To write a complete history of any village is one of the hardest literary
labours which anyone can undertake. The soil is hard, and the crop after
the expenditure of much toil is often very scanty. In many cases the
records are few and difficult to discover, buried amidst the mass of
papers at the Record Office, or entombed in some dusty corner of the
Diocesan Registry. Days may be spent in searching for these treasures
of knowledge with regard to the past history of a village without any
adequate result; but sometimes fortune favours the industrious toiler,
and he discovers a rich ore which rewards him for all his pains. Slowly
his store of facts grows, and he is at last able to piece together the
history of his little rural world, which time and the neglect of past
generations had consigned to dusty oblivion.

In recent years several village histories have been written with varied
success by both competent and incompetent scribes; but such books are few
in number, and we still have to deplore the fact that so little is known
about the hamlets in which we live. All writers seem to join in the same
lament, and mourn over the ignorance that prevails in rural England with
regard to the treasures of antiquity, history, and folklore, which are to
be found almost everywhere. We may still echo the words of the learned
author of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_, the late Mr. Hughes, who said that
the present generation know nothing of their own birthplaces, or of the
lanes, woods, and fields through which they roam. Not one young man in
twenty knows where to find the wood-sorrel, or the bee-orchis; still
fewer can tell the country legends, the stories of the old gable-ended
farmhouses, or the place where the last skirmish was fought in the Civil
War, or where the parish butts stood. Nor is this ignorance confined to
the unlearned rustics; it is shared by many educated people, who have
travelled abroad and studied the history of Rome or Venice, Frankfort or