New Directions in Local History Since Hoskins

Christopher Dyer, Andrew Hopper, Evelyn Lord, Nigel Tringham, Christopher Dyer, Andrew Hopper, Evelyn Lord, Nigel Tringham

• Publisher: University Of Hertfordshire Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781907396120
• eBook ISBN: 9781907396533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Utilizing the techniques developed by renowned local historian W. G. Hoskins in his landmark study published 50 years ago, Local History in England, this book demonstrates how local history has evolved as a discipline over the last half century. Fifteen historians write about a variety of local history subjects that are significant in their own right but which also point to current trends in the field. They show how local historians use their sources systematically, from the nonverbal evidence of buildings to various types of electronic sources. All periods between the middle ages and the early twenty-first century are explored, covering many parts of England from Skye to the Kent coast and discussing topics that include social, economic, religious, legal, intellectual, and cultural history.

1. Does local history have a split personality?¹

David Dymond

John Beckett’s recent survey has highlighted the deep amateur origins of local history.² For several centuries educated gentlemen and leisured professionals (such as clergy, lawyers and schoolmasters) explored the history of rural parishes, towns, major cities, counties and various kinds of region. They were motivated, as the word ‘amateur’ implies, by strong emotional attachment to their human and physical surroundings. Then, in the later nineteenth century, academic history based on the critical interpretation of primary sources took root in English universities. It concentrated principally on political affairs at national and international level, an emphasis which it has retained to this day, but at the same time developed a strong separate tradition of economic history. This inevitably carried local dimensions and made use of knowledge already won by amateurs.³

Thus were born the two streams of local-cum-regional history which survive today. The older and much larger one is amateur and largely based on personal lifetime experience and allegiance. Often descriptive and discursive in style, it tends to rate the accumulation of evidence more highly than its critical and imaginative use.⁴ By contrast, the younger and smaller tradition is professional, university-based and dependent on cumulative academic debate. It starts by considering questions and problems, is critical and analytical in using evidence, and builds interpretations around general concepts. By the early 1900s these two groups knew of each other’s work but showed little appetite for cooperation. The purpose here is to explore this duality over the last 50 years (since Hoskins’s Local history in England appeared in 1959), how far it has been a serious fracture, or has been successfully mended, and how far it persists today.

Based on lectures given at Oxford, Hoskins’s book was written clearly and elegantly, with touches of dry humour.⁵ It was obviously intended for the largest possible readership, and acknowledged both approaches to the subject and the value of linking them. We should remember that Hoskins, like all academics, had gone through an amateur phase of personal development.⁶ In his youth he had read widely in history and literature and, as importantly, had explored his physical surrounding with questioning eyes.⁷ Thereafter, human contacts convinced him that the amateur strand was a source of talent and energy often characterised by a deep knowledge of people and places, subjects and sources. The amateur, he wrote, ‘has made a large contribution to English local history in the past, and there is still plenty of room for him (or her) in this vast and still largely unexplored field’. On the other hand, as a result of his university training in economics and in the relatively young discipline of economic history, Hoskins recognised that the study of local life, although restricted geographically, carried wide chronological and thematic dimensions.⁸ Furthermore, it provided incomparably rich evidence for use in broad scholarly debates connecting with the rest of human history.

Local history in England was a landmark in the subject’s development, for it mapped out major aspects worthy of investigation and ways of pursuing them. It led commentators to talk of ‘old’ and ‘new’ local history, before and after Hoskins.⁹ The organisers of the 2009 Leicester conference judged that this book ‘helped to establish the subject both as an academic discipline, and as a pursuit of thousands of local historians who are not professional academics’. In fact, Hoskins already valued the work of contemporary professionals such as Tate and Emmison, and insisted that the book was ‘not written for the specialist, or the professional historian’, but for ‘the great army of amateurs in this field’. He described how, during each autumn, when ‘the evenings grow longer and darker’, amateurs reached for their ‘exercise books’. His purpose was to persuade members of the public to study the history around them, respecting the standards already established by the Victoria County History (VCH) and university pioneers of local history at Reading, Hull and elsewhere.¹⁰ Hoskins’s approach was based on inclusiveness and encouragement rather than superiority or snobbish withdrawal. To him the word ‘amateur’ was not pejorative but simply the opposite of ‘paid academic’. Nor was he afraid of calling local history ‘a hobby which gives a great deal of pleasure to a great number of people’. In addition, because academic history was becoming ever more specialised, he judged that local history was ‘likely to remain the stronghold of the amateur’.¹¹

