Book Recommendation: The Making of the British Landscape

The Making of the British Landscape, by Francis Pryor.

Pryor quickly shows, the neolithic, iron and bronze ages are really not [empty] at all. Under his gaze, the landscape starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today. Pryor shows us bumpy ridges, the kind of thing you might ignore on an afternoon's walk, which turn out to be the surface traces of bronze age fields, together with some untidy stumps that are actually the remains of a buried forest. Kathryn Hughes The Guardian. (Read Full Review).

Hoskins in the TLAHS

Hoskins published most of his early historical research, establishing himself as a scholar of distinction, in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society. He continued to publish in TLAHS until the late 1950s.

The far-sighted editorial team of TLAHS have made back editions of the journal available for free on-line.  Below I have collated all of Hoskins's papers from the journal for easy access. It is fascinating to trace the development of his scholarship and his thinking about locality and landscape through these papers.

The population of an English Village 1086-1801: A Study of Wigston Magna Volume 33 for 1957

Seven deserted village sites in Leicestershire Volume 32 for 1956

Croft Hill Volume 26 for 1950

The Origin and Rise of Market Harborough Volume 25 for 1949

Studies in Leicestershire Agrarian History- Introduction Volume 24 for 1948

The Leicestershire Crop returns of 1801 Volume 24 for 1948

Leicestershire Yeoman families and their Pedigrees Volume 23 for 1947

The Leicestershire farmer in the Sixteenth Century Volume 22 for 1941-2

A Short History of Galby and Frisby Volume 22 for 1941-2

The deserted villages of Leicestershire Volume 22 for 1941-2

The Leicestershire Country Parson in the Sixteenth century Volume 21 for 1939-40

Murder and Sudden Death in Medieval Wigston Volume 21 for 1939-40

Wigston Magna Lay Subsidies 1327 to 1599 pp. 55-64 Volume 20 for 1938-9

A History of the Humberstone Family, pp.241-287 Volume 20 for 1938-9

Further notes on the Anglian and Scandinavian settlement of Leicestershire pp. 93-109 Volume 19 for 1936-7

The fields of Wigston Magna pp. 163-199 Volume 19 for 1936-7

The Anglian and Scandinavian settlement of Leicestershire pp. 109-147  Volume 18 for 1933-35

I also include Charles Pythian-Adams's posthumous appreciation of Hoskins Hoskins's England: A Local Historian of Genius and the Realisation of his Theme and his obituary from the Transactions.

Hoskins My Hero

Author Penelope Lively writes in the Guardian 25 November 2011 of the influence that reading The Making of the English Landscape had on her thinking and career. 'Those years stumping around in muddy fields gave me an imagery of the juxtaposition of past and present that would feed into fiction for years to come'. Read the full text of her article here.