Art. 8.-OUR ENGLISH VILLAGES.

1. East Hendred; a Berkshire Parish historically treated. By Arthur L. Humphreys, F.S.A. Hatchards, 1923. 2. The History of Banstead in Surrey. By H. C. M. Lambert, C.B. Oxford University Press, 1912.

3. The Priory and Manor of Lynchmere and Shulbrede. By Arthur Ponsonby. The Wessex Press, 1920.

4. The History of the Parish and Manor of Wookey. By the Rev. T. S. Holmes. Bristol (no date).

Horn

5. History of the Manor and Parish of Saleby with Thoresthorpe. By the Rev. R. C. Dudding. castle, 1922.

BEHIND our country villages lie more than fifteen centuries of history. Yet of the three factors in the agricultural industry-land, capital, and man—the human element has been least studied. Better farming and better business have engrossed more attention than better living. In towns, civilisation in all its manifold forms has swept onwards, leaving the country a century behind. To the citizen the rural population is a mystery ; he scarcely conceives of rural interests as human interests. He thinks most of cheap food. Yet, before many years have passed, it will possibly be recognised that there is no more important influence on national life than the wife of the rural worker, no more important home than her cottage, no more important social need than that of bringing the conditions of country living into line with the development of the towns.

In the United States and in every part of reconstituted Europe, rural life is the subject of discussion, if not of legislation. In this country, of recent years, efforts have been made to give our villages a fuller existence, to break down the apathy which is bred of limited opportunities and of an admirable but almost fatalistic patience, to revive something of their ancient gaiety, to render life less solitary and more attractive, to show that all the real prizes of human happiness do not necessarily lie at a distance from the land. Much more is needed than amusements or even increased mental occupations. But they are something, and it is to be hoped that, before it is too late, and in spite of agricultural depression, these efforts may be increasingly

successful. Unless decay can be arrested, it is not creditable to 20th-century progress that national life should be rotting at its vital roots.

For lovers of the country its villages have a peculiar fascination. But it is a dispiriting reflexion that, albeit in dependence, squalor, poverty, and insanitary conditions, mediæval villages enjoyed a fullness of corporate and individual interest which, compared with to-day, is as a flowing river to a stagnant pond. On the features of remote clusters of inhabitants is still stamped each stage in social and economic history, from the distant days when land was everything and trade nothing, down to the present century when, as pessimists assure agriculture is going to the devil in a gale of wind. Some in one direction, some in another, they present impressions of the past so vividly that the old world seems to be still kept in living touch with the new. The evidences which any one village affords of ancient habits, customs, and manners is fragmentary; but facts and details collected over ever-widening areas may enable competent scholars, in the near future, to recapture the life of our forefathers with an increased degree of freshness and completeness.

It is as a contribution to the general stock of knowledge, from which wider conclusions may be safely drawn, that the history of a parish has a value beyond its own immediate neighbourhood. Social and economic historians already owe much to the patient labours of those who, before ancient landmarks had been obliterated and old names forgotten, preserved the records of obscure hamlets which have never, perhaps, been associated with remarkable men or memorable events. The debt will be enhanced by the increased accuracy of modern methods. Yet, personally, I should regret the complete passing of the older school of local historians who had access to fewer documents, less science, greater taste for gossip, robuster appetites for tradition. Loving the place in which they lived, and about which they wrote, they painted their pictures with enthusiasm, throwing into their work the vividness of local colour and of their own personalities. Often inaccurate, seldom judicial, generally credulous, they are full of interest, even when they rear from airy nothings summer palaces of conjecture which

shrivel under the first frosts of historical criticism. Arrangement of materials is not their strong point. They adopted every variety of plan, or not infrequently, none at all. Many, like John Aubrey, 'set Things down tumultuarily, as if tumbled out of a Sack, as they came to my Hand, mixing Antiquities and Natural Things.'

Colder and more impersonal are the aims of the modern school of searchers after historical truth. The new spirit is admirably illustrated in the important monograph on an interesting village among the Berkshire Downs which Mr Arthur Humphreys has recently produced. In his East Hendred, a Berkshire Village,' he lays down principles of method and arrangement which, in form, may well serve to standardise the work of local historians of the future. To the biographical and personal portion of his work he has devoted particular attention. The genealogies of the old yeoman families, as well as of the larger landowners, are carefully traced. Except in this respect, he is severe, if not ascetic, in his abstention from the ordinary luxuries of parochial historians. His main object has been to collect and classify all the sources of information which relate to every branch of the history of the parish. But he indulges in no conjectures or guesswork; he allows himself no pictures of life, manners, and customs. Within these limits the work is admirably done. He has added in nearly 100 pages, an index which for accuracy and completeness is beyond all praise.

