Britons, Saxons, and Scandinavians: The Historical Geography of Glanville R. J. Jones

This volume contains a selection of the collected papers of the late Professor Glanville R. J. Jones. Following a brief assessment of the man and his work, by J. Beverley Smith, an extensive introductory essay by the editors sets Jones’s work in a wide historiographical context. This material provides an overview of his ‘multiple estate’ model and concludes with an assessment of its continuing relevance in the twenty-first century. The selection of his published papers then begins with Welsh roots and the work from which his ideas grew, while the remaining items show how the questions he asked led him towards explorations of ‘early’ medieval estate structures in England, their links with rural settlement evolution, and the pragmatic, tenurial, and fiscal arrangements which bound individual rural settlements into broader spatial structures. Jones’s ideas are often cited — usually, but not invariably, with praise — and this corpus is intended to allow today’s scholars to reach a mature assessment of what he achieved. Right or wrong, he presented important challenges to the various disciplines working on the archaeology, history, and historical geography of the periods before and after the Norman Conquest of 1066.