47 
which they have ever lost. I have elsewhere ventured the opinion 
that the reign of George II. was the golden age of the rural 
population, but this was on the ground of the general plenty 
which turnip husbandry had brought us; as to the law, it has 
been reserved to our own days to see a complete freedom of 
labour from parish settlement, which term in its fact meant estate 
settlement. You have little chance of fixing a year and a certain 
lord for any great step in the process of liberation, except in a 
corporate or quasi-corporate town, where an early charter has 
been granted to or purchased by the inhabitants, and my present 
idea in addressing a Field Club is the Topography of a village or 
country district. 
Between these extremes, the king on his throne and the serf in 
the fields ; in the families of the lords large and small, and in the 
great adoptive families of a celibate clergy we find the domain of 
true Topography. To say nothing of Wales and Scotland, the 
most of which countries are as yet unreclaimed by the Topographer, 
the student has in England a vast field as yet imperfectly tilled 
by his predecessors. While I could count some English shires, 
such as Cheshire, Durham, Surrey and parts of Yorkshire, (not 
meaning, however, to exclude the works of Hasted, Blomefield, 
Hutchins, Nash and others,) to which noble monumental folios 
have been erected ; there are other counties such as Hampshire, 
Devonshire, Suffolk and Herefordshire, and perhaps nearer to home, 
where no worthy topographical effort has as yet been completed. 
Let the vast collections to be found in manuscript in the public 
libraries be evidences that the deficiencies of Topography are not 
altogether due to the apathy of her own disciples. These monu- 
mental folios require either a patron or a public, and it is not 
every county that can boast a Sir Richard Hoare, or can raise 
such repeated subscription lists as Dorsetshire. 
The Topographer, who in the present day undertakes a district 
hitherto imperfectly described, has a great advantage over his 
predecessors, through the recent cataloguing and making public 
