January 2023 Reviews

By Colin Speakman

(Gritstone Publishing 2020 192pp ISBN 978-0-9955609-8-7) £15 (post free) from www.gritstonecoop.co.uk

‘John Phillips was one of those Giants on whose shoulders later generations of nineteenth and twentieth century scientists could indeed stand’. So writes Colin Speakman of his hero, a man who, from humble beginnings and with no formal qualifications, rose to become professor of geology at Oxford and keeper of the Natural History Museum there. This fascinating, and beautifully illustrated, book is not a biography as such: rather it is an account of the intellectual development of Phillips, his many achievements and writings, and his love of the topography of Yorkshire in particular.

John Phillips (1800-1874) was born in Wiltshire, the son of an excise officer, but was orphaned at the age of eight. His mother had been the sister of William Smith (1769-1839), the pioneer geologist; and Smith now took him in and saw to his education. Smith employed Phillips in his teens as a sort of apprentice, teaching him geology, surveying and cartography, and also setting him the task of cataloguing Smith’s fossil collection. Phillips also acted as Smith’s amanuensis, at the same time teaching himself lithography, which was to serve him in good stead in later life. Between 1817 and 1819, Phillips accompanied Smith on surveying trips to Yorkshire, but by this time Smith had got into financial difficulties, including spending some time in a debtors’ prison, and it would appear John was now increasingly looking after William rather than the other way round. Phillips worked with Smith on updating Cary’s county maps of Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, as well as working on a single-sheet map of the Lake District. In 1822, Phillips moved to live in Kirkby Lonsdale. Here he got to know another famous pioneer geologist, Adam Sedgwick, and also met Matthew Allen from the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, who, clearly impressed, invited him to give a series of lectures in York. This led to Phillips’ appointment as keeper of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society’s Museum, aged only 26, the start of his academic career. He moved to York, where in 1828 he was joined by his younger sister, Anne, from whom he had been separated for fourteen years. Neither of them ever married, but she lived with him until her death in 1862, serving as his housekeeper, generally assisting him, and becoming something of a geologist in her own right.

Phillips’ career now really took off, with lecture tours and the publication of his first best-seller, Illustrations of the Geology of Yorkshire ... The Yorkshire Coast (1829), which was not just a geological text-book, but a work of topography. In 1831 he became secretary of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, and got involved in an event at the Yorkshire Museum that year which led to the formation of the British Society for the Advancement of Science, becoming its assistant secretary, a post he held until 1859. Phillips now moved onto the national stage, becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1834. Also in 1834, despite not even having a first degree, he was given the chair of geology at Kings College, London (a part-time job, he continued to live in York). In 1844 he received in addition the chair of geology at Trinity College, Dublin, and then in 1853 he was made deputy reader in geology at Oxford. This was a full-time job, and so he and Anne regretfully left York for a cottage in Oxford, near Magdalen Bridge. In 1860 he became full professor at Oxford.

As his career advanced, so did his ideas. It was an interesting time for scientists like him, who were also Christians, albeit humanist Christians. Like other geologists of his day, he believed in the reality of the Universal Deluge, and he saw deposits as being ‘antediluvian’ or ‘post-diluvian’, where we would today see them as being glacial or post-glacial. However, he increasingly came to grips with the idea of Deep Time. Unlike those at that time who still thought of the earth as being only 6000 years old, he dated the origin of the earth back some 60-96 million years (Darwin was later to estimate it at 300m years; today it is thought to be 4.5 billion years old). In 1841, in an obscure book on the fossils of Cornwall, Devon and West Somerset, he came up with a three-way division of all geological time, dividing the geological eras into the Palaeozoic (the age of early life, including fishes), the Mesozoic (the age of reptiles) and the Cainozoic (the age of mammals), terms still in use today. His interests widened into the fields of astronomy and meteorology, with him taking one of the first detailed photographs of the moon, and inventing an improved rain-gauge, which was exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851, along with four other inventions of his.

An early proponent of promoting the public understanding of science, he lectured widely, to mixed audiences, including women (the female members of his audiences being referred to, dismissively, by one local journal, as ‘belles of the ballroom’). In 1840 a through railway line from London to York was established, making it easier for him to travel the country with his lectures, but also making the landscape he loved more accessible to a wider audience. In 1836 he had published what he regarded as his best book, the second volume of his Geology of Yorkshire, this time on The Mountain Limestone District. Then in 1853 he wrote a guidebook specifically aimed at the railway traveller, Rivers, Mountains and Sea-Coast of Yorkshire, ‘arguably one of the best books ever written about the landscape of Yorkshire’, says Speakman, which brings ‘the feeling of artist or poet to the observational precision of the scientist’ and which was accompanied by 25 lithographic sketches by Phillips, several of which are reproduced in this book. Phillips followed this up almost immediately with Railway Excursions from York, Leeds and Hull, soon reprinted and reissued by the North Eastern Railway Company as Professor Phillips’ Railway Excursions. In all of these works he expanded on his basic contention that it was geology that made a landscape distinctive and special.

In 1856 Phillips was appointed keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, and in 1857 founded the Oxford Natural History Museum. He continued to do original research and fieldwork, publishing a Geology of Oxford and the Valley of the Thames in 1871. As a senior academic, he was now inspiring a new generation, with a number of proteges, including William Boyd Dawkins, who went on to become professor of geology at Manchester University. In September 1873 Phillips journeyed with Dawkins on a field trip to Victoria Cave, Settle. Speakman includes a splendid group photograph taken of the Settle Exploration Committee, showing nineteen gentlemen, all with impressive sets of whiskers, but with Phillips’ startlingly white fringe beard winning the prize. This, though, was to be Phillips’ last excursion to the Dales. In April 1874, after dinner in All Souls College, Oxford, he fell down a flight of steps, received critical injuries, and died the following day. His body was taken to York to be buried, alongside his sister.

