Calne, a small town in north Wiltshire, stood on a large royal estate, and the witan met there - St Dunstan survived the partial collapse of a building at one meeting. It sent members to parliament from the thirteenth century, and it became a pocket borough in the eighteenth. The town stands on what until 1971 was the main London to Bristol road; markets and fairs were held, and inns flourished. It was also industrial: water-powered mills were used for fulling, and from the sixteenth century to the 1840s it was a centre for cloth making. The topography of the town, its growth, government and...

Tutbury and Needwood forest have a rich history, fully explored here from the earliest times to the present day: the former with its great medieval castle, the heart of a major feudal honor held from the 13th century by the royal earls and dukes of Lancaster, and the latter with its medieval parks and hunting lodges. The volume also covers the important early Anglo-Saxon monastic and royal site of Hanbury, the burial place of St Werburh, a Mercian princess; and offers accounts of the mansion houses built in and around the ancient forest area by members of the Bass brewing family and others,...

Religious history is the focus of this volume, which covers the development of Christianity in the county from its Romano-British origins up to the Elizabethan Church Settlement of 1559; it provides the first ever in-depth study of the county's religious history during the Middle Ages and the Reformation. The story it tells is a highly distinctive one, full of interest, covering the uniquely numerous local saints and founders, their legends and the parish churches, chapels, holy wells and religious sites associated with them, as well as the larger religious communities. The Cornish clergy are...

The ancient religious settlement of Glastonbury, with its many legendary associations stretching back into the Dark Ages, and the manufacturing town of Street, the creation of the late 19th century, are curious neighbours. They lie at the centre of the mysteriously-named Twelve Hides Hundred, the core estate of Glastonbury Abbey in the early Middle Ages. Around them, spreading into the low-lying moors of the Somerset Levels, are parishes which produced for the abbey, after continuous improvement of drainage, most of its economic riches - meat, milk, cheese, fruit, wool, wine, cider, fish,...

Chelsea was a desirable riverside residence for wealthy merchants, lawyers, and courtiers from the fifteenth century, and a pleasure resort for all ranks of society from the eighteenth; it is now one of the most expensive and desirable places to live in London. This new volume relates all this and more, including a re-examination of the location of Sir Thomas More's house, a reassessment of Henry VIII's relationship with the manor house, the history of a major estate not previously identified, and a survey of the farm-gardening which gave prosperity to some local inhabitants. Facets of...

This volume comprises a history of the large west Oxfordshire town of Witney and its rural townships of Crawley, Curbridge, and Hailey, an area of over 7,000 acres derived from a large, late Anglo-Saxon estate. Witney, probably the site of the Anglo-Saxon estate centre, was redesigned as a planned new town' in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century; from the seventeenth century it was widely known for its blanket industry, and became a centre of religious non-conformity. The town's origins, buildings, and physical development are fully discussed, together with its economic, social and...

Somerset's Polden hills divide the county's central marshlands, Sedgemoor to the south and the Brue Valley to the north. Traces of human activity there include wooden trackways built across those marshes six thousand years ago. Most of the written sources tell the story of men from settlements on the nearby hills or isolated 'islands' who looked to those low-lying lands for food and fuel for themselves and food for their stock. Those sources, dating from the late Saxon period and particularly rich in the middle ages, derive largely from the archives of the former abbey of Glastonbury, main...

This volume covers the town of Burton-upon-Trent on the county's eastern boundary, along with its suburbs and satellite villages on either side of the river, including Stapenhill which was formerly in a separate parish in Derbyshire. Best known as a major centre for brewing beer from the earlier nineteenth century, Burton first came to prominence in the early eleventh century as the site of a Benedictine monastery which later promoted the cult of its own saint, the legendary St Modwen. Part of the monastic infirmary survives in the present Abbey inn, and a house called Sinai Park on the high...

Boydell & Brewer are pleased to announce that as from 1 December 2001 they will be distributing the Victoria County History, which has an international reputation as a work of reference for English local history. Begun in 1899, the publication of about three new volumes each year is gradually creating an encyclopedic history of the counties, ranging from earliest times to the present. For each county there is or is planned a set of volumes, containing general chapters on subjects such as prehistory and ecclesiastical and economic history, and topographical chapters giving a comprehensive,...

The volume was published more than eighty years ago, and its reissue makes available what is virtually an antiquarian book; it is nevertheless a work of reference that in many respects has not been replaced. Half the volume is devoted to Ecclesiastical History and separate histories of the religious houses of the county, numbering no less than 125 and including Lincoln cathedral and Crowland abbey; several of those histories were written by Rose Graham and the accounts of the seventeen friaries by A. G. Little. The second half of the volume contains chapters on Political History (by C. H....