Abstract
SIR DANIEL HALL, in the course of his presidential address to the Conference of Delegates of Corresponding Societies at the Southampton Meeting of the British Association, appealed for their help in studying the antiquities of the land and of farming. He pointed out that the opportunities in local societies for the study of natural history and archæology are rapidly becoming smaller, and even in such fields as botany and zoology the development of science is rapidly decreasing the sphere of activity available to the non-professional man. He therefore suggested that such individuals can profitably turn their attention towards recovering, before it is too late, the detailed agricultural history of the country. The Corresponding Societies can give invaluable help in discovering the original settlement of the land, the manors, the system of cultivation adopted before enclosure, and the date and method of enclosure. The need for this work has been made all the more urgent by the Law of Property (Amendment) Act of 1924, which practically does away with the manor as a legal entity, and by the recent sales and breaking up of many of the great estates. Title deeds and estate records in the hands of manor stewards, family solicitors and the like, may therefore become distributed and increasingly difficult to trace. In this connexion a request from a Society to be allowed to examine these records will carry far more weight than one from a private person. In addition, much useful information could be obtained in some districts by a close study of vestigial physical traces of the old farming, and by the examination of field names referring, for example, to crops that have now disappeared. Again, the preservation for local museums of old farming implements would be a valuable activity of a local society. Apart from the intrinsic interest of this work, it would find a useful and highly desirable application in country schools. A series of parish maps showing the change in agricultural customs, distribution of land, vegetation, and so on, would provide excellent material for showing how, in response to physical and changing economic environments, the present farming system has slowly grown up from its simple beginning far back in the past.
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Current Topics and Events. Nature 116, 406–408 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116406b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116406b0