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REVIEWS MEDIEVAL AGRARIAN HISTORY Variety and diversity are the keynotes of this weighty addition to a distinguished series. Above all, the accent is firmly on the local and regional, as is shown by the division of five of the volume's chapters-on settlement, farming techniques, population, social structure, and the relationship between population and landholding-into eight regional sub-sections (including one on Wales and the Marches), which taken together account for some two-thirds of the total text. The remaining chapters are more synoptically organised, dealing with England before the Norman conquest, the evidence of Domesday Book, prices and wages, the life of the people, and rural building. While the importance of emphasising the differences within and between regions is amply borne out by reference to a vast array of published and unpublished sources, contributors have not all been equally successful in presenting their material in a digested form and in elucidating its significance. Detailed description sometimes threatens to swamp the text at the expense of analysis. It is also a pity that the volume's organisation left little room for drawing general conclusions about the nature of agrarian development on both a regional and national basis during the period. Further- more, the lack of a common interpretative framework within individual chapters written by several authors hinders comparison between regions, tending to make those chapters no more than the sum of their parts-a comment which could indeed be applied to the volume as a whole. Diversity of approach is perhaps inevitable in any co-operative work produced by eleven scholars, and in this case probably reflects the specific difficulty, when dealing with medieval societies in which at least 90 per cent of the population lived in the countryside, of drawing a line between agrarian history and social and economic history in general. Nevertheless, precisely because of its solid empirical base, the volume will furnish the historian interested in medieval agriculture and rural society with a wealth of valuable information which can hardly be ignored in future work. Moreover, a number of sections stand out for their comprehensive and coherent treatment of particular regions or themes. Thus, Christopher Dyer's contributions on the West Midlands provide an admirable regional study, which one could recommend to undergraduates, for example, as indeed do those of John Hatcher and Edward Miller on south-west and northern England respectively. Sally Harvey's long chapter on Domesday England offers an excellent survey, while David L. Farmer, in a discussion backed up by a formidable series of statistical tables, turns what might seem I THE Agrarian History of ENGLAND AND Wales. Volume II, 1042-1350. Edited by H. E. Hallam. Cambridge University Press, 1988. Pp. xxxix, 1,086. £ 90.00.