Keats's "To Autumn" is set in a landscape of thatch-eaved cottages, the vine-clad walls and straw roofs locating the poem in a specifically English countryside of traditional materials and organic architecture; Hardy's Wessex stories and poems attend to thatch as one of the defining visual features of the rural landscape he was documenting before its transformation — the thatched cottage as evidence of a vernacular building tradition using the land's own materials; A poet might write "the thatch was forty years old and beginning to think of replacement — its dark humps and valleys a history of weather, the whole roof a slow argument between craft and entropy"; The thatched rick — the haystack protected from rain by a thatched cap — appears in harvest poetry as the image of stored abundance given its permanent form, the year's work completed and sheltered; The craft of thatching — the layers of reed or straw applied with specific techniques that have been refined over centuries — appears in poems about traditional crafts and their practitioners, the thatcher's skill as worthy of celebration as any other form of mastery; Rick-burning — the deliberate firing of thatched haystacks by desperate agricultural laborers during the Swing Riots of the 1830s — gives thatch a darker political resonance, the rural poor's most effective and terrifying form of protest expressed through the destruction of the stored abundance they had created.