SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC 



HISTORY 



BEDFORDSHIRE is a small county, and possesses few distinctive 

 characteristics to distinguish its social and economic history from 

 those of the adjacent counties. Moreover, records giving information 

 upon the subject of this chapter are for some periods scanty, and 

 no serious attempt has hitherto been made to collect and examine more than 

 a few of those that do exist. Such county records as are extant do not go 

 farther back than 17 14, and the only existing records of the borough of 

 Bedford previous to the 17th century are the town charters. 



Other chapters in the present work give detailed accounts of the 

 earthworks, pottery, coins, and other remains which testify to the successive 

 settlement and industrial occupation of the county area by the British, 

 the Romans, the Saxons, and the Danes. These matters demand mention 

 here only as reminders of the continuous occupation of the land by peoples 

 that more or less overlapped chronologically and to some degree at least 

 intermixed racially. We are left to surmise the social and economic 

 condition of this local population from what we know generally of those 

 peoples, added to what we know and can legitimately surmise of the 

 condition of the land during those periods. The county would then be 

 as habitable as it is now, except that a less severe system of drainage would 

 leave the water-courses broader aad would render some of the low-lying 

 districts swampy, while the woodland would be much more extensive, and in 

 parts would remain in the condition of primitive vigour which made the 

 horridae silvae such objects of fear and superstition to the ancients. 



For any special information about those who owned and tilled our 

 Bedfordshire farms, and how they lived before the Normans came, we have 

 to be dependent upon the retrospective notes of Domesday Book. But as 

 we know that the county was a part of the border land between the lands of 

 Alfred and those held by the Danes, and that Alfred and his son both made 

 historical marches across it, and as we further know that the Danes made 

 numerous attacks upon Bedford and predatory excursions in other directions, 

 we can safely assume that the agriculture and what other industry there may 

 have been were seriously interfered with, and the arts of peace had little 

 encouragement. The condition of the Bedfordshire people in the late Saxon 

 times, as indicated by Domesday Book, was, however, comparatively pros- 

 perous. There does not appear to have been much waste land, and the 

 county was generally well populated for the period. Abundant use was 

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