Note 16 to Chapter 8 of the author's George Eliot and the Visual Arts, which Yale University Press published in a 1979. It has been included in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Most of the hedgerows in the midlands were planted between 1750 and 1780 as a result of the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts; see W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1955; rpt. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1977), pp. 195-200.
Last modified 20 September 2000