Re-thinking English Local History
This article is a review by W B Stephens of the University of Leeds of Re-thinking English Local History by Charles Phythian-Adams. Department of English Local History, University of Leicester, Occasional Papers, Fourth Series, No.1, 1987. iv+58 pp. £5.95.
The debt of English local history to the Department of Local History at the University of Leicester is considerable – indeed it must take much of the credit for the subject’s recognition as a proper academic discipline. Not a little of this achievement has been due to the successive heads of that department – W. G. Hoskins, H. P. R. Finberg and Alan Everitt – both through their own researches and in their conceptualization of the nature of local history.
Now Charles Phythian-Adams, the fourth individual to head the department, inaugurates a fourth series of the Leicester Occasional Papers in Local History with a timely and thoughtful, if densely written, survey of developments in English local history writing over the last thirty years or so with some suggestions for further development. In his own words this booklet ‘is concerned … with the ways in which academic local historians have ever looked more widely than their immediate concerns might imply, and how in the future it might prove possible to connect more systematically with the history of English society as a whole’.
He points out that while Hoskins and Finberg established the valuable principle that local history was worth studying in its own right, yet their own writings contributed much to national history, in particular in suggesting new themes for study at the national level. From their work developed the classification of types of communities and a comparative approach which drew local and national history together in ways not extensively undertaken before. The most important development within the last few decades the author sees as the identification and examination of types of regions based largely on agriculture and on physical and economic attributes. England is now increasingly seen, as Alan Everitt has suggested, less as a monolithic community than as an ‘incomplete amalgam of differing but related societies, of differing but related ‘pays’. Here local (or regional) history becomes national history in a sense infrequently recognised until recently. Phythian-Adams points out, however, that despite some excellent studies more work needs to be undertaken on the connection between county and national politics and government, and in the relationships in all aspects of life between different pays . He feels that students of individual pays are still too exclusively inward looking, a comment which is correct, but given the enormous scope for work so defined, understandable at this stage.
Phythian-Adams argues, too, that the conceptual framework oft he community life-cycle, of geographic regions and of topographically orientated socioeconomic structures, which have served local historians well, are unsuited to embrace new topics interesting local and other historians – especially those of the family, kinship and cultural themes. A new overall framework is called for, and one which may assist local history to retain its identity and sense of purpose among the plethora of contemporary specializations (as folk-studies, demography, oral history, spatial geographical analysis, and so on) which make use of local evidence. He advocates, therefore, a ‘societal’ approach – defined as the investigation of ‘the history of the component structures of a whole society, and the manner in which such structures have been inter-related’. The identification of ‘arenas of social relations wider than the single community yet narrower than that of the national society’ may derive from the study of such factors as the bounds of local migration, the areas of common dialect and folk-lore, and regions of dense kinship networks. Existing studies of individual villages, clusters of communities, areas based on market towns and regional centres, and even studies of agricultural and administrative regions and of pays , have limitations for this purpose since all are based on socio-economic rather than social structure processes. Societal regions should not be accepted as already obvious – the identification of the spatial and social attributes of societal areas and their connections with the national society need to be determined. Individual communities could then be studied in relation to such frameworks.
This opens a vast new dimension to the study of local history and Phythian- Adams must be applauded for identifying and discussing the task. Hoskins and Finberg long ago emphasized that local historians should seek to answer significant questions, and a multitude of new and important questions are suggested in this essay. Phythian-Adams does, however, acknowledge the fact that many more traditional questions have yet to be answered for a large number of places and regions. It must be a matter of opinion as to whether the programme delineated here should now become the prim e object of academic local historians, as he suggests. Some may doubt whether the societal factors discussed are likely to be shown to be more significant in the life of local communities than socio-economic, religious and political ones. Nevertheless those who now follow traditional approaches can no longer be unmindful of the regional dimensions stressed in this essay. Phythian-Adams has provided us with a work which though short is very significant.
The original article was published in Midland History in 1988.
W. B. Stephens, C. P. Lewis, Gervase Rosser, Asa Briggs, Ann J. Kettle, Barrie Trinder, Alan Thacker, W. L. Warren, N.W. Alcock, Barbara F. Harvey, S. J. Gunn,
Andrew Pettegree, Robert Ashton, Brian Lyndon, Pauline Croft, Margaret Spufford, Vivienne Larminie, G. E. Mingay, Barrie Trinder, F. C. Mather, Michael Sanderson, Barrie Trinder & Royden Harrison (1988) Re-thinking English Local History, Midland History, 13:1, 113-140, DOI: 10.1179/ mdh.1988.13.1.113
