Stuart Brookes – författare

Peasant Perceptions of Landscape marks a change in the discipline of landscape history, as well as making a major contribution to the history of everyday life. Until now, there has been no sustained analysis of how ordinary medieval and early modern people experienced and perceived their material environment and constructed their identities in relation to the places where they lived. This volume provides exactly such an analysis by examining peasant perceptions in one geographical area over the long period from AD 500 to 1650. The study takes as its focus Ewelme hundred, a well-documented and archaeologically-rich area of lowland vale and hilly Chiltern wood-pasture comprising fourteen ancient parishes. The analysis draws on a range of sources including legal depositions and thousands of field-names and bynames preserved in largely unpublished deeds and manorial documents. Archaeology makes a major contribution, particularly for understanding the period before 900, but more generally in reconstructing the fabric of villages and the framework for inhabitants' spatial practices and experiences. In its focus on the way inhabitants interacted with the landscape in which they worked, prayed, and socialised, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape supplies a new history of the lives and attitudes of the bulk of the rural population who so seldom make their mark in traditional landscape analysis or documentary history.

This is an inter-disciplinary study of pathways to regional rulership and territorial lordship in early post-Roman Britain which takes as its starting point the East Anglian royal centre at Rendlesham and its contexts.This book examines the origins and development of the East Anglian kingdom in the fifth to eighth centuries AD through the lens of the elite settlement complex at Rendlesham, Suffolk using an interdisciplinary approach involving field survey, landscape history, excavation and metal-detecting finds. It also examines the wider regional context and proposes a new narrative of kingdom formation.