Why Local History Matters Dr Jonathan Healey Lecture delivered at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, 14 November 2012 Dr Jonathan Healey is University Lecturer in Local and Social History at Oxford University He is based at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education and is a Fellow of Kellogg College My talk today is going to start with one of the two greatest publications in the English language I’m going to talk to you about what local history is, and why I think it matters so much, not just as something that’s fun and engaging – because merely waving your eyes at the internet can tell you that – but as something that is academically important, and by this I mean that it helps in the broad quest towards understanding the world, and the human position within that world So, what are the two greatest publications in the English language? Well, I don’t want to jump the gun on my colleagues in English, but I say stuff Dickens: long funny names, poor people, pickpockets, whatever And who really cares about Milton? Shakespeare? Man dresses up as woman, woman dresses up as man, they all live happily ever after; unless you are a king – no, when you get near to power in Shakespeare, you die, and everyone hates you, and it’s really really sad Nope, I’m not referring to any of these jokers The first of my two greatest publications in the history of English, well, history, is the greatest ever periodical It is, of course, the Westmorland Gazette Now, the ‘Wezzy Gezzy’, as it’s called in my part of the world, is just wonderful It’s a newspaper so local, that the county it’s named after doesn’t even exist anymore It’s a newspaper so rural that whereas you used to get ‘spot the ball’ competitions in most papers, Kendal’s greatest broadsheet proudly peddles its own version Instead of a melee of footballers in a goalmouth scramble looking up at a missing ball, it shows a picture of a field of sheep, and eagle-eyed readers are expected to judge the position of the missing sheep-dog from the formation of the beasts But it’s not the ‘spot the dog’ that I most treasure about the Wezzy Gezzy – it’s the wonderful local-ness of the headlines Recent front-pages on the newspaper’s website (yes, it has one) have included, ‘Car wing-mirrors vandalized in Ulverston’; ‘Petrol leak at pump station’; and the now legendary, ‘Chair destroyed’, which story explained: ‘An office chair was destroyed after it was set on fire on the grassy area, off Maude Street, Kendal this afternoon’ It is, as the editor somewhat defensively noted after this story hit the nationals, a ‘low-crime area’ Sometimes, though, things get a bit more serious An ominous story a few weeks ago had ‘Woman reports seeing body floating in the River Lune’, although nothing has yet been found Current theories suggest the object, watched by the witness from a passing train, might just have been a treetrunk Even the US election has featured, with the headline of Thursday 27th of September asking, ‘Is the ghost of Mitt Romney’s ancestor haunting Kendal pub?’ Probably not, one suspects But there is a serious point here, which is that local things tend to be looked down upon, particularly by those who live and work in the biggest local community of all: metropolitan London I don’t think it is too much to say that – up to a point – when you put the word ‘local’ in the title of something, it gives it a bad name It conjures up images of parochialism, obscurity, and irrelevance A ‘local celebrity’ is inevitably viewed as somewhat laughable; local news always less interesting than national I So what is local history? And is it really parochial – something to entertain the amateurs while the professionals get on with the real business? The distant origins of the subject in England lay in the medieval past, and probably even earlier People have always lived in places, and they quite often understood the landscape they inhabited in terms of its place in a grand narrative of time Rocks, bumps, old earthworks, were ascribed Brent Knoll (Somerset): ancient remains held local meanings in which history meanings for medieval people, even when their shaded into legend and faith origin was hardly understood Photo: Steven The saints were a constant Ashman presence in the landscape; as were the actions of humans now gone, like the mythical ‘Old Man’, to whom was ascribed old mineworks in the Derbyshire Peak District, for example In London, when the city moved under Viking threat back within the Roman Walls, the area of previous settlement, just to the west of the new city, came to be known as the ‘Old Market-Town’, or in the language of time ‘Ald-wych’: Aldwych There is evidence from archaeologists that AngloSaxons co-opted pre-Roman burial mounds as part of their own spirituality, suggesting they forged links with their local past Come the high middle ages, Christian writers would attempt to trace the stories and deeds of their local saints And it was not just saints either, who had a real presence in the medieval landscape: on a visit to the south-west in 1113, a group of French monks were told, proudly, by locals, that they were in ‘Arthur country’ The real origins of modern local history lay, however, not in such fanciful meetings between