Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 132

The declared premise of this book – the ‘question’ of the self-contained village – is a non-issue. Historians of rural England do not believe in village self-containment. Indeed such is the orthodoxy of population mobility, land turnover, and economic and cultural interaction, the reader might even anticipate a counter argument, a revisionist claim for population continuity, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural isolationism. But this is not the theme of a collection that, in its conclusion, reasserts the non-existence of the self-contained village: ‘The self-contained village probably never existed’, writes its editor on the last page of the book, ‘and was certainly not in continuous decline between 1250 and 1900’ (p.141). It would therefore be tempting to treat the ‘question’ as a mere device to impose coherence on a diverse collection. Yet this would be a superficial reading of some sophisticated essays that, whatever the jacket blurb, explore mobility, social interaction, and notions of community and belonging in a range of English communities. The most interesting among them actually explore how this myth of the self-contained village had more relevance to some sections of society than others. Stability and authority were ideologically linked.

So they are a valuable group of essays, covering the period from 1250 to 1900 in essays dealing with the late medieval (Chris Dyer and Jane Whittle), the early modern (Steve Hindle and Henry French), and the modern (Ian Whyte and David Brown). The geographical range is relatively wide, though it is limited to England. Most counties are mentioned and the North is not invisible: indeed, there is a chapter (Whyte’s) on Cumbria.

One of the book’s values is that it demonstrates the range of source material available to explore the dynamics of village life, the historical variability of documentary evidence, and the consequent differing questions asked by historians of their respective periods. Land transfers, court rolls, and tax records dominate medieval work on the English village, as demonstrated in Dyer’s chapter. Manorial documents are one of the primary sources in Whittle’s exploration of population mobility in rural Norfolk during the late medieval and (early) early modern periods, but she is also able to use church court depositions to good effect, working them against the records of the landholding families to show social differentiation at work: the landholders were less mobile than those captured in the archives of the more socially inclusive church courts. The sophistication of Hindle’s chapter is not merely a result of his skills of reconstruction and analysis (though he is one of Britain’s most talented early modern historians) but a reflection of the superiority of early modern sources over the medieval. He is able to move beyond the mere mechanics of mobility to explore actual concepts of ‘belonging’ in rural communities. His cultural work on the early modern period complements Keith Snell’s work on the parish and local attachment in rural England from the mid-eighteenth century, though Snell is a notable absence from this collection. Hence also French’s ability to rethink Richard Gough’s History of Myddle (1700), reconciling its ‘village in the mind’, which, with its privileging of ‘residence and familial longevity’ (p.82), really did come close to the mythology of the self-contained village, with the mobility that surrounded the Goughs of rural England. The answer lies with social variation.

While the book’s recurring themes – regional variation, temporal flux, social differentiation, the early role of the market, the dynamic role of the industrial revolution – are familiar to historians of rural communities, I can think of no other volume that demonstrates them with such historical and geographic range, and which, at its best, takes the historiography to a new level.