A Place for the Heathlands

Current models of complex adaptive systems, like panarchy, offer new ways for investigating dynamic, unpredictable change in the social and other sciences; for being inter- and transdisciplinary; and for working across a range of factors that may operate at differing temporal and spatial scales. They have the potential, then, to be innovative and invigorating in exploring the "dynamic synergy" between individuals, society, and environment through the nested complexities of their inter-connected elements.^{3 ( 3 )}
Ingold 2000, 16 These characteristics allow wide-ranging, hermeneutic approaches to the interpretation of the past.

Of particular interest in this context are the intersecting social-environmental models outlined by the historian Fernand Braudel,^{4 ( 4 )}
Braudel e.g. 1958, 2012 the ecologist C. S. Holling,^{5 ( 5 )}
Holling 2001; Gunderson and Holling 2002a and 2002b the economist Elinor Östrom,^{6 ( 6 )}
Östrom 1990 the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu,^{7 ( 7 )}
Bourdieu 1977 and the environmental scientists Firket Berkes, Johan Colding and Carl Folke.^{8 ( 8 )}
Berkes, Colding and Folke e.g. 2002, 2002 Within their different disciplines each takes a wide and heterogenous view of "society" that includes all aspects of ecology, environment, geography, society, and climate, at all spatial and temporal scales; that accommodates the longue durée and individual agency; and that foregrounds processes across time and space over the apparent immediacies of cause and effect. This contribution to such debates explores the proposition of each of those scholars of the mediating influence of social capital, accrued over long periods of time – in this case, through the collective governance of shared natural resources on heathlands and other commons – on wider cultural change.

Braudel described the longue durée, the familiar habitat of most archaeologists and many historians, as that long-term "history whose passage is almost imperceptible, that of man in relationship to his environment".^{9 ( 9 )}
Braudel 1972, 20-21; see also 1958; 2012 By setting short-term events and medium-term processes against that slower-moving, imperceptible evolution in social, political and/or economic life, he argued, historians might more accurately identify those medium-term innovations and transformations stimulated on the one hand by dramatic short-term processes or episodic events and moderated on the other by the steadying influence of social-environmental capital accumulated over the longue-durée.

Bourdieu's conception of habitus is based on a similar proposition: that our fundamental attitudes to other people across a wide range of contexts – how we expect them to treat us, and how we expect to treat them – are perpetuated across generations through a multiplicity of unspoken attitudes and preconceptions that are learned through example in childhood, and that change only very slowly from one generation to another.

Elinor Östrom arrived at comparable conclusions in her economic analysis of institutions that govern rights of common in shared natural resources.^{10 ( 10 )}
Östrom 1990 Their relevance to the argument presented here is the capacity for such institutions to persist across the longue durée. That continuity is founded on several conditions. Resignations or deaths of individual holders of common rights cannot destabilized institutions for collective governance since those commoners can be replaced. The principles that frame such institutions are so generalized (see below) that they provide considerable flexibility for right-holders to adapt the detail of by-laws to take account of their own changing local conditions. And lastly, as Östrom remarks, commoners "are jointly affected by almost everything they do. Each individual must take into account the choices of other when assessing personal choices".^{11 ( 11 )}
Östrom 1990, 38 Consensual decision-making is thus embedded, contributing to the tendency for collective governance to be conservative and risk averse. Change is consequently slow and incremental – a conclusion that finds synergies in the work of Braudel and Bourdieu.

