Читать книгу The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings - Simon Thurley - Страница 7

Leaving behind some of the problems of this enterprise, I now want to turn to some overarching ideas that affect the whole story I have to tell. They will be covered in more detail in the following chapters, but a few moments’ consideration here will, I think, help set the scene.

Let us start with England. It is small. France covers 212,209 square miles; England covers only 50,333. It is on an island but is not itself an island, accounting for 57 per cent of a landmass also occupied by Wales and Scotland. As an offshore island, on the edge of a continent, Britain has an extraordinarily rich geology. Pumped, pummelled and folded by tectonic activity for three billion years, it has a variety of underlying strata not found on a great landmass. A traveller across the United States might go for hundreds of miles before noting a change in scenery; in most parts of England changes come thick and fast, influenced by over seven hundred types of soil and their underlying geology. England is the most fertile and easily cultivated part of Britain: only 13 per cent of its land is upland (i.e. over 600ft); in Wales and in Scotland the figures are 42 per cent and 48 per cent respectively. Yet England itself is divided into lowlands and uplands by a line that runs between Teesmouth and Torquay. This is a fundamental determining factor in both agriculture and building. In general terms, in the lowlands farming is arable and in the uplands livelihoods are maintained by grazing livestock. Upland or lowland, England is an extremely fertile country with a temperate climate, and the successful and innovative practice of agriculture, in a variety of guises, was a crucial factor in its early economic development.

The Customs House, King’s Lynn, Norfolk – a building for merchants, built by merchants to advance sea trade.

What lay beneath the fertile meadows and ploughed soils later came, perhaps, to be even more important. From the early Middle Ages the presence of flint, slate, limestone, brickearth and millstone grit, to name a few, influenced the form and appearance of man-made structures; but, decisive in England’s history, was the exploitation of clay, salt, metal ores and, particularly, huge amounts of coal. It was coal, extracted at first for the domestic needs of Londoners but later to power industrial production, that was first to transform Britain and then the world.

The geographic and geological distinctiveness of England, the individuality of its regional building traditions and the diversity of its economy make it hard to write a history of English building. Some recent books have acknowledged this, taking a regional approach and declining to paint a national picture.¹² This is welcome, as generalisations about change in any one period in any one place are almost certain to be compromised by examples taken from other parts of the country. Yet it is possible to paint a national picture and desirable to do so. This book relies on the fact that the diversity of building in England means that although national generalisations might not be quite right, they are equally likely not to be completely wrong.

The Roman historian Tacitus wrote of Britain that ‘nowhere does the sea hold wider sway … in its ebb and flow, [it] is not held by the coast, but passes deep inland and winds about, pushing in among highlands and mountains, as if in its own domain.’ It was up Britain’s rivers that attackers came, from the Vikings to the Dutch, and down those same rivers developed the trade that gradually placed them at the centre of a worldwide network of waterways. The seas around Britain were, of course, a major deterrent to potential invaders; although there were waterborne assaults on England after 1066, none was successful in taking England in battle. This fact is fundamental to England’s history as, unlike all of its European rivals, it was not continually overrun by adjacent states. Its boundaries, even those with Scotland, were fixed from an early date, giving it territorial stability and helping to establish itself as a nation state before 1066.

During the Middle Ages the sense of national identity grew strongly, but the Reformation significantly intensified nationalism, characterising Catholic Europe not only as hostile but as oppressed and poverty-stricken. Protestant England was increasingly seen by its inhabitants as a sort of chosen nation, blessed by God. The Civil War strengthened this underlying culture, and over the following century the idea of individual liberty safeguarded by parliament was added to it. Indeed, from the Viking raids to the First World War, national identity has been shaped by war. In particular, war with France: the Hundred Years’ War, the wars after the Reformation, intermittent war through the 18th century, and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars of 1793 to 1815. As well as building and bolstering national self-image, these wars also accelerated social, economic and architectural change. This is a theme that runs throughout this book, which sees 1815 as a decisive moment in the national story. A final victory over France, with the help of its allies, put Britain into an unassailable position of world power, hurtling it into a century of rapid and fundamental transformation.¹³

Rievaulx Abbey, Yorkshire was suppressed in 1538 and sold to the Earl of Rutland. A series of detailed accounts chronicle its partial demolition by the Earl over the following two years.

Trade was central to this. Being on an island, England had to use the seas in order to trade. It was not unique in being a seafaring nation, but, it was unique in that trade with countries other than Scotland had to be seaborne. If exports were bound for Calais, they might as well be bound for Bordeaux, too – or for that matter Bombay or Buenos Aires. In this way, once Britain had secured the freedom of the seas after its European wars it was in a position to build up a dominating global trading network.

So in terms of fundamentals, England, on a temperate and fertile island, with rich mineral resources, a powerful sense of national destiny and a strong maritime culture, was blessed with a number of advantages. These contributed in some measure to England being a populous country. Changes in its population have also had a fundamental impact on its history and architecture. In particular, relatively rapid population growth in the century before 1300, between the early 1500s and 1650, and then exponential growth after 1760 have had a wide range of important impacts, many of which have determined the narrative in this book.

A central feature of English social structure is the rights and privileges of the individual over the group or over the state. This leads to a particular view of property rights. Nowhere else in Western Europe could an owner dispose of his property with such freedom as in England; everywhere else the proportion that could be freely sold was limited by law and children had some claim over their parents’ property. In England, even with primogeniture, which became the rule from the 16th century, it was possible to sell at any time, effectively disinheriting the following generation. So English land and buildings were commodities that could be easily transferred, and all property was purchasable. Individualistic property ownership lies at the heart of the history of English building.

On four occasions in English history property transfer took place on a national scale. The first was the plunder of Anglo-Saxon estates by the Normans, in which the majority of English land changed hands; soon after there was another, less traumatic, transfer – the granting of substantial estates to the Church from the Crown and the aristocracy. By 1200 this had created the skeleton of the medieval landscape, comprising a series of great estates owned by Crown, aristocracy, bishops and abbots, a situation that remained until the 1530s, when Henry VIII triggered a third great shift. The Dissolution of the Monasteries saw a reversal of the process started during the early Middle Ages, secularising the ownership of both rural and urban estates. Despite the disruption of the Civil War and Commonwealth, which saw an assault on the lands of the Crown and bishops, the Dissolution set the scene for the whole of the period up to the First World War. After 1918 came a fourth transfer. The great estates of the aristocracy, now no longer economically beneficial for their owners, were largely, but not completely, dispersed, with ownership transferring to smaller operators and being sold for urban expansion.

In tandem with these major changes in land ownership were cyclical management decisions by landlords. From the Conquest to the First World War, landlords chose either to manage their lands themselves or to rent them out to tenants, depending on which was more profitable. So, for instance, between about 1184 and 1215 landlords took their lands in hand, but after the Black Death – between around 1380 and 1410 – lands were rented out to tenant farmers.

The ordinary English people who were involved on a micro level in these changes in land tenure were, from at least the 13th century, individualists. They were socially and geographically mobile, market-oriented and acquisitive.¹⁴ They exploited the opportunities presented by the redrawing of property ownership and in due course transformed the practice of agriculture, making England the most productive country in Europe per head.