Shaping medieval landscapes - Tom Williamson

The English landscape of today owes much to changes and
transformations that took place in the medieval period, i.e.
before the large-scale planned enclosures from the 1700s onwards.
What went before was a much more open system of fields with
regional variations in the configuration of settlement, fields,
hedgerows, roads and paths. Throughout this book Tom Williamson
discusses the dichotomy between 'planned' and 'ancient',
'woodland' and 'champion' landscapes; between areas where
nucleated villages were separated by regular open fields, as
opposed to isolated farms and small hamlets with fields enclosed
by hedges and larger amounts of woodland. Collating a great deal
of information from an area extending from the Thames to the
Wash, Williamson reveals fresh insights into the complex social,
economic and demographic pressures that led to regional variation
in landscape types.