The Evolution of the Fishing Village: Landscape and Society along the South Devon Coast 1086-1550.(Book Review)

by Harold Fox (Oxford: Leopard's Head P., 2001; pp. 206. Pb. n.p.).

Harold Fox has a reticent style, saved from any danger of dryness by the judicious use of understated humour (he describes the Vicars Choral of Exeter Cathedral as `ferocious tithers'). He also exhibits an engagement with the past extant in the here and now, as when detailing an epiphanous visit to Dittisham following his study of its manorial account rolls in the PRO. Here he is moved to quote from Eliot's Four Quartets and one gets a sense of someone for whom the past is more than dried ink on paper and parchment, or the crunching of numbers. This book, then, is no sterile academic exercise, though …