Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 285

The latest addition to the long running VCH East Riding covers nine parishes in the northern Wolds, a remote and rural corner of the county today characterized by large arable fields, straight enclosure roads and broad sweeping vistas. This is the first of the East Riding ‘red books’ to benefit from the recently revised VCH format and the inclusion of an introductory essay. Organized chronologically, the introductory chapter opens with a detailed overview of the archaeology of the region which makes good use of the published literature, a recent aerial photographic survey and the findings from the long-term excavations at nearby West Heslerton and Wharram Percy. Less is said about settlement and agriculture in the medieval and early modern periods, although the authors briefly touch upon wider debates about the date of the region’s planned villages and the impact of William I’s ‘Harrying of the North’.

Yet, as elsewhere in the volume, David and Susan Neave’s great strength lies in their research and analysis of the later period. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a key period of change in East Buckrose, when the open fields were enclosed, sheep-walks and rabbit warrens converted to arable, new isolated farmsteads constructed and village houses, schools and churches rebuilt. By far the most important figures in these changes were the Sykes family of Sledmere, prodigious improvers who, according to an inscription in the village, transformed ‘a bleak and barren tract of country [into] one of the most productive and best cultivated districts in the County of York’. The introductory section on the Sykes family is one of the most readable and engaging in the book, and an excellent outcome of the VCH’s decision to talk about people as well as places.

The rest of the book is made up of the parish entries. Here the basic structure of the earlier volumes is retained, but additional sub-titles make individual chapters easier to navigate – surely a plus for those less familiar with the VCH way of doing things. There are also useful new sections on local politics and religious history, the latter offering a far less cursory discussion of nonconformity than was present in the older volumes, as well as longer entries on settlement layout, which – like the introductory essay – help to place the villages in a longer historical perspective. Perhaps most importantly, each of the parish entries includes a new section on its buildings covering the parish church, village houses, nonconformist chapels, and distinctive ‘Sykes’ farmhouses, farm buildings and schools. Each of these sections is well illustrated with plans and elevations from the archives, and modern and Victorian photographs, many of them taken by the Sledmere schoolmaster Henry Thelwell (1844–1923).

Overall, this is an important addition to the existing corpus of work on the historic East Riding. The 50page introductory essay is a valuable attempt to offer a more interpretative perspective on the information presented in the individual chapters, although there is necessarily some repetition of material between the parish entries and the introduction, which is at times a little ‘fact-heavy’. This notwithstanding, the new-style VCH East Riding will surely prove itself useful not only to academics, but also to the legion of local, family and community historians in the county.