Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 227

In common with other counties, the Victoria County History of Northamptonshire is undergoing a long period of gestation. Four years elapsed between the appearance of Volume I in 1902 and the publication of the second volume, while Volumes III and IV became available in 1930 and 1937 respectively. Whether through intention or serendipity, then, this latest edition to the magisterial series celebrates the centenary of the project. The editor’s foreword darkly hints at a complexity of interplaying tensions at work during the work’s preparation. These were perhaps not entirely unconnected with disagreements between collaborating academic institutions and other difficulties which appear to have been in part instrumental in the termination of the contracts of employment of both the editor himself and his assistant at the Nene College of Higher Education (currently University College, Northampton) where they were based. This being the case, it is to the credit of Philip Riden and his colleague Charles Insley that with the generous support of a variety of trusts, commercial organizations, banks, historical societies and individuals the volume has been safely guided through the press.

The hundred of Cleyley comprises twenty-five thousand acres in the extreme south of Northamptonshire and in its quiet way reflects on a local basis many of the broader trends of English rural history. Although the limited fieldwork to date has identified little in the way of prehistoric, Roman or early Saxon activity, Cleyley had evolved by the later Middle Ages as a district of nucleated settlement largely innocent of industrial activity. Of major significance was the establishment in 1542 of a large royal estate, the Honor of Grafton, which, before it passed into the control of the second Duke of Grafton in 1706, had been subject to imparking, some enclosure of common field and a modest degree of depopulation. While various grandees remodelled their houses and rationalized their estates in the seventeenth century, industrial development remained vestigial and Cleyley rested in its rural slumber for the next three centuries. The Victorian period witnessed the final enclosure of open field, extensive rebuilding of farms on the major estates, the establishment of village schools, the renovation of parish churches, and, in parishes not under the control of major landowners, some limited building of villas for the professional classes. Meanwhile the hundred pursued the quiet tenor of its way. Political and religious tensions were few, industrial and commercial development fragmentary, and as men laboured in field, wood and byre, their women remained at the hearthside occupied with lace-making. The only perceptible stresses within this particular rural backwater were linked to an increasing level of pauperism, and as population increased limited efforts were made to establish a small-scale scheme to promote transatlantic emigration.

With the sale of the great estates and the rise of freehold farming in the early twentieth century, the age-old pattern was set to change. The Heskeths managed to cling on to the great estate of Easton Neston with its glorious Hawksmoor house, yet thousands of acres of other properties changed hands as generations of tenants purchased their freeholds. Henceforth we encounter the familiar pattern of increasing rural depopulation, the building of council houses after World War I (often against the wishes of the sometimes obscurantist rural district councils), and, in subsequent years, the almost total eclipse of traditional village life. As the working classes happily gravitated towards the new council houses after the Second World War, so their dark and insanitary cottages – sanctified by age, if little more – were eagerly acquired by professional incomers from elsewhere, keen to secure a rural foothold. In the meantime, farm buildings were adapted for light industry or offices and outlying field barns were converted to domestic purposes, so that rural facilities deteriorated in a manner so balefully perpetuated the length and breadth of England. Today Milton Keynes and Northampton, the workplaces of many Cleyley denizens (whence they are obliged to travel by car due to the disgraceful shortage of public transport), are the principal influences on the local economy.

Philip Riden’s volume follows the standard Victoria County History format and in terms of its detail is rather superior in respect of depth and breadth than its 228 the agricultural predecessors. Drawing upon an impressive range of sources, the work achieves exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) coverage of individual parishes including manorial and ecclesiastical aspects, agricultural and economic history, local government, landscape and settlement, trades and crafts and much more besides. Lustre is lent to Riden and Insley’s efforts by the high quality of the line drawings and maps, the excellence of Peter Moyse’s photographs, and a highly-detailed and comprehensive index which is an exemplar of the genre. The volume is prefaced by a lengthy introduction to the hundred of Cleyley and a separate section dealing with the Honor of Grafton. Whereas in keeping with the traditions of the Victoria County Histories, these essays are severely factual and offer little in the way of analysis or interpretation, they provide valuable context to the remainder of the work.

Many readers of this Review will not have been born when the previous volume of the Victoria History of the County of Northampton came into being. Let us hope that not too long a time will elapse before the appearance of Volume VI from which, if it equates with the admirable quality of Riden and Insley’s efforts, those of us still in the land of the living will derive much pleasure and profit.