Professor John Blair
Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology
The Queen's College
Research Interests
- Early medieval settlement and landscape
- Early medieval buildings and material culture
- Early medieval ritual and belief
Social, cultural, ecclesiastical and landscape history and archaeology of early medieval England.
My interests lie in the settlement, landscape and society of Anglo-Saxon England, especially the built landscape, with an emphasis on archaeological evidence.My book The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society was published in 2005. I gave the Ford Lectures in British History for 2013 under the title `Building the Anglo-Saxon Landscape'.
Publications
Planning in the Early Medieval Landscape
The extent to which Anglo-Saxon society was capable of large-scale transformations of the landscape is hotly disputed. This interdisciplinary book – embracing archaeological and historical sources – explores this important period in our landscape history and the extent to which buildings, settlements and field systems were laid out using sophisticated surveying techniques. In particular, recent research has found new and unexpected evidence for the construction of building complexes and settlements on geometrically precise grids, suggesting a revival of the techniques of the Roman land-surveyors (Agrimensores). Two units of measurement appear to have been used: the ‘short perch’ of 15 feet in central and eastern England, where most cases occur, and the ‘long perch’ of 18 feet at the small number of examples identified in Wessex. This technically advanced planning is evident during two periods: c.600–800, when it may have been a mostly monastic practice, and c.940–1020, when it appears to have been revived in a monastic context but then spread to a wider range of lay settlements.