The English Landscape

An atlas of English archaeology covering the period from the middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC) to Domesday Book (AD 1086), encompassing the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Roman period, and the early medieval (Anglo-Saxon) age.

The classic text of English landscape history, ground-breaking and hugely influential.

The English Landscape is a stunning volume of essays and photographs celebrating the breadth, diversity, and delicacy of the English countryside. A distinguished selection of writers such as the Duchess of Devonshire, Richard Mabey, Anna Parord, Christopher Lloyd, Robin Hanbury-Tenbison, Marina Warner, Dame Jennifer Jenkins, and David Bellamy pay homage to their favorite parts of the English landscape. Complete with color photographs and maps, The English Landscape will engage Anglophiles, travel enthusiasts, and literature buffs alike.

Jane Austen was deeply inspired by the landscape and rural comforts of southern England. Her family's final move to Chawton, in the depths of the Hampshire countryside and so near the Steventon rectory of her childhood, gave her great satisfaction and led to her most creative period.

This book provides an overview of the extent to which the 18th-century English Landscape Garden spread through Europe and Russia. While this type of garden acted widely as an inspiration, it was not slavishly copied but adapted to local conditions, circumstances and agendas. A garden 'in the English style' is commonly used to denote a landscape garden in Europe, while the term 'landscape garden' is used for layouts that are naturalistic in plan and resemble natural scenery, though they might be highly contrived and usually large in scale. The landscape garden took hold in mainland Europe from about 1760. Due to the differing geopolitical character of several of the countries, and a distinct division between Catholic and Protestant, the notion of the landscape garden held different significance and was interpreted and applied variously in those countries: in other words, they found it a very flexible medium. Each country is considered individually, with a special chapter devoted to 'Le Jardin Anglo-Chinois', since that constitutes a major issue of its own. The gardens have been chosen to illustrate the range and variety of applications of the landscape garden, though they are also those about which most is known in English.

The eighteenth-century phenomenon of the English landscape garden was so widespread that even today, when so much has been built over or otherwise changed, examples remain throughout England. Although seemingly natural, the English landscape was generally the result of considerable effort, contrivance, and design skill, the glorious outcome of "the art that conceals art." Taking many forms, the landscape garden might involve digging lakes, raising or leveling hills, or planting vast numbers of trees--whatever was required to show nature to best advantage. Richly illustrated throughout, this book uncovers the complex, multi-layered, and wide-ranging story of the landscape garden in England.

Long before the Norman Conquest of 1066, England saw periods of profound change that transformed the landscape and the identities of those who occupied it. The Bronze and Iron Ages saw the introduction of now-familiar animals and plants, such as sheep, horses, wheat, and oats, as well as new forms of production and exchange and the first laying out of substantial fields and trackways, which continued into the earliest Romano-British landscapes. The Anglo-Saxon period saw the creation of new villages based around church and manor, with ridge and furrow cultivation strips still preserved today. The basis for this volume is The English Landscapes and Identities project, which synthesised all the major available sources of information on English archaeology to examine this crucial period of landscape history from the middle Bronze Age (c. 1500 BC) to the Domesday survey (c. 1086 AD). It looks at the nature of archaeological work undertaken across England to assess its strengths and weaknesses when writing long-term histories. Among many other topics it examines the interaction of ecology and human action in shaping the landscape; issues of movement across the landscape in various periods; changing forms of food over time; an understanding of spatial scale; and questions of enclosing and naming the landscape, culminating in a discussion of the links between landscape and identity. The result is the first comprehensive account of the English landscape over a crucial 2500-year period. It also offers a celebration of many centuries of archaeological work, especially the intensive large-scale investigations that have taken place since the 1960s and transformed our understanding of England's past.

In this interdisciplinary study, Ann Bermingham explores the complex, ambiguous, and often contradictory relationship between English landscape painting and the socio-economic changes that accompanied enclosure and the Industrial Revolution.

The name Lancelot 'Capability' Brown has become synonymous with the eighteenth-century English landscape garden: between 1751 and 1783 his consultancy handled over 170 major commissions. Ruthlessly efficient, he could stake out the 'capabilities' of a particular terrain within an hour on horseback. Rising to the position of Master Gardener to George III, his trademark features included bald lawns, clumped trees, undulating lakes and enclosing belts of woodland on the estate's perimeter. With this standard park formula Brown and his followers held the commercial monopoly on garden design well into the following century, resisting the more rugged topography advocated by Richard Payne Knight's new generation of Romantics.

Nicholas Crane's new book brilliantly describes the evolution of Britain's countryside and cities. It is part journey, part history, and it concludes with awkward questions about the future of Britain's landscapes. Nick Crane's story begins with the melting tongues of glaciers and the emergence of a gigantic game-park tentatively being explored by a vanguard of Mesolithic adventurers who have taken the long, northward hike across the land bridge from the continent. The Iron Age develops into a pre-Roman 'Golden Era' and Crane looks at what the Romans did (and didn't) contribute to the British landscape. Major landscape 'events' (Black Death, enclosures, urbanisation, recreation, etc.) are fully described and explored, and he weaves in the role played by geology in shaping our cities, industry and recreation, the effect of climate (and the Gulf Stream), and of global economics (the Lancashire valleys were formed by overseas markets). The co-presenter of BBC's COAST also covers the extraordinary benefits bestowed by a 6,000-mile coastline. The 12,000-year story of the British landscape culminates in the twenty-first century, which is set to be one of the most extreme centuries of change since the Ice Age.