I.1 - Land use and people

Summary

In order to come to grips with the land of England and the people who inhabited it in the centuries on either side of the Norman Conquest, it is necessary to consider a period broader than the basic chronological timeframe of this volume. Indeed, as we shall see, the extraordinary transformations of landscape and people which so mark the central Middle Ages began not in the tenth century, but rather in the generations before ad 800. Although the West Saxon conquest of the Danelaw in the tenth century, the conquests of England by Cnut the Great and William the Conqueror in the eleventh and the problems of Stephen's reign and their resolutions in the twelfth century were the ruination of many landholders and the making of others, the major changes concerning land use and people described in this chapter had little to do with grand politics. Instead, they were determined by the ways many hundreds of thousands of people came to farm and pay what they owed their betters, and by the sorts of communities in which they chose or were told to live. These things changed dramatically over the course of the central Middle Ages, and they transformed the look of the land and the lives of the people who made their livings from it. Indeed, as people during this period remade the landscape, the landscape came to remake them.