Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain

Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain PDF Author: Richard W. Hoyle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351946633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
A great deal has been written about the acceleration of English agriculture in the early modern period. In the late middle ages it was hard to see that English agriculture was so very different from that of the continent, but by 1750 levels of agricultural productivity in Britain were well ahead of those general in northern Europe. The country had become much more urban and the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture had fallen. Customary modes of behaviour, whilst often bitterly defended, had largely been swept away. Contemporaries were quite clear that a process of improvement had taken place which had seen agriculture reshaped and made much more productive. Exactly what that process was has remained surprisingly obscure. This volume addresses the fundamental notion of improvement in the development of the British landscape from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Contributors present a variety of cases of how improvement, custom and resistance impacted on the local landscape, which includes manorial estates, enclosures, fens, forests and urban commons. Disputes between tenants and landlords, and between neighbouring landlords, over improvement meant that new economic and social identities were forged in the battle between innovation and tradition. The volume also includes an analysis of the role of women as agricultural improvers and a case study of what can happen when radical improvement failed. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of landscape studies, rural and agrarian history, but will also provide a useful context for anybody studying the historical legacy of mankind's exploitation of the environment and its social, economic, legal and political consequences.

Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain

Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain PDF Author: Richard W. Hoyle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351946633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Get Book Here

Book Description
A great deal has been written about the acceleration of English agriculture in the early modern period. In the late middle ages it was hard to see that English agriculture was so very different from that of the continent, but by 1750 levels of agricultural productivity in Britain were well ahead of those general in northern Europe. The country had become much more urban and the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture had fallen. Customary modes of behaviour, whilst often bitterly defended, had largely been swept away. Contemporaries were quite clear that a process of improvement had taken place which had seen agriculture reshaped and made much more productive. Exactly what that process was has remained surprisingly obscure. This volume addresses the fundamental notion of improvement in the development of the British landscape from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Contributors present a variety of cases of how improvement, custom and resistance impacted on the local landscape, which includes manorial estates, enclosures, fens, forests and urban commons. Disputes between tenants and landlords, and between neighbouring landlords, over improvement meant that new economic and social identities were forged in the battle between innovation and tradition. The volume also includes an analysis of the role of women as agricultural improvers and a case study of what can happen when radical improvement failed. The volume will be essential reading for scholars of landscape studies, rural and agrarian history, but will also provide a useful context for anybody studying the historical legacy of mankind's exploitation of the environment and its social, economic, legal and political consequences.

Custom and Commercialisation in English Rural Society

Custom and Commercialisation in English Rural Society PDF Author: J. Bowen
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 1909291633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
English rural society underwent fundamental changes between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries with urbanization, commercialization and industrialization producing new challenges and opportunities for inhabitants of rural communities. However, our understanding of this period has been shaped by the compartmentalization of history into medieval and early-modern specialisms and by the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism and landlord-tenant relations. Inspired by the classic works of Tawney and Postan, this collection of essays examines their relevance to historians today, distinguishing between their contrasting approaches to the pre-industrial economy and exploring the development of agriculture and rural industry; changes in land and property rights; and competition over resources in the English countryside.

Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440-1660

Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440-1660 PDF Author: Jane Whittle
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd.
ISBN: 1843838508
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Tawney's Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912).

Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500

Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500 PDF Author: Carl J. Griffin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319742434
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book offers the first systematic study of the multiple and contested ways in which protest is remembered. Drawing on work in social and cultural history, cultural and historical geography, psychology, anthropology, critical heritage studies, and memory studies, Remembering Protest focuses on the dynamic and lived nature of past protests, asking how conflicted communities and individuals made sense of and mobilized protest past in forging the future. Written by several of the leading historians and historical geographers of protest in early modern and modern Britain, the chapters span the period from 1500 to c.1850 while also speaking to the politics of past protests in the present. In so doing, it also offers the first showcase of the variety of approaches that comprises the vibrant and intellectually fecund ‘new protest history’. Empirically rich but conceptually sophisticated, this book will appeal to those with an interest in protest history, and early modern and modern British history, and historical geography more generally.

