{"id":10197,"date":"2019-08-11T19:37:25","date_gmt":"2019-08-11T18:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.brh.org.uk\/site\/?post_type=events&p=10197"},"modified":"2020-01-01T15:14:51","modified_gmt":"2020-01-01T15:14:51","slug":"studio-2-political-landscapes-and-protest-in-the-south-west","status":"publish","type":"events","link":"https:\/\/www.brh.org.uk\/site\/events\/studio-2-political-landscapes-and-protest-in-the-south-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecology from below"},"content":{"rendered":"

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed widespread attempts to \u2018privatise\u2019 rural England. By enclosing common land and extinguishing customary rights, rural elites sought to physically reshape and culturally redefine the countryside. In counties such as Somerset and Dorset, labourers increasingly found themselves barred from entering the fields and woodland that had supported their families for generations. Meanwhile, those who attempted to voice their concerns regarding these changes were portrayed by the landowners as supporting a working-class culture of \u2018sloth\u2019 and \u2018insubordination\u2019. The cultural legacies of this Agricultural Revolution have persisted until the modern day, with many accounts portraying the struggle against enclosure as one of necessary progress against backwards traditionalism.<\/p>\n

However, recent historical research has suggested that a powerful set of \u2018plebeian environmental ethics\u2019 existed in rural England, governing how rural workers envisioned and interacted with their local landscapes. Consequently, this talk will reveal how countryfolk constructed their own \u2018moral ecologies\u2019 to oppose landscape change. The belief in a \u2018morally correct\u2019 state for the local environment drove protests such as trespass, arson, hedge-breaking and tree-maiming. By materially and symbolically reverting rural landscapes to their pre-enclosure state, these acts of resistance offered tangible reconstructions of threatened lives and customary practices. The rural poor did not simply resist landscape change due to economic concerns but also because enclosure threatened what they believed to be the ethical relationship between men, masters and the environment.<\/p>\n\n

\"Goose
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The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed widespread attempts to \u2018privatise\u2019 rural England. By enclosing common land and extinguishing customary rights, rural elites sought to physically reshape and culturally redefine the countryside. In counties such as Somerset and Dorset, labourers increasingly found themselves barred from entering the fields and woodland that had supported their families for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":10220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"categories":[186,883,188,209],"tags":[1193,1199],"class_list":["post-10197","events","type-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commons-customary-rights-enclosures","category-environmental","category-history-theory-practice","category-riots-disturbances","tag-nineteenth-century","tag-west-country"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nEcology from below - Bristol Radical History Group<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.brh.org.uk\/site\/events\/studio-2-political-landscapes-and-protest-in-the-south-west\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ecology from below - Bristol Radical History Group\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed widespread attempts to \u2018privatise\u2019 rural England. 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