k , X^XVlW .vA.\.5\.e THE VICTORIA HISTORY OF THE COUNTIES OF ENGLAND SOME PRESS OPINIONS Literature A word to begin with about the existing county histories. There .are plenty of them. Some of them are rather good and some of them are very bad ; some of them can be procured without difficulty and some of them are rare and costly. But there are many reasons why none of them can be accepted as adequate at the present day. In the first place they were all written a long time ago — mostly at the end of the last or the beginning of the present century — before the modern scientific spirit had begun to influence historical (and particularly genealogical) research. Consequently there was little criticism of the material used, and they are all in various degrees inaccurate and untrustworthy. In the second place they are the work in most cases of one or two men, and it needs the services of many men to bring together the expert knowledge required to write adequately in all its departments the history of even a single county. Thirdly, the treatment of the subject in these old histories is, so to say, inorganic. They consist in the main of a series of parish, manor and borough histories jumbled together but not co-ordinated. There is no attempt to consider the history of the parish in its relation to the history of the county, or th€ history of the county in its relation to the history of the country as a whole. The work that is now being prepared is of a widely different character. It is not the work of a single antiquary or of a small group of antiquaries ; but an organized attempt, under the patronage and with the active assistance of the people most interested in the subject and best qualified to direct and advise, to write the history of the counties of England in such a way as to make it unnecessary for any one else to go over the same ground a second time. , That this object is in a fair way to be achieved is clear from the constitution of the General Advisory Committee : ?> SOME PRESS OPINIONS His Grace the Duke of Devonshire K.G., Chancellor of the Uni- versity of Cambridge ; His Grace the Duke of Rutland, K.G.; His Grace the Duke of Portland ; the Most Noble the Marquis of Salisbury, K.G., Chancellor of the University of Oxford ; the Most Nobje the Marquis of Lome, K.T., M.P. ; the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Rosebery, K.G., K.T. ; the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Coventry, President of the Royal Agricultural Society ; the Rt. Hon. the Viscount Dillon, President of the Society of Antiquaries ; the Lord Bishop of London ; the Lord » Bishop of Oxford ; the Rt. Hon. the Lord Acton, Regius Professor of Modern History, Cambridge ; the Rt. Hon. the Lord Lister, President of the Royal Society ; Sir Frederick Pollock, Bart., Corpus Professor of Jurisprudence, Oxford ; Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, K.C.B., Director of the British Museum ; Sir Clements R. Markham, K.C.B., F.R.S., President of the Royal Geographical Society ; Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte, K.C.B., Keeper of the Public Records ; Col. Sir J. Farquharson, K.C.B. ; Sir John Hooker, G.S.C.I., F.R.S. ; Sir Archibald Geikie, F.R.S., Director of the Royal Geological Survey ; Rev. J. Charles Cox, LL.D. ; Lionel Cust, Director of the National Portrait Gallery ; Dr. Albert L. G. Giinther, F.R.S., President of the Linnean Society ; Col. Duncan A. Johnston, Director-General of the Ordnance Survey ; F- York Powell, Regius Professor of Modern His- tory, Oxford ; J. Horace Round; Walter Rye ; W. H. St. John Hope, Assistant Secretary of the Society of Antiquaries. Honorary Secretary, Aubyn B. R. Trevor-Battye. Honorary Treasurer, the Rt. Hon. the Earl of Cassillis. This is a strong combination. Indeed it is difficult to see how it could be strengthened. The distinguished names upon the list are a guarantee that no useful source of information is likely to be closed to the writers engaged upon the work. Even the State papers, to which his- torians are sometimes forbidden access for fear lest they should use them in the spirit of partisans, are likely to be shown to them ; while they will certainly be more freely furnished with the opportunity of examin- ing important documents in the possession of private families than would any historian less influentially introduced. Moreover in addition to the General Advisory Committee there is to be a special Advisory Com- mittee for each separate county. The plan on which the work will be composed is of a most com- prehensive character. Under the general editors there is a special editor (a local expert, whenever a competent local expert can be found) for each county ; and the county editor directs the operations of a small army of local writers and investigators. The scope of the work is of the widest. It is to ' trace, county by county, the story of England's growth from its prehistoric condition, through the barbarous age, the settlement of alien peoples, and the gradual welding of many races into a nation.' It will deal with the phases of ecclesiastical history, the changes in land tenure, the records of historic and local families, the