Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain... - 9781409400523

Taylor & Francis

This book addresses how concepts of improvement, custom and resistance impacted on the local landscape - which includes manorial estates, enclosures, fens, forests and urban commons - in the early modern period. It is essential reading for scholars of landscape studies, rural and agrarian history, and for those studying the historical legacy of mankind's exploitation of the environment and its social, economic, legal and political consequences. > A great deal has been written about the acceleration of English agriculture in the early modern period. In the late middle ages it was hard to see that English agriculture was so very different from that of the continent, but by 1750 levels of agricultural productivity in Britain were well ahead of those general in northern Europe. The country had become much more urban and the proportion of the population engaged in agriculture had fallen. Customary modes of behaviour, whilst often bitterly defended, had largely been swept away. Contempo.