Village in History

London: Guild Publishing. Very Good/Very Good. 1988. Reprint. Hard Cover. Sm 4to 0297793128 Dust jacket comlete, unclipped. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling on spine. Illustrated end papers. No ownership marks. Numerous colour and b/w illustrations and photographs. 197 pages clean and tight. THE POETIC VISION of an ancient village, of venerable cottages crowded around a tree-fringed green, dominated by the church and the manor house, the inhabitants ruddy-faced, well-fed and cheerful, is an enduring image laid down by generations of watercolour artists. But village life has never stood still. Evolving over centuries and subject to sudden cataclysms - invasions and disease, famine and fire - the fabric of the villages which stand today bears witness to a continuous process of both change and continuity. Graham Nicholson in the first section of this book tells the history of village England, from the earliest known beginnings, before Domesday Book, through the intervening centuries of growth and decline when developments in agi iculture, changes in building techniques, the regular visitations of the Plague, the architectural schemes of the great landowners and war all left their mark, to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when growing industrialization together with agricultural depression saw a sharp decline in village populations. In the second section of the book Jane Fawcett profiles over 120 villages, giving details of their architectural treasures and historical importance, and listing individual houses, surrounding countryside and even whole villages in the care of the National Trust, which devotes itself to historic preservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. .