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The history of British vegetation
SHORTER
NOTICES
325
YI-FU TUAN, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values
(Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Pp. 260. $4.95) Yi-Fu Tuan is seen by many to march to the beat of a very different drum. Topophilia, his opus maximus, comes crashing through with the power of an entire percussion section. Concerned with how people cognitively structure their environments, the book’s principal arguments are richly supported by historical evidence. Indeed, it is really a collection of essays treating various aspects of man’s historical quest to order his habitat. How have different societies valued their physical and man-made environments? What were their environmental ideals ? How have these ideals served historically to link man and his environment? Topophilia is necessary reading, especially for those historical geographers interested in such matters as the cognition of landscape and geographical decisionmaking in the past. JOHN A. JAKLE
B. L. ANDERSON(Ed.), Capital Accumulation in the Industrial Revolution (London : Dent, Readings in Economic History and Theory Series, 1974. Pp. xxvii+212. g2.95) The chronology of capital accumulation before and during the industrial revolution in Britain have become of increasing concern to historians since the early 1960s when Rostow argued for a rapid advance in capital investment as central to, and diagnostic of, take-off to sustained economic growth. The historical geographer, too, should give the process some attention, for it is clear that there was a spatial as well as a temporal element in the accumulation of capital, and that he has much to offer in studies of the channels, institutions and individuals through which geographical and sociological distances between getters and spenders were reduced. B. L. Anderson’s collection of reprints is therefore welcome as a guide to how contemporaries interpreted the subject. He has brought together eleven readings, ranging from Smith’s chapter on the accumulation of capital from The wealth of nations to Giffen’s statistical exercises made at the end of the nineteenth century, and has embellished them with an introduction where they are discussed in the context of developments in economic thought. WALTER MINCHINTON, Devon at Work: Past and Present
(Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1974. Pp. 112; plates. E3.50) Devon at work isan annotated collection of photographs relating to the county’sindustrial archaeology, broadly defined. Our image of Devon today is not one of an industrial county. Yet when Daniel Defoe crossed its borders in the 1720s he was as delighted as he always was when encountering an industrial landscape: “so full of people . . . so universally employed in trade and manufactures” that it could not “be equalled in England . . . perhaps not in Europe”. Earlier, in the fifteenth century, travellers would have encountered there many valleys echoing with the thud of cloth-fulling and with the clatter of tin mines. And, in addition to these two industries of national importance, Devon has always supported numerous trades associated with its basic occupations of agriculture and industry. Recent photographs of industrial fossil forms and cultural relicts (to use Carl Sauer’s terms), old plates of vanished mines and mills and of men at work, reproductions of relevant prints, maps and industrial artefacts: all have been assembled by Professor Minchinton in a book which may be read with equal profit and pleasure. WINIFRED PENNINGTON, The History of British Vegetation (London: English Universities Press, Modern Biology Series, revised edition, 1974. Pp. viii + 152; plates, &3*75and E2.10 softback) The history of British vegetation is offered as a modern “introduction to those two great
326
SHORTER NOTICES
classics of British botany” by Tansley and Godwin, and as a text for courses which integrate palaeobotany and ecology. Its pedigree and purpose predict its contents. “All history must begin somewhere”, writes Dr Pennington; hers starts with what is known of Tertiary flora and unfolds as vegetational changes are induced by the climatic fluctuations of the Quaternary. It ends with the relatively recent impact on woodland of AngloScandinavian settlement and of playboy Norman kings, and with the creation of hedgerows and plantations as man-made ecosystems. The story is summarised with great lucidity, yet without concealment of sources for or gaps in our knowledge. In a world where so much is so new, one perhaps regrets only that the story is not brought completely up to date; that there are not entries in the index for coypu as well as Cistercians, for Dutch elm disease as well as Ulmus, for Myxomatosis as well as rabbit, for London plane as well as Rhinoceros. REX C. RUSSELL,The Logic of Open Field Systems: Fifteen Maps of Groups of Common Fields on the Eve of Enclosure (London: Bedford Square Press for the National Council
