gardens, legitimation, and resistance

International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Vol.3,No. 1,1999

Gardens, Legitimation, and Resistance

Tom Williamson1

Eighteenth-century garden design has been interpreted in terms of legitimation, atool with which elites attempted to maintain power and authority over marginalizedgroups. But most acts of aesthetic landscaping, it can be argued, were primarilydirected not towards "the poor" but to rival groups within the propertied. Similarly,any opposition to the dominant ideology expressed in the design of landscapewas mainly mounted by disaffected groups within the ranks of the franchised.In so far as the poor in this period inscribed their mark upon the land, it wasin acts of vandalism or reappropriation which have left little direct trace in thearchaeological record.

INTRODUCTION

This paper discusses the role of designed landscapes in eighteenth-centuryEngland. It questions the extent to which they were employed to legitimate theposition of the propertied against the "poor," and argues that evidence of "resis-tance," in the archaeological record relates mainly to marginalized groups withinthe propertied.

In both Britain and America, the last two decades have seen a steady growthin "garden archaeology"—the study of early designed landscapes through fieldsurvey and excavation (e.g., Bell, 1990; Curry and Lockwood, 1991; Taylor, 1983;Kelso, 1992; Yentsch and Kratzer, 1994). Gardens created in the period up to themid-eighteenth century, and again in the nineteenth, involved considerable amountsof earthmoving in order to create the terraces, basins, and viewing mounds thatcharacterized the formal, structured nature of these highly artificial and geometricenvironments. They also featured much "hard landscaping" in the form of gravel

1Centre of East Anglian Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.

KEY WORDS: resistance; garden design; landscape.

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1092-7697/99A)300-0037$l6.00A) © 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation

paths, ornamental buildings, and in particular walls: for most gardens in the pe-riod before 1750 consisted of networks of interconnecting walled enclosures. Themore "naturalistic" gardens of the later eighteenth century are less amenable toconventional archaeological investigation, although even here, as we shall see, thediscipline can make an important contribution.

Although archaeologists have added to our general understanding of the phys-ical development of designed landscapes, they have paid less attention to the ex-planations for changing style. In most instances they have considered the socialmeaning and function of such landscapes in terms of ideology and legitimation.Designed landscapes have been seen as means of controlling the poor by makingarbitrary and unequal social and economic relationships appear as natural and un-changing. Yet it is, perhaps, slightly worrying that virtually identical argumentshave been applied to landscapes which were, in fact, very different in layout andappearance. Mark Leone, in a pioneering article about later geometric gardens inAnnapolis, Maryland, argued that these were active instruments in maintaining anunequal status quo at a time of social and economic change: bolstering the claimsof a mercantile elite "which was steadily being compromised by the rise and theclose interaction of formerly distant classes." Gardens were one of the ways inwhich the established leaders of society took "themselves and their position asgranted," and convinced "others that the way things are is the way they always hadbeen and should remain" (Leone, 1984, p. 27).

The art historian Anne Bermingham (1987, pp. 13-14) has made very sim-ilar suggestions with regard to the rather different, "naturalistic" designs of latereighteenth-century England.

As the real landscape began to look increasingly artificial, like a garden, the garden began tolook increasingly natural, like the pre-enclosed landscape. Thus a natural landscape becamethe prerogative of the estate...so that nature was the sign of property and property the sign ofnature.... By conflating nature with the fashionable taste of a new social order, it redefinedthe natural in terms of this order, and vice versa.

