ABSTRACT
Our initial questions about how to investigate changes in land-use and settlement over a long period were answered as the East Brittany Survey developed: our methods, undeniably, evolved. With the benefit of hindsight, we would argue that what we ultimately did was – by and large – the right way to do it. We would certainly strongly recommend our starting-point: a detailed, localizable survey of the pre- (or early) industrial landscape, such as the Napoleonic cadastre for France or tithe and enclosure maps for England. This kind of source is particularly appropriate for investigating a much-used, as opposed to an uncultivated, landscape. However, archive work, field programme and buildings survey were all complementary and we could not have grasped thirteenth- to twentieth-century trends without all three.
