The Local Historian Volume 51 Number 1 January 2021

By David Dymond

pp 2-15

For many years David Dymond has been among our most respected and influential local and regional historians, and in this important article he discusses, with a wealth of examples, the history, rules and characteristics of the game of camping. This popular sport, a cousin of both football and rugby, can be traced back to at least the 14th century, and it continued to be played in rural areas of East Anglia into the mid-19th century. The paper focus on Norfolk and Suffolk, although the two counties are placed in the context of the wider East Anglian region. It draws its evidence particularly from contemporary newspaper reports, notices and advertisements.

The analysis describes the context of the game and then considers the sponsors and organisers, setting the social and commercial perspective and noting the prizes which were offered. There is coverage of the venues which were chosen, and details are given of the evidence from contemporary sources for the types of pitch involved, their dimensions and the form of the goals. David Dymond then focuses on the timing and length of matches, and the numbers of spectators, before turning to the rules of the game, including the size and arrangement of teams; the starting procedures; rules of engagement; and scoring. The conclusion places camping in a broader context, looking at its social characteristics, similarities with and differences from other popular sports, and the reasons for its eventual disappearance as more closely-regulated and systematically organised team sports, with formal clubs and leagues, took its place.
This paper exemplifies the importance of sport history as an aspect of social and cultural history. It is a major new contribution to the published regional history of East Anglia and highlights the very great value of newspapers as a source which is now readily accessible online.

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By J.R. Silver and Marie-France Weiner

pp 16-26

Wall Hall, a large country house and estate at Aldenham near Watford, Hertfordshire, was the subject of a previous article by the authors (published in The Local Historian vol.46 no.4 October 2016). Here they focus on its use during the Second World War, exploring claims that it was then the headquarters of some branch of secret warfare training. Their investigations eventually centred on the Special Operation Executive [SOE] which is itself still cloaked in mystery and confusion. The paper uses a range of published, primary and oral sources to try to build up a picture of what was happening at Wall Hall during the early 1940s. It begins with a potted history of the secret organisation, which was primarily concerned with promoting subversive and espionage activities in enemy-held territories in Northern Europe.
The authors describe the research into Wall Hall, showing its role as a training school in 1943-1944, and outlining the activities which are known to have been involved in the work of preparing agents to undertake missions into German-controlled Europe. The evidence suggests that over a period of less than two years about 200 agents from Belgium, Poland and Norway passed through the school. Their concluding discussion section sets out the many challenges that were faced in attempts to unravel the story of wartime Wall Hall. These included a lack of specific archival material, the emergence of myths and romanticised accounts, and a major absence of personal testimony from the people concerned. A very useful tabular appendix lists sources and assesses them according to provenance, information that they provided, and their reliability—an interesting method of providing such information in a form that allows comparison. A second appendix reproduces verbatim some of the key sources with a critique of their content.

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By Roger Ottewill

pp 27-35

This paper, focusing on what was then the market town of Basingstoke, seeks to highlight the often-underplayed role of the opponents of women’s suffrage in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Roger Ottewill argues that, because their campaign was eventually unsuccessful, their cause is often portrayed as doomed from the outset—quaint and outdated. He recounts the beginning of the campaigning for and against the enfranchisement of women, in 1908-1909, explaining the significance of the meetings and counter-meetings, and the contemporary importance of the speakers on both sides.

The paper then outlines the way in which the continuing campaigns developed, placing this in the sub-regional, county and national context, and highlighting the increasingly vocal and competitive elements of the campaigns. The conclusion is that—despite the popular impression today—the great majority of local people were uninterested in the arguments of either side, and that they were largely apathetic, although the way in which the campaigns were covered in the local press meant that few could haven unaware of the debate. Ottewill points out, though, that representatives of both sides clearly felt that there was value in holding meetings even in this small town.

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By Margaret O’Sullivan

pp 36-46

In this ground-breaking paper Margaret O’Sullivan reviews the wealth of published material on cooking, food and recipes from inter-war and immediate post-war Britain. In this first part she begins by discussing the social context, including the changing circumstances of Britain between the wars; the salient fact that most cookery writers were women, and the social classes from which they came; and the concept of ‘tradition’ as part of the framework within which some of them wrote. The following section reviews the state of British food and cooking in the early twentieth century, and its generally dismal reputation, and places this in the context of the much-altered conditions after 1918. She reviews the major increase in the publishing of cookery books and household manuals, often with upper-class authorship, and observes the influence of the Empire—and particularly India—on the cookery of better-off households.

The next section looks at a distinctive genre of cookery books—those produced by or for community benefit and, in particular, to raise funds for worthy and charitable causes. These included—and still do today—churches, medical institutions, and perhaps inevitably in the circumstances, military and wartime causes. This leads to a section on books and other publications which demonstrate social awareness, as authors and compilers sought to promote better quality, more proficient and more economical cooking for poorer households, in the context of national campaigns for better nutrition and a healthier population. The final section considers the increasingly important role played by magazines and the popular press in disseminating cookery information, supporting government campaigns in wartime, and publishing recipes. The paper has a notably full set of notes and references.

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By Elaine Murphy

pp 47-56

This paper traces the history of the two surviving fragments of common in the parish of Brockdish, on the north bank of the River Waveney in south Norfolk. It begins with a brief overview of commons and then reconstructs the documentary evidence for the former commons of which the fragments today are the only survival. Enclosure took place in the 1820s and the paper charts the complexities of the sale and purchase of the manor which was its prelude, and the arrangements made for the continuing communal management of the residual areas of common by the Brockdish Common Rights Trustees (1838), a body which soon fell into desuetude. Elaine Murphy then sets out the subsequent history of the fragments, including evidence for their active use up to and including the Second World War. The final sections discuss the background to, and challenges raised by, the Commons Registration Act 1965, and the protracted legal process by which2011, the future of the commons as a public asset was secured—a very satisfactory instance of the practical contemporary benefit of local history research.

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By Andrew J.H. Jackson and Andrew Walker

pp 57-61

This short paper reviews the career and great contribution of Dennis Mills, the Lincoln-based historical geographer and local historian who died in 2020. His work included major research and analysis of rural communities in 119th-century Britain (mostly in the East Midlands) which was a key element in the emergence of the model of ‘open’ and ‘closed’ villages, a very important

idealised construct in later twentieth century analysis in the fields of rural history, settlement geography, social structures of rural communities and much else. The paper outlines his other work, as well as highlighting his very great contribution to the historical research about, and understanding of, the city of Lincoln and the county of Lincolnshire.

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Edited by Mavis E. Smith and Peter Smith

(Betley Local History Society 2019 255pp ISBN 978-0-9538151-6-6) £9.99 available from the authors: p.smith.crewe@gmail.com

Letters from early Victorian women are rich sources for local and national history. As well as comments on public events and news of ‘hatches, matches and dispatches’, such correspondence can offer otherwise hard-to-find evidence of informal networks of association. This 255-page paperback by two local historians of North Staffordshire, Mavis Smith and Peter Smith, is an excellent example of such a resource, comprising transcripts of eighty letters from 1832 until about 1870 from Ellen Tollet (1812–1890) of Betley Hall to ‘the friend of her heart’, the Hon. Annabel Crewe (1814–1874) of nearby Crewe Hall (Cheshire) and Madeley Manor. Well-illustrated with drawings, prints and photographs, and arranged in chronological sections with informative sub-headings and a comprehensive index, the book has appendices on the backgrounds of the two women, and, more unusually, on the writer’s attendance at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Annabel’s replies are not known to survive, but Ellen’s letters are complemented by other works by Mavis E. Smith, notably her edition of Ellen’s journals (2008) and her study of the Tollet family (2005), both published by Betley Local History Society.

Though from the same local milieu, the circumstances of the two women were different. Ellen Tollet’s childhood was warm and stable, while Annabel, a motherless former ward of court with an absent self-exiled father, was brought up mostly by a childless aunt. Despite having two siblings, a brother and a sister, it became apparent that Annabel was the likely future heiress to the Crewe estates and so was exposed to greater social and marital expectations. Ellen was lively, amusing, and well-informed. Her letters are a wide-ranging blend of accounts of events, mostly everyday but including family tragedies such as the deaths in childbirth of two of her sisters within two years and of another from consumption, together with more reflective insights. The seventh of eight children of George Embury, later Tollet—a barrister who became Recorder for Newcastle-under-Lyme after inheriting the Betley estate in 1796—she was an assiduous writer with an allusive, oblique and entertaining style. Sufficiently close to Annabel not to have to spell things out, her remarks convey feelings as well as facts. Conventional though sincere comments testify to stoicism and forbearance in the face of grief and patient acceptance of God’s will but, while not railing against fate, Ellen expressed frustration with the limits of educational and cultural opportunities open to her. She had aspirations but neither the means nor the personal independence to achieve them. Highly literate, she belonged to a book society through which new publications were added to the well-stocked library at Betley Hall and she read widely, ranging from novels (Shirley by Charlotte Bronte, for instance) to political, religious and philosophical works of the moment. Music was another interest: Ellen heard the violinist Paganini play in Newcastle-under-Lyme and was in the audience for a performance of the oratorio Palestine by Dr William Crotch at the 1839 Worcester Music Meeting. As an amateur artist, she visited Royal Academy exhibitions but was conscious of her lack of training, at one time exploring the possibility of lessons from the painter Peter de Wint. Geology had a particular appeal for Ellen; she much regretted she had no chance to obtain practical experience, commenting wryly ‘all one can ever gain is just to know what it means, but it is pleasant to acquire our morsel of knowledge and so important to those who lead lives of refinement like ours’. She also travelled frequently in England, noting ‘two charming journies’ by train in 1838 and becoming an early passenger in June 1840 on the new railway line to Southampton, from where she went on through the New Forest to ‘a sea place called Bourne … perfectly quiet and pretty’, but which would be ‘extremely dull, if it were not for the most magnificent sea view’. Ellen’s social circle was mostly centred on family connections, but included figures of more than local significance such as Florence and Parthenope Nightingale (their mother was a close friend of Ellen’s mother), together with members of the extensive Wedgwood and Darwin families; she noted a visit in 1848 from the ‘very invalidish’ Charles Darwin. Though Ellen described Betley as ‘remote’, she acknowledged that constant visitors kept her in touch with affairs in London and the wider world. Politics were discussed at home: in 1835 the family was ‘sadly divided. Mamma was always a Waverer and now a Peelite. Penelope [Ellen’s sister] is rattled on account of the Irish Church Bill and Papa and Chas [Ellen’s brother Charles] still very staunch. What an awkward thing for the King having to call in again Lord Melbourne whom he described without heart 6 months ago’.

