Abstract

The documents of landscape history: snares and delusions P D. A. Haroey In 1960 I completed a doctoral thesis on the have to be taken into account in deciding what it medieval history of Cuxham in Oxfordshire, a means. Some words are entirely ambiguous. In village with peculiarly good manorial records of medieval records the Latinfossata can mean a ditch the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. When, or a dike, a moat or an embankment; the context seldom shows which, and usually it is anyone's unbelievably, the long-awaited moment arrived of writing the last sentence I could think of nothing to guess, yet the difference is crucial if we are working on landscape reconstruction. Sometimes records say. Everything sounded either pretentious or banal, or both. Finally, overcome by the sense of despair express themselves with a precision and exactness that I had felt throughout the whole work, I wrote well understood in their own time but now lost. (without second thoughts, to judge from the original When Domesday Book measured the woodlands of some counties in terms of the number of pigs draft): they could support, this told contemporaries very Only one general conclusion can safely be drawn .... much