Hoskins observed that, by 1959, amateur historians were being recruited from a much wider sample of the general population. The older antiquarian and elitist tradition survived in the shape of the occasional scholarly squire or parson, but was increasingly overshadowed by groups such as teachers, farmers, housewives and the retired. They included, be it noted, growing numbers of women, a trend which has since contributed massively to the quantity, diversity and humanity of modern research.¹² These trends gave rise to two expressions frequently heard today: ‘grass-roots’ history and the ‘democratisation’ of history. They both carry a significant double meaning, not often fully articulated, that many more people in the present study the lives of many more people in the past. In other words, a wider (although still incomplete) cross-section of contemporary society is now committed to this study and, as time passes, newer social, economic and ethnic groups will undoubtedly be recruited. A notable characteristic of local historians is that they yearn to grow in the subject and not to stagnate. Hoskins’s book was an early attempt to advance that process, because he himself had frequently reconstructed the lives of ‘ordinary’ people from the past, and he knew that non-professionals were capable of contributing positively to this work.

In his inaugural lecture at Leicester in 1966, Hoskins addressed the crucial issue of standards. ‘The best amateur can equal - perhaps surpass – the achievement of the professional; but … the average standard of professional achievement is likely to be considerably higher than that of amateurs as a whole’.¹³ Not only was local history both professional and amateur, but wherever possible cooperation between these two groups was to be encouraged. That responsibility has motivated many authors who since 1959 have written newer general works on the nature, themes, sources and methods of local history.¹⁴ They were writing for all those, professional and amateur, who sought deeper involvement with the subject.

Is local history still the ‘stronghold of the amateur’? For example, does this judgement of 1959 now apply to the British Association for Local History (BALH), the subject’s principal voluntary national organisation? Most of its members, both individuals and societies, are certainly amateur, but the current list of trustees, council members and committees soon reveals a heavy and growing professional presence. For this and other reasons I would argue that, when we probe developments over the last 50 years, we soon appreciate that local history has grown fast on both fronts. The whole scene is now much more complex and tangled, with an amazing panorama of interests, approaches and levels of involvement. The many divisions and sub-groups are inhabited by those who, being on both sides of the old divide, may be paid or unpaid.

Academics, as full-time professionals, are paid to teach, research and write. This group is now larger than in Hoskins’s day, and generates much more research. For 30 or so years after 1959 most teaching posts specifically dedicated to local history were in university departments of adult education, but since the 1990s their number has declined markedly because of funding problems and competition from other subjects. The loss has been barely offset by three recent trends: new appointments in new universities; the growth of sub-specialisations such as demography and vernacular architecture; and the way some scholars engaged with local studies prefer to label themselves as specialists in ‘micro-history’, ‘community history’, ‘heritage studies’ or ‘public history’.¹⁵ The most important influence, however, has come from academics in major disciplines such as economic, social and ecclesiastical history, who avoid calling themselves local historians but adopt the localised approach when it suits them - which it increasingly does. Their work is driven less by interest in particular communities or places and more by the availability of above-average local sources that open up broader issues.¹⁶ In the last 50 years professionals of this latter kind have produced most of the ‘classic’ local histories represented by places such as The Blean, Earls Colne, Dorchester, Havering, Morebath, Terling and Whickham.¹⁷ Simultaneously they have promoted new approaches, themes, sources and methods. In turn these developments have strengthened old-established specialisms (such as place-name studies and ecclesiology) and created new specialisms (such as oral history and garden history). Collectively, they show that the local dimension is increasingly important as a tool of investigation and powerfully stimulates new thinking in many historical fields.

