One of the greatest changes in the perception of the early landscape and in historical thought on the subject of early medieval woodland, has been in the quantity and nature of the woodland believed to have been present. In the late 1950s, we were presented with an idea that seems to owe more to notions of the American frontier than early medieval England – dense areas of primeval woodland in many regions waiting to be cleared by intrepid Anglo-Saxon colonists. There was even a notion of ‘mother’ villages sending out colonists to construct ‘daughter’ settlements in the wilderness. When W. G. Hoskins published his The Making of the English Landscape in 1955 he followed the then conventional view that at the beginning of medieval times:

In the Midland region, the Computer-Mapped Flora of Warwickshire, published in 1971, was placed within a historical setting that still presented this same hypothesis: prehistoric and Romano-British colonists had established themselves along the valley of the River Avon before venturing out southwards and finally northwards into the ‘Forest of Arden’.