The Local Historian Volume 48 Number 1 January 2018

By Alan G. Crosby

Early last autumn, completely by chance, two papers on the same theme were sent to me lkuittle more than a week apart, for possible publication in The Local Historian. They looked at cases of alleged witchcraft—one in the late seventeenth century in Somerset, the other in mid-Victorian Essex. Quite independently, the authors had taken a similar approach to their analysis, by exploring the local and family history of the supposed victims and the accused. They had used familiar sources, such as parish registers and census returns, newspapers and published accounts of the cases, to try to get behind the sensational ‘facts’ and to place the people involved in their social and cultural context.

Such an approach has been used before—for example, recent studies of the celebrated Pendle witches in Jacobean Lancashire have considered the strong religious dimension to the case, against a background of persistent recusancy in the county. They have also teased out intriguing connections between the victims and some of the magistrates and other members of the elite who were involved—not least their geographical proximity. But I was very pleased to see that in both of the papers published in this issue of The Local Historian the methodologies of local history and family history have been applied so effectively. This ‘deconstructing’ of a story works well: it exposes the realities and the social, kinship and cultural frameworks behind the sensationalised events, and it sheds light upon what Ian Beckwith, quoting Hobsbawm and Rudé, calls ‘the dark village’. In other words, the powerful yet undocumented parallel structures which lay—and doubtless still lie—behind the formal frameworks of every community.

The purpose is not the negative one of debunking a myth, though that might be an outcome of such research. Rather, it is to emphasise the complexities and nuances which are in such sharp contrast to the two-dimensional cardboard cut-out picture of these events. Andrew Pickering could not at this distance confirm or refute that Mary Hill really did vomit ‘more than Two Hundred Crooked Pins, besides several clusters of Crooked Pins ... Seven Pieces of Pewter, Four Pieces of Brass, being Handles of Spoons, Six Pieces of Lead, some whereof were Handles of Spoons, and some, the Lead of a Window, besides one Solid Piece of Lead, which weighed full two Ounces; Six long Pieces of Latten, with Wire belonging to them; Five Pieces of Iron, one whereof was round, but hollow, and very big; and Two and Twenty Nails, some whereof were Board-Nails, above three Inches and a Quarter long’. I have to confess that it seems unlikely that she did), but instead Andrew was able to demonstrate the complex intermeshing of kinship links and other ties within the village community.

It’s likely that every reader will know of local tales and stories which are constantly repeated in the derivative literature but which under scrutiny fall apart. Sometimes we do not know where and when they originated, at other times the source is clear and the culprit can be identified. Two examples of such generally-accepted but implausible tales in my own county, Lancashire, are that textile production began with the arrival of Flemish weavers in 1337—what local people wore before then is never stated—and that until the late eighteenth century there were almost no wheeled vehicles in the county and most goods, even those carried between Liverpool and Manchester, went by packhorse. Neither is remotely tenable, but both are still repeated in unreliable un-researched histories. We try to promote solidly-grounded and accurate local history, but sometimes it’s an uphill struggle!

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By Christopher Dyer

pp 3-18

This paper is based on Professor Dyer’s annual lecture on the BALH Local History Day. The author is one of this country’s foremost medieval historians, and he begins by introducing the concept of social and geographical mobility in the context of the myth of an unchanging social scene and structure. In a general sense, opportunities for social mobility may also, he argues, be subject to myth-making. The main section then deals with the question of migration in the middle ages, focusing especially on the use of surname evidence to reveal patterns of mobility. Other potential sources are noted, including court records, but the importance of names (derived from taxation records, hundred rolls and other listings) is emphasised.

Dyer discusses the distances which people moved, their motives for doing so, and the distinctive flows to and from particular areas. Using examples from Warwickshire he demonstrates that migration was very unevenly spread, and that factors such as economic opportunity, the existence of open or closed villages, and the links with monasteries and great lords were always significant. Further, he suggests that migration patterns were also determined in part by the social and tenurial status of individuals and families. In this context manor court records may be particularly valuable as a source, though Dyer notes that there is always a predominance of evidence about males, even though it is known that females migrated in large numbers.

The second half of the paper considers social mobility, with particular attention to the question of accumulation of land by peasants and the impact of cyclical social and economic trends including the Black Death. The importance of the developing administration in communities, giving opportunities for dynamic and able individuals to gain local status, is discussed, as is the role played by the Church in raising young men from the lower ranks of society. The discussion also considers townspeople, arguing that the ideal of artisans becoming merchants was ‘difficult and relatively uncommon’, but noting that mobility increased in the fifteenth century because of the expansion of the cloth industry. Mobility within and into the ranks of the aristocracy is assessed, as is the problem of gentry families dying out for lack of male heirs. The final part of the paper looks at the impact of the Black Death, including the point that historians tend to look at upward social mobility, but that the wheel of fortune meant that some moved in the opposite direction, and they too are worthy of study.

