage facilities, plus the palaeoecological approach (palaeobotany etc that now extends even into soils).

The second is that Britain was in no sense a farming terra nullius at the start of this period – most of the land had already been worked over, reshaped by human work. “On Overton Down, near Marlborough Wiltshire, for instance, a crumbly, demineralised topsoil, the washed out remains of a cultivated humus in the second millenium BC, was already supporting in the later centuries BC the ‘old grassland’ which later fed one of the largest monastic flocks in the Middle Ages… the chance are that the much -loved if largely mythical ‘pioneer Anglo-Saxon woodsman’, felling his way through the trees, was chopping down secondary growth.” (p.56)

The main approach of the book is the shooting down of the already much-battered idea that various types of farming can be associated with particular ethnic groups – rather it argues that variations in types of plough, shapes of fields, forms of settlements etc were much more related to local conditions, economic changes, etc.

Instead the book comes up with eight broad phases of farming, although dating these, Fowler says, doesn’t make a lot of sense, it merely provides a framework for thinking about change. These are:

1. Before the Romans – thousands of years of farming had already shaped the landscape – many uplands had been podsolised into low-fertility, treeless moorlands, suitable only for extensive grazing, while some of the lowlands had also been totally cleared; others were used for what sounds much like slash and burn that was tradtional in some tropical areas until very recently. In the highlands some areas had been laboriously stone-hedged, while many practice run rig.

2,3,4,5.Romans and the post-Roman period – many of the same patterns continued but there was population increase, probably rapid, and cereal surplus and export became more important. With more labour and deeper-cutting ploughs, yields increased , and new luxury crops, such as grapes, were introduced. Haymaking became important in some areas.

All of this collapsed as the Roman system collapsed, although there are lots of variations on estimates of dates – from around 450 to the seventh century. A good time perhaps to be a livestock farmer, for as Fowler points out in times of trouble you can take them with you, as you can’t fields and growing crops. But many places continued much as before – knowledge of technology such as water mills seems to have been lost in some places, but survived in others. Often families would continue to farm the same land as their ancestors, but perhaps now for themselves as subsistence peasants, rather than for an overlord.

6. Early seventh and eighth centuries
Estates started to be reformed, with new trading and ecclesiastical centres formed partiularl at river crossing and estuaries. Many of the arrangements of this period survive to the present day.Bede’s monastery on the banks of the Wear and Tyne was for example formed in this period. On these farming became better organised again, although technology was not yet changing much.

7. Ninth and 10th centuries
“The most significant phase in the whole of the first millennium” – most of England’s medieval and modern villages were located during this phase, and many of the towns were re-established, either on new or Roman sites (eg Exeter, Winchester and York). Arable farming greatly expanded, which “led ewither to a remembrance of the ‘Roman plough’ which may have just survived in Wales and Cornwall, or – much more probably – to technological experiments with bits and pieces on an ard frm which emerged the one-way, wooden-framed plough with coulter, asymmetrical share and fixed mouldboard.” (p. 292) With more woodland being felled and more open large arable areas developed, communities could more easily be brought under the tight control of a lord.

8. Eleventh century to Domesday book
Much agrarian continuity, although the seigneurial hold on the land was tightened, and the technology of plough and watermill spread.

So there’s a framework, but there are within the book many accounts of sudden local flowerings, and indeed collapses, in response to social and environmental circumstances. There’s Flixborough in North Linclnshire, for example, where occupation has been identified from c. 700-1,000AD (and still continues today).

“Between the late seventh and late eighth centuries it seems to have been an aristocratic estate centre, perhaps with a household or family church and leaving behind a collection of rubbish suggesting ‘conspicuous consumption’, eg of goods like exotic glass vessels and lava querns, and of consumables like dolphins. During the first half of the ninth century the number of cattle slaughtered markedly decreased, while the exploitation of domestic fowl, particularly chickens and geese , reached a peak. Styli and window glass were in use; craft production increased; the dominance of sheep may have related to wool and textile manufacture, perhaps for export. [possibly a monastic community] … Thereafter, from the mid-ninth until the early 10th century, the settlement was much involved in textile productions, with smaller buildings and less conspicuous consumption; but by the early decades of the tenth century consumption returned, though this time in the form of the ‘ostentatious use of timber in the largest buildings’… and also massive consumption of animal resources” consistent with an Anglo-Saxon manor and feasting. (p. 105)

Plenty of change, plenty of “development” – lots going on just on one small site – a lot more interesting period than you might think.