history of the social life and sports of the villages and towns, and the development of art, science, SOME PRESS OPINIONS manufacture and industries. In order that this may be done with uniformity of method, and in order that the extravagances of the faddist and the local enthusiast may be kept within due bounds, sectional editors have been appointed to guide and coroperate with the local workers on the subjects on which they are experts. Natural history for example (including geology as well as flora and fauna) is under the editorship of Mr. Aubyn Trevor-Battye. Prehistoric and Roman remains are under the direction respectively of Professor W. Boyd Dawkins and Mr. F. Haverfield ; Mr. Hercules Read and Mr. Reginald Smith, both of the British Museum, attend to Anglo-Saxon antiquities ; Mr. Gomme to the ethnography ; Professor J. K. Laughton to the maritime history of coast counties ; Mr. St. John Hope to ecclesiastical architecture ; Mr. J. Horace Round to Domesday Book and the history of the feudal baronage ; and Mr. Oswald Barron to family history and heraldry ; while the departments of architecture and records are supervised by special committees for the purpose of securing absolute accuracy. The Archi- tectural Committee consists of Mr. J. Bilson, Mr. R. Blomfield, Professor Baldwin Brown, Mr. Arthur S. Flower, Mr. J. A. Gotch, Mr. W. H. St. John Hope, Mr. W. H. Knowles, Mr. H. T. Micklethwaite, Mr. Rowland Paul, Mr. J. Horace Round, and Mr. Thackeray Turner. The members of the Record Committee are the Bishop of Oxford, Sir Henry Maxwell-Lyte, Sir Edward Maunde Thompson, Mr. W. J. Hardy, Mr. F. Madan (of the Bodleian Library), Mr. F. Maitland (of Downing College, Cambridge), Mr. William Page, Mr. J. Horace Round, Mr. S. R. Scargill Bird (of the Record Office), Mr. W. H. Stevenson, and Mr. G. E. Warner (of the British Museum). So elaborate an organization is naturally directed to the production of a large book as well as an important one. It should be added that the arrangements for illustration are no less comprehensive than those for the literary contents. There are to be i6o photogravures of drawings specially done for the work by Mr. William Hyde, illustrating the characteristic scenery of the counties, and many thousands of other illustrations, including castles, cathedrals, manor houses, family portraits, etc. The architectural drawings will include coloured ground-plans, arranged to show the architectural history of the buildings : of these there will be about 400. The maps, of which there will be approximately an equal number, will include Domesday and archaeological maps for each county. Speed's maps of 1 6 1 o, and maps showing the oro- graphy and the parliamentary and ecclesiastical divisions. Finally, there will be an abundance of heraldic illustrations, in which the splendours of the coats of arms borne in the Middle Ages will be set forth on a scale never previously attempted. The Rolls of Arms are being done com- pletely for the first time ; and the coat arms of all the great feudal families — and possibly also all the arms of the heralds' visitations — will be given in colours. There are of course many thousands of these, and it is worth adding as a technical detail that a way has been found of printing them in colours on rough paper. 3 SOME PRESS OPINIONS Such is the scheme of the great work about which paragraphists have gossiped loosely, and about which the First Lord of the Treasury was questioned in the House of Commons. It is in fact, if not in name, a great national undertaking entered into for the purpose of raising a worthy literary memorial of the Victorian Age ; and every precaution is being taken to prevent it from depreciating in value after publication. The Daily News A COMPLETE SURVEY OF ENGLAND This massive volume, with its fine paper and print and its numerous coloured maps, plans and other illustrations, conveys an imposing idea or the great scheme of publication of which it forms part. It is the first of four volumes to be devoted to the history of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight ; but this is only the commencement of an enterprise which contemplates nothing less than a national survey of the counties of England, showing the conditions of each county at the present day and tracing the domestic history of the English counties back to the earliest times. Literature This is the great beginning of a great undertaking. It is the first time that a serious attempt has been made to put forth a national survey of the counties of England after a fashion which shall at once show their condition at the present day and trace back their history to the earliest times. When the work was first announced it was felt that no one man, nor any special group of men, however able, could possibly achieve suc- cess. The difficulties in the way of any general scheme of co-operation were so great and complex that Mr. Doubleday is much to be congratu- lated on having secured so able a body of experts to begin the history of Hampshire. If the three other volumes are conceived and executed on similar lines — and we see no reason to doubt that this will be the case — Hampshire will have