Holling's conceptualisation of panarchy developed from his research into resilience in ecological change. The name he gave it signalled the breadth of his vision, building on the name of the Greek god Pan as "the universal god of nature" who, half goat, half man, embodied the indivisibility of man and environment combined with the wildness of unpredictable change.^{12 ( 12 )}
Gunderson and Holling 2002a, 73; see Jost 2012 for the etymology Panarchy, he wrote, "approaches ecological and social systems as complex adaptive systems in which components adapt to and change with their environments, leading to unpredictable outcomes".^{13 ( 13 )}
Gunderson and Holling 2002b, 3; see also Gunderson and Holling 2002a, 420-421 He envisaged an interdisciplinary, "integrative" model for exploring evolutionary economic, ecological, and social change through the interplay between processes, some slow and others episodic, some regional and others global, some short- and others long-lived.^{14 ( 14 )}
Gunderson and Holling 2002a, 5, 74 Panarchy allows archaeologists and other specialists to investigate how an unlimited number of individual adaptive cycles, "nested in time and space" in a social-environmental system, may change at different speeds and scales between stability and transformation, adaptation and revolution, in the expectation of uncertainty and surprise.^{15 ( 15 )}
Gunderson and Holling 2002a, 20; Redman 2005; Lane 2015 Such systems are too complex for homeostasis (self-regulation). They are made up of a combination of "dynamic structures in which smaller, faster processes nest inside and interact with larger, slower ones ...[Each] has its own adaptive cycle".^{16 ( 16 )}
Gunderson and Holling 2002b, 22 Because change can "cascade" up or down, influencing other levels for better or worse, such "transformations, even the most socially and environmentally dislocating changes, are not chaotic and idiosyncratic but, rather, are governed by particular dynamics, conditions, and opportunities".^{17 ( 17 )}
Redman 2005, 72; Gunderson and Holling 2002b, 25

Figure 1, inevitably simplified, offers a general illustration of a panarchy at three levels.^{18 ( 18 )}
For more detail see Gunderson and Holling 2002a, 40-47

Panarchy is thus an attractive model for its potential to generate new and complex meta-narratives in the social sciences, paradigms that are multi-scalar in time and space, and unbounded by specialism, theoretical framework, research question, methodology, or data. Its heterogenous conceptualization is not prescriptive, nor does it place limits on interdisciplinarity. It may enable research outcomes that are uncertain, unpredictable, surprising. And, in integrating all aspects of ecology, environment, geography, and climate with all aspects of "society", at all spatial and temporal scales, it may reveal "non-linear dynamics with thresholds, reciprocal feedback loops, time lags, resilience, heterogeneity, and surprises".^{22 ( 22 )}
Liu, Dietz, Carpenter et al. 2007, 1513

The long-term continuity, sustainability, and resilience of commons, and the distinctive institutions through which they are governed, provide good grounds for their use as examples through which the wider influence of the “Remember” function can be explored. They are framed by distinctive principles, norms, and social values that provide predictable (if unarticulated) limits to the objectives of governance, defining what must be undertaken, what may be undertaken, and what may not.^{23 ( 23 )}
Östrom 1990, 90 An expression of habitus, those universal fundamental principles are framed by commoners’ mutual goals: the defensibility in law of their rights of property in a natural resource; the equitable distribution of the output of the resource among them; mitigation of the risk that the actions of one right-holder may adversely affect others; enforceable remedies for breaches of by-laws; and a managed balance between short-term maximization of output and long-term sustainability.^{24 ( 24 )}
Östrom 1990; see also Berkes and Folke 1994; Berkes, Colding and Folke 2000, 2002; Folke 2006, 2016

It follows that the practical organisation of shared rights in heathlands and other commons is as predictable, similarly persisting across a longue durée that can, on occasion, span millennia. Of these the most significant here are the fundamental principle of equity between all right holders in all aspects of collective governance regardless of each individual’s rank, wealth, or power outside the common; the expectation that all commoners should attend and participate in regular, formal meetings for the governance of the resource, in discussions, and consensual decision-making; and the record of all decisions in oral traditions of custom and practice.

The universality of both principles and practice means that, where commons can be demonstrated, distinctive forms of social organisation and social relations among and between commoners can be inferred.^{25 ( 25 )}
Oosthuizen 2016

The argument now moves to explore the utility of panarchy as an interpretative model for understanding processes framing wider social-economic adaptation and change. It takes the instance of the medium-term influence in early medieval England of ancient traditions of collective governance on the increasingly directive lordship of emergent manorialism, itself responding to a sudden and catastrophic fall in population.

