CHAPTER IX 



HISTORY AND THE PARISH HAMPSHIRE CORNWALL 



Some day there will be a history of England written 

 from the point of view of one parish, or town, or great 

 house. Not until there is such a history will all our 

 accumulations of information be justified. It will begin 

 with a geological picture, something large, clear, archi- 

 tectural, not a mass of insignificant names. It must be 

 imaginative : it might, perhaps, lean sometimes upon Mr. 

 Doughty 's Dawn in Britain. The peculiar combination of 

 soil and woodland and water determines the direction and 

 position and importance of the ancient trackways; it will 

 determine also the position and size of the human settle- 

 ments. The early marks of these — the old flint and 

 metal implements, the tombs, the signs of agriculture, the 

 encampments, the dwellings — will have to be clearly 

 described and interpreted. Folk-lore, legend, place- 

 names must be learnedly, but bravely and humanly used, 

 so that the historian who has not the extensive sympathy 

 and imagination of a great novelist will have no chance 

 of success. What endless opportunities will he have for 

 really giving life to past times in such matters as the line 

 made by the edge of an old wood with the cultivated 

 land, the shapes of the fields, with their borders of streams 

 or hedge or copse or pond or wall or road, the purpose 

 and interweaving of the roads and footpaths that suggest 

 the great permanent thoughts and the lesser thoughts and 

 dreams of the brain. ... As the historic centuries are 

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