'Mapledurwell' is the first parish history to be published by the New Victoria History of Hampshire group. Since publication of the first VCH account of the parish in 1911, ideas about what constitutes a good parish history have been transformed. Our new history includes much more about the village itself and about its economy and society, highlighting the lives of ordinary people as well as tracing those who owned the parish's land and property. It discusses Quakers and Congregationalists as well as the congregation of the established church, and looks minutely at the history of elementary education, revealing the appalling sanitary conditions suffered by pupils at the local school. Despite its proximity to the urban centre of Basingstoke, Mapledurwell is typical of many Hampshire downland parishes in which the present-day landscape reflects an earlier open-field system. Its village, recorded in Domesday Book, is rural and picturesque with many attractive timber-framed cottages, the oldest of which is 15th century. Much of it was owned for a long period by Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Winchester College also had properties in the parish. This book explores, through a close reading of the archival records, how Mapledurwell developed from an agricultural community, which also produced textiles and later malt, into a modern commuter village with only one working farm, and establishes a model for the histories of other rural parishes in Hampshire. The Victoria County History series of paperback parish and urban histories aims to bring local research to publication as swiftly as possible, and to inspire readers to get involved with VCH ventures in their own localities. Each history makes a new contribution to the Victoria County History, which was founded in 1899 and is recognised as the greatest publishing project in local history. www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk

Steventon, a chalkland village near Basingstoke, is best known because Jane Austen, the famous novelist and daughter of the local rector, spent the first 25 years of her life here. Unlike Chawton and Bath, no house or museum commemorates the author's memory in Steventon but this new history explains how family life and observation of north Hampshire society shaped her early literary career. She wrote early versions of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey in Steventon from 1796 to 1798, drawing on local society for inspiration for characters, manners and sentiments. But the village had a rich history before and after its famous novelist and there are many other reasons to enjoy this book. Steventon is a typical southern chalkland settlement whose history provides examples of downland agriculture, of agricultural improvements, a scandalous landlord who was driven out of the village by his son and excommunicated by the archbishop of Canterbury, a new Victorian manor house, of landlord-tenant relations and much else. It discusses the social, economic and religious lives of the ordinary people of the village together with the lords of the manor. This is the second parish history to be published by the new Victoria History of Hampshire group, providing scholarly studies of individual places. It should be of interest to those living in and beyond the county. The first new parish history by the group, Mapledurwell, was published in 2012.

Provides for a new interpretation of the agrarian economy in late Tudor and early modern Britain. This volume revisits a classic book by a famous historian: R.H. Tawney's Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912). Tawney's Agrarian Problem surveyed landlord-tenant relations in England between 1440 and 1660, the period of emergent capitalism and rapidly changing property relations that stands between the end of serfdom and the more firmly capitalist system of the eighteenth century. This transition period is widely recognised as crucial to Britain's long term economic development, laying the foundation for the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. Remarkably, Tawney's book has remained the standard text on landlord-tenant relations for over a century. Here, Tawney's book is re-evaluated by leading experts in agrarian and legal history, taking its themes as a departure point to provide for a new interpretation of the agrarian economy in late Tudor and early modern Britain. The introduction looks at how Tawney's Agrarian Problem was written, its place in the historiography of agrarian England and the current state of research. Survey chapters examine the late medieval period, a comparison with Scotland, and Tawney's conception of capitalism, whilst the remaining chapters focus on four issues that were central to Tawney's arguments: enclosure disputes, the security of customary tenure; the conversion of customarytenure to leasehold; and other landlord strategies to raise revenues. The balance of power between landlords and tenants determined how the wealth of agrarian England was divided in this crucial period of economic development - this book reveals how this struggle was played out. JANE WHITTLE is professor of rural history at Exeter University. Contributors: Christopher Brooks, Christopher Dyer, Heather Falvey, Harold Garrett-Goodyear, Julian Goodare, Elizabeth Griffiths, Jennifer Holt, Briony McDonagh, Jean Morrin, David Ormrod, William D. Shannon, Jane Whittle, Andy Wood. Foreword by Keith Wrightson