Local history is all around us. Our family, our house, our street, our community, all have a ‘history’. My workplace is a large house built in 1800. Why was it built on this site in this year? From my window I can see a road. It looks ordinary enough, but the modern tarmac hides a much older road, which was turnpiked in 1789–90. I become a local historian when I stop simply walking along the road and entering the building, and I ask how the road and the building have come to be here in the first place. Both...

Where, or when, did local history start? It is an obvious question with which to begin, and while we can be confident that it began with the study of antiquities, deciding on a suitable date is almost impossible. We can track back as far as the Venerable Bede in the eighth century, but perhaps a more realistic starting point is with the chronicles of Anglo-Saxon monks. William of Malmesbury, in hisGesta Pontificum Anglorum(‘History of the Prelates of England’) produced in 1125, used both topographical and antiquarian approaches in surveying the ecclesiastical history of England. Gerald of Wales’s works...

What had been planted in the sixteenth century, and had sprouted in the seventeenth, came into full blossom during the eighteenth century, before fading gently away in the nineteenth. In the course of the eighteenth century antiquarian studies started to fragment, and three separate if overlapping movements can be identified. The first was the evolution of topographical studies into travel and tourist accounts, particularly in conjunction with the picturesque movement of the later eighteenth century. The second was the development within antiquarianism of natural historical and archaeological studies. Archaeology, although still within the family of antiquarian study, was emerging as...

If the county was the preferred unit of study, the parish increasingly came to be viewed as the practical limit of most scholars and, following loosely from this, it was only a short step towards discussion of the town as a separate place. Studies of towns inevitably began with London, particularly the great survey published by Stow at the end of the sixteenth century. No other towns were in the same league in terms of size and status, but it is no surprise to find histories being compiled of cathedral towns and some of the larger provincial towns including Norwich,...

Until the nineteenth century no real distinctions existed within historical studies, hence the convenient term ‘antiquary’ to describe the various practitioners. There were no particular skills or methodologies, and the study of the past was in the hands of men with at most a classical training and a deep interest. The Society of Antiquaries may have been a meeting place, but it was not the keeper of standards; indeed, one of the more difficult accusations to counter, both for the Antiquaries and the Royal Society, was that they gave too much space to incredulous and fanciful material. In the course...

Between the 1880s and the Second World War local history enjoyed something of a schizophrenic existence. The societies flourished, turning out record series volumes and annual transactions, touring their counties (transferring from ‘brakes’ to motor buses in the process), and attracting new members to join in their research sections. In other words, they continued the associational tradition in the form established during the nineteenth century. Archaeologists maintained links with the societies, participating in, and keeping track of, the local digs organised by the societies. By contrast, historians, mindful of Professor Freeman’s suggestion in 1884, maintained a lofty distance, while always...

In the years prior to the Second World War local history struggled to maintain its credibility with the community of professional historians who concerned themselves with politics, the state, and constitutional matters. Local studies were seen as a means of contributing to the understanding of these issues, but in themselves they were considered to have value only as contributions to antiquarian study. Local history gained acceptance only within economic history. After 1945 much was to change. Methodologically the beginnings of a new way of thinking originated in France in the 1920s, in the work of theAnnalesSchool, and arrived...

The developments of the 1950s had various results. First, they produced a vigorous methodological debate about the purpose and function of local history. Under the wing of economic history, local history had flourished, and in the 1960s it was to be just as significantly affected by the rise of social history. Second, through the rapid spread of interest in the subject at all levels, new questions were raised about access to the sources, and the use of the data. In 1957 it was still possible to walk into one of the smaller record offices and be the only searcher on...

In the nineteenth century antiquarianism was an umbrella which sheltered a variety of specialisms connected with what we would today call local history. Eventually some of these specialisms ducked out from under the umbrella to make their own way in the world as separate disciplines, notably archaeology and history. Unfortunately, what was left tended to be seen as the parts no one else wanted, and ‘antiquarian’ gradually became a pejorative term. The image was perpetuated by the seemingly unbreakable fascination of county journals with church bells, family pedigrees, heraldic bearings, and other relatively esoteric interests, which were written up with...

One of the key problems for local historians in the past was access to the sources. Dugdale, Thoroton, and other county historians succeeded because their social standing among the county gentry enabled them to spend long hours in their neighbours’ muniment rooms. Various classes of public records were available for consultation, but as we saw in chapter V these were widely scattered, and would-be researchers required plentiful resources of both time and money. The desire to improve access to research materials was one of the reasons that record publishing became popular in the nineteenth century. Every published edition of a...

In 1977 the Standing Conference for Local History established an independent committee to assess the pattern of interest, activity and study of local history in England and Wales. The committee, headed by the Oxford historian Lord Blake, met fourteen times between 1977 and 1979, received 701 items of written evidence, solicited comments from twenty-eight organisations and three individuals, and still found it could not really decide what local history actually was:

There is no one accepted definition of local history. It has been suggested to us that the price of local history’s ‘coming of age’ should be the formulation of...

Local history is one of the major leisure interests in this country today. Every week thousands of people attend lectures, read documents in archive offices and books in local studies libraries, study artefacts in museums and heritage centres, and watch television programmes and read magazines, which in one way or another tap into this huge national interest. Local history ties together all sorts of disciplines, including academic subjects such as history and geography, and adult education and WEA classes. It brings together librarians, archivists, museum curators, and heritage centre managers. The practitioners of local history come in all shapes and...