PARISH AND BELONGING

Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales 1700 – 1950

Keith Snell, published by Cambridge University Press in 2002.

What role did the parish play in people’s lives in England and Wales between 1700 and the mid-twentieth century? By comparison with globalisation and its dislocating effects, the book stresses how important parochial belonging once was. Professor Snell discusses themes such as settlement law and practice, marriage patterns, cultures of local xenophobia, the continuance of out-door relief in people’s own parishes under the new poor law, the many new parishes of the period and their effects upon people’s local attachments. The book highlights the continuing vitality of the parish as a unit in people’s lives, and the administration associated with it. It employs a variety of historical methods, and makes important contributions to the history of welfare, community identity and belonging.

Professor K D M Snell was Director of the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester and is currently Emeritus Professor of Rural and Cultural History. 

His other published works include:

  • Spirits of Community: English Senses of Belonging and Loss, 1750–2000 (Bloomsbury, 2016)
  • Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)
  • (co-editor) Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850 (Boydell & Brewer, 2004)
  • The Bibliography of Regional Fiction in Britain and Ireland, 1800–2000 (Ashgate, 2002)
  • Rival Jerusalems: the Geography of Victorian Religion (with Paul S. Ell), (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
  • (editor) The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1998)
  • Edition of Alexander Somerville Letters from Ireland During the Famine of 1847 (Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 1994). Translated into German as Irlands Grosser Hunger: Briefe und Reportagen aus Irland Während der Hungersnot 1847 (Unvast-Verlag, Munster, 1996).
  • Church and Chapel in the North Midlands: Religious Observance in the Nineteenth Century (Leicester University Press, 1991)
  • Edition of Alexander Somerville, The Whistler at the Plough: Containing Travels, Statistics and Descriptions of Scenery and Agricultural Customs in Most Parts of England (London, 1989).
  • Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1985). Winner of the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize; New Society book of the year.