West Country Farms

"This explores the significance of a unique type of document that has hitherto been almost unknown to scholars. House-and-estate surveys - which add details of the village's houses, outhouses, and farm buildings to the standard evidence of an estate survey - survive for South-West England for the period from the end of the 16th to the mid-18th century. The first part of the book discusses the twenty West Country communities for which such surveys exist, painting landscapes of individual farming communities caught at one moment in time-pictures that come as close as written records can to the complete archaeological excavation of village sites." "The second part of the book considers each of the villages and their farms in detail. Each chapter introduces the place and its individual features, and discusses the character of its houses, its farmsteads and its farming economy as revealed in the surveys. This is followed by an abstract of the detailed information in the corresponding survey."--Jacket.