English Villages

Reverend Peter Hampson Ditchfield (1854-1930) was the author of Our English Villages (1889), Old English Sports (1891), Books Fatal to Their Authors (1895), Old English Customs Extant at the Present Time (1896), English Villages (1901/06), The Parish Clerk (1907), Memorials of Old London (2v/1908), and Vanishing England (1910). "To write a complete history of any village is one of the hardest literary labours which anyone can undertake. The soil is hard, and the crop after the expenditure of much toil is often very scanty. In many cases the records are few and difficult to discover, buried amidst the mass of papers at the Record Office, or entombed in some dusty corner of the Diocesan Registry. Days may be spent in searching for these treasures of knowledge with regard to the past history of a village without any adequate result; but sometimes fortune favours the industrious toiler, and he discovers a rich ore which rewards him for all his pains... "