Landscapes and Identities
This chapter pulls together the themes of the volume as a whole, looking back at the nature of the evidence, providing a synthesis of landscape use and considering again issues of identities. We review the nature of our evidence, as well as the possibilities and difficulties posed by working with large amounts of information. We review the broader differences found across England, either side of a line roughly from Torquay to Whitby, where south and east of that line more settlements and artefacts occurred than north and west. These differences indicate long-term contrasts in ways of life in both areas. We end by considering the complex question of identities, taking seriously issues of scale. An English identity was produced through a political project in the early medieval period and would not have existed in this form earlier.