May 22, 2004

• Having spent many a rainy yorkshire morning being dragged, by my dad, to see the excavations at Wharram Percy, I was surprised at how nostalgic the site made me! It is a beautiful place (as is most of the Yorkshire Wolds area) and an example of the excellent work frequently carried out by English Heritage.
• As someone from southern California, where a hamburger joint from the 1960's is considered to be "historic" it's a pleasure to view this sort of stuff, even virtually. Love the content, but the navigation on the website was more than a bit tedious.
• plep: very nice Ginger: I envy you! How fun. Interesting that "economic" conditions were the cause of abandonment. Wouldn't this area have supported fewer people in a subsistance lifestyle? Who owns the land now? What is it used for? This link shows a flat plain with grazing cows. Where is the the steep-sided valley? This link shows a high plain with gazing Germans. rough translation: We look at the grass in Wharram Percy , where there was (past?)times a village. Is the wold down below? Usually I'm pretty good at orienting myself from a map, but I can't seem to get it into my head the vantage point from where the shots were taken.
• Blue Horse - I don't know how deep the valley is - the artists sketch seems to suggest that it was a river(?) valley with gently rising hills or perhaps a plateau on either side. About the economic conditions: it's buried a little, but explained more on this page. It was enclosure - landlords replaced peasant tenants with sheep. You can feed many more people with grain than with wool, but how many are fed isn't really at issue (the amount of food production wasn't changing much in the sixteenth century). The village ended because the people lost their jobs/livelyhoods. This was a serious issue in sixteenth century; as the quotes on the page show, many contemporaries, including Sir/St Thomas More, wrote against this practice as being immoral and detrimental to society. The end effect of enclosure on society and living conditions is currently the subject of fierce academic debate, but generally everyone agrees that it caused (and was also aided by) the engrossment of land (where fewer people were owning larger amounts of land). Other than tenants who were simply evicted, smaller landholders also could not bear the costs of enclosure, and often had to sell what land they had to pay for the enclosure. Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries most places in rural England saw the emergence of a strong division between farmers (who sometimes held very large farms) and landless labourers dependent on wages for a living (rather than having any produce or other resources to live on - wage labouring is much more precarious). This happened in the south earlier than the north, and there are always exceptional areas, of course. But it was a big change from the middle ages and earlier, when most rural people had rights (either owning or leasing, often on very long leases) to some if not much land, and below the gentility were considered to hold similar stauses. The whole shape of the society changed, and new classes were created - commercial and capitalist, rather than subsistence, farmers and a rural labouring class. (Sorry if that last bit sounds too Marxist for some, but Marx was simply talking about what had happened in England in the last few centuries before he wrote. Marxist history is out of fashion currently, but he was actually quite perceptive about what he was concentrating on - the development of economic relations of Europe, especially England, in the early modern period. He needs to be refined, of course, but recent research has been suggesting that there was certainly something to the effects of the alienation of the means of production - it changed people's lives and the way they related to each other, and created new classes. It may have also affected living standards, but that is hard to tell, as living standards were going up, but may have been going up more unevenly than aggregate research would show.)
• I lost a village in Yorkshire, once. I was on a hike across the moors, and when I got to the pub for lunch, there it was - gone. I never did find it again, and no one posted it to me, even though it quite clearly had my address on it. I bet one of those Tyke bastards stole it.
• missed that, jb--thanks