Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and graphs
- List of tables
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Map 1 Cambridgeshire: natural boundaries and soil types
- Map 2 Cambridgeshire: county and parish boundaries
- PART 1 People, Families and Land
- 1 The peopling of a county
- 2 The problem: the disappearance of the small landowner
- 3 The reality: the small landholder on the chalk: Chippenham
- 4 The reality: the small landholder on the clay: Orwell
- 5 The reality: the small landholder in the fens: Willingham
- General Conclusions to Part One
- PART 2 The Schooling of the Peasantry
- PART 3 Parishioners and their Religion
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 The Butlers of Orwell
- Appendix 2 Notes on Graphs 3 and 5
- Index of Contemporary Names
- General Index
1 - The peopling of a county
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and graphs
- List of tables
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Map 1 Cambridgeshire: natural boundaries and soil types
- Map 2 Cambridgeshire: county and parish boundaries
- PART 1 People, Families and Land
- 1 The peopling of a county
- 2 The problem: the disappearance of the small landowner
- 3 The reality: the small landholder on the chalk: Chippenham
- 4 The reality: the small landholder on the clay: Orwell
- 5 The reality: the small landholder in the fens: Willingham
- General Conclusions to Part One
- PART 2 The Schooling of the Peasantry
- PART 3 Parishioners and their Religion
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 The Butlers of Orwell
- Appendix 2 Notes on Graphs 3 and 5
- Index of Contemporary Names
- General Index
Summary
It is said that the foolish curiosity of Elagabalus attempted to discover from the quantity of spiders' webs, the number of inhabitants of Rome.
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. XXXI.Until very recently Cambridgeshire has been ill-served by the local historian. The reasons for this are to be found partly in its ancient history. It lay in the disputed land between the Saxon kingdoms of East Anglia and Mercia. The great parallel series of war-ditches that run from the fens on the one hand, up over the gentle rise of the chalk and across the great traffic artery of the Icknield Way to the woods on the boulder clay above it, bear witness to this. From before the Conquest to the present day, Cambridgeshire has belonged fully neither to East Anglia nor to the East Midlands. A certain hesitation about its regional classification has frequently, and unhappily, been resolved by leaving out the mention of it altogether. Since the beginnings of regional studies made by Maitland and Cunningham, little research has been done on the county until very recently, except by archaeologists. A fulltime archivist was not appointed to the Record Office until the 1950s, and a record society was not formed until 1972.
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- Contrasting CommunitiesEnglish Villages in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, pp. 3 - 45Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1974