The Local Historian Volume 33, Number 1 February 2003

By Alan Crosby

Although we are said to live in a godless age, local historians show no sign of becoming uninterested in, or dismissive of, religion and its history in individual communities and regions. This issue of The Local Historian includes two articles which shed important light on the local experience and which could readily serve as models for researchers in other parts of Britain. Rita Sharp has investigated a very specific instance of the passionate and sometimes violent anatgomisms which religious issues could generate in the mid-Victorian period. To many people today the intensity of fervour which is descirbed in her artcle might seem more than a little excessive, given the somewhat low-key respinse which the Church of England tends to produce inthe early twenty-first century, but it is apparent not only that the subject of doctrinal differences gave rise to a remakable polarising of opinion in the part of east London concerned, but also that this was a media event of major improtance that attracted national attention. The detailed case study of the events at St George's in the East during 1859-1860 points to deep-seated and fundamental shifts in religious perceptions as the Church found itself in competition with other denominations and its 'broad church' structure cameunder increasing pressure from within. In a wider sense, the article highlights the role of case studies in local history, using the experience of one parish to illuminate themes of general importance to the religious history of the period. Case studies such as this help to illustrate the wider picture and also contribute to our better understanding of what was going on - without case studies we would resort too often to over-simplification and perhaps make glib assumptions based on little evidence. The more that carefully-researched case studies are available, the more likely it is that we will arrive at an accurate view of the circumstances and events we analyse.

Rita Sharp makes extensive use of newspaper reports, drawing attention to a source which is perhaps still under-exploited by many local historians. There are obvious problems with using local and national newspapers. With the conspicuous exception of The Times, indexing of newspapers is still limited, though many groups and societies have undertaken local projects in recent years. Newspapers are cumbersome and unwieldy if the originals are used, and eye-straining and tiring to read on microfilm. They also contain a remarkably large number of words! Reading an unindexed paper may require many hours of fruitless searching (apart from the inevitable distractions presented by the fascinating minutiae of other stories) but equally serious in terms of their value as a source is the reliability of the newspapers themselves. They were, as so many still are, politically partisan, so that the reporting is bound to be coloured by the perceptions and prejudices of the proprietor and of individual reporters. This in itself is of major historical significance, for a biased source can in some circumstances be even more informative than a supposedly objective one. Newspapers are a rich source of information; usually full of eminently quotable lines, and with the Victorian love of words their multi-syllabic, convoluted and often agreeably pompous reporting can provide exceptional levels of detail. 'The riots at St George's in the East' exemplifies the way in which, combined with careful assessment of the more balanced and objective analysis in works on religious history, they can provide a strong basis for a local history article.

But all such sources are, to a degree, impressionistic. Many historians in the past forty years have given emphasis to another perspective, that of statistical analysis, in order to offer a more quantitative (rather than qualitative) structure to their work. Statistics in history are a perennial problem. The 'imperfections; of the original sources (imperfect simply because they were not created for the benefit of present-day statisticians) all too often render a quantitative approach hazardous and uncertain, while statistics in themselves do not explain the processes which we want to illuminate. They are a way of showing patterns and trends, not of demonstrating why what happened did happen. But used with caution, and given a reasonably reliable source of data, it is possible to use statistics to highlight more precisely what might otherwise be mere description. In his article on Methodism in rural Leicestershire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (which follows a parallel study on the town of Leicester published in The Local Historian vol 30 no 2) Gerald Rimmington makes use of the figures for membership of Methodist societies, showing the trends in the adherence to Weslyan and Primitive Methodism, comparing these with population changes, and then placing the statistical profile in the context of contemporary opinion. he is well-served by Methodist historians and Methodist archives, both of which give important judgements about the increase and decrease in attendance and membership, though as always historians subsequently may disagree with the conclusions reached by contemporary observers. Do we know better than they did, and should we have the effrontery to argue a contrary case? It is a question relevant to any historical issue for which evidence of contemporary interpretation survives. Maybe it is comforting for us, generations later, to realise that people in the past not only disagreed about the causes of the problems which they observed in contemporary society, but also had different perceptions as to whether the problems actually existed at all ... just as we do ourselves. They did not necessarily know better, and of course we have the inestimable advantage of hindsight. We know what came next in the story, even if we don't understand it any more clearly.

