In Oxfordshire, as in all counties, the Victoria County History has lately had storms to weather, but with a supportive County Council and successful fund-raising Trust it has weathered them remarkably well. This (its fifteenth volume in all, and third for Bampton hundred) maintains the exceptionally high standards of the Oxford office but is also, inevitably, touched by the rethinking forced upon the whole enterprise by financial pressures. Like volume XIV it uses the new format: whiter paper, larger type, clearer headings, more integrated pictures. The parish histories, by Simon Townley, Veronica Ortenberg and Robert Peberdy, cover Alvescot, Asthall, Black Bourton, Carterton, Clanfield, Kencot, Minster Lovell and Brize Norton, but of these only Kencot follows the new structure adopted in 2002, with distinct sections for ‘social history’ and ‘buildings’.
Most of these parishes, and those treated in volumes XII-XIII, were formed from the huge mother-parish of Bampton minster, in a zone between the Thames and Windrush valleys which rises north-westwards from the river-gravels to the Oxford clay and Cotswold limestones, and was bordered north-eastwards by Wychwood Forest. Across it from west to east ran the Roman Akeman Street. One achievement of this volume, albeit characteristically low-key and needing to be winkled from the detail, is the recognition of what looks like an ancillary and parallel Roman road, called ‘street way’ in the sixteenth century and traversing a place called ‘Frenchester’ (pp. 74–5). By the early middle ages, through-routes from the minsters of Shipton-under-Wychwood and Charlbury converged on Bampton and a presumed Thames crossing. Economic change in the decades around 1100, when the market towns of Witney, Burford and Faringdon rose at the expense of the old minster centres, may explain what looks like an Anglo-Norman communications initiative (not explicitly noted here): a straight, causewayed road (pp. 74, 113) linking Burford across the Thames floodplain to Faringdon, with a new crossing at Radcot Bridge which would witness battles in the civil wars of the 1140s, 1380s and 1640s.
Wychwood and its wood-pasture economy had an enduring impact on the region. The detailed topographical studies in this volume and volume XIV chart the retreating edge of the late Anglo-Saxon forest, as communities south-west of the Windrush colonised the woodland beyond the river: Asthall Leigh (the leah of the ‘Astallings’) from Asthall, Town Field from Minster Lovell, Hailey and Crawley from Curbridge/Witney. In mysterious isolation on that woodland frontier stood Minster Lovell church, its character and status proclaimed by its name, by its dedication to St Kenelm, and by the magnificent late ninth-century jewel found there. It is suggested here, plausibly enough, that it had a mother-parish, but it remains an anomaly in the early minster geography of the region, and one wonders whether it could have begun as an eremitical satellite of Bampton. In the more developed farming landscape towards the Thames, the concentration of –cot names around Alvescot (some lost, but recovered in a fine piece of topographical reconstruction on pp. 10–12) is especially distinctive: it suggests groups of small peasant producers dependent (again) on Bampton.
The late- and post-medieval periods offer varied attractions. For some, the full, well-illustrated and excellent account of the great fifteenth-century Lovell mansion at Minster Lovell will be the highlight of this volume. But in the same parish is Charterville, the classic settlement of the Chartists’ ill-fated National Land Company, with its rows of model cottages built in the 1840s to provide a self-sufficient rural life for the urban poor. By an odd coincidence, the neighbouring new town of Carterton, founded soon after 1900 by the speculator William Carter, was also designed to attract people back to the land (improbable though that might seem from the pictures on p. 104). Nearby at Brize Norton, the airfield started in 1935 has developed into the RAF's largest base: there President Gorbachev was given a glimpse of British capitalist prosperity in 1987.
How will users respond to the new-look Victoria County History? The page-layout, clearer to navigate and more congenial to read, can only be an improvement. ‘Social history’, as a section distinct from ‘economic history’, enables important strands of local distinctiveness to be woven together more effectively. The same is probably true of ‘religious history’ (subsuming Anglicanism, Nonconformity and ‘church life’), where the integrated treatment of the different denominations works well for a region with such a strong and rich Nonconformist tradition as this one. There may be less agreement about ‘buildings’, where the old treatment of churches alongside church life, and of manor-houses alongside their manors, must be balanced against the new convenience of finding all architectural information in one block. But overall, traditional strengths are being preserved remarkably successfully in our access-conscious world. A modest highlighting of regional themes is a welcome addition to, not a substitute for, the essential bedrock of detailed, accurate, parish-by-parish data, founded on a disciplined searching of all the main sources. To press for more synthesis than this would be the greatest folly: as the above examples illustrate, the researcher interested in any general theme can, in a few hours spent following threads from parish to parish and volume to volume, amass more relevant and unexpected facts than in months of archival work. The only necessary grumble (but an important one, as it refers to what seems to be general Victoria County History policy) is that indexing is puzzlingly incomplete: many users will, for instance, take it for granted that all field-names are indexed and may be seriously misled. Otherwise, one can only congratulate the Oxfordshire team and its sponsors, and urge them onwards in this first-rate enterprise.