good cause to congratulate itself on the success of this great experiment. The Athenseum The first volume of the Victoria History of Hampshire is as handsome a book as we have lately seen. The print, paper, plates and general style leave nothing to be desired, and if the three promised volumes which will complete the work are worthy of that which is now given to the public, they will together form at least a fitting monument of typo- graphical art at the close of the century. Unlike other county histories in which generally the entire labour of collecting materials, of writing and of publication is undertaken by a single writer, the Victoria Histories 4 SOME PRESS OPINIONS are intended to be produced by the co-operation of many authors under the direction of responsible editors. In this way the originators of the series hoped to secure the services of specialists eminent in their own particular branch of knowledge, whose judgments could not fail to carry weight when confided to their own lines of research. The advantages of this plan are patent, and are well illustrated in the volume before us. The contributors are all men who, having made a special study of the subjects upon which they have written, can be regarded as trustworthy authorities upon them. Moreover, in the choice of these writers the editor has not hesitated to avail himself of ' the advice of the most eminent authorities,' as he tells us in his preface. One obvious danger which frequently mars the value and certainly detracts from the interest of many works produced by the co-operative system — the danger of repetition — has been specially guarded against by ' interchanging the articles of those who have written on kindred subjects.' The Times This is the first volume of the magnificent Victoria History of the Counties of England, of which we gave a preliminary account a few months ago. So far as may be judged by a single specimen of a series which is to extend to some i6o volumes, the first instalment promises exceedingly well for the whole work. At the same time the scale and design of the work preclude a final judgment even of a single county history from the indications of a single volume. The History of Hamp- shire and the Isle of Wight is to occupy four volumes in all. The first volume is for the most part little more than preliminary. Of some 530 pages 250 or nearly half are occupied by natural history, a subject to which great prominence is given in the present undertaking. Then fol- low chapters on ' Early Man,' on ' Romano-British Remains,' on ' Sil- chester ' and on ' Anglo-Saxon Remains.' It is only at the 400th page that we emerge from natural history and archaeology into history proper with three instructive, authoritative and learned sections from the pen of Mr. J. Horace Round on ' The Hampshire Domesday and the Win- chester Survey,' the text of the former document being given in full. ' Silchester has no history,' says Mr. F. Haverfield, the author of the chapter on ' Romano-British Remains,' but it has abundance of archao- logical interest, and of course the study of its remains forms an import- ant element in any adequate history of the county ; but we generally judge a county history by its treatment of documents and records, and though in the present volume we have only Mr. Round's final chapters to enable us to judge it from this point of view, we may say at once that the promise is high and the standard of treatment adequate and scholarly. Hampshire does not seem so far to have been fortunate in its county historians. ' It has,' says Mr. Doubleday, the editor of the present * 5 SOME PRESS OPINIONS volume and the general editor of the whole series, ' received perhaps less attention at the hands of topographers, historians, and antiquaries than any other county in England.' Only two so-called histories of the county have previously been published. One, according to the Dic- tionary of National Biography, is a ' miserable compilation,' attributed to Richard Warner, an antiquary of note, though Warner himself disowned it and is known to have had little or nothing to do with it. The other, by Woodward and Wilks, is incomplete, ' nor could it,' says Mr. Doubleday, ' have aspired to the position of a county history in any case.' Yet Hampshire is, historically speaking, one of the most important counties in England. It teems with prehistoric relics and Roman re- mains. Its capital was for a long period the seat of the national Govern- ment. It has held the principal home of the Royal Navy ever since there was a Royal Navy. In the New Forest it possesses a region of surpassing interest to the student of social and economic history. It is thus eminently fitting that Hampshire should be the first county to be treated in the most elaborate series of county histories ever projected in this country. We can only say as yet that the method and substance of its treatment in the new series bids fair to fulfil the high aims of the projectors of the series, and that the first volume now issued in no way disappoints the favourable anticipations we founded on the specimen volume previously noticed in these columns. The Guardian Not only are the