Arguments like this have a number of problems. They sometimes rely on ver-bal puns which are one step away from material reality, and which are dependenton modern linguistic usage. They are not implicitly or explicitly echoed in the volu-minous philosophizing about "the natural," or the art of landscaping, produced bywriters of the time. More importantly, such arguments seldom consider the ques-tion of who was admitted to such landscapes, and to whom these displays wereaddressed. Furthermore, they seem to assume a remarkable level of naivete on thepart of other members of society, especially the poor, easily (it would seem) dupedby such devices. Lastly, in the English context, such interpretations rest on rathera simplistic analysis both of society and of the motivation of individuals within it.Landowners were, it can be argued, more concerned about the impression that theirgrounds might make on neighbors of similar social rank than with the impact whichthey had on the local poor, who were anyway kept firmly in place with a wide range

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of coercive sanctions. Moreover, eighteenth-century England was a complex soci-ety, and was not composed simply of two confronting groups, the landed rich andthe landless poor. Firstly, there was an important division between the elite of greatlandowners and the more numerous local gentry. Secondly, in addition to smallfreeholders, tenant farmers and the laboring poor, it included increasing numbersof merchants, financiers, industrialists, professionals and shopkeepers. Nor was ita stable and unchanging society; indeed, the development of landscape design canonly be understood against a background of radical social and economic change.

THE CONTEXT OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN

In order more fully to understand the meaning embedded in these gardensand landscapes, three key developments, occurring particularly in the period afterca. 1750, need to be highlighted. The first was a growing separation of local elitesfrom local communities (Langford, 1992, pp. 389-461; Snell, 1983). This was aperiod of economic expansion and demographic growth: the gentry benefitted fromthis, but less so their neighbors. Small freehold farmers continued to experiencea decline in their fortunes, the number of tenant farms was falling, demographicincrease outstripped the supply of jobs, and enclosure added to the problems ofthe poor. A social and cultural gulf steadily opened between the gentry and theirneighbors. There was a greater awareness of rank, and of the economic realitiesof the tenant-landlord relationship, as capitalist relations finally replaced an olderorder rooted in concepts of community and deference.

The second important development was the emergence of a new pattern ofsocial relations between the local gentry and the elite of great landowners. Inthe early eighteenth century landed society had been fairly rigidly stratified, withrelations between the greatest landowners and the others being characterized bya pattern of deference. During the course of the century, however, the differencesof rank between the elite, on the one hand, and the broad mass of the local gentryand the wealthier professionals, on the other, were played down, partly becauseof the changing balance of economic power between these groups (Langford,1992, pp. 59-124; Girouard, 1978, pp. 188-193; Williamson, 1995, pp. 110-118;Girouard 1990, pp. 76-78). Emphasis was placed instead on easy social contactbetween members of these groups. All began to share a single lifestyle and tomix in an easier, less formal, more affable way. They began to behave, to use thecontemporary phrase, as members of a single "polite society."

This group was defined by shared norms of dress and behavior; and the periodsaw a steady expansion in fashionable consumption, as well as a steady prolifer-ation of playhouses, assemblies and other arenas for "undiluted socializing andpersonal display" (Dain, 1993, p. 7). This expansion of consumption did not onlyaffect the landed rich, however. This was the period of the "Consumer Revolution,"

Gardens, Legitimation, and Resistance 39

in which "more men and women than ever before in human history enjoyed theexperience of acquiring material possessions" (MacKendrick et al., 1982, p. 1),a boom in consumption which had, by the 1750s, "reached revolutionary propor-tions" (MacKendrick et al., 1982, p. 1). This is the third context in which we needto examine the development of gardens. Upward mobility, long a distinguishingfeature of English society, increased markedly in the second half of the eighteenthcentury. The expansion of the service sector led to an increase in the size of the"middle class"—a varied group, with members ranging from small farmers andshopkeepers, through petty industrialists, to prosperous merchants and profession-als. This development was a particular cause for concern among the establishedelite because, with the increasing amounts of consumer goods available, traditionalmarkers of status were being eroded. Artifacts once restricted to the rich were nowmore widely affordable and it was, in particular, becoming increasingly difficultto tell a gentleman from the clothes he wore (Fielding, 1988, p. 77; Williamson,1995, pp. 112-114). How were traditional values and hierarchies to be maintainedin this new, more fluid world?

