The W G Hoskins Lecture 2002

‘The Perception of the Landscape in Early Modern England’ presented by Professor Sir Keith Thomas.

The thirteenth Hoskins lecture

Professor Sir Keith Thomas had known Hoskins in the 1950s – Hoskins had spent fourteen years in Oxford between his two bouts in Leicester – and he began and ended his lecture with personal reminiscences of Hoskins the man and Hoskins the historian. He recalled Hoskins’ down-to-earth approach, his dislike of generalisations, and his dislike of the ‘landscape as scenery’ approach; for him landscape was history, where fieldwork, together with research into documents, could provide clues and information to make possible the recreation of the past

Professor Thomas’ title was ‘The perception of the landscape in Early Modem England’, and his focus was the period 1570 -1770, which Hoskins had considered to be rural England at its peak, going downhill thereafter. Professor Thomas reminded us how nostalgic Hoskins could sound about this vanishing England, quoting he belief that the 20th century had destroyed and ‘uglifled’ the landscape and produced ‘foul and joyless towns’. (Alan Everitt, however, produced a footnote to this during questions at the end of the lecture describing how Hoskins had shown him, with evident pleasure, a Victorian church, and adding ‘His lack of constancy was part of his charm’.)

The central theme of the lecture was that there was never any single perception of the landscape from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries: it depended on the point-of-view of the observer, or, very different, of the inhabitant. In the seventeenth century ‘landscape’, or more usually ‘landskip’, was a new term, introduced by artists, referring to the background to pictures, or to a painted ‘prospect’: ‘landskips’ were always the product of art not nature. By the 1620s pictures of ‘landskips’ were being produced, some realistic and topographical, some idealized and Arcadian, such as those of Rubais and Claude.

Professor Thomas illustrated his lecture with a fascinating and eclectic range of references from contemporary and classical writings (too many for this reviewer, with no shorthand, to capture more than a passing few). He showed how the idea of ‘landscape’ implied an aesthetic response in the viewer: 17th century travellers such as Celia Fiennes described the countryside through which they passed as ‘landskips’, as if they were pictures; and poets of the same period we similarly influenced by painters, so that there was a common currency of what was, or should be, admirable by the educated elite. Ideas here were as important as what actually appeared on the ground: the new landscape gardens and parks could only be appreciated by the educated elite who carried the cultural baggage – the classical education and the knowledge of painting – which enabled the recognition of the Arcadia before them. The spectator’s stance, recognizing the references to classical landscapes, opened a social gap between the viewer and the view: the spectator was emphatically not in the landscape, and the working inhabitants were preferably out of sight.

The 17th-century fashion for ‘prospects’ and panoramas seen from high hills had been foreshadowed by medieval enjoyment of views revealed in such names as ‘Beaumont’ and ‘Belvoir’. The Elizabethans had a taste for fine prospects too, but in the seventeenth century it was implied that a ‘good view’ could be appreciated by anyone, but a ‘fine prospect’ could only be appreciated by someone of taste, someone who would notice its variety, its harmony and its extent. The medieval hortus conclusus went out of fashion as it became more important to see a greater extent of the surrounding countryside, and in the seventeenth century new houses were built high on hills, with commanding views (and also weather), when previous generations had sought sheltering valleys. Large houses commanding the heights exuded authority and power, overlooking lower and socially inferior houses.

Professor Thomas cited Camden, among others, whose ideal of landscape was an extensive garden, an ordered, regular, tidy and looked-after place, with the hand of man everywhere in evidence. Agricultural improvers shared the preference for a busy, tilled and ‘smiling’ countryside, for practical reasons, but whose advocacy of expanding tillage into marginal land was also based on the shared aesthetic that an uncultivated common was ‘horrid and unpleasant’.

Champion country had its own appeal for the upper classes, as it was good for hunting, hawking and recreation, but Professor Thomas pointed out that this unenclosed landscape, especially where it included heaths and commons, provided a living for the lower classes of poor cottagers, who therefore were unlikely to share the post-1700 educated and dismissive view of this sort of uncultivated land. However, many rocky and mountainous backgrounds were to be found in idealized painted ‘landskips’, and Professor Thomas had found late seventeenth-century writing which enthused about mountains, following biblical and classical sources: this was a hundred years before the Romantic movement, and showed that ‘mountain mysticism had arrived’.

Turning to those whose livelihood depended on the countryside, and pointing out that the view of those on foot was important, and fundamentally different to that of the rider on horseback, Professor Thomas quoted George Bourn (Sturt) and Wordsworth, among others, who described, in different ways, how all aspects of the landscape were important to the farm labourer: he was part of it, and fitted into it. Many ancient field-names were redolent of the attitudes of past generations of workers – names such as “Starveall’, and the like. Many arguments pro and anti-enclosure in the period of parliamentary bills had revealed strong historical knowledge and an inherited memory of what relics in the landscape meant to the community: Old men’s memories had been raided for information about the significance of old ridge-and-furrow, barrows, deserted settlements and so an. As an aside, Professor Thomas noted that some knowledge degenerated over years into myth, as in the many stories of stone circles having originated as petrified dancers; never-the-less the popular perception of the landscape had a historical perspective: the landscape was a human creation, and a ‘recognizable archive of previous experience’

By way of his own childhood, growing up in agricultural Wales, and spending much time in the company of a farm labourer and his son, both of whom were deeply knowledgeable about, and in tune with, the landscape they inhabited and worked in, Professor Thomas returned to W.G. Hoskins, finding that an historical awareness of landscape was already in existence amongst yeoman farmers, such as Hoskins’ forebears, long before the invention of ‘landscape history’.

This as an enormously wide-ranging lecture in the scope of its references, and much enjoyed by all.

From an original report by Deborah Hayter.