2 - Regional and local settings

Summary

In whatsoever direction we proceed, the same pleasing and diversified scenery presents itself; and, on attaining an eminence, no expansive view can be found chequered with more enchanting objects. On every side our gaze is arrested by scattered village spires, the country seats of the affluent, and monastic and castellated ruins; while the rich woodland, the verdant pasturage, the arable soil, and the light green of the hop grounds, intersected by translucent waters, display, on all sides, the richly embroidered carpet of prolific nature.

(Ireland, 1828, vol.1, p.3)

THE PARISHES OF KENT, ESSEX AND SUSSEX

Kent, Essex and Sussex, the setting chosen for this study of ‘contours of death; contours of health’, were, thus, described in glowing terms by some of their county topographers. Situated in the south-east corner of England, with the coastal waters of the English Channel and the North Sea forming one boundary, the River Thames another and the metropolitan zone of London a third, these three counties lay in a position close to continental Europe and within reach of the metropolis of England (Figure 2.1). Enhanced by soils of rich and natural fertility and free from the blights of heavy manufacturing expansion, this corner of England retained its pleasing and agrarian prospect throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was to the men and women who traversed its bounds a landscape which in broad outline had been structured in some unknown past but which in detail had been moulded and nurtured by centuries of toiling the soil. Topographical features and human environments blended together to create a world of rustic simplicity and human activity.