Sarah Holland’s study is a welcome one. It does justice to the appreciation of the particularity of single places, to the contrasts between them, and also to the nature of the spatial inter-relationships apparent across districts. The analysis focuses most on a half dozen villages, which the author has selected to form a sample of places within different landownership and environmental settings around the market town of Doncaster in South Yorkshire: Braithwell, Fishlake, Rossington, Sprotbrough, Stainforth and Warmsworth. The volume, at a conceptual level, is based upon an opportunity that the author takes to revisit the open-closed settlement model, and reassess its significance and utility in the present.
Holland’s study adds to the existing literature in its furthering of the close critical examination of settlement typologies, and in its endeavours to bridge the rural and urban – in this case, the village and the market town. In addition, the research, as the General Editor of the broader book series notes, represents something of a drift north of studies contextualising the open-closed settlement framework. Previous contributions have tended to consider southern, East Anglian and the East Midland counties.
The structure of the volume follows themes familiar to local and regional, and rural, historians: social, economic and cultural. Thus, agricultural practices and industrial activities feature, as do religious and educational provision and custom, and working and domestic life and conditions. The differences between places, for the author, can be found in relation to their location in spatial hierarchies, the manner of the exercise of power and influence, and domains of human agency.
Holland does not allow the work to get enmeshed within, or burdened by, reflections at higher levels of abstraction, and extended discussions of the shifting paradigmatic contexts through which the open-closed settlement model evolved over a period of some decades. The resulting read would probably be the worse for it, and lose some of its accessibility. However, it can be said that Holland’s study of places is in itself located in a different time than those undertaken by the open-and-closed settlement modellers of the past. The early and pioneering conceptual work arose against the background of a mindset more hopeful about, and fascinated by, the possibilities of positivism and quantitative methodologies, and a grass-roots, if not quite neo-Marxist, commitment towards identifying inequality, conflict and dissent; and, indeed, reflecting in some ways the motivations and observations of contemporary commentators who were concerned about difference and disadvantage in the countryside, place by place, open and closed. Holland deploys historical perspectives that are now more familiar, following postmodernism and cultural turns, and the taking up by some of actor-network theory. Holland’s approach can be appreciated for its turn away from prediction and assumption, and towards a particular interest in that which is individual, plural, divergent and unpredictable.
The author concludes, as did some of the early writers, as well as their revisionist successors, that reductionist typologies can constitute a helpful start, but only a start, and cannot hope to encompass all variables and all that is nuanced. Through Holland’s relatively more cultural gaze, there are very helpful observations beyond merely reading everything off from how landed resources were distributed, or not. There is acknowledgement of the role of other actors alongside the landowners, and their influence on the course of local development: the clergy, a local corporation, and agricultural societies. Moreover, it is by incorporating the market town that the study opens up more widely the consideration of the breadth, dynamism and reach of political and cultural networks, and social and economic relationships.
The rounder approach taken by Holland closes a gap somewhat, between the vision of historians, geographers and indeed rural sociologists, and that to be found in the literary and fictional constructions forged at the time by provincial novelists. Holland’s departure from the open and closed model gets closer to the realities of life within places, the unpredictability of decision-making, and the fluidity of human experience.
The underpinning primary research is impressive. The use of the archives at Doncaster is extensive. Some foraying elsewhere is evident, to repositories at Durham University and the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, as well as to Kew for the Census. In addition, the author has made a comprehensive survey of parliamentary papers. Trade directories, a standard point of reference for typologies, are exploited well. The work benefits considerably from a searching examination of provincial newspapers and magazines relating to agriculture and farming. This last body of source material was not exploited so fully in earlier typological studies, but here deepens and extends human and cultural interpretation.
This book is number 16 in the Studies in Local and Regional History series hosted by University of Hertfordshire Press. This volume, and the series as a whole, continue to sustain the production of shorter monograph studies exploring and enriching thinking and practice in local and regional history.
