This book contains the fruits of current work and thinking on medieval agriculture, mainly in Wales, of over a dozen scholars. The focus of the various contributors varies considerably; some present "big-picture" surveys which relate to much of southern Britain; four look at medieval Irish agriculture; seven examine different aspects and indeed periods of agricultural development in different parts of Wales. Thus of the total of just over two hundred pages (leaving aside a glossary of terms, a general bibliography of relevant work on medieval Wales, and the index), only around one hundred and thirty pages actually have medieval Welsh practice as their primary focus. And the majority of those pages are devoted to regional or local case-studies. This is therefore a revealing work--revealing, that is, in terms of the paucity of serious work on medieval Welsh agriculture compared to what has been accomplished in other aspects of medieval Welsh studies. Although the notional scope of the book is the period from c.400 to 1600 AD there is a tendency to concentrate on developments in the early medieval period--say, 600-1100--though post-Roman and later medieval Wales are also examined. For the early medieval period the abiding problem is how to make progress in spite of a significant shortage of conventional evidence. There is a lack of charter evidence for most areas outside south-east Wales. The extent to which the law-texts can be expected to shed light on developments earlier than the twelfth century is debatable; the same problem affects the usefulness of place-and field-name evidence. One contributor notes that "studies of the early medieval economy in Wales commonly suffer from a lack of available source material" (174). The fact that this book has been written is however proof that the problem of poor sources is not insurmountable.
The editors provide a very helpful and concise introduction to the contributions of the various authors, which also draws attention to general problems of gaps in research, such as the problem that "many landscape studies...tend to focus on upland areas and transhumance...while the lowland part of the ecosystem is relatively neglected" (3-4). The editors' comments are not entirely gloomy, however, as they point to developments that may overcome the under-utilisation of place- and field-names, and note the ways in which "paleoenvironmental investigations are providing increasing insight into the use of the medieval landscape"(4).
Passing to the work of the contributors, Stephen Rippon uses the findings of his research project on the "Fields of Britannia" to explore the transition from Roman to early medieval land-use in southern Britain. A picture emerges of a shift of varying degrees of intensity in lowland areas as communities responded in different ways to the political and socio-economic changes of the fifth century, while in upland areas the picture is complicated by the problem of the extent to which climate change may have played a part in shifts. With specific reference to Wales Rippon notes that there is some evidence of relationships between Romano-British landscapes and medieval ones, but much less than is the case in the central zone of England and the south east. Rippon's paper ends on a rather bleak note by emphasising both the paucity of sites that meet the necessary criteria for establishing the extent of continuity between Romano-British and medieval field systems in Wales and the lack of suitable pollen sites which would enable researchers to study continuity of land-use. Even in this context, however, a decline in the intensity of exploitation of the land in the immediate post-Roman period is evident from paleoenvironmental analysis.
Della Hooke's contribution on the management of seasonal pasture proceeds by way of case studies in both England and Wales, emphasising the symbiosis between relatively intensive lowland agriculture and woodland and upland areas where summer pastures were utilised. The English examples focus mainly on survival of transhumance through the early medieval period, whereas in north Wales the phenomenon survived for longer, and was important in the thirteenth century. Evidence for the details of that survival includes limited documentary sources such as the late-thirteenth century extents as well as more problematic use of place- and field-names and observation of surviving landscape features. A picture emerges of longer distance transhumance links giving way to much shorter distances, with cattle being dominant.
Four investigators, Meriel McClatchie, Finbar McCormick, Thomas R. Kerr and Aidan O'Sullivan, consider changing perspectives on Irish agriculture in the early medieval period. Their contribution emphasises the use of archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological and archaeological evidence alongside the longer-established use of written sources such as law-texts to reveal the importance of arable production alongside animal husbandry, with the scale of both developing significantly in the early medieval period.
The remaining seven essays concentrate mainly or exclusively on developments in Wales. Sara-Elin Roberts contributes a concise and admirably clear discussion of how the Welsh lawbooks reveal much about the farming practices of the central medieval period, particularly those of the thirteenth century. Such revelation is largely a by-product of those significant sections of Welsh law which sought to "regulate behaviour, exchanges, contracts, ensure fair deals and provide a guide to punishment and retribution" (90). Welsh law did not seek to describe the changing nature of exploitation of the land in the classical age of the Law-texts (the thirteenth century) but is nevertheless a valuable means of teasing out details of those changes.
Bob Silvester offers a broad survey of the state of knowledge of medieval field systems in north Wales, and in the casts a critical eye over the impact of the work of G. R. J. Jones, one of the pioneers of the study of socio-economic development in medieval Wales. Still widely quoted, Jones's work is here subjected to sceptical re-appraisal. It should be set alongside the evaluations in a paper by Andy Seaman in Welsh History Review and by Thomas Charles-Edwards in Wales and the Britons 350-1064. Basing his survey largely on "field evidence coupled where relevant with data from historic cartography" (94), Silvester offers a synthesis of current views which the editors describe, very reasonably, as "timely and pertinent" (8).
