Champion

Champion: The pattern of nucleated settlements and extensive open fields most commonly found within the landscape of the Midlands. This book presents a radical reinterpretation of the origins of villages and open fields, and their development in the late medieval and post-medieval periods, in the Midland, champion areas of England. Most landscape historians believe that villages were created in the middle or later Saxon periods through the nucleation of a formerly dispersed pattern of settlement, that many villages were initially laid out as planned, regular settlements and that open fields probably came into existence at the same time. Re-examination and mapping of the data suggests nucleation is a myth, village planning an illusion and open fields were created, at least in their classic, regular forms, only in the eleventh or twelfth centuries.