Field Book of Walsham-Le-Willows, 1577

This database contains the 1577 Field Book of Walsham-Le-Willows, a small village in Suffolk County, England, not far from Bury St Edmunds. In the introduction to this work the following description is provided: "The Field Book is a manorial document belonging to the class of surveys of which it is a specialized type. It is of value for the study of documents and for manorial history, but its more general interest lies in the fact that its two manors included all of the land in the village of Walsham le Willows and virtually all of the land in the parish, and thus provides a detailed description of the village and its agricultural base in February and March of 1577. Its descriptions are in tenurial terms, i.e., who holds what and where the tenements or holdings were situated in relationship to one another and to the ways, lanes, paths, brook, and other features of the landscape, and when combined with its mention of the church, cemetery and parsonage, houses, barns and stables, guild hall, town house and game place, and decayed messuages and windmills, it provides the basis for the reconstruction of the village and landscape."