The relationship between the two women changed when Annabel at the age of 37 became the wife of the writer, politician and former suitor of Florence Nightingale, Richard Monckton Milnes, afterwards moving to his family home, Fryston Hall near Wakefield. Both knew much about Monckton Milnes’ unsuccessful pursuit of Florence, attributed by Ellen to the nursing campaigner’s wish for independence, and it was very shortly after the death in 1850 of the most important person in Annabel’s life, her aunt and protector, that she accepted his proposal. Ellen did not want to lose ‘very happy meetings indeed & our enjoyment of each other’s society which years I hope can only increase’, but she wrote regretfully in 1852 that ‘to keep a fair balance amongst one’s duties and affections is as difficult as to do it with European Powers & Russia and Austria representing husbands and children. It is very difficult to prevent friends, neighbours, as coming badly off like the small states’.

Apart from their local relevance, these letters are significant in that they demonstrate an important aspect of contemporary female friendship: the role of an empathetic confidante. In writing, Ellen had few constraints and her tone was as revealing as her contents. Reporting that Annabel featured in her dreams, she asserted ‘how I feel that you understand & enter into every feeling of my heart’. Annabel’s replies were as ‘wells in the desert’ to Ellen, ‘leading as I do a life which allows no materials for making itself amusing’. Ellen envied Annabel’s lifestyle. especially the frequency of overseas travel—Paris to Ellen was ‘as remote as Timbuctoo’. But to today’s readers Annabel’s position was unenviable. Duty as much as choice may well have influenced her decision to marry. Ellen tried to be circumspect in expressing her reservations and her fears, but they were based on real affection and on knowledge of the effects of loss which could accompany marriage, childbirth and child rearing, remarking ‘there is no state free from care & pains as the single’. Ellen’s ambivalence and conflicts of interest add another dimension, increasing the evidential value of her letters.

Ironically, it was Annabel’s marriage that led to the preservation of Ellen’s letters among the papers of Milnes, later Milnes-Coates, family which in 2013 were donated to the Borthwick Institute in York. The Institute’s holdings of personal papers are perhaps less well known to local historians than other series (see https://borthcat.york.ac.uk/index.php/personal-papers), but this exemplary publication, the fruit of considerable research and fully contextualised with footnotes, an introduction and a postscript, is a model which ought to encourage similar projects.

Margaret O’Sullivan, a retired archivist, is researching the career of Emma Crewe, the great-aunt of Annabel Crewe, the recipient of these letters

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By Chris Paton

(Pen & Sword 2019 x+162pp ISBN 9781526768421) £14.99

This latest addition to Pen & Sword’s family history series, written by the Ayrshire-based genealogist Chris Paton, aims to help family historians by providing a guide to Scottish records. Following the Act of Union in 1707 many functions of government were transferred to Westminster, but several uniquely Scottish institutions were maintained, including the legal system and the Church of Scotland. Many of the records now of interest to family historians are therefore still in archival collections within Scotland, rather than in London, the most important repository being the National Records of Scotland (NRS) in Edinburgh, where many Kirk and state records are held.

The introductory chapter focuses on resources available for Scottish genealogy, both online and off, from commercial sites and the important national repositories, such as the NRS and the National Library of Scotland, as well as smaller organisations such as the Scottish Archive Network. Language difficulties are addressed: while many records are in English, significant numbers are in Scots, Latin or Gaelic. Scots is probably the easiest to tackle for English speakers, but even Scottish people will find some texts difficult, especially legal documents: the online Dictionary of the Scots Language is recommended. For the Latin and the Gaelic documents some basic sources are indicated; for help with documents in secretary hand the only suggestion is a link to the relevant part of the NRS website.

Paton then provides a history of civil registration, giving many links, examples, and discussion of the records held by the NRS. The most commonly consulted of these deal with births, marriages and deaths, but he also covers divorce, vaccination, adoption and child migration. Next are the records of the Church of Scotland, the Kirk, many of which are in the NRS. Responsibility for keeping records of baptisms, marriages and funerals fell to individual parishes, which were supposed to make copies of their registers and send them regularly to Edinburgh, where the survivors are held in the Old Parish Registers collection of the NRS. This section of the book is important because the history of the Church of Scotland is complex. Presbyterian congregations fought time and again for the right to choose their own ministers, rather than having them imposed from above, and many chose to break away from the Kirk to form splinter churches, of which the ‘Wee Free’ is the most famous. This led to problems with the accurate keeping of records—were the Kirk’s ministers still responsible for people who were no longer members? Some thought so, but not all, and it may be necessary to look elsewhere for information. There is discussion of the minute books of the Kirk Sessions, which recorded much day to day life in the parish and covered matters like poor relief, the issue of testificates (documents allowing the transfer of parishioners between parishes) and disciplinary matters such as irregular marriage and illegitimate births. Paton also outlines the records of other churches, great and small, including dissenting Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Catholics as well as Unitarians and Swedenborgians, plus Jewish and Sikh records.

The chapter ‘Where were they?’ deals with records about daily life, the most important being the decennial censuses from 1841 to 1911 (the last year presently available). It details the history of these, how the questions changed over time, how to interpret the returns, and how to locate individual residences, with reference both to the collections of maps, gazetteers and street directories held by the NLS, and its collections of floor plans and other mapping. Paton provides information on the various tax records, burgh rolls, electoral registers, poor law records, other censuses, and the 1939 Register. Finally, there are the Statistical Accounts of Scotland, reports compiled on each parish in Scotland. There are three of these—the Old [1791–1799], the New (1834–1845), and the Third (1951–1992).

Until quite recently for most of Scotland land tenure was tied to the feuing system. Paton outlines this and the associated system of land conveyance, written in charters. Those issued by the Crown are easiest to locate, but those issued by vassals are more difficult, being held by many local archives with no central index; however, the final document in such conveyances was always an Instrument of Sasine, and from the early seventeenth century onwards these were collected into local or national registers. These can be difficult to navigate, but Paton offers much practical advice on the Registers of Deeds and estate records as sources of information on land tenure, as well as on the role of tacksmen in the Highlands and of the udal system in the Northern Isles. The following chapter covers the Scottish system of inheritance, the records involved, where to find them and the ways in which land was passed from generation to generation without the use of wills. It also reviews what happened when no heir could be found, with a lengthy example from the author’s own experience.

The final chapter deals with law and order, noting that the Scots system is entirely different from that of England and Wales. There are case studies demonstrating how the system worked in practice. Civil and criminal law are covered, attention being given to debt and to bankruptcy proceedings. Some unusual courts are covered, such as the Admiralty Courts which administered maritime law; the Lyon Court in Edinburgh, which deals with heraldry; and the courts maintained by the various trade incorporations. A strength of Tracing Your Scottish Ancestors is that the author provides the historical contexts in which records were made and shows how each category developed over time, making the book engaging and informative, especially for family historians beyond Scotland. This is a useful and very readable introduction to Scottish records, with many case studies to assist the reader, and there is much that may be new even to more experienced historians.Alex McDonald gained an MA in History from the University of Edinburgh and a Post-graduate Diploma in Information and Library Science from the University of Strathclyde. He is currently one of the volunteers working on the transcription of the BP Archive at the Museum of the Scottish Shale Oil Industry.

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By William D. Shannon

(Chetham Society vol.154 2020 xiv+346pp ISBN 978-0-9554276-7-1) £34.95

I first became aware of the ‘learned and indefatigable Dr Kuerden’ from Edward Baines’ four volume History of the Duchy and County Palatine of Lancaster (1836) which acknowledged his debt to this ‘laborious antiquary’. Kuerden himself had ambitiously issued a prospectus for his own five-volume history of the county but, writes Baines, he was ‘overwhelmed by the vast mass of materials’ which he had collected. Baines included a short biography of Kuerden and also described where his surviving papers could be viewed—Chetham’s Library in Manchester, the College of Arms, and the Harleian MSS in the British Museum. His collaborator on biographical entries, William Whatton, suggested that the Chetham MSS deserved to be published but warned that the papers were ‘in so illegible a hand, and so much abbreviate, that great difficulty would arise in selecting a person duly qualified to under the task’. Clearly no one did undertake it in full—it did not appeal to me as a research project (I have enough problems deciphering my own handwriting). Fortunately Bill Shannon has been undaunted by the difficulties and produced the first in-depth study of the man and his work which also describes in detail the contents of Kuerden’s papers and, in a wide-ranging introduction, meticulously sets his life in contemporary scientific, antiquarian and literary contexts, or ‘the networks of knowledge’ of the time.

Many aspects of Kuerden’s personal life remain obscure, including his name. He was born Richard Jackson but adopted the place he lived (Cuerden, near Preston) as his surname. His entry in the DNB by Daniel Woolf is under Jackson and makes no reference to Kuerden (unlike the original 1891 entry by C.W. Sutton). He attended both Oxford and Cambridge in the 1640s and might well have had a career at Oxford but for his strong Royalism and the religious controversies during the war and the Commonwealth. He did not formally take the oath to graduate until 1663. Shannon discusses whether he was also Catholic, by inclination if not practice, but no clear answer emerges. Whatever the reason for his failure to pursue a university career, he took up practice as ‘Doctor of Physicke’ in and around Preston in the 1650s. Shannon expertly discusses this in its wider intellectual and medical context. Kuerden emerges as something of a polymath, operating in a variety of intellectual spheres, but his passion throughout remained antiquarianism. From the 1650s he transcribed documents in the offices of the Palatine Chancery Court and Court of Common Pleas at Lancaster Castle, in Oxford’s Bodleian library and in London at the Tower of London, Duchy of Lancaster office, College of Arms, Chancery Lane, Westminster Hall and the Tally Office. He nurtured a wide range of contacts, including local Catholic antiquarians, Christopher Towneley and William Blundell. He was close to the Warwickshire antiquary and herald William Dugdale, with whom he worked on the latter’s visitation of Lancashire in 1664, and corresponded with Randle Holme and Gregory King, among others. In his day he was clearly acknowledged as a prominent antiquarian and genealogist.

