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Reviews Peter Walker, James II and the Three Questions: Religious Toleration and the Landed Classes, 1687–1688 (Oxford and Berne, Peter Lang, 2010), 223 × 149mm, xxx + 310pp, ISBN 978-3-03911-927-1; ISSN 1661-1985 (pbk), £42. This book is based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis at Leicester University. It examines the attempt by the Catholic, James II, to repeal laws which discriminated against his co-religionists by packing Parliament with his supporters. In the winter of 1677–78, James ordered the lords lieutenants to canvas the gentry of their respective counties with three questions: would they consent to the repeal of the Test Act and the penal laws; would they support candidates who wished to abolish them; and would they accept the Declaration of Indulgence which granted general religious toleration. The author analyses the returns in detail and argues that they failed to garner the King any real support, but he also notes that many of those who responded negatively to the first two questions also answered positively to the third. He argues that this indicates more support for general toleration than has previously been allowed. Chapter 8 on the Leicestershire returns will be of most interest to readers of this journal. The county’s lord lieutenant was Theophilus Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, an appointee of James and pro-Crown despite being a Protestant. The returns contain replies from 27 of the counties landed gentry, whose responses roughly correspond to the national pattern. Only a fifth of the Protestant gentry in the county supported the King, even excluding those who failed to respond. The survey was subsequently used by the King to replace officers and members of corporations seen as disloyal. This attempt at subverting democracy merely served to increase opposition to James, culminating in the Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange ascended to the throne. Paul Courtney Pamela Abbott, Stephen Allen, Pamela Aucott, Rosemary Culkin, Sally Kersting, Liz Thomas and Beryl Tracey, with a foreword by Michael Wood, Furlong and Furrow: A 14th-century survey of the Open Fields of Great Bowden, Leicestershire (Market Harborough, Great Bowden Heritage and Archaeology, 2011), 213 × 145mm, 48pp, 1 map and 2 col. illustrations, paperback, £5, obtainable from Steve Allen, tel. 01858 433021. The value of this research report is far greater than its length suggests. Members of the village history and archaeology group set out to transcribe British Library Additional Charter 6108, a survey of Great Bowden’s fields datable by internal evidence to 1331 and 1336. It is believed to be the only survey of its type from Leicestershire, and possibly drawn up as part of the process leading to an exchange of lands between the King and Geoffrey le Scope. Tony Brown drew the group’s attention to the document, and Michael Wood, who encouraged its publication, praises it in his foreword as ‘a model of its kind’ (p. 4). Not only agrarian historians will find this case study informative. As Wood points out, the local names raise interesting questions, too. He believes the preponderance Trans. Leicestershire Archaeol. and Hist. Soc., 86 (2012) 11_Reviews_193-202.indd 193 28/08/2012 10:16 194 reviews of English as opposed to Scandinavian field names ‘might suggest that the important minster site – an old English village already existing in the ninth century and probably long before – was not taken over by Vikings. The English... lived alongside their Danish neighbours, but got on with their own lives’ (p. 4). Graham Jones Barrie Cox, The Place-Names of Leicestershire, Part Five, Guthlaxton Hundred, The Survey of English Place-Names, Vol. 88 for 2011 (Nottingham, English Place- Name Society, 2011), 224 × 145mm, xxxi + 316pp, 1 fig. (map), hardback, ISBN 13: 978-0-904889-87-1, ISBN 10: 0-904889-87-4, £35 (EPNS members) or £40 (non-members) + £3.50 p&p. For the historian or archaeologist, especially those waiting for the missing volumes of Leicestershire’s Victoria County History, Barrie Cox’s survey of the county’s place- names is, as ever, a considerable evidential resource. The etymologies of towns and villages are generally well rehearsed. It’s in the marginal detail and fine print that Professor Cox’s work is crucial. The field-names, lost names, names of streams and hillocks – these are the weft and warp of ‘the landscape of place-names’, in Margaret Gelling’s phrase, the material for both micro-histories and regional synthesis. Their greater inclusion in the third generation of English Place-Names Survey volumes provides a depth and breadth of evidence which is critical to understanding how our settlements and countryside came to be. This is not only the case for those interested in pre-industrial communities. Sixty years after ‘Beeching’s axe’ (that