The first students for the new Honours Degree in Geography in the Faculty of Arts in the University of London started their courses in October 1918, one month before the end of the First World War. They graduated in 1921, by which time similar courses could also, with a different background of subjects at ‘intermediate’ level, lead to the degree of B.Sc. The teaching of geography in the University goes back much further, for H. J. Mackinder, then Reader in Geography at Oxford, was amongst the lecturers listed in the first prospectus of the London School of Economics in 1895 (he subsequently became Reader in 1908 and Professor in 1923), and L. W. Lyde's Chair of Economic Geography was established at University College in 1902.

By 1906 L.S.E. had established a Certificate in Geography, primarily for school-teachers; this was superseded in 1910 by the University's Academic Diploma in Geography, which was of full honours standard.

The new degrees called for a wider basis of instruction, particularly in physical, mathematical and historical geography, than was available at L.S.E., while at King's College facilities existed in physical geography (taught by the Professor of Geology), mathematical geography (taught in the Civil Engineering Department), and historical geography (there was a Professor of Imperial History), but none at all in regional or economic geography.

After winning a borough scholarship in 1922 I entered the University College of Southampton. In recent years Southampton had had two well-known men in charge of geography: C. B. Fawcett (1915–19), appointed to a newly created lectureship in the subject, and W. H. Barker (1919–22) who was given a Chair in 1921. As in many other universities at that time they were not trained in geography but came from some other subject or subjects in which they had specialized. Their skills in these rendered their work for geography as varied as their initial training but at least they established a common mode of approach which in turn drew much of its inspiration from the new geographical studies which emerged from Oxford or from the work of such writers as H. R. Mill of the Royal Geographical Society. Fawcett, who had taken a degree in science at the University College of Nottingham, went on to extend his qualifications by taking the invaluable geographical Diploma at Oxford under A. J. Herbertson. Thus he was a singularly well-qualified person for appointment to the new lectureship. In 1918 he published Frontiers: a study in political geography and in the following year there appeared his Provinces of England.

Another advantage for the geography course at Southampton was the presence in the town of the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey, at that time under the direction of Colonel Sir Charles F. Close.

In the middle years of the fifth century B.C. the long war between the Greeks and the Persians was drawing to a close. Hostility was deepening between Athens and Sparta, the foremost protagonists on the Greek side, but the Delian League, over which Athens had presided since its foundation in 478 B.C., was still intact, though a couple of its members had rebelled against the growing control which Athens was exercising over it. In 454 its treasury had been transferred from the island of Dhílos to the city of Athens, an event which marked the final transformation of a voluntary league of Greek states into an instrument of Athenian imperialism. Athens had at the same time become, by the standards of classical Greece, an exceedingly wealthy city, and its riches were matched by its pride and its self-assurance. Work was beginning on the cluster of buildings on the Acropolis – the Parthenon was begun in 447 – which was to make Athens the most beautiful city of antiquity. The last of the plays of Aeschylus had just been presented; Herodotus, Sophocles and Euripides were in middle life, and Thucydides and Aristophanes were children. The quarter of a century which began in 450 saw the climax of Athenian civilisation.

At this time Rome was a small town spread over the low hills that rose above the Tiber marshes. The Etruscan kings had been driven from south of the river, but their threat to the city was far more real than that presented at this time by the Persians to Athens.

At the turn of the twelfth century Europe was in a condition of rapid change and growth. The incursions of the Northmen had at last been checked. The last wave of Ural-Altaic settlers from the Russian steppe was well on the way towards assimilation, and in the south the drawn-out struggle with the forces of Islam had turned decisively in favour of Europe. Advance was still slow in Spain, but in the eastern Mediterranean European peoples had gone over to an offensive, both commercial and military.

Within Europe itself, the division between the west, the heir of Rome, and the Byzantine south-east, implicit since the third century, had now come into the open, and the formal schism, which developed in the eleventh century, was to continue through the rest of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the sphere of western civilisation, as if to redress the balance, was at this time being extended into Scandinavia, the middle Danube basin, and eastward across the plains of Poland.

Population within Europe was increasing more rapidly than at any time in the previous thousand years. The forest was yielding to the settler's axe, and the area of land under cultivation was keeping pace with the rising population. Long-distance trade, a product both of mounting population and of a rising level of welfare, was being developed anew, and from Italy to Flanders and from Spain to Poland, small urban communities were coming into existence under the protection of monastery or castle or within the crumbling walls of former Roman towns.

