From a statistical testing perspective:

Dorset – no.

Bucks – yes.

Leics – no.

Dorset was too mixed; even individuals parishes had multiple landscape types within them – for example, a nucleated village core supplemented by dispersed settlement in the newly assarted woodlands. The intermixing of landscapes is not accessible to the Chi Squared Test.

Bucks was much more suitable as a test area; not only did it have two completely different landscape types, they were physically demarcated by a dramatic and unmissable structure; the Chiltern escarpment. Puritanism made great strides in the dispersed, wood-pasture landscapes south of the escarpment (before being disproportionately rolled back during the Great Ejection); much less so in the nucleated landscapes north of the escarpment.

Leics seemed just as suitable to apply our test; three quarters nucleated settlement in champion open field country and a quarter dispersed hamlets and farms in wood, heath and high ground. My initial disappointment in looking for a positive result in Leics was quickly offset by realising that, in fact, Leics is the test that proves the rule and supports the final conclusion – that social relations and social structures drove the intellectual traction of puritanism. Landscape type and settlement morphology drove, to very large degree, social relations and structures, but not always; and Charnwood is the exception that proves the rule.

Charnwood looks like a classic wood-pasture landscape but, sitting isolated within the ‘central belt’ of champion open field landscape it was culturally nucleated.

Nucleated settlement relies on, and promotes, a shame culture (group driven, external, peer pressure, mutuality, conformity). Dispersed settlement relies on, and promotes a guilt culture (self-driven, internal, self-directed, independent, non-conformist). “Guilt depends on one’s own standards and self-evaluation, while shame depends on societal standards and public judgement.” A nucleated settlement can be ‘supervised’, by the squire, the parson, and by the villagers themselves at the village pump; “in many traditional societies, shame emerges as the dominant emotion in social control” and this is simply not possible in a dispersed settlement.