Familiar Ground and Pastures New: On-Going Debates over the Origins and Development of Medieval Settlements and Landscapes in the English Midlands

Abstract

Those familiar with recent books on the English medieval landscape must have noticed that their front covers are becoming decidedly predictable. Just as books on place-names seemingly require a photograph of a fingerpost, so publishers of landscape histories now tend to default to a narrow set of ‘appropriate’ images. Leaving aside the use of aerial photographs, and likewise skimming over the artist’s reconstruction, the most dominant image used is a bucolic photograph of the English countryside. Verdure when not muted by the choice of a black and white is the order of the day, so too blue skies and cotton wool clouds, the scene either a villagescape, cleared of people and invariably showing the parish church, or a fieldscape, from which people are again absent but which contain animals, cattle but usually sheep, providing scale, movement, and depth. Books, we are told, should never be judged by their cover. Yet there seems to be little getting away from the fact that, taken together, the way that English landscape history is now packaged–might we even suggest how it seeks to present itself?–has become rather safe and conservative. What has happened to the radical edge which epitomized the startling dust-jackets produced during the interand post-war periods by Batsford, exemplified best by the stylized visions of rural England provided by the artist-designer Brian Cook? Is it a surprise that Ideas of Landscape (Johnson 2008), a call for a theoretical rethinking of the English landscape, drew on railway poster iconography for its cover rather than use a contemporary image? Will we ever again see a cover so politically charged as the Shell Guide to Rutland (Hoskins 1963)? What prompts these observations, and encourages shelves to be revisited, are the two cover photographs carried by Williamson, Liddiard, and Partida’s Champion and Partida, Hall, and Foard’s Atlas of Northamptonshire. The former shows a distant view of the village and church steeple of Brampton Ash seen across the hedged fields of its parish; the latter shows sheep grazing on mountainous ridge-and-furrow picked out in raking low sunlight at Cottesbrooke. Visually, the cover of the Atlas makes direct reference, consciously or otherwise, to Williamson’s (2003) Shaping Medieval Landscapes. But if the reader is seduced by the tranquillity of these scenes into believing that landscapes, Vol. 15 No. 2, November, 2014, 165–171