Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 1 (2022), p. 136

This lively volume of essays will be close to the hearts of many members of the British Agricultural History Society. Not only are the editor and several of the contributors stalwarts of the society but its dedicatee, David Hey (1928–2016), had served as the society’s president and is remembered affectionately as the life and soul of many a conference and excursion. The book is a fitting memorial to the scholarship of one of England’s leading regional and local historians, who was firmly rooted in the Sheffield region but whose many contributions to rural history were never myopic. It contains ten essays, many by long-standing colleagues and friends (often an artificial distinction to David), prefaced by the tribute paid to him at his funeral by Charles Phythian-Adams, his friend for half a century.

The ten papers range widely across historical themes, with a greater or lesser focus on the Sheffield region. Two explore woodland in the medieval landscape. The late Melvyn Jones provides a reflective and wide-ranging survey of the purposes and meaning of deer parks, using those in the Sheffield area as examples, and paying welcome attention to their post-medieval history in the transition from park to coppice woodland or farmland. Trajectories in the history of woodlands are also the theme of Ian Rotherham’s contribution, a broad, general essay with a focus on what he terms ‘shadow woods’, the medieval wood pastures which often evolved into largely treeless commons.

As is appropriate for a volume of essays on the Sheffield region, two contributions home in on the history of the steel industry – the ‘fiery blades of Hallamshire’ of the title of one of David Hey’s most important books. In a characteristically thought-provoking and stimulating paper, Richard Hoyle offers a revisionist view of the role played by the earls of Shrewsbury in the statute of 1624 which established the Cutlers’ Company in Sheffield. Rather than signifying a withdrawal from active manorial control, he sees the move as an expression of the need for new regulatory mechanisms for urban industry in early modern England. Dorian Gerhold places the south Yorkshire steel industry in a national context, providing a useful and succinct survey of steel-making in England as a whole in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He traces its development from Coalbrookdale (c.1615), south Yorkshire (probably by 1630) and Stourbridge (by 1641), to north-east England by the 1680s and Birmingham by around 1714. Within south Yorkshire, the steel-making heartland shifted from the Rotherham area to Sheffield around 1710.

Several papers examine aspects of rural society and landscape between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, shedding new light on a disparate array of topics. Peter Edwards’ detailed account of the realities of wardship in the early seventeenth century uses estate disbursement books to trace how Lord William Cavendish of Hardwick Hall integrated the estates of his ward, Francis Wortley, with his own, while honouring his obligation to make payments as Wortley’s guardian. John Beckett seeks to reach behind the formal records of parliamentary enclosure in Nottinghamshire to assess the full scale of resistance to enclosure, arguing that W. E. Tate’s conclusions based on counter-petitions to enclosure bills significantly underestimated the level of opposition. Alan Crosby’s paper provides an exemplar of how the history of a single family can be used to shed light on much wider aspects of socio-economic history in local societies, an approach of which David Hey was himself a pioneer. His reconstruction of the fortunes of the Bagshaws, a yeoman family in the Peak District, from 1600 to 1942 is a fine case study of a long-resident family of the ‘middling sort’, whose rootedness fostered the distinctive local cultures of pre-modern England. Nicola Verdon’s essay on the First World War ploughing-up campaign in Derbyshire also illustrates the value of a local case-study approach. Using surviving records of district War Agricultural Committees, she provides a full account of the challenges and achievements of the ploughing-up campaign in the county, which saw an increase of over 32,600 acres of ploughland between 1916 and 1918, as official encouragement was replaced by compulsion.

In a fascinating survey, which touches only briefly on the Sheffield region, John Broad explores the growth of settlements along boundaries – many of them marginal communities of ‘squatter’ cottages, exploiting jurisdictional uncertainties along the boundaries of parishes and counties. Several place-names recur, not only the self-explanatory ‘No Man’s Land/Heath’ but others, notably ‘Little London’, which occurs at least 140 times, though the full significance of the name is far from clear. The volume is rounded off by a brief paper on south Yorkshire surnames by David Hey’s friend and collaborator, the late George Redmonds, which is included in the form in which it was submitted shortly before his death. It offers a sharp reminder of the importance of local knowledge (in his case a profound familiarity with both landscape and documentation) in the study of naming, as in so many other aspects of local and regional history.

David Hey was deeply appreciative of the richness of landscape and history in the Sheffield region. ‘Where else in Britain’, he wrote, ‘can you pass from heather moors through wooded hills and vales to the “champion country” of the magnesian limestone belt and on to the Dutch-style landscape of Hatfield Chase within a journey of only thirty miles?’1 This meaty volume succeeds in using the varied territory of his home patch to interrogate wider themes and in doing so to illuminate a broad range of topics. David would have enjoyed it thoroughly.