Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape, by Della Hooke

Abstract

Della Hooke’s work on the Anglo-Saxon landscape is well known and is distinctive in its historical-geographical approach and use of Anglo-Saxon charters, particularly those with boundary descriptions. Her present book builds on this work but assumes that readers will be familiar with her methodology, and so the limits of the study are not always clear. The dependence, for example, on the charter material (and to a lesser extent Domesday) restricts the chronological and geographical extent to south-central England between the later eighth and tenth centuries and so is more circumscribed than, for instance, Oliver Rackham’s work on woodland, which uses a wider range of sources. And concentration on the boundary information in charters means that our perception of the landscape is, by definition, peripheral and somewhat divorced from people and where they lived. The bias might have been corrected and the results made more widely applicable, for example, by the inclusion of landscape work in the north (notably Cumbria) or a comparison between Hooke’s landscape reconstructions and Thirsk’s farming regions. It would also have been helpful to know how the droveways (key to her reconstruction of the rural economy) had been established.