Speakman devotes his two last chapters to ‘The Legacy’ (chapter 8) and ‘In the footsteps of John Phillips’ (chapter 9), the latter covering what has happened in geology since, especially regarding Yorkshire, and how best the modern reader might follow up his work, through books and by visiting the numerous museums of the county. All in all, this is a fascinating account of the life and work of an intellectual giant, an outstanding scientist and a populist who, I am ashamed to report, I had not come across before. This book does him justice, and is a bargain at only £15.

William D. (Bill) Shannon PhD is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. His main research interests are in landscape history and the history of cartography.

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By Michael Farley

(Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society 2022 xx+216 pp ISBN 978-0-957177-9-4) £18+£4 p&p https://bas1.org.uk/new-publications-may-2022

Mike Farley has written a splendid book about Brill, in a lively style, full of information culled from an eclectic range of sources and generously illustrated with pictures, plans and maps of the topics he has concentrated on. At its heart is the enquiring mind of an archaeologist who has decided to use his detective skills on some of the knotty problems surrounding the place and its history.

The hill-top village of Brill lies at one of the highest points of the Midland plain, north of the Chilterns. Its modern origins lie in Saxon times when it was a royal estate favoured by Edward the Confessor. He liked it for its hunting, a delight pursued by post-Conquest monarchs particularly King John and Henry III, whose visits are well documented. By then it was the centre of the forest of Bernwood, with whose history it was deeply entwined. Elizabeth I was the last monarch to hunt there, and its forest status was abolished some fifty years later. Approximately ten miles from Oxford and about the same from Aylesbury, Brill has been a quiet, almost hidden, corner the world until the M40 and lately HS2 encroached. Its remoteness meant that its market never flourished despite its prominent position, but the clays that were easily accessible close to the village became the centre of a medieval pottery industry of note, that supplied its neighbourhood and Oxford, but in the nineteenth century declined into making bricks, tiles and garden pots.

Much of the book dwells on the royal presence and what it entailed, and explores how the royal estate, churches and forest inter-related. There was a royal ‘hall’ in medieval times, but we do not know exactly where, and there are also the remnants of a mound that could represent an early castle, or alternatively a hundredal meeting place. Using evidence from other large royal medieval buildings and knowledge of available local resources, potential construction materials and methods are discussed in detail. Sources from The National Archives have been mined to uncover how the royal household was provisioned, including large quantities of wine brought long distances to quench the royal thirst. The book is centred on the medieval world of Brill, but there are lavishly illustrated diversions into the workings of Bernwood forest, the surviving maps of the place, the part played by the village on the front line in the English Civil War, and the pottery industry through to the nineteenth century.

This is a book that will delight and entertain those who like a good mystery and are prepared to accept that many of the problems do not have simple answers. It does not attempt to provide a complete history of Brill in all its facets or even in any period. The people of Brill had a history intimately connected with the forest of Bernwood and the resources it provided, opportunities that drew migrants from outside in Tudor times, who then found their livelihood cut off by the disafforestation of 1632. After that Brill struggled: it had a large population, and its main industry was in decline. Only in the twentieth century has it benefitted from incomers who could use their cars to base themselves in a delightful spot. Today it is a village with long vistas, an interesting common with its windmill and grassed over clay pits, but also rows of predominately small houses and cottages in brick or stucco lining its streets.

Mike Farley is a notable Buckinghamshire archaeologist and knows the county well. His book reflects this, focusing primarily on the surviving elements of the built environment, hidden or visible, and the mysteries surrounding their origins and evolution. As a book, the Kings at Brill succeeds well in the task it sets itself, and it deserves a wider readership than the those who now live in the area. And it is a rich addition to the stream of book-length studies that have been published by the Buckinghamshire Archaeological Society in recent years.

John Broad is a member of CamPop at the University of Cambridge. His research covers a range of topics in English rural history, especially in the south Midlands. He has written on Bernwood Forest’s history, but currently is writing about the history of the English cottage and rural housing, on understanding how local boundaries have shaped aspects of local and national history, and on regional variations in the Poor Law and welfare provision

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By Sonja Smith

(Custodian Books 2022 x+211pp ISBN 978-1-3999-2094-0) £12.95 + p&p (contact sonja@custodian4.co.uk)

Parish histories come in a variety of forms, spanning a broad spectrum from chronological narratives to thematic or analytical works. One trap into which many writers from all points of the spectrum often fall is uneven coverage of the whole period, with the Middle Ages or the twentieth century frequently receiving less attention than other times. Sonja Smith has avoided this pitfall in her study of Canon Pyon by concentrating on one century, the seventeenth. By so doing she has given us a fascinating portrayal of a Herefordshire parish in what might have been expected to be a particularly turbulent period.

While superficially Canon Pyon might appear to be a fairly typical village (if such a thing exists) it possessed a number of unusual characteristics. The manor had been in the hands of the Dean and Chapter of Hereford since before the Norman Conquest, and escaped being sold during the Commonwealth, when the estate was managed by the parliamentary authorities. As virtually all land in the parish was owned by the Dean and Chapter, most property was held by either copyhold or long lease. This produced a remarkable degree of continuity of landholding throughout the period of the study, and the author, using a map made by Isaac Taylor c.1755, has been able to identify many of the holdings, some of which disappeared before the nineteenth century. She has also been able to identify many of the occupiers of these properties through several generations.

The Dean and Chapter had for a long time granted the advowson of the church to the farmer of the tithes, though this arrangement was not renewed when the cathedral lands were restored in 1660. One of the most interesting sections of the book deals with the clergy who served the parish during this period, and Sonja Smith is to be congratulated on unearthing so much detailed biographical information. It is significant that she has noted several instances of error in the list of vicars displayed in the church—such discrepancies are probably far more common than hitherto realised. Similarly, the period of the Civil War and Interregnum raises many questions concerning the religious and political stances of the clergy.

