West Country farms - N. W Alcock

This major innovative study is centred on a type of document
that has hitherto been almost unknown to scholars. It explores
the significance of a unique source, the 'house-and-estate'
survey - which adds detail of the village's houses, outhouses,
and farm buildings to the standard evidence of an estate survey.
These surveys are explored for South-West England for the period
from the end of the 16th to the mid-18th centuries. The first
part of the book examines the twenty West Country communities for
which such surveys survive, using these documents to paint
landscapes of individual farming communities caught at one moment
in time - pictures that come as close as written records can to
the complete archaeological excavation of village sites. It
examines (a) The communities and their social structure,
including land-holdings and demographic evidence. (b) The houses,
covering construction and plan (including evidence from standing
buildings); rooms and their use, and the pattern of housing
revealed in the surveys. (c) The farmsteads, covering the
buildings of the farmsteads (examining both standing buildings
and documentary sources), the relationship of the farms to the
regional economies, and the discovery of economic opportunities
and contrasts between neighbours (an innovative study based on
comparisons drawn from the survey evidence). The second part of
the book considers each of the villages and their farms in
detail. Each chapter introduces the place and its individual
features, discusses the character of the houses, of the
farmsteads and the farming economy as revealed in the surveys.
This is followed by an abstract of the detailed information in
the corresponding survey. The book includes an index including
the many hundred West-country individuals named in the surveys,
that will be of value to anyone working on the region.