Into my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
From, A Shropshire Lad, 1896.
A. E. Housman (1859–1936).
We've been watching a BBC series from Netflix called The Story of England, by the historian Michael Wood. About a year ago he made another documentary called The Story of India that was also pretty good. I like his enthusiasm, although I think he bugs John a bit. Sometimes he gets very emotional for a serious researcher, and he paws through ancient documents without wearing protective gloves, which gets on my nerves from a fussy archivist point of view.
Anyway, The Story of England covers 750 years in the life of one community called Kibworth. As part of the program, the locals dug 55 test pits, supervised by university archaeologists. The dig was a wild success and they found prehistoric flints, Roman shards, Anglo-Saxon pottery and more layered all the way up into Victorian times. Along with that, parish records and maps survive at nearby Oxford so Woods could trace individual peasant families over a dozen generations to the present time.
Feudal society had a rigid structure, and every inch of land that could be cultivated was, right to the cottage door. Without surveying or fences, the locals had to have an intimate knowledge of the landscape. With the medieval open field system, fields were divided into small, irregular strips of land.
Common lands were carefully managed, but each tiny stripe on the map was an individual holding! The Story of England is worth checking out, if you enjoy history documentaries.
From, A Shropshire Lad, 1896.
A. E. Housman (1859–1936).
We've been watching a BBC series from Netflix called The Story of England, by the historian Michael Wood. About a year ago he made another documentary called The Story of India that was also pretty good. I like his enthusiasm, although I think he bugs John a bit. Sometimes he gets very emotional for a serious researcher, and he paws through ancient documents without wearing protective gloves, which gets on my nerves from a fussy archivist point of view.
Anyway, The Story of England covers 750 years in the life of one community called Kibworth. As part of the program, the locals dug 55 test pits, supervised by university archaeologists. The dig was a wild success and they found prehistoric flints, Roman shards, Anglo-Saxon pottery and more layered all the way up into Victorian times. Along with that, parish records and maps survive at nearby Oxford so Woods could trace individual peasant families over a dozen generations to the present time.
Feudal society had a rigid structure, and every inch of land that could be cultivated was, right to the cottage door. Without surveying or fences, the locals had to have an intimate knowledge of the landscape. With the medieval open field system, fields were divided into small, irregular strips of land.
Common lands were carefully managed, but each tiny stripe on the map was an individual holding! The Story of England is worth checking out, if you enjoy history documentaries.
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