Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 2 (2014), p. 365

The University of Hertfordshire Press (like the historians of its host University) has an excellent record of publishing volumes of local and regional history which meet the needs both of academic historians and of an interested public. This recent addition is no exception, offering excellent value for a large-format and colourfully illustrated, stoutly produced paperback, with a brief but insightful introduction on historical atlases by Nigel Goose with an excellent bibliography of the genre. Local historical atlases have tended to fall at one of two ends of a spectrum. At one end are those more academic publications which set themselves a historical agenda, covering all the main thematic areas across time, and then seek to provide maps which illuminate those themes, even if the data available for mapping some concepts are often elusive, requiring careful historical evaluation. At the other end are those (generally aimed at a wider public) which start from mappable data, not attempting to cover all topics, and leave the reader to draw wider thematic conclusions. This particular volume falls somewhere in the middle. It is organized thematically, covering in turn boundaries, buildings, communication routes, demography, early settlements, industries and work, landscape, religious buildings and religion, social issues, towns and villages, war and civil unrest, but as the alphabetical ordering of that list suggests, it imposes no particular chronological model of county development on those subjects (after an introductory section on the physical landscape and the origins of the county), and some of the individual topics selected, such as icehouses, City of London coal tax markers or medieval and Tudor graffiti, reflect the enthusiastic knowledge of particular researchers. There are 82 separate sections, mostly consisting of two pages with one map, and the text tends to summarize the topic and the lessons to be learned from the map for the general reader, rather than evaluating the sources and reliability of the data being mapped. Nigel Goose manages to get two maps each to illustrate his sections on Tudor and Stuart population and on straw-plaiting and hat-making in the nineteenth century, as does Nigel Agar for agricultural trades. The longest sections, however, are those on the county’s garden cities and new towns, which together get an unrivalled ten pages. The 51 contributors are an impressive mixture, with heritage professionals and local historians rubbing shoulders with leading figures in landscape and local history and historical geography such as Tom Williamson, Evelyn Lord and Hugh Prince.

It has to be confessed, however, that this is not an atlas designed to please the agricultural historian. Agar begins his section on agriculture in the nineteenth century by noting ‘Although agriculture has been practised in Herefordshire since Neolithic times, the first century for which we have really detailed information is the nineteenth’, and this controversial view seems reflected in the volume as a whole. There is no systematic coverage of settlement history or types after the Anglo-Saxon period (not even in Domesday), apart from a section on abandoned settlements, and no attempt to map patterns of landholding: even the location of major estates can only be deduced from the discussions of buildings and landscape features. There is a section on markets and fairs, though it only maps markets established up to the sixteenth century, but it offers no analysis of the agricultural produce marketed. The sections on landscape address woodlands (mapping woodland with over 200 swine in Domesday), rabbit warrens, dovecotes, parks and ‘great gardens’ (two sections on the latter two topics), but only the modern sections on parliamentary enclosure, orchards and agriculture in the nineteenth century reflect directly on farming practices: even the last-named section simply illustrates parishes with more than 60 per cent arable or more than 60 per cent pasture from the 1836 tithe commutation data. The chapter on mills deals entirely with mills up to 1400, predominantly those in Domesday. There is a section on malting and brewing, focused on Ware’s role as a malting centre for London and nationally, but nothing in the text indicates the source or date of its map of malthouses and breweries. The map accompanying the section on watercressgrowing is dated to around 1900, but is classified by the type of bed structure used in growing, not in relation to other farming types. Agar’s and Goose’s sections noted above throw some light on dealers in corn, hay, malt and cattle and the spread of the straw industry in the mid-Victorian period, but there is no further consideration of agricultural produce, processing or trading; the other industries covered are technologically interesting ones such as bell-founding and papermaking, not the standard cloth, leather and metal trades. The texts on medieval roads/bridges and on turnpike roads refer occasionally to agricultural goods: an account of the origin and numbers of wagonloads of grain passing through Colliers End in 1632 is described as ‘probably the first ever traffic census’, but both these sections and that on rivers and navigations are either silent about the goods carried or refer to produce from East Anglia moving through to London, rather than the county’s own output. The only author really to address agriculture is Goose, both briefly in his discussion of population trends after 1500, and at slightly more length in his introduction, where he confirms ‘the “fame” of the county for tillage, and its essentially agrarian economy for much of its history’, but, sadly, despite its many other virtues, this volume does little to reveal that agrarian economy or society.