Abstract
This book investigates the invention of the ‘countryside’ in England between the Game Act of 1671 and its repeal in 1831. For it was during this period of most controversial game legislation that ‘countryside’ ceased to refer to a specific side — east or west, north or south — of a piece of country, or a river valley, or a range of hills, and became ‘the countryside’, an imaginary, generalized space. Henceforth ‘countryside’ would connote not specific, local but aesthetic, global ‘natural unity’ (OED). ‘The countryside’ became a favorite word of descriptive writers.
How much English poetry depends upon English hunting this is not the place to enquire.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Jack Mytton’ (1926)
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Notes
See Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 1–3,
and Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 3–4. Jeremy Burchardt makes a similar argument to mine, that ‘the concept of “the countryside” came into being’ when rural landscape began to be experienced as ‘an object of consumption, rather than as a means of production’, in Urban Perceptions and Rural Realities: Attitudes to the Countryside in England 1800–2000 (forthcoming 2001). My thanks to him for letting me read the book in manuscript.
On the rivalry with France as a cultural solidifier of the English, Welsh, Scots and, most problematically, the Irish, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1701–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992),
and Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987).
Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 4.
Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), 3: 326; quoted in Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 1. See also Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993);
and Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989).
Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689–1798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 9.
For a summary of economic and social change during this period, see Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward, ‘Introduction: The Country and the City Revisited, c. 1550–1850’, in MacLean, Landry, and Ward, eds, The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–23.
See also Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in The Provincial Town 1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989).
Howard Newby, Country Life: A Social History of Rural England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), p. 34.
Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Cultural and Social History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), p. 17,
and J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 40, 170.
David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 160.
Pope, An Essay on Man (1733–34), Maynard Mack, ed., vol. 3: 1 (1950), The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, gen. ed. John Butt, 11 vols (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939–69). All quotations from Pope’s poetry are from the Twickenham text. For convenience see John Butt, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text With Selected Annotations (London: Methuen, 1963).
Barrell, ‘The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Simon Pugh, ed., Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 19–40; this passage p. 29.
Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982), p. 82.
Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1993), p. 98, n. 3.
Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume V.ii., 1640–1750: Agrarian Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 371.
Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 32.
On Whig versus Tory landscape aesthetics, see Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994).
On nationally connected county gentry versus locally minded parish gentry, see Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England 1540–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). On Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, see David Loewenstein, ‘Digger Writing and Rural Dissent in the English Revolution: Representing England as a Common Treasury’, in MacLean, Landry and Ward, eds, Country and City Revisited, pp. 74–88.
On Walpole’s use of the game laws for prosecuting political dissidents, see E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975).
Stephen Deuchar, Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 156. On the poaching wars and man traps, see Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers, pp. 62–75.
Nigel Duckers and Huw Davies, A Place in the Country: Social Change in Rural England (London: Michael Joseph, 1990), p. 11.
On pre-eighteenth-century agrarian complaint, see James G. Turner, The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978),
and Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
On pre-eighteenth-century sympathy for hunted animals, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (London and New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 1.
See Langford, Propertied Englishman, pp. 1–70, and Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 127–86.
Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 134.
Patterson, Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 15–16.
R. O[verton], Mans Mortallitie (Amsterdam, 1644); Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Houndmills and London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 153, 156.
On the doctrine of similitudes, which preceded Enlightenment taxonomies of species and so on, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Eng. trans. of Les Mots et les choses (1966) (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 17–45.
For example, Alexander Pope argued ‘Against Barbarity to Animals’, in The Guardian, No. 61, Thursday, 21 May 1713; Norman Ault, ed., The Prose Works of Alexander Pope: Vol. I. The Earlier Works, 1711–1720 (1936; rpt New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968), pp. 107–14. The clergyman James Granger offered remarkably similar arguments in An Apology for the Brute Creation, or Abuse of Animals censured; In a Sermon on Proverbs xii. 10. Preached in the Parish Church of Shiplake, in Oxfordshire, October 18, 1772 (London: Printed for T. Davies and Sold by W. Goldsmith, 1772). Moira Ferguson has worked most extensively on connections between anti-slavery and anti-cruelty movements; see ‘Breaking in Englishness: Black Beauty and the Politics of Gender, Race and Class’, Women: A Cultural Review 5: 1 (1994): 34–52, and Animal Advocacy and Englishwomen, 1780–1900: Patriots, Nation, and Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).
