The Making of the English Landscape

The Making of the English Landscape is a 1954 book by the English local historian William George Hoskins. The book is also the introductory volume in a series of the same name which deals with the English Landscape county by county. It is illustrated with 82 monochrome plates, mostly photographs by Hoskins himself, and 17 maps or plans. It has appeared in at least 35 editions and reprints in English and other languages. The book is a landscape history of England and a seminal text in that discipline and in local history. The brief history of some one thousand years is widely used in local and environmental history courses. Hoskins defines the theme of the book in the first chapter, arguing that a landscape historian needs to use botany, physical geography and natural history as well as historical knowledge to interpret any given scene fully. The remaining chapters describe how the English landscape was formed from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, starting c.450 AD, and looking in detail at the mediaeval landscape, the depopulation following the Black Death, the Tudor period through to the splendour of the Georgian period, the parliamentary enclosures that affected much of the English midlands, the Industrial Revolution, the development of road, canal, and railway transport networks, and finally the growth of towns from Norman times onwards. There is little mention of cities. The concluding chapter, however, laments the damage done to the English countryside by "the villainous requirements of the new age" such as military airfields and arterial roads, describes the new England as barbaric, and invites the reader to contemplate the past. The work has been widely admired, but also described as grandly emotive, populist, and openly anti-modernist. Writers have praised the book for helping them understand and interpret the landscape in which they lived.

Book

Overview The introduction sets out Hoskins' stall with "No book exists to describe the manner in which the various landscapes of this country came to assume the shape and appearance they now have", mentioning geology ("only one aspect of the subject"), the clearing of woodlands, the reclaiming of moor and marsh, the creation of fields, roads, towns, country houses, mines, canals and railways: "in short, with everything that has altered the natural landscape."

Editions and translations

The first edition was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1954. They reprinted the book in 1956, 1957, 1960, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1974, 1977. They issued a new edition in 1988, a revised edition in 1992, and a new edition in 2005, reissued in 2006. They published Korean and Japanese editions in 2008. In 1970, Penguin Books published a paperback Pelican edition in England and a Penguin edition in the United States. Penguin reprinted in 1973, 1974, 1975, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988, 1991, and 2005. From 1977 onwards, further editions were published in England by Book Club Associates, Coronet Books, Teach Yourself Books, the Folio Society, and Little Toller books.

Illustrations The book is illustrated with 82 monochrome plates and 17 maps or plans, all uncredited except for some use of Ordnance Survey maps, and so apparently the work of Hoskins himself. These are closely integrated into the text; for example, the text in chapter 1 is accompanied by a pair of diagrams showing how a holloway ('hollow way') could be formed by the digging of a "double ditch", i.e. a pair of raised earth banks either side of a ditch to mark the boundary of two estates, and supported by a photograph (Plate 13) of a sunken lane in Devon, explained by Hoskins as a boundary, from probably the 7th century, between the Saxon estates of (royal) Silverton and Exeter Abbey. The photograph shows high hedgebanks in bright sunshine, dwarfing the figure of a woman in the middle distance.

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