The confused nature of the Interregnum period is shown by the fact that two vicars, Thomas Griffithes and Thomas Bedford, each appear to have been deprived and replaced in the living in a ‘cox and box’ fashion between 1645 and 1673. The circumstances behind this situation are very confused, and neither would appear to have been particularly identified with either the puritan or the Anglican persuasions. Several of the vicars of Canon Pyon had a penchant for litigation—not merely the disputes with parishioners over tithe payments which were the bread and butter of the diocesan courts but occasional more serious matters which involved the lay courts. In 1610, for example, Philip Knapp, vicar from 1601 until his death in 1639, was implicated in a Star Chamber action concerning the attempted abduction of the daughter of a leading figure of the parish. Knapp, perhaps not entirely willingly, had allowed some of the participants to use his vicarage as a base. Legal records have proved a mine of information, and reveal a great deal of detail about the tensions which existed in what was essentially a fairly closed community.

The nature of this community is revealed in the final chapter where the social hierarchy is examined in detail. Of particular interest are the biographies of poorer members of the parish, compiled using a variety of records including hearth tax exemptions, manorial records, church court proceedings and other sources. This clearly illustrates the potential for discovering more about the ‘hidden’ members of village society using taxation records as a starting point, and while not all places are as well documented as Canon Pyon, there must be many where such an approach would also bear fruit.

Sonja Smith’s introduction to the book tends to underestimate what she has achieved. She states that the ‘work is descriptive rather than analytical’ and while it is true that it is not peppered with tables illustrating such things as infant mortality, average life expectancy, illegitimacy statistics and similar sociological information, it is far from being merely descriptive. What has been achieved is actually a distillation of many years of research with case studies to illustrate particular points. It is pleasing to note that the methodology behind these conclusions and examples may be clearly seen. For example, the means by which the occupation of many houses in the parish has been reconstructed may serve as a useful exemplar for others who wish to try similar projects in their own areas.

There are one or two minor criticisms, which in no way detract from the usefulness of the book. Some of the verbatim quotations (such as that on p.43 concerning the right to a seat in the church) are unnecessarily long, and could easily have been replaced by a brief summary in the author’s own words. Similarly, the endnotes could have been presented in a somewhat more economical format, though this may well be the result of the printers’ unfamiliarity with this type of publication. In her introduction the author notes that ‘researching history only serves to educate the researcher unless the results are shared with others’. When her work was rejected by a commercial publisher as being too localised, she was inspired by a BALH internet seminar by John Chandler to persevere with self-publishing, and has produced a book which has considerable interest and use for other researchers beyond her home county of Hereford.

Martin Speight is currently chairman of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, and is the author of Diddlebury: The History of a Corvedale Parish (Logaston 2007).

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By Leanda de Lisle

(Chatto & Windus 2022 464pp ISBN 978-1-784-74296-6) £25

‘Revisionist history at its absolute best’, reads the sales pitch on the front cover of this high-paced biography of Charles I’s French queen. Leanda de Lisle claims in her preface that the Catholic Henrietta Maria is often portrayed as ‘the worst queen consort ever to have worn the crown of the three kingdoms’, condemned as unfaithful, frivolous and meddling. De Lisle’s stated purpose is to reclaim her reputation from this anti-papist obloquy, which was certainly dominant in the mid-seventeenth century, but one wonders how necessary this really is today. In modern times there have been several sympathetic biographies of Henrietta Maria, most notably that by Carola Oman as long ago as 1936. The queen’s reputation is firmly on the rise among court, art and theatre historians, and her biography in the ODNB is extremely positive.

Even so, De Lisle has a good story to tell, of the vivacious princess whose Protestant-turned-Catholic father, Henri IV, was murdered when she was still a baby, and whose Protestant husband was beheaded when she was 40, condemning her to years of grief and struggle. The horrible symmetry of those events might have broken her, but Henrietta Maria had been resolute and courageous from childhood. At the age of 15, encouraged by her mother, the formidable Marie de Medici, and elder brother Louis XIII, she married Charles I just months after his accession in 1625. Before granting dispensation for this interfaith union, Pope Urban VIII was assured that the marriage could ‘kick-start the reconversion of the Stuart kingdoms’. For Louis there were even bigger games to play. Henrietta Maria was asked to play a key role in the long struggle between France and Habsburg Spain by securing English support for France and her allies. One of the great strengths of this book is Lisle’s deftness in maintaining a clear view of this complex and ever-shifting European context.

For local historians, however, much of its interest lies not so much in the political drama of Charles’s downfall, so frequently recounted elsewhere, but in the queen’s life in London from 1625 to 1642 and again briefly from 1662 to 1665. De Lisle recounts how, under the provisions of the marriage settlement, Charles allowed Henrietta to hold her own court and practice her own religion. This involved a surprising degree of tolerance. To avoid liturgical conflict, the wedding was conducted by proxy at a ceremony at Notre Dame, and the new queen was excused from participating in Charles’s coronation at Westminster Abbey. At New Year 1626, the king gave her his late mother’s palace of Somerset House, on the south side of the Strand, which became the queen’s principal residence.

A bumpy start to the marriage led in June 1626 to the abrupt dismissal of most of Henrietta’s French household and their replacement with English courtiers, but the murder of the king’s favourite, Buckingham, in 1628 and the birth of a healthy son, later Charles II, in 1630 brought marital harmony. The king put up £2000 for a new Chapel Royal, designed by Inigo Jones, to be built at Somerset House, and donated a magnificent Rubens altarpiece depicting the crucifixion. Capuchin friars arrived from France to conduct the services and minister to the congregation. When the chapel opened for its first public mass in December 1635, the spectacular tableau created by Jones, with the Host ‘exposed in a golden sunburst’, drew so many visitors that it was impossible to close the doors for three days.

