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Contents: Until this book was written, there was not one which dealt with the historical evolution of the English landscape as we know it. With his combination of scholarship and readability Professor Hoskins has supplied the want with a book which is now a confirmed classic in its own right and also a masterly introduction to a county by county series. Those who have a vague idea man's effect on his landscape begain in the eighteenth century, will find from Professor Hoskins that it is a much longer and more fascinating evolution. More than half England, he says, never underwent the familiar kind of enclosure, and, in some places, the landscape had been largely completed by the eve of the Black Death. He sets out to show why the hedgebanks and lanes of Devon are so totally different from those of the Midlands, why there are so many ruined churches in Norfolk and so many lost villages in Lincolnshire and what history lies behind the winding ditches of the Somerset marshlands, the remote granite farmsteads of Cornwall and the lonely pastures of upland Northamptonshire. He is concerned with the ways in which men have cleared the natural woodlands, reclaimed marshlands, fen and moor, made roads, lanes, and footpaths, laid out towns, built villages, hamlets, and farm houses, country houses and parks, dug mines and driven canals and railways across the countryside-in short, with everything that has altered the natural landscape. A commonplace ditch, he points out, may be the thousand-year-old boundary of a royal manor. A hedgebank may be even more ancient-the boundary of a Celtic estate. A deep and winding lane may be the work of twelfth-century peasants, some of whose names may be made known to us if we search diligently enough. These are tall claims, but Professor Hoskins, reinforced by a most skilfully chosen miscellany of photographs, makes them sound very plausible. He begins in pre-Roman times, traces the consequences of the Saxon settlements, discusses the colonization of medieval England and the dire effects of the Black Death. He passes on to the flowering of the countryside under the Tudors and the Georges, followed by its reverse side, when the industrial revolution brought steam-power and the spreading of slums. Maps and Plans: Includes 17 maps and plans
Chapters: 1. The Landscape before the English Settlement 2. The English Settlement 3. The Colonization of Medieval England 4. The Black Death and After 5. Tudor to Georgian England 6. Parliamentary Enclosure and the Landscape 7. The Industrial Revolution and the Landscape 8. Roads, Canals and Railways 9. The Landscape of Towns 10. The Landscape Today Select Bibliography; Index About the Author: The author had been Reader in Economic History at the University of Oxford from 1951-1965, and Hatton Professor of English Local History at the University of Leicester from 1965-1968. He became Emeritus Professor in 1968. At the time of publication of the book, he had written extensively on the landscape: He had also authored the Shell Guides to Rutland and to Leicestershire; and had been involved in a series of televised programmes on the landscape; he wrote for example the BBC Booklet 'English Landscapes', which accompanied the programme |
Different editions at Amazon: Other works of interest: Works on how the land was shaped:
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. Jacket photograph of a Saxon boundary bank in East Devon by Nicholas Toyne.