Angol
Illustrated with 64 pages of colour plates, this book concerns the origins of villages and open fields, and their development in the late medieval and post-medieval periods, in the Midland, 'champion' areas of England. 'It is here that many of the current orthodoxies of landscape history were first formulated, especially concerning the origins of nucleated villages and open-field agriculture, and the processes by which they disappeared in the course of the post-medieval period...' Most landscape historians believe that villages were created in the middle or later Saxon periods through the 'nucleation' of a formerly dispersed pattern of settlement, that many villages were initially laid out as planned, regular settlements and that open fields probably came into existence at the same time. Re-examination and mapping of the data suggests 'nucleation' is a myth, 'village planning' an illusion and open fields were created, at least in their classic, 'regular' forms, only in the 11th or 12th centuries. Focusing on Northampton, but of national significance in its implications, this book presents the most detailed reconstruction of landscape and land-use in a medieval county ever attempted. It provides a radical reinterpretation of village and open-field origins and casts new light on the practice of agriculture, the development of open fields and the character of the enclosure process in the post-medieval period.
