Abstract

LANDSCAPES 2020, VOL. 21, NO. 1, 93–96 BOOK REVIEWS Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape, by John Blair, Stephen Rippon and Christopher Smart, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2020, xii + 351 pp., 100 b+w figures, £80 (hbk), ISBN 978-1-78962-116-7 The publication of this volume has been highly anticipated amongst early medieval scholars, outlining as it does the results of a novel research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The primary aim of the study has been to identify and explain the degree to which early medieval buildings, settlements and landscapes were the subject of large-scale planning, and the mech- anics and contexts by which this may have been possible. The concept that pre-Conquest com- munities structured the world around them in deliberate and often precise ways is not in itself controversial, and indeed is something that the current reviewer has advocated for some time. More hotly contested, however, is the regular measures of perches and grids that the project asserts were utilised, and the idea that the principles were based upon a revival of the tech- niques of Roman land surveyors (agrimensores). These core principles were published in a 2013 paper by John Blair which laid the foundations for