ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents an overview of key concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The preceding pages identified an environmental aspect in the economic dimension of the English Revolution. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was a transformation in the physical environment, in the way that the land was occupied, furnished, used and perceived. It was a broad and fundamental change, of a sort that had not occurred for a millennium and that would not occur again for two centuries to come. The distinctive character of the medieval period had consisted in a context of open and undifferentiated relationships. That world was open in the communal working habits of the villagers, in the dispersed and interlaced pattern of holdings and in the lighter touch upon the land, just as the agricultural field was open to the reception of spiritual influences. The physical and intellectual spheres worked in a continuum.
