This book applies an economic and environmental perspective to the history of landscape and the rural economy, highlighting their inter-connections through specific case studies. After explaining how the author made his discoveries and when they started, it analyses relations between documentary and landscape evidence. It is based on exceptional first-hand observation of a dozen sites and close consideration of topics in the ecological and economic history of southern England. They range from reclaiming chalk down-land, occupying low-lying heaths and reconstructing parkland, to wool-stapling and the manufacture of gunstocks for the African slave trade. Additional themes include the tension between ecology and institutions in decisions about the location of economic activity; the decay of communal farming ahead of enclosure; and other interesting puzzles in rural economic history. This book offers an original approach to questions in economic history through its synthesis of different types of evidence. It will be of interest to a diverse range of readers because it addresses how economic change was registered in the landscape, and how that change was influenced by landscape. It is a book with highly original features, contributing simultaneously to economic, agricultural, environmental, and landscape history. Eric L. Jones is Senior Fellow at the University of Buckingham, UK.

This book applies an economic and environmental perspective to the history of landscape and the rural economy, highlighting their inter-connections through specific case studies. After explaining how the author made his discoveries and when they started, it analyses relations between documentary and landscape evidence. It is based on exceptional first-hand observation of a dozen sites and close consideration of topics in the ecological and economic history of southern England. They range from reclaiming chalk down-land, occupying low-lying heaths and reconstructing parkland, to wool-stapling and the manufacture of gunstocks for the African slave trade. Additional themes include the tension between ecology and institutions in decisions about the location of economic activity; the decay of communal farming ahead of enclosure; and other interesting puzzles in rural economic history. This book offers an original approach to questions in economic history through its synthesis of different types of evidence. It will be of interest to a diverse range of readers because it addresses how economic change was registered in the landscape, and how that change was influenced by landscape. It is a book with highly original features, contributing simultaneously to economic, agricultural, environmental, and landscape history.

From prehistory to the present day, our landscape has been transformed by successive periods of human activity, triggered by the rise and fall of populations and their need to be fed, housed, and employed. These changes have built up layers of evidence which offer historians exciting insightsinto land use through the centuries and how rural communities of the past lived their lives. In this ground-breaking study - published in hardback as The English Rural Landscape and now available in paperback - Joan Thirsk and her team of distinguished contributors, many of whom live in the places they describe, invite us to explore the historical richness of the English landscape. Eachchapter synthesizes the latest thinking and provides fresh perspectives on its subject. It is the first book since W. G. Hoskins' definitive study The Making of the English Landscape, published nearly 50 years ago, to do so. The first ten chapters describe the characteristic features of the main landscape types, including fenland, downland, woodland, marshland, and moorland. However geographically scattered areas of a particular landscape type are, they have often been moulded by successive generations in ways that haveproduced strong physical similarities. The second part of the book is made up of five cameo features, each exploring an individual place in detail: the people and the distinctive histories that shaped them. These include the Land Settlement experimental village of Fen Drayton, set up during the Great Depression in the 1930s, and surveysof the very different settlements of Hook Norton in North Oxfordshire and Staintondale in North Yorkshire. Rural England: A History of the Landscape shows us how much of the rural past is still visible if we choose to dig for it. It illustrates how we might go about exploring it for ourselves. It is the definitive work on the history of the English landscape for all would-be landscape and local historydetectives, professional and amateur alike.

This book examines the English rural community, past and present, in its variety and dynamism. The distinguished team of contributors brings a variety of disciplinary perspectives to bear upon the central issues of movement and migration; the farm family and rural labour force; the development of contrasting rural communities; the portrayal of rural labour in both 'high' and popular culture; the changing nature of religious practice in the English countryside; the rural/urban fringe, and the spread of notions of a rural English arcadia within a predominantly urban society. Fully illustrated with accompanying maps, paintings and photographs, The English Rural Community provides an important and innovative overview of a subject where history, myth and debate are inseparably entwined. A full bibliography will assist a broad range of general readers and students of social history, historical geography and development studies approaching the subject for the first time, and the whole should establish itself as the central analytical account in an area where image and reality are notoriously hard to unravel.

The first major synthesis of the evidence for Anglo-Saxon settlements from across England and throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and a study of what it reveals about the communities who built and lived in them.

William Faulkner once said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Nowhere can you see the truth behind his comment more plainly than in rural New England, especially Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. Everywhere we go in rural New England, the past surrounds us. In the woods and fields and along country roads, the traces are everywhere if we know what to look for and how to interpret what we see. A patch of neglected daylilies marks a long-abandoned homestead. A grown-over cellar hole with nearby stumps and remnants of stone wall and orchard shows us where a farm has been reclaimed by forest. And a piece of a stone dam and wooden sluice mark the site of a long-gone mill. Although slumping back into the landscape, these features speak to us if we can hear them and they can guide us to ancestral homesteads and famous sites. Lavishly illustrated with drawings and color photos. Provides the keys to interpret human artifacts in fields, woods, and roadsides and to reconstruct the past from surviving clues. Perfect to carry in a backpack or glove box. A unique and valuable resource for road trips, genealogical research, naturalists, and historians.

The varied character of Britain's countryside and towns provides communities with a strong sense of local identity. One of the most significant features of the southern British landscape is the way that its character differs from region to region, with compact villages in the Midlands contrasting with the sprawling hamlets of East Anglia and isolated farmsteads of Devon. Even more remarkable is the very 'English' feel of the landscape in southern Pembrokeshire, in the far south west of Wales. Hoskins described the English landscape as 'the richest historical record we possess', and in this book Stephen Rippon explores the origins of regional variations in landscape character, arguing that while some landscapes date back to the centuries either side of the Norman Conquest, other areas across southern Britain underwent a profound change around the 8th century AD.

A compelling study of the influences that shape our responses to landscape, through eight modern British lives.

The use of wildlife products, together with advances in livestock feeding, were essential in propelling Western economic growth. Extraordinarily, these early modern and early industrial features are side-lined relative to the role of manufacturing. This book restores the balance, detailing how many species were relocated around the world and how late natural products persisted into the age of synthetics. This text describes how animals were driven immense distances to market and harnessed for transportation and to power machines; even after industrialisation, animals were employed for innumerable purposes, besides being co-opted as pets. The recent rebound from a wholesale persecution of wild nature, and how the plundering of the animal kingdom and the development of livestock farming jointly created the Smithian Growth that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, are also described.