of Social Service, Standing Conference for Local History, 1974. 5ZO.90) There is no better point of departure for studies for field systems than acquaintance with the details depicted on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosure and tithe maps. Rex C. Russell has already published extensively on parliamentary enclosure in Lincolnshire. Now, in this misleadingly titled but useful pamphlet, he has abstracted basic patterns of land-use and field divisions from maps of forty-seven Lincolnshire parishes on the eve of enclosure. The “logic” which he illustrates in notes accompanying his maps is the way in which these patterns predictably reflect local geology and topography. It is implicit in much of what he says that field systems might be adjusted as evaluations of soils changed over time, and that their character was moulded by variables other than physical influences. Nevertheless, his maps illustrate, strikingly in many cases, just how strong these influences were; scholars who undertake more penetrating analyses of the origin, development and functioning of field systems will neglect them at their peril. JOHN M. STEANE, The Northamptonshire Landscape: Northamptonshire and the Soke oj
Peterborough
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, Making of the English Landscape Series, 1974. Pp. 320; plates. E3*95) This is the first volume in the new ‘Making of the English landscape’ series to deal with a midland county. It succeeds in conveying the distinctiveness of typical midland landscapes-vast plains where the eye is drawn to a neatly arranged middle distance by the straight lines of hedges and roads, then to a far low horizon, a blur of hedgerow timber under a vast sky-as well as in highlighting features of the evolution of Northamptonshire which give the county some distinctiveness among its neighbours. Mr Steane is at his weakest when summarising the economic and social background to the evolution of Northampton&ire’s cultural landscape. He is at his best in his many short case-studies of particular places. Then his deep involvement with Northamptonshire local history, so apparent on every page of this book, yields its fullest rewards, whether in his account of medieval clearances in Rockingham Forest, of Capability Brown’s refashioning of Burghley House (175Os), of enclosure at John Clare’s village of Helpston (1809) or of urban development at Corby New Town (1950-). H. S. A. Fox
NOTICES
325
YI-FU TUAN, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values
(Engelwood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974. Pp. 260. $4.95) Yi-Fu Tuan is seen by many to march to the beat of a very different drum. Topophilia, his opus maximus, comes crashing through with the power of an entire percussion section. Concerned with how people cognitively structure their environments, the book’s principal arguments are richly supported by historical evidence. Indeed, it is really a collection of essays treating various aspects of man’s historical quest to order his habitat. How have different societies valued their physical and man-made environments? What were their environmental ideals ? How have these ideals served historically to link man and his environment? Topophilia is necessary reading, especially for those historical geographers interested in such matters as the cognition of landscape and geographical decisionmaking in the past. JOHN A. JAKLE
B. L. ANDERSON(Ed.), Capital Accumulation in the Industrial Revolution (London : Dent, Readings in Economic History and Theory Series, 1974. Pp. xxvii+212. g2.95) The chronology of capital accumulation before and during the industrial revolution in Britain have become of increasing concern to historians since the early 1960s when Rostow argued for a rapid advance in capital investment as central to, and diagnostic of, take-off to sustained economic growth. The historical geographer, too, should give the process some attention, for it is clear that there was a spatial as well as a temporal element in the accumulation of capital, and that he has much to offer in studies of the channels, institutions and individuals through which geographical and sociological distances between getters and spenders were reduced. B. L. Anderson’s collection of reprints is therefore welcome as a guide to how contemporaries interpreted the subject. He has brought together eleven readings, ranging from Smith’s chapter on the accumulation of capital from The wealth of nations to Giffen’s statistical exercises made at the end of the nineteenth century, and has embellished them with an introduction where they are discussed in the context of developments in economic thought. WALTER MINCHINTON, Devon at Work: Past and Present
(Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1974. Pp. 112; plates. E3.50) Devon at work isan annotated collection of photographs relating to the county’sindustrial archaeology, broadly defined. Our image of Devon today is not one of an industrial county. Yet when Daniel Defoe crossed its borders in the 1720s he was as delighted as he always was when encountering an industrial landscape: “so full of people . . . so universally employed in trade and manufactures” that it could not “be equalled in England . . . perhaps not in Europe”. Earlier, in the fifteenth century, travellers would have encountered there many valleys echoing with the thud of cloth-fulling and with the clatter of tin mines. And, in addition to these two industries of national importance, Devon has always supported numerous trades associated with its basic occupations of agriculture and industry. Recent photographs of industrial fossil forms and cultural relicts (to use Carl Sauer’s terms), old plates of vanished mines and mills and of men at work, reproductions of relevant prints, maps and industrial artefacts: all have been assembled by Professor Minchinton in a book which may be read with equal profit and pleasure. WINIFRED PENNINGTON, The History of British Vegetation (London: English Universities Press, Modern Biology Series, revised edition, 1974. Pp. viii + 152; plates, &3*75and E2.10 softback) The history of British vegetation is offered as a modern “introduction to those two great
326
SHORTER NOTICES
classics of British botany” by Tansley and Godwin, and as a text for courses which integrate palaeobotany and ecology. Its pedigree and purpose predict its contents. “All history must begin somewhere”, writes Dr Pennington; hers starts with what is known of Tertiary flora and unfolds as vegetational changes are induced by the climatic fluctuations of the Quaternary. It ends with the relatively recent impact on woodland of AngloScandinavian settlement and of playboy Norman kings, and with the creation of hedgerows and plantations as man-made ecosystems. The story is summarised with great lucidity, yet without concealment of sources for or gaps in our knowledge. In a world where so much is so new, one perhaps regrets only that the story is not brought completely up to date; that there are not entries in the index for coypu as well as Cistercians, for Dutch elm disease as well as Ulmus, for Myxomatosis as well as rabbit, for London plane as well as Rhinoceros. REX C. RUSSELL,The Logic of Open Field Systems: Fifteen Maps of Groups of Common Fields on the Eve of Enclosure (London: Bedford Square Press for the National Council
of Social Service, Standing Conference for Local History, 1974. 5ZO.90) There is no better point of departure for studies for field systems than acquaintance with the details depicted on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosure and tithe maps. Rex C. Russell has already published extensively on parliamentary enclosure in Lincolnshire. Now, in this misleadingly titled but useful pamphlet, he has abstracted basic patterns of land-use and field divisions from maps of forty-seven Lincolnshire parishes on the eve of enclosure. The “logic” which he illustrates in notes accompanying his maps is the way in which these patterns predictably reflect local geology and topography. It is implicit in much of what he says that field systems might be adjusted as evaluations of soils changed over time, and that their character was moulded by variables other than physical influences. Nevertheless, his maps illustrate, strikingly in many cases, just how strong these influences were; scholars who undertake more penetrating analyses of the origin, development and functioning of field systems will neglect them at their peril. JOHN M. STEANE, The Northamptonshire Landscape: Northamptonshire and the Soke oj
Peterborough
(London: Hodder and Stoughton, Making of the English Landscape Series, 1974. Pp. 320; plates. E3*95) This is the first volume in the new ‘Making of the English landscape’ series to deal with a midland county. It succeeds in conveying the distinctiveness of typical midland landscapes-vast plains where the eye is drawn to a neatly arranged middle distance by the straight lines of hedges and roads, then to a far low horizon, a blur of hedgerow timber under a vast sky-as well as in highlighting features of the evolution of Northamptonshire which give the county some distinctiveness among its neighbours. Mr Steane is at his weakest when summarising the economic and social background to the evolution of Northampton&ire’s cultural landscape. He is at his best in his many short case-studies of particular places. Then his deep involvement with Northamptonshire local history, so apparent on every page of this book, yields its fullest rewards, whether in his account of medieval clearances in Rockingham Forest, of Capability Brown’s refashioning of Burghley House (175Os), of enclosure at John Clare’s village of Helpston (1809) or of urban development at Corby New Town (1950-). H. S. A. Fox