illustrations of this volume thoroughly good and numerous, but the maps are uncommon and exceptionally usefiil. There are two geological maps on a special plan ; a botanical map, dividing the county into definite areas corresponding to the letterpress ; a Roman map, showing every station, villa, pavement, or field, as well as the Roman road system ; a Domesday map, marking by coloured Hnes beneath the names the manors that pertained to the Church, to the Crown, and to the great lay tenant, Hugh de Port ; and smaller con- jectural maps of Hampshire in the Pleistocene and in the Neolithic and Bronze ages. We beg to ofl^er Mr. Doubleday our cordial congratulations on his successful initiation of this stupendous undertaking. The Morning Post The appearance of the first volume of the Victoria County Histories is an event of so much topographical importance that we are tempted to speak here more of the scheme of the histories as a whole than of the individual volume before us. But the temptation must be resisted, as o yield to it would take us outside the hmits of a review. We will SOME PRESS OPINIONS therefore be content to remark that (unless the announcement of the scheme is wholly misleading, an idea almost as absurd as anything in Euclid) we shall have, for the first time, in the Victoria County His- tories a bringing together in coherent form of the vast mass of material for county history that now, either in print or in manuscript, lies scat- tered throughout the length and breadth of England. Like that of nearly every county, the Victoria History of Hamp- shire will be contained in four volumes. The first of these is now under notice, and it deals with the natural history, the history of early man, and with Romano-British and Saxon remains in the county. To these is added a complete translation of Domesday for Hampshire, with an introduction by Mr. J. Horace Round. Maps, plans, and drawings illustrate the volume in lavish profusion. The special chapter on Sil- chester, written by Mr. George Fox, F.S.A., and Mr. W. H. St. John Hope, M.A., is particularly well illustrated, as, indeed, it deserves to be, for it is one of the best things in the volume. There seems to have been good reason for, first of all, providing Hampshire with a history. That county, says Mr. Doubleday, has received less attention at the hands of topographers, historians, and antiquaries than any other county in England. Yet it is in the closest manner connected with the history of the country, for Winchester was the early home of the English Court and seat of national Government. This act is emphasized in Mr. Round's introduction to the Domesday section, a work which certainly displays the author's intimate knowledge of the Norman period of his- tory and his ability as a critic of the theories of previous writers on the subject of Domesday. Much of the favourite story of the reckless way in which, to make the New Forest, the Conqueror laid waste smiling villages and vast tracts of cultivated land in Hampshire vanishes under the light of Mr. Round's criticism, and we agree with him that in the making of the New Forest the evidence of Domesday is of more than local interest, since it throws light on the Conqueror's character and general policy. The Field The promise of this first instalment is that of a work which will quite surpass anything of the kind that has ever been attempted. The Daily Telegraph Nothing like the Victoria History of the English Counties has ever before been attempted. It will be a modern Domesday Book, with a vastly higher purpose and execution. ' The Victoria History will trace, county by county, the story of England's growth from its pre- historic condition, through the barbarous ages, the settlement of alien 7 SOME PRESS OPINIONS peoples, and the gradual welding of many races into a nation which is now the greatest on the globe,' This monumental work should be in every country house and every public library in the county and the island. The Spectator The Victoria History of the Counties of England, the first fine volume of which appears at the opening of the new century, is conceived and published on a scale worthy of a great subject. The idea of issuing such a work as a complete history of the English counties, embodying not only a national survey of our land as it is to-day, but a complete record, from the earliest times, of the changes in the physical features of each shire, the story of its inhabitants from prehistoric times, of its antiquities, its social and ecclesiastical history, its land tenure, and its particular industries and products, marks emphatically that respect for local history and local feeling which is among the sound developments of the later part of the late Queen's reign. In reviewing such a monumental and varied work as this it is impossible even to give a complete list of the contributors. But we may safely say that the names all carry weight for local or general know- ledge, and that the work done is even better than might be expected. The book is beautifully printed, on good yet light paper. It is also handsomely bound. No finer addition could be made to a country house library ; it is, in