Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), p. 156

The Victoria County History moves forward in spite of the obstacles in its path, and this volume demonstrates the value that the VCH gives both its local readers and the whole historical profession. It deals with twelve ‘settlements’ in west Oxfordshire centred on Shipton-under-Wychwood and the royal forest of Wychwood. There is no town among the group of parishes chosen for this volume but it has a unity based on the centrality of Shipton. This was the site of a minster church and a royal estate centre in the early middle ages, and in modern times has been a large village with a concentration of facilities. Most of the 12 villages have shared in the experience of living in or near to the royal forest. Cornbury House and Park, and its estate, though lying on the edge of the territory covered by the volume, has exerted much influence. Shipton station, opening in 1853, gave the villages a transport focus, and in the twentieth century the Imperial Wireless Station at Leafield became a centre of technology and employment.

This VCH volume continues the traditions of the VCH in its authority, careful referencing of information, and calm and confident tone. It is arranged according to the conventional template of themes such as landscape, economic history and local government, but that standardized ordering of subjects is essential if parish histories are to be compared. The volume can be repetitive, but this is inevitable in a work of reference in which readers expect each parish history to be complete in itself. Within the traditions of the VCH project, one welcomes the modernization of the terminology and approaches. We begin with landscape and built character, and landownership has replaced the history of the manor. Welfare is now a subheading under social history. The overview provided at the beginning of this volume is an excellent introduction to the overall development of the twelve settlements. It makes use of historical concepts, such as the multiple estate model, which suits Shipton very well, and the minster status of the parish church is important for understanding the evolution of the units of lordship. Archaeology is integrated into the history, and in particular shows the value of field walking for tracing changes in settlement. In analysing the modern villages they are found to fit the ‘open’ and ‘closed’ parish model. Long-term population changes are laid out in a table in the overview and explained separately for each parish. The operations of the poor law, old and new, have an important role in the social history of the parishes.

All aspects of agricultural history are covered, with information about the soils and topography under ‘landscape’, farming methods and land holding under economic history, while farmers and labourers figure prominently in the social history section. The documentation for agricultural history (particularly from the perspective of this reviewer) is not abundant, but there is enough to establish the main outlines. The nucleated villages and open fields (mostly two fields) were established quite early, though some parishes have large areas of old enclosure, sometimes the result of assarting from the forest up to the fourteenth century. The open fields (practising sheep and corn husbandry) persisted, and one parish was not enclosed until 1854. The yeomen farms that developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were subject to amalgamation in later centuries until some parishes now have one very large farm, or all of the land is cultivated from a distance. For centuries the people of such villages as Shipton, Ascott, Ramsden and Leafield had access to grazing and other forest resources, claiming common rights but often taking wood and game illicitly. As on the fringes of many royal forests they established a distinctive way of life and mentality. Outsiders dismissed their behaviour as criminal. The ending of royal forest elsewhere was usually protracted, but in the case of Wychwood it was sudden and brutal, as disafforestation and the clearance of the woods all happened in 1856–8. Communities which had always been impoverished felt even more deprivation and, in the depression of the 1870s that soon followed, many migrated to Australia and New Zealand. Since those hard times Wychwood’s villages have followed a familiar route of gentrification, the growth in commuting, and the death of the village shop.

The VCH is designed to be consulted, and cannot give extended attention to the many subjects covered. Readers are left with a desire to know more, which may mean following up the footnotes, or embarking on their own research. This agrarian historian was intrigued by the VCH’s discovery of a wealthy demesne farmer, Thomas Sessions of Milton around 1500, and gives tantalising hints of his activities. Some may notice the strength of political conservatism. For example the village hall at Shipton was built in the 1880s on the initiative of the Conservative Association and named Beaconsfield Hall in honour of Disraeli. Some local people adopted contrary attitudes: a pauper rebellion against a select vestry at Ramsden in 1834–35 showed robust dissent against attempts to reduce poor relief. Ascott in particular became a centre of radicalism, at a popular level in 1873 when the ‘Ascott martyrs’ (16 women supporting the agricultural workers) were imprisoned, and in the early twentieth century with middle-class promotion of progressive causes, such as the WEA. Nonconformist religion also flourished in the villages. The VCH tells us about a popular culture of Morris dancing and mumming throughout the area, which predates the arrival of middle-class intellectuals, and we would like to know more about its roots. Finally, the editors of the VCH, while discreetly maintaining their objectivity throughout, provide a clue to the area’s notoriety in the second decade of this century, with a sentence (on p. 171) revealing that this was the epicentre of the ‘Chipping Norton set’.