Leonard Cantor - The Changing English Countryside, 1400-1700

Volume 1

First published in 1987 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

This edition first published in 2018

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1987 Leonard Cantor

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-89481-5 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-315-11336-4 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-73933-8 (Volume 1) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-18412-8 (Volume 1) (ebk)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

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Brassington in Derbyshire, ridge and furrow

Part of the open fields at Laxton in Nottinghamshire

Strip lynchets at Marske, near Richmond in Yorkshire

A map of 1596 showing the open fields of Salford in Bedfordshire

The deserted village of Great Stretton in Leicestershire

A map of Edgware in Middlesex, in 1597

Floated water meadows at Nunton in Wiltshire

Cornelius Vermuydens map of the Fens, 1642

A map of Boarstall in Buckinghamshire in 1444

The parish church of Long Melford in Suffolk

Baddesley Clinton Hall, Warwickshire

Coughton Court, Warwickshire

The dovecote at Dormston in Worcestershire

The village of Kersey in Suffolk

Moat Farmhouse near Dormston in Worcestershire

Arlington Row, Bibury in Gloucestershire

Staunton Harold parish church, Leicestershire

Kirby Muxloe Castle, Leicestershire

Lower Brockhampton House, Herefordshire

Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire

Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire

Belton House, Lincolnshire

Chatsworth House, Derbyshire

Abbot Hubys tower. Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire

The ruins of Corfe Castle, Dorset

A map of the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset, about 1585-6

Cold Overton Park, Leicestershire

The knot garden at Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire

The topiary garden at Packwood House, Warwickshire

The gardens of Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire, in 1707

The garden at Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire

Medieval iron-mining at Bentley Grange, Yorkshire

A 1664 map of colliers in the River Tyne

Charcoal-making in the seventeenth century

An iron bloomery at work in 1550

A mid-sixteenth-century drainage pump in a mine

A house and pottery at Burslem, Staffordshire, in the later seventeenth century

The medieval stone quarries at Barnack, Northamptonshire

A windmill in the Fenlands 1652

An extract from the 1360 Gough map of part of Cumbria

The fifteenth-century bridge at Cromford, in Derbyshire

A medieval packhorse bridge at Danby, North Yorkshire

The medieval causeway at Swarkeston in Derbyshire

A page from a road book of 1544

An extract from John Ogilbys Britannia of 1675

The open fields at Wedhampton, in Wiltshire

Upland and lowland England

The Midland System of open fields, c. 1550

Tutbury Castle, Staffordshire

The royal forests of England, 1608

Cold Overton Park, Leicestershire

The main areas of cloth manufacture, c. 1550

The major extractive industries in seventeenth-century England

The routes of the Gough Map of about 1360

The saltways of Cheshire

The roads and tracks of Padbury in Buckinghamshire, 1591

The road system of seventeenth-century England

The navigable rivers of England about 1600

First published in 1987 by

Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Published in the USA by

Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc.

in association with Methuen Inc.

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Set in 10/11 pt Erhardt

by Columns of Reading

and printed in Great Britain

by Thetford Press,

Thetford, Norfolk

Leonard Cantor 1987

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Cantor, Leonard Martin.

The changing English countryside, 14001700.

(The History of the British landscape)

Includes Index

1. Land use, RuralEnglandHistory.

2. AgricultureEconomic aspectsEnglandHistory.

3. EnglandEconomic conditions. 4. EnglandRural conditions. I. Title. II. Series.

HD604.C36 1987 333.76130942 86-6676

British Library CIP Data also available

ISBN 0-7102-0501-5

Throughout its history, the English countryside has been affected by change, and the long period of three hundred years covered by this book was no exception. However, due largely to the much slower rate of technological development, change occurred at a much more leisured pace than the one we have to live with today. At the beginning, the Middle Ages had not yet run its course, the English economy was still overwhelmingly an agricultural one, and over 90 per cent of the population lived in the countryside, earning their living by methods of farming which had changed little over the centuries. England in 1400 was, moreover, a thinly populated country with a population of only 2 million, about the population of the West Riding of Yorkshire today.

Three hundred years later, the country was on the brink of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions which were to wreak changes on the English countryside that were vastly greater than any that had preceded them. The seeds of these traumatic changes were sown in the earlier period covered in this book. By 1700, the population had more than doubled, industry had expanded and now employed approximately twice as high a proportion of the working population, major agricultural improvements were taking place, the transport network had expanded and its carrying capacity was greatly enhanced. Thus, the three hundred years between 1400 and 1700 span two very different Englands: on the one hand, the England of the later Middle Ages, very underdeveloped by comparison with its Continental neighbours and almost entirely dependent on a primitive agricultural economy; and, on the other, the wealthier, more sophisticated England of 1700, poised to usher in the major agricultural and industrial developments of the eighteenth century.