"REMEMBER". There are multiple instances of the long-term persistence across millennia of commons on heaths and beyond throughout Britain.^{26 ( 26 )}
Oosthuizen 2013b, 2013c A few examples must give the character of the rest. Common rights on upland heathlands and wider commons on Dartmoor (Devon) have been continuously exercised since the Bronze Age;^{27 ( 27 )}
Fleming 2008 those on Bodmin Moor (Cornwall) since at least the late Iron Age;^{28 ( 28 )}
Herring 2008 as too the extensive heath commons on the Cheviot Hills (Northumberland).^{29 ( 29 )}
Davies and Dixon 2007 Parts of the Weald, that enormous tract of wooded grazing and high sandy heaths along the South Downs in Kent and Sussex, have been commoned since prehistory.^{30 ( 30 )}
Everitt 1986 As have, too, the vast wetland peat commons of the East Anglian fen basin which survived almost intact into the seventeenth century.^{31 ( 31 )}
Oosthuizen 2017

In each case commoners met regularly every three or four weeks in formal assemblies in all were expected to participate. Their work was complex and detailed: regulating access to rights of common, formulating by-laws, judging infractions, and managing usage by timetabling the movement of cattle and/or sheep across the commons through the grazing season, thus assuring both the animals' health, and the resilience and sustainability of the mosaic of the grassland species on which their stock relied. All aspects of their activities were framed by ancient traditions of custom and practice preserved in collective memory. Underpinning both society and economy since "time out of mind", they are rightly termed "ancestral commons".^{32 ( 32 )}
Doorenbosch 2013; Løvschal 2021, 2023; Haughton and Løvschal 2023

Such shared natural resources had, for millennia, belonged to territorial groupings, many of which had, by the late sixth and early seventh centuries, evolved into small kingdoms.^{33 ( 33 )}
Oosthuizen 2013c, 2017 Each of their free (male) members was entitled, on reaching adulthood, to property rights that brought with them the public obligation to participate in territorial governance. The archaeologist and anthropologist Chris Gosden characterized such polities as a "political system in the idiom of kinship" qualified by status.^{34 ( 34 )}
Gosden 1985, 480 It was the historian Susan Reynolds who perceptively pointed out the obvious: that it is not surprising that early medieval territorial units were so often rationalized in terms of "communities of common descent" since the mutual obligations, responsibilities, and rights integral to collective governance, as well as their shared oral traditions of custom and practice, are also aspects of relationships between kin (and another aspect of habitus).^{35 ( 35 )}
Reynolds 1983, 381

"REVOLT". A cluster of severe, chaotic and destabilizing short-term events in the 530s and 540s marked the onset of the Late Antique Little Ice Age. It began in spring 536 with a particularly large volcanic eruption in the northern hemisphere which was followed by two further eruptions in 540 and 547.^{36 ( 36 )}
Büntgen, Myglan, Ljundqvist et al. 2016, 232 The thermal shock was so intense that the 540s were the coldest decade of the Common Era, perhaps sustained "by positive feedback loops of ocean-heat content and sea-ice extension".^{37 ( 37 )}
Büntgen, Myglan, Ljundqvist et al. 2016, 232; also Harper and McCormick 2018, 25 The resulting veil of atmospheric volcanic dust obscured the sun from spring 536 to autumn 537. It was followed by catastrophic crop failure, exacerbated by a prolonged dry period, leading to widespread famine.^{38 ( 38 )}
Helema, Arppe, Uusitalo et. al. 2018; Harper and McCormick 2018, 25-6 Further stress came in the last quarter of the sixth century as heavy rain caused severe marine and freshwater flooding along the eastern coasts of Britain and other North Sea coasts.^{39 ( 39 )}
Harper and McCormick 2018, 25-6, 38, Fig.1.7; McCormick, Büntgen, Cane et al. 2012, 195-6, 198