In the concluding chapter Shannon discusses how Kuerden’s reputation as antiquarian waxed and waned over time. He was virtually forgotten by the late eighteenth century but over the following century and a half his transcriptions of original documents were increasingly valued, copied and quoted. Some of his more finished work was finally published, notably in the late 1870s in Manchester Courier by John Parsons Earwaker, locally-born professional antiquarian and historian but also one-time secretary of Oxford Archaeological Society and deputy keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Earwaker clearly had copies of Kuerden’s MSS and these were subsequently purchased by William Farrer and used to research the Victoria County History of Lancashire in the 1900s. His MSS, however, contain few original documents and resort to them became less frequent at the century progressed. But Shannon argues that his legacy goes beyond providing the basis for later publications, and the light which his life and work sheds on the world of a provincial seventeenth-century antiquary—his real importance lies in his work as a cartographer.

Kuerden’s maps were rediscovered in 1952 and quickly attributed to him by the Lancashire county archivist R. Sharpe-France. Although some recent revisionists have attempted to challenge this attribution Shannon rejects these views; with his own lifelong interest in the history of cartography and of early modern Lancashire he is ideally placed to do so and to explain the significance of the maps as artefacts, images and purveyors of information. The collection, now in Lancashire Archives, comprises various plans of houses, notes on surveying, some unique sketch plans, linear road itineraries through Lancashire, south to north, with descriptions of landscape and buildings along the way, detailed town maps of Lancaster and Preston in the mid-1680s with the names of inhabitants alongside their properties, and various maps of Lancashire north of the sands (now Cumbria), showing boundaries and what would appear to be every road and cart track. Shannon explains how Kuerden would have surveyed, what pens and paper he used, when he undertook the work, what the maps reveal about the landscape and topography of the county and their contribution to our understanding of early cartography. What remains a mystery is why they were undertaken. As overseer of highways for Preston, Kuerden clearly had a working knowledge of roads but the survey goes went well beyond that. Like his proposed history, it was probably a grand scheme which never came to fruition. Shannon speculates that ‘What Kuerden seems to have had in mind by this stage was a road book, covering all the roads of Lancashire, however minor, in the same strip-map format which Ogilby had used, but at more than three times his scale’. Whatever the motive and however flawed aspects of them were, they provide unique insights into the county at the time.

Shannon argues that Kuerden should be viewed as ‘the father of Lancashire History’. No equally ambitious multi-volume of the county appeared until Baines’ publication nearly 150 years later. As noted, Kuerden’s notes greatly assisted his efforts but Baines had what Kuerden lacked—cash. He could afford to hire assistants to visit every parish and to transcribe documents in Manchester, London and elsewhere. Kuerden by contrast, was impoverished by his researches and forced to sell his precious manuscripts in the 1690s. He seems to have died in poverty about 1702, but no gravestone or formal record has been found. In his failure to publish he was not unusual among antiquaries. Shannon likens him to the fictional Edward Casaubon in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, but he left an important legacy in the form of his maps and his notes, Given that some of Kuerden’s antiquarian papers are in Chetham’s Library in Manchester, it is appropriate that this study has been produced by the Chetham Society, one of the longest established antiquarian publishing societies in the country. It has done the author proud although this reader would have appreciated slightly larger reproductions of maps and documents (not that he would necessarily have been able to read the handwriting)! In addition to the discussion of the man and his work, the volume includes detailed appendices which include the full text of his ‘Proposal’, a calendar of his manuscripts, descriptions of Leyland Hundred from the Harleian MSS in the British Library, and a calendar and extensive notes on documents in all the repositories Kuerden visited, and his maps in Lancashire Archives. The volume has much to offer historians of topography, antiquarianism, historiography, Lancashire, and the broader intellectual history of seventeenth-century England. Michael Winstanley lectured in regional and social history at Lancaster University between 1978 and 2010. He has published on a wide range of subjects related to the North West and continues to do so in ‘retirement’. Like Kuerden, he has too many unfinished projects, but is currently working towards completing an assessment of John Brownbill MA, professional antiquary and joint author of the Lancashire VCH.

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By Catherine Howe

(APS Books 2020 iv+184pp ISBN 978-1-789960-85-3) £ 9.99

Catherine Howe’s book concentrates on 1848, the year when, for the third time in a decade, the Chartists rallied for one great push to achieve fundamental political reform. Whereas the first two phases of Chartist activity in the late 1830s and in 1842 were located in the provinces—the Midlands and the industrial North—this last chapter was centred on the capital and the book therefore focuses largely on London. The author paints a vivid picture of the capital in the late 1840s, with the many destitute thousands living in cellars, workhouses and decrepit houses cheek-by-jowl with the splendid houses of the rich and with the offices of government. Because London was at the heart of the establishment, and persuading Parliament to adopt the Six Points was the central purpose of the Chartist movement, the 1848 Chartist demonstration occurred there. It also helped that the influential Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, had moved its offices there. Howe’s narrative is given human interest by extensive reference to the lives of individual Chartists. Some of her dramatis personae—Ernest Jones, Julian Harney and Feargus O’Connor, for example—are well-documented, but others less so; the harrowing tales of such men as James Bezer, the impoverished and radicalised fish-seller, and William Cuffay, the diminutive Soho tailor, add distinct colour to her story.

The events of late March and early April, the days leading up to the Kennington Common demonstration, are recounted in detail. She describes the arrival of thousands of working people from all over the country, pouring in for the rally which was to lead to a march on parliament. The purpose was to present a petition of five million signatures (or was it the 1.9 million which the government claimed?) demanding immediate democratic reform. The passages covering the authorities’ preparations for the descent of these hordes on London have pace and excitement. With the queen and prince consort escaping to Osborne on the Isle of Wight, the Whig government deployed nearly 10,000 soldiers, over 4000 police officers as well as 85,000 special constables. A thousand truncheons were sent from carpenters’ workshops in Gosport and police and troops with muskets protected public buildings, guarded river bridges and readied themselves for confrontation. The end of the meeting of 10 April was bathetic; after a ban on a march on parliament, O’Connor concluded that to challenge it would be to invite the certainty of a bloodbath. The petition was instead sent by van to Westminster; the crowds heard a speech and dispersed with little violence.

There was a second phase of London activity, culminating in the Bonner’s Field meeting in June when once again Chartists sought to force the government to concede reform. Howe describes the detailed planning of the Chartist Ulterior Committee for the erection of barricades to turn London into another Paris with the aim, if not of effecting a revolution, then ‘to set fire to entire streets’. Once again, they were undermined by spies and informers, as well as by an obdurate government with well-drilled, impressively prepared military and police forces. There were no barricades in London and after June the story of Chartist insurgency broadens out into the rest of the United Kingdom, with threats of violence in, for example, Manchester and Ireland.

A strength of the book is the way Howe sets this last English efflorescence of Chartism in a wider context, emphasising the Chartist links with revolutionaries in Paris and in Ireland, where Confederates threatened violent upheaval to bring about independence. There is plenty of detail on the plight of starving Irish peasants faced with another potato blight and with an unimaginative and resolute English administration, the raw material for insurgency. She is strong on the story of joint Confederate/Chartist planning in London throughout the year; both parties knew that carefully co-ordinated uprisings in Ireland and in London could seriously embarrass the government.

Her underlying theme is that this period of Chartism was ‘insurrectionary … albeit briefly’. It is clear that her sympathies lie with these frustrated revolutionaries. She quotes their incendiary language and records instances where arms were being collected in readiness, but she does not compare these with similar examples of sabre-rattling in 1838/9 or 1842. It would be instructive to compare these weeks in London 1848 with previous peaks of Chartist activity: was the situation in 1848 any more dangerous than in earlier years? She shows why sound and fury in the end came to nothing, citing police informers, well-armed police, the engagement of special constables, an implacable government’s legislation (the Treason Felony Act of April 1848), and the timely arrest of key Chartist leaders, to explain why a massed assembly on Kennington Common failed to force the Six Points on the government. She adds that those Chartist leaders not yet incarcerated were unwilling to go in for the kill: Feargus O’Connor preferred to use the threat of violence rather than to employ force. She writes very well about the pressures on O’Connor to call off a march from Kennington to parliament. Ernest Jones railed against men who would not act ‘because it is forbid’, but the reader is left with the distinct impression that, despite the scale of Chartist unrest, the government held the whip-hand throughout. The strength of its forces meant that the chances of England having a Continental-style 1848 revolution were slim: ‘the point at which insurrectionary action gains its own momentum was not reached, because there was no real leadership to direct it’.

Catherine Howe has done a valuable service, giving a very readable account of a year in Chartist history which is sometimes treated as a mere after-shock to the dramatic events of the end of the 1830s and of 1842. Her detailed narration of the subsequent fate of Chartist prisoners here or transported overseas forms a bleak and moving epitaph to a story of dashed hopes.Andrew Reekes has published extensively on nineteenth and early twentieth century British history. Speeches that changed Britain includes an essay on Chartist oratory in Birmingham; Two Titans: Joseph Chamberlain and George Cadbury and The Birmingham Political Machine consider aspects of nineteenth century political reform and organisation, as well as philanthropic responses in Birmingham to the condition of England question.

