Description: John Broad explores the rise and fall of the Verney family of Middle Claydon, Buckinghamshire, demonstrating the family's rise to wealth as motivated by a strong dynastic imperative. He reveals how the family managed its estates to maximize income and used its wealth to transform the Claydon villages and landscape, creating a pattern of "open" and "closed" parishes. Based on the formidable Verney family archive with its abundant correspondence, this book will appeal to anyone interested in the English countryside as a dynamic force in English social, economic and demographic history.
Brief description: John Broad is Principal Lecturer in History at the London Metropolitan University.
Review Quotes: "This is essentially an excellent case study of the ways a middle-ranking Buckinghamshire gentry family responded to the changes in English political, economic, social, and cultural life across two turbulent centuries that witnessed the transition to modernity. It is a book that delivers far more than its author promises, itself a rare feat in these times."
Robert G. Ingram, Ohio University, Sixteenth Century Journal