The Birth of Modern Britain: A Journey into Britain’s Archaeological Past: 1550 to the Present. Francis Pryor
it is true to say that gardens are places of beauty and pleasure, but they have largely ceased to be instruments of political advancement and even intrigue. While most gardens were indeed permanent fixtures, some were created for a specific purpose, often the visit of a monarch and his or her court, and were always intended to be temporary – rather like the show gardens at Chelsea. Much controversy has recently been caused by the reconstruction at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire of such a temporary garden, created by Robert Dudley, Earl of Essex, to impress Elizabeth I when she made a two-week visit there for nineteen days, between 9 and 27 July 1575. Dudley, of course, is famous for being the Queen’s favourite and we can only imagine what might have been his true motives for creating such a magnificent showpiece, which cost English Heritage the eye-watering sum of £2,100,000 to reconstruct, largely on the basis of a sketch and a single, albeit detailed, eyewitness letter.9
The garden is now permanently open to the public and it does give visitors a good impression of the lengths that people were prepared to go to impress the Tudor court, although doubts remain as to the so-called ‘eyewitness’ letter, which may have been a contemporary spoof or satire on Dudley’s pretensions. But even if it was, one could argue that the garden it depicts might have been the sort of creation that would have been inspired by such a royal visit. On the other hand, there is some archaeological evidence to support it, such as the discovery by Brian Dix of fragments of a fountain similar to the one described in the letter. Taking all things together, I tend to accept that the garden was indeed constructed and I find the controversy, which has already generated at least one television documentary, fascinating. The modern re-creation was constructed just before the financial crisis and only six months later, in less profligate times, it now appears an excess. Doubtless the original garden impressed Her Majesty, but if I had been one of the impoverished tenants of the Dudley estate I might well have been rather less enthusiastic.
I have stated that I have no intention of attempting a history of designed landscapes, but it is worth pointing out that many books that approach the subject from an art historical background tend to ignore the complexity of what actually happened out there in the real world. Today garden fashions come and go with bewildering rapidity: a few years ago everyone was covering their lawns with pergolas and wooden decking, then they painted their garden furniture blue, and now one cannot step into even the smallest back garden without running the risk of toppling into a water feature. Much the same could be said about the past except that then taste was not dictated by television makeover programmes. Of course there were highly influential people, such as ‘Capability’ Brown or Humphrey Repton, whose general influence was widespread but there were also other, often complementary traditions, too.
Recently the landscape archaeologist and historian Tom Williamson has called for a more regional approach to garden archaeology. There is a natural tendency to sing the praises of a particular, often grand garden and to make it sound as if it stood in magnificent isolation, whereas in reality it was often surrounded by parks and horticultural creations of comparable quality. Tom has eloquently pointed out that the estates and homes of less grand, local landowners helped create regional traditions with a unique style all of their own.10 It wasn’t just that earlier traditions remained popular with many people, but sometimes innovations, which the textbooks would have one believe were universally and rapidly adopted, actually failed to find acceptance in certain areas. For instance, the new and characteristically ‘English’ landscape parks of the second half of the eighteenth century failed to catch on in Hertfordshire, where formal plantings of avenues and rides were laid out in the 1760s at major houses such as Cassiobury, Ashridge and Moor Park.11 Such geometric features belonged to an earlier era and went very much against the ‘natural’ spirit of landscape designers, such as Brown or Repton.
FIG 5 A map showing the distribution of landscape parks in East Anglia in the late eighteenth century.
We ignore these smaller parks and gardens at our peril if we want to create a true picture of the past that is not just based on a few well-known and very grand places. Such information will be invaluable when we come to interpret the remains of lost parks and gardens threatened by the immense expansion of housing that we are told will happen when the current economic downturn ends. Take one example: the large number of parks created in East Anglia in the late eighteenth century. Their quantity is impressive and their distribution pattern very informative.
There are, for instance, very few parks in the Fens, which were then plagued by endemic malaria and were characterised by numerous small landholdings. The heavy clay lands of Suffolk were also poorly emparked, but there were large parks on the poor, sandy soils of Norfolk’s Breckland (north of Bury St Edmunds, mostly around Thetford), where prominent families had owned hunting estates since the Middle Ages. Another interesting development was the proliferation of small parks around the increasingly prosperous urban centres of Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and south Essex, which was already feeling the influence of London.
I mentioned that it was possible to discern distinctive regional styles and one of the best of these is the use of canals in parks and gardens of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Suffolk. It is debatable whether this was a result of the area’s proximity to the influence of the Low Countries or reflected the suitability of the heavy, water-retentive clay soils that had been widely used for constructing moats in the Middle Ages. It is, of course, entirely possible that some people in the area simply created their own traditions of garden design as a conscious reaction to the increasing influence exerted by London fashions and popular designers like ‘Capability’ Brown, which many independent local landowners resented.12
We tend to think that the great parks and gardens were the product of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with perhaps a few Tudor excesses such as Hampton Court, Hatfield and Burghley Houses to point the way forward. In reality, however, members of the upper echelons of medieval society were showing off their power and influence by constructing staged and elaborate approaches to their castles, and by fashioning their own landscaped parks.13 A particularly fine example is to be found on the approaches to the now ruined castle at Castle Acre, in Norfolk. This involved the redirection of a Roman road in the mid-twelfth century, by way of a newly founded Cluniac priory. Even when driving these narrow rural lanes today, this circuitous diversion, which was only done to impress visitors with the family’s piety, still feels distinctly odd.14
By the same token, we also tend to see ‘agri-business’ and industrial farming as rather unpleasant and ultimately unnecessary creations of the later twentieth century, but, again, the reality is rather different. The rapid growth of Britain’s population throughout the nineteenth century meant that the additional mouths had somehow to be fed and although imports could (and did) help to meet the shortage, in pre-refrigeration times the majority of food, especially of milk and meat, had to be produced at home. And here the well-laid-out model farms of the large rural estates were to play a crucially important role.
We will see in Chapter 5 that the monuments to Britain’s industrial past have been cared for and cherished since the subject of industrial archaeology first emerged from the shadows back in the 1960s. But their rural equivalents have only very recently received anything like their fair share of recognition – and almost too late, because numerous farm buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are now becoming rather tatty and even derelict, simply because farmers in the twenty-first century are finding the money for their maintenance harder and harder to come by.15 A proportion has been saved for posterity by conversion to office or light industrial use, but sadly these remain a minority. The rest are quietly slipping into neglect and disrepair.
The great landed estates that were such a feature of the countryside from the seventeenth to the earlier to mid-twentieth centuries