The queen herself spent lavishly on secular pleasures and became an important patron of the arts. She commissioned a theatre at Somerset House and spectacular court masques. She embellished the grounds of Somerset House with fountains and gardens, importing plants and trees from France. From a handsome water-gate giving on to private landing stairs, she could be rowed by her own bargemen to Whitehall Palace or downstream to Greenwich. For the royal park there Jones designed the pavilion now known as the Queen’s House, with a pillared portico to serve as a platform for viewing the gardens, the river and Greenwich Palace. The garden front of the house (now white) was decorated with colourful grotesques, and the Italian painter Orazio Gentilleschi and his daughter Artemisia created vast ceiling paintings for the great hall (these are now at Marlborough House in London).

Throughout the 1630s Charles ruled without parliament, raising taxes by the assertion of custom and prerogative. When these revenues proved insufficient to fund military campaigns to enforce religious reform in Scotland—the so-called Bishops’ Wars of 1639 and 1640—parliament was recalled and a disastrous drift into Civil War began. In February 1642 Henrietta Maria set sail from Dover for The Hague in a flotilla of twelve ships. A violent storm sank her baggage ship containing not only £60,000 but also the chapel ornaments and a priceless relic of the true cross. When war broke out the chapel and its contents were thoroughly trashed, the Rubens altarpiece torn to shreds and hurled into the Thames.

It would be 20 years before Henrietta Maria returned to Somerset House, after the Restoration. Then, in a forceful assertion of royal splendour, the palace was rebuilt with new state rooms along the waterfront and grand lodgings for Henrietta’s household, and the chapel and her private apartments were lavishly and expensively restored. This triumph was not to last. When the Great Plague broke out in 1665, Henrietta Maria returned to Paris, where she died four years later. Her greatest legacy to London, Somerset House, was demolished in the eighteenth century and replaced by its current incarnation, home to the Courtauld Institute of Art and numerous creative organisations.

Leanda de Lisle relates the story of Henrietta-Maria’s tumultuous life with verve, and her enjoyment of anecdote and curious details enlivens a complex story. The book is equipped with some useful apparatus, including 36 illustrations, brief pedigrees of the Bourbon, de Medici and Stuart families, a map of the Habsburg empire, chapter notes and index. Regrettably there is no bibliography.

John Gaisford is an independent scholar with a special interest in the mid-seventeenth century Spanish cloth trade between London and Paris.

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By Margaret Willes

(Yale University Press 2022 xi+299pp ISBN 978-0-300-24983-5) £25

All local histories hold importance beyond the bounds of one particular place, whether this be due to the great events and people associated with this location or due to the fact that each local history is an integral piece in the wider patchwork of history. There are, though, few places that can be truly said to have influenced history beyond their own bounds more than the area around St Paul’s Cathedral in the City of London. The claim made by Margaret Willes in the title of her wonderful book is that St Paul’s Churchyard has shaped the history of London. Having read her book this argument is hard to deny. However, the book itself makes a subtler but similarly strong case that the churchyard has had broader influence, shaping the history of England and later Britain, with influence on the wider world. While much of this is known to those who have a pre-existing knowledge of the history of this place it is useful and important to have it so eloquently expressed here at length.

It may only be natural that such an unusual local history should give rise to such an excellent book, but it is undoubtedly the skill of Willes, a former National Trust publisher who has written several other books, which has led to the superb execution of this story. She has put together a gripping account of the history of the area ‘in the shadow’ of the great cathedral which has long dominated the London skyline as well as the minds of Londoners. In the midst of London’s religious affairs from the early medieval period onwards, St Paul’s Churchyard has long been a place for everyday life and also an important hub for communications. It has, throughout recorded history, attracted formal gatherings and processions such as the ‘folk moot’, the famous preaching place at Paul’s Cross (depicted beautifully on the dustjacket of the book) and ceremonies like those associated with the lord mayor. The neighbourhood was often the site of plays and pageantry, for example by the boys of St Paul’s School.

The space around the cathedral, and even at times the cathedral building itself, also played host to various trades and business from early times onwards. Especially prominent has been the situation of a large part of England’s trade in print and manuscript over many centuries. Originally linked to serving the needs of St Paul’s religious community in medieval times, this trade flourished from the early sixteenth century onwards with the arrival of the printing press. Throughout much of this and the following century there remained strict restrictions on who could legally work in this trade, with the members of the Company of Stationers, who continued to base themselves largely in the same area as their predecessors had done, holding a theoretical near monopoly in the country. This centralising of the trade around the cathedral left a strong legacy and even after formal changes the area around St Paul’s long remained at the beating heart of English printing, publishing and bookselling. It was in this area that, thanks to the links to the trade in print and proximity of the wider commerce in the City, coffee-house culture was established in England in the late seventeenth century.

Overall, the work is excellently put together enabling both a broad overview of the history of the churchyard as well as insights illuminating the activities and people associated with the place. It is a richly illustrated book with both in-text images and plates. Three useful maps help ground this study in the topography. Twelve chapters, in addition to an introduction and epilogue, move broadly chronologically, though without strict restriction into periodisation. We get a sense of the thematic throughout, with destruction and rebuilding featuring particularly prominently. This is especially so of the significant space devoted to the events of the Great Fire of 1666 and the aftermath, a cataclysmic event for the area. There continues to be useful discussion within the references at the end of the book and altogether we get a sense that Willes could have said much more about her subject.

