English Pastoral: An Inheritance, Progress

Read the whole book.

new farming had taken two mutually beneficial things - grazing animals and fertilizing fields - and separated them to create two massive industrial-scale problems ... farms with thousands of animals had more muck than their land could possibly accommodate, while crop farmers now had no animals, and thus no muck to fertilize plants

English Pastoral: An Inheritance, Nostalgia

Read the whole book.

As I sat in the back of the tractor watching the seagulls, it felt as if Grandad and the seagulls behind his plough were part of the same whole, the one as true as the other. They both had timeless claims on the earth; they both belonged to the same cycle in that landscape.

The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England, chapter 1

My favourite bit so far:

You will also find [in London in the fourteenth century] a communal running water supply - fed through a series of conduits... On certain special occasions the conduits are even made to run with wine - for example, on the arrival of the captive king of France in 1357, or to celebrate the coronation of Henry IV in 1399.

Three Men in a Boat, chapter 18

Our luck ordained it that the man should set his wreched machine in motion at the precise moment that we were both lying on our backs with a wild expression of 'Where am I? and what is it?' on our faces, and our feet waving madly in the air.

Three Men in a Boat, chapter 12

We did not know what had happened at first, because the sail shut out the view, but from the nature of the language that rose up upon the evening air, we gathered that we had come into the neighbourhood of human beings, and that they were vexed and discontented.

Three Men in a Boat, chapter 6

There are many chuckle-some bits I'd like to quote. Here's one:

It was difficult to say, for the moment, which was us and which was the Middlesex bank of the river, but we found out after a while, and separated ourselves.

Three Men in a Boat, chapter 1

It is a curious fact, but nobody is ever sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick.

Illustrated Social English History (really), chapter 4

for all historical phenomena
are conditioned by time
and are produced
by the sequence of events

economic and social life
takes little heed of the deaths of Kings,
or the accession of new dynasties

there is always an overlap
of the old and the new