Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 254

The history of Witney is in part the history of some remarkable continuities. Until the late nineteenth century the town and its rural hinterland formed a single parish, whose boundaries were those of an Anglo-Saxon estate granted by King Edgar to one of his thegns in 969. From 1044 until 1862, with only a seven-year break in the history review 1550s, the whole estate was in the hands of the bishops of Winchester, though it was leased out from the sixteenth century onwards. The basis of the town’s prosperity was the manufacture of woollen cloth, especially, from the early seventeenth century, blankets. First evident in the late twelfth century, cloth manufacturing was finally abandoned only in 2002, by which time the rise of the duvet had brought about the irreversible decline of the blanket. For a period of more than eight hundred years there was almost certainly no single year in which cloth was not made in Witney, its makers drawing initially on Cotswold wool and latterly on supplies from as far afield as Australia and India. Even the outlying rural settlements at Hailey and Crawley were partly populated with weavers and spinners, fullers and tuckers. For much of the modern period this manufacturing emphasis made for dissenting churchmanship and liberal politics. Yet the local economy, and with it the springs of Witney’s growth, was by no means monocultural. The town was situated on a boundary. Divided in two by the River Windrush, the estate’s northern half was (and is) largely one of mixed agriculture on assarted land reclaimed piecemeal from Wychwood Forest; while to the south of the river lay both the town, a market centre for its region, and the great demesne of the bishops of Winchester. Champion country, with proportions of arable and pasture varying over the centuries, this remained largely farmland until the second half of the twentieth century, when it was cut through by the dual-carriageway Witney by-pass and eaten up by housing in a still continuing phase of rapid and relentless urban expansion. In the last fifty years the landscape south of the river has changed more than in the previous five hundred.

One parish, less than a single hundred, some 7000 acres: some might complain that to give a whole volume to Witney is to deal in particulars minute even by VCH standards. They would be wrong to do so, for this is microhistory at its best. The level of detail is probably unparalleled in other VCH volumes: for the rural areas, almost every farm seems to receive attention. But the borough of Witney naturally dominates the picture, and a full account is given of its descent, economic life, church history, schools and social institutions, following the usual VCH pattern. There is throughout, however, a very great deal to interest the historian of England as well as of Oxfordshire. The six double-columned pages given to the medieval exploitation of the bishop’s demesne are in themselves a substantial contribution to the history of the Winchester estates and to agrarian history in general. Demographic historians will note the exceptionally high mortality brought by the Black Death, when as many as two-thirds of the population may have died. Particularly valuable too are the descriptions of buildings, not one of the traditional strengths of the VCH. Fuller and more comprehensive than those in ‘Pevsner’, they are especially useful in a county unsurveyed by the RCHM. If the treatment at all points is predictably factual and prosaic, it supplies the material for the imaginative historian to work on. Witney itself, with its prosperous elite of master weavers and clothiers, many of them dissenters, its small professional class of lawyers and doctors, its civic pride finding expression through charitable giving and public institutions, its working men’s clubs and benefit societies, and its contrasting slums, has something of the air of an Oxfordshire Middlemarch or Casterbridge. The maps and illustrations, here helpfully integrated with the text, are a notably strong feature of the volume. One could no doubt cavil. In a perfect world VCH history would be less self-contained, more comparative and more sensitive to the national picture; and even in an imperfect one it is strange to find that J.Z.Titow’s famous article published in this Review in 1962, and contrasting the ‘colonizing’ Winchester manor of Witney with ‘noncolonizing’ Taunton, receives no mention. Nor – to move some centuries forward – does the name ‘Waitrose’ appear in the index, although for the population of west Oxfordshire Witney has for the past twenty years meant supermarket shopping. But in general this is a history of which, like the whole VCH enterprise, not just any county but any country should feel proud.