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