Another has been to subdivide the extended Revolution into sub-Revolutions, such as a ‘chemical’ followed by an ‘extractive’ Revolution. In Chapter 6 I will discuss the merits of various ‘ceramic revolutions’. These were indeed fast, and revolutionary in their effects. But on the ceramic market alone. They never transformed people’s lives. My own feeling is that these sub-Revolutions are really clutching at straws and are helping to perpetuate the use of a term that ought to be dropped, for the simple reason that it is both inaccurate and misleading.
Students of industrial archaeology study the physical remains of early factories and workshops. They make extensive use of documents – if they are available – but perhaps most important of all they closely examine the archaeological evidence for contemporary housing, for both workers and management. Increasingly today industrial archaeologists are concerned with the long roots of industrialisation and its social consequences.12 The trend towards social perspectives has affected the scope of archaeologists who are now more concerned with the wider relationship between housing, factories and workshops; the effect has been to look at industries within the landscape: how and why they arose in a particular area and the influences they had on a given region’s population and economy.13
The concept of landscape is particularly significant within industrial archaeology, because it can be used to decide why certain sources of power were originally selected – coal and water are obvious examples. Landscapes can also help to explain why workers’ housing, for example, was located in certain areas, but social considerations always seem to have remained pre-eminent. For example, the switch from waterwheels to steam power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often necessitated twenty-four-hour shift working to cover the additional costs of coal. This in turn meant that housing had to be positioned close by the factory or mill, whether or not the terrain was actually suited to such a change. Sometimes underlying social motives could be less apparent. For example, many of the great mill owners aspired to emulate the landed gentry (which they often achieved with notable success) and to do this they built their new homes to resemble the great country houses of the nobility. Their houses were placed relatively nearby (to enable them to keep an eye on the shop), but the positioning carefully avoided any visual reminders of the mills and back-to-back housing that actually generated their wealth. But all rules have exceptions, as we will see when we come to look at where the great industrialists Robert Owen and his much-underrated father-in-law placed their houses in the model town they created at New Lanark.
I have always had an interest in what one might term modern archaeology and found I had more time for it after I had completed work on the report of my excavations at Flag Fen, a process that occupied me, night and day, for some five years in the mid-1990s. When that was finished I decided I really had to get out more, see the world and ‘get a life’. But I still had a deep and abiding interest in the past and the story behind the creation of modern Britain. So I found my attention was gradually shifting forwards in time. I was, however, completely astonished by the sheer diversity I encountered when I delved more deeply into the archaeology of modern times. It wasn’t just about the obvious themes: the growth of industry or agriculture and the development of towns. I also found that students and researchers were approaching even these topics from unexpected directions, often with surprising results. This was one of the other reasons I decided it was impossible to present a ‘balanced’ view of the archaeology of post-medieval times and have opted instead to examine projects and ideas that give one a new slant or perspective, if not a ‘sideways’ look at the period. Although there are a few excellent history books that cast their nets wider,14 too often such accounts approach early modern Britain from the viewpoint of the great and the good. Theirs is a story of major politicians, generals, bishops, kings, queens and princes. Mine, I hope, will be about everyone else.
Finally, I must say a few words about the way this book has been organised. Readers of the three other volumes of this four-part archaeological history of Britain will have grown used to a straightforward chronological layout. In fact, I’ll be quite honest and admit that, for the sake of consistency, I tried to organise this book in the same way. But sadly it just didn’t work. I found I was attempting an impossibly difficult juggling act with too many balls in the air at one time. Put another way, too much was happening too quickly across too many different areas of life to sustain a coherent narrative, especially when I switched themes, at which point, like a bad television documentary, I was forced to summarise or recapitulate ‘the story so far’. Anyhow, after a few weeks I abandoned the unequal struggle and decided instead to follow a series of general themes, chapter by chapter. These topics will, however, be approached chronologically. Of course an author is never a good judge of such things, but, fingers crossed, I think it works rather better than I once dared to hope.
* I use the terms Scheduled (for ancient sites) and Listed (for standing buildings) to denote that these places are protected by Act of Parliament.
Chapter One
Market Forces: Fields, Farming and the Rural Economy
SO FAR MY investigation of Britain’s archaeological past has taken me almost two millennia this side of prehistory, my own area of expertise. I am now deep within unknown territory, what medieval adventurers might have described as terra incognita. With this in mind I trust readers will forgive me if I follow an old excavator’s principle and work from the known to the unknown.
So I want to start our exploration of Britain in the post-medieval period in the farms and fields of the countryside. There, at least, I feel reasonably at home and not just because I was brought up in a small village, but because over the past thirty-odd years my wife Maisie and I have kept a small sheep farm which would regularly make a tiny profit, until, that is, 2001, when the market value of British livestock collapsed, rather like wheat prices after the Black Death. In our case the miscreants have been BSE/scrapie, foot-and-mouth (twice) and now the dreaded Bluetongue in all its grisly variants. More recently, and much to our surprise, things have picked up. This improvement followed directly on the bursting of the bankers’ bubble in 2008, when the collapse of cheap credit forced an international reassessment of what matters in life. At last people have recognised that the era of cheap food was always unsustainable. Anyhow, my interest in sheep-farming has given me insights into, and much sympathy for, historic and ancient farmers. So let’s start our journey where the food that nourishes human life originates: with farms, with farmers, and their families.
I would guess that over the years archaeologists have excavated hundreds, if not thousands, of prehistoric, Roman and medieval farms, farmyards and field systems. I myself have dug upwards of a dozen. But with one exception, which I will discuss shortly, I cannot think of a single post-medieval or modern farm that has been treated in this way.* This simple fact illustrates, if anything can, how different is the way that post-medieval archaeology is carried out. There are fewer excavations and instead far, far more effort goes into the accurate surveying of upstanding remains which are then painstakingly tied in with the documentary evidence. So that’s how things are done and to some extent it makes complete sense, because why dig when you can measure and survey at a fraction of the cost?
It is all perfectly rational, but nevertheless the digger/excavator deep down inside me feels a bit uneasy: surely without entirely new and unexpected information from the ground there is always a danger that observations derived from surveys can somehow be made to ‘fit’ the documentary evidence? True, these two strands of research can together combine to reveal fascinating stories, but, speaking entirely for myself, I sometimes enjoy seeing theories – even my own – being turned rudely upside down. The inevitable rethink that follows can be wonderfully invigorating and is far cheaper than a bottle of Champagne. That’s what makes
