Property title deeds are perhaps the most numerous sources of historical evidence but also one of the most neglected. While the information any one deed contains can often be reduced to a few lines, it can be of critical importance for family and local historians. Nat Alcock's handbook aims to help the growing army of enthusiastic researchers to use the evidence of these documents, without burying them in legal technicalities. It also reveals how fascinating and rewarding they can be once their history, language and purpose are understood. A sequence of concise, accessible chapters explains why they are so useful, where they can be found and how the evidence they provide can be extracted and applied. Family historians will find they reveal family, social and financial relationships and local historians can discover from them so much about land ownership, field and place names, the history of buildings and the expansion of towns and cities. They also bring our ancestors into view in the fullness of life, not just at birth, marriage and death, and provide more rounded pictures of the members of a family tree.

Tracing History Through Title Deeds: A Guide for Family and Local Historians

Business & Money

Alcock, Nat

Economics

Pen and Sword Family History

The aim of this lavishly illustrated book is to provide an in-depth study of the many medieval peasant houses still standing in Midland villages, and of their historical context. In particular, the combination of tree-ring and radiocarbon dating, detailed architectural study and documentary research illuminates both their nature and their status. The results are brought together to provide a new and detailed view of the medieval peasant house, resolving the contradiction between the archaeological and architectural evidence, and illustrating how its social organization developed in the period before we have extensive documentary evidence for the use of space within the house. Nat Alcock and Dan Miles' work on Medieval Peasant Houses in Midland England has been nominated for the 2014 Current Archaeology Research Project of the Year.

The Medieval Peasant House in Midland England

History

Miles, Dan

Europe

Oxbow Books

This major innovative study is centred on a type of document that has hitherto been almost unknown to scholars. It explores the significance of a unique source, the 'house-and-estate' survey - which adds detail of the village's houses, outhouses, and farm buildings to the standard evidence of an estate survey. These surveys are explored for South-West England for the period from the end of the 16th to the mid-18th centuries. The first part of the book examines the twenty West Country communities for which such surveys survive, using these documents to paint 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. It examines (a) The communities and their social structure, including land-holdings and demographic evidence. (b) The houses, covering construction and plan (including evidence from standing buildings); rooms and their use, and the pattern of housing revealed in the surveys. (c) The farmsteads, covering the buildings of the farmsteads (examining both standing buildings and documentary sources), the relationship of the farms to the regional economies, and the discovery of economic opportunities and contrasts between neighbours (an innovative study based on comparisons drawn from the survey evidence). 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, discusses the character of the houses, of the farmsteads and the farming economy as revealed in the surveys. This is followed by an abstract of the detailed information in the corresponding survey. The book includes an index including the many hundred West-country individuals named in the surveys, that will be of value to anyone working on the region.Table of ContentsPart I: West Country Communities Introduction South-western England in the Seventeenth Century The Estates The Surveys Communities and their Social Structure The Size of Landholdings Social Structure Demographic Evidence The Houses House Construction and Plan The Rooms of the House The Evidence of the Surveys The Farmsteads The Buildings of the Farmsteads Farmsteads and the Regional Economies Economic Opportunities Among Neighbours Part II: The Villages and the Farms Introduction Kenton (1598) Survey of Kenton Cornish Manors (1602-1606) Survey of Cornish Manors Sherford (1606) Survey of Sherford Farway and Whitwell (1609) Survey of Farway and Whitwell Seaton (1609 and 1682) Surveys and leases of Seaton Nettlecombe (1619) Survey of Nettlecombe Somerset Crown Estates (1606-1608) Bedford Estates (1704) Survey of Bedford Estates Sidmouth (1764) Survey of Sidmouth Subject Index Index of Persons Index of Places

West Country Farms: House-and-Estate Surveys, 1598-1764

Carson, Cary

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Alcock, Nat. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Alcock, Nat