The Age of Exuberance 1550-1700

The Making of Britain #3

by Michael A. Reed

Bound in the publisher's original cloth with the spine stamped in gilt.

Genres: History

306 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1986

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Age of Exuberance 1550-1700 is a landscape history first published in 1986 that I bought while on holiday, attracted by the many illustrations of 16th and 17th century architecture. I grew up in houses built during that period, so already have a keen awareness, and qualified appreciation, thereof. They're very pretty and well-ventilated but extremely cold in winter. Reed draws upon both documentary evidence, such as probate inventories, and surviving physical structures to find themes in the changing landscape of Britain over two centuries. The book begins with a detailed discussion of enclosure. Although informative, this was definitely the least compelling part. When the topic shifted to structures required for manufacturing and early industries, I became much more interested. Reed's discussion of coal use complements Andreas Malm's Marxist analysis in Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming:

Coal replaced wood as a source of heat in an increasingly wide range of manufactures. There were however many problems to be overcome before coal could be used satsfactorily. Malt dried with raw coal made an undrinkable beer, and so by about 1603 attempts were being made to dry malt with coal which had itself been roasted to drive off the impurities. Success was a long time coming and it seems to have been the 1640s before coke was being used successfully to dry malt from which a palatable beer could be brewed. It continued to be impossible to use coal in blast furnaces however and it was not until 1709 that Abraham Darby made iron successfully using coke at his Coalbrookdale ironworks, and even then the technique spread only very slowly and it was the second half of the eighteenth century before it began to be adopted on any scale.

That paragraph demonstrates Reed's fondness for a run-on sentence, which I got used to and found rather charming. (Some may think otherwise.) The second half of the book is largely concerned with residential and institutional buildings, discussing the fascinating and wide-ranging impacts on the Reformation and Renaissance. The former had immediate implications for land ownership and use, whereas the latter's influence on architecture was slow and gradual. Given that he is covering two hundred years, Reed is suitably reluctant to overgeneralise. I appreciated his identification of broad tendencies via examples.

The many illustrations in The Age of Exuberance 1550-1700 attracted me in the first place and are well-integrated into the text. They also reminded me that my life has been almost entirely spent living in villages, towns, and cities with historic cores dating back 500 years or more. Not only have I been lucky enough to be surrounded by historical architecture, a couple of the plates in this book are of buildings I've actually been inside. Most amusingly, I recognised Plate 45 as a branch of Lakeland that I've shopped in. The frankly boring town of Ipswich, which I refuse to call a city, is often mentioned as many Tudor and Stuart buildings survive there. Indeed, the same is true across Norfolk and Suffolk, which Reed explains in the text: since the 18th century they've been backwaters virtually untouched by industrialisation. Yet in earlier centuries they were populous and economically successful parts of England. I hadn't realised that Norwich was the second-largest settlement in England, after London, at the end of 17th century. I liked how Reed grappled with the distinction between town and village, a perpetual challenge for anyone attempting spatial classifications:

Neither size nor legal status are very satisfactory indicators of towns, since the word could be, and was, applied to places that were very small indeed, and a number of important towns during these two centuries were never incorporated as boroughs. This is why, when searching for any significant distinction between a village and a town, we are compelled to look to function as proving the surest guide. A village will become a town when a significant proportion of its inhabitants, perhaps as many as a third, are engaged in non-agricultural occupations, more especially when they are producing goods and services for the use of people living outside the immediate confines of the town, so that it acts as a focal point for the surrounding district, however small.

I honestly have no idea how niche the appeal of The Age of Exuberance 1550-1700 is. The writing style struck me as neither academic nor popular, but something in between. Although I expect landscape scholarship has moved on in the past 40 years, it's an engaging and informative read if you're interested in 16th and 17th century Britain's built and cultivated environment, as I am.

[Christopher Newton · Rating 3 out of 5]

scholarly, a bit dry, but full of interesting stuff about the transition in Britain from medieval to modern times.