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By Richard Atkinson

(4th Estate 2020 512pp ISBN 978-0-0075092-9) £20

The author of this family history is the publisher of very successful cookery books and so has a lot of editorial experience—yet he has never previously written a book of his own and, as an historian, proclaims himself an amateur. He is candid about his motivation for embarking on this project—he realised that he and his wife would never have children of their own, so his contribution to the family would be to write its history. He had little idea, however, of what he might find. Soon after starting, ‘in a scruffy old cardboard box’ full of early-nineteenth century letters, he came across a ‘List of Negroes’, giving details of 196 slaves on a Jamaican sugar plantation in 1801. At least in part, and a substantial part at that, the wherewithal of his ancestors had been derived from slave labour. Deeply shocked, he wondered whether to continue but decided to tell the story ‘warts and all’. He devoted a decade to the task, and the result is a magnificent book.

The family lived in Temple Sowerby, Westmorland for over 300 years. Down to the mid-eighteenth century they made their way as tanners. Requiring numerous vats and other plant and with over a year to wait while skins were turned into leather, tanning was a capital-intensive business and not for the faint-hearted and difficult to begin independently—the Atkinsons did so via a partnership. Their business benefited from its proximity to a main droving route through Cumbria—regular dealings with drovers encouraged them to diversify informally into banking, since drovers needed access to financial services during their journeys. The book is to be welcomed for dealing with these origins, for we know too little about the middling sort in this period, especially in remoter parts of the country. The Atkinsons were able to use the deposits made by drovers to extend credit to more fragile enterprises. Presiding over a sizeable pool of floating capital, they were among those who set wheels turning.

In the gentle wake of his humdrum forebears a younger son, Richard ‘Rum’ Atkinson (1739–1785), built a brilliant career at the centre of the nation’s affairs. A director of the East India Company, an alderman of the City of London, a West India merchant and later an MP, he was the biggest contractor for the British government during the American War of Independence, shipping provisions, uniforms, furniture, fodder and liquor, including rum, to the armed forces across the Atlantic. Prodigiously gifted, highly intelligent, exceedingly hard-working and charismatic, he was adviser to two prime ministers (Lord North and Pitt the Younger) and accumulated a wide range of other distinguished connections, many friends and as many enemies. Above all, he amassed a huge fortune, including the two Jamaican sugar estates which constituted the core of his legacy, before quite suddenly dying, probably of tuberculosis, aged 46 in 1785. Some years earlier he had emerged relatively successfully from what his opponents maintained was one of the great political scandals of the age, concerning lucrative contracts for the supply of rum to the armed forces. Commercially, he was among the largest and most successful of contemporary entrepreneurs and, because of the strategic importance of his business, a player in many of the major political developments of his day, not merely at home but, despite never setting foot there, in India, the Caribbean and North America.

The chief focus of the first part is Richard’s extraordinary public career, but there are enough details of his private life, including a heartbeat by heartbeat account of his unrequited love for a close friend and society beauty, Lady Anne Lindsay, for him to emerge multi-dimensionally and convincingly. The only regret is that, through no fault of the author, we know almost nothing about how his remarkable talents were nurtured. There are very few details of his childhood and none of his education. How on earth did he manage it? At 16 he was working as a clerk in the London office of the merchant, Samuel Touchet. According to an obituary in the Morning Chronicle, he was a ‘mere adventurer, unsustained by any inheritance [and] by few family friends of any power’. A more succinct summary was that he had risen ‘from a mean station to wealth and honours’. It seems that his achievements were all his own.

Much of the second part of the book describes and analyses how the fruits of Richard’s success were dissipated as his heirs and other interested parties wrangled litigiously over his complex will. Cut off in his prime, Richard could scarcely have envisaged the turbulence to which Caribbean affairs were later subject during the long years of war with France, and the ultimately triumphant growth of the anti-slavery movement in Britain. The ebb and flow of both developments is dealt with judiciously as the indispensable context for discussion of family affairs. The fact that Richard never married encouraged him to provide lavishly for members of his own and the next generation, including numerous nephews and nieces; and for various friends and associates, including Lady Anne Lindsay. The outcome was replete with difficulty and in his will Richard, for once, seriously overreached himself.

The author has conducted research in Jamaica and visited the remnants of his family’s sugar estates. He deals comprehensively and unflinchingly with the experience of the slaves. There is no self-indulgence here. He was further shocked, for instance, to discover that a cousin was the sponsor of the legislation which introduced the treadmill or ‘everlasting staircase’, a notorious contraption for deriving power from the ‘dancing’ of ‘upwards of 20 prisoners’ in lieu of the workhouse, hard labour or flagellation.

This is a very full family history with many episodes in diverse locations. Particularly impressive are the careers of one of ‘Rum’ Atkinson’s nephews, Nathaniel Clayton (1756–1832), and one of Nathaniel’s sons, John (1792–1890). Originally, the Atkinsons retained the former, an attorney in Newcastle-on-Tyne, to defend their interests in lawsuits arising from Richard’s will. He fell in love with Richard’s niece Dorothy, married her, became town clerk of Newcastle, and played a conspicuous role in the family’s legal affairs for many years. John followed his father as town clerk—between them they served 82 years in the role and John transformed Newcastle into a modern industrial metropolis, as well as doing valuable work, including excavations, on Hadrian’s Wall. His nephew, Nathaniel George, inherited personal estate valued at £728,746, over 26,000 acres in Northumberland and 22 properties in Temple Sowerby.

While this book is immensely varied and often vivid, the manner in which its material is dealt with is equally impressive. To cope with the simultaneous developments in different branches of the family in dispersed locations, many chapters proceed in scenes. We move from one episode to the next without losing the thread of the whole. This is done skilfully and is no doubt where editorial experience left its mark. Like many families, the Atkinsons favoured a restricted series of Christian names. This sometimes causes confusion to the uninitiated and, indeed, occasionally confused the author in the early stages of his work, which is perhaps why he provides simplified pedigrees. However, the problem is more than offset by another feature. Confusion and other reactions are shared with the reader in occasional asides, where narrative and analysis make way for the author’s instinctive responses to the discovery of particular records or certain turns of event. Others involved in family history will cherish these, which are used sparingly but to great effect. When I last wrote here I lamented the exorbitant price of a book which put it beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest individuals and the keenest institutions. I take pleasure in doing the opposite with this work. It is substantial, beautifully made, with a typeface easy on the eye, full references, copious illustrations, maps, pedigrees and details of both manuscript and published sources. At £20, you will not find a better bargain for an excellent history book!PETER ROEBUCK was taught by and worked with the late Professor Ralph Davis. He has a long-standing interest in trade, and his current research concerns the major internal trade of cattle droving. Until recently he was chairman of the Cumbria Local History Federation.

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By Joanne Sear and Ken Sneath

(Routledge 2020 322pp ISBN 978-0-367-34111-4) £32.99

This book is an important challenge to earlier studies of the ‘consumer revolution’, which some historians placed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, because it explores evidence from a longer period—1350 to the start of the nineteenth century. The large quantity of primary evidence consists mainly of probate records, used to demonstrate what individuals owned at death; and household and purchasing accounts, to establish the prices of goods. It covers a wide range of locations, primarily Huntingdonshire, Yorkshire, and Dorset, with comparison with Bristol and Marlborough, Cornwall and Kent (these two covering 1660-1750 only).

In the first chapter, Sear and Sneath review where historians have placed the consumer revolution. A cynic might suggest that it is in historians’ own periods of study, but it would be less cynical to join with Brian Cowan, as the authors note, in proposing that every era had a consumer revolution. Citing the work of medievalists such as Chris Dyer and Maryanne Kowaleski, the study makes a key argument about locality as well as chronology: ‘the first stirrings of change in the late medieval period focussed on London and the south-east and gradually spread outwards to other areas of England’, with towns a focus of supply and demand. Other medievalists, surveyed by John Hatcher and Mark Bailey, explored the range of medieval occupations, the nature of transport for goods, and the fate of village and town markets before and after 1350. From this they argued for the a rapid expansion and growing sophistication of commercial activity between the Norman Conquest and the Black Death, while noting that some historians’ ideological standpoint influenced their interpretation of the decline or growth of commercialisation in the fifteenth century. This is a reminder that identifying the start of any consumer revolution depends on how it is defined and approached.

Towns, and in particular London and those in the south east, are rightly suggested to have been the key to any post-1350 consumer revolution. The authors argue that London, a large city dependent on a very extensive hinterland for its food and other supplies, recovered relatively quickly from the Black Death—and this may also have applied to towns close to London. However, the picture is more mixed in towns of different sizes, even in the south east. Sandwich in Kent and Rye in Sussex were the most significant towns of the Cinque Ports in the fifteenth century yet neither experienced a post-Black Death boom, perhaps because their inhabitants and economies were very closely tied to their agricultural hinterlands, in which depression continued until the start of the sixteenth century. The discussion of probate records could have been extended by reference to the use of inventories in studies of Kent houses, notably at Sandwich where Clarke, Pearson and Mate discussed in detail the locating of rooms in late medieval and early modern houses, noting the impossibility of making deductions about their position, the goods within these rooms, and whether these were for household use or stored for commercial purposes. At Rye many trades and crafts disappeared with the Black Death and subsequent fourteenth-century outbreaks of plague, and there was no recovery until the first decade of the sixteenth century. From the detailed evidence of the town it is hard to argue either for a boom in consumption beginning after the Black Death, or for one which continued steadily during the early-modern period, although then there was indeed a growing demand for fancy cloths, buttons, lace, and thread. In rural Sussex after the Black Death a complex pattern of rises and falls in wages, prices and rents (which differed from the situation in Kent) and no evidence of a boom which could have fuelled increased consumption. These points serve to emphasise that, as the authors note, locality and region were important factors in the consumer revolution (as well as gender, class and wealth).

As well as food and drink, the authors examine clothing, the ‘home environment’, and ‘religious consumption’—that is expenditure, mainly before the Reformation, on goods such as brasses or church improvements which expressed the wealth and social status of the donor. Early modern funerals are considered as well as gravestones, although to a lesser extent the many tombs of the wealthy which still exist in churches and graveyards. The authors consider how consumption, or expenditure, continued or varied over time and particularly pre- and post-Reformation and Restoration, for example in the provision of coffins, the tolling of the parish church bell and how parishioners interpreted this practice. In the discussion of the ‘home environment’ leisure is covered, with the suggestion that tobacco pipes were the first disposable consumer items since they are often found by excavation but seldom mentioned in bequests or inventories. Musical instruments are covered from, among other sources, the proceedings of the Old Bailey Online where they feature among valuable items stolen.

