Joan Thirsk, ed. The English Rural Landscape. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 352 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-866219-8.
Reviewed by John Smail (Department of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte)
Published on H-Albion (December, 2000)
In a perfect world, this book would be read while on holiday in the English countryside. Ensconced in a country inn, one could read a chapter in the evening and spend the next day exploring on foot the secrets of the landscape which had been revealed. (In this perfect world, the book would come with a pullout section containing maps of suggested walks and a pub guide, but alas....) The world being the imperfect place it is, readers will have to endure a modicum of frustration as they enjoy and learn from this book, for it sparks a desire to go out in the field and learn for oneself the historical meaning which the authors have teased from the landscape, a desire which most of us will not be able to satisfy immediately. This frustration, however, is something of a refreshing change from standard historical fare. I have been inspired by historical writing before, but never have I been inspired to go out and examine for myself the sources from which they were written. In this case, of course, that is possible. Unlike a history of social process or cultural identity, the main source for this book, the landscape itself, is accessible. Moreover, thanks to the authors' fine analysis of the complex interplay between landscape and history, it has been made meaningful for a wide audience.
The book is divided into two quite different but complementary parts subtitled respectively: "Panoramas" and "Cameos." By and large, the chapters in each section trace the history of a particular landscape type or place from the earliest human occupation through to the present. Most of the contributions forefront an analysis of the landscape itself, a process akin to reading a palimpsest in which the many layers of human activity need to be discerned from what can been seen in the present. All, however, supplement this reading with serious archival study. The chapters in the first part of the book provide a survey of the major English landscape types: downlands, wolds (two chapters), lowland vales, woodlands and wood pasture, forests, marshes, fenlands, and moorlands. The chapters in the second part of the book, in contrast, explore in loving detail the development of particular local landscapes: a wood/pasture parish in the Chilterns, and open field village in Oxfordshire, a large woodland community in Staffordshire, and a moorland estate in North Yorkshire. The contrast between the two parts serves the reader well. One clearly needs the broad view provided by the panoramas, but any reader not intimately familiar with English geography will find themselves a little disoriented in a thicket of half familiar place names and landforms. The cameos thus provide a welcome opportunity to really get to know one place and appreciate how the history of a particular landscape was shaped.
Perhaps the most important lesson academics should draw from this book is that the conventional dichotomy between upland and lowland landscapes, while workable, needs to be more nuanced. Introduced by Joan Thirsk and other pioneering social historians a generation ago, this dichotomy, or its close cousins forest/field and pastoral/arable, have been taken up again and again as explanatory tools with results which are useful and yet limiting. To give but one example, David Underdown's use of the pasture/arable distinction in his exploration of popular allegiance in the West Country during the Civil War cannot be easily transposed to explain allegiance in other parts of the country. This collection of essays suggests why, for it shows that the histories of particular landscapes included on either side of the broad dichotomy are more complex: wood/pasture and moorland are both "upland" landscapes but they have different histories. For example, readers familiar with the ebbing and flowing of English population from the prehistoric to the pre-industrial periods will appreciate the insights the various chapters given into the subtlety of the effects of population increase and decrease on the landscape, social structure, and rural economy. Growing population generally lead to the clearing of land, but such clearances took different forms in different kinds of landscape and happened in different periods. The fens were hardly touched during the population booms of the medieval and early modern periods; extensive exploitation only took place in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Woodlands in Western England, in contrast, are now known to have been settled in prehistoric times, contradicting the received wisdom which held that they were only opened up for cultivation and settlement by the technological advances of the medieval period. The effects of a shrinking population were similarly varied. Deserted villages were only characteristic of the patterns of settlement in some landscapes; elsewhere the density of population decreased without the wholesale abandonment of settlements. In so far as landscape is an important determinant of the economic activities of its inhabitants, the book thus provides a template for more sophisticated analyses of the patterns of interplay between economic and social, political, and religious history in pre-industrial England upon which other scholars can build.
As well as refining the available typology of landscapes, the book also suggests some quite novel ways of reading the landscape which focus upon the interplay between geography and history. Brian Short's chapter, for example, explores how the intersection of geography and forest law helped to shape the forest and wood-pasture landscape of lowland England. Charles Pythian-Adams offers an even more iconoclastic reading of the landscape in his essay on "frontier valleys," a series of which are arrayed along England's east coast from the Tweed south to the Stour. Unlike navigable rivers which unite the landscapes and societies on either bank, each of these frontier valleys-characterized by an east/west river with major physical barrier running along its south bank-served to divide relatively distinct cultural and economic provinces. Each of these provinces developed around urban centers strung along the rivers' northern banks whose hinterlands reached northwards almost as far as the next frontier valley.
Both its wonderful evocation of the intricacies of the English landscape and these academic insights make this an enjoyable and valuable book which will appeal to a wide audience on several different levels. Alan Everitt's study of common lands presents both a serious analysis of their past extent while at the same time opening a window into the complex and rich cultural traditions of its inhabitants. Margaret Sufford's intimate portrait of the parish of Eccleshall in Staffordshire is, from its opening line, a good read pure and simple. Yet at the same time she provides a nuanced analysis of medieval agricultural expansion and an intriguing historical reconstruction of the social reality in which Gregory King may have developed his observation about the half of the English population who were "decreasing the wealth of the nation." With these qualities, the book successfully occupies a middle ground between the coffee table and the academic's bookshelf -- the illustrations and lack of footnotes place it in the former category, the quality and importance of its insights in the latter. In comparison, its flaws are relatively minor. The writing is uneven; some of the chapters in the panorama section in particular overwhelm the reader in a welter of unfamiliar detail or pedestrian prose. More problematic is the absence of maps -- surprising given the importance of geography to the authors' message and the otherwise excellent and copious illustrations. Ideally one would need a large scale map color coded for the different landscapes, but at the very least each chapter should have included a map locating the distribution of the landscape being discussed and the places named in the text. However, if the unfamiliar geography at times leaves one lost (almost literally), the insights the authors offer into the history of the English landscape make the frequent and necessary references to a road atlas and gazeteer more than worthwhile.
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Citation:
John Smail. Review of Thirsk, Joan, ed., The English Rural Landscape.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2000.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4733
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