I want to examine how these complex changes were related to the design ofgardens and landscapes, but first it might be useful to remind readers briefly of thecharacter of these changes. The gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,as already noted, had been of structured, geometric form. Their principal featureswere symmetrical abstract patterns defined by gravel and planting: parterres, knotsand topiary. Aesthetic areas were usually enclosed by high walls, but not otherwisesegregated from productive areas of the domestic complex: residences were usuallysurrounded by stable yards, kitchen grounds, nut grounds, orchards, and farmyards,and by such features as fish ponds and dovecotes. These productive facilities werenecessary to sustain the household but they also often expressed status. Dovecotes,for example, were restricted by law to the manorial gentry (Williamson, 1995,pp. 31-34). There was often no clear distinction between the aesthetic and theproductive: orchards might be part of the aesthetic garden, fishponds might doubleas ornamental basins (Currie, 1990). Beyond this network of enclosures, the largestlandowners often possessed a deer park, again a landscape valued both for the foodit produced (venison was the elite meat par excellence) as well as for the status itconferred. By the seventeenth century parks were often extensively colonized byornamental features such as avenues and banqueting houses.

In the early eighteenth century, at the highest social levels—that is, amongthe county elites of the greatest landowners—new forms of landscape emerged.Gardens continued to be geometric in design but they became simpler and lesscluttered. Complex parterres declined in popularity, as did enclosing walls. De-signs based on smooth grass lawns, gravel, and formal arrangements of trees—particularly in the form of ornamental woods or "wildernesses"—became the orderof the day. This style, associated with such names as Charles Bridgeman, BattyLangley, and Stephen Switzer, involved often considerable feats of earth movement

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to form terraces and viewing mounts even more monumental in construction thanthose of the earlier tradition (Willis, 1977). There was, more importantly, an in-creasing interest in classical allusions—sculptures, temples and the like; and fromthe late 1730s, under the influence, in particular, of William Kent, these were some-times set within compartments of more irregular planting and serpentine layout, asat Stowe or Holkham (Fig. 1). Such scenes were radically different from anythingthat had been created before. There was, at the same time, an increasing separationof productive and aesthetic areas. Home farms were normally moved far awayfrom the residence. The planting within the park, like that within the gardens,tended to become simpler: complex meshes of avenues were, in the 1730s and40s, increasingly replaced (at the highest social levels) by designs based on blockplanting and implied vistas. Temples, obelisks and the like were often erectedhere, as the termination of such vistas, and the experience of park and gardenwas increasingly integrated as the walls of the latter were lowered, or replaced bysunken fences ("ha-has"). At the same time the park was often extended in such away that the house lay close to its centre, rather than (as was usually the case inthe previous period) on its edge. Settlements had been removed or truncated forlandscaping schemes in earlier periods, but the early eighteenth century seems tohave witnessed an upsurge in the phenomenon.

At many elite sites enormous amounts of labor were expended on levelling thesites of farms or settlements thus removed. At Holkham in Norfolk, for example,the estate accounts reveal that laborers worked for 10 years in the 1740s in order

Fig. 1. William Kent's design for the South Lawn and the Temple on the Mount, Holkham,Norfolk, England, ca. 1740.

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to obliterate the remains of the village to the north of the hall, so as to create thestudied natural simplicity of Kent's North Lawn. Not surprisingly, no above-groundtraces of the settlement now survive. Such ferocious activity, here and elsewhere,has produced an absence of archaeology: this is superficially disappointing to fieldarchaeologists, yet tells us much about contemporary attitudes.

The changes just described were largely restricted to the residences of theelite—that handful of families in each county with estates of 10,000 acres or more,and social, cultural, and political horizons stretching beyond the locality. The greatmass of the local gentry were less likely to possess deer parks, and tended in thisperiod to retain their older-style gardens, set in walled enclosures, and often withbarns, farm yards, and other productive facilities in close proximity. In the period af-ter 1750, however, under the influence of Lancelot "Capability" Brown and his lessfamous contemporaries like Nathaniel Richmond and Richard Woods, there was amarked convergence in the styles of elite and gentry grounds. Structured, geomet-ric gardens now normally disappeared from the vicinity of mansions—from thoseof the local gentry as much as the landed elite. An open, "naturalistic" landscapeof grass and scattered trees, often including a serpentine lake and circumscribed,in whole or part, by a perimeter plantation belt, became the fashion (Stroud, 1957;Turner, 1985) (Fig. 2). These landscape parks developed, at the highest social lev-els, from existing deer parks, but among the local gentry they were established atthe expense of a working agricultural countryside. As already noted, these designs,less dependent on "hard landscaping," have generally received less attention from