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By Elizabeth Norton

pp 19-29

This paper was the winner of the BALH Medieval and Early Modern Essay Prize 2017. Bede rolls were lists, compiled by a parish priest or members of a guild, recording the names of donors to the church or institution. They would be read out to the congregation or membership in full at least once a year, and an abbreviated form, listing principal benefactors, was usually read out each Sunday. The ensured post-mortem commemoration of the individuals, and provided an incentive for the living to give generously to the church. The priest would normally receive a small stipend each year for reading out the list of names.

The article notes that although every pre-Reformation church had a bede roll, many no longer survive. Those that do show that they were usually running lists, to which names were added over time. The names could be those of the dead (who left money in wills and legacies) or the living (who gave in their own lifetimes) and often no distinction is made. The underlying principle was that prayers would be said at the time of reading for the souls of the deceased, and this helps to explain the rapid decline and then abolition of the practice in most places during the Reformation.

The central section of the paper discusses bede rolls in the sixteenth century with many examples to illustrate the sources which might be used and also the structure of the rolls themselves. Regional variations are considered, and the nature of the bequests and donations is explained. Other comparable types of commemoration are noted, such as mortuary rolls in monastic houses, fraternity rolls, and an analysis is made of the immense (51,000 name) roll from the Archdeaconry of Stafford.

The final section looks at bede rolls after 1547, showing that in some instances they survived because they were ambiguous (unlike, for example, statues of saints, and shrines) and it is argued that at least for the remainder of the sixteenth century they were potentially acceptable in a Protestant context, if taken simply as a reminder of those who had given to the church, but generally without the accompanying prayers. They were, suggests Elizabeth Norton, ‘remarkably egalitarian documents’ which played a major part in the Sunday services of the late medieval and early Tudor periods.

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By Andrew Pickering

pp 30-40

In 1689 at the village of Beckington near Frome in Somerset a teenaged girl, Mary Hill, allegedly experienced bizarre bouts of vomiting (ejecting large quantities of miscellaneous metalwork including pins, spoon handles, pieces of lead, wire and nails) while William Spicer suffered severe convulsions. Both were said to have been bewitched by three women, who were on three separate occasions thrown by villagers into the River Frome to see if they would float, and were eventually taken to be tried. One died in prison at Ilchester, and the other two were found not guilty of witchcraft.

In this paper Andrew Pickering forensically examines the case, not in terms of whether witchcraft did take place but rather by teasing out the family, kinship and social networks of the victims and the accused, in the context of inter-relationships and connections within the community and the wider area. He begins by discussing the approaches of historians to witchcraft and community in early modern England, showing that there were a number of cases of witchcraft in the region during the late seventeenth century. He analyses the social status and personal circumstances of the dramatis personae, demonstrating the range of sources which can be used to reconstruct the networks and family linkages. Pickering argues that exploring witchcraft and similar cases exposes important details about the early modern community, including interaction between the local and parish elite and those lower down the social scale. The case study is a model of what could be done for comparable episodes elsewhere in the country.

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By Ian Beckwith

pp 41-57

This article discusses the manslaughter of an elderly man known as ‘Old Dummy’, as a result of the treatment he received at the hands of a group of villagers of Sible Hedingham, Essex, on the night of 3 August 1863. Regarded as a ‘cunning man’, he was accused of putting a spell on Emma Smith, wife of a beerhouse keeper in the nearby village of Ridgewell. Although this example of ‘low magic’ has been mentioned in various discussions of the late survival of witchcraft belief, it has never been examined systematically, but the accessibility on-line of a wide selection of national and provincial newspapers has opened up a valuable source of evidence, albeit one that has to be treated with caution as the present case study shows. Largely absent from other studies is any use of census returns, parish registers, and other source materials, to discover as much as possible about the parties named in the case. The paper considers the case in the light of Hobsbawm and Rudé’s definition of the so-called ‘dark village’, and points to inconsistencies in the evidence given by witnesses at the time, as reported in the press.       

The case is analysed using the factual evidence of census returns and parish registers, supported by extensive use of newspaper reports and with comparison with other Essex cases in the Victorian period. It is argued that modern medical and psychological analysis points towards the alleged victim of witchcraft, Emma Smith, having a personality disorder, and that the other victim, ‘Old Dummy’, was exactly the sort of eccentric outsider who would be accused in such cases. Kinship networks, social connections and the role of the local elite are all considered in Beckwith’s analysis.