See John Lawrence, ‘On the Rights of Beasts’, A Philosophical And Practical Treatise On Horses and on the Moral Duties Of Man towards The Brute Creation (London: T. Longman, 1796), pp. 117–63. Animal rights are satirized in Thomas Taylor’s parodic A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (1792); see Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 30–3, and 13–56 for the wider context.
Coleridge, ‘To a Young Ass, Its Mother Being Tethered Near It’, in Ernest Hartley Coleridge, ed., Coleridge: Poetical Works (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 11. 1, 26–8, and n., p. 75. David Perkins contextualizes the poem in ‘Compassion for Animals and Radical Politics: Coleridge’s “To a Young Ass”’, English Literary History 65: 4 (Winter 1998): 929–44. I disagree with his conclusion that Coleridge was only a half-hearted democrat, and that the ‘poem laughs apologetically at its own silliness’, p. 940. Coleridge anxiously feared reprisals against his Pantisocratic views, but that did not mean those views lacked conviction.
On the class-related aspects of anti-cruelty, see Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 152–7 and 172–3; and Ritvo, Animal Estate, pp. 130–53.
Carr, English Fox Hunting, pp. 195–214, 246–56; and David C. Itzkowitz, Peculiar Privilege: A Social History of English Foxhunting 1753–1885 (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), pp. 135–50.
Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 21.
Colin D.B. Ellis, Leicestershire and the Quorn Hunt (Leicester: Edgar Backus, 1951), pp. 14–15;
Eric Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1967), pp. 311–25; and Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History V.ii., pp. 577–8.
Elspeth Moncrieff with Stephen and Iona Joseph, Farm Animal Portraits (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1996), pp. 231, 234–5.
Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History V.ii., pp. 577–8. On the early importation of ‘arabs, turks, and barbs’, see Peter Edwards, The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 40–1.
See, out of many possible sources, the chapters on thoroughbred lineages derived from the three foundation sires, the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian and the Byerley Turk, in Silk and Scarlet, by The Druid [H. H. Dixon] (London: Vinton, 1859; new edn 1895), pp. 156–242. The best scholarly study of horses in East-West relations is the chapter, ‘Managing the Infidel: Equestrian Art on its Mettle’, in Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion and Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 132–85. For ‘Orientalism’, see Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; London and New York: Penguin, 1995), who does not discuss horse-breeding.
See, for example, David Levine, ed., Proletarianization and Family History (London and Orlando: Academic Press, 1984),
and, for a useful critique, Rab Houston and K.D.M. Snell, ‘Proto-Industrialization? Cottage Industry, Social Change, and Industrial Revolution’, The Historical Journal 27: 2 (1984): 473–92.
Wordie, ‘Introduction’, in C.W. Chalklin and J.R. Wordie, eds, Town and Countryside: The English Landowner in the National Economy, 1660–1860 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 1–25; this passage p. 19.
Bunce, The Countryside Ideal: Anglo-American Images of Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 34.
Clare, [The Fens], in Eric Robinson and David Powell, eds, Oxford Authors: John Clare (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 11.77–84. Quotations from Clare’s verse will be from this edition unless otherwise noted.
Eric Robinson, ed., John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), pp. 9–10.
See reports in The Sporting Magazine of carted stag-hunting with George III’s hounds at Windsor, for example, for October 1796 in vol. 9 (1797), pp. 6–8. The Rothschilds still hunted carted stags at Waddesdon in Buckinghamshire in the early years of the twentieth century; Simon Blow, Fields Elysian: A Portrait of Hunting Society (London and Melbourne: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1983), p. 69.
W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1955; London and New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 196.
Around 1830, the third horn or ‘leaping head’ was introduced, attributed to a Frenchman, Jules Charles Pellier, or to an Englishman, Thomas Oldaker. For Pellier, see Stephanie Grant, ‘Evolution of the Amazone in Life and Literature’, National Sporting Library Newsletter 7 (December 1978): 1–2, 4–5; this passage p. 1.