fact, a library itself. The Times It is just fifteen months since we called attention to the prospectus of a great literary scheme, the Victoria History of the Counties of England, and we remarked that in scope and importance it would deserve to rank with the Dictionary of National Biography. The promise of the pro- spectus has already begun to be realized ; the first volume of Hampshire appeared some time ago, and we have now to welcome the first of the six volumes which are to be consecrated to Norfolk. • We gather that, so far from these being isolated phenomena, a large number of other volumes are in active preparation, and will be ready before very long. The publishers, Messrs. Constable, are sanguine enough to believe that the whole of the i6o volumes will be ready in eight years, and that the forty supplementary and larger volumes, dealing with pedigrees, will be published either within the same period or very soon afterwards. This will be a great achievement, such as is possible only on two conditions — that the co-operation among authors should be real and that the direc- tion should be efficient. These conditions appear likely to be fulfilled in the present case. It may be asked what can be the demand for such 8 SOME PRESS OPINIONS an enormous work. The answer of course is that no private buyer, unless he has an omnivorous appetite for history, is expected to subscribe for the whole ; that is the affair of the public libraries, here and in America and the Colonies, and we are glad to learn that these institu- tions, especially in the United States, are showing themselves anxious to possess the series. Private people will content themselves with the one or two counties in which they are interested — the county where they were born, that where they live, and any other with which they happen to be connected. It is not a question of subscribing for 200 volumes, but of finding room for four, or six, or eight ; handy volumes too, just the size of a sheet of foolscap, and not the huge and heavy folios of the ordinary county history. The late Bishop Stubbs, who was one of the most eager promoters of this new series of county histories, always maintained that there was left enough local feeling in the different counties of England to make such a venture successful. He thought, moreover, that the venture ought to be made, since the personal and local side of history is best attacked through the localities, and since, though much remains for future investigators to learn, enough is now known to make it worth while to supersede the old books. He believed that it was possible to carry out, with very great success, what the pre- face of the Norfolk declares to be the principle of the series — ' co-opera- tion between local students of history and archeology and those who possess expert knowledge in certain periods of history or departments of archasological research.' The History Schools of the Universities have done so much during the last thirty years, under such men as Stubbs himself, to strengthen this latter class that it no longer seems impossible to control the local student. The two classes have worked together with much success. Everybody knows what sort of a book was the normal old-fashioned county history. It was commonly the work of one man, laborious in the extreme, praiseworthy, decorous and dull. It ran to three or four immense volumes, with steel plates of churches and gentlemen's seats, good maps according to the lights of those days, and a good index. Sometimes, as in a few of the Yorkshire histories, a factitious value was lent to the bojoks by the drawings specially made by Turner, which soared as high above reality as the prose of the author sank below it. But the real fault of the county history of this type was that the local aspect of things was not presented in its proper relation to the history of the country as a whole. The spirit in which the book was written was too commonly the spirit of the topographer. Every local unit remained a unit ; the writer, as a rule, had his county or his township so much before his eyes that he paid no attention to the wider aspects of the national life. Nor was it possible that the idea of development, which is the root idea of the modern historian, could take any great place in the older local histories. Probably many excellent local his- torians of to-day would be guilty of the same faults if they were left to do their work alone ; but the organization of the Victoria History is 9 SOME PRESS OPINIONS such as to prevent this. The series is controlled, not only by a central ' Advisory Council ' composed of the heads ox historical study in the Universities, the Museums and the learned Societies, but — which is much more effective — by a group of ' Sectional Editors,' who are described as ' co-operating with the local workers in every case.' These are the best practical authorities of the day, not too big or too busy for the part, and not likely to give their names and nothing more to the scheme. When we have said that these sectional editors in the depart- ment of political history are Messrs. W. H. Stevenson, J. H. Round, T. F. Tout, James Tait and C. H. Firth, historical