ABSTRACT
Looking at East Brittany in 1978, when we began work there, its rural communities of small farmers appeared timeless: strongly agricultural, committed to their localities, with limited external connections, living beside their work, and farming the land in a mixed regime. We knew, because of our familiarity with ninth-century texts, that this land was well peopled and intensively used before the year Ad 1000, with an apparently similar mixed agricultural regime. Had there been no change?
