English Rural Communities: The Impact of a Specialised Economy PDF
Preview English Rural Communities: The Impact of a Specialised Economy
English Rural Communities English Rural Communities: The Impact of a Specialised Economy EDITED BY DENNIS R. MILLS MACMILLAN EDUCATION Selection and editorial matter© Dennis R. Mills 1973 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1973 978-0-333-14961-4 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1973 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in New York Dublin Melbourne Johannesburg and Madras SBN 333 14961 0 (hard cover) SBN 333 14962 9 (paper cover) ISBN 978-0-333-14962-1 ISBN 978-1-349-15516-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15516-3 The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise. be lent. re·sold. hired out. or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 7 INTRODUCTION 9 PART ONE: SPECIALISATION IN AGRICULTURE 29 The Lord and the Landscape, illustrated through the changing fortunes of a Warwickshire parish, W ormleighton BY H. Thorpe 31 2 The Development of Rural Settlement around Lincoln, with special reference to the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies BY D. R. Mills 83 3 Dispersed and Nucleated Settlement in the Yorkshire Wolds,I770-1850 BY M. B. Gleave 98 4 The Social Study of Family Farming BY W. M. Williams 116 PART TWO: SPECIALISATION IN INDUSTRY 135 5 Population Changes over the West Cumberland Coalfield BY T. H. Bainbridge 13 7 6 The Model Village at Bromborough Pool BY J. N. Tarn 145 7 The Economic Geography of Craven in the early Nineteenth Century BY R. Lawton 155 8 The Geographical Effects of the Laws of Settlement in Nottinghamshire: an analysis of Francis Howell's report, 1848 BY D. R. Mills 182 PART THREE: MOBILITY 193 9 Rural Depopulation in Nineteenth Century England BY R. Lawton 195 6 Contents 10 Rural Population Changes since 1851: Three Sample Studies BY June A. Sheppard 220 11 The Metropolitan Village BY F. 1. Masser and D. C. Stroud 235 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 257 INDEX 259 Acknowledgements 'The effect of the depression of the mining industry on the cultural landscape of Cleator Moor, Cleator, Frizington, Moor Row, Bigrigg and Woodend, Cumberland', by Joyce Kneale, Ilkley College of Education dissertation, 1971, cited by permission of Joyce Kneale 'The Lord and the Landscape', by H. Thorpe, Transactions o/the Bir mingham Archaeological Society, LXXX (1965), by permission of H. Thorpe 'The Development of Rural Settlement around Lincoln' by D. R. Mills. East Midland Geographer, No. 11 (June 1959), by permission of The East Midland Geographer 'Dispersed and nucleated settlement in the Yorkshire Wolds, 1770-1850', by M. B. Gleave, Transactions qf the Institute of British Geographers, No. 30 (1962), by permission of the Institute of British Geographers 'The Social Study of Family Farming', by W. M. Williams, Geographical Journal, CXXIX (1963), by permission of the Royal Geographical Society and W. M. Williams 'Population Changes over the West Cumberland Coalfield', by T. H. Bainbridge, Economic Geography, XXVI (1949), by permission of Economic Geography 'The Model Village at Bromborough Pool', by J. N. Tarn, Town Plan ning Review, XXXV (1964-5), by permission of J. N. Tarn 'The Economic Geography of Craven in the early Nineteenth Cen tury', by R. Lawton, Transactions 0/ the Institute 0/ British Geographers, No. 20 (1954), by permission of the Institute of British Geographers 8 Acknowledgements 'The Geographical Effects of the Laws of Settlement in Not tinghamshire', by D. R. Mills, East Midland Geographer, v (1970), by permission of The East Midland Geographer. 'Rural Depopulation in 19th Century Britain', by R. Lawton, in Liver- pool Essays in Geography: a Jubilee Collection, edited by R. W. Steel and R. Lawton, Longman (I967), by permission of Messrs Longman Green 'Rural Population Changes since 1851: Three Sample Studies', by June A. Sheppard, Sociological Review, X (1962), by permission of Sociological Review 'The Metropolitan Village', by F. I. Masser and D. C. Stroud, Town Planning Review, XXXVI (I965-6), by permission of Town Planning Review The maps and diagrams have been prepared for the press by Mr A. Hodgkiss of the University of Liverpool and Mr H. Dobson and Mr J. Hunt of the Open University Introduction THE student may already turn to a significant number of books dealing with the establishment of the basic settlement patterns of England in the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and medieval periods (for example, Thorpe in Watson and Sissons (1964), Mitchell (1954), Chapters III and IV; Darby (1936); Hoskins (1955), Chapters II and III; and the Domesday Geographies edited by Darby's team). More recently he has been provided with texts exploring rural location patterns with a strong emphasis on the role of distance factors (for example, Chisholm (1962) and Everson and Fitzgerald (1969», while Clout (1972) has written an extremely useful introductory survey of rural geography, mainly from the standpoint of the present day. It is more difficult for the student to investigate the impact of a specialised economy upon the geography of rural communities over the last four or five centuries. Considerable contributions have been made by historians, such as Beresford and Hurst (I 971), Hoskins (1957), Laslett (1965) and Saville (1957). Geographers have paid attention to many landscape features associated with this impact, such as the survival of ridge-and-furrow and the building of canals and railways. Nevertheless, the student of geography who is interested more specifically in the relationship between economy and community must hunt up articles scattered through a wide range of journals, some of them of limited circulation. In bringing together a selection of such articles, I hope I shall at one and the same time shorten the student's search and stimulate him to extend it wider afield in the bibliography provided. A further hope is that those many students who write dissertations on small localities will find between these covers some of the guidance they may need, in the form of methodology by example. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which is concerned with some of the effects of specialised forms of agriculture on rural communities, landscapes and spatial patterns since the fifteenth cen tury. For reasons that are made clear below, the middle part of the For references to this Introduction. see page 26. 10 Introduction book is made up of readings on industrial aspects of the subject, while the final part is devoted to mobility. Increased mobility of goods and people was a pre-condition of increased specialisation, but its greatest effects have been felt in the century and a quarter since the railway network was established. In order then to provide a very broad chronological sequence, the three readings illustrating mobility have been placed at the end of the book. METHODOLOGY Early geographical studies of rural settlements placed a heavy emphasis on environmental determinism. Characteristic of this phase were investigations into the relationships between geology, soils, water supply, drainage and vegetation on the one hand and settlement patterns on the other. Not surprisingly, these investigations concen trated on the earlier periods of our history, before the advance of technology apparently liberated Man from close reliance on Nature. The doctrine of possibilism admitted that Man was a free agent, having the wit to make a choice between one location and another, with the result that he did not always finish up with settlement patterns logical in terms of the physical environment. Thus since 1945 historical geography and related disciplines have explored many aspects of cultural systems that render more intelligible the locational decisions of the past, within the English countryside and elsewhere. In some way or other most of the readings in this book belong to this school of thought, among others. For instance, the estate system is prominent in Thorpe's paper; the technological system of agriculture in Gleave's; family farming as a social system in Williams; the social structure of a factory village in Tarn's and the poor law system in my own paper on Nottinghamshire. Now it is fair to say that probably none of the authors concerned consciously wrote their papers to exemplify the technique of study known as systems analysis, with its highly conscious structuring of in formation and its striving for generalisations. The geographical study of rural communities is a highly complex field, since such a wide range of physical and cultural factors make their influence felt on settlement patterns. Moreover, in the case of rural settlements geographical iner tia has been so strong that it is quite impossible to arrive at a satisfac tory geographical explanation for any given date without referring back to the earlier history of an area. This is one of the principal
The list of books you might like
