The Local Historian Volume 30, Number 4 November 2000

By MARGARET SPUFFORD

Margaret Spufford began by briefly examining the width of the topics which have been investigated in her work, from economic profiles of villages and small towns through religion and literacy to cheap print and its distribution in the early modern period. She followed this by a discussion of what has emerged to her as the central problem whenever she embarks on a new piece of local history, the establishment of the typicality or a-typicality, of any particular settlement for its region. One of her solutions has been to establish a 'framework' of regional social and economic characteristics from taxation records.

This led her to a description of the Roehampton Hearth Tax Project. This begins with the microfilming of all the Hearth Tax Records in the PRO with the aid of a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, proceeds through transcription of selected returns, to their analysis and mapping, and finally to publication both on the world wide web and in print in conjunction with the British Record Society, complete with scholarly introductions, tables and maps. The local historian also needs to be able to look at his or her place of study on a map for comparative purposes. The visual images produced by cartography which the Centre at the University of Surrey Roehampton hope to produce for the whole country are vital.

We do not wish only to count hearths without an awareness of the houses that contain them. Examples were given of the very different patterns of housing revealed by the Hearth Tax Returns for Kent, Cambridgeshire and County Durham, and of the societies that produced them. She concluded with an appeal for experienced transcribers.

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By KEITH WALKER

The heroic efforts of Marc Brunel in successfully building the Thames Tunnel in the period 1825 -1843 are well recorded. However there were earlier attempts at subaqueous road building in Britain, including a little known effort to tunnel under the Severn at Newnham in Gloucestershire between 1810 -1812.

This article explores the economic factors which encouraged those involved in the construction of local tram roads to attempt to tunnel under the Severn. Evidence is presented to explain how the difficulties of crossing the river at Newnham helped swing the local sentiment behind the building of the tunnel.

The 1810 Act of Parliament which enabled the building of the tunnel is discussed, in particular the scheme of tolls. Surviving evidence describing the actual construction is presented, including a contemporary account of the fateful day when the waters of the Severn broke into the workings.

A possible explanation is given for the co-existence of plans for the Thames Driftway Tunnel with surviving material concerning the Severn Tunnel in Gloucester Records Office.

Finally the Severn Tunnel attempt is placed into context with all other known tunnel attempts in the early 19th century.

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By DONALD F HARRIS

Shropshire in this period was predominantly a rural county, with several market towns, many of them quite small. The one industrial area, which consisted of a few small centres, was in marked decline.

This article considers Canada's need for immigrants, particularly to develop the prairies, the Canadian Government's effort to attract them, and the reasons why external circumstances, rather than these efforts, brought increasing immigration from 1900 after some thirty years of disappointment. The shipping companies operated as partners with the Canadian Government in the campaign to recruit immigrants, by making literature available, publishing advertisements in local newspapers, and making arrangements for visiting lecturers, particularly the Canadian farmers sent by their governments to recruit agriculturalists. Canadian employers and employment agents worked with them.

An assessment is made of the efforts of the local agents in attracting emigrants, the quality of their advice, and their work for other countries, though there was a clear preference for Canada. The particular contribution of booking agents to the emigration of farm labourers and female domestic servants is discussed.

There is a shortage of evidence available for some of the issues considered above, local historians are urged to find and analyse the papers of local shipping agents.

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By HELEN ROBERTS

Quakerism has a long and varied history in Yorkshire dating back to the 1650s which has left its mark on the landscape and in the written records of the region. The survival of extensive but geographically dispersed collections of Quaker archives and libraries is the starting point for the Yorkshire Quaker Heritage Project. A variety of finding tools will be made available from a central web site (http://www.hull.ac.uk/lib/archives/quaker) including a location register describing and locating each collection and a name index database to Quaker records covering the East and part of the North Ridings.

The project is based at the Brynmore Jones Library, University of Hull, with two partners, leeds University Library and the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research at the University of York. Its focus is the Quaker holdings of these three institutions but an ongoing survey will map collections held elsewhere. It has been funded by the Higher Education Funding Council under the Research Support Libraries Programme as a 'demonstrator' of what can be achieved in this area using new technologies.