Fig. 2. Typical eighteenth-century parkland: Ickworth, Suffolk, England.

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field archaeologists, although careful survey of the earthworks they contain—thetraces of the landscape made redundant by emparking—can tell us a great dealabout the ways in which the "genius of the place" was consulted. They can revealthe manner in which the existing landscape was systematically transformed by aprocess of selective destruction (of settlements, roads, boundaries) and retention(of existing woods and timber). In the larger parks, moreover, the natural landformsmight be altered to open up views or vistas: such modifications, often subtle, areagain amenable to archaeological investigation (Hughes, 1982; Williamson, 1998).

LANDSCAPE GARDENS AND LANDSCAPE PARKS

How were these changes related to the wider economic and social develop-ments outlined briefly above? To begin with, we need to emphasize that althoughthe kinds of landscapes made fashionable by Kent and Brown are often lumpedtogether in histories of eighteenth-century landscape design—the extensive, irreg-ular landscape parks of the latter developing out of the smaller serpentine pleasuregrounds of the former—they were in fact doing very different things. Holkham,in Norfolk (see Fig. 1), created around 1740 for Thomas Coke, is a good ex-ample of Kent's work. With temple, clumps of pines and evergreen oaks, thislandscape—which formed a component within a wider, more traditional geomet-ric structure—was clearly based on the landscapes of the Italian campagna, or onthe representations of this in paintings by artists like Lorraine or Poussin whichwere widely hung on the walls of the rich. In fact, the garden can be read as a kindof three-dimensional postcard: a dreamlike, idealized version of real landscapes,as dimly remembered by those who had witnessed them, first hand, on the GrandTour—the extended progress through Europe which was the essential completionof the education of the fashionable. Kent's garden formed an appropriate settingfor the erudite Palladian correctness of Holkham Hall itself (Sicca, 1989). Likeother similar designs of the period, however, it operated on a number of levels,related to the viewpoint and experience of the observer. By doing so, it servedto emphasize the differences, and similarities, between various social groups. ForHolkham was on display, and not only when its owners entertained. Admissionto the grounds was normally permitted, at least on the allotted days, to those whoappeared respectable. Members of the landed elite, like Coke himself, would haveunderstood well enough what was being exhibited here. Most were educated in theprinciples of Palladian architecture, and many would have experienced these land-scapes first hand on the Grand Tour. A wider constituency of visitors—membersof the local gentry, or of the urban patriciate of major towns like Norwich or KingsLynn—could also partake of a measure of understanding, for similar images ofItalian scenery were widely available in the form of prints derived from the paint-ings of Lorraine or Poussin. Partial knowledge allowed them to recognize whatwas on display in this theater of landscape, and thus to appreciate the superior


status of men like Coke. Such an act of recognition also served to affirm their ownrelative importance in society. These landscapes thus helped reinforce the ties ofclientage, patronage and dependence which still bound the gentry and the upperbourgeoisie to the elite of great landowners. The local community, of small farm-ers and (in particular) laborers were not party to such experiences: they were notan intended audience. Most were physically excluded—only the respectable wereallowed admittance—and even when they did gain entry, moving through the land-scape on tasks of maintenance or construction, they were excluded in more subtleways. The fields in which they had formerly labored had been transformed into anintellectual landscape of elite display. Their village had been swept away; Holkhamwas no longer Holkham, but an alien place, and for decades they worked to levelthe remains of their former homes, to eradicate all signs of their own history. Thevarious ranks among the propertied were thus defined, at the same time as the masswere excluded, as the very act of design lifted this and similar landscapes out oflocal time and space altogether, moving them into the realm of selective socialexperience (Williamson, 1988, pp. 164-182).