students will recognize the competence of the controlling authority. Any local investigator, say in Norfolk or Buckinghamshire, would be glad to submit his manuscript to such authorities and to profit by their com- ments. Names of like authority are provided for other departments Mr. St. John Hope for the cathedrals. Professor Joseph Wright for dialects, Mr. J. K. Laughton for the maritime history of the coast counties, Mr. Haverfield for Roman remains, Mr. R. L. Poole for ecclesiastical history, and so on. It may therefore be assumed that the new histories will in two principal ways avoid the faults of the old — they will be systematic, and they will be brought into their proper relations with the general course of national history, so far as the latter is known to the best authorities. We can of course form only a very partial idea of the success which may attend Norfolk from the first of six volumes. This deals mainly with the natural, non-human features of the county — with its geology, its fauna and its flora ; while, as to man, it takes us down no further than the Norman Conquest, and therefore treats of little more than scattered archaological remains. The natural history will fascinate some readers and will be skipped by others. If every subscriber were com- mitted to the whole series, there might be good reason to complain that so much space was given to facts which must be more or less the same for all counties. The birds of Norfolk, for example, do not differ essentially from those of Suffolk and Essex, though the northern county catches a few migrants which do not visit the neighbours. But of course in these matters each book has to be taken by itself; nobody is expected to study the fauna of fifty counties. From its own point of view the zoology of Norfolk is ot extreme interest ; the best game county in England is, or has been, also one of the best for birds and mammals of all descriptions, from Savi's warbler to the great bustard, from the pine-marten to the seal, which may still be captured on the sandbanks in the Wash. As for man, as far as this volume reveals him, he is not quite so interesting as we may expect to find him in Kent and some other counties. Our Neolithic, Celtic, Roman and early Anglian predecessors have left traces, but not many, of the first importance ; yet Mr. Haverfield's masterly essay on Romano-British Norfolk is a revelation of the amount that may be learnt about the remote past of any English county under the guidance of a scholar. It is an earnest of lO SOME PRESS OPINIONS what we shall learn as to medieval and modern Norfolk in the hands of Mr. Walter Rye and his contributors, and of what is being prepared in regard to all the other counties which are to be the subject-matter of the Victoria History. The Daily Chronicle The first volume of the Victoria History of the Counties of England has been pronounced so excellent a piece of work that some have doubted whether the high level thus attained could be kept up in the succeeding issues. There is no ground for any such apprehension. This first volume of the history of Norfolk is at least equal in merit to the Hampshire volume. Co-operative labour in literature, and especially in historical literature, evidently has a great future before it. As the domain of knowledge widens — and specialists are widening it more and more from day to day — it is becoming clear that, for the mass of the cultured classes, men must needs content themselves with receiving the results of scientific and historic research, trusting to departmental students to carry on those processes of inquiry and minute investigation which only the few favoured ones are qualified to pursue or to verify. This is the age of encyclopaedias, of dictionaries, of biography, and now of county histories ; and while such works as these are brought out on a scale commensurate with the importance of the subject in hand we shall all be gainers, and literature will surely not suffer. The Athenaeum The first of the six volumes assigned to the large county of Norfolk in the Victoria County History scheme has now been issued. The greater part of this handsome and substantial book is occupied by a variety of treatises on the different branches of natural history. One good feature is common to them all, viz. the centering of interest on that which is definitely local. This is secured by the co-operation of general experts with local students. The maps and illustrations of this volume are for the most part excellent, and far the greater portion have been specially prepared. This first volume of the Norfolk County History is a distinct success, and augurs well for the efficiency of the undertaking. Literature It is a pleasure to welcome the first volume of another shire in the Victoria County History scheme, and to find that it bears out fully the praise that has been bestowed on its two forerunners. The high level of the part devoted to natural history is well sustained by men of national repute such as Mr. H. B. Woodward in geology and Mr. Lydekker in palaeontology, Mr. John Amphlett on flowering plants, II SOME PRESS OPINIONS and Mr. R. F. Tomes on birds prove that W.or