Within five years of the eruption of 536 already stressed and malnourished communities were struck by a virulent pandemic of plague (Yersinia pestis) that crossed Europe between about 541 and 549 CE. Outbreaks continued into the eighth century.^{40 ( 40 )}
Keller, Spyrou, Scheib et al. 2019; McCormick 2019; Sarris 2020 and 2022 With a mortality rate of between 40% and 100% the plague had devastating repercussions on local populations. Its consequences were still visible in 1086 when the English population numbered around 1.87 million – still only around half of its fourth-century level of around four million.^{41 ( 41 )}
Broadberry 2015, 7; Millett 1990, 184-85; Millett 2023

There was significant potential for social collapse: "when bad years clustered together, two, three, or more bad years in a row could menace even the most resilient and well-stockpiled of ancient societies".^{42 ( 42 )}
Harper and McCormick 2018, 13; see also Büntgen, Myglan, Ljundqvist et al. 2016, 234 Yet in contrast to some parts of Europe there is, currently at least, no direct evidence that the systemic shocks of sudden climate change, famine, and plague, either individually or collectively, were so destabilizing as to cause immediate social or economic crisis across Britain.^{43 ( 43 )}
Büntgen, Myglan, Ljundqvist et al. 2016, 234 There is little indication of the widespread regeneration of woodland that might indicate the desertion of settlements, arable, and pasture. Instead, farmers appear to have adapted by converting their arable land to grazing. Faced with a larger proportion of their land under pasture, they maintained their existing property rights over that area by increasing the size of their flocks and herds that grazed it rather than allow abandoned arable land to go to waste.^{44 ( 44 )}
E.g. Rackham 1986, 74; Murphy 1994, 25-7 and 37; Hey 2004, 40-1 While there were ecological adjustments to climate change, there was no fundamental alteration in the mosaics of grass species supported on heathlands and other commons, nor in the animals, insects, or molluscs that inhabited them. Nor is there environmental or landscape evidence that heathland and other commons were abandoned. Instead, the evidence indicates ecological persistence across them and continuity of their management under collective governance.^{45 ( 45 )}
Oosthuizen 2013c, 40-43 That resilience may, at least in the short-term, reflect a responsive move towards a largely "autarkic" subsistence economy.^{46 ( 46 )}
Sarris 2020, 516

The discussion that follows suggests that the longer-term effects on society and economy of catastrophic mid-sixth-century population loss were moderated by bringing into play the ancient traditions of equity and collectivity that had framed the governance of heathland and other commons across the longue durée.

The argument presented below is necessarily limited by space. A more extensive application of Holling's model might include other potentially contributory processes that developed across the late sixth and seventh centuries – among others, the emergence of kingdoms and the development of an increasingly complex social hierarchy; the persistence of Romanitas, the belief that English society still largely conformed to what were believed to be Roman values; the stimulus of multiple connections with early medieval Europe driven by religion, trade, scholarship, and intermarriage; the long-term history of arable cultivation in central England and the associated presence of small groups of tied labourers; the limitations on crop production imposed by the climatic conditions of the Late Antique Little Ice Age which did not falter until the end of the seventh century. What follows, then, can only be an indicative example of the utility of panarchy in explaining a significant change in the early medieval landscape.

The process of change in the organisation of the productive landscape appears to have been initiated around the mid-seventh century by a significant innovation in property right as kings began to grant vast estates to members of an emerging religious and secular elite.

That was a consequential change. Traditionally, free men belonging to each territorial polity were entitled on achieving adulthood to rights in property made up of two inextricably interlocked components: an independently cultivated landholding, and rights of common in the community's natural resources. Those rights carried concomitant legal, public obligations to the territory as a whole. They included participation in its governance, membership of a communal militia, and characteristic renders, services, and money payments made to the king. Neither exclusive nor granted in perpetuity, they reverted to the community on death, neglect or misuse.^{47 ( 47 )}
Faith 1997, Ch. 4; Oosthuizen 2011, 2016 These older forms of property right persisted into the thirteenth century and later.^{48 ( 48 )}
Oosthuizen 2013a, 66-72; Oosthuizen 2013b; Oosthuizen 2013c, 1016 and 17-47; Oosthuizen 2017, Ch. 5.

