Changing landscapes, changing environments: enclosure and culture in Northamptonshire, 1700-1900

Drawing on the Victoria County History for Northamptonshire, nineteenth-century parliamentary papers, and local journals, the project team built a database containing details of all 213 parliamentary enclosures in the county. A gazeteer of all eighteenth and nineteenth-century church building projects in the county was also compiled and more detailed research undertaken into sites where enclosure coincided with the rebuilding of churches and/or the replanning/depopulation of settlements. Artistic representations of the Northamptonshire landscape, particularly the works of George Clarke of Scaldwell were also used alongside a series of field visits to examine distinct landscape types within the county.

Two key themes emerged, (a) the Church and (b) environment and parish culture. The former focused on the enrichment of the Church as Rectors exchanged their right to tithes for substantial landholdings at enclosure; and the latter on the long war waged by local parishes against species perceived as 'vermin', notably sparrows. Both have shed considerable light on the ways in which the world was perceived locally in the wake of enclosure.

One of the most interesting findings of the project is that only rarely were changes in the landscape as a result of enclosure carried through into remodelling of the local church. Given the extent to which the churches were enriched by the process, and the extent to which agriculture became more profitable after enclosure, it might have been expected churches would have been 'upgraded' and that we would have found a correlation between the date of enclosure and church improvement.

In June 2009 the project held a two-day interdisciplinary conference sponsored by the AHRC, the Historical Geography Research Group and Economic History Society called 'Landscape, enclosure and rural society in post-medieval Britain and Europe.' The keynote speaker was Professor T Williamson, University of East Anglia.