Though this is an excellent book there are some queries on scope which should be noted for the potential reader. The first concerns the focus of the work on the middling sorts and the great and the good. This is, understandably, a history of great people and events in this place which has attracted so many of them. It is also in practice, as well as ostensibly, about the role of the churchyard in shaping wider events and so it looks outwards as much as it looks in. There is therefore little on the common and meaner sorts who lived, worked and passed beneath the shadows of the cathedral. Nor is there much on the conditions of life. The second concerns the material from which this evidence is drawn. Willes’ reading is extensive up to and including very recently published academic works and so is in many respects a synthesis of works of other historians, who are liberally acknowledged. There are throughout many useful quotations from a wide range primary material, notably diaries and printed literature, but these sources offer flavour rather than details, and have their particular limitations of course. There has, however, been little research in the archives with just five manuscript sources consulted, one of these being the sole reference to a document in the Stationers’ Company archives. For a study so focused on the print trade the absence of insight from the Company’s rich documentation on its members and their work feels like an omission. Also, most of this book is concerned with the early modern period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, although this is arguably the most important and interesting period in the churchyard’s history, especially from a print trade perspective.

The last issue which is of especial interest to readers of The Local Historian is whether this is even a ‘local’ history when so much is concerned with national events and the work of one particular trade. Local historians are of course happily free to choose our own focus for our research, based on our own expertise and interests, as Willes has done; however, this, combined with the above concerns over whose history is told and the sources used, mean many will be left desiring more depth. It is of course a local history, but of a particular kind, a popular local history extolling the virtues of historical focus on a locality to a broad readership. In this way it is as an ambassador for local history to the wider world and so should be particularly noted by local historians for this reason.

There is no doubt that this book is a significant contribution to the histories of London and of print. The ordinary reader will find this a superb introduction to both. It is moreover an excellent demonstration of the value of a local perspective in the telling of broader histories and how this might be done with flair and finesse. This is a lesson for the general reader, local historian and academics of London and/or the print trade alike. It is a book that can be read lightly and for enjoyment as it is a work which tells a complex story in an accessible way for the lay reader. Finally, as this is a book largely about other books it seems right to say that this is a worthy volume to mark that history. There has long been a need for this book and Willes has fulfilled that need excellently. The pages chart how this was a place utterly destroyed, the historic fabric obliterated during the Second World War and how it has been for some time without the secular community that had for so long thrived in the churchyard. Today, it is almost impossible to get a sense of this place’s history when walking within the glass and concrete jungle filled with tourists and office workers. Willes does amazing job of bringing so much of this lost world back to life … an expressive eulogy for a lost world.

Joe Saunders is a PhD researcher at the University of York working on the print trade and the Stationers’ Company in seventeenth century London. As a keen local and family historian descended from Londoners his interests in the city are broad

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By Alan Brooke

(Huddersfield Local History Society 2022 xx + 230pp ISBN: 978-0-992-984-151) £15

When Mrs Gaskell related in Mary Barton (1848) the botanical and entomological enthusiasms of working men in Manchester, she was describing a well-known characteristic of many working-class communities. Even a century later I can recall being taken by my father to a small stone-built cottage to visit an old man, the walls of whose living room were covered from floor to ceiling with glass-fronted cases containing stuffed birds of every description. This was the world of Seth Lister Mosley (1848-1929). Alan Brooke recalls being introduced to this world by his father, and by the Bird Room at the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield, of which Mosley was the first curator in 1920. The poet laureate, local boy Simon Armitage, also recalls this Bird Room and its influence upon him. So, the purpose of this book is to recover the life and reputation of this remarkable and influential man, Seth Lister Mosley, and in so doing to recreate the intellectual world of amateur enthusiasts from a generation of working men who stood on the outer threshold of a formal education and the professionalisation knowledge.

Mosley was born in Lepton, near Huddersfield, the son of a handloom weaver, carpenter and bird hunter who became well-known in the area as an expert taxidermist (bird-stuffer). Young Seth followed in his father’s footsteps in this latter activity, but also briefly attended classes in drawing at the Mechanics’ Institute and became expert at drawing and painting birds, butterflies and moths. Initially he earned his living as a house painter and decorator, but gave this up to concentrate full-time on his botanical and ornithological interests, collecting, mounting and stuffing, and writing about the flora and fauna of the Huddersfield district. He started, edited and contributed to several periodicals, including the Naturalist and the Young Naturalist; was an active member of several local and national organisations including the Huddersfield Naturalist Society and the Lancashire and Cheshire Entomological Society; advised and exhibited at museums across the country; and produced over 33,000 hand-coloured pictures of the flora and fauna of the Huddersfield district. His first ‘museum’ was started in his boyhood home; his first proper museum came in 1880 at his married home near the new Beaumont Park (1883), with ‘Fine Collections in all branches of Natural History’, open to the public and subsidised by running a refreshment room for picnic parties which had come to the park. As this grew, he began to campaign for a publicly-funded municipal museum, but the rate payers of Huddersfield were unsympathetic. Finally, in 1896 an annex to the Technical College was designated for a museum. This opened in 1900 with Mosley as curator. He gave up his own Beaumont Park Museum and transferred the bulk of his collection to the College. He also became curator of the Keighley town museum, opened in 1899. But it was not until 1920 that Huddersfield acquired its own town museum when Legh Tolson, a wealthy manufacturer, gave his Ravensknowle Hall and Park to the town in memory of his two nephews who had been killed in the Great War. Mosley was the first curator until his retirement at the end of 1925, having just completed setting up his splendid new Bird Room.

