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Lowland Iron Age communities in Europe
REVIEWS
331
from a radical-liberal stance during the period reviewed, to one of conventional socialism in the years which followed. For the historical geographer the references to the spatial articulation of the elite within the settlements are somewhat fleeting, although it is inherent in the study. This reviewer must also confess that at times the book had a somewhat soporific effect which, given the basic interest which Dr Crossick engendered and the effective structuring of his argument, seemed paradoxical. One reason may be that the volume seems to be an adaptation of a doctoral thesis, a quality that it never quite loses. One hesitates to criticize so individual a matter as style but at times sentences are clumsily structured and need to be re-read. In the end this reviewer concluded that the type size and the closeness together of the lines, probably attempts to economise on space, together with an irritating unjustified right-hand margin, were largely to blame. Quite simply the book tended to cause eye-strain. This might seem an observation of the utmost triviality but it did have an impact on the effective assimilation of what is an impressive and important study. Dr Crossick has isolated and identified a distinctive group within the working class of nineteenth-century England and presented both an effective portrait and a detailed analysis of it. UniversitJl College of Wales, Aberystwyth
HAROLDCARTER
BARRYCUNLIFFEand TREVORROWLEY(Eds), Lowland Iron Age Communities in Europe (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1978. Pp. 197. g4.50) This collection of ten papers is the outcome of a conference held by the Department of External Studies at Oxford in October 1977. It tries to describe the socio-economic realities of the Iron Age from the silent, and essentially partial, archaeological evidence. There are seven detailed studies of particular groups of sites; four from southern England and three from the North Sea coast of Europe. The remaining three papers are more general, and draw parallels between the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. It is possible to identify four main themes. First, the English authors argue a strong case for the existence of high levels of population in the late Iron Age, possibly approaching those found in the fourteenth century; this implies a necessarily large-scale post-Roman population decline. Following from this most of the authors appear to accept that demography was a crucial, and even the major, factor in determining social and economic change. The third conclusion is that buildings were extremely mobile during the Iron Age; settlements were in a continual state of flux. Finally, all the authors stress the great need for multidisciplinary studies incorporating the evidence of palynology, history, the landscape as a “resource area”, and aerial photography. The most successful papers deal with individual sites in detail. Drury’s study of Iron Age settlements in Essex provides numerous good examples of changing building styles, and Schmid’s analysis of the northwest German coastal area is illustrated by fascinating reconstructions of Iron Age “hallenhaus” farmsteads. It is only sad that some of the German maps do not have English keys. However, despite the quality of the detailed analyses of individual buildings, little attempt was made in these papers really to come to grips with the nature of the settlements themselves. By attempting to locate sites within territories Brown and Taylor set about rectifying this omission. They argue that the basic system of land units remained remarkably stable from the Iron Age, and possibly the Bronze Age, through until the medieval period, and that there was settlement mobility within this territorial continuity. They admit that the evidence is slim, but, tilting at windmills, they prefer a multiple-estate type model to “the theoretical models of locational geography”. There is, however, a danger in accepting this continuity argument without any dissent. In parts of northwest Nottinghamshire, for example, there is clear evidence of Roman, or late Iron Age, field divisions totally ignoring the medieval town-
REVIEWS
ship boundaries. It would be interesting to compare the results of a boundary reconstruction, based solely on the archaeological evidence, with the actual surviving medieval boundaries. While we may accept Cunliffe’s conclusion that Iron Age populations were far larger than has previously been estimated, his attempt to explain sociological and economic changes by the demographic models of overshoot (Malthus), emigration (territoriality), and technological innovation (Boserup) must be open to question. As Brenner has shown for a later period similar demographic trends were associated with very different agrarian structures in medieval Europe. There is a strong argument for treating demographic change as an effect and not a cause. Indeed it is appropriate to ask whether it really is possible to reconstruct social relationships from artifacts alone. It is also worth recalling a fact often mentioned in this volume, but also rarely adhered to, that we may well be overestimating Iron Age populations by not differentiating satisfactorily between contemporaneous sites. University of Durham
