A Short History of Enclosure in Britain

In an excellent article in The Land Simon Fairlie describes how the progressive enclosure of commons over several centuries has deprived most of the British people of access to agricultural land. The historical process bears little relationship to the “Tragedy of the Commons”, the theory which ideologues in the neoliberal era adopted as part of a smear campaign against common property institutions.

Over the course of a few hundred years, much of Britain's land has been privatized — that is to say taken out of some form of collective ownership and management and handed over to individuals. Currently, in our "property-owning democracy", nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population,1 while most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line. Read More.

Ancient Trees in Sheringham Park

One of a series of short films by the National Trust, the clip below discusses evidence for ancient woodland in Sheringham Park, North Norfolk.

 

Ancient & Remarkable Trees from Lightly Frozen Productions on Vimeo.

Class 6: A Curse Upon the Land

The slides for Class 6: Parliamentary Enclosure, a Curse Upon the Land, are available for download from here.

Laxton Maps at the University of Nottingham

The Department of Manuscripts and Special Collections at Nottingham University Library holds a large collection of material relating to Laxton, including many maps. Here are three fine maps spanning the 18th and 19th centuries, reproduced on their Laxton focused web-based collection of primary materials.

Hand-drawn and coloured map of the lordship of Laxton and Laxton Moorhouse, 1789

Hand-drawn map of the parish of Laxton, 1820

Hand-drawn and coloured plan of Earl Manvers’ estate in Laxton, 1862

Map Regression Exercise

Map Regression is an important tool for exploring and understanding the development of landscape. Laxton is fortunate in having a wealth of historic mapping, allowing analysis of landscape change and development at a high resolution. 

You can compare two of the principal sources of mapping that of Mark Pierce (1635) and George Sanderson (1835) using the interactive maps on this website.

Map Regression Exercise
Using the historic mapping of Laxton provided below trace the development of either Town End Farm or Church Farm. 



Your aim is to understand the origin and antiquity of features of the modern landscape – so aim to produce a map of the present farm that demonstrates these two based on you map analysis.  You might care to visit the English Heritage website to investigate the context for such analysis of historic farms.

• Laxton in 1635 Map
• Laxton in 1789 Map
• Laxton in 1812 Map
• Laxton in 1812 Map
• Laxton in 1834 Map
• Laxton in 1862 Map
• Laxton Today

Treasures of the Bodleian: Mark Pierce's Map of Laxton

Mark Pierce's wonderful 1635 map of Laxton is owned by the Bodliean Library at the University of Oxford. Here the Nick Millea the map librarian  introduces the map in all its glory.

Class 5: An Excess of Sheep

The slides for Class 5: An Excess of Sheep can be downloaded from here.

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Class 4: Awaiting the Sound of a Human Voice

The slides for Class 4: Awaiting the Sound of a Human Voice can be downloaded from here.

Domesday Book

William of Normandy's great survey of England is a fascinating source of evidence for the social, political and economic organisation of late 11th century England.  This complex and much studied documents continues to yield new insights into the landscape and society of Saxo-Norman England.

The National Archives guide to Domesday is a good starting point for study.  There are also several on-line versions of the book (beware those that try to charge you for an extract). The best is domesdaymap.co.uk. Here you can search by place and person, view facsimile images of the original folio volume, read a digest of each entry and generate your own interactive maps. Below for example is the entry for Geoffrey Alselin, Lord of Laxton in 1086.

There is also an interesting report by English Heritage on mapping Domesday data: Lowerre, A. 2008. Mapping Domesday Book using GIS. Research News: Newsletter of the English Heritage Research Department. Number 8, which may be downloaded from here.  And as if that wasn't enough, Darby and Maxwell's classic Domesday Geography of Northern England is available as a free Google E-book from here.

Class 3: Becoming a Land of Villages

Belatedly, here are the slides for this week's class, Becoming a Land of Villages, with in particular, details of the types, uses and evidence that may be gleaned from aerial photography.

Hoskins's England:A Local Historian of Genius

Charles Pythian-Adam's appreciation of Hoskins's life and legacy was published in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society after Hoskins's death in 1992.  You can read the full text here.

Hoskin's published much of his early research in TLAHS.  It makes fascinating reading in its own right and it is possible to see his great themes, expounded in Making of the English Landscape, beginning to emerge.

You can download and read all of Hoskins's early works from the LAHS website, search the pre-War volumes for the majority of his work.

Aerial Views of Laxton

As promised, digital versions of the air-photographs discussed in this week's class.

The Castle from the north-east

The Castle from the north

Fish-ponds south of the church

Making a Home. English Culture and English Landscape by Matthew H. Johnson University of Southampton

Making a Home. English Culture and English Landscape by Matthew H. Johnson University of Southampton

Every weekend, thousands of people take a walk in the English countryside. A walk in the country is about exercise, but it is also much more than that. It is enabled by the tracks and paths, the public rights of way over private property. The surrounding scenery is of fields, hedges, grasslands, moorlands, studded by the spires and towers of medieval churches, and the distant prospect of Georgian houses amidst parklands.

All these elements are and were human creations...Read More

Making a Home : The Public Value of the Humanities : Bloomsbury Academic

Aerial Phoography of Laxton

Laxton from the Air

Both Google Maps and Microsoft Bing Maps have useful aerial imagery of Laxton. Look in particular for he shadows of subtle earthworks on the Bing Maps image.

Google Maps

Microsoft Bing Maps

Novelist William Boyd on Re-Reading Hokins

William Boyd: Rereading The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins

Novelist William Boyd discusses rereading Hoskins's Making of the English Landscape for Guardian Books.  Hoskins provided his readers with an innovative lens through which the history of the English countryside could be decoded – and inspired in me an enduring fascination with the land around me, says William Boyd in Guardian Books  [Read More]

The Making of the British Landscape

The Making of the British Landscape, by Francis Pryor.

A perfect up to date counterpoint to Hoskins. 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).

Class 2: Darkening Hills

The Slides for Class 2, Dakening Hills, can be downloaded from here.