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By Harry Fairburn

pp 58-72

In this paper Harry Fairburn, who was himself one of the evacuees who were sent from Gateshead and Sunderland to the market town of Northallerton on the outbreak of the Second World War, analyses the attitudes of the councillors and officials in the reception area, using local authority minute books and reports. He explains the background to the great evacuation procedure and the administrative complexities of the exercise, focusing in particular on the role of the billeting officers who were tasked with managing the process on the ground. Using interviews and correspondence from former evacuees, carried out in 2002, he demonstrates how they felt on arriving in this largely rural area of the North Riding, and employs official statistics and reports to chart the progress of the scheme and – no less importantly – to reveal the onset of the return movement.

There is extensive discussion of the educational arrangements which were needed to provide evacuees with schooling, and of the often sharply different perspectives of local people. The financial arrangements, whereby host households received allowances which were often considered inadequate, and the pleasantness or otherwise of the experience for the evacuees are described. Appendixes give the full text of a letter from a local billeting officer and contemporary extracts from Bedam, the Bede Collegiate Boys School [Sunderland] magazine, describing the experience of the boys in their own words.

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By Paul Jennings

As a subject of local historical study, inns, taverns, alehouses and pubs have a long history, dating back to Victorian work such as that of Dymond on the The Old Inns and Taverns of Exeter (1880). More generally the subject has also enjoyed a lengthy popularity, with books like Thomas Burke’s The English Inn of 1930 or A.E. Richardson’s The Old Inns of England (1934), which boasted a foreword by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Similar publications have continued to appear down to the present day. Although some work, like Dymond’s, was well researched and is still useful, much of it was of doubtful value: the ‘whole pile of “Ye Olde Inne” books … of little use for the understanding of the pub today or at any other time’, as it was caustically described in The Pub and the People, Mass Observation’s well-known study of the pub in Worktown (actually Bolton) in the late 1930s. More recently, however, the history of drink and drinking places has attracted the attention of a number of historians, from Brian Harrison’s great work on Drink and the Victorians of 1971 and Peter Clark’s pioneering study of The English Alehouse in 1983. This trend has continued and many aspects of the subject have now received, and continue to receive, scholarly attention.

At the local level, the subject—but particularly that of inns, pubs and other drinking places—has also been thriving and the first three books under review here exemplify the kind of work which has been published, the first two taking approaches commonly adopted, the third one which is rather more rarely undertaken. Of the former, one method has been to present a collection of photographs with commentary and captions. This is the one taken by Paul Chrystal in his book on the pubs of Harrogate, which also takes in neighbouring towns and villages including Knaresborough and Boroughbridge, and looks at a total of forty establishments. Avowedly ‘accessible and friendly’, it provides some historical detail, both on the area covered and the selected pubs, although this is of questionable value, being largely anecdotal. This section of the introduction takes up almost a whole page (of just four) with lengthy quotations from Fiennes and Defoe and containing some obvious mistakes—for example, that the number of pubs was restricted by law in 1553. That was in fact a statute applying only to taverns, which specialised in the sale of wine. The book also displays a common anachronism, despite all the work on the subject now published, in that the term ‘public house’ did not come into use until the close of the seventeenth century and ‘pub’ not until the mid-nineteenth. The photographs themselves are a mixture of historical and contemporary colour, which are certainly nicely presented but the accompanying captions are also of variable quality, being sometimes rather perfunctory and again tending to the anecdotal, including the ghost story, that old favourite of books about inns and pubs.  Therefore from the quality of its illustrations, the useful maps, the contemporary information and at least some of the historical information this is of some interest to local residents and visitors, it does not offer, and perhaps is not really intended to, a history of pubs in the area and is consequently of little use to historians of the subject.

Chrystal's book is published by Amberley, which together with the History Press and formerly Tempus, has produced a number of similar works on local inns and pubs. Others have been published by their authors or by local societies. Such is the case with the second book under consideration, by the Herne Hill and Dulwich Societies. This similarly offers a collection of historical and contemporary photographs, again nicely produced, of forty pubs in the districts concerned, listed alphabetically as a gazetteer, which is a format commonly used in local studies. The associated commentary and captions are clearly based on detailed work in primary sources and contain much of interest. Overall, they are based in a good understanding of the historical context of drink and drinking places. However I did feel, as someone with no previous knowledge of these places other than a memory of seeing television coverage of the destruction of pubs during the Brixton riots of 1981, that more detail on the history of the area would have been helpful. However, in the quality of the research and production, this is certainly of interest more widely than simply to local people. Sources are listed, although they are rather limited on the wider history of the pub, and a useful index is provided.

