Abstract

Our understanding of how people in late medieval Britain perceived their landscape is still at an early stage. While much attention has been devoted to seigneurial perceptions of space, largely confined to the rather narrow field of castles, much less work has been devoted to the way in which peasants conceptualized the landscape which they occupied. The study of the perception of the spiritual has been almost entirely limited to established religious sites, which fails to reflect the thorough penetration of the sacred into the mundane world. In recent years archaeology has increasingly turned to think in greater detail about perception as it has become clearer that the thought-about world and the experienced world, two interlinked aspects of perception, played a significant role in behaviour.