This story of Mosley’s life is pieced together from autobiographical fragments in his various publications, and the chronicle of his activities as reported in the local press, notably his weekly ‘Nature Around Huddersfield’ column which appeared in the Huddersfield Examiner between May 1914 and February 1929. But this is only a part of the story told by Alan Brooke. Of even more interest is the development of Mosley’s ideas about the purpose behind his life-long devotion to Nature. Mosley began as a hunter-gatherer like his father, a collector like many of his contemporaries who saw Nature as a treasury to be raided. He ended as a worshipper of Nature who revered all forms of life and believed in the physical, mental and spiritual healing powers brought about by a close and reverential approach to the natural world: in short, he was in many respects an ecologist before his time. This influenced all he did. The purpose of a museum was to inspire, especially in the young, this reverence for Nature. While stuffed specimens might be necessary for scientific study, his illustrated pictures were preferable and more wholesome (and less prone to fading) than the real thing. Whereas once he had pioneered displaying stuffed birds in a recreated ‘natural setting’ so they might be understood better, he ended with doubting the value of such and regretted having loaned out specimens for object lessons in local schools. Whereas once he had once enjoyed his mother’s pheasant pies (poached by his father) he was now a vegetarian. Alongside this reverence for Nature his religious views also changed. Brought up by a sceptical father, he had once been a leading member of the Huddersfield Secular Society and a supporter of the notorious atheist, Charles Bradlaugh; but at some point in the 1890s he discovered his religious faith and became an active member of Buxton Road Wesleyan Chapel where he organised summer rambles for the Mutual Improvement Society. In the 1901 census, Mosley described himself as ‘Curator of Museums and Wesleyan Local Preacher’. He taught that God’s word could be discerned through the study of nature, both from the pulpit and, preferably, in the fields and woods of Huddersfield and district. This leading of worship in the chapels of various denominations continued for the rest of his life and it is a pity that no Methodist or other church records appear to have been consulted to give a more rounded view of this activity. Was Mosley actually a qualified local preacher; and if so, how was his increasing unorthodoxy viewed? He called his sermons ‘Theocosmic Addresses’ in which he expounded the nature of God in an increasingly panentheistic way, believing that God is separate from but has an immanent presence in the material world. His services were certainly popular and drew congregations from beyond the normal ranks of chapel-goers.

Mosley’s ideas about museums were also eccentric and his insistence on the correctness of his own views did not make him an easy person to work with. This does not mean he was wrong: he stressed the scientific nature of his work but his concern was to speak to the needs of ordinary people. He was always the amateur enthusiast who wished to bring all to understand and love the fruits of Creation. This was not always appreciated by local councillors, mindful of the rates, nor by more professionally qualified scientists such as Thomas Woodhead, who had started his studies at Mosley’s Beaumont Park Museum but gone on to gain a doctorate at the University of Zurich, then becoming head of biology at the Technical College. Woodhead was the first director at Ravensknowle and, as such, Mosley’s superior. Alan Brooke presents the story from Mosley’s point of view, perhaps representing Woodhead unfairly. Woodhead was charged with creating a town museum, not a botanical museum organised on Mosley’s principles. As such Ravensknowle had to reflect all aspects of Huddersfield life. My own recollection is of the large three-dimensional model of the geomorphology of the area, and of the collections relating to the local textile industry and transport. Unlike the poet laureate I was left unmoved by the stuffed birds. Mosley would not have understood me.

This is an enthralling book, well written and beautifully illustrated with 22 colour plates reproducing Mosley’s work. His importance, what he stood for and all he achieved deserve this recognition and Alan Brooke’s labour of love sets a fine example of how to uncover the riches to be found in the lives of local people.

Edward Royle is emeritus professor of history at the University of York. He grew up near Huddersfield and was educated at King James’s School in Almondbury. His works on Huddersfield include ‘Owenism and the Secularist Tradition: the Huddersfield Secular Society and Sunday School’, in M. Chase and I. Dyck (eds), Living and Learning (Scolar Press, 1996), Power in the Land: The Ramsdens and their Huddersfield estate, 1542-1920 (University of Huddersfield Press, 2020) (contributor and editor); and most recently, ‘Occupational structure and literacy in Almondbury in 1866’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 94 (2022)

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By Peter Roebuck

(Bookcase 2022 xii+247pp ISBN 978-1-912-181544) £15 + £4 p&p from bookscumbria.com

Although there has been a recent increase in cattle kept on upland pastures, observers of the Cumbrian scene over recent decades may well have come away with the idea that farming in the county is dominated by the rearing of sheep, but in historical times the keeping of cattle within mixed farms was more common. Peter Roebuck has taken as his subject the movement of cattle by droving during the three centuries leading up to 1900 and its eventual decline, when steam-shipping and the railways took over the long-distance movement of livestock. The droving of cattle was unusual in its time as a mass movement of bulk items for long distances overland.

This detailed study of the great droving routes from Scotland and Ireland, especially as they passed through what is now Cumbria, to points south is contextualised by a consideration of those factors which influenced the prosperity or otherwise of the trade. Some of the influences described that were a fillip to the trade include the subjugation of the Border reivers under James I; the union with Scotland in 1707; victualling the British army and navy (the amount of beef involved was staggering); and the growing market of an increasingly urbanised population. Among the influences discussed that slowed the trade are cross-border taxation; epidemics of cattle disease (although Cumbria was affected less severely due to local action); toll roads; and the advent of mechanised transport. The author notes also that at times droving from Scotland and Ireland was subject to protectionist actions by the English and that the Irish appear to have been the primary scapegoats.

Peter Roebuck has published before on droving through Cumbria but he has brought to this volume new primary evidence which illuminates many details about the trade. These details have in part informed a critique of some of the received wisdom regarding the droving trade. The author offers several thought-provoking assertions: that although the union with Scotland in 1707 was a major boost to the droving trade, it was already well established before; that the number of cattle involved has probably been significantly underestimated; and, far from being a backwater during the years of droving, some people locally in Cumbria were adept at taking advantage of the trade and were supported by a nascent banking system.

