ATTACHMENT

In Chapter 3, we met an unknown Suffolk labourer who was quoted as saying that ‘everybody in the world may cut rushes on the common’. He was providing testimony at one of the many court cases in the eighteenth century that settled disputes regarding common rights, and he clearly felt that such an open-minded and generous approach to the use of the common would help to protect it, but this would almost certainly have been in vain. The comment might well seem to us today to be naïve and somewhat simplistic but it is nonetheless remarkable because it was obviously borne out of a substantial belief in a sense of communality and sociability that the common field system provided, and which appeared to know no bounds. As such, the common itself would also provide a special setting for the ‘involvement and the creation of meanings’. It may well have been in existence in this labourer's parish for several hundred years and so, by the very passage of time, his attitude was shaped by a powerful sense of tradition and attachment, as well as his day-to-day experiences within his social world.

There is another, perhaps even more subjective, dimension to this sense of attachment which emerges in some of the art and literature during the early nineteenth century, when the natural world came to be viewed and reported more in relation to certain interior trains of thought.