On the amateur, non-professional or lay flank, numbers have grown even faster (Hoskins already referred to an ‘army’), so that today local history has become a widespread leisure interest in this country and elsewhere. Not only does it engage the interest of large numbers of people, but it often leads them into practical and critical research. With its emphasis on all levels of society, from paupers to aristocrats, and on all kinds of community, from housing estates to large natural regions, local history presents universal themes of human experience. Paradoxically, this makes it wider and more educationally relevant than any other form of history.

Nonetheless, it is patently foolish to lump all amateur local historians together, because they include many different groups with varying backgrounds, interests and values. One helpful, although still crude, distinction is to postulate two main groups whom we can call ‘consumers’ and ‘activists’. Consumers are a very large segment of the general population. Their interest in history leads them, for example, to visit cathedrals, National Trust properties and English Heritage sites, and to follow Timewatch and Who do you think you are? on television. They may also join conducted trails and excursions, sample lectures organised by local societies, and perhaps dip into the big red volumes of the VCH. They are not themselves concerned to research or write, but are happy to learn about the past from others.

Fig. 1.1 W.G. Hoskins in Devon, in the 1970s

Professionals should never forget that these consumers are their public and to a large extent their paymasters through taxes, subscriptions and cash registers. They prove that history in general, but particularly history of the local and family sort, is now hugely attractive to the public. We ignore their interests at our peril, and have a duty to see that they get greater choice when spending their leisure: for example, in where to go, what to attend and what to read. Let us remind ourselves that Hoskins not only supported adult education as ‘one of the most vigorous growing-points for the serious study of local history’¹⁸ but also believed in reaching wider audiences (admittedly, mainly middle-class) through the use of radio, television and non-academic writing. I guess that his broadcasts on ‘Landscapes of England’ and resultant articles in The Listener were at least as influential as his books.

By contrast, ‘activists’ are amateurs who spend large parts of their leisure or retirement striving to discover the past for themselves (although en route they usually seek help from others). They regularly use record offices, libraries and to a lesser extent museums; they consult printed and manuscript sources and explore local landscapes and townscapes; and they wrestle with problems of interpretation. Some accumulate useful knowledge but do not write; others publish in local periodicals or produce their own books. Within the expanding ranks of amateur activists are a sizeable proportion, perhaps a majority, whom Tiller memorably described as ‘local local historians’ - those interested only in their place of residence or birthplace.¹⁹ That approach reminds us again of the relevance of personal experience, observation and sentiment in local history. Although it has dangers, it can produce memorable and respected results, as it did with great pioneers of local history such as White Kennett (Ambrosden, Oxon), Henry Cowper (Hawkshead, Lancs.), Sir Matthew Nathan (West Coker, Somerset) and Frank Hill (Lincoln).²⁰

Of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: local history in the twenty-first century Christopher Dyer, Andrew Hopper, Evelyn Lord and Nigel Tringham
• 1 Does local history have a split personality? David Dymond
• 2 The great awakening of English local history, 1918-1939 C.P. Lewis
• 3 Twentieth-century labour histories Malcolm Chase
• 4 Parliamentary elections, 1950-2005, as a window on Northern English identity and regional devolution Stephen Caunce
• 5 Locality and diversity: minority ethnic communities in the writing of Birmingham’s local history Malcolm Dick
• 6 Hythe’s butcher-graziers: their role in town and country in late medieval Kent Sheila Sweetinburgh
• 7 The houses of the Dronfield lead smelters and merchants, 1600-1730 David Hey
• 8 A community approaching crisis: Skye in the eighteenth century Edgar Miller
• 9 ‘By her labour’: working wives in a Victorian provincial city Jane Howells
• 10 Religious cultures in conflict: a Salisbury parish during the English Reformation Claire Cross
• 11 The Court of High Commission and religious change in Elizabethan Yorkshire Emma Watson
• 12 From Philistines to Goths: Nonconformist chapel styles in Victorian England Edward Royle
• 13 Evangelicals in a ‘Catholic’ suburb: the founding of St Andrew’s, North Oxford, 1899-1907 Mark Smith
• 14 The kings bench (crown side) in the long eighteenth century Ruth Paley
• 15 Local history in the twenty-first century: information communication technology, e-resources, grid computing, Web 2.0 and a new paradigm Paul S. Ell
• Index