The final three chapters return to the central questions of the book—when did the ‘consumer revolution’ begin and who were the first people to own new consumer goods—and explore the relationship between social status and the ownership of particular goods. It is argued that clear trends emerge about the ‘changing ownership patterns of consumer goods, their spread across the country and the extent of their diffusion across society’. There is discussion as to whether there was a ‘consumer revolution’ or a consumer evolution, while ch.8 considers social structures and social status, and how they changed and were described over time. The labour of enslaved people provided some of the most notable consumer items examined in this book—sugar, tea and coffee—and Sears and Sneath note in particular that from the early seventeenth century sugar came from plantations in Barbados belonging to English settlers: a few references to slaves appear in the index.

The discussion of post-Black Death changes in wealth among different social groups depends heavily on British Economic Growth 1270-1870 (edited by Broadberry, Campbell et al) which by its nature depends on amalgamating studies from across the country. Sear and Sneath comment that most significant rises in household income occurred in the lowest strata of society, and that the gentry and nobility suffered over constraints on their income after the Black Death. This chapter really takes off when the authors draw on their own research from inventory and testamentary evidence after 1550.

The authors acknowledge the advice of academics and local history societies in the development and writing of this book, which is attractively produced with black and white photographs, well indexed and has a short glossary. There are some minor typographical errors such as ‘drafts’ for draughts, and ‘course materials’ for coarse materials which could usefully be corrected when the book is republished, as no doubt it will be. It successfully provides the wider context of a range of subjects such as housing, clothing, furniture, and jewellery for local historians, academics and students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, and is important in giving a wide perspective on studies at parish, town or village levels. The wealth of detail drawn from a very wide range of secondary and primary sources make this a vital read. It is referenced with extensive notes at the end of each chapter, but a bibliography would be an extremely useful addition to future editions. This book should be widely available in universities and libraries, and on the shelves of local historians.GILLIAN DRAPER is BALH’s Events and Development Officer, an associate lecturer at the University of Kent, and visiting research fellow at the Centre for Kentish History and Heritage at Canterbury Christ Church University. Her recent publications are on settlement and routes in south-east England, the rebuilding of Ashford church in 1475-1483, and literacy and identity in the playbook of New Romney.

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Edited by Marianne Howell, Geoff Timmins, John Wilson, Diana Winterbotham and Jacquie Crosby

(Lancashire Local History Federation 2020 xx+156pp ISBN 978-1-5272-6533-2) £15+£4 p&p from LLHF

Arranged in chronological order and, of course, taking Lancashire places, people or artefacts for their subject, these chapters presented to Alan Crosby provide fascinating insights into various aspects of life in the ancient county of Lancaster from about 1400 to 1913. The book concludes with the impressive list of Alan’s publications, and details in the list of contributors clearly indicate their connections with Alan. This collection is an excellent example of the variety of local history topics that might be available to research in any county—although one hesitates to suggest that Lancashire is just ‘any county’.

Bill Shannon, one of a group of academics [re]studying the places depicted on the Gough Map of c.1400, discusses possible identifications of the 44 places in the north west on the map; ‘obvious’ places that are missing; the depicted topography of the area including a detailed river network; and the enigmatic red lines on the map which indicate routes between places, albeit in notional distances. Finally he considers the significance of the inclusion of Tarn Wadling (tarne wathelan) a little-known lake near Penrith mentioned in romantic poems of the early fifteenth century, suggesting both a slightly later date for the map and that local knowledge contributed to its contents.

Whereas the chapter on the Gough Map ranges over the whole region, most of the others concentrate on specific communities. Peter Shakeshaft considers the tribulations of the Catholic Clifton family, who held the right to present clergy to the chapel at Lund and the church at Lytham, and as a result came into conflict with local parishioners, and with the church authorities, over a period of about 300 years. Diana Winterbottom reconstructs the earlier layout of the township of Pilkington near Bury. As there are no pre-seventeenth century manorial documents, field names extracted from other documents, such as charters, have been used to determine some of the early landscape features; land use; the bounds of the medieval deer park; and even local occupations. Zoe Lawson considers the production of Lancashire cheese in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Goosnargh area. Many parts of Britain produced their own speciality cheese, but why were they in their specific form? Here the answer is that the Lancashire Longhorn yielded a smaller quantity of milk than other cows, but its cream was richer and more abundant. Lawson explains how the cheese was made and calculates how much the average herd of five cows would produce in a season (about 12½ hundredweight). Although she is cautious about what they can reveal, one of her main sources is probate inventories: the presence of a cheesepress indicates cheese production on a commercial scale and, given their size they represented an investment in space as well as of money. Such investment was more than recouped at the markets of Preston and Garstang, and there are hints that Lancashire cheese was even traded in the Caribbean. As it does not lend itself to factory production, it is still made as farmhouse cheese in Goosnargh and the surrounding area.

Angus Winchester discusses the changing socio-economic character of the Quaker congregations in Preston Monthly Meeting between 1850 and 1900. One of the characteristics of Quakers was inter-related families, often in business: this resulted from marriage regulations which required them to marry ‘within’ if they were to retain membership of the Society, but in the period considered there was a relaxation of the regulations. The Preston membership register allows analysis of occupations and thus the social structure of the Meeting: nearly half were in commerce, and the majority of other occupations were in business or the professions, but as time went on there were more employees than employers. There was also a fairly high turnover with people moving in or out of Preston. Losses through ‘disownment’ or resignation, and gains through ‘convincement’ and reinstatement, can be tracked. Winchester finds that those who joined did so because they favoured Quaker principles, including the unlawfulness of war and of oaths, thus providing insights into religious thought at the time. Geoff Timmins’ chapter is fitting for 2020 since he discusses working at home. His focus is Winckley Square, Preston, and the business activities that professional people developed there during the nineteenth century. He addresses two inter-related issues: the circumstances in which home-based working continued during and beyond the Industrial Revolution when more people worked away from home; and the nature and economic significance of small-scale family businesses conducted in domestic premises. Perhaps unsurprisingly several of the businesses in Winckley Square were those of lawyers and doctors: the space required for non-domestic activities was relatively small. In contrast the other businesses, small boarding schools for young ladies (six during various periods in century), took up a great deal of space. Indeed, thanks to details in a newspaper advertisement when no.23 was sold, Timmins has been able to indicate the uses and numbers of rooms in that house/school. Other sources include the census and trade directories.

David Hunt traces the (mis)fortunes of the ffaringtons of Worden in Leyland, a family in which the ladies were the stronger sex and generated a variety of documents. Miss Susan Maria ffarington, for example, composed a wedding hymn (1847) for her brother James and his wife Sarah Esther, which set out what was required of them as owners of such an estate, but he died less than a year later. Sarah’s ‘Rules for the household’ appear to have been hung up in the butler’s and housekeeper’s rooms so that they could be followed. The third lady involved was James’s other sister, Mary Hannah. The ladies in the family were barred from inheritance but they kept the estate going for the male line until Susan’s death in 1894, and then distant male heirs took over. The glories of the house and its furnishings can be glimpsed in an insurance survey of 1938 and a sale catalogue of 1947. Although the house has gone, the family line continues in the person of Sir Henry William Farrington, the eighth baronet.

Since 1968 Margaret Edwards has been researching stained glass studios that had operated in Lancaster. The focus of her chapter is the Seward stained glass studio, which was working from about 1778 to the early twentieth century. She provides a list of the thirteen known surviving examples of Seward windows—not an easy feat, because not all their windows were signed and/or dated. Finally, Mike Winstanley explores the nature of local history and the Lancaster historical pageant of 1913: such pageants are the subject of much current research and were very popular at that time. This one was performed every afternoon in August bank holiday week for 3½ hours, with some 1800 participants of all ages and from all sections of the community. Newspaper reports provide details of the planning of the pageant, including discussions on the purpose of such performances: to bring people together; to raise money for public objects; and to educate the nation and local people about the town’s allegedly glorious heritage. Winstanley’s account of the town’s historians and the discussions about which episodes should, or should not, be included in the pageant are fascinating, not least because several of the proposed scenes were deemed by some to be unauthentic. In the event the King John scene was the product of W.O. Roper’s ‘happy imagination’ and the John of Gaunt scene was ‘imaginative but totally ahistorical’.

Whenever I read the chapters in a festschrift I wonder what the honorand thought (or would have thought) of the offerings in ‘their’ book. I know for a fact that Alan was delighted with this impressive collection.HEATHER FALVEY is Reviews Editor for The Local Historian and has recently contributed to a collection of essays presented to David Dymond entitled Shaping the Past: Theme, time and place in Local History (2020).

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Edited by Evelyn Lord and Nicholas R. Amor

(University of Hertfordshire Press: Studies in Regional and Local History no.18 2020 xvii+215pp ISBN 978-1-912260-23-2) £35

This festschrift in honour of David Dymond is a worthy addition to the Studies in Regional and Local History series published by the University of Hertfordshire Press, its title summing up the enormous contribution that David has made to the study of local history in general, and to that of Suffolk in particular. The book has seventeen chapters which seek to explore the ideas of theme, time and place, many of them relating to East Anglia and some focusing on David’s county of Suffolk. Following Mark Bailey’s introduction, the chapters are grouped into time periods. Eight cover the medieval period, subdivided into those considering aspects of medieval religion and those dealing with medieval trade and industry; the remaining eight papers are divided between the early modern and modern periods.

