Focusing on Northampton, Championoffers a radical reinterpretation of the origins of villages and open fields, and their development in the late medieval and post-medieval periods in the Midlands. Instead of the commonly accepted belief that villages and open fields were created in the middle or later Saxon period through a process of "nucleation," or village planning, the authors of this volume suggest that these settlements only emerged in their classic, regular forms in the eleventh or twelfth centuries. Their findings are based on an innovative use of digital mapping and geographical information systems, and they cast new light on the agricultural practices in the post-medieval period.