PREFACE 



THE scope of this work, as will be seen from the general 

 advertisement of the Victoria History, differs essentially from 

 that of any county history hitherto attempted. The services 

 of specialists both national and local have been secured for the 

 treatment of the subjects with which their names are identified, so that 

 the authority for the statements put forth and the views advanced can be 

 at once recognized. The subjects comprised in the present volume are 

 arranged in chronological order from the geology of the county down 

 to the Domesday Survey. From this point the general articles do not 

 naturally fall into any special order, and Mr. Albert Hartshorne's mono- 

 graph on monumental effigies therefore forms a convenient conclusion 

 to the volume. In the second volume will follow general articles on 

 ecclesiastical history, the history of ancient schools, architecture, 

 industries, etc., but the bulk of the remaining three volumes will be 

 taken up with detailed histories of the parishes and manors of the 

 county, and the work will conclude with a chapter that draws the 

 various threads together, and recounts the civil and political history 

 of this part of England from the Saxon period, when the county first 

 emerged as a distinct area, to the present. 



Northamptonshire readers and others in opening this volume will 

 probably reflect that there are already three histories of the county of 

 great reputation : Morton's (17 12), Bridges's (1791), and Baker's. The 

 existence of these works makes the compiling of the present volumes at 

 once easier and yet more difficult. Easier because of the great amount 

 of material and information already gathered together, but more difficult 

 because of the necessity of sifting the evidence on which various 

 statements rest, and of the labour of testing and substantiating the very 

 large number of references. John Morton's folio Natural History of 

 Northamptonshire is the only one of these older histories which to any 

 extent covers the same ground as that traversed in the present volume, 

 for not only did Morton deal somewhat exhaustively with the natural 

 history of the county so far as such studies were then understood, but 

 he treated also of some of the antiquities and gave a carelessly executed 

 transcript of the Domesday Survey. Baker's work is, alas, only a frag- 

 ment, and the History of John Bridges was written at a time when many 

 sources of information now available were unknown, and before the 

 scientific conception of historic development had been applied to county 

 history. These two, which have more in common with the present 



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