THE GREAT REBUILDING: A REASSESSMENT^*

Regional Identity in the Lake Counties: Land Tenure and the Cumbrian Landscape

“…Cumbria's 'great rebuilding' gathered momentum after the Restoration, when the surplus of wealth from the livestock trade provided the means, and the confirmation of security of tenure on customary tenant right property the encouragement, for yeomen farmers to invest capital in house-building. 36 Notions of improvement and agricultural innovation were in the air by the later seventeenth century: farmers in the narrow coastal belt in south-west Cumberland were among the pioneers of potato cultivation from the 1660s 37 while liming was increasing crop yields across the Cumberland plain by the 1680s. 38 Customary tenants were by no means a uniformly backward group.…”

Worth, age, and social status in early modern England1

“…6 6 McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, Birth of a consumer society ; Thirsk, Economic policy and projects ; Hoskins, ‘Rebuilding of rural England’; Barley, ‘Farmhouses and cottages’; Machin, ‘Great rebuilding’. …”

The interpretation of urban buildings: power, memory and appropriation in Norwich merchants' houses,c. 1400–1660

“…The debate around the 'great rebuilding' of houses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains central to our narratives of architectural and social change in this crucial period of transition, but has been conducted almost wholly with reference to rural buildings. The original chronology suggested by W. G. Hoskins (1953), which posited a sustained campaign of rebuilding between c.1570 and 1640, has been replaced by a more complex picture of drawn-out regional building cycles (Currie 1988;Machin 1977;Platt 1994). Similarly, a simplistic view of the rebuilding of houses as a direct reflection of economic prosperity has been replaced by a more nuanced approach placing changing social relations and cultural identities at the heart of changing house forms.…”