Publisher's Synopsis
"With its gentle hills and timeless villages, the Cotswold countryside is a vision of rural calm, but the region's history reveals a darker picture. Over the centuries, people in the Cotswolds have known prosperity, but they have also experienced war, poverty, and despair. Lying between the provinces and the capital, the region has been home to kings and aristocrats, and has played a dramatic role in the story of Britain. Everywhere in the Cotswolds are reminders of the past: prehistoric monuments, ruined Roman villas, and Tudor mansions. Wealthy medieval wool merchants paid for fine churches and manor houses. Later, the landscape was scarred by the English Civil War, while evidence of an industrial past can be seen in the mills and factories of the south-west. After the wool trade reached its peak in the fifteenth century, the fortunes of the Cotswolds suffered a slow decline. By the 1890s poverty was widespread and villages were sinki