The third book, by Andrew Sargent on Deal, is an altogether more ambitious project and exemplifies a much rarer approach to the subject by offering as the author puts it a ‘”whole story” account of the consumption of beer and the development and functioning of public houses in a specific location’. In this he kindly acknowledges a debt to my own work on Bradford (see below); that of Rob Donovan on Norwich (published in Brewery History nos.130, 132, 134 and 137 in 2009 and 2010); and that of R.C. Riley and Philip Eley on Portsmouth (Public Houses and Beerhouses in Nineteenth Century Portsmouth, 1983). Accordingly, there are chapters on the brewing industry; the pubs themselves and those who ran them; the customers and the vital social role which pubs played in the life of the town; the regulation and policing of pubs; and the temperance movement and its effects, covering the years from the important Beer Act of 1830 down to the First World War. The particular history of this Kent coastal town is clearly and thoroughly detailed. Throughout, this local material is set in the wider historical context, for example in the clear but detailed analysis of the effects of various pieces of licensing legislation. There is a huge range of fascinating insights, such as that concerning the notoriously corrupt Deal by-election of 1880 which resulted in the town losing its independent parliamentary representation, or on the operation of the controversial Contagious Diseases Acts which sought to remove the problem of venereal diseases by targeting the women rather than the soldiers and sailors who provided their custom. These are just three examples of many where the local evidence presented contributes to our understanding of broader questions. Detailed references are provided, enabling other researchers to see the type and range of relevant primary sources available. There is a select bibliography, which includes key general works on the subject as well as local studies, and an excellent index. There are useful maps and over eighty illustrations, although in my paperback edition at least they do not always reproduce very clearly. Overall, this book fulfils its author’s aim admirably and the book should be regarded as an excellent study of drink and drinking places in a specific locality, and it is important and valuable to anyone interested either in its particular subject matter or more generally in the social history of the nineteenth century.

The roadhouses which form the subject of the monograph which is the fourth book reviewed here were a transient phenomenon (chiefly of the inter-war years), few in number and confined largely to south-east England, but one which the authors invest with wider significance. As their name implies, roadhouses were rooted in the growth of motor car use after the First World War and the associated development of new arterial roads. Two phases in their story are identified. The first, from 1929 to 1933, saw their patronage by an ‘elite metropolitan group of highly mobile people’, epitomised by the sighting of the playboy Prince of Wales at the Ace of Spades roadhouse on the Great West Road. Patrons enjoyed fine dining, the American vogue for cocktails, dancing and a range of other activities, notably outdoor swimming (benefiting from unusually hot 1930s’ summers) but also polo, riding, tennis, squash, badminton, miniature golf and croquet, among others. Opportunities for sex were a further attraction, including those afforded by their car parks. In the second phase, from around 1934, the fashionable elite moved on, to be replaced by members of the growing number of middle- and lower middle-class suburbanites with well-paid jobs and cars. It is this departure of the fashionable crowd that the authors cite as a principal reason for the rapid demise of roadhouses. As they quote from Monica Ewer's 1935 novel Roadhouse, ‘A luxury business built on a craze never lasts’. In the end, big brewery companies, rather than the individual entrepreneurs who had typically established roadhouses, more successfully met the desires and aspirations of the leisured motorist with their so called ‘improved pubs’, emphasising greater comfort, the provision of meals and a more family-orientated ambience, superseding the old-style, male-dominated pub.

This necessarily brief summary inevitably does not do justice to the which is detail here assembled, at times indeed a little repetitively, and which is fully supported with notes, bibliography and a catalogue of the 78 roadhouses known to the authors. The wider significance of the phenomenon is drawn out, as roadhouses are linked to key trends of the inter-war years: the expansion of car ownership, suburbanisation, the growth of the middle and lower-middle classes, greater gender equality, the vogue for physical fitness and the outdoors and the influence of the United States on British culture. At times this can be rather ploddingly, even pretentiously, expressed as when, for example, we hear of ‘a conflation of the ideas of modernity and Americanization in inter-war cultural discourse’, which some may find off-putting. Overall, though, this is a book with much to offer those interested in the social and cultural history of these years, although this reviewer couldn’t warm much to the 'fatuous and trivial' fashionable life which it portrays. Its subject would seem, however, to offer limited scope for further detailed research for local historians with an interest in the period and in changing patterns of leisure, due to the limited number of roadhouses, their regional concentration and transient nature.

