Archaeology, common rights and the origins of Anglo-Saxon identitye med_316 153..181 Susan OosthuizenIt is generally accepted that rights over land, especially rights of pasture, played a formative role in establishing the identity of early Anglo-Saxon 'folk groups', the predecessors of the middle Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. This speculative paper sets early medieval and medieval common rights in the context of the archaeological longue durée of the period before 400 AD. It argues that ancient traditions of common governance, integral to Anglo-Saxon identity, might have offered an attractive legitimacy to middle Anglo-Saxon kingdombuilders. While not seeking to establish any answers, the paper hopes to contribute to a wider research agenda.Although their demographic and political histories diverged before and after the Roman period, documentary evidence suggests that since at least the early Middle Ages British regions have shared an understanding of what is meant by rights of common and how these should be organized and regulated. While specific details of custom and practice varied from place to place, from circumstance to circumstance, and from period to period, the structures which underlay them were universal: governance and management as the prerogative of right-holders; an oral tradition based on collective participation in decision-making; regular meetings of assemblies and courts; decisions made on the basis of custom and practice; and the election of representatives to settle disputes and/or enforce judgements.Deeply resistant to change -common rights were legal rights whose amendment required the assent of all right-holders -the oral traditions of custom and practice through which such rights were exercised offered a flexible and pragmatic system which both managed the detail of resource allocation, regulation and management, and allowed

The question interrogated here, through the case study of agricultural resources, is whether the governance of collective rights of property in past non-literate communities can be explored through archaeological methods. Property rights and the structures for their governance are an expression of social relations. According to Alchian and Demsetz (1973, 16), the 'techniques, rules, or customs to resolve conflicts that arise in the use of scarce resources' that underlie property rights and their governance are likely to be consonant with each community's perceptions of individual and collective relationships, rights and obligations in relation to others both within and beyond their own territory. This paper explores through seven brief illustrative exemplars the development of a methodology for inferring the practical details of collective governance of agricultural property in the non-literate past.

This article addresses how and when the small, rectilinear or irregular fields of Roman Britain were transformed into the open and common fields of medieval England. Furthermore, the sparse and often unsatisfactory physical indicators of continuities and discontinuities in the layout and management of arable fields during the Anglo-Saxon centuries are explored. Mid Saxon agricultural innovation seems to have included an increase in the area under cultivation, and the introduction of new crops, new technologies, and new approaches to maintaining the fertility of the soil, within the familiar structures of infield-outfield cultivation which remained the basis of arable management. The two general types of mid Saxon field layouts are explained: enclosed and unenclosed. The data suggests that the process of the transformation of ancient into medieval fields may have been more attenuated than previously supposed.

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Understanding how and why material culture changes is a central preoccupation for archaeologists. One of the most intractable examples of this problem can be found between 400 and 800 AD in the enigmatic transformation of sub Roman into Anglo-Saxon England. That example lies at the heart of this review, explored through the case of the agricultural economy. Although the ideas critically examined below relate specifically to early medieval England, they represent themes of universal interest: the role of migration in the transformation of material culture; politics and economy in a post-imperial world; the significance of "core" and "periphery" in evolving polities; ethnogenesis as a strategy in kingdom building; property rights as a lens for investigating cultural change; and the relationship between hierarchical political structures and collective forms of governance. The first part of the argument presented below proposes a structured response to paradigmatic stalemate by identifying and testing each underlying assumption, premise and interpretative framework. The recognition of any fallacies, false premises and flawed arguments might assist with an overall evaluation of the continuing utility of a discourse-whether it has life in it yet, or should be set aside. In either case, the recognition of its structure should enable arguments to be developed that do not lead into a disciplinary cul-de-sac, prevented by the orthodoxy from exploring new avenues for research. The second part of the review deliberately adopts a starting point outside the limits of the current discourse. Freed from the confines of the conventional consensus, it experiments with an alternative "bottom up" approach to change in early medieval England that contrasts with conventional "top down" arguments. It focuses in particular on how rights over agricultural property-especially collective rights-and the forms of governance implied by them may assist in illuminating the roles of tradition and transformation in effecting cultural change.