TIM UNWIN
RICHARDJ. DENNIS(Compiler), The Victorian City (London: Institute of British Geogra-
phers, Transactions new series Vol. 4 No. 2, 1979. Pp. 194. g6.00) The essays in this issue of the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers fall into three classes. Class A comprises those which are primarily historical in method and orientation; class B consists of those which use the techniques of the geographer to provide historically interesting analyses; and class C contains those which use the approaches of the geographer to provide analyses which are, presumably, of some interest to other geographers. The view of a historian reading the whole range with a varying degree of understanding must be that class A is weak history; class C might be good geography but is largely incomprehensible; whilst class B indicates the benefits of the geographer’s methodological precision. The two papers in class A-Gordon Cherry on ‘The town planning movement and the late Victorian city’ and Ronald Jones on ‘Consumers’ cooperation in Victorian Edinburgh’-can be judged as history tout court. Professor Cherry considers the “critical watershed” in town planning between 1885 and 1905, and provides a good argument for the need to rescue planning history from planning historians. It is a trite retelling of commonplaces, lacking the rigour of analysis which historians have come to expect of other measures-old age pensions, labour exchanges, health and unemployment insurance-which were in the legislative pipe-line along with the Town Planning Act of 1909. Jones reaches the not unexpected conclusion that the cooperative societies of Edinburgh located their shops on grounds other than the strictly commercial. He realizes that not everyone had a firm mastery of location theory, and is accordingly willing to consider the actual decision-making process of a particular enterprise. As such it is a very useful corrective: as history it is a mere footnote, based upon a very limited range of secondary material. Class C should be subdivided into two subclasses. The first contains C. R. Lewis on ‘A stage in the development of the industrial town: a case study of Cardiff 1845-75’, R. C. Fox on ‘The morphological, sociological and functional districts of Stirling 17981881’, and G. Gordon on ‘The status areas of early to mid-Victorian Edinburgh’. A historian might well find these papers alarming and baffling. They could, cynically, be seen as a case study of the dominance of a particular frame of reference, controlling and distorting academic enquiry. Of course it should be admitted that the same applies within
331
from a radical-liberal stance during the period reviewed, to one of conventional socialism in the years which followed. For the historical geographer the references to the spatial articulation of the elite within the settlements are somewhat fleeting, although it is inherent in the study. This reviewer must also confess that at times the book had a somewhat soporific effect which, given the basic interest which Dr Crossick engendered and the effective structuring of his argument, seemed paradoxical. One reason may be that the volume seems to be an adaptation of a doctoral thesis, a quality that it never quite loses. One hesitates to criticize so individual a matter as style but at times sentences are clumsily structured and need to be re-read. In the end this reviewer concluded that the type size and the closeness together of the lines, probably attempts to economise on space, together with an irritating unjustified right-hand margin, were largely to blame. Quite simply the book tended to cause eye-strain. This might seem an observation of the utmost triviality but it did have an impact on the effective assimilation of what is an impressive and important study. Dr Crossick has isolated and identified a distinctive group within the working class of nineteenth-century England and presented both an effective portrait and a detailed analysis of it. UniversitJl College of Wales, Aberystwyth
HAROLDCARTER
BARRYCUNLIFFEand TREVORROWLEY(Eds), Lowland Iron Age Communities in Europe (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1978. Pp. 197. g4.50) This collection of ten papers is the outcome of a conference held by the Department of External Studies at Oxford in October 1977. It tries to describe the socio-economic realities of the Iron Age from the silent, and essentially partial, archaeological evidence. There are seven detailed studies of particular groups of sites; four from southern England and three from the North Sea coast of Europe. The remaining three papers are more general, and draw parallels between the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. It is possible to identify four main themes. First, the English authors argue a strong case for the existence of high levels of population in the late Iron Age, possibly approaching those found in the fourteenth century; this implies a necessarily large-scale post-Roman population decline. Following from this most of the authors appear to accept that demography was a crucial, and even the major, factor in determining social and economic change. The third conclusion is that buildings were extremely