Landscape Hist 28

Historical study of the period between 1220 and 1349, during which groups of people destroyed enclosure banks, hedges and fences in defence of their common rights. Many law suits were provoked by encroachments on common pastures. This reflected the importance of an enclosure movement which had its main impact in wooded, upland or wetland landscapes. It led to large areas being taken out of common use, and a growing proportion of land being controlled by individuals. The beneficiaries of enclosure included the lords of manors, but also landholders below the gentry. The opponents of the movement had some success in preserving areas of common pasture.

The paper considers how, from the sixteenth century, antiquarians regarded the `savage' inhabitants of remote `uncivilised' countries as a model for the inhabitants and the landscape of ancient Britain. It is argued that, at the end of the nineteenth century, important figures in the newly emerging discipline of archaeology were influenced both by contemporary accounts of equatorial Africa and the tenets of Darwinism. This led them to propose that the apparent concentration of prehistoric monuments on chalk and limestone uplands resulted from the whole of prehistoric lowland Britain being covered by a dense, impenetrable and uninhabitable jungle, which remained in existence until it was cleared by the Anglo-Saxons. This model, although contested by some from the 1930s onwards, remained a central tenet of archaeological thought until the 1970s, by which time evidence from palaeobotany, aerial survey and surface collection rendered it untenable.