My research focuses on
- the origins of English society between about 400 and 700 CE.
- rights of common. In particular how evidence for landscape managed under rights of common can be discerned in the landscape, how early medieval and medieval commons were managed in practice, and what can be inferred from commons about the ways in which people and communities interacted in the early medieval landscape.
- the origins, layout and development of English rural settlements, non-arable resources and field systems between the fifth and the early fourteenth centuries.
- evidence for resilience in landscape, community and society as explored through the interactions between long-term tradition [e.g. oral traditions of custom and practice] with medium term processes [e.g. climate change, the emergence of kingdoms and manors] and with short-term events [destructive weather events, or pandemics like the Justiniac plagues of the sixth century].
Brief biography
My undergraduate degree in Archaeology and History was taken at the University of Southampton. I hold an MA in Area Studies (Africa) from SOAS (University of London), and a PGCE in teaching history from the University of Cambridge. My PhD on continuity and transformation in Anglo-Saxon agricultural landscapes was undertaken in the University of Cambridge Department of Geography and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Bridging archaeology, history and historical geography, that work was published as Landscapes Decoded (Hertfordshire University Press, 2006). I began teaching for the University of Cambridge in January 1986. I joined the staff of the University’s Board of Extra-Mural Studies in January 1995, retiring early in December 2018. I remain an Officer of the University.
I am an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, having been a Governing Body Fellow since October 2002. I am a Senior Fellow of the University’s McDonald Institute, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, of the Royal Historical Society, and of the Higher Education Academy. My most recent books are the Anglo-Saxon Fenland (Windgather, 2017) and The Emergence of the English (Arc-Humanities Press, March 2019).
Professor Susan Oosthuizen 