The Enclosure of Knowledge

The Enclosure of Knowledge PDF Author: James D. Fisher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316517985
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The rise of agrarian capitalism in Britain is usually told as a story about markets, land, and wages. This study reveals that it was also about books, knowledge and expertise, challenging the dominant narrative of an agricultural 'enlightenment' and showing how farming books appropriated traditional knowledge in pre-industrial Britain.

A Social History of England, 1500-1750

A Social History of England, 1500-1750 PDF Author: Keith Wrightson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107041791
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
The first overview of early modern English social history since the 1980s, bringing together the leading authorities in the field.

Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830

Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 PDF Author: Paul Stock
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198807112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Europe and the British Geographical Imagination, 1760-1830 explores what literate Britons of the period understood about 'Europe', focussing on key themes which shaped ideas about the continent, including religion, the natural environment, race, the state, borders, commerce, empire, and ideas about the past, progress, and historical change.

Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833

Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833 PDF Author: Richard Maguire
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1783276339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
What were the lives of Africans in provincial England like during the early modern period? How, where, and when did they arrive in rural counties? How were they perceived by their contemporaries? This book examines the population of Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk from 1467, the date of the first documented reference to an African in the region, to 1833, when Parliament voted to abolish slavery in the British Empire. It uncovers the complexity of these Africans' historical experience, considering the interaction of local custom, class structure, tradition, memory, and the gradual impact of the Atlantic slaving economy. Richard C. Maguire proposes that the initial regional response to arriving Africans during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not defined exclusively by ideas relating to skin colour, but rather by local understandings of religious status, class position, ideas about freedom and bondage, and immediate local circumstances. Arriving Africans were able to join the region's working population through baptism, marriage, parenthood, and work. This manner of response to Africans was challenged as local merchants and gentry begin doing business with the slaving economy from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Although the racialised ideas underpinning Atlantic slavery changed the social circumstances of Africans in the region, the book suggests that they did not completely displace older, more inclusive, ideas in working communities.

The Invention of Improvement

The Invention of Improvement PDF Author: Paul Slack
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199645914
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The idea of improvement - gradual and cumulative betterment - was something new in 17th century England. It became commonplace to assert that improvements in agriculture, industry, commerce, and social welfare would bring infinite prosperity and happiness. The word improvement was itself new, and since it had no equivalent in other languages, it gave the English a distinctive culture of improvement which they took with them to Ireland, Scotland, and America. Slack explains the political, intellectual, and economic circumstances which allowed notions of improvement to take root.

Shakespeare's Nature

Shakespeare's Nature PDF Author: Charlotte Scott
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191508160
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Shakespeare's Nature offers the first sustained account of the impact of the language and practice of husbandry on Shakespeare's work. It shows how the early modern discourse of cultivation changes attitude to the natural world, and traces the interrelationships between the human and the natural worlds in Shakespeare's work through dramatic and poetic models of intervention, management, prudence and profit. Ranging from the Sonnets to The Tempest, the book explains how cultivation of the land responds to and reinforces social welfare, and reveals the extent to which the dominant industry of Shakespeare's time shaped a new language of social relations. Beginning with an examination of the rise in the production of early modern printed husbandry manuals, Shakespeare's Nature draws on the varied fields of economic, agrarian, humanist, Christian and literary studies, showing how the language of husbandry redefined Elizabethan attitudes to both the human and non-human worlds. In a series of close readings of specific plays and poems, this book explains how cultivation forms and develops social and economic value systems, and how the early modern imagination was dependent on metaphors of investment, nurture and growth. By tracing this language of intervention and creation in Shakespeare's work, this book reveals a fundamental discourse in the development of early modern social, political and personal values.