Learning more about local villages

I am a perpetual tourist, I can't help it. I can’t stop visiting places near to where I live. I live in Cambridge, and today on the bicycle I was visiting the wonderfully named Shudy Camps, a small village of some 300 people just ten or so miles from Cambridge. The village appears to be a rather odd collection of clusters of buildings, rather than just one central area. But that's about all I was able to gather from passing through it. Yet Shudy Camps is the site of a major Anglo-Saxon burial site, dating from the 7th century, with over 149 burials. One of those burials was a woman, buried in her iron bed, a remarkable discovery from an excavation in 1933, )although the same type of bed burial was also found elsewhere in Cambridgeshire just up the road at Cherry Hinton). 

How do I know all this? Not, for once, because I can find out in Wikipedia. The Wikipedia entry for Shudy Camps is just five sentences. No, I have in my hand a pamphlet – small book, more like – that tells me in remarkable detail the archaeological history of each village in this part of Cambridgeshire. It is called Archaeology of Cambridgeshire, and comprises two volumes; Shudy Camps is in volume two. I discovered these volumes being sold off by the Cambridge local studies library for £5 each volume. The first two volumes don’t cover all of Cambridgeshire, but I’ve never seen volume three, and I don’t think it was ever published.

 

For each village, Taylor gives an outline of the growth (and decline, if relevant) of the settlement, showing fascinating details about individual houses, in their historical context. For many of the villages, there is an excellent annotated map, full of information that could only be gained from someone with Taylor’s experience (she was County Archaeologist for 21 years). By comparison, the relevant entries in Pevsner’s Buildings of England are limited only to a few buildings, and lack much of the context that makes the articles so fascinating. The Victoria County History, where it exists, is full of detail, but you cannot see the wood for the trees. Next to no maps or illustrations. 

Map of Balsham, Cambridgeshire, from the Archaeology of Cambridgeshire (Taylor, 1998)

With those maps, Alison Taylor achieves something that many major UK publishers failed to do, which is to create some effective integrated publishing – the text and illustrations complementing each other on the same page. You wouldn’t think it so difficult to do until you try it. In contrast, Wikipedia for small communities tends to be anecdotal, full of trivia, and frequently praising local details (“The Holy Trinity Church [at Balsham] holds two services every Sunday and communion every Wednesday. The church also plays host to two yearly concerts by the village choir.”)

Instead, Taylor analyses. Simply by looking at census records, Taylor is able to tell a story for each village. Shudy Camps, for example, had 85 tenants recorded in 1279, which grew to 418 people in 1831, since when it has declined. Which leads to lots of questions: why the increase? Why the decline? For one village in West Cambridgeshire, Knapwell, Taylor identified that the entire axis of the village had moved to follow the movement of the main road through the village, from east-west to north-south.

Sadly, I don’t think there will ever be a third volume. The finances of local authorities have been challenged so drastically by central government cutbacks that such discretionary expenditure is unlikely ever to be possible again. I cannot imagine Reading Borough Council, for example, ever again publishing a guide to a Terry Frost exhibition at Reading Art Gallery, which took place in 2009 (the guide cost me £1 in the Gallery shop).