Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 287

The village of Spratton lies six miles north-west of Northampton in the rolling countryside on the edge of the Northamptonshire Uplands. Like the surrounding parishes, it was enclosed at the height of the parliamentary enclosure movement in the second half of the eighteenth century. Today the compact village and medieval church are surrounded by a landscape of neatly hedged, straight-sided fields. Most of the agricultural land in the parish is currently in the hands of six or seven big and medium-sized farmers who mainly have it down to livestock along with smaller acreages of wheat, barley, beans and rape (pp.45–9).

Such was not always the case, as Heaton’s short history of the parish in the 250 years since the parliamentary enclosure amply demonstrates. Thus for example, landholding was more equally split between big and small landowners at the time of the enclosure in 1766, when those holding less than 100 acres farmed about 25 per cent of the parish (p.12), while in the mid-nineteenth century most of the parish was farmed by a small number of large landowners (p.27). Extensive research has allowed Heaton to trace the changing landholding structure of the parish from 1766 up to the Second World War, as well as to include detailed information on landholding, crops and rotations practised in 2009. The changing fate of Spratton’s farmers is represented on eleven maps – some in colour, some black and white – which show the location of the various landowners’ and tenants’ properties. All this is accompanied by detailed genealogical information on the leading farming families in the parish, as well as other useful illustrations including a reproduction of the landscape historian David Hall’s map of the preenclosure field system and Heaton’s own reconstruction of the now lost 1766 enclosure plan.

Nevertheless, Heaton could have said more about how the shifting landholding structure of the parish impacted upon other aspects of the village experience, as well as about the parish’s changing appearance in the 250 years since enclosure. The information represented on the impressive series of maps also cries out to be more clearly summarized at the end of the book, either by means of some basic statistics or in a concluding discussion. More importantly, considerably more could have been done to set Spratton’s history in the context of wider research on Northamptonshire, the Midlands and Britain more generally. While Heaton does briefly discuss how climatic shifts, the coming of the railways and fluctuating wheat prices affected farming in the parish, some of this analysis would have been improved by reference to the wider literature. Significantly, a number of key works on Northamptonshire are never mentioned, perhaps most notably Jeanette Neeson’s Commoners.

Overall then, this is a highly detailed and lovingly researched piece of local history abundantly illustrated with maps and photographs. That said, ultimately it needs to do rather more to be either of interest to those without a local connection or of use to those looking for comparative material to draw on in more substantive histories of rural landholding.