The section on medieval religion includes accounts of Barnwell Abbey in Cambridge (Jacqueline Harmon); several churches in the city of York, and their stained glass (Claire Cross); the hermits of medieval Norwich (Carole Rawcliffe); and what the cult of King Henry VI tells us about late medieval religion, not only in Suffolk but also elsewhere (Heather Falvey). David Sherlock focuses on the will of Robert Scolys, providing a fascinating insight to a man who was not only vicar of Southwold 1444-1470 but also professor of theology at Cambridge. On his death this learned man left a number of books and an astrolabe, but his legacy of an armoury comprising multiple examples of at least eight different types of weapon is more surprising and gives an insight into the fear of civil and international conflicts at the time. The first paper on medieval trade and industry deals with the fairs of late medieval Thetford—Joanne Sear makes good use of maps to explore them, their locations, spheres of influence, and eventual decline. Nicholas Amor explores the reasons for the success of the Norfolk worsted and Suffolk woollen industries in the medieval period, dealing with such topics as availability of labour, industrial organisation and trade networks, and highlighting the links between East Anglia’s cloth-makers and the mercers of London as well as the merchants of the Hanseatic League. Alan Rogers takes Stamford (Lincolnshire) as his focus in an analysis of artisans and the domestic building trade, but highlights the importance of looking at a whole region when considering its economy.

The third section, focusing on the early modern period, reflects the eclectic nature of David Dymond’s scholarship. Lyn Boothman deals with office-holding in Long Melford, and Alan Crosby’s analysis of the infighting on Thetford Corporation 1658-1700 provides another perspective on local power and authority. Evelyn Lord considers the link between Suffolk cheeses and Scottish whaling and illustrates the point, made by David in his book Researching and writing history: a guide for local historian, that even if questions remain unanswered or only partially answered, they are worth raising as a contribution to historical debate. The final section of the book deals with the modern period. The subject matter is wide ranging—disorder in Suffolk workhouses (Harvey Osborne), the suburbanisation of Sutton, Surrey (David Woodward), and Godmanchester and the census (Ken Sneath), are followed by Sean O’Dell’s assessment of Canon Arthur Pertwee and Brightlingsea, and Andrew Jackson’s intriguing analysis of the concept of place in local history and regional literature through the fictional England of Bernard Samuel Gilbert.

The book concludes with a bibliography of David’s work, which itself covers a very wide range of topics. Many of his books, some co-authored, have been reissued or revised, and some therefore have two or more dates of publication. The papers reflect David’s wide interests and his wish to explore in his own writings the ideas of theme, time and place, and to encourage other historians to do likewise. There are some excellent colour photographs, and clearly laid out tables, figures and maps to illustrate the material. This book is a fitting way to commemorate the excellent work of David Dymond in many areas of local history and the inspiration that he has given to so many aspiring local historians over the years.

HILLARY WALKER considers herself lucky to have been one of the many students whose love for local history was kindled by David Dymond. Her particular interest is in the eighteenth-century artisans of Saffron Walden in Essex, close to the border with Suffolk.

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By Jeff Childs

(Jeff Childs and the West Glamorgan Archive Service 2018 xx+340pp ISBN 978-0-9551703-6-2) £30

Nowadays, most people who know the area regard Llangyfelach as just a small, suburban village within the City and County of Swansea, situated some 4 miles NNE of Swansea city centre. However, the parish of the same name was far more extensive. The largest parish in the lordship of Gower and the second largest parish in the historic county of Glamorgan (after Cadoxton-juxta-Neath), at 27,305 acres (43 square miles) it covered all the modern areas of Blaenymaes, Cadle, Clydach, Felindre, Landore, Llangyfelach, Morriston, Penlan, Penllergaer, Plasmarl, Portmead, Trebanos, Treboeth, Ynysforgan and Ynystawe, as well as parts of Fforestfach, Garnswllt, Pontardawe and Pontlliw. It encompassed extensive areas of upland in its northern parts, as well as lowland to the immediate north-west of Swansea and in the Swansea Valley, and stretched for 12 miles from its boundary with the urban parish of St John-juxta-Swansea in the south to its border with the Carmarthenshire parish of Betws in the north.

The author of this book is one of the leading historians of Glamorgan and Gower, and has worked on this subject for over thirty years. The fruits of his extensive research, combined with the great size of the parish, find their reflection in the considerable scale of this study, the main focus of which purports to be the ownership and occupation of land, between 1650 and 1914, with a concentration on the period after 1750. However, while it is an outstanding investigation into the estates and landed families, it is in fact far wider in its scope. In particular, ch.1 gives a detailed account of the history of the parish, together with its topography, demographic trends and, especially, the early industrial development in its southerly parts—Plasmarl, Landore and Hafod, with their coal mining and smelting industries, became the cradle of the local Industrial Revolution. Indeed, it is telling that the first copper works in the Lower Swansea Valley, established at Landore in 1717, was called Llangyfelach Copper Works because it lay just within the southern extremity of the parish. Over the next 200 years, this lowland area along the river Tawe was an industrial centre of world importance.

But the main thrust of the work is concerned with the rural nature of the parish, the succeeding chapters dealing with the occupancy and use of land, together with its ownership and the changes which occurred as a result of inheritance, marriage, sale and purchase. Chapter 2 takes stock of the situation regarding the land in 1840, while the following three chapters consider changes in ownership between 1750 and 1850, differentiating between the large estates, such as Briton Ferry and Penllergaer, and the smaller ones, such as Cilybebyll and Penderry. The final chapter deals with developments post-1850.

Each chapter is accompanied by extremely comprehensive endnotes which, in all cases, could be chapters in themselves and, in most instances, are almost as long as, or in some cases even longer than, the actual chapters (for example, ch.1 has 14 pages of text and 16 pages of notes; the 19 pages of text in ch.5 are complemented by 19 pages of notes). This is not a criticism. Such is the depth and breadth of the author’s research, combined with his exceptional knowledge of his subject, that the notes will be one of the most useful elements for all users of this book. Indeed, his admirable aim was to create a work of reference, so ‘the endnote sections should perhaps be entitled “Notes, references and amplifications” – with the emphasis on the latter’. This intensity of treatment is reflected in the bibliography. As one would expect, extensive use has been made of sources in The National Archives at Kew, the National Library of Wales and a host of archive repositories and libraries in Wales, but the author has cast his net far wider than that, consulting records in many English archives, as far distant as Bristol, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Rutland and Norfolk.

There is little, if anything, about this book with which this reviewer can find fault—and the price (£30) represents exceptional value. The research has been painstaking, the writing and overall arrangement are excellent, while there are many useful tables, maps (particularly of the farms) and illustrations (especially of the large houses, many of which no longer survive), plus a series of appendices which include data from the tithe apportionment of 1838; continuity of land ownership; holdings of hamlets in the manor of Clase; the 1815 survey of farms in the parish belonging to the important Briton Ferry Estate; and useful extracts from the Minutes of Evidence presented to the Royal Commissioners on Land in Wales and Monmouthshire (1893). There is so much in this highly informative book which not only makes it a delight to read, but also ensures that it will be a work of essential reference for all interested in parish history; the organisation, management and descent of estates; and the general history of this fascinating part of south-west Wales.

JOHN ALBAN is honorary senior lecturer in the School of History at the University of East Anglia and was formerly county archivist of Norfolk. Previously, he was city archivist of Swansea and for 22 years taught and directed courses on the study of local history, and on the history of Swansea, Gower and south Wales, in the Department of Adult Continuing Education at the then University College of Swansea. He was brought up at Graig Trewyddfa, within the parish of Llangyfelach.

THE NESTON COLLIERIES 1759-1855 An Industrial Revolution in Rural Cheshire by Anthony Annakin-Smith (University of Chester Press 2019 xxii+389pp ISBN 978-1-908258-04-5) £19.99

This remarkable book, the product of lengthy, exceptionally wide-ranging and meticulously detailed research, tells the story of a small and now almost-forgotten coalfield which lies on the shore of the Dee estuary in west Cheshire, some 10 miles north-west of the city of Chester. For almost a century the coalfield was worked with two major pits, one of which—Ness Colliery—had in its heyday had a larger output, and was more profitable, than most of the contemporary collieries in the better-known and more extensive coalfields of South West Lancashire and North East Wales. This was a significant industrial undertaking, with all the associated technological development and engineering investment which would be expected of a successful mining enterprise in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ness Colliery, for example, was only the second mine in Cheshire to have an atmospheric steam engine for pumping (probably installed from the outset, when it opened in 1759). There were at least 30 different shafts at Ness, some of the workings of which extended under the estuary itself, and at the end of the eighteenth century the colliery not only had railed tramroads but also a system of underground canals to transport the coal.

This study could have easily have been confined to those geological, technological and engineering aspects which are the mainstay of many books and publications on mining history, particularly in conjunction with surveys of present-day industrial archaeology. Given the quality of the research, analysis and writing that would have produced a more than satisfactory volume, albeit one perhaps only one-third the length of that which eventually emerged. But what really distinguishes The Neston Collieries 1759-1855 is the outstandingly ambitious, and successful, attempt to provide detailed analysis of all the other aspects of an industrial enterprise. In effect, the first 85 pages deal with the history of the coalfield, its geology, and the technology and engineering. This section is followed by 160 pages which are filled with a wealth of information and discussion about the wider operations and the social history of the industry.

This begins with an account of the colliery employees and the conditions in which they worked. The evidence is drawn from a variety of sources, including parish registers, census returns and newspapers, supplemented from parliamentary papers and reports, mining reports, and a great range of miscellaneous primary material in several archive repositories. The discussion includes coverage of the geographical origins of colliers and their families; methods of recruitment; the fluctuating size of the workforce and the way in which it was organised above-ground and below-ground; the roles and duties of different categories of employee; pay and wage rates; industrial relations; accidents, deaths and injuries; and child and female employment. An intriguing diversion relates to the baptism at Neston on 12 May 1765 of Emma, daughter of Henry Lyon, the blacksmith at Ness Colliery. The father was buried only a month later. The daughter died in 1815 as a global celebrity … she was Nelson’s Lady Hamilton.

The same characteristic of broad-ranging research is evident in the next chapter, which discusses the products of the collieries and the diversification of the business into, for example, coke, charcoal, lime-burning, the import of slate, and the production of bricks and tiles. This is followed by a superb 70-page survey and analysis of the markets for Neston coal, a tour de force of research and the collation of evidence. This dimension to mining history is, all too often, either ignored or is woefully inadequate. Here, instead, is the exemplar for future historians to follow. From local deliveries by donkey and cart, to the demand and supply patterns and methods relating to Chester (the largest market nearby), to an assessment of markets served by the coastal shipping which left the small quays of the west coast of Wirral, this provides an essential and fascinating perspective on the economic rationale and raison d’être of the enterprise.