With regard to droving, detailed primary evidence has hitherto been somewhat lacking but Roebuck has located records in the papers of the Musgrave Estate dating from the early eighteenth century. The estate provided staging posts where cattle were fed, watered and rested, and the associated records provide the numbers of beasts involved. From these figures he has been able to extrapolate estimates of the total trade at that time. Further evidence has been found in a public statement about the scale of the trade passing through Carlisle in the years leading up to 1812: the author of this statement was William Hodgson, town clerk, who had a responsibility for monitoring the cattle trade. From Hodgson’s figures, and taking into account other routes across the Anglo-Scottish border, Roebuck has suggested a much larger scale of trade than imagined previously for this period at the highpoint of droving. Additionally, he suggests that during periods of taxation at the Anglo-Scottish border many drovers would have sought to avoid the authorities by taking out-of-the-way routes and that this smuggling was probably widespread. He asserts that these unrecorded movements need to be considered when estimating the scale of droving during periods of cross-border taxation.

Although some droves were driven across the treacherously tidal upper reaches of the Solway Firth (sometimes with disastrous results) and details are given of the transit of cattle via sailing boat from Ulster and from the Western Isles to the Scottish mainland, it was only late in the day that shipping became a significant component of moving livestock onwards from Cumbria. In particular this reviewer found the account of the cattle trade by sea from Port Carlisle to Liverpool most fascinating. Although now much reduced, it is too easy to forget that the coastal trade in bulk cargoes was a major component of transport infrastructure. In addition to noting the general increase of shipping along both the east and west coasts Roebuck offers details as to how, in the latter days of droving, considerable effort and expenditure was made in order to take advantage of the speed with which cattle could be delivered from north Cumbria directly to the considerable market of Liverpool and its hinterland, this despite the need to construct a canal from Carlisle to the wharf and the ongoing passage being through difficult to navigate waters with a marked tidal range.

This otherwise excellent publication is let down by the poor quality of reproduction of the illustrations, especially the maps, which is a pity given the significant geographical component of the subject matter. The book does however offer a fascinating yet accessible insight into a significant historical trade which, as the author outlines, had influence far beyond the movement of cattle to distant markets.

A resident of Cumbria and familiar with some of the more remote droving routes, Alan Dougherty is a keen visitor to the Scottish Highlands and Islands; he never ceases to be astonished by the journeys undertaken previously by the drovers of cattle

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By Ian Pykett

(Country Books 2022 284pp ISBN 978-1-910489-82-6) £15 from http://www.countrybooks.biz/

The author is a little too self-effacing in his preface (‘I am no historian … but I have discovered that I share my new-found amateur enthusiasm for such matters with many Victorians’) and, when comparing his efforts with nineteenth century local chroniclers such as Llewellyn Jewitt (1816-1886), Reverend John Cox (1843-1910) and the father-and-son duo Thomas Brushfield (1798-1875) and Thomas Nadauld Brushfield (1828-1910), writes ‘how shallow is the research I have undertaken myself’.

Ian Pykett is at his best researching narrower fields, as in the chapters on the renovation of Holy Trinity at Ashford (near Bakewell in Derbyshire); the building of a new vicarage (which he himself lived in); and an account of the late-nineteenth century village. The renovation is usefully framed within the national changes taking place in Victorian church architecture. ‘One persistent driver within the nineteenth century Anglican church … was the high church Oxford Movement’s desire to counter the rise of Nonconformism … medieval architectural styles that were being revived across the western world at the time were appropriated by the Established Church in support of its ambition to reinforce its continuity with its pre-Reformation Catholic past’, viz. the early ‘gothic revival’ style. Pykett explains both the metaphorical and sacramental phases: ‘Against this backdrop of a vigorous, albeit turbulent, architectural revival following three centuries’ worth of neglect of England’s churches and cathedrals, the Victorian restoration movement gathered steam; it is estimated that around 80% of all Church of England churches were affected in some way, from minor repairs to complete demolition and rebuilding’. Thus, at Ashford only the tower, the tower arch, and the three sixteenth century arches and octagonal pillars separating the nave from the north aisle remained untouched.

This meaty and fascinating chapter is followed by a shorter one on the building of a new vicarage in 1853, to initial pen and ink sketches by Joseph Paxton (he of Crystal Palace fame). Three storeys high, with large rooms, high ceilings, cast-iron window frames and an exposed site on a hillside (an indoor water closet was only added later) it was difficult to heat and repair. Perhaps it was the alleged presence of ‘Jennifer the Poltergeist’, that led it to being finally sold in 2002. It was merely part of a mass exodus of clergy from such vicarages during the twentieth century—hence so many ‘The Old Vicarage’ signs seen in the villages and towns of today.

Ian Pykett is equally good when describing the village of Ashford in Luxmoore’s time. The main industry was the marble trade: villagers were employed in mining and cutting, turning and polishing, and decorating the marble. Ashford was essentially self-sufficient: most of the trades, labour and skills could be found in the village, nearby settlements or the town of Bakewell. There were domestic workers, shopkeepers, gardeners and grooms as well as a carpenter, blacksmith and wheelwright. Of course, there were times of hardship and soup kitchens were one answer. Sanitary arrangements were basic and exterior dry-earth toilets were commonplace. Visitations of smallpox and typhoid were in addition to pleurisy and tuberculosis.

The appendix by David Windle, on the history of the dissenting chapels in Ashford ,is also a model of local history research and narration. The Baptist Chapel on Ashford Lane opened in 1761 but has been ‘swept away long ago’: a small cemetery, with ivy-covered graves, is all that remains. A Presbyterian Chapel (Cliff End), opened in 1701, was acquired by the Congregational Church at Bakewell in 1870, but came to a sudden end in 1937 when the roof collapsed. A steady stream of heavy quarry traffic had not helped. Wesleyan Methodism was founded in the village in the late 1820s, using an adapted building in Court Lane. A new chapel was opened in 1899 but falling numbers led to its closure in 1994.