More than a century ago Macaulay reminded his readers that the England which he described in his History was a very different land from that with which they were familiar. The events of a bare hundred and fifty years had transformed the landscape. But the changes which had taken place between the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the mid-nineteenth century were small compared with those which transformed the ancient world into the modern. If Macaulay had difficulty in reconstructing the landscape of the seventeenth century, the task facing the historian who would describe the European landscape when prehistory merged into history is incomparably greater. For the latter era the documentation is scanty; the evidence of geology and botany, slight, and that of archaeology all too often inconclusive.

At a time when the first histories were being written in the Aegean region man was still practising a Stone Age culture in parts of Scandinavia. In the former he could describe, though not always accurately or with understanding, the environment in which he lived; for the latter our evidence derives from the pollen trapped in the peatbogs, from varved clays in the riverine deposits, and from the scanty finds in human burials.

The reconstruction of the face of Europe at the beginning of the historical period must therefore call, not only on sources which are historical in the narrow sense, but also on the researches of the geologist, botanist, meteorologist and archaeologist.

By the end of the first quarter of the fourteenth century the period of medieval economic growth was over, and with it the cultural flowering to which it had given rise. The late medieval population decline had not yet begun, or, at least, had not reached measurable proportions. But there had been a run of bad harvests a few years before, and mortality had been heavy. Most medieval cities had already achieved their maximum size, as measured by the circuit of their walls. The great cathedrals and churches were built, and the few that still lay unfinished were to remain so into modem times. It is the Europe of this late summer of the Middle Ages that this chapter seeks to describe.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

By the fourteenth century the political map of Europe had begun to assume the form which it was to retain for several centuries. In the west and north the national monarchies had taken shape. In the east, the tribal kingdoms of Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria had ripened into states with well-defined boundaries and established administrative structures. Only within the limits of the German Empire was the trend towards the centralisation of political power reversed, with the fragmentation of the German Empire into an immense number of quasi-sovereign territories and self-governing cities. In Italy, too, where the imperial authority had rarely been more than nominal, the land was breaking up into independent duchies and contadi, while the Balkan peninsula had already become the prey of plundering bands of Crusaders from the west and of Turkish armies from the east.

This book was conceived more than twenty years ago as a series of pictures of Europe at a sequence of periods in European history, each to be linked with the one which follows by an historical narrative. It grew in size until first, it had to be divided into two parts: classical-medieval, and modern, and then the linking narratives had to be omitted. As it stands now, this volume attempts to reconstruct the physical scene at five widely separated periods of time. The choice of periods has necessarily been influenced by the availability of sources. In general, however, sources are most abundant for those periods which have most continuously interested historians: the fifth century B.C., the age of the Flavian and Antonine emperors, the Carolingian period and the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In a sense these mark climaxes in the flow of European history. It is the scene at these periods, together with – since it is a long haul from about A.D. 800 to 1300 – the early twelfth century, that this book seeks to reconstruct.

The principal elements which made up the geographical scene at any of these periods of time were, in addition to the physical environment itself, the people, the forms and distribution of their settlements, their agriculture, their crafts and industries, and their trade. The purpose has been to present the distribution of each of these elements at each period, with a backward glance over the previous centuries to see how they had come to assume the pattern described.

The early years of the ninth century were, compared with those which preceded and followed, a period of relative peace. In the east, the Arab attack on Constantinople had failed, and, though the Middle East was finally lost, Asia Minor had been retained for the Eastern Empire. So also had the imperial footholds in southern Italy and around the shores of the Adriatic Sea. The First Bulgarian Empire straddled the Balkan peninsula. Its rulers at intervals threatened the Byzantine Empire, but they were imitators of the emperors, rather than barbarian invaders intent only on destruction.

The Western Empire had disintegrated more completely than the Eastern. Its line of emperors had ended in 476, and the splendour of the imperial court and the unity of its administrative system were but memories. But on Christmas Day, in the year 800, Charles, son of Pippin the Short and King of the Franks, was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III. The meaning of this act continues to be disputed. But to most people who knew of it, it symbolised the power and continuity of imperial rule; it gave hopes of a new period of peace, prosperity and internal harmony, and it represented Charles as picking up the reins of power that had fallen from the ineffective hands of Romulus Augustulus, and establishing himself as the new Constantine.

