The South Oxfordshire Project: perceptions of landscape, settlement and society,c. 500–1650

Abstract

Historians and archaeologists are increasingly interested in moving beyond landscape reconstruction and economics to investigate how past inhabitants perceived their environment. This reflects the subject's intrinsic interest and an awareness of the importance of decisions made by ordinary people in shaping the development of the countryside. However, the evidence available makes it difficult to uncover mentalities and attitudes. To date, most attention has been paid to particular features which seem to say most about self-perception and beliefs, but the greatest advances will arguably be made by studying the landscape as a whole. This article explains the approach to popular perceptions being adopted by 'The South Oxfordshire Project', an interdisciplinary analysis of fourteen parishes encompassing lowland clay vales and Chilterns wood-pasture from the early Middle Ages to the mid seventeenth century.

From Field Walking to Phenomenology: A Review of Recent British Landscape Historiography

“…94 This was a view echoed by Stephen Mileson, who argued that rather than by studying 'particular features'an implicit acknowledgement of the imaginative use historians such as Oliver Creighton have made of phenomenology in reconstructing the environs of medieval castles -'the greatest advances (in understanding how past inhabitants perceived their environment) will…be made by studying the landscape as a whole'. 95 Mileson and his co-author Stuart Brookes duly delivered on this in their remarkably ambitious Peasant perceptions of landscape, a study of Ewelme hundred in Oxfordshire over more than a millennium. Through careful consideration of personal and place names, settlement morphology, terrain, vegetation, agricultural practice, and patterns of social and spatial interaction, the authors demonstrate it is possible to recover far more about even 'ordinary' inhabitants' perceptions of landscape from this early period than we might suppose.…”

Introduction: people, places and possessions in late medieval England

“…50 The value of outdoor space for understanding social relationships is summed up by Stephen Mileson, who argues that 'Landscape History offers one of the most promising approaches to past inhabitants' perceptions, embodied … in the intimate daily experience of a particular physical environment'. 51 The most dominant theme in studies of outdoor space to date has been a focus on royal and lordly landscapes. Scholars have explored how the creation of deer parks, gardens, orchards and other settings of recreation and leisure signalled the lord's wealth and status by demarcating the great residence within the wider landscape and by providing stages on which the rituals of elite life could be played out.…”