ABSTRACT
When Domesday Book was being written the South East was already one of the longest-inhabited and most populous parts of England, with layer upon layer of inherited man-made features etched into the face of its varied countryside and townscape. Yet the exceptionally lengthy period of time of man's exploitation of the region, and hence of the very gradual evolution of the landscape, has only recently become apparent. By 1959 Lennard was sufficiently impressed by the complex process of Anglo-Saxon colonization to call Domesday England 'already an old country' (Lennard 1959: 1). A generation later, thanks to aerial photography and environmental archaeology, it is now recognized as an ancient one. The notion that the Anglo-Saxons were the makers of the South East has had to be discarded and the open and chequered landscape of coastal Kent and Sussex at the present day is now attributed to continuous agricultural colonization over at least four millennia. By the Bronze Age the bare downland scenery of Domesday shepherds had already come into being, with over-zealous eradication of forest, as also had the scrawny Surrey and Sussex heaths, where round barrows bury evidence of a once richer, more wooded environment. The management of coppice woodland, first recorded in the regional economy in Domesday Book, was until recently thought of as an eleventh-century innovation, but there is now reason to suspect that this type of managed woodland had evolved from the first century BC or even earlier. As for settlement and field systems, the low light of winter photography or crop marks in late summer reveal a palimpsest of an older population and system of agriculture repeatedly incorporated in the new (Taylor 1983: 104—6 and passim; Drewett, Rudling and Gardiner 1988). This evidence of a landscape long since begun would everywhere be more evident than it is had not prehistoric and Romano-British earthworks been needlessly destroyed during the past 25 years for the production of surplus food.