Charlemagne, as he has become known to posterity, was indeed fortunate. The Moslem threat to western Europe had receded two generations earlier.

The reigns of Hadrian and the two Antonines, which together spanned much of the second century A.D., constitute one of the few periods in human history to which subsequent generations have looked back with reverence and longing. It fell short in artistic achievement of the level set by Periclean Athens or even Augustan Rome, but more than made up for this by its attention to human welfare and happiness. ‘Their united reigns,’ wrote Gibbon, not without a certain exaggeration, ‘are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.’ Aristeides, who lived under the benevolent rule of Antoninus Pius, claimed in a rhetorical flourish that he could not remember when this peace was broken, and relegated stories of war to the category of legend, so profound was the peace amid which he lived. While he wrote, however, there was conflict along the northern frontier of the Empire and revolt in Britain and in some of the African and Asian provinces.

A long period of economic growth had preceded the age of the Antonines, The population had increased; agriculture had penetrated the forest and waste, and villas and scattered farms had, at least in the more peaceful provinces of the Empire, replaced the nucleated and defensible villages. ‘Cultivated fields have overcome the forests,’ wrote Tertullian, ‘the sands are being planted, the rocks hewn, the swamp drained; there are as many cities today as there were formerly huts.’

The national income accounts show that in 1969 the transport sector, excluding communications, contributed 6.2 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product of the United Kingdom. Back in 1956, the figure was 6.9 per cent and in the intervening years the proportion, though declining slowly, has been very stable. Edwards (1970 a), using census data for the production and distribution industries, concluded that ‘it is probable that transport accounts for at least 9 per cent of the total cost of producing and distributing [goods]’. On the face of it, spatial variations in the incidence of transport costs ought to be a highly significant factor for industrial location and for regional development generally.

Yet, in his review of the available post-war literature on industrial location in this country, Brown (1969, 778) came to the following conclusion:

Brown could have added that it is widely accepted that though transport costs may be a negligible factor in industrial location, other attributes of the transport sector are important; speed, reliability, convenience, packaging problems and the feasibility of integrating transport services into the production process are all given serious consideration by industrialists.

Although the death of the business cycle has been frequently proclaimed in the post-Keynesian era there are grounds for thinking that, like Mark Twain's obituary notice, such claims are a little premature. For although the post World War II years have seen no economic or financial crashes on the scale of 1929, a large number of statistical indicators continue to show wave-like patterns of between two and twelve years' duration – the conventional range of business cycles – superimposed on longer-term aggregate growth (Bronfenbrenner, 1969). For the United Kingdom economy as a whole, four major cycles in industrial production have been recognised by the Central Statistical Office in the last two decades. The longest extended over a seventy-three month period from 1952–VII to 1958–VIII with a minor recession in the summer of 1956. This was succeeded by two fifty-three month cycles (1958–VIII to 1963–I and 1963–I to 1967–VI). The latest period falls within the fourth cycle which to January 1970 had lasted for thirty months. As Figure 3.1 shows, the cycles of industrial production are matched by cycles of unemployment although here the cycle lags some months behind the production cycle. This lag has varied from four months at the start of the first cycle to three months for the start of the second cycle and two months for the third cycle. The last cycle showed a curious double peak in the summers of 1967 and 1968.

The terms ‘heavy industry’ or ‘light industry’ are normally used far too loosely. Definition proves much harder than the quick wave of the hand over a map or the glib labelling of a district would suggest. Transistor manufacture and the production of stationery are clearly enough on one side of the fence; shipbuilding and the production of large pressure vessels on the other. Size, volume and weight of product are important in the classification for they affect the type of input, the material handling equipment of the plant and the minimum size of the whole operation. When large masses of material, perhaps hot or corrosive, are involved much investment in plant is required; characteristically, therefore, heavy industry has a high capital/labour ratio, and, in spite of big labour forces, a high value of output per employee. In general products are sold not to individuals but to other manufacturing industries. Such indices of heaviness are admittedly crude, for many industries or individual firms span a much wider range than can be comprehended under the title of ‘heavy’ – the big chemical firms for instance make pharmaceuticals and gardening requisites and the steel industry's products range all the way from giant castings and forgings to the razor blade steel and umbrella frames of one major Sheffield plant. A number of heavy industries, some new, some long established, can be readily isolated, bearing some, but not in each case all, of these characteristics.