mobile during the Iron Age; settlements were in a continual state of flux. Finally, all the authors stress the great need for multidisciplinary studies incorporating the evidence of palynology, history, the landscape as a “resource area”, and aerial photography. The most successful papers deal with individual sites in detail. Drury’s study of Iron Age settlements in Essex provides numerous good examples of changing building styles, and Schmid’s analysis of the northwest German coastal area is illustrated by fascinating reconstructions of Iron Age “hallenhaus” farmsteads. It is only sad that some of the German maps do not have English keys. However, despite the quality of the detailed analyses of individual buildings, little attempt was made in these papers really to come to grips with the nature of the settlements themselves. By attempting to locate sites within territories Brown and Taylor set about rectifying this omission. They argue that the basic system of land units remained remarkably stable from the Iron Age, and possibly the Bronze Age, through until the medieval period, and that there was settlement mobility within this territorial continuity. They admit that the evidence is slim, but, tilting at windmills, they prefer a multiple-estate type model to “the theoretical models of locational geography”. There is, however, a danger in accepting this continuity argument without any dissent. In parts of northwest Nottinghamshire, for example, there is clear evidence of Roman, or late Iron Age, field divisions totally ignoring the medieval town-
REVIEWS
ship boundaries. It would be interesting to compare the results of a boundary reconstruction, based solely on the archaeological evidence, with the actual surviving medieval boundaries. While we may accept Cunliffe’s conclusion that Iron Age populations were far larger than has previously been estimated, his attempt to explain sociological and economic changes by the demographic models of overshoot (Malthus), emigration (territoriality), and technological innovation (Boserup) must be open to question. As Brenner has shown for a later period similar demographic trends were associated with very different agrarian structures in medieval Europe. There is a strong argument for treating demographic change as an effect and not a cause. Indeed it is appropriate to ask whether it really is possible to reconstruct social relationships from artifacts alone. It is also worth recalling a fact often mentioned in this volume, but also rarely adhered to, that we may well be overestimating Iron Age populations by not differentiating satisfactorily between contemporaneous sites. University of Durham
TIM UNWIN
RICHARDJ. DENNIS(Compiler), The Victorian City (London: Institute of British Geogra-
phers, Transactions new series Vol. 4 No. 2, 1979. Pp. 194. g6.00) The essays in this issue of the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers fall into three classes. Class A comprises those which are primarily historical in method and orientation; class B consists of those which use the techniques of the geographer to provide historically interesting analyses; and class C contains those which use the approaches of the geographer to provide analyses which are, presumably, of some interest to other geographers. The view of a historian reading the whole range with a varying degree of understanding must be that class A is weak history; class C might be good geography but is largely incomprehensible; whilst class B indicates the benefits of the geographer’s methodological precision. The two papers in class A-Gordon Cherry on ‘The town planning movement and the late Victorian city’ and Ronald Jones on ‘Consumers’ cooperation in Victorian Edinburgh’-can be judged as history tout court. Professor Cherry considers the “critical watershed” in town planning between 1885 and 1905, and provides a good argument for the need to rescue planning history from planning historians. It is a trite retelling of commonplaces, lacking the rigour of analysis which historians have come to expect of other measures-old age pensions, labour exchanges, health and unemployment insurance-which were in the legislative pipe-line along with the Town Planning Act of 1909. Jones reaches the not unexpected conclusion that the cooperative societies of Edinburgh located their shops on grounds other than the strictly commercial. He realizes that not everyone had a firm mastery of location theory, and is accordingly willing to consider the actual decision-making process of a particular enterprise. As such it is a very useful corrective: as history it is a mere footnote, based upon a very limited range of secondary material. Class C should be subdivided into two subclasses. The first contains C. R. Lewis on ‘A stage in the development of the industrial town: a case study of Cardiff 1845-75’, R. C. Fox on ‘The morphological, sociological and functional districts of Stirling 17981881’, and G. Gordon on ‘The status areas of early to mid-Victorian Edinburgh’. A historian might well find these papers alarming and baffling. They could, cynically, be seen as a case study of the dominance of a particular frame of reference, controlling and distorting academic enquiry. Of course it should be admitted that the same applies within