The transformation of rural England

by Williamson, Tom

"This book is about the development of England's rural landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: about enclosure and reclamation, land use and settlement, hedges and walls, farm buildings, the archaeology of farming, and much else. But it is also an examination, from the perspective of landscape history, of the complex process of agrarian change usually referred to as the 'Agricultural Revolution'. Many eminent scholars have written on this subject: economic historians, economists, geographers. Landscape history can add another exciting dimension, and one perhaps more rooted in the environment, and in the realities of farming life, than some of the rarified models currently propagated; models evidently produced by people more familiar with computers than with the soil. Landscape history has come of age. It is time to use its particular insights and approaches to contribute to wider debates in social and economic history."--BOOK JACKET.