This collection of essays considers an early modern transformation in the British landscape and its relationship with agricultural productivity. Five biographical, four topographical, and two general essays discuss the tension between tenants’ aims in protecting their interests through custom and landlords’ ambitions in applying ideas of improvement. In an introductory essay by the editor, it is pointed out that custom and improvement have typically been viewed as opposites. Readers should turn to this collection of essays, produced to a customary high standard by Ashgate, for a more nuanced understanding of the issues at stake in improving the landscape. They should begin with Paul Warde’s excellent essay, “The Idea of Improvement, ca. 1520–1700,” which appears midway through the collection. The opening lines sum up the theme: “‘Improvement’ is a word much loved of historians describing a new ethic for agricultural advancement in early modern England. The ‘improver’ was a determined opponent of custom and habit. Centuries of agricultural practice could melt into air if found wanting before the court of reason, experiment and experience” (127). Warde’s essay engages with medieval English and early modern European and North American evidence and clarifies a distinction in the meaning of improvement. Before the Restoration, improvement generally referred to raising yields from the land, as a means to maximizing profit, but from the late seventeenth century onward it was associated with general ideas of betterment. As Warde points out, opponents of the later definition, English or Native American, could be more easily vilified than earlier opponents of landscape improvements. Finally Warde—by explaining that later campaigns of improvement focused their attention on soils—shows a tie-in with the modern green revolution.

Writing this review in a North Yorkshire village a few miles from a ruined Cistercian abbey and a market town where a statue was erected in the square by the tenants to commemorate a nineteenth-century landlord, I wonder to what extent these later ideas of improvement (i.e., general betterment) existed in the medieval period and how far these two definitions overlapped during the nineteenth century. The Cistercians (before the popularity of lay brotherhood turned their abbeys into farming corporations) used improvement of the land as prayer before Calvinist thought developed these ideas further. More discussion could have been given to the conditions of cooperation in transforming landscapes, raising questions over whether modes of negotiation for improvement in early modern Britain were particularly aggressive or whether the evidence is simply thinner when compared to earlier and later periods. It would be interesting to consider some of the views put forward in these essays over a longer and wider framework and to make use of quantitative data and Historical Geographic Information Systems.

Alasdair Ross’s essay on improving an estate on the Grant estates in the Strathspey valley, thirty miles east of Loch Ness, shows how a gamble did not pay off. The landlord, on the advice of his former tutor Lorimar, destroyed a successful cattle-transhumance system in favor of arable production based on smallholdings. Critically, as the landlord commenced the program, he was not clear in his own mind as to whether small or large holdings provided the optimum framework for improvement, and he did not have access to an efficient transportation system for marketing the grain. Disaster followed when harsh weather came, and tenants who had been recently settled were evicted, with a reversion to the status quo ante. That Lorimar’s recommendations drew on personal visits to farming improvement schemes in New York province and Scotland, as well as wide reading, demonstrates how later pro bono ideas of improvement could be far more dangerous to both landlords and tenants than schemes directed toward narrower, pre-Restoration era, objectives of increasing rental values.

Other essays in the collection are more focused on insular developments within the early modern period. Gender is represented with two essays by Elizabeth Griffiths and Briony McDonagh discussing the contributions of Lady Alice Le Strange and Mrs. Elizabeth Prowse, respectively. There is reasonable geographical and chronological coverage, albeit—perhaps inevitably—with an emphasis on the East Anglian region. Nicola Whyte’s essay, “Contested Pasts: Custom, Conflict and Landscape Change in West Norfolk, ca. 1550–1650,” convincingly demonstrates how different landscape features in the breckland area served as boundaries for negotiation between lords and tenants. The essays by Richard Hoyle and Heather Falvey explore how efforts to control the written record were used to manipulate memories of custom. Contributions from Henry French, Bill Shannon, and Julie Bowring are well written and raise points of interest in relation to urban and waterlogged rural environments.

More indexing and more thought at the final editing stage could have improved this book. For example, on page 241 six unindexed places are mentioned, and secondary actors, such as Winstanley, appear to have been omitted from the index. “Personal communication from Professor Andy Wood” at pages 37 and 206 in the notes needed further fleshing out in relation, respectively, to the date at which customary systems were established and the uniqueness of the Le Strange family among Norfolk landowners in not facing protests against enclosure. Only three maps are provided, and yet not all readers will be familiar, for instance, with fenland geography. This interesting and balanced volume of essays will be of interest to early modern British historians, and the essays by Ross and Warde have implications for the understanding of economic development across the premodern period.