Abstract
Ordinary houses are a familiar, even iconic, element of the English countryside. Houses that are modest in size and built of local materials using traditional methods can be found in almost every English rural community. Thousands of these houses were either built or modified in the early modern period and are still in use as family homes today. A casual walk down the high street of a Midland village, a hike along the shoulders of northern valleys, or a stroll around the Sussex or Kent countryside is not just physical exercise; if accompanied by an attentiveness to the buildings around the observer, it can be an observation and appreciation of the physical presence of the past landscapes of England1 (see figure 2.1).
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W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955);
Matthew Johnson, Ideas of Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007).
Eric Mercer, English Vernacular Houses: A Study of Traditional Farmhouses and Cottages (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1975).
A. Green, “Confining the Vernacular: The Seventeenth-Century Origins of a Mode of Study,” Vernacular Architecture 38 (2007): 1–7;
N. Cooper, “Display, Status and the Vernacular Tradition,” Vernacular Architecture 33 (2002): 28–33.
See for example comments by different contributors to Vernacular Buildings in a Changing World: Understanding, Recording and Conservation, ed. Sarah Pearson and Robert Meeson (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2001).
Ronald Brunskill, Traditional Buildings of Britain: An Introduction to Vernacular Architecture and Its Revival (London: Cassell, 2004, 3rd revised edition);
Maurice Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage (London: Routledge, 1961) xix, explicitly links an archaeological approach with a functional/utilitarian perspective.
Compare Robert Machin, “The Mechanism of the Pre-Industrial Building Cycle,” Vernacular Architecture 8 (1977): 815–819 with
Robert Machin, The Houses of Yetminster (Bristol: University of Bristol Dept. of Extra-Mural Studies, 1978).
Dell Upton and John M. Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), xxiii; see also
Paul Oliver, ed., Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
John R Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). Classic North American studies include
Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: A Structural Analysis of Historic Artifacts (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975);
Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004);
James F. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor, 1996, 2nd rev. edn.).
Matthew Johnson, Archaeological Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010, 2nd rev. edn.).
A vast literature includes: Matthew Johnson, “Phenomenological Approaches to Landscape Archaeology,” Annual Reviews in Anthropology 41 (2011): 269–284;
Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
John Barrett and Ilhong Ko, “The Phenomenology of Landscape: A Crisis in British Archaeology?” Journal of Social Archaeology 9, no.3 (2009): 275–294.
Matthew Johnson, Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Landscape (London: UCL Press, 1993);
Matthew Johnson, “Rethinking the Great Rebuilding,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 12, (1993): 117–125;
Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). I revisited and revised these ideas in
Matthew Johnson, English Houses 1300–1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life (London: Pearson, 2010).
Richard Harris, Discovering Timber-Framed Buildings (Princes Risborough, Shire, 1993, 3rd edn.); see also
Richard Harris, “The Grammar of Carpentry,” Vernacular Architecture 20 (1989): 1–8.
Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995);
Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007).
W. G. Hoskins, “The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640,” Past and Present 4 (1959): 44–59; Mercer, English Vernacular Houses.
Kate Giles, “Vernacular Housing in the North: The Case of England,” in The Archaeology of Medieval Europe, ed. M. Carver (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011), 159–175;
Sarah Pearson, “Rural and Urban Houses 1100–1500: ‘Urban Adaptation’ Reconsidered,” in Town and Country in the Later Middle Ages: Contrasts, Connections and Interconnections 1100–1500, ed. Kate Giles and Christopher Dyer (London: Society for Medieval Archaeology, 2005), 43–65.
J. A. Taylor, British Empiricism and Early Political Economy: Gregory King’s Estimates of National Wealth and Population (London: Praeger, 2006).
Most famously in Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, 2nd rev. edn.).
See for example Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and Its Meanings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); also
Catherine Richardson, Shakespeare and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011);
Sara Pennell, “Pots and Pans History: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England,” Journal of Design History 11, no.3 (1999): 201–216.
Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Cynthia Robin, Everyday Life Matters (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013).
Peter Brears, North Country Folk Art (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988).
James Sharpe, Witchcraft in Early Modern England (London, Longman, 2001);
Dianne Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996);
Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, Scribner, 1971) are three classic texts.
R. Merrifield, The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic (London: Batsford, 1987);
D. Eastop, “Garments Deliberately Concealed in Buildings,” in A Permeability of Boundaries? New Approaches to the Archaeology of Art, Religion and Folklore, BAR International Series S936, ed. R. Wallis and K. Lymer (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2001), 79–83; T. Easton, “Spiritual Middens,” in Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture, ed. P. Oliver, 1: 568.
A. McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Wendy Wall, “Renaissance National Husbandry: Gervase Markham and the Publication of England,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 27 (1996): 767–785.
Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London: Browne, 1613) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22973/22973-h/22973-h.htm, accessed May 19, 2013.
J. Mylander, “Early Modern “How-to” Books: Impractical Manual and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no.1 (2009): 123–146.
See references to material culture, above; also studies in D. Gaimster and P. Stamper, eds., The Age of Transition: Archaeology and English Culture 1400–1600 (Oxford: Oxbow, 1996).
On the methodological issue of “tacking,” see Alison Wylie, Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Chapter 11. On history and archaeology,
John Moreland, Archaeology and Text (London: Duckworth, 2001) and Johnson, Ideas of Landscape, are two places to start in a vast literature.
Most effective in my view is Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), Chapter 8.
A rapidly developing literature includes Graeme Earl, “Modeling in Archaeology: Computer Graphic and Other Digital Pasts,” Perspectives on Science 21, no.2 (2013): 226–244;
Graeme Earl, Vito Porcelli, Constantinos Papadopoulos, Gareth Beale, Matthew Harrison, Hembo Pagi, and Simon Keay, “Formal and Informal Analysis of Rendered Space: The Basilica Portuense,” in Computational Approaches to Archaeological Spaces, ed. Andrew Bevan and Mark Lake (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2013), 265–305.
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Johnson, M. (2015). Living Space: The Interpretation of English Vernacular Houses. In: Stock, P. (eds) The Uses of Space in Early Modern History. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490049_2
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