A VILLAGE DOMESDAY BOOK.
Mr. Maxwell and others in association with Community Councils are persuading Kent schoolchildren to make village surveys. It is 800 years since the first, and best, of these was made ; and one can imagine no better foundation for a child's interest in its home and culture than a local and more particu- lar Domesday Book. A striking success was achieved three years ago in Oxfordshire. The method was to start with tracings of the one-inch ordnance map, and take each field, marking its name and nature, the crops it bore, the soil and sub-soil, the signal marks of history. The children perambu- lated the parish and enquired, for example, into the reason of the shape of the fields and the origin of the names. Many of these names went back a good three hundred years and several quaint derivations of yet quainter names were un- earthed. The Local Education Authority, Leplay House, Barnett House, the British Association, the Colleges all lent some aid ; and groups of teachers did the rest. The pamphlet (Village Survey-Making : An Oxford Experiment. H.M. Stationery Office. Is.) is as essential a document in a new kind of activity as Professor Abercrombie's first County Survey, of Kent, which perhaps has influenced Mr. Maxwell in this historical (not fictional) venture.
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