Charles Phythian-Adams

Professor Charles Phythian-Adams was born on the 28th of July 1937, educated at Marlborough College, Wiltshire, and Hertford College, Oxford, where he took his MA. He is a local historian and former head of the Department of English Local History at the University of Leicester, which he first joined under W. G. Hoskins in 1986.

His work focussed on the concept of cultural regions which were claimed to be the most convenient container for studying patterns of historical development across large parts of the English countryside and understanding the relationships between social, economic, political, demographic and administrative history. He proposed a series of cultural provinces, beyond counties, based on watersheds and river basins, as wider areas of human activity in the early modern period. This was a modification of the work of Alan Everitt and his idea that the countryside was divided into pays, that is districts with distinctive landscapes, settlement patterns and societies, which was in itself a development of the ideas of Joan Thirsk based on her project to define farming regions in the whole of England which she undertook in her time as Research Fellow at Leicester. This engagement with explaining regional differences has been a theme of work at Leicester over six decades, and the concern to understand the interaction between society and landscape has been the characteristic of what has become known as the ‘Leicester approach’.

The Phythian-Adams Award

Named in honour of Professor Charles Phythian-Adams the Friends provide up to 10 grants of £100 for undergraduate students entering their final year who are currently planning their dissertation research projects. The funding is intended to help cover the costs of research trips to local archives offices within the UK for research on any topic related to regional or local history, or the history of the family. The expectation is that this research would be undertaken over the coming summer vacation period leading into the final year. These grants are available to University of Leicester BA History or BA joint honours students. More details here.

Selected publications

Local History and Folklore: A New Framework, London : Bedford Square Press for the Standing Conference for Local History, 1975.
Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
The Norman Conquest of Leicestershire and Rutland, Leicester, Leicester Museums, Art Galleries and Records Service, 1986.
Re-thinking English Local History, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1987.
Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History, Leicester, Leicester University Press, 1993.
Land of the Cumbrians: A Study of British Provincial Origins, AD 400–1120, Aldershot, Scolar Press: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1996.