West Country Farms
Subtitle: House-and-estate Surveys, 1598-1764
Publisher: Oxbow Books Limited; Oxbow
Published: February 28, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 248
ISBN-13: 9781842172995
Subjects: Local history; c 1600 to c 1700; c 1700 to c 1800; History; History - General History; History: World; South West England; Europe - Great Britain - General
Description: "This explores the significance of a unique type of document that has hitherto been almost unknown to scholars. House-and-estate surveys - which add details of the village's houses, outhouses, and farm buildings to the standard evidence of an estate survey - survive for South-West England for the period from the end of the 16th to the mid-18th century. The first part of the book discusses the twenty West Country communities for which such surveys exist, painting 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." "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, and discusses the character of its houses, its farmsteads and its farming economy as revealed in the surveys. This is followed by an abstract of the detailed information in the corresponding survey."--Jacket.