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Land Ownership in 18th Century England

In the 18th century, England -- like other countries throughout the world at the time (and arguably in some measure still today) was a country marked by enormous distinctions of wealth, distinctions that were expressed in terms of owner ship of land.

Thus it is no surprise that the changing political and cultural tenure of English life during the 18th and 19th centuries was reflected in the meaning of land; the metaphors and significances associated with land both mirrored and in some measure created these political changes.

At the beginning of the 18th century England (like other European nations) was marked by extreme distinctions of wealth, with a very large distance between rich and poor, powerful and impotent and cultured and uneducated. These distinctions were in many ways defined and maintained by the different relationships that the different classes had to land. Those who owned large estates were not only wealthy, but they constituted the governing classes both in terms of those who were legislators sitting in Parliament and passing laws and those who served as magistrates sitting in local courts enforcing them. Moreover, as Mingay notes, the culture of the wealthy landed class diverged sharply from that of the unlanded peasantry.

The culture of the wealthy, embracing art, literature, architecture, music and drama, and not least manners and the arts of polite conversation and correspondence, contrasted sharply with the unsophisticated country lore and confined horizons of the laboring folk, whose leisure hours were mainly devoted to rustic sports, often brutal and violent .

Thus men (and to a lesser extent women) of the landed classes were bound together not only by common interest in the protection of that property but by an entire network of cultural beliefs and activities. But this relatively homogeneous and unified culture began to disintegrate over the course of the century, at least in some part because of th...

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Land Ownership in 18th Century England. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:43, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1699022.html