Patriotic Views: Aristocratic Ideology and the Eighteenth-Century Landscape

Abstract

While landscape design of the eighteenth century has been widely written about, it is only in more recent years that the politics of landscape has become a central area of academic investigation. This paper concentrates on the relationship between patriotism and landscape on aristocratic estates in England in the eighteenth century, using the county of Yorkshire as the research area. It proceeds from an examination of eighteenth-century ideas concerning patriotism to an exploration of how these were reflected in designed landscapes. Its thesis is that landscape could be conceived of as patriotic in a general sense in terms of the uses of both agricultural land and parkland, as well as in the memorialising of specific events through the erecting of monuments or the renaming of parts of the estate. This in turn was intertwined with the ideology of a paternalistic aristocracy, an aristocracy that conceived of patriotism as a defence of liberty and just government. The paper forms a synthesis of theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence to argue that landscape became a powerful metaphor for libertarian and democratic principles associated with patriotic conceptions of England.

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