Peasant Perceptions of Landscape: Ewelme Hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500-1650(Medieval History and Archaeology)

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants' spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

Table of Contents:
1: Introduction 2: Geography and Sources 3: The Early to Middle Anglo-Saxon Period, 500-800 4: The Late Anglo-Saxon Period, 800-1100 5: The High Middle Ages, 1100-1350 6: The Late Middle Ages, 1350-1530 7: The Early Modern Period, 1530-1650 8: Conclusion Bibliography

About the Author :
Stephen Mileson is a landscape historian who works for the Victoria County History of Oxfordshire. He teaches at Oxford University, and he has published widely on medieval landscapes and social history. His publications include an article in Past and Present on 'Openness and Closure in the Later Medieval Village'. Stephen is editor of the journal Oxoniensia. Stuart Brookes is a Senior Research Associate at UCL and author of seven monographs and edited volumes, including (with John Baker) Beyond the Burghal Hidage, winner of the 2013 Verbruggen Prize in Military History. Stuart is editor of The Antiquaries Journal and Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine.

Review :
New ways of seeing the medieval countryside are offered through a rewarding account of 20 villages in S. Oxfordshire with a focus that offers an alternative to the usual narratives of colonisation, village formation, social subjection and agricultural development. The book is well written, scholarly yet accessible, and draws on a wide-ranging academic literature from archaeology to history, and from the Dark Ages to the dawn of modernity. Mileson and Brookes have produced an admirable book...the authors' passionate interest in their subject matter, and their informed and judicious judgements, are the outstanding features. The authors express the hope that the book will 'stand as a model for future research in different regions and landscapes'. They have succeeded admirably in this aim, combining painstaking research with inventive means of exploring the landscape forged by, and in turn influencing, the peasants of Ewelme hundred. Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes in this valuable volume seek to understand how peasant perceptions changed over the medieval and early modern periods. Mileson and his co-author Stuart Brookes duly delivered on this in their remarkably ambitious Peasant perceptions of landscape, a study of Ewelme hundred in Oxfordshire over more than a millennium.