Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 1 (2007), p. 129

The eight largely rural parishes covered in this latest volume of the VCH Oxfordshire have few distinctive features. If they are known at all to the wider world, it will be because they take in the UK’s largest RAF base at Brize Norton, the much visited ruins of William Lovel’s great house at Minster Lovell, the childhood home of the Mitford sisters at Asthall, and, for the cognoscenti, the birthplace of Maria Edgeworth at Black Bourton. Lying mainly between the Thames and the Windrush, to the west and south-west of the town of Witney (the subject of the previous volume), most were originally part of the royal vill and minster paruchia of Bampton. The break-up of this great pre-Conquest estate, virtually complete by 1066, began a longer process of f ragmentation which saw the growth of independent parishes from Bampton’s chapelries, the evolution of manors from small dependent settlements, and then, in the late medieval and early modern periods, the dispersal of manorial lands among freeholders, yeomen farmers and resident gentry. All eight were originally open-field parishes, whose enclosure between about 1770 and 1840 consolidated scattered holdings into fairly large farms, so partially reversing the earlier process of disintegration. To judge by the way in which parishes were apparently laid out in ‘strip’ fashion, giving access to different types of farmland, from the downs of the north to the riverine pastures and meadows of the south, some guiding hand, perhaps a communal one, lay behind their early formation. Mixed terrain must have facilitated the mixed arable-based farming which was (and is) characteristic of the region: wheat and barley, sheep and cattle, varied at different times and in different places with pigs, poultry, bees, turnips, sainfoin and mustard. The religious history of the different villages followed a broadly similar pattern of common experience. Livings were often held by distant corporations, and in the earliest days by Norman monastic houses, clerical non-residence was common until the nineteenth century, and dissent latterly exercised a strong attraction, particularly for the farm labourers, whose Primitive Methodism was often seen as a threat by the parish clergy. The records of church attendance suggest a generally low level of enthusiasm for the established church, though this was often effectively countered by a religious revival inspired by some particularly energetic and reformist parish priests in the mid to late nineteenth century. It usually proved short-lived. If these historical developments followed a generally similar course throughout the pays, so too have developments in more modern times. The closure of chapels and shops and their conversion into private houses, the decline and often the disappearance of voluntary organizations, the replacement of the tradesmen, craftsmen and retailers who once stood at the centre of village life by commuters, weekenders and the retired, and the shrinking opportunities for rural employment: these changes, whether regarded as melancholy, progressive or merely inevitable, typify the recent history not only of a few west Oxfordshire villages but also of much of rural England. In 1871 Ringwood Farm, at 600 acres the largest farm in Asthall, employed thirty people. In 2000, now much larger at 900 acres, it employed two.

In keeping with most recent volumes of the VCH, this one covers only a small area; but it does so with exemplary thoroughness and skill. To read it from cover to cover, which only a reviewer is likely to want to do, is in some ways a mind-numbing experience, so dense is the factual content and so unavoidably lacking in thesis or argument is most of the prose. Yet to do so reveals not only some of the general patterns and trends outlined above, but also the immense labour of productive research lying behind even the most straightforward parish history. The unpublished documents used in this volume are drawn from the muniment rooms of Eton and the Oxford col-leges, from those of Arundel Castle and Longleat, and from many other repositories. Breaking with the old VCH tradition, but like its immediate predecessors, it contains full and valuable descriptions of buildings, and for one parish, Kencot, it follows a newly-adopted structure by including a discrete section on social history: a helpful innovation which makes possible what is in effect an historical essay, going beyond the usual sequence of facts to deal with such large issues as social structure and immigration. One conspicuous omission, common to other volumes too, is worth noting. Amid all the information provided here, nothing at all is said about village losses in the two world wars, though these must often have had a traumatic effect on farming, labour supplies, and many other aspects of village life. The names and numbers of the dead could easily have been gleaned from war memorials and it is odd that they should have been overlooked. Much can slip between the standardized and regimenting sub-headings which the VCH format imposes on each parish history. But in all other respects the series goes from strength to strength.