Hoskins's England Class 1: Unravished England

W.G. Hoskins and the Making of the English Landscape

Class 1. Unravished England

Tutor: Keith Challis

hoskins-england.blogspot.co.uk

W.G Hoskins

Hoskins’ England hoskins-england.blogspot.co.uk

Professor W G Hoskins CBE1908-1992

The Making of the English Landscape (1955)

'This is one of those rare books that can produce a permanent and delightful enlargement of consciousness' (New Statesman)

Immemorial England


Class Summary

• Admin and Housekeeping• Personal Introduction• Course Outline• What is landscape?

• Coffee Break (11- 11.15 ish)

• Hoskins, his life, work and influence• Introducing The Making of the English

Landscape


Admin and Housekeeping

Practicalities

• Facilities at the Mechanics'

• Enrolment paperwork and payment (Nikki)

• Register

• Absence ([email protected]) or Phone/Txt 07921457007

• What to bring

• Handouts (paperless course?)


mailto:[email protected]

Personal Introduction

About Me• Research Associate, Department

of Archaeology, University of York

• Research Fellow in Remote Sensing, University of Birmingham

• Research Officer, York Archaeological Trust

• Research Associate, University of Nottingham

• 13 years project management and commercial archaeological consultancy at Trent & Peak Archaeology


My Interests

• Remote Sensing– Lidar– Airborne MS/HS imagery

– Satellite applications in cultural heritage

• Heritage– Alluvial geoarchaeology– Medieval landscapes

• GI Science

– Predictive modelling– Social media

• Visualisation– Landscape, narrative, – Computer games


Course Outline

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the role and importance of W.G. Hoskins in English Landscape studies

• Appreciate the broad chronological development of the English Landscape

• Appreciate the development of landscape studies after Hoskins, in particular what characterises contrasting modernist and post modern approaches to landscape

• Appreciate how our perception of landscape underpins national identity

• Identify and explain evidence for landscape development in the field and on cartographic and photographic sources


Course Outline• Class 1: Unravished England.

25th January

• Class 2: Darkening Hills. 1st FebruaryReading Chapter 1

• Class 3: Becoming a Land of Villages. 8th FebruaryReading Chapter 2

• Class 4: Awaiting the sound of a human voce. 15th FebruaryReading Chapters 3 an 4

• Class 5: An Excess of Sheep. 22nd FebruaryReading Chapter 5

• Class 6: A Curse Upon the Land. 1st MarchReading Chapter 6

• Class 7: A Desirable Spot to Build Upon. 8th MarchReading Chapter 7

• Class 8 and 9 (Field Trip to Laxton) Saturday 16th March 2pm

• Class 10: An Unexpected Street. 22nd MarchReading Chapter 9


Learning Experience• Informal Lecture

• Seminar Discussion


• Group Project (Applied skills)

Group Project

Understanding Laxton:

Village and Fields Research

• Archaeological Evidence

• Aerial Photography

• Historic cartography

• Documents

• Fieldwork


Field Trip

An afternoon in Laxton (with muddy boots)


Reading and Books


Aston, M. 1985. Interpreting the Landscape: Landscape Archaeology and Local History.

Hoskins, W.G. 1955. The Making of the English Landscape.

Johnston, M. 2006. Ideas of Landscape.

Tilley, C. 1997. A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments.

Reading and Books


Course bookshop (Amazon)

http://astore.amazon.co.uk/hoskins-21

Course Web Site


• Lecture Slides

• Downloadable handouts

• Bookshop

• Resources

• Supplementary Material

• Answers

hoskins-england.blogspot.co.uk

What is Landscape?

Defining Landscape

• Your Ideas?


Defining Landscape

Notable Quotes (Theory of Landscape)

• ‘Landscape is a kind of backcloth to the whole stage of human activity’. (Appleton 1975).

• ‘Landscape is not merely an aesthetic background to life, rather it is a setting that both expresses and conditions cultural attitudes and activities….’ (Relph 1976).


Defining Landscape

Notable Quotes (Studying Landscape)

• ‘The list of specialist skills associated with landscape research is a daunting one…It concerns a special aptitude for looking at shapes and recognising how fragmentary lines in the landscape can be identified, expanded, linked and converted into shapes which emerge as former polities or furlongs or routeways or elements of settlements.’ (Muir 2000, xv).

• ‘The landscape itself is very complex – a series of interconnecting systems, with people at the centre. It has always been so and we need to become, very early on in our work, allergic to simplistic explanations for features we can see and changes we can infer’. (Aston 1985, 20).


Defining Landscape

Notable Quotes (Hoskins’s view)

• ‘The English landscape itself, to those who know how to read it aright, is the richest historical record we possess…To write its history requires a combination of documentary research and of fieldwork, of laborious scrambling on foot wherever the trail may lead’. (Hoskins 1955, 14-15).

• ‘One needs to be a botanist, a physical geographer, and a naturalist, as well as an historian, to be able to feel certain that one has all the facts right before allowing the imagination to play over the small details of a scene.’ (Hoskins 1955, 19).


