Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 1 (2012), p. 138

This volume of essays arises out of the second conference organised at University of Leicester to commemorate the work of W. G. Hoskins. The conference, held in July 2009 in association with the British Association for Local History, was designed (ostensibly) to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Hoskins’s influential Local history in England. In fact, it was also intended as a showcase for the writing of local history today, much of which takes Hoskins as its inspiration, but a great deal of which has developed in ways that he might not have expected.

These essays are gathered together under several headings: ‘The practice of local history’; ‘Region, class and ethnic diversity’; ‘Making a living in town and country’; ‘Religious culture and belief’; and ‘Sources, methods and techniques’. As the editors note in their introduction, perhaps the most profound shift in local history since the late 1950s is its increasing preoccupation with the twentieth century. This is an inevitable development, particularly as the tumultuous events of its first four decades recede from memory, even if it might not have met with the approval of Hoskins (a confirmed anti-modernist).

Nevertheless, the essays in this volume confirm that local history remains the history of the places in which we live. As such, it is not surprising that the essays in this volume have a predominantly urban focus, from Dick’s fascinating study of the histories of settler communities in Birmingham, Sweetinburgh’s detailed reconstruction of Hythe’s medieval butcher-graziers, Howells’s equally interesting analysis of working women in nineteenth-century Salisbury, and Royle and Smith’s studies of church building, and church politics in the nineteenth-century suburbs. Only Miller’s study of the crofter economy of Skye in the eighteenth century is resolutely rural and agrarian in theme. Perhaps this august journal corners the market in all such research, but it would be nice to think that local history can still be agrarian in character.

All the essays in this volume are detailed, scholarly explorations of local or regional themes. Those by Chris Lewis on local history between the wars, and Ruth Paley on the King’s Bench (crown side) are the two most likely to be cited repeatedly. Both illustrate local history at its best. Lewis makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of the historiography of local history, and emphasizes the role that its ‘amateur’ practitioners played in the simultaneous evolution of political, economic, agrarian and social history within British universities and colleges in the 1920s and 1930s. As he notes, the efflorescence of professional local history at Leicester after 1945, during which Hoskins produced his best work (and the BAHS was founded), had much deeper roots. Paley’s essay demonstrates another profound contribution of local history to wider knowledge. The best local history has always been grounded on a knowledge of sources that comes only by working with them repeatedly, and thinking about their structures and forms. Her essay on the criminal side of the King’s Bench opens up a vast array of important and revealing eighteenth-century deposition evidence that offers detailed new insights into the conflicts produced by daily life. However, as she notes, the task of wading through the various index books in order to trace the cases is not for the faint-hearted.

Remembering Hoskins as chronicler of the histories of Exeter, the ‘Great Rebuilding’, and Tudor inflation and agrarian distress, the essays by Sweetinburgh, Hey and Miller review urban life in late medieval Kent, the houses of Derbyshire lead smelters, and the demographic and agrarian difficulties of eighteenth-century Skye. They emphasize the benefits of local history in anchoring historical research very firmly to the practicalities and possibilities of place. Similarly, the essays by Cross and Watson on the processes of religious reform in Tudor England show how detailed local insights can reveal the complexities of larger historical processes. Cross demonstrates that it took considerable effort to translate Salisbury’s vigorous Henrician religious conservatism into its equally strident late Elizabethan Protestantism. Watson explains the role of the Court of High Commission in challenging the power of lay elites in Elizabethan Yorkshire. Royle’s chapter takes up where Pevsner left off, and illustrates the architectural and historical significance of the Gothic revival within Victorian nonconformity (among sects which had previously set their Greco-Roman faces against Anglican architectural filigree). Smith’s entertaining chapter illustrates the sub-Trollopian machinations created when various shades of Anglicanism (and snobbery) collided in suburban Oxford around 1900.

Finally, while it difficult to reconcile modern technology with the nostalgia of Hoskins’s vision of local history groups dusting off their school exercise books after a summer of tending their potatoes, Ell’s chapter on local history and the Web is instructive. Although such essays stand to be outdated with alarming rapidity, his chapter serves as a timely reminder of how much local history is being done on-line. Since its inception, family historians have harnessed the various incarnations of the Internet with enthusiasm. Local historians have followed in their wake rather more slowly, but technologies such as ‘crowd sourcing’ surely provide a means to join up research, expertise, and effort in a form first envisaged in the 1890s by the Victoria County History, but in ways that might now truly be democratic, representative and flexible. While funding has dwindled for resource-enhancement initiatives and ended for ‘millennium’ local history projects, the technology still advances at a pace to make such open-access research enterprises tantalisingly possible. It would definitely be worth following that particular new direction in local history.