The book ends with a splendid survey of the social conditions of the colliers and their families, looking at (for example) family sizes and marriage ages; health and welfare, using the evidence of the records of Chester Infirmary, to which the colliery owners were subscribers on behalf of the workforce; mortality of colliers and their families; household sizes and structures; food supplies; the operation of the Poor Law; housing for mining families and managers; religion and education; recreation and leisure; the impact of war; and the consequences of closure. A brief and evocative coda uses census returns to track down what happened to the miners and their families who had been thrown out of work. Six tabulated appendices detail financial and production statistics, and no less than 94 pages are given over to an awesomely-complete set of endnotes and references and an equally impressive bibliography. Even the index is 31 pages long.

Books are often described as ‘definitive’, but rarely can this term have been more appropriate. It is pretty certain that Anthony Annakin-Smith has found out everything that survives in the written records to do with Neston collieries. Yet the great strength of his work is the underlying vision that the social, human, financial and business aspects of industrial history could be melded with the technical and engineering themes, and the chronological ‘time-line’ of the story, to create a truly comprehensive account. And at £19.99 it is amazingly good value, too.

ALAN CROSBY is the editor of The Local Historian. For many years he has researched, written about and given talks and lectures on diverse aspects of the history of Cheshire. His A History of Cheshire was published in 1996 and he has more recently been researching the social history of the East Cheshire coalfield and colliers.

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Edited by Judith Everard, James P. Bowen and Wendy Horton

(Victoria County History/ University of London Press 2019 xii+173pp ISBN978-1-912702) £16

This volume, the first of a series of projected short histories of Shropshire market towns, marks the rebirth of the Victoria County History of Shropshire. This had gone into abeyance after the withdrawal of funding by Keele University twenty years ago, and owes its revival largely to the enthusiasm of Professor Richard Hoyle, former director and general editor of the VCH. The fact that the project moved from its inception to its first publication in a mere five years is a significant achievement. The great challenge was to uphold the exacting standards established by the ‘red books’ in a publication where there was necessarily a significant input from volunteers. This meant that the quality of editorship was a key factor in achieving success, and in the opinion of this reviewer the three editors carried out their task in exemplary fashion.

The organisation of the contents follows the general pattern of topic areas for studies of market towns established in the earlier volumes, but with a number of significant additions. It is particularly satisfying to see detailed analysis of plan units for the medieval town of Wem, aided by an excellent plan. Similarly, the section on the built environment of the town is one which should find a place in all future volumes in the series. One omission from the earlier volumes was the administration of poor relief both before and after 1834, and this has been corrected in the present work. Particularly significant here is the survival of out relief on a substantial scale, due in part to the fact that it was more economical than maintaining paupers in the workhouse. This practice was also followed in parts of the Ludlow Union and was no doubt far more prevalent than used to be thought.

Wem was an excellent choice of subject for the first volume in the series. While superficially a typical small market town, it exhibits several individualities which greatly enhance its interest. As a planned medieval castle town whose castle was abandoned by the fourteenth century, it is an interesting example of arrested development. It never achieved the corporate status and institutions gained by similar sized towns such as Much Wenlock and Bishop’s Castle, but neither did it wither away like Caus. Increasingly seen as an irrelevance by its absentee manorial lords, it failed to develop organs of borough government. Even its supposed medieval market charter proved to be the result of a misreading by the seventeenth century antiquary, Edward Lhuyd. The formation of Wem Urban District Council in 1900 saw the first elected body which served the town rather than its hinterland. This survived until 1967 when it became a parish council, before being made a town council with a mayor in 1974.

Wem’s medieval history is poorly documented, but this is amply compensated for by the wealth of sources for the seventeenth century onward. During the Civil War the town, which was garrisoned for Parliament, saw action on several occasions, including a siege in 1644. Destruction of part of the suburbs at this time was compounded in 1677 when Wem was devastated by fire. Both events are considered in relation to the subsequent development of the town. Of particular interest in the section on economic history is the discussion of cheese making, which developed from a farmhouse industry in the seventeenth century into full scale commercial production during the twentieth. Unfortunately both the cheese factory and the creamery fell victim to takeovers and mergers, and were closed in the 1970s. In the following decade a similar fate befell the town’s brewery, when its owners, Greenall Whitley, closed all operations in the town. Thus, in a decade the two major sources of employment were lost.

One of the many advantages of the new format is that far more use could be made of illustrations than was possible in the ‘red books.’ There are no less than 35 figures, five maps and nine tables, and these make references more readily understandable. Photographs of surviving examples of vernacular architecture amplify the text most usefully, and the use of plans and prints in the section on the rebuilding of the parish church after 1810 is particularly gratifying. Church plans have long been a neglected source, yet are often the only means of identifying the liturgical arrangements in buildings of this rather neglected period of church building history.

There is a most interesting discussion of the patterns of land holding in the town which highlights the prevalence of copyhold and similar secure forms of tenancy at the time of the purchase of the estate by Daniel Wycherley in 1665. He was a rapacious landlord, in contrast to his more relaxed predecessors the earls of Arundel, and his management of the estate led in 1673 to a number of tenants starting an action in the Court of Exchequer, which eventually found in their favour a decade later. It is interesting to note that the tenants did not wish to purchase their freeholds, having sufficient security of tenure without doing so. Despite enfranchisements during the eighteenth century, much of the property was still copyhold in the middle of the nineteenth.

The ‘red books’ were largely intended for an institutional market, with their prices fixed accordingly. This meant that most readers consulted the volumes in public libraries and record offices, rather than purchasing their own. The great virtue of ‘short’ volumes such as this is that, at £16, they are affordable to most general readers who would like to learn more of the history of their town. The citizens of Wem, and indeed all those with an interest in Shropshire and in urban history, have been well served by this excellent publication.Martin Speight is chairman of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society. He is currently researching early nineteenth century church building and restoration in the county.

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Edited by Andrew Senter

(Victoria County History of Essex 2019 ix+131pp ISBN 978-1-912702-11-4) £14+£2 p&p

The north-Essex port conurbation of Harwich, Dovercourt and Parkeston has been the subject of historical publications since the early eighteenth century, with one early, and four later, twentieth-century histories and two more recent (2013) works prior to this latest book, which maintains the high standard of research and writing that characterises more recent VCH material. It is a short publication but comprehensive, with the themes of topography, economic history, social history, religious history and local government set out in chapters sub-divided into specific sections. The preface gives a useful, brief historical overview of the area and provides detail which underpins its identity as a commercial port, a military and naval base and, more recently, a seaside resort. The introduction provides data and detail on boundaries, landownership, population, migration, communication and transport. Interesting and unusual details are discussed, such as the gender imbalances evident during the early nineteenth century: in Harwich St. Nicholas parish in 1801 some 61.9 per cent of residents were female; by 1901, 57.5 per cent of the population were male.

The following chapter discusses the physical developments after 1800. At Harwich these were mostly in the south and west, rather than in the medieval town, while Dovercourt saw the construction of brick-built terraced houses. These and subsequent developments show some patterns that characterise contemporary urban development more widely, but others are more specific to the area—for example, two lighthouses were rebuilt and further ‘iron-framed’ lighthouses were constructed under the supervision of Trinity House, who also positioned lightships in the harbour to aid navigation. Military defences, present on the promontory from the fourteenth century onwards, were expanded significantly during the nineteenth, particularly in the area of the Harwich Redoubt, in concert with the developments on the Suffolk side of the estuary of the Rivers Stour and Orwell, at Landguard Fort near Felixstowe.

Economically, Harwich was a port from the middle ages into the nineteenth century, but this activity was then affected by developments close by at Parkeston following the arrival of the Great Eastern Railway. As the century wore on sea-fishing began to re-establish economically after earlier decline, as did the cement stone dredging trade, while a large military presence in the town encouraged a lively local economy. The coming of the railways had a significant impact on many towns and communities, and Parkeston was no exception. At Dovercourt, which had been predominantly agricultural, tourism began to contribute to its economy, although the area maintained its agricultural trade throughout the century. Ship and boat building, established at Harwich during the seventeenth century, continued throughout the nineteenth, while cement manufacturing was a more recent activity which began around 1807. Unsurprisingly, many tertiary trades flourished and the hotels built to accommodate the tourist trade added to the economic mix.

Development at Harwich, Dovercourt and Parkeston inevitably affected the social structures of the area. The clergy, gentry and naval and military officer class became prominent in the social hierarchy while the professional and merchant classes gained influence in civic and municipal affairs from the middle of the century. Poverty, a substantial problem at times of economic hardship, reduced over time. The usual mix of societies, organisations and social activities that one would expect in regional urban communities is discussed; latterly the social order was complicated on a seasonal basis as the tourist trade took root. The analysis of religious activity makes very interesting reading. The area shared in a general regional rise in nonconformist congregations: Wesleyan Methodist and Primitive Methodist congregations were substantially in evidence, although the Religious Society of Friends had disappeared by 1800. The Strict and Particular Baptists were present from 1814 and a congregation of between seventy and eighty is recorded in 1829. Maritime and coastal communities regionally and nationally acquired increasingly varied nonconformist congregations, but this does not appear to have been the case at Harwich, Dovercourt or Parkeston. The Salvation Army appeared towards the end of the century—William Booth visited in 1880 and the citadel was built in 1892—but the activities of the Army were not always in accordance with social order: Captain John Harding received 14 days’ imprisonment for refusing to pay a fine after obstructing a footway when holding a service for some 200 people in the town.