The designs that Capability Brown and his contemporaries created in the sec-ond half of the eighteenth century were very different, and suited to different times.This period, as already noted, saw a restructuring of social divisions in England.Relations between the elite of great landowners on the one hand, and the localgentry and upper bourgeoisie on the other, were no longer organized primarilyaround ties of deference and dependence. The upper echelons of society were nowcohering into a single "polite" elite, consciously different from the "impolite."The landscape park was its symbol, a simpler form of landscape than the kindsof classical, serpentine layouts of the 1740s and 1750s, and one that made fewdemands on knowledge or experience. The park was a mass-produced fashionableitem that represented an idealized transformation of native scenery. The park's en-tire structure exuded seclusion and privacy, surrounded as it was by belts of trees.The safely distanced spire or smoke from a remote cottage chimney might be per-missible additions to the prospect, but belts always obscured any more immediatesigns of habitation. Farms and cottages were frequently removed, public roadsalmost always closed or diverted when a park was laid out. It formed an insulatingcordon around the mansion, which clearly separated the landowner from the localcommunity. It both reflected and forged discrete paths of contact and experience.

Writers on landscape design in the eighteenth century often talked about theneed to consult the "genius of the place" when parks were laid out; the designershould work with, rather than against, the character of the local topography. Carefulconsideration of the existing landscape lay at the heart of the new style, andthis in effect meant that an extensive ornamental landscape could be created atcomparatively little cost, utilizing much of the old landscape. Moreover, insteadof the miles of gravel paths to be weeded, beds to be hoed, shrubs and hedgesto be clipped, walls to be maintained, the landscape park had only the sweeping

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park turf, and this could be grazed for profit—just as the timber in the woods andplantations was, in effect, money in the bank. Landscape parks were not cheap,but they were comparatively so, given their size. Vast amounts of money couldbe thrown at them, yet a passable version could be created at relatively little cost.They were landscapes available to the small local squire as much as the magnate,and as such, they expressed the new unity, the ease of relationships, within theranks of the polite, and the separation of this group from the rest.

The landscape park excluded the poor, and created an arena for a range of"polite" activities, especially the breeding and slaughtering of pheasants. But itwas not created primarily as an attempt to "dupe" them, in the ways implied byBermingham (1987). The lower orders were firmly controlled by a range of legaland economic sanctions and structures. The park removed their offensive pres-ence from the polite gaze but the details of its design mainly expressed attitudestowards other, less marginalized groups. In an age of expanding production andconsumption, and of increasing social mobility, the landscape park helped to main-tain elements of established hierarchy. Only the landed rich could have a park: thegreat landowners, the gentry and the most successful merchants and manufacturers,who might aspire to a property on the edge of town. The rest—the broader middleclass, steadily gaining in numbers and wealth—had gardens, not parks. They sim-ply lacked the amounts of land necessary to create Brown's sweeping panoramas,and they thus continued to lay out grounds of structured, even geometric character.And so, as an essential part of the "package" of the Brownian style, landownersswept gardens away from the main facades of their mansions: for to live withgardens in full view was what the bourgeoisie did, just as to live with orchards andyards and dung heaps in sight was the mark of the farmer. Gentlemen, by definition,lived in houses set in parkland, and enjoyed views over open parkland from theirwindows. And so it was that not only walled gardens but also orchards, farmyards,fishponds, bams—all the things that had once clustered around the mansion—werenow banished from sight. This was a society increasingly geared to fashionableconsumption, and thus superior resources for production were no longer a markof distinction. In a veritable revolution in landscape design, the house was set freefrom all signs of industry, all associations with useful toil and activity.

