Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 345

This volume covers seventeen predominantly rural parishes in central Somerset, comprising the hundreds of Huntspill, Puriton and Whitley. In this region the low ridge of the Polden Hills divides two wetland areas, the central and southern Somerset Levels. Both consist of low-lying peat moors, overlain towards the coast by alluvial clays. Islands and peninsulae rise above the floodable land on both sides of the Poldens. In the parishes studied here the most extensive are the Sowy island and the High Ham promontory, both to the south beyond King’s Sedgemoor.

This area was dominated throughout the middle ages by the great Benedictine abbey of Glastonbury. The settlement pattern is primarily one of large nucleated villages. Several villages along the northern flank of the Poldens have a distinctly rectilinear layout which suggests some level of organized planning. This was presumably initiated by the abbey, and investigations at Shapwick have suggested that this may have taken place in the tenth century during a major reorganization of the monastic estate. The extent of Glastonbury’s contiguous landholdings also enabled it to undertake substantial drainage works, notably the diversion of the River Brue through the central Levels from Meare Pool westwards to a new outlet to the Bristol Channel below Highbridge. This diversion is here dated to the later twelfth century, a little earlier than the date-range proposed by Michael Williams in The draining of the Somerset Levels (1970). Not only was the abbey directly involved in reclamation, it also encouraged its tenants to undertake similar works, and evidence of agricultural expansion and the settling of new hamlets and farms reaches a peak in the thirteenth century.

Even before the end of the fifteenth century, however, much of the Glastonbury demesne land was being leased out, arable farming had contracted, and some enclosure had taken place. The suppression of the abbey in 1539 and the division of its estate between individual proprietors brought to an end the traditional large-scale movement of flocks and herds around summer pastures on the Levels, and disrupted the co-ordinated management of the drainage. The new owners and tenants were unenthusiastic about improvements which they feared would prejudice their common rights, and preferred to accept the hazards of regular flooding. Overstock-ing for fatstock and cheese production in due course caused the grassland to deteriorate, and the value of the moors inevitably declined. Renewed improvements were undertaken through a series of parliamentary acts for division and reallocation of the moors between 1777 and 1807, while comprehensive drainage schemes were initiated for Sedgemoor and the Brue valley, with varying degrees of success. Major works continued into the middle of the twentieth century, with the construction of the Huntspill River and the widening of the King’s Sedgemoor Drain.

One of the delights of the VCH is the detail it provides on some of the backwaters and byways of agricultural history. Scattered through the volume is a wealth of information on both traditional and more recent uses of the unimproved moors: summer grazing, reed-beds, osier cultivation, the pasturing of geese, fisheries, duck decoys, medieval turbaries and modern peat extraction. On the higher land, pockets of open fields survived into the eighteenth century, but here too there were distinctive local cultures such as cider orchards.

Occasionally one reads criticisms of the standardized format of the VCH and its encyclopaedic content. Yet its purpose is surely not to address the fashionable questions of a particular time, but rather to provide a solid bedrock of thoroughly researched material which can be quarried according to the needs of its users, along with a record of sources which can be used as a guide by those wishing to investigate further. The range of sources consulted is formidable and, for those of us whose grasp of palaeography and medieval Latin remains somewhat wobbly, the distillation of information from so many unpublished early manuscripts is particularly valuable.

If the Somerset VCH has a weakness, it is its parish maps. In this, as in previous volumes, they are immaculately neat, but limited in ambition, and therefore less useful than they might be. Based mostly upon sources of the 1830s and 1840s, they plot parish boundaries, roads and watercourses, and locate and name settlements; but they reveal little of the agricultural landscape, the extent and distribution of woodland, meadow, parkland, open field and enclosure. VCH volumes from some other counties, notably Oxfordshire, have made effective use of earlier estate maps to portray such information, and it is a pity that this practice is not more widely adopted.

It would be wrong, however, to end on a carping note. This latest Somerset volume is a splendid achievement, and Dr Dunning and his collaborators, Mary Siraut, who contributed six of the parish accounts, and Elizabeth Williamson, who provided the architectural d escriptions, deserve our gratitude and congratulations.