Champion : The Making and Unmaking of the English Midland Landscape

Champion: The pattern of nucleated settlements and extensive open fields most commonly found within the landscape of the Midlands.

This book presents a radical reinterpretation of the origins of villages and open fields, and their development in the late medieval and post-medieval periods, in the Midland, ‘champion’ areas of England. Most landscape historians believe that villages were created in the middle or later Saxon periods through the ‘nucleation’ of a formerly dispersed pattern of settlement, that many villages were initially laid out as planned, regular settlements and that open fields probably came into existence at the same time. Re-examination and mapping of the data suggests ‘nucleation’ is a myth, ‘village planning’ an illusion and open fields were created, at least in their classic, ‘regular’ forms, only in the eleventh or twelfth centuries.

Tom Williamson is lecturer in landscape history at the University of East Anglia and has written widely on agricultural history, landscape archaeology and the history of garden design.

Robert Liddiard is Professor of History at University of East Anglia.

Tracey Partida is a consultant specializing in geographical information systems (GIS) and her PhD is in progress at University of Huddersfield.