CHALLENGES TO THE LANDSCAPE PARK

Gardens did not, however, entirely disappear, even from the homes of thefashionable. They generally continued to exist in marginal locations, away fromthe main facades of the house, increasingly regarded as womens' space and devel-oped and elaborated by landowners' wives. The park, used for riding and shooting,was increasingly defined as a masculine space. But in addition, some landowners,especially those dwelling in the more provincial areas of England, continued


to maintain old-fashioned enclosed gardens, publicly displayed before the mainfacades, even if they also laid out a park beyond them. To judge from diaries andletters, this was often part of a conscious rejection of fancy London ways—andsomething more. The culture of the polite was a national culture, involving na-tional norms of dress, deportment, and speech: national, but based essentially onLondon and the south east. We need to be careful about reading resistance to thedominant culture in eighteenth-century England solely in terms of class. Regionalidentities, increasingly blurred and swamped by the development of a national cap-italist market economy, were also important: the opposition, in eighteenth-centuryparlance, between "court" and "country." Yet such resistance was itself boundup with views about the nature of society: and this connection began to be con-sciously articulated, in a sophisticated critique of Brown's style, towards the endof the eighteenth century. This was in the ideas of "picturesque" landscaping, pro-pounded by Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight—landowners, significantly,from remote, rural Herefordshire (Knight, 1794; Price, 1794; Daniels and Watkins,1991). Their style involved an emphasis on detail, rather than endless panoramas;on terrain which was rugged, rather than Brown's bland Home Counties pastoral;on the idiosyncratic and the local (Figs. 3 and 4). Gardens, these writers argued,

Fig. 3. A park in the style of Capability Brown. Illustration by Thomas Hearne from Richard PayneKnight's The Landscape (1794).

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should be reintroduced before the main facades of the house, and the perimeterbelt broken at intervals to express the landowner's involvement in the affairs ofthe community. The key principle was "connection": "Although the separation ofthe different ranks and their gradations, like those of visible objects is known andascertained, yet from the beneficial mixture, and frequent intercommunication ofhigh and low, that separation is happily disguised, and does not sensibly operateon the human mind" (Daniels and Watkins, 1991, p. 159).

This was the landscape both of regional resistance and of traditional pater-nalism, consciously set in opposition to the naked exploitation symbolized by theBrownian park. Such concepts were further adapted and developed by HumphryRepton, and in the decades after 1800 gardens and pleasure grounds became moreextensive and elaborate, terraces and parterres began to appear once more, divid-ing the house from the open expanses of parkland (Stroud, 1962). Within the parkitself, planting became more varied and more luxuriant; greater attention seemsto have been paid to the relationship between the park and the wider countryside,with particular care being taken over entrances.

These ideas had a particular appeal at a time when the French revolution wasdemonstrating too clearly what happened when the rich lost contact with the local

Fig. 4. The park in Fig. 3 given the "picturesque" treatment. Illustration by Thomas Hearne fromRichard Payne Knight's The Landscape (1794).

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Williamson

community: they also lost their heads. In the early nineteenth century, at somesites, the poor were publicly embraced while still excluded: Houghton in Norfolk(Fig. 5) was one of many places where the main entrance was relocated so that thepreexisting estate village could be seen to cluster, deferentially, at the park gates.How far such displays were truly directed at the local poor, and how far they werea response to the growing attacks on the establishment by middle-class radicals,is a matter of debate.

The connections between these, and other, alternatives to the dominantBrownian mode of landscaping are complex: there were shifting varieties of re-sistance. These were related to the shifting fortunes and experiences of, and con-nections between, the various groups marginalized from the core of the "polite."Moreover, styles developed by one group, in one arena, could be taken up anddeveloped by another. There was much in the "Picturesque" style, especially inthe form developed by Repton, which appealed to small landowners and aspir-ing members of the bourgeoisie: to those whose carriage drives were short. Anemphasis on structure and detail, on gardens, and on dense and varied plantingmade more visual sense on small properties than vast panoramas. Repton's style,as developed by such practitioners as Lewis Kennedy, William Sawrey Gilpin, andJohn Claudius Loudon, was soon adapted to serve the needs of the middle classes,busy building neat villas in ever-increasing numbers on the margins of the majorcities and country towns (Piebenga, 1994).

