A Legal History of the English Landscape

Taking a broadly chronological approach, A Legal History of the English Landscape is an engaging account of how the law has played a pivotal role in shaping the English landscape through the concepts of security, inheritance, dispute resolution and transfer of land. There are descriptions of several legal cases illustrating the way the law worked, from a lawsuit between two Roman citizens about a wood to leading cases of the nineteenth century. As conditions changed, once-important laws became obsolete and the author shows how later generations were able to adapt or circumvent them for their own needs. A Legal History of the English Landscape aims to set land law in a wider context of changes in society and of ideas such as what it means to describe someone as owner of land and how it comes about that Parliament has the power to rearrange the landscape. "The book has pride of place in our bookcase" Phillip Taylor, Richmond Green Chambers