Although there have been anxieties in modern Britain over the effects of excessive alcohol consumption, as with so called binge-drinking, or its consequences for individual health, this pales beside the preoccupation of our Victorian and Edwardian forebears with the ‘Demon Drink’, as it was significantly capitalised. Not only was it the target of a massively supported temperance movement, but concern about drink and its social consequences also pervaded society. The fifth of these books reflects that importance in its focus on the key area of the regulation of drink and drinking places. That it does so as a study of one city, Liverpool, reflects two important points. The first is the enormous diversity of towns and cities, each one with its unique experience. Thus nineteenth-century Liverpool ‘enjoyed’ a reputation as a pre-eminently drunken city, a black spot on the Mersey, which its civic leaders consciously sought to overturn. Second is the importance of how the regulatory system established by parliament was implemented locally, emphasising the supreme importance of localism in nineteenth-century urban life.

The book’s detailed subject matter is the licensing system in Liverpool, overseen by local magistrates, and how ‘local diagnoses produced local solutions’, or the way in which a particular configuration of local circumstances produced the outcomes it did. In practical terms this was expressed in efforts, for example, to prevent prostitutes frequenting pubs (which in law they were entitled so to do for ‘reasonable refreshment’) and, more widely, women in general; to control the architectural and spatial arrangements of pubs in targeting snugs, where immoral actions might take place, or back doors into which women might sneak; as well as over the more fundamental question of the number of pubs. It covers in total ninety years from the passing of the Beer Act 1830, which saw 800 new beerhouses open in the city in just three weeks, through the city’s experiment with so-called ‘free licensing’, in which a licence was granted to any suitable applicant who applied; to the development by the century’s end of its new reputation as an example of what could be achieved by licensing; and finally to its experience of the restrictions of the First World War.

This is in many ways a highly technical subject. Licensing law was extremely complex and its administration equally so. Similarly, questions with which Beckingham engages, such as that of the tension between individual freedom on the one hand and the perceived need for restriction on the other, or of the response which civic authorities made to the problems thrown up by the growth of cities, are challenging ones. Nonetheless, they are subjects with which he deals in a readable way and a non-specialist reader is guided through developments clearly. One never loses sight of the essential humanity of the subject—the people with whom we are dealing—as exemplified by the splendid cover illustration of a slum child leaving a pub with a jug of beer (another cause for civic concern), watched by two bewhiskered constables.

For local historians, in particular, the book shows the importance of the national context, embodied in licensing legislation, but above all there is the message that localities do not merely serve as case studies of a national issue but that localism, of context and outcome, is central to understanding how society worked. One would therefore find different stories in, say, Bradford, Newcastle, Norwich or Portsmouth, to name just four cities which have received the attention of historians, and it is perhaps a pity that Beckingham did not engage explicitly with other experiences of the question. Despite the work that has been done, it is a subject which offers much scope for further local research and for this, as more generally for our understanding of the Victorian and Edwardian ‘Drink Question’ and the shaping of its great cities, Beckingham’s book is warmly recommended.

Books reviewed in this article

HARROGATE PUBS including Knaresborough by Paul Chrystal (Amberley 2016 95pp ISBN 978 1 4456 5318 1) £14.99 

THE PUBS OF DULWICH AND HERNE HILL by John Brunton, Laurence Marsh, Ian McInnes and John Walters (Herne Hill Society in association with the Dulwich Society 2016 130pp ISBN 978 0 9540323 1 9) £9.50 available via www.hernehillsociety.org.uk;

DRINKING IN DEAL: Beer, pubs and temperance in an East Kent town 1830-1914 by Andrew Sargent (BooksEast 2016 288pp ISBN 978 1 908304 20 9) £20 pbk also in hbk

THE ROADHOUSE COMES TO BRITAIN: Drinking, driving and dancing, 1925-1955 by David W. Gutzke and Michael John Law (Bloomsbury 2017 viii+181pp ISBN 978 1 4742 9450 8) £65

THE LICENSED CITY: regulating drink in Liverpool, 1830-1920 by David Beckingham (Liverpool University Press 2017 xii+289pp ISBN 978 1 78138 343 8) £80

PAUL JENNINGS is a social historian who has specialised in the history of drink and drinking places in England. His chief publications are The Public House in Bradford, 1770-1970 (Keele University Press, 1995),  The Local: a History of the English Pub (The History Press, 2007 and pbk 2011) and A History of Drink and the English, 1500-2000 (Routledge, 2016). He has now shifted his attentions and is researching a book on the working classes in Edwardian Harrogate.

By Various

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By Frances Willmoth and Elizabeth Stazicker1

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By Christopher Thornton, Jennifer Ward and Neil Wiffen

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By Richard Jones and Christopher Dyer

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By Jacqueline B. Geater

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By Nigel Smith

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