Currently reading Farming in the First Millennium AD: British Agriculture between Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror. And more can be known than you think. But the author, Peter Fowler, got an interesting thought about the historical record:
No one recorded how villages developed; no one, to judge from the silence, decided that an open field system would be better for some parts of Britain and not for most of the rest of Britain. TO be fair, neither documents nor archaeology are good at recording such developments for any period, however important they may be interms of longer-term significance, e.g. no government statement or official document recorded when the people of Britain became a ‘post-modernist society’. The evidence is not, therefore, just being awkward for the first millennium AD.”
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