In this issue of The Local Historian, therefore, two very different ways of approaching religious history are set out, continuing the journal's long tradition of publishing on that subject. In our collected index 1952-1999, indeed, religious history occupies more column space than any other theme except agriculture. Glancing down that long list, though, one omission is immediately apparent. Every single article on religious history has dealt with Christian faiths. Naturally, many different denominations have been considered, and it is true that articles on migration and ethnic minorities do touch on the question of religion. Yet the development of a 'multi-faith' society is not really reflected in the pages of The Local Historian. This is perhaps not unexpected, but it is a gap in coverage which strongly deserves to be filled. The first purpose-built mosque in England, at Woking in Surrey, was opened as long ago as 1889, there have been synagogues for much longer than that, and in the second half of the twentieth century many other religions and faiths have appeared and become important in our towns and cities. There are major problems for such investigations, not least the extreme uncertainty of archival evidence, but for local history to reflect the reality of experience it is important that such work is begun soon

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By Rita Sharp

In this article Rita Sharp examines in detail a particularly notorious religious controversy which raged in the parish of St George's in the East, London, in 1859-1860. It concerned the bitter disagreement within the Church of England between on the one hand the evangelical wing, which opposed elaborate ceremonial and aesthetic embellishment of churches and services, and on the other the ritualists, who favoured the 'high church' styles of worship with rich vestments, candles, and crucifixes and much use of dramatic gesture. The conflict in this parish led to extensive disorder and rioting and savage personal attacks upon the key protagonists. The Bishop of London was soon drawn into the fray, and the press enjoyed reporting the developments in typically detailed fashion. The dispute was one of the most sensational manifestations of the growing tension and internal division within the Church as it came under pressure from external forces - the rise of secularism, the increasing strength of nonconformity, the freedom of Catholic worship - and the article emphasises the context within which this local case study should be seen.

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By Tom Williamson

Tom Williamson is one of England's leading landscape archaeologists and historians and has played an important part in developing new approaches to, and explanations of, questions concerning the evolution of the rural landscape. This article is a substantially-revised version of one published in the journal Landscapes in 2000. In it Williamson seeks to show how the process of enclosure, one of the most fundamental elements in the creation of the present rural landscape, was complex and showed striking variations from area to area. But he also demonstrates that the subject is not self-contained, but must be seen in the context of the social, economic and political circumstances of time, place and personality. The influence of individual landowners, the regional trends, national context and changing fashions in aesthetics and economic activity all had an important part to play. The article discusses the forms of landscape which emerged from these processes and is illustrated with photographs of different types of enclosure landscape. There is a valuable discussion of the importance of hedges and an analysis of Hooper's famous - and deeply-flawed - formula for hedgerow dating. The notes and references form a very helpful bibliography of current works on enclosure and its landscape impact.

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By Gerald Rimmington

In this second part of his comprehensive analysis of late Victorian and Edwardian Methodism in Leicestershire, Gerald Rimmington considers its rural dimension (his previous article, on the development of Methodism in the town of Leicester, was published in The Local Historian vol.30 no.2, 2000). He analyses the trends in membership and chapel attendance among Wesleyan Methodist and Primitive Methodist congregations, cross-referencing these with census evidence for population change to identify those communities in which membership grew or shrank in a pattern distinct from that of the population as a whole. Contemporary evidence from circuit minutes and Methodist newspapers and journals is employed to highlight the opinion of these trends which was expressed at the time. The article particularly emphasises the way in which Wesleyans and Primitives competed both with each other and with the Anglican Church and identifies different patterns of attendance in each across the county, which can be related to local circumstances. In a wider sense, Rimmington places his analysis within the context of a changing world in which religious attendance as a whole was becoming less certain and showed clear signs of falling. The roles of preachers, education, local chapels and evangelism are all investigated as a way of explaining local divergences from general trends. This, with its sister article, is an important contribution to the study of religion in England in the years before the First World War.

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By Janet Brown

This brief article is a transcript of a memorandum written in 1816 by Alexander Davison of Swarland Hall, Northumberland, to his groom, explaining in precise and copious detail the arrangements for a journey with two horses from Morpeth to London. It gives valuable information about the route to be taken, the overnight stopping places, the care and management of the horses, and the financial procedures to be followed.