Fresh records are continuously published. Among recent publications is the very complete series of documents relating to the Manor of Banstead in Surrey, translated and admirably edited by Mr Lambert. It contains, among other documents, accounts rendered by stewards or bailiffs from 1275 onwards, Court Rolls on which are entered the proceedings of manorial courts, surveys of the estates in which, on the sworn testimony of the tenants themselves, are recorded their number and names, the sizes of their respective holdings, their money or produce rents, their labour services, and other obligations. Similar evidence relating to villages in Somersetshire, Lincolnshire, and Sussex may be gathered from the books whose titles stand at the head of these pages.

In many of our villages the signs of extreme antiquity are unmistakable. They do not force themselves on the eye by glaring contrasts of medieval buildings with modern erections. Rather the long passage of time has mellowed the whole into a harmony of unobtrusive colouring, and steeped it in the pervasive atmosphere of age. Nowhere is the old-world character more faithfully preserved than in the features of hamlets on the slopes of the Downs. Here are found some of the oldest sites of villages, and for obvious reasons. It was on the edges of the Downs that the least labour told the most, and that the transition from the nomadic life of pastoral hordes to more settled agricultural communities was the easiest. Fertile valleys, tangled with forest growth, remained uncleared when dry and comparatively treeless uplands were occupied and cultivated. To these chalk escarpments, with their wide bare pastures and sheltered dips, were attracted not only the Saxon settlers, but the more ancient inhabitants of the country. The uplands were grazed by flocks and herds, while the steep sides, or the pockets of soil below the rise, were scratched up for scanty patches of corn. Nor did the Downs serve agricultural purposes only. They were the sites of mysterious megalithic monuments. They were camps and battlegrounds and burying places. They were also natural highways. In districts along the lines of the Downs it was a common tradition that, on quiet nights, could still be heard the tramp of armed hosts and the creak of their heavy chariots as they passed from camp to camp along the ancient tracks.

In its physical aspects, East Hendred is a typical Down village, following the uniform plan that our forefathers stamped on the face of the uplands of SouthEastern England. The shape of the parish is that of a long-sided parallelogram, running north to south. The northern and north-western base follows the course of a stream; the southern base, high up on the Downs themselves, meets and rests on the boundaries of other parishes. Between the two long eastern and western sides is the land, cultivated, grazed, or mown by the occupiers, and adapted to the various needs of a selfsupporting, self-sufficing community. At the southern end stretched the wide grazing grounds of the Downs.

At the northern and north-western extremity, where the brook turned the corn-mills, the best of the land was chosen for the meadows; the poorer parts afforded the rough pasture, mixed with bush, small wood, bracken, and rushes, that are suggested by the field names of Band's Moor, Long Moor, Great and Little Moor, Mill Moor, Barn Moor, Picked Moor, Further and Upper Moor. The arable land lay on the drier portions, pushing upwards to the slope of the hills, until the soil became too thin and poor for cultivation. According to this uniform arrangement, the Downs were never ploughed. It would therefore almost seem that the horizontal terraces on the hills, which are a prominent feature of the country, and are popularly known as 'daisses,' 'lynches,' or 'lynchets,' were the work of hillfolk at a stage of husbandry more primitive than that of the Saxon settlers.

The arable land is the land of Ceres.' Here were grown, in unvarying triennial succession, the crops of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and peas,' which Shakespeare exhaustively enumerates in The Tempest.' The appearance of the land under the plough preserves some of the features which it bore in the days of the Plantagenets. It is still a bare, hedgeless, and, but for recent plantations, treeless expanse, with none of the small enclosures or detached isolated farmhouses which generally mark individual occupation and modern farming. A prophet of the 17th century foretold that 'thorn and horn will make England forlorn,' or, in other words, that pasture fields enclosed by hedges, and stock farming, would strip England of her rural population. East Hendred has so far escaped these dangers. It has remained a corn-growing district, and such divisions as are made between the broad arable fields are not made by thorn hedges, but by the grass-grown banks, 'balks' or 'meares' of mediæval farmers. To-day the iron plough traverses the land drawn by the untiring arm of steam. But the great hedgeless expanse makes it easy to conjure up a picture of the teams of eight oxen, plodding slowly to and fro over the patchwork pattern of acre and half-acre strips, dragging behind them the cumbrous plough with its wooden mould-boards, as in the days of Crecy or of Agincourt.