This volume shows how the north-west of the county looked at the end of three major phases of landscape development: the open fields at the height of medieval expansion, c.1300; the end of the early stage of open-field enclosure by agreement, c.1750, and as mapped by the Ordnance Survey in the 1880s.
The first has been reconstructed using archaeological survey results and historical sources. the second from the evidence of 250 maps - estate maps, enclosure maps and tithe maps that show the extent of woodland, landscaped-parks and the plan-form of villages. The third part of the atlas is a reproduction of the Ordnance Survey First Edition originally published at the six-inch-to-a mile scale. Between them, the maps show changes in settlement and countryside over nearly 600 hundred years. All the Atlas maps are reproduced at 2½ inches to the mile scale (1:25,000), the same as the modern Ordnance Survey Explorer series, with which they may be compared.
The book has an introduction that explains the geographical and historical context of the region. It outlines the history of its medieval administration, Rockingham Forest, the open fields, and enclosure. There is a detailed section on the nature of the village origins and settlement. The final part of the book, placed after the atlas section, consists of short essays briefly describing the history of each of the 70 villages in the region from 1086 to approximately the 19th century. Each essay has at least one plan showing individual houses and surrounding paddocks as they were in the 17th and 18th centuries (or 1885 if there is no older map). Extracts of manuscript maps are provided in many cases. These plans will be of interest to those studying the history of their own property.
The Atlas covers over 572 square kilometres (221 square miles) of land between the River Welland and the River Nene in the northern part of Northamptonshire. The extent is similar to the bounds of the royal Forest of Rockingham as it was in 1286. The book is the result of fieldwork and historical research undertaken since the mid 1960s to map and analyse the landscape of the whole of Northamptonshire. The data have been collected in a digital computerised format which is the only effective method of dealing with such a large quantity of information. It is then possible to display the character of the landscape in a variety of formats and show how it changed through the centuries.
This a substantial A4-sized hard-back book of 312 pages, nearly half of them in full colour.
Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Medieval administrative organisation
- Rockingham Forest
- Open fields
- Enclosure
- The origins and character of medieval settlement
- Atlas
- Medieval
- Early-modern
- Victorian
- Gazetteer
- Glossary
- Abbreviations
- Selected Bibliography
- Index