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This volume by Helena Hamerow and her team is the interpretive companion to their digital database (https://doi.org/10.5284/1057492) for the recently finished five-year FeedSax project. It explores the profound changes in farming and environment across the period, with new insights on the debate surrounding open-field systems and the mouldboard plough package in particular. The book blends project methodology and rationale with case studies and thematic debate. It will be invaluable not only to environmental archaeologists but to anyone interested in ‘cerealisation’, population growth, and marketisation.
Though initially conceived to investigate pre-Conquest farming, the project was driven by the data and expanded chronologically, with datasets ultimately spanning c.AD 420-1400. What makes the volume particularly persuasive is how it utilises multiple scientific approaches to tackle old debates – above all on open-field systems and settlement nucleation. The data suggest that in some cases open-field systems pre-date nucleation, though the authors stress that these systems are highly complex and regionality is key. Likewise, the implications for the adoption of the mouldboard plough will be contentious for some, but the combined evidence from weed ecology, crop isotopes, and cattle-traction pathologies makes a convincing case for adoption as early as the 7th century in places (which aligns with isotopic changes seen in humans elsewhere). This ‘package’ extends beyond the plough technology itself to include crop rotation and low-input (extensive) cultivation – practices that could and did exist independently of open fields and nucleation. It was the coalescence of these ingredients with the Medieval Climate Anomaly that proved the perfect recipe for high crop yields and population expansion.
There is something for everyone in here: a large radiocarbon dating programme, archaeobotanical data, zooarchaeology, stable isotope analysis, palynology, GIS, and more. Inevitably, the volume only scratches the surface of the data they have produced – at points leaving readerswanting more – but here the datasets will spark further work. A book that leaves you hungry is, perhaps, fitting for such a project.
REVIEW BY SAM LEGGETT
Feeding Medieval England: a long ‘Agricultural Revolution’, 700-1300
Helena Hamerow, Mark McKerracher, and the FeedSax team
Oxford University Press, £99, or Open Access eBook
ISBN 978-0198878520