Fig. 5. Houghton, Norfolk, England. The main entrance was repositioned in ca. 1800 so that it couldlead off from the end of the main village street.

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CONCLUSION

Eighteenth-century landscapes carried symbolic meaning, which might affirmor reject particular ideologies. They were also, however, about being: dwelling,fitness, and suitability for the owner's lifestyle. Landscapes expressed how indi-vidual landowners felt about production, and about their relations with tenants;and in particular, whether they identified principally with the local communityor with the wider national culture of the polite. A visible challenge to dominantfashion demanded land, however. Not surprisingly, all the challenges to the dom-inant modes of landscaping to which I have briefly referred came from groupswhich, while marginalized, were nevertheless propertied and participants in thepolitical game, whether these were essentially reactive groups, like the provincialbackwoods Tory gentry, whose star was waning; or, like the middle classes, risinggroups, those whose time was yet to come.

What, then, of resistance by the poor? If by this term we mean the ruralproletariat, they could by definition mount little in the way of a distinctive challengein the arena of landscape because, in a period in which enclosure was removingthe last vestiges of community control over land, and in which their personalstake in the land had often dwindled to nothing, they had no canvass on which toinscribe their mark. In estate villages like Houghton even the design of their owngardens might be dictated by the owner and land agent, so that it might enhance theappearance of the park entrance. In the vast landscapes of power, their presence wastransient, fleeting. At Holkham, when the great perimeter belt was being planted,Thomas Coke was able to save money on planting costs because, instead of theestate planting the potatoes to cleanse the ground, he allowed the neighboring poorto do so, "which is a great comfort to them" (Kent, 1796, p. 90).

We do of course have some evidence of how the lower levels of society reactedto the changes occurring in the landscape around them. A blacksmith from Bedalein Yorkshire wrote a poem describing the changes which had occurred in his ownlifetime. The owners of the local country house, the Rand, had closed public roadsto lay out a park:

And now them roads are done awayAnd one made in their roomQuite to the east, of wide displayWhere you may go and comeQuite unobserved from the RandThe trees do them secludeIf modern times do call such grandIts from a gloomy mood. (Lewis, 1990)

The resistance of the poor is most clearly indicated by acts of reappropriationand trespass—especially as parks were sometimes established, or expanded, at theexpense of former common land. Poaching had reached epidemic proportions bythe 1790s, in spite of draconian legislation—and parks were, above all, breeding


Fig. 6. William Heath's comment on the Game Laws. A poacher is simultaneously caught in a man trapand fired on by a spring gun.

grounds for pheasants (Munsche, 1987). The parkland plantations offered otherresources to the marginalized. The estate accounts for Chatsworth in Derbyshirerecord numerous payments for setting guards on the plantations to prevent thelocal people from gathering nuts in them. Sometimes the poor reacted with simpleacts of pointless vandalism, often recorded in estate accounts or local newspapers:"Wanted: information about those persons who so maliciously destroyed the plan-tation of firs in Drinkstone park, by plucking the leading shoot from each tree."It was in such acts of resistance that the poor inscribed their mark upon the land-scape. Unfortunately, such traces are hard to detect in either the archaeological orthe documentary record. Indeed, perhaps our best evidence comes from the mea-sures of counter-resistance mounted against them by the propertied—the springguns in the woods, and the steady proliferation of entrance lodges (Fig. 6).

The landscape of eighteenth-century England is not, then, a good place tosearch for an archaeology of "resistance" on the part of the disenfranchised. Someof the general observations made above may, nevertheless, have a wider relevance.In complex societies, resistance to the dominant ideology is as likely to come frommarginalized groups within the propertied as from the truly poor; and the marksleft by the former, having access to resources and land, are likely to appear withgreater clarity in the archaeological and documentary record than those made bythe latter. We, as archaeologists, would do well not to confuse the two.

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