The English Village: History and Traditions
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.85
Trade in The English Village:History and Traditions for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.85, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Product Description
The village remains a quintessential and much-loved treasure of the English countryside. This rural idyll has inspired generations of great poets, novelists and artists including the likes of Constable, Hardy, Wordsworth, as well as providing the picturesque setting for modern TV series such as "Lark Rise to Candleford and Cranford". "The English Village" celebrates all that is unique and loved about a typical village - the pub, the green, the school, the church, the pond, the local shop and more - as well as exploring how the village has changed over the centuries. Also includes fascinating information on the origins of village names - Siddington, for example, means the farm of the valley (sidd: valley, in: belonging to, ton: farmland). Filled with facts, figures, customs and lore, there is a wealth of fascinating information to be discovered in this charming book.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Lightweight and dull,
By
This review is from: The English Village:History and Traditions (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
It's hard to believe a book so short and light can also manage to be so dull and tiresome.The tone is flat and as I read I kept being put in mind of a bored schoolmaster attempting, without enthusiasm, to fill his charges with knowledge that neither he nor they cared much about. The subject, brilliantly treated by Hoskins in his "The Making of the English Landscape", is here reduced to a cosy travelogue of half hearted clichés and endless recitation of facts. The English village deserves much better. On the plus side, both the cover and illustrations outclass the text by some distance, promising intrigue and delight that the text does not deliver.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A delightful book,
By
This review is from: The English Village:History and Traditions (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
Most of us, especially those of us who are literary, have a cozy image of a typical English village in our minds. Mine has definitely been imparted through reading, but has only been strengthened over the time I've lived in England. Uneven rows of thatched roof cottages, wide expanses of farmland, the rectory, and maybe even the manor house on the hill - it depends what historical period your mind works best in. Our ideal of the English village is more myth than any kind of reality, but that doesn't mean you can't still love them, and that is the contradiction that Wainwright explores in The English Village.It's clear from the start that Wainwright loves the ideal of England as much as the rest of us do. The book is broken down into chapters concerning different aspects of the village, from those cottages I mentioned to the festivals that the villagers used to celebrate. The book concludes with a chapter on the potential future of the English village and the changes that have happened recently, namely a revival in village life and a determination to conserve the bits we have left for the future. Each chapter also contains black and white drawings of, usually, buildings mentioned in the text to give us a good idea of what we're reading about. At the core this was really a delightful book. I loved the way that Wainwright pulled history into the idyllic vision that so many of us cherish - not to remove the dream, but to add a layer of realism to it. One of my favorite parts was when he mentioned that some cottages which are now valued at over one million pounds used to be houses for the poor. It's this dichotomy which sums up that contradiction; the now pretty villages had an underside which has mostly moved to the cities, leaving much of the countryside for the wealthy. The English Village naturally also covers the history of the village and how it has evolved through time, starting with the Norman Conquest and ending with the people who are keeping the dream alive, either through pubs or restoration. The industrial revolution effectively ended the need to live in cottages scattered across the countryside, but that way of life was common throughout our history until that point. The shift was monumental, although also incremental, and given that I am always a person who is fascinated with those fundamental changes, I was hooked by this in particular. For anyone who has ever imagined having a little house in the countryside - perhaps a timber-framed, plastered house with a thatch roof, as I've wished - The English Village is truly the perfect read. And it would make a great Christmas gift, too; if you're in poking around the shops this weekend looking for last minute presents, look no further.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nostalgia aint like it used to be,
By
This review is from: The English Village:History and Traditions (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Programme (What's this?)
The English Village - History and TraditionsMartin Wainwright Villages - Those idyllic places where "townies" believe they will be at peace , second homes, back to nature (Arcadia) - what is the history and the reality? This book covers the following with humour and nostalgia:- History of the village - Saxons to present Historical relationships to major landowners and the crown Abbeys, monasteries and churches The pub - centre of the village Buildings - types and earliest dates (mainly 1700 onwards) Agriculture, Industries and typical wages Customs (fairs and sports) - ancient and modern Industrial villages - paternalism The future of villages I enjoyed it - worth reading by anyone with an interest in rapidly disappearing ( or at least changing) traditions For the obsessive ( or the plain curious) the Bibliography is extensive
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews |
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
