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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Agback" data-source="post: 2652747" data-attributes="member: 5328">Well, they depict 5th-century Britain as imagined by a 13th-century Frenchman.I'm not sure about landscape history before the 11th Century. Somebody upthread suggested that it didn't change much from Celtic or even pre-Celtic times, and that isn't inconsistent with the work I tried to report. The reason that fellow states 'llittle change of landscape after 1086' is not that there was a lot of change up to 1086, but because he reached his conclusion by comparing the Domesday Book land records with land use at about the time the railways wre being built. Domesday Book is the earliest comprehensive source of land-use data. To get information about land use earlier than is recorded in Domesday  Book you would have to intensely study individual sites (analyse the pollen in soil cores etc.), so it would be expensive to get truly conclusive information.One datum I can point out that illuminates land-use change in the centuries before Domesday Book is the spatial pattern of Danish place-names in that part of Britain that was occupied and settled by the Danes in the 9th century. Most of the Danish names are concentrated in marginal and reclaimed farmland, This suggests that rather than seize farms and give them Danish names (in which case you would expect the Danish names to be concentrated in the richest farmlands) the Danes kept the English names of any farms they siezed, and gave Danish names only to new farms they established by developing unused land. That suggests an expansion of cultivation in northern England about the ninth century. This may, of course, have been a re-development of land cultivated in Celtic times and abandoned under the Romans or the Angles--I don't know of any information that casts light on this question.</blockquote>

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