Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 320

‘Microhistory’ involves studying a community in minute detail from a wide range of sources, thereby gaining insight into the history of all its individual families, buildings and institutions. More importantly, by studying such aspects as demography, occupations, household size, migration and servants, the wider picture of the community’s fortunes can be traced over time and both its social structure and geography can be reconstructed. Many of these results can be displayed on tables and maps.

This CD publication uses as a case study the village of Sparsholt three miles outside Winchester, which is fairly typical of many arable estate villages in the south and east of England with a Victorian population of fewer than 500. It provides a guide to the process of microhistory and begins with a sound introduction succinctly summarizing the methodology involved, grounded on the latest thinking on census and demographic analysis. However after this there is no further text, simply a series of tabulated transcripts of the census data for Sparsholt from 1841 to 1901 and of two detailed estate surveys of 1842 and 1851, together with a useful blank template for anyone wishing to carry out similar exercises for other communities. A serious omission is a map which would have allowed readers to gain a feel for the local topography.

The census tables are annotated with additional in-formation from other sources, including the results of a ‘house repopulation’ exercise. This is one of the key processes of nineteenth-century microhistory – a technique to give a spatial dimension to census data by matching all the households listed in 1841 or 1851 with the properties in which they lived. For this purpose the existence of a near-contemporary tithe map and schedule, or similarly detailed survey is vital. In the case of Sparsholt, only just over ten per cent of households were initially identified with properties on the 1841–3 tithe record (compared with nearly 17 per cent for a similar exercise in a Derbyshire market town). However by bringing in a variety of other sources such as parish rate books, estate rentals, and parish registers the matching was completed with approximately 98 per cent success. Again, however, neither maps nor analytical tables are provided to demonstrate what has been learnt from this exercise. In addition one would expect such a detailed study to throw up occasional stories of ‘human interest’ – extended households of farm labourers, interesting migrants, sad cases of hardship and so forth – but the text is not enlivened by one single example.

The basic problem with this CD is that it does not deliver what it says on the can, which claims to show ‘in micro-detail the changing demographics of a Hampshire village through the time of feast and famine in Victorian England’. In practice there is more famine than feast as one seeks in vain for meaningful summaries of the results of such a study; in fact it had this reviewer re-examining the CD case to see if he had missed a second disk! For example, although the author tells us that the national agricultural returns for the village were a useful source for charting the effects of the agricultural depression from the 1870s onwards, he does not hint at what these were.

Although production on CD has the advantage of offering electronic searching of the data, the layout of the census tables (on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets) is frustrating to use. Each household is not separated from the next by a space or a bold line (as in the original records) and the over-generous width of the columns means that personal information such as occupation, age and birthplace cannot be read in one view without constant resort to the horizontal scroll bar.

This publication introduces a valuable case study which is a useful template for comparative researches in other communities. It is just a pity that the author could not have included a few more samples of his conclusions to prove to others why such exercises are worth doing. As it is he has provided the user with the tools, some building blocks and a tantalizing plan but rarely revealed any parts of the finished structures. Is it too much to ask for a Volume Two?