Product Description
The history of a high part of the Cotswold hills, extending from the steep escarpment above Cheltenham south-eastwards to the small town of Northleach on the Foss Way, is detailed in this volume. Northleach was established as a market town in about 1220, and its later functions were as a distribution centre for the medieval wool trade and as a stage on the main road from London to Gloucester and South Wales during the coaching era. In the rural parishes, with little industry apart from quarrying, the varying fortunes of agriculture shaped the development of landscape and village: among the main phases traced here are a late-mediaeval recession in arable farming that led to deserted hamlets and shrunken villages, several centuries when sheep-raising was the principal support of the economy, and the 18th-century era of agricultural improvement which transformed the landscape of the wolds from open field and downland pasture to drystone-walled fields and large enclosed farms.
