Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 285

Like topless sunbathing or tear gas in the streets, some things that seem natural in France do not always translate very well to Britain. This has been true of the quest for regions and regional identities in historical perspective. After a century of Febvre, Braudel and a plethora of theses and books reconstructing the geo-social regions of France, the idea that people, as well as vines, should have their own particular terroir is almost a cliché of Francophone scholarship. In England, by contrast, although Charles Phythian- Adams’s innovative work on regional formations has been widely admired, it has not been much imitated or developed.

Alan Fox’s in-depth depiction of a social-spatial fault-line between east Leicestershire and west Lincolnshire provides a highly methodical, meticulously researched, well-grounded and very welcome test of Phythian- Adams’s hypotheses about regional ‘societies’. Phythian- Adams’s thesis is, broadly, that the geographical distribution of social contacts and interactions is shaped by natural features such as major watersheds. These have provided barriers to communication and mobility for millennia, and have even helped to define (and been reinforced by) administrative boundaries. This is not crude geographical determinism, but might be described as geographical ‘structuration’ – that is, such watersheds provide some of the parameters that shape, channel and delimit human interactions, and therefore contribute to the definition of the experiences and identities of the populations within them (not always in predictable ways). Although to the outside observer the barrier between Leicestershire and Lincolnshire seems to lack the existential drama of that between Yorkshire and Lancashire, Fox explains that it fits most of Phythian-Adams’s criteria. The bulk of the population was concentrated within major river basins, while the frontier between the counties coincided with a relatively sparsely populated limestone heathland. Each of these areas was oriented towards a ‘primate’ town – Leicester, Nottingham, and Lincoln. This seems to have been recognized by a county structure established early in the eleventh century, under Danish rule.

Fox tests this hypothesis carefully and systematically through this volume. He organizes his analysis into three parts. Firstly, he explores the applicability of Phythian-Adams’s hypothesis to the border area that he has selected, particularly in relation to its physical geography and history. Secondly, he examines aspects of the area’s economic, social and cultural history, to determine whether different experiences of population growth, wealth and poverty, enclosure and vernacular architecture and culture indicate a sharp separation around the county boundary. The evidence is mixed. West Lincolnshire was marginally more prosperous than east Leicestershire. Enclosure histories did not vary dramatically, but there may have been a small net inflow of population from populous Leicestershire into unenclosed parishes in Kesteven in Lincolnshire. Patterns of vernacular architecture and speech exhibited some quite marked differences. Thirdly, Fox moves onto examining the evidence of spatial contacts, generated by marriage alliances, probate links, kinship and dynasties, and then transport and economic flows.

This evidence is the most suggestive. Marriage links were comparatively weak across the heathland, compared to intra-county alliances, both among marriage partners and their sureties. While Fox does not find strong evidence of the presence of ‘dynastic families’ spreading out across several parishes, the paucity of cross-border connections appears to confirm the marriage data. Even so, his comment that ‘some of the Lincolnshire bondsmen also hint at a connection with farm animals’ (p.120) could, perhaps, have been rephrased, although it may embody dark Leicestershire suspicions! In some ways, Chapter Eight is the most interesting one in this third section, because it mentions two impediments to mobility that could have been embedded more firmly in this analysis. The first of these was that Leicestershire and Lincolnshire hiring fairs were out of phase. In Leicestershire servants were hired annually from Michaelmas, whereas in Lincolnshire hiring was concentrated around Mayday. These fundamental differences in the agrarian labour cycle must have had profound effects on the movements of the (most mobile) unmarried labouring population. Secondly, it deals effectively, but in a relatively limited number of pages, with the road network, which was oriented very strongly north–south rather than east–west. The Great North Road ran through the eastern side area, and must have exerted a tremendous alternative ‘field-of-force’, pulling migrants south towards London. The modern A606 speared north–west, taking travellers to Melton Mowbray and Nottingham. Roads carry possibilities as well as people, and it may be that the powerful influence of these prospects crowded out many cross-border links. Neither of these observations denies Fox’s assertion that the border between the two counties appears to have formed a tangible societal barrier, or that the county boundaries may have been drawn up to reflect a pre-existing disposition of connections and networks. Instead, they merely suggest that some of the reasons for the patterns within this region may lie outside it.

This study is the most thoroughgoing test and demonstration of aspects of Phythian-Adams’s thesis. It is based on rigorous and exhaustive parish-by-parish analyses, including a phenomenal family reconstitution of fourteen parishes in this border area. Fittingly, perhaps, this is research on the epic scale of an Annaliste doctoral thesis. The end result is persuasive, even if the concluding discussion, which pushes back the ‘region’ to the Danelaw, based on surname and place-name, might not persuade early medievalists. Yet, although the idea of geographical ‘structuration’ is fascinating, and plausible, this reviewer suspects that further research will be necessary before the sceptical rosbifs are fully convinced. In particular, Phythian-Adams’s ideas now seem quite a long way removed from recent work on identity formation, which stresses the multiple, overlapping and contextual nature of identity. While this can sometimes be stretched to atomized anomie, it does imply that although the spatial boundaries of regional ‘societies’ were formative in some contexts, it may yet be difficult to demonstrate that these provided the hook on which all else hung.