Elements of Landscape




Ridge and Furrow

Motte and Bailey

Watercourse

Village

Field Boundaries

Farm


Natural

• Topography

• Rivers and streams

• Vegetation

• Weather



Anthropogenic

• Settlement• Buildings• Routeways• Fields• Ceremonial Places• Changes to the natural



Social

• Meaning = function

• Home

• Abroad

• Waste

• Outland


Approaches to Landscape

Theoretical

Processual (Modernist)• Concerned with the processes of cultural change…• and the appropriate objective methods used to study them• Explanation is scientific through the construction and testing of hypotheses

and general observations

Post-Processual (Post Modern)• Contextual archaeology landscapes as a text to be decoded• Reflexivity - Ability to change methods as you work• Knowledge stems from the dialogue between subject

(archaeologist) and object (landscape)• Rejection of concept of ‘objective reality




“To understand a landscape truly it must be felt, but to convey some of this feeling to others it has to be talked about, recounted, or written and depicted."

Chris Tilley


Empirical (The English School)

• The real work [in the study of landscape] is accomplished by the men and women with the muddy boots and aching joints who do most of the work (Muir 2000)

• [The author’s] hobby is exploring England on foot, a pursuit of inexhaustible interest in which he reckons to make at least one major “discovery” each week (Hoskins 1954)


Coffee Break

Hoskins, his life, work and influence

Early Life

• Professor William George Hoskins was born on 22nd May 1908 at 54 St David's Hill, Exeter.

• His father, another William George, was a master baker.

• The young Hoskins won a scholarship at the age of ten for Heles School, before attending the University College of the South West, now Exeter University


Hoskins in Exeter c.1930

Leicester

• Hoskins began his academic career at the University College of Leicester between 1931-41 and 1946-51, as a Lecturer in Economics, and from 1948 as a Reader in English Local History at Leicester.

• From 1964 until 1968 he was the Hatton Professor (Emeritus) of English History at Leicester.


Oxford

• Hoskins was a Reader in Economic History at Oxford University from 1951 until 1965

• He disliked Oxford

• During this period he wrote and published his most significant works including Devon, published in 1954 and considered to be the finest modern county history and The Making of the English Landscape published in 1955


The BBC and After• On retirement he returned to his

native Exeter.

• Hoskins made two TV series for the BBC, the first in 1972 based on 'The Making of the English Landscape' and the second in 1976, called The Landscape of England.

• The Sunday Times included Hoskins in their 1991 1,000 Makers of the 20th Century.

• He died on 11th January 1992 at Cullompton, and his ashes were scattered in the meadows of Brampford Speke.


Publication

• Hoskins published extensively in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society both before and after the War

• Much of his work explored local themes in Leicestershire history and made the academic transition from economic to local history.

• His most productive period, in the 1950s, was crowned by his bestselling Making of the English Landscape

• His later publications, especially for the BBC, sought to popularise his approach to local history and fieldwork


Introducing The Making of the English Landscape

The Making of the English Landscape

Structure

• After a brief introduction Landscapes is a fairly conventional period and thematic based exploration of the English landscape

• Hoskins made use of extensive illustration to carry his arguments about landscape. The impression is of an intimately known and exhaustively explored England

• In his introduction and especially in his concluding chapter Hoskins expounds is views on the antiquity of the English landscape



Key Themes - Antiquity

• Hoskins key themes were the Antiquity of the English Landscape “most of England is a thousand years old, and in a walk of a few miles one would touch nearly every century”

• Later he expanded this view with the realisation that “everything in the landscape is older than we think”



Key Themes - Diversity

• Hoskins was keen to stress the regional diversity of the English landscape and the variety of historical and social processes that had formed this regional variation



Key Themes – The craft of the landscape historian

• Implicit in most of his writing is what can best be described as the craft of the landscape historian.

• This emphasised fieldwork, especially walking the landscape, the primacy of local knowledge and exploration of diverse sources (documents, maps, place-names).

• The successful historian assembled a narrative that explained the observable facets of landscape, explaining what of the past could be seen in the present.



Context

• As Hoskins himself pointed out his book was the first to explore a narrative history of the English landscape

• His revolutionary idea was to expose and explain the antiquity of much of the countryside, previously thought to be a product of 18th and 19th century enclosure

• This had great resonance in an age of post-war change and wholesale urban and rural renewal



Influence

• Landscapes was a critical and popular success.

• Its focus on the timeless antiquity of the English landscape was taken up by the burgeoning conservation movement and reiterated in his two 1970s TV series

• His approach to landscape studies enthused and informed a new generation of academics in their study of landscape.

• His narrative, fieldwork focused approach has defined English landscape archaeology ever since and underpins diverse approaches to landscape from English Heritage, to Time Team to Historic Landscape Characterisation


Further Study

Suggested Reading

Hoskins, WG. 1955. The Making of the English Landscape. Especially introduction an chapter 10

Johnson, M. 2007. Ideas of Landscape. Especially chapters 1 and 3.

Self Study Themes

Landscapes chapter 1 for next week!


Education

Hoskins's England Class 1: Unravished England