A major problem for any historian, amateur or otherwise, is a natural desire, after all the hard work ploughed into their research, to put everything he or she has found into the subsequent book. One entirely empathises with Pykett’s comment: ‘As I began to discover the facts about John Reddaway Luxmoore’s life, it became impossible for me to divorce them from the context of the social transformations of the Victorian and Edwardian eras’. Hence the ‘Life and Times’ of his book. However, his long Chapter II, which encompasses half the length of the work, ought to have been severely pruned. The Reverend John Reddaway Luxmoore is the most important thread in the narrative, but he is too often obscured by extraneous topics, whether of other individuals or only mildly relevant events. The information about Devon and John’s family (‘we’ll call him ‘our’ John to differentiate him from many other John Luxmoores’, says Pykett) are so detailed as to confuse the reader. Many of these passages are intrinsically of interest, but they impede the more straightforward account of John’s actual life and career: his birth; his education with the Reverend Field and at St Bees Theological College; his first clerical appointments at Smalley in Derbyshire and Ross-on-Wye; his marriage to Rosalie Stonhouse-Vigor; and his arrival in Ashford. The controversy over the ‘free-thinker’ Richard Nadault Brushfield’s tablet (Luxmoore refused to accommodate it in his church) is a good example of what should be in the chapter.

The Luxmoores had six children, one boy dying only a few months old. All three girls died unmarried, as did the eldest son ‘Johnny’. Both the latter and the youngest child, William Cyril, followed their father into the Anglican ministry. William did not marry until aged 49. His eldest son Christopher also entered the priesthood, ending as Assistant Bishop in Chichester. Only the younger son, Robin Stonhouse Luxmoore, broke away from the cloth, to work on a ranch in the USA and oil exploration in the Arctic.

Ian Pykett should be congratulated on his book. There is so much in it of interest, and it is a revealing snapshot of a late Victorian/Edwardian country vicar wrestling with the issues of his times. The virtual rebuilding of his church is an apt example of what was going on elsewhere and is a useful aid for the more general historian of the Church of England. This reviewer has nothing but admiration for the enthusiasm and dedication of such ‘amateur’ historians (as Pykett describes himself).

Kenneth Hillier is a local historian, who has written several books on Ashby de la Zouch in North-West Leicestershire and articles for The Leicestershire Historian. He now lives in South Derbyshire.

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By Paul Anderton

(Clayhanger Press/Tertius Ingpen 2022 170pp ISBN 978-1-7398007-2-7) £10+p&p from Amazon

The first COVID lockdown, with no access to archives or libraries, was a challenge for all local historians and research groups. Paul Anderton rose to this challenge by showing how local history can start from small beginnings (the view from his kitchen window) and develop into a chronological narrative which relates the history of his immediate neighbourhood and the area he could walk to during isolation, showing how this area of Newcastle-under-Lyme changed over time.

His exploration uses a wide variety of sources: from the web, personal contacts, books and journals. The book starts with a source which anyone can use—street names—which can then be related to maps and local memories of the area. These show that this was once pastoral land, and that what are now main roads were once muddy tracks. Change was gradual, but speeded up in the 1950s with the sale of the Keele estate. The narrative continues with a description of land use and buildings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At that time open land in the area was known as the Butts and used as a rifle range for the local militia. This is followed by a discussion on the Victorian workhouse which was situated close by. The changing attitudes to both the military and towards the poor are discussed with relevance to government legislation, which melds local history into its wider application. The realisation that old age did not necessarily mean pauperism is illustrated in the 1930 photograph of workhouse staff which include a number of nurses and ancillary workers. However, the building was not thought suitable as a home for the elderly, and it was demolished in 1938.

The second half of the book deals with housing. It examines the housing stock and public health in the town for the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century in the context of Newcastle’s local government, and the difficulties it faced with an expanding population but little space for new buildings. One councillor, John Mayer, played a major role in the borough’s politics and its improvement as one of the first Labour representatives on the council. When borough politics came into play in 1909 he withdrew from the council. This highlights a neglected facet of local history: local politics in the early twentieth century. Following the First World War the Housing and Town Planning Act 1919 enabled local councils to take out loans in order to buy land for housing. In Newcastle this was the start of the author’s home estate, Westlands. Planned on the principles of the Bourneville Trust, this was to have a layout of wide tree-lined avenues and plenty of space, with privately built houses for ‘people of a certain social standing’. However, it did little to increase the town’s housing stock for the less well-off, who were still living in districts condemned in the Ministry of Health’s 1919 Survey of Housing, which is printed in the book. Prior to this, some council-owned ‘corporation cottages’ had been built in 1915, and in 1922 the council purchased a site on Liverpool Road, although due to financial restrictions building there was slow. The discussion emphasises a now familiar but still relevant discussion on private enterprise and council housing developments, with the 1925 Labour government promoting council housing and the following Conservative government encouraging local authorities to deal with private enterprise.

This book presents almost faultless local history. My one criticism is that I would probably not have included the family history of William Henry Dutton, although the account of John Mayer and his family is relevant to the narrative of housing and local government. The coverage of the history of the area and its changes does not lose sight of the wider application of local history and the relationship of local life, to national events, and government legislation. This is accessible local history and there are themes developed in the book which should encourage other local historians to look at the housing and local politics of their own towns, in particular the zoning of areas according to wealth and social status, as well as local politics in the first 30 years of the twentieth century. If we had all produced something like this as a result of lockdown we would have been doing well, and this book could be our model.

EVELYN LORD is the author of Investigating the Twentieth Century: Sources for Local Historians. For many years she was reviews editor of The Local Historian, and before retirement she was Director of the Masters in Local and Regional History for the University of Cambridge. She is now chair of the Cambridgeshire Association of Local History and joint convenor of the Landscape and Local History Research Group.

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