The distinctive features of those new rights now granted by royal charter were that they were granted in perpetuity and that, although the owners of those new estates had regional responsibilities for infrastructural repair and military service, they were exempt from supplying the characteristic renders and services paid by free men to the king.^{49 ( 49 )}
Faith 1997, Ch. 1 That innovation in property right stimulated significant change as new estate owners, themselves an expression of increasing social stratification and a growing gap between rich and poor, began to exert significant pressure for a shift from a subsistence to a profit economy.

The income of those new lords initially came from two sources: the renders, previously provided to the king, from free men whose holdings now lay within these newly "privatized" estates; and from agricultural production on demesnes worked by pre-existing small groups of hereditary tied tenants. Those receipts were, however, immeasurably inadequate for the evolving needs of those near the top of an increasingly hierarchical society That limited income now had to satisfy demands from the state that became more structured and more intensive over time; to support (agriculturally) unproductive members of their religious communities or secular households; to pay for the construction and furnishing of outrageously expensive churches or enormous halls; to supply raw materials for specialized activities like manuscript production; to generate start-up capital for secondary production (particularly mills) on their estates; to accrue capital for investment; and to sustain the conspicuous consumption that "resonated with power" in the layouts of their estate centres and in the material goods of their everyday lives.^{50 ( 50 )}
Hamerow 2012, p.102, my addition; for examples see e.g. Crabtree and Campana 2014, 309-10; Cramp 1969: 24, 58; Evans and Loveluck 2009, xxv, 4, 109; Hamerow 2002: 151-2; Henig 1998, 696; Lester-Makin 2019, 113-14, 117; Oosthuizen 2013, 110-120; Pitts 2014: 6-7; Thomas 2015 The quantity and quality of the agricultural surpluses (profits) they demanded far exceeded the abilities of their demesnes and/or their free tenants to supply them.

The gap between expectation and fulfilment was initially addressed by attempts to improve the efficiency of existing arable production. Lords moved to detailed, directive management of their expanding arable demesnes. Fields were reorganized into very large "open" fields, sub-divided into cropping units, each further subdivided into holdings laid out in strips (Figures 2 and 3). As significantly, assiduous management regulated all details of crop production and specified, directed, controlled, and monitored the form, range, and volume of labour services from their tied tenantry.^{51 ( 51 )}
Oosthuizen 2013c, Ch. 4 Intensive though they were, these innovations were bound in the end to be insufficient. The profits on which they were focused could not be achieved without increased labour inputs – in an economy profoundly limited by a shortage of labour.

By the late seventh century estate owners were exploring incentives to persuade free and semi-free men on their estates, then liable only to provide renders, to join their tied, servile workforce. Those inducements initially took the form of offers of economic security: the provision of a house and sufficient arable to support a household through the year – on condition of acceptance of the same permanent, hereditary unfree status and labour services as existing tenants.^{52 ( 52 )}
Whitelock 1979, 32. 67 But acquiescence meant the loss of the common property rights that were a prized indicator of free status, and the opportunities they brought to mingle as equals with others of different wealth, rank and power beyond the commons.^{53 ( 53 )}
E.g. Oosthuizen 2011, 2016 How were free men – even those struggling to make a livelihood – to be persuaded to relinquish a valued status and its cherished associated benefits?

