Inhabiting the landscape - Nicola Whyte

The discipline of landscape history has recently taken a new
turn: away from the analysis of past land use and environments
towards an understanding of landscape as a social construct. This
book is a significant step along this exciting new road. Focusing
on Norfolk in the post-medieval centuries, Nicola Whyte
recaptures the essential character of ordinary people's
experience of landscape. She shows how perceptions were deeply
rooted in the comprehension of material antiquities, the annual
round of work, public events and religious ritual, and the
complex web of rights and jurisdictions mapped out in the fields.
People valued and gave meaning to the landscape for a wide range
of reasons, many of them unconnected with the economic potential
of the land. Landscape features outside the confines of the
church and the graveyard - pilgrimage routes, crosses, wells and
springs - played an important part in the ideological shift of
the Reformation. Parish boundaries, and in particular the annual
ritual of 'beating the bounds' at Rogationtide, reveal much about
the shifting pattern of local allegiances and competition over
resources. Places of execution and the graves of suicides were
'mneumonic spectacles' defining both geographical and behavioural
limits. The local history of enclosure and rights to commons is
the story of nascent capitalism in rural England, a clash of
values between modern productivity and ancient tradition that
involved the reinterpretation and renegotiation of the past.
Informed by the latest archaeological theory, this book shows how
landscape development was a dynamic,
experiential
process, in which world-views changed as well as woods, hedges and fields.