The South Oxfordshire Project: perceptions of Landscape, settlement and society, c.500-1650 AD

The South Oxfordshire Project was funded by The Leverhulme Trust in 2012-15. Its objective was to investigate how in the early Middle Ages to the seventeenth century inhabitants' values, perceptions and sense of identity were related to the places in which they lived. The project started in 2011 as a pilot study organised jointly by VCH Oxfordshire and the University of Oxford, and funded by the John Fell Fund. Under the leadership of Dr Stephen Mileson, and thanks to Leverhulme funding, it was expanded to a three-year programme of research running until September 2015.

The research used concepts drawn from archaeology, anthropology and sociology in order to understand the relationship between landscape character, settlement type and perceptions of landscape, locality and community. The study area comprised over 10,000 hectares of mixed landscape in the former hundred of Ewelme. The hundred's 14 parishes included dispersed settlements and early enclosed wood-pasture landscapes as well as nucleated villages and large open fields. The area has an exceptionally rich collection of documents and early estate maps, and huge archaeological potential. Analysis of documents, archaeology, standing buildings and field-names was framed around a GIS database constructed by Dr Stuart Brookes. The tithe maps digitized as part of this analysis were deposited with the ADS.

The project's archive comprises an assemblage of a spatial database of vector files, which were created by digitising the available historical maps of 14 parishes in the Oxfordshire. This project produced data and results of national and local historical significance and, methodologicially, was one of the first GIS-based works carried out in the county.
The digital archive is composed of the following:

1. GIS database: polygons of all digitised fields and settlements of 14 parishes in the South Oxfordshire hundred of Ewelme. Based on tithe maps of c.1840 and the Newington enclosure map of c.1812.
2. GIS database: polygons of the field classes believed to be in existence in ca.1300.