I have been reading (well, last October, wrote this in February but tempus fugit a mite fast since then) The Making of the English Landscape by W.G.Hoskins because I thought, with so many excellent nature books on my shelves, it might be a good idea to go back to the beginning and read one of the definitive ones first.
Published in 1955 my edition is an old hardback, but The Making of the English Landscape also makes a welcome and essential addition to the Little Toller Books list of nature classics, offering as it does such a definitive historical route through this land as we know it. I love the Fay Godwin picture on the cover too, her work graces several of Ted Hughes' books and I always feel it has that real sense of a brooding and secretive past just waiting to give up its treasures if I look hard enough.
Professor Hoskins sets off across Anglo-Saxon and Medieval England, traversing the devastation of the Black Death before heading into Tudor and Georgian enclosure, the Industrial Revolution, the roads, canals and railways and the establishment of towns.
It all sounds a bit dry and dusty doesn't it, but I was surprised to find a compelling and interesting book that really sorted out my homeland historical muddle. It's all so long ago... me learning it that is... and, well... it actually happening too. It was good to get everything back in the right order and feel some relief that I recognised the details of the Industrial Revolution, which for some reason was done to death at school; flying shuttles and spinning jennies imprinted and embedded when so much else was glossed over...or maybe I wasn't paying attention for a couple of years.
Professor Hoskins was eventually a dweller in the Shire so the South West receives many honourable and justified mentions, and with references to places very near to us here.
Incidentally the Shire is looking very well-dressed at the moment, finest raiment etc
Quintessential Hoskins...
One reference in particular that could (might...maybe) suggest that our green lane is the old boundary between one parcel of land and another, as each landowner dug out a ditch and threw the earth into a continuous bank on his own side. A double ditch emerges creating a track several feet wide and sunk several feet below the level of the fields...that would describe our green lane perfectly.
..as well as perhaps explaining the origins of the Devon bank hedges that we know so well.
For reasons that can only be speculated upon, apparently Devon was enclosed into smaller fields much sooner than elsewhere (1300s v 1700s) . The theory is that there was such an excess of pasture land no one really objected to a bit of hedging, but I was fascinated to read more about the creation of the hedgerows around us here...
'a trench is dug to mark the limits of the holders land, and the soil removed from it is thrown up into a mound on the inner side of the ditch...a lease in 1398 specifies that the ditch shall be four feet wide and four feet deep. The mound is planted with a quickset hedge, and grows in course of time by the addition of soil thrown up whenever the ditch is cleared. No feature of the Devon landscape is more characteristic than these vast banks crowned with oak, ash, hazel or other coppice wood growing to a height of twenty feet or more and forming an impenetrable screen.'
I can't tell you the difference when the 'impenetrable screen' to the front of the house has its spring and autumn cut, or how neat and tidy the lane looks (for a while) after it has been done...
and how quickly it reverts in summer...
Nor had it really occurred to me that there were two hundred years of tree-clearing slog before the emergence of the green and pleasant agricultural land that we take for granted. We have just watched them cut the grass in the field behind the house, hard to envisage it as forest...
'From rising ground England must have seemed one great forest before the fifteenth century, an almost unbroken sea of treetops with a thin blue spiral of smoke rising here and there at long intervals...'
The peasants set too and imagine the extent of the destruction as Professor Hoskins defines it in human terms...
'Timber alone served the purposes of coal, steel and concrete today...we read that one Durham man alone was said in 1629 to have felled more than thirty thousand oaks in his lifetime...'
Imagine that destruction going on across the country, little wonder that by 1664 diarist John Eveyln was pleading with landowners to plant many millions more trees, which apparently all saved our bacon when ships were needed about a hundred years later in the great naval struggle with France.
The Making of the English Landscape is a book chock-full of Did You Knows...
Imagine this country with only twenty thousand people living in it...
Only twenty-five people to the square mile at the end of the eleventh century...
Imagine that population growing and then being reduced by half thanks to the plague when it arrived in 1348...
And so much more. Definitely one to read if, like me, you are enjoying the modern flurry of nature and landscape writing, Professor Hoskins certainly set the genre in very firm foundations.
Has anyone else read this one...
Are there any other 'early' books in this genre that I should add to the reading list...
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