Abstract
SIR CYRIL FOX, director of the National Museum of Wales, delivered the annual Im Thurn Memorial Lecture to the Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society on April 17. Sir Cyril emphasized the urgent need of making an adequate record of the cultures of Britain of the pre-Industrial Revolution era, cultures which survive more or less intact in outlying districts, and the material remains of which are still very widely distributed. He had cast his title, “A Field Museum To-morrow: What's to do To-day ?”, into a colloquial form to emphasize his view that the matter concerned the man-in-the-street in every geographical or political region in Britain. The collection of material for the future national open-air museums should be carried out on rigidly scientific lines, special attention being devoted to things related to life and work on the land. We need the furniture of farmhouse and cottages of every century from the sixteenth; the carts, tools and implements used on the farms: tools used in, and products of, rural industries. Techniques of farm and house building should be recorded and photographed; farm lay-outs should be planned. Only adequately provenanced objects should be collected; only so can we hope to map, ultimately, the cultural regions of pre-industrial Britain. We want to know whether the boundaries of these regions are political or economic. If political, do they go back to the Heptarchy in southern Britain? Outside a few museums, the fate of British folk-material is a sad one-torn from its environment, it is regarded as ‘old world’ and ‘quaint’, collected by those from whom its real interest and importance as a manifestation of a once vigorous culture are hidden. How many collectors trouble to record the exact provenance of their specimens ?
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Culture of Pre-Industrial Britain. Nature 143, 848 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143848c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143848c0