West Country Farms

As the authors of this handsome and innovative study point out in their introduction, in the past historians of vernacular architecture have been forced to let a fragment of the documentary record stand for the whole. There was no alternative to using the incomplete sample of buildings that had survived, many of them inevitably much altered over time, and almost inevitably skewed towards the more substantial and prosperous buildings of any given period. In a formula well known to the historians of vernacular architecture, the further back one goes the fewer examples of the more humble buildings survive intact. Generally speaking, it is the dwellings of the poor and the more mundane buildings that are most likely to have been swept away and replaced or substantially ‘improved’. As a means of overcoming these obstacles, this study uses house-and-estate surveys from the early modern period, which provide a much more complete and rounded record. What sets them apart from conventional manorial surveys and other documents is the detailed information they give about actual houses, outhouses, and farm buildings. As a result these surveys come closer than any other documents to providing information about all the habitations of village property-holders, regardless of their wealth. The volume brings together surveys which permit an examination of the social structure and living conditions of twenty West Country communities in the early modern period. The first part of the book discusses the twenty communities for which such surveys exist: this includes the social structure of the communities, the houses (covering construction and plans, rooms and their uses), the pattern of housing in the villages, the buildings of the farmsteads, and the relationship of the farms to the regional economies. The second part considers each of the villages and their farms in detail, discussing their individual features, the character of the houses, their farmsteads and the farming economy revealed by the surveys. Together, these surveys provide an almost unparalleled portrait of a wide sample of the small farming and maritime communities of the south-west. The remarkable feature of many of the farming communities was the relatively broad distribution of landholding which, when plotted graphically, subdivided into a number of types. One pattern was for a single broad hump of landholding, centred around an average of about thirty acres. Another shows a similar concentration at about the same level but with a low peak of holdings of an acre or so. In some villages, smallholders of this size comprised about a third of all the holdings

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