6 John Langton, an English geographer who is swimming against the tide, writes that “relatively little regional geography has been written about England”; see “The Industrial Revolution and the Regional Geography of England,” IGBT, n.s. 9 (1984), 145-67. Strong arguments against regional models have come from British geographers and historians, at the same time that colleagues in other nations have been moving the other way. See G.H.T. Kimble, “The Inadequacy of the Regional Concept,” in L. D. Stamp and S. W. Wooldridge, eds., London Essays in Geography (London, 1951). This antiregional bias is especially strong among middle-class Londoners (as it also tends to be in New Yorkers and Parisians) who divide their country into the “metropolis” and the “provinces.”
7 Cyril Fox, The Personality of Britain (Cardiff, 1932); Joan Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England and Wales,” in Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales: IV, 1500-1640 (Cambridge, 1967), 1-112; John D. Gay, The Geography of Religion in England (London, 1971); R. T. Mason, Framed Buildings of England (Horsham, 1974); Eric Mercer, English Vernacular Houses (London, 1975).
8 David Underdown, “The Chalk and the Cheese,” PP 85 (1979), 129-54; Thirsk, “The Farming Regions of England and Wales,” 1-112. Thirsk asks, “Was it generally true that pastoral regions were also the most fertile seedbeds for Puritanism and dissent?” In the 17th century, antiquarians such as John Aubrey used soil types to explain differences in dialect in Wiltshire. “In North Wiltshire and the Vale of Gloucestershire (a dirty clayey country),” he wrote, “the Indigenae or Aborigines speak drawling. They are phlegmatique, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit.” The Natural History of Wiltshire (1862, rpt. New York, 1969), 11.