Champion: The pattern of nucleated settlements and extensive open fields most commonly found within the landscape of the Midlands. This book presents a radical reinterpretation of the origins of villages and open fields, and their development in the late medieval and post-medieval periods, inthe Midland, "champion" areas of England. Most landscape historians believe that villages were created in the middle or later Saxon periods through the "nucleation" of a formerly dispersed pattern of settlement, that many villages were initially laid out as planned, regular settlements and that openfields probably came into existence at the same time. Re-examination and mapping of the data suggests "nucleation" is a myth, "village planning" an illusion and open fields were created, at least in their classic, "regular" forms, only in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. | Champion by Tom Williamson, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters