INTRODUCTION: ‘The scenery of common ground’

Summary

ENGLAND AND ITS COUNTRYSIDE

One ‘traditional’ image of the English countryside is that of a ‘patchwork’ of groups of small fields, enclosed and demarcated by verdant hedgerows. However as some landscape historians, for instance Christopher Taylor in his 1975 book, Fields in the English Landscape, have pointed out, the word ‘traditional’ has to be used advisedly in relation to any type of English landscape, which largely evolved in a constant state of flux, change and contradiction. Much of this change in the countryside occurred during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Britain in general experienced a period of intense social, economic and industrial expansion. At the same time, a peculiarly English attachment to the countryside developed, which came to play a crucial role in the development of a strong sense of national identity. Parliamentary enclosure was but one component part of this expansion, producing that ‘patchwork’ landscape which became the emblematic image of the ‘English Countryside’ and of ‘Englishness’ for later generations. As such, this ‘traditional’ landscape is 250 years old at the very most.

The subsequent cultural dominance of this type of countryside also reveals just how little we actually know of its antithesis – the unenclosed landscape of arable fields and commons. Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century accounts of the common field landscape describe open arable fields almost in terms of an alien world of endless, open, plains: ‘unbroken tracts’ that, according to the Reverend James Tyley in Northamptonshire, ‘strained and tortured the sight’.