The final chapter deals with local government, public health and services, beginning with the context that since its creation as a borough constituency in 1604 Harwich was a ‘treasury borough’, enabling government officials to be allocated to its two seats in parliament. For the first three decades of the nineteenth century there were few residents eligible to vote but after 1832 the number grew. From 1885 it became part of the Harwich Division. With few exceptions, Tory-Conservative MPs dominated. Not until the early twentieth century was a Liberal candidate was returned. The first borough council after 1835 was dominated by the Conservatives, but a Whig-Radical group held a majority from 1838 to 1842, and the Liberals had some success in the 1850s. As a port, the area had public health concerns—cholera, typhus, whooping cough and smallpox were prevalent during the early decades—but as new drainage and sewerage works were carried out from the 1850s public health improved. An afterword neatly summarises the situation in the area at the start of the twentieth century.

There is a comprehensive list of abbreviations and the index is similarly comprehensive. The evidence and data in the book are clearly and coherently presented, the text is appropriately referenced, and notes detailing all primary and secondary sources are given. This will be a valuable resource for students, academic historians and anyone interested in the history of this locality. The book presents detailed local history, but allows the reader to consider the impacts of wider, more general historical phenomena upon a complex and vibrant regional community.Sean O’Dell lectures in Contextual Studies and Social History at University Centre Colchester. His research interests are centred within British social history from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century.

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Edited by David Crouch

(Boydell/IHR 2019 352pp ISBN 978 1 90435 650 9) £95

In an article in volume 51 of Northern History in 2014 John Beckett, the then director and general editor of the Victoria County History, catalogued the vicissitudes which had beset the Yorkshire VCH in the 115 years since the decision was taken to publish histories of all the counties in England from the earliest times until the present day. In the original scheme every county was allocated four volumes (two for general essays, two for topographical entries) although because of its size Yorkshire was allowed eight (two general volumes and two topographical volumes for each of the three ridings). At first things went more or less to plan. VCH Yorkshire volume I, which concentrated on the county’s natural history, appeared in 1907; volume II, with entries on archaeological remains and the Domesday Book, in 1912; and volume III, with essays on ecclesiastical, political, military, social and economic history, in 1913. By the outbreak of the First World War the research for the North Riding had also been completed: volume I came out in 1914; volume II in 1923.

Then, as the VCH was no longer considered a commercial undertaking, in 1932 it was handed over to the University of London and all work on Yorkshire ceased. After the Second World War attempts were made to revive the VCH through partnerships between the University of London and local county councils. Apart from a privately commissioned history of the village of Barlow near Selby (published on line in 2011) no progress was made in the West Riding but the East Riding has fared much better, with the cities of York and Hull agreeing in 1954 with the East Riding County Council to finance a local editor and an assistant. This resulted in the publication of the City of York volume in 1961 and the City of Hull, the first volume in the East Riding series, in 1969. The constraints on limiting the topographical volumes to two per county having long been lifted, there then followed volumes II to IX between 1974 and 2012.

Volume X, Part I: Howdenshire: the townships therefore appears when the entire East Riding is at last nearing completion. A very lowlying area, mostly at or in some cases below sea level, Howdenshire was bounded to the north by the old course of the river Derwent and two drains, Common End Dyke and Langdyke; to the west by the Derwent; to the east by the river Foulness; and to the south by the meandering tidal river Ouse just before its confluence with the Humber. The wapentake owed its existence to a grant made in 959 by King Edgar to Cwen, a southern lady, who subsequently bestowed it upon Peterborough abbey only for it to be taken back by the Crown in the early years of the following century. In 1081 William the Conqueror conferred the entire estate upon the bishop of Durham, William de St Calais, and it remained administratively as well as ecclesiastically an outpost (technically a liberty) of the bishopric of Durham in the East Riding until 1836.

The very names of some of the nineteen Howdenshire townships—Barmby-on-the-Marsh, Saltmarshe, Yokefleet—reveal the nature of the place: large parts were uninhabitable fen and moorland until the 1160s when Bishop Hugh du Puiset embarked upon the construction of a series of major dykes, sluices and flood banks to channel water down to the Ouse. The recovered land was laid out in open fields and leased to new manorial lords who held their lands at fixed rents and by suit of court of the head manor of Howden. The new settlements of Balkholme, Bellasize, Bennetland, Gilberdyke, Greenoak and Newland all came into being as a result of the bishop’s enterprise. Much of the soil, however, proved to be heavy clay and some was left to pasture until the mid-eighteenth century when wealthier farmers began flooding their embanked lower-lying land to enrich their fields with a covering of alluvial tilth. This practice, known as ‘warping’, continued until after the Second World War when cheaper alternatives in the form of chemical fertilisers and pesticides became available.

While agriculture has always been the main industry there were other sources of employment. Small scale weaving was carried out in some settlements in the medieval and early modern periods. In the nineteenth century sacking was manufactured at Barmby-on-the-Marsh, flax and hemp dressed at Laxton, and a flax mill remained in operation in Blacktoft till 1930. Brick making, begun in Kilpin in the early eighteenth century, continued into the 1890s, while the brickworks at Sandholme, set up in 1855, lasted till 1969. One of the most important factories in the area was the Kilpin fertiliser plant established in 1860. At its height it had a work force of around a hundred men, but it closed in 1985. Especially before the coming of the railways in the 1840s, river traffic played a crucial part in the local economy, promoting industrial development in some of the eleven settlements with a frontage onto the Ouse. A small shipbuilding and repair yard, started at Kilpin Pike in the late eighteenth century, migrated down river to Skelton where eighteen vessels were launched between 1800 and 1852. It went out of business in 1902. Fisheries leased by the bishop of Durham were particularly significant in the Middle Ages, though fishgarths could be a hazard to shipping. Salmon were still being caught in the Ouse in the Victorian period.

Many of the settlements, such as Asselby, Balkholme, Bellasize, Gilberdyke, Kilpin and Scalby, had no resident lord of the manor and seem always to have been relatively egalitarian, but others were dominated by the major landholder from the earliest times until after the Second World War. The longest-lived of such gentry families were the Saltmarshes and the Methams. Until the death of Philip Saltmarshe IX in 1970 his family ruled over Saltmarshe for a remarkable seven hundred years, while the Methams governed Metham from at least the beginning of the thirteenth century until 1778 when they sold out to a Hull merchant. The eighteenth century, indeed, saw a series of comparable dynastic failures—thus the Athorpes at Kilpin gave way to the Wards, and the Clarkes succeeded the Arlushes at Knedlington where then Old Hall, built by Arlushes during the Commonwealth period, bears witness to their former eminence.

Although there was little to distinguish the region geographically or socially from the villages bordering the Ouse to the west and the Humber estuary to the east, as an ecclesiastical peculiar of the bishopric of Durham it was administratively and religiously totally distinct. Until the early nineteenth century, with the exception of Blacktoft and Scalby which formed part of the parish of Brantingham, and Eastrington created a separate parish in 1269, the whole of Howdenshire constituted a single parish dependent upon Howden minster, which in the later Middle Ages became a collegiate church with six prebendaries and eventually four canon chaplains, each with responsibilities for certain of the settlements. In the later Middle Ages some gentry endowed chantry chapels on their estates and other townships established their own chapels of ease but only one at Laxton survived the Reformation. Howdenshire, with the exception of Howden itself, is a landscape singularly devoid of medieval churches. With almost no resident Anglican clergy, nonconformity flourished in the eighteenth century and by 1800 almost every township had a Methodist chapel and many had two. In the Victorian period, after the abolition of the liberty and the division of the region into six ecclesiastical parishes, two new churches were erected at Barmby-on-the-Marsh and Laxton, and the local gentry played a prominent part in the ensuing resurgence of Anglicanism. No fewer than three generations of the Empson family (John Empson, his son Amaziah Empson II and his grandson John Empson II) were in holy orders; Philip Simpson of Metham acted briefly as curate of Laxton in the 1840s, and his son, Edward Whitmore Simpson, served as vicar of the new parish of Laxton from 1868 and until his death in 1910, living throughout his ministry in Metham Hall.

Other members of this landed elite achieved some literary fame, particularly in the sphere of local history. In addition to contributing three scholarly articles on Howdenshire villages to the Transactions of the East Riding Antiquarian Society between 1906 and 1909, Colonel Philip Saltmarshe VIII published the History of the Township and Family of Saltmarshe in 1910. Hoeing a somewhat different furrow later in the century Charles C. Empson (1935–2002), the last of his family in the male line to live in Yokefleet Hall, drew inspiration for his three historical novels from the lives and letters of the sons of the Reverend Amaziah Empson II. Global events increasingly impinged upon the area during the twentieth century. Lieutenant John Empson of the Royal Flying Corps, the heir to the Empson estate, died when his plane came down in fog just before the outbreak of the First World War. In the Second World War the RAF brought back into use a landing field constructed for the Flying Corps in Bellasize in 1916 and the camp in the village originally intended for the army housed German prisoners between 1942 and 1946.

The influence of the gentry persisted in some townships well into the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s as well as managing of the village school Mrs Margaret Scholfield was the moving spirit behind the Skelton Women’s Institute. A.W. Empson donated a village hall to Yokefleet as late as 1947. In more recent decades settlements adjacent to the railway line which connects the area with Hull, Sheffield and York have undergone considerable expansion. Houses and bungalows were built in Blacktoft in the 1990s, somewhat later a private estate of over a hundred houses was developed at Eastrington, Gilberdyke has been designated a ‘commuter hub’, and the construction of large detached houses in the Sandholme-Hive area has reversed the population decline of the last century and a half. In the face of much opposition a wind farm was erected on either side of the drain at Balkholme in 2012.

Howdenshire: The Townships follows the arrangement of previous volumes in the series. After a short general introduction the townships are treated in alphabetical order with sections on boundaries, landscape, settlement and buildings, landownership, economic history, social history, religious history and local government. The work includes very helpful pre-enclosure maps for each township together with some evocative photographs and drawings of long demolished chapels and houses. It constitutes a valuable addition to the East Riding VCH in its own right, but Howdenshire without Howden is as unthinkable as Hamlet without the prince of Denmark, and the second part of the volume will be eagerly awaited.

A BALH trustee, Claire Cross taught history at the University of York until she retired in 2000.Most recently she has been working on monks, friars and nuns and secular clergy in Yorkshire in the decades before and after the dissolution of the monasteries.

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