For Oldaker, see Charles Chenevix Trench, A History of Horsemanship (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 277. On women’s relegation to spectators rather than participants in field sports, beginning in the late eighteenth century, see Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers, pp. 38–9, 200, n. 64. I have analyzed the significance of the side-saddle extensively in a forthcoming manuscript, The Making of the English Hunting Seat.
Trollope, ed., British Sports and Pastimes (London: Virtue & Co., 1868), p. 74.
Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; Canto edn, 1992), p. 1.
See C.E. Hare, The Language of Sport (London: Country Life, 1939), pp. 32–3, 39, 43, 117, n. 2.
David W. Macdonald, Fran H. Tattersall, Paul J. Johnson, Chris Carbone, Jonathan C. Reynolds, Jochen Langbein, Steve P. Rushton and Mark D.F. Shirley, Managing British Mammals: Case Studies from the Hunting Debate (Oxford: Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, 2000), pp. vi, x, 39, 46.
All quotations from Wordsworth’s poetry will be, unless otherwise stated, from Stephen Gill, ed., Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
McKeon, ‘The Pastoral Revolution’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 267–89; this passage p. 289.
De Bruyn A, ‘From Virgilian Georgic to Agricultural Science: An Instance in the Transvaluation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Albert J. Rivero, ed., Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honor of Martin C. Battestin (Newark, DE and London: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1997), pp. 47–67; this passage p. 53.
Laura Caroline Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 16, 140–1.
Margaret Grainger, ed., The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), Appendix Va, ‘Volumes in Clare’s Library relating to Natural and Garden History’, p. 359.
James S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1985; Bollingen Series 35: 34 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 9.
Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1989).
Tom Stephenson, Forbidden Land (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 57.
Kathleen Coburn, ed., The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1957–73), 1 (Text): entry 760 (June–July 1800).
On the sexual politics of the picturesque, see Vivien Jones, ‘“The coquetry of nature”: Politics and the Picturesque in Women’s Fiction’, in Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape, and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 120–44.
Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 63–4.
Massingham, Remembrance: An Autobiography (London: Batsford, 1941), pp. 20–1.
On Massingham, see Patrick Wright, ‘An Encroachment Too Far’, in Anthony Barnett and Roger Scruton, eds, Town and Country (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), pp. 18–33.
John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 89.
See the episode described in Grainger, ed., Natural History Prose Writings, p. 234, and the fine essay by John Goodridge and Kelsey Thornton, ‘John Clare: The Trespasser’, in Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield, eds, John Clare in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 87–129.
Eric Robinson and David Powell, eds, John Clare By Himself (Ashington, Northumberland and Manchester: Mid-NAG/Carcanet Press, 1996), pp. 83–4.
Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 72–3.
See Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, Property and Landscape: A Social History of Land Ownership and the English Countryside (London: George Philip, 1987), p. 205,
and Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 131–2.
Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), pp. 26, 4–5. By contrast with the Planned, what Rackham calls the Ancient Countryside is the product of at least 1,000 years of continuity, and most of it has altered little since 1700. A country of hamlets and ancient isolated farms, ancient mixed irregular hedges, many footpaths, winding lanes and sunken drovers’ roads, many small woodlands and ponds and patches of heath, the Ancient, or anciently enclosed, Countryside contrasts strikingly with the ‘England of big villages, few, busy roads, thin hawthorn hedges, windswept brick farms, and ivied clumps of trees in corners of fields’, a ‘mass-produced, drawing-board landscape, hurriedly laid out parish by parish’, pp. 4–5.
Macdonald, Running with the Fox (New York and Oxford: Facts on File Publications, 1987), p. 173.
Sandra E. Baker and David W. Macdonald, ‘Foxes and Fox-hunting on Farms in Wiltshire: A Case Study’, Journal of Rural Studies 16 (2000): 185–201.
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© 2001 Donna Landry
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Landry, D. (2001). Inventing the Countryside: An Introduction. In: The Invention of the Countryside. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287570_1
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