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PREFACE THE scope of this work, as will be seen from the general advertisement of the Victoria History, differs essentially from that of any county history hitherto attempted. The services of specialists both national and local have been secured for the treatment of the subjects with which their names are identified, so that the authority for the statements put forth and the views advanced can be at once recognized. The subjects comprised in the present volume are arranged in chronological order from the geology of the county down to the Domesday Survey. From this point the general articles do not naturally fall into any special order, and Mr. Albert Hartshorne's mono- graph on monumental effigies therefore forms a convenient conclusion to the volume. In the second volume will follow general articles on ecclesiastical history, the history of ancient schools, architecture, industries, etc., but the bulk of the remaining three volumes will be taken up with detailed histories of the parishes and manors of the county, and the work will conclude with a chapter that draws the various threads together, and recounts the civil and political history of this part of England from the Saxon period, when the county first emerged as a distinct area, to the present. Northamptonshire readers and others in opening this volume will probably reflect that there are already three histories of the county of great reputation : Morton's (17 12), Bridges's (1791), and Baker's. The existence of these works makes the compiling of the present volumes at once easier and yet more difficult. Easier because of the great amount of material and information already gathered together, but more difficult because of the necessity of sifting the evidence on which various statements rest, and of the labour of testing and substantiating the very large number of references. John Morton's folio Natural History of Northamptonshire is the only one of these older histories which to any extent covers the same ground as that traversed in the present volume, for not only did Morton deal somewhat exhaustively with the natural history of the county so far as such studies were then understood, but he treated also of some of the antiquities and gave a carelessly executed transcript of the Domesday Survey. Baker's work is, alas, only a frag- ment, and the History of John Bridges was written at a time when many sources of information now available were unknown, and before the scientific conception of historic development had been applied to county history. These two, which have more in common with the present xuc