ABSTRACT The reign of King Stephen, c. 1135–54, was con­ demned by nineteenth­century historians as a period of anarchy and castles have often been seen as a cause or symptom of its instabilities. Although many aspects of Stephen’s reign have been reappraised in more recent years, an archaeological perspective of these castles and their environmental contexts is still lacking. With the aid of a Geographical Information System (GIS), this regional study provides an overview into how the succession crisis, and how the ensuing civil war between Stephen and Matilda, impacted Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Disproving the assumptions of contemporary chroniclers that unlicensed castles were hastily built solely in militarily advantageous locations; the interplay between these structures and their landscapes shows that castle­building by the time of the mid­twelfth century was more complex. From the physical evidence available, the social, political and economic qualities inherent within the locations of these castles highlights that local magnates were conscious of the long­term benefits of this landscape and typically sited their castles regardless of the struggle for the throne.

ABSTRACT In the course of a series of field trips the landscape associated with the great late medieval park at Vieil-Hesdin, Pas-de-Calais, France, was subject to detailed observations and analysis. This led to an evaluation of the archaeological potential of the site and the opportunities it presented for further study. Working with local historians attempts were made to locate a number of key features including the famous Marsh Pavilion, a programme of activity which included walking the entire 14 kilometres perimeter of the park. Conclusions were reached about the variety of ways in which the space within the park was used. Post-medieval factors were examined and incorporated in to an account of the transformation of the once celebrated park and modern perceptions of the park’s significance examined.

ABSTRACT The paper addresses the issue of innovative measuring techniques and their adaptation and spread in the High Middle Ages. More precisely, the extremely regular spatial module of the Flemish hide and its modalities, which shaped settlements and agricultural landscapes in a large part of East-Central Europe. We sought to determine whether the application of the Flemish hide can be evidenced in regions where it is not explicitly mentioned in written sources. Specifically, we focused on Bohemia (Czech Republic) and analysed relevant medieval charters, a selection of cadastral plans and the surface remains of three deserted medieval villages. We concluded that different types of hides were used in high medieval Bohemia, which seem to have been identical to the Flemish hide. The use of the Flemish hide as a unit of land measuring was adapted and further improved in the Bohemian lands, which partly explains why rural settlement forms were, on the one hand, very heterogeneous, while on the other hand, some were close parallels to the ones evidenced in other regions of Central Eastern Europe.

ABSTRACT England’s 13,000 medieval churches are a distinctive landscape feature, not least because they were mostly constructed of local building materials. Especially prominent are churches incorporating iron-rich (ferruginous) stone, in a range of yellow-brown colours. This study investigates churches in an 1,800 km2 area centred on south Cambridgeshire, and interprets the distribution of three iron-rich building stones in space and time. Over 120 churches have been studied in the field, and a further sixty churches provisionally assessed using only photographs. The study confirms existing views that two iron-rich walling stones — the Ely and Gamlingay sandstones — were quarried from the bedrock Woburn Sands Formation (Lower Cretaceous). However, a third walling stone — the Cottenham Sandstone — is re-interpreted as a ferricrete (ironpan) formed by cementation of Quaternary river sediments by iron-rich ground-water. The churches containing ferricrete are shown to lie on the relict floodplains of the ancestral River Cam, rather than following the Woburn Sands outcrop. Cottenham ferricrete was used most commonly during the twelfth to fourteenth centuries with some reuse in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This result conflicts with a hypothesis based on churches in the London Basin that ferricrete walling indicates a twelfth-century or earlier date. There is no evidence in the Romanesque and later churches of the study area that iron-rich and iron-poor building stones were used to create patterned rubble walling as a visual feature. The lack of patterning supports the view that such walls were not meant to be seen and were usually rendered or lime-washed.

This book is a tribute to the work of Oliver Rackham, who died in 2015. In this collection of twenty-four contributions from leading global authorities on countryside and landscape history, many of whom were friends and colleagues of Oliver Rackham, Oliver’s whole-life work is presented in new contexts that are inspirational and educational.

ABSTRACT The article examines Ralph Vaughan Williams’ first symphony, ‘A Sea Symphony’, from 1912, in the context of the British contemporary relationship to the sea as of defining national importance. It specifically looks for ways in which the symphony engages with narratives around the sea as a national landscape and a nationally defining geography. The article’s aim is to situate the symphonic output and text in a nationally embedded, articulated and traceable discourse around the seascape, and interrogate the ways in which it relates to and contributes to such discourse. It finds that the music resonates against historical, cultural and political engagements with the seascape, and puts forward ways in which these engagements can be heard through textures, expression and sonorities, as well as being seen in inspirations and interpretations of the relational sea-scape and its geographical situatedness.

ABSTRACT Archaeology, history, ecology and ethnology are closely related to our understanding of landscape history but there are other cultural sources that deserve investigation. Here an attempt is made to look into related folklore. Two trees in particular epitomise the seasons — the holly and the hawthorn (may) — and this article considers why this should be so. Most of our seasonal rituals have an ancient ancestry but their meanings have changed over time. The holly was constantly seen as the tree of the waning year while the may heralded the beginnings of spring. In Celtic mythology the Oak King would give way to the Holly King as the seasons turned and the holly provided protection for the home. The holly gradually found its way into Christian rituals and was brought as greenery into the church at Christmas. But the holly’s dominance in winter also reflects its invaluable use as a winter fodder crop, especially during inclement weather. The may, on the other hand, was invariably associated with spring when the hawthorn was bursting into flower. In Celtic and later rural rituals, it was a fairy tree invariably seen as sacred, symbolising love and protection, youth and sexuality, and associated with fertility. The church decried the unseemly rituals that took place and attempted to see it as the thorn associated with Christ’s crucifixion. But rural May Day ceremonies rarely lapsed altogether — this tree was so closely seen as the harbinger of the fertility of crops and animals.