half-remembered cull of loss-making railway lines), we have reached the point where Cox’s inclusion of rail-related names is a self-contained historical resource (e.g. Clankers Close, Cosby, p. 69). The same is true of pub names, in an age when public houses have vanished by the score, perhaps by several hundreds in a single county – not to mention their widespread renaming. Long gone also is a sense of the circumstance of local naming. While the orality of rural societies ensured that name spellings reflected pronunciation, capturing in aspic the long horizons of events, people and activities, it needs the painstaking dedication of scholars like Cox to unlock the written forms so that their sometimes exotic origins can be brought back to light. Had an obscure, fourteenth-century Frolesworth landholder found honour on North African battlefields (p. 93). Did a Wigston Magna headland belong in the thirteenth century to ‘a Bulgar’, an Albigensian-like heretic (p. 227). The richness of Cox’s treasure-store can be gauged by the number of index entries – about 1,500 for the 40 parishes in this wedge of Leicestershire between the city and Watling Street, from the Fosse Way on the west to the old A50 to Husbands Bosworth and the fledgling Avon on the east. As always in these volumes, Cox’s introduction is essential reading, and his 60-page list of elements by parish is magisterial. A delightful essay explores the Hundred name itself and its relevance, little or large, to the story of St Guthlac, whose own name attached to the probable milestone on the Fosse Way near Cosby where the moot of Guthlaxton wapentake assembled. As in the Framland 11_Reviews_193-202.indd 194 28/08/2012 10:16 reviews 195 volume, Leicestershire’s link with Guthlac is a little underplayed: if all devotional locales are included, our own county, not Lincolnshire (p. 3), has the most Guthlac dedications. Cox’s minor names continue to inform our appreciation of British survival far from the Welsh borderlands, an element in the Guthlac story, as it happens. Cox concludes that Walton and Walcote, Bretterhill (‘Britons’ hill) in Wigston Magna, and two ‘Welsh-moors’, in Cosby and Leire, are ‘sparse’ evidence, but is this too pessimistic? A feature of the Hundred is its long, often meandering lanes and minor routes running north-south onto the upland divide, between the North Sea-bound waters of the Soar and the Irish Sea-bound waters of the Avon. They look strongly like seasonal stock routes, hinting at transhumance (see the following review). The ‘Welsh-moors’ suggest life on pastoral margins. Did the Britons survive primarily as herders? Cox has no fewer than 31 instances of ‘wold’ names here. The richness of the pastures is exemplified in Gilmorton’s name, no longer a clue to gilded treasure. Cox thinks rather of gold-coloured wetland flowers like the marsh-marigold. This same periphery was notable for its burial mounds: the glossary lists no fewer than 29 names in hla¯w (‘tumulus’), including three remembered for wakes, or watchings. The reader is eager to see them mapped, a feature missing from more recent EPNS volumes, though Stenton and Mawer’s contrasted distributions of t u¯ n and le¯ah names in Warwickshire, for example, is still used. Hopefully county distribution maps of selected elements will appear in the sixth and final volume, on Sparkenhoe Hundred. It’s sad that the funding for this volume did not run at least to a plan of the charter bounds of an Anglo-Saxon estate at Claybrooke from Sawyer 833, Leicestershire’s only surviving AS charter with Old English bounds. It is discussed here (pp. 64–6) for the first time since Charles Phythian-Adams’ 1978 commentary, ensuring that for this too the volume will be widely consulted.1 Graham Jones Neil Finn, Bronze Age Ceremonial Enclosures and Cremation Cemetery at Eye Kettleby, Leicestershire (Leicester Archaeology Monograph No. 20, University of Leicester School of Archaeology and History, 2011), 298 × 215mm, xii + 152pp, 82 figs, 36 tables, ISBN 978-0-95601-795-6 (hbk), £20. This handsome volume describes the developer funded excavations outside Melton Mowbray in advance of building work. It is concerned principally with a Mesolithic and Neolithic flint scatter, some Neolithic and early Bronze Age pits, two Bronze Age ring ditches and associated and later burial evidence, a later Bronze Age settlement and two undated D-shaped enclosures. The report is taken chronologically, and it is to be commended that the specialist reports on artefacts and ecofacts are not relegated to some general finds chapter, environmental section, or indeed a series of appendices as often seems to happen in such monograph reports. The Mesolithic and Neolithic evidence is largely derived from fieldwalking though two pits 1 Charles Phythian-Adams, Continuity, Fields and Fission: The Making of a Midlands Parish (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1978).