There follow three sharply focussed studies of specific localities. David Austin in "Y Filltir Sgwâr: Mapping the History of Local Land in a Welsh Heartland" produces a close look at a "square mile" (in fact four square miles) of land at the heart of the site of the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida in west Wales. The depth of Austin's feeling for this terrain is made clear by his announcement that this is a locality "within whose bounds I plan to be buried along with my Welsh-born and Welsh-speaking wife, Gaenor" (112). Using techniques of regressive analysis Austin moves from the nineteenth century back through time to a point at which he discerns an abbey which [in the twelfth century] "took over an agricultural and administrative set-up already deeply embedded in the Welsh landscape" (126).
Following on from David Austin, Rhiannon Comeau provides a meticulous analysis of three localities in northern Pembrokeshire--the area of south-western Wales which lay immediately to the north of the region of intensive Norman and Flemish settlement which produced the territory known as Little England beyond Wales. In contrast the areas studied by Comeau were in a region strong in Welsh language and tradition. Comeau's multidisciplinary methodology of regressive analysis of maps, place-names and soil types added to sixteenth-century descriptions of local agriculture, high-medieval commentaries in Welsh lawbooks and archaeological excavation combine to produce some markedly interesting results. One bonus from her investigation was the excavation of a rectangular structure which can be identified as a summer settlement. Associated finds suggest it was in use in mid-eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, making it the earliest known summer dwelling in Wales that can be firmly dated.
A final contribution on a distinct locality is provided by Andy Seaman's investigation of parts of the kingdom and lordship of Brycheiniog in south-eastern Wales. A strikingly multidisciplinary approach includes a fascinating discussion of a small group of the Llandaf charters, that intractable but hugely important source for the early medieval history of the whole of the south east. Two charters relate to estates which can be identified with certainty as Llangorse, centred on the celebrated Llangorse crannog, and Llandeilo'r Fan, a very different environment occupying upland on the fringe of Brycheiniog, and marked by poor quality land with some patches of land of moderate quality. The conclusions which Seaman derives from these sites are exciting and reveal how agricultural investigation has implications for political and ceremonial reconstruction.
The last detailed contribution to the book is that of Tudur Davies, "Culture, climate, coulter and conflict: pollen studies from early medieval Wales." His synthesis of the methods and results of paleoenvironmental studies is informative and encouraging. It is not without elements of controversy,--as when his conclusions challenge those of Stephen Rippon's "Fields of Britannia" project. Davies detects three main phases of agricultural development across Wales. The first is the period 400-600 when a sharp in the farming economy may indicate the impact of climate change but may also suggest a breakdown in administrative structures. The second phase, 600-800, takes us to a resurgent agricultural economy, as part of an intensification of farming practices and associated phenomena in "the long eighth century." A third phase, 800-1050 is more complex, but signs of "the strategic control of farming produce" in north-west Wales may be linked to important developments within the polity of Gwynedd. The linkages are important and far-reaching.
Finally a brief summary chapter by Andrew Fleming, consistently illuminating and by turns entertaining, profound and elegiac looks to the future and to the prospect of "more holistic ways of thinking--both about continuity and about change" (207).
In terms of coverage, like all such collections of papers which have their origin in a conference, there is little attempt to achieve a comprehensive coverage. Indeed there are some interesting omissions: there is no discussion of the Great Famine of the second decade of the fourteenth century--and thus no reference to Phillip Schofield's important article [1]--and of the Black Death (a single index reference) and the subsequent episodes of plague which brought desolation and opportunity to the land of Wales in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. So too the impact on agriculture of the Glyn Dŵr rising and its suppression in the early years of the fifteenth century is not investigated. Some at least of these topics are noticed by the editors in their Introduction, and it is to be hoped that this will encourage future investigation.
For the central and later medieval periods whole categories of evidence are absent or little discussed--Welsh poetry, the Inquisitions Post Mortem which extend patchily across much of Wales from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries; the splendid Extents and Surveys dating from the late thirteenth through to the fifteenth centuries. Some use has been made of these, particularly by Della Hooke, but they will repay much further investigation and analysis, as will the fact that Walter of Henley's Husbandry was translated into Welsh--probably in Glamorgan.
The rate of advance in scholarship in topics relevant to some of the work presented here is exemplified by the fact that authors presenting work in a book published in 2019 already saw by the end of that year the appearance of works to which they would have wished to refer. Those works included, for example, Matthew Frank Stephens, The Economy of Medieval Wales 1067-1536, and Patrick Sims-Williams, The Book of Llandaf as a Historical Source. The latter work devotes some discussion to the Llandaf charters nos. 146 and 154 and should be read alongside Andy Seaman's contribution noticed above. The appearance of new research and of new syntheses underscores the comment of the editors of Living off the Land that "this collection of studies represents a starting point rather than a definitive statement" (10). Starting point it may be but it already represents a distinct advance on the work of previous generations of scholars, and it fulfils to a marked degree the editors' hope that it will provoke "further studies that challenge and overtake existing understanding" (10).
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1. Phillip Schofield, "Wales and the Great Famine of the Early Fourteenth Century,"Welsh History Review 24/2 (2018): 143-167.