It is in the solution to this apparently intractable problem that the ameliorating effect of long-term traditions ("Remember") of collective governance of commons on the medium-term ("Intermediate") impact of the mid-sixth century demographic collapse ("Revolt") becomes apparent. The process was preserved in the organisation of "Midland" open-field systems (so called from the area of their most dense distribution) whose origins may be discerned across the "long" eighth century between about 650 and 850 AD.^{54 ( 54 )}
Oosthuizen 2013c, Ch. 4 and 6

The organisation of "Midland" open-field systems embodied the fusion of two apparently incompatible sets of values (Figure 4).^{55 ( 55 )}
Roberts and Wrathmell 2002, 144. On the one hand, the dominant authority of lordship was expressed in the specification, codification, and enforcement of labour inputs on the arable fields. On the other, arrangements for the administration and operation of open fields were structured on the ancient, traditional principles of equity and collectivity integral to rights of common. All cultivators, unfree though they were, had legally defensible rights of common grazing across stubbles and/or fallows. The exercise of those rights depended on complex timetabling of rotations of crops sown and harvested in different seasons across the many open-field subdivisions. That required consensus among all cultivators. A system of governance emerged that precisely conformed to Östrom's diagnostic criteria for the collective governance of shared resources.^{56 ( 56 )}
Östrom 1990, 90 That is, all cultivators were expected to attend and participate in regular assemblies that agreed enforceable by-laws by consensus; that regulated and adjudicated breaches of those by-laws; that elected officials to manage all aspects of work on the fields; that decided the distribution of crops across the arable; the timing and organisation of sowing and harvest; and the opening and closing of periods of grazing. All were recorded in oral traditions of custom and practice.

That integration of organising principles drawn from the commons suggests that lords' initial offer of economic security – whose consequence was the loss of the social capital implicit in common rights – was insufficient to achieve an adequate increase in the supply of labour. The proposition was thus, it seems, adapted to include simulacra (because they were now marks of servitude rather than free status) of traditional expressions of collective governance without diminishing lords' new, managerial approaches to agricultural efficiency. It was those facsimiles – rather than managerial innovations – that became the distinguishing characteristics of (uniquely British) "Midland" open-field systems.^{57 ( 57 )}
Bailey 2010

Here, the restraining influence of "Remember", drawing on social capital (habitus) accumulated across the longue duréethrough the collective governance of heathland and other commons appears to have played a substantive role in moderating "Intermediate" risks to social and economic resilience – risks caused by the potentially disruptive intersection of population collapse ("Revolt") with demands for a shift from subsistence to profit, in the wider context of the emergence of a stratified and consumerist social elite in increasingly centralised kingdoms.

Until very recently, the social capital drawn from the practise of commoning on heaths and other landscapes and preserved in the habitus of long-term memory and conservative traditions, has generally been undervalued in histories of the landscape. Commons appear peripheral in archaeological and other literature, which tends to be more interested in arable cultivation than collective pastoralism, even when the two were aspects of the same economy. Visible changes in patterns of layout, holdings, and cropping appear to have the edge over commons whose persistent environmental history, largely static layout and generally sparse archaeological features seem to have less to offer to archaeologists and social and economic historians.

Yet the long-term stability of environmental evidence of, for example, specific groupings of pollen, seeds, and/or invertebrates across large, apparently "empty" areas may be particularly significant in revealing the "quite deliberate management of the landscape to maintain that landscape as it ought to be" (emphasis added).^{58 ( 58 )}
O'Connor 2009, 11 It is clear from the mosaic of those species that what the landscape "ought to be" was extensive grassland for grazing flocks and/or herds, and (sometimes) for growing hay. What is often missed is that that environmental evidence of continuity together with that archaeological evidence (or, more often, its absence) is very often also an indication of continuity in collective management under shared property rights over a longue durée that can extend over millennia.^{59 ( 59 )}
Oosthuizen 2013c

That blind spot inhibits our understanding of past societies, their economies, their social/political organisations, and their symbiotic relationships with the environment. Heathland and other commons have a rich potential to contribute to models for interpreting long- and medium-term change through their roles in mitigating disturbance and risk across social-environmental systems, reducing uncertainty, encouraging innovation and experimentation, and strengthening connections across such systems' complex components. Whether or not the "Remember" function is successful in supporting innovation and experimentation or in averting social, political, economic, and/or environmental collapse, interpreting change over time becomes a lot more interesting once its role is recognised.