The Common Stream

This is the story of a village in East Anglia, astride its common stream - a saga of continuity and change which stretches back two thousand years. Rowland Parker tells the story of those who lived and died in the village, cutting out the familiar but domineering clamour of kings, prelates, politicians and absentee landowners. But since the common man leaves comparatively little trace, it took thirteen years of detective work to piece together, combing through reports of archaeological excavations and manor court rolls, collecting stories at the pub and inspecting old wills and land tax returns. Although The Common Stream was created by one man interested in the history of his village of Foxton in Cambridgeshire, with it Rowland Parker succeeds in giving us, at last, the true story of the English, alive with their feuds and fun, their farms and families, their fights and fornications.

Auteur

Rowland Parker was born in 1912 in North Lincolnshire. His father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all farmers and his youth was spent in the country. He was educated at Louth Grammar School, won a scholarship to Nottingham University and then trained as a teacher. In 1935 he joined the staff of what was then the Central School, Cambridge, and except for the war remained there, teaching French, until his retirement in 1972. He had enlisted in the Royal Artillery in 1940, and served in North Africa, Italy, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, where he began to take an interest in archaeology and history. In 1946 he moved to the village of Foxton, and absorbed himself in researching the history of his cottage. He hand-wrote his notes to make them readable for family and friends, but it was his teenage daughter who persuaded him to pay for the printing of this first work, Cottage on the Green. It was followed by The Common Stream and Men of Dunwich, but by this time he had fallen into the hands of professional publishers. A keen cyclist and rambler all his life and a cross-country runner in his youth, he was often burdened with a sketchbook. He would later work up the quick line drawings he had made on the hoof, sitting by the fire smoking his pipe, with a small glass of whiskey on the table beside him. He donated his most important archaeological finds to Royston Museum and to the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, but kept a few things in a storeroom at home where they could be cherished. He remained a natural teacher, with an innate understanding of the power of holding an object for yourself. So he regularly took his 'mobile museum' with him on his talks, and risked handing a roman pot around the classroom, in case it might kindle a lifelong sense of history in a child. He died in 1989.