The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan Page B

ditches, and kept fences and paddocks in good condition. The positioning of fields and trackways, and even of houses and yards, depended on far more than the altitude and slope of the land. Drainage, shade, and soil types were critical factors, so much so that most farmers kept a remarkably accurate map of their land in their heads—they do to this day. For instance, in the flat Fen country of eastern England, farmers had several types of land. Some was floodplain; other areas flooded regularly during the winters. You needed a diversity of land and soil if your beasts were to thrive on good summer pasture in flooded areas and keep dry in the winter. This led to often confusing arrangements for handling stock, which could include establishing and using droveways (trackways for driving animals) that followed field layouts and allowed animals to pass in an orderly fashion from one form of grazing to another.
    The same droveways separated individual landholdings and served as boundaries that subdivided what eventually became an organized landscape, seemingly a patchwork of fields, ditches, hedges, and tracks, but easily decipherable to those who used and maintained it. The working landscapes of ancient times, wherever they were located, were both material and social landscapes.
    Efficient stock raising relied on carefully monitored grazing that used barriers of all kinds. Hedges and ditches may have kept out wild animals and predators, but they were far more important as a means of controlling grazing, especially in crowded landscapes. Such devices would have allowed individual plots to recover, and permitted dung lying on the surface to break down and become incorporated into the recovering, grazed vegetation. Allowing land to lie fallow for a while also offers some relief from microscopic parasites, such as fluke, that can cause serious problems. If the quality of the grazing was good andabundant, then herds and flocks would have wandered quite widely, with only children or young men controlling them.
    Enclosed grazing land tended to develop when flocks became larger, graze was of poorer quality, and land in shorter supply. Much closer control was necessary. For thousands of years, earthworks, sometimes including burial mounds—as was the case in southern Britain—may have served as territorial markers that delineated landholdings, perhaps by kin groups. These mounds, or tumuli, dotted an open landscape where herds and flocks grazed, tended by young men and boys, and watched over by the revered ancestors lying under conspicuous burial mounds. As farming populations rose in number, so the importance of boundaries increased, not just shallow banks and ditches, which even a young lamb can traverse, but substantial hedges. Francis Pryor believes that winter hardwood cuttings taken from nearby forests formed such hedges for thousands of years—tough, easily geminated, and often with their own natural protection in the form of thorns. He points out that such hedges were commonly used many centuries later, during the days of the infamous Enclosure Act of the early nineteenth century CE .
    At Fengate, the herders practiced what Pryor calls a carefully “structured mobility.” 2 The mobility was vital, but it was far from random. Each winter, the farmers lived on high, flood-free ground, in small farms dominated by a single round house. Both the land and the dwelling might have been occupied for only a generation or so. Come late April or May, the water levels in the nearby marshland fell slowly. Part of each family would move out into the lush, open fen pastures, taking most of their sheep and cattle with them. Young men and children would supervise the herds. In autumn, the now-fattened and well-fed beasts would be driven back to higher ground. This was the season of feasting and ritual, when people gathered from a wide area of surrounding countryside. Animals would be culled, marriages arranged, and livestock