Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 282

The field of landscape history has long been dominated by a preoccupation with tracing the ways in which the emergence of agrarian capitalism and associated economic processes steadily and inexorably transformed the physical environments occupied by people in the past. Nicola Whyte’s important and pioneering book challenges this prevailing paradigm through a close study of the county of Norfolk. It forges a fruitful link between recent theoretical approaches to the landscape as a cultural construct and perspectives and arguments that have been a hallmark of influential work on the social history of early modern England over the last two decades. The result is a monograph that significantly recasts our understanding of both the making of the post-medieval landscape and the spatial dimensions of the formation of social and economic identities and relationships between 1500 and 1800. Through skilful examination of two key sources – cartographical material surviving in local and national archives and records from the central law courts – Whyte is able to reconstruct in revealing detail how the early modern inhabitants of East Anglia perceived, negotiated, and appropriated the material world surrounding them. The keynotes of her analysis are an emphasis on the agency of the populace at large in shaping the rural environment and recognition of the capacity of the landscape to function as a powerful catalyst and stimulus to custom, right, and memory. Reacting against the tendency to regard the landscape as merely a passive backdrop to structural forces that fundamentally altered its use and reconfigured class relations, Whyte paints a picture of the complex interactions and conflicts that occurred between individuals of all social ranks over the spaces and places that they inhabited and traversed.

Chapter two of the book examines the extent to which the Reformation altered the spatial framework of sixteenth-century spiritual topographies, not merely by eliminating many reminders of the Catholic Church that demarcated the landscape – monasteries, chantries, hermitages, pilgrimage chapels and wayside crosses – but also by re-orienting religious practice more firmly around a reduced number of parish churches. Whyte’s findings about Protestantism’s ‘rationalisation’ of the traditional foci of religious and liturgical life are particularly striking and have implications that call for further investigation. Chapter three explores the effects of administrative developments that led to the growing encroachment of the Tudor and Stuart state on local communities, notably through the consolidation of the parish as an instrument of welfare provision and jurisdiction. It also highlights the gradual transformation of Rogationtide perambulations from a religious ritual into a mechanism for demarcating parochial boundaries and articulating rights and responsibilities. In chapter four, Whyte turns to the local ‘geographies of custom and right’, and shows how enclosure and other changes in land use fostered networks of association that cut across conventional socio-economic divides. In contrast with accounts predicated on a polarity between ambitious and avaricious landowners and subjugated tenants and commoners, she underlines the extent to which enclosure and other changes in land use could result in alliances as well as clashes and tensions. Chapter five assesses how physical landmarks surviving from the past were assimilated into new matrices of belief and action. The ‘afterlives’ of standing crosses as territorial markers, of saints’ days as critical junctures in the agricultural calendar, and of prehistoric barrows as sites for the interment of the deviant dead, illuminate the manner in which material relics and remains affected the lives of future generations. In a culture of limited literacy and vibrant orality, such physical structures were critical in shaping contemporary outlooks.

Sensitive, nuanced, and persuasive, Inhabiting the landscape demonstrates how local and micro-history can illuminate larger questions about religious, social and economic change. Straddling the boundaries between landscape and social history, Whyte’s book has significant implications for scholars in both fields and should help to encourage greater dialogue between them. Its publication coincides with a kind of ‘spatial turn’ in historical studies that is gathering momentum. A model of interdisciplinary endeavour, it also sets a fresh conceptual agenda and a methodological example that deserves wider emulation.