Stephen Mileson and Stuart Brookes, Peasant Perceptions of Landscape: Ewelme Hundred, South Oxfordshire, 500–1650

Summary

The former hundred of Ewelme stretched from Nettlebed parish in the Oxfordshire Chilterns north-westward across the vale to Rycote at the northern tip of Great Haseley parish. It thus contained contrasting terrains – from the Chilterns’ chalky hills cut by steep-sided combes to the heavy clays and meandering streams of the vale – which have supported very different kinds of farming and settlement. This is the area which Stuart Brookes and Stephen Mileson have addressed. Their book is the product of the South Oxfordshire Project, which was supported by the University of Oxford and the Leverhulme Trust. The authors bring to bear some powerful resources. One author, Mileson, was employed in research and writing for the recent Victoria County History volume on Ewelme Hundred (reviewed in Oxoniensia, vol. 85, 2020, pp. 297–300), and this book has benefited from collaboration with that project. It will be interesting to see where the association might lead in future VCH volumes, for the book’s approach turns us in new directions.

The authors intend their work to be not simply a study of landscape but something more ambitious: an exemplar of a new kind of history, one concerned with peasants’ perceptions. Such questions as ‘how were perceptions and local identities formed in relation to particular settings?’ and ‘how did those perceptions and identities change as a result of social and landscape reorganisation?’ dictate the focus of this richly rewarding book. To that end this ‘spatial turn’ uses a new kind of evidence, as was also employed in Susan Kilby's recent study of places in modern Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, Peasant Perspectives on the Medieval Landscape: A Study of Three Communities (2020). This is ‘microtoponomy’; that is, the study of the corpus of names given locally to very small environmental features. Its riches lie in its intense local focus. By assembling the names which people gave to the minutiae of their surroundings – the pond, the muddy ditch, the bend in the street, the furlongs in fields and ‘ends’ in villages – the authors aim to give us a view of how local inhabitants saw their world.

The project on which the book is based involved new ways of working.