legend and the landscape, but in the more systematic writings of those who lived under the Tudors and the Stuarts Now, there are really many, many reasons why wealthy men in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries developed an interest in the histories of the various communities of the realm; but I’m going to highlight just two Firstly, this was a period in which the landscape and topography of England was undergoing quite drastic and possibly unprecedented change Part of it was economic, with vast shifts in fortune between towns: Coventry and York were on the decline, and new centres of influence were emerging in places like Birmingham and Manchester The countryside was changing too, though the writers of the age were much more interested in the stately homes of the landscape than the enclosures, the disappearing villages, or even the new crops that were springing up But perhaps the most important element was that understandings of the landscape were changing: the Reformation effectively, at least as far as the literate elite were concerned, purged the saints, the holy wells, the holy trees, and the sacred stones from the landscape As a result, such things were interpreted not as spiritual and mystical landmarks, but as human relics of the past: of the Romans, or of the Ancient Britons The second issue was one of pride: local pride And it was pride that came, oddly enough, out of government The Tudor and Stuart state was one of the most ambitious in history: it legislated about everything from the length of apprenticeships to what clothes people could wear It taxed the English to unheard of levels, managed law courts that attracted a greater proportional volume of business than at any other time in our history; and it created the first national system of social security in the world All this depended on the co-operation of local gentlemen These were the men who managed the behemoth that was Tudor and Stuart government; and the main arena they governed in was the county This was where their law courts sat, where they decided on how to divide the burden of taxation, and it was the most important location for setting poor law policy And this role in government gave them real pride in their county They bought the new maps by Christopher Saxton or John Speed, and they took an interest in the old monuments of their county Perhaps they bought a copy of one of the greatest works of English scholarship in the whole of history: William Camden’s Britannia – a county by county compendium of surviving relics of the past that is every bit the forerunner of the modern-day guide for the historical traveller At this time, the way local history was thought of was essentially what we would call ‘antiquarian’ By this I mean that it John Speed’s Map of Oxfordshire (1611): the explosion of aimed to catalogue mapping in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surviving old things reflected not just improved techniques, but growing local and county pride amongst the English gentry rather than analysing their place in the wider human history of a place And as the political conflicts of the seventeenth century faded into history, and as the market for books and histories expanded dramatically into the eighteenth and nineteenth, this was the kind of local history that was produced The antiquarians shared a passion for preserving the surviving records of the past: they were like collectors, throwing together a diversity of artefacts: sometimes these were physical remains, sometimes they were traditions, yet other times they came in the form of documents Their writing often did little to convey the motions of historical change; sometimes it quite happily jumped from discussions of hillforts, to Civil War destruction, to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, back through medieval charters to the Romans They focused also on the wealthy: they were much more interested in the transition of ownership of a particular manor than they were in the rhythms of daily life: of farming, of trading, of birth, marriage and death Of course, such an approach was more suited to the culture of the Georgian and Victorian ages than it was to the twentieth century, and so the last hundred years or so have seen a great shift in the way scholars have approached the local past In fact, it is only really in the modern world that ‘local history’ in the sense that I mean it, and in the sense that we study it here at Oxford, developed The origins of the study of this modern, scientific local history lay not just with the antiquarian tradition stretching back to Camden and the Tudors, but also with the development of the relatively new discipline of social history, sometimes erroneously defined as ‘history with the politics left out’, but really the history of the peoples’ everyday interactions with one another, and how these have changed through time Partly influenced by socialism, often the Christian socialism of men like Richard Tawney as much as Marxist socialism, but perhaps more fundamentally influenced by democracy, the emergence of social history was the most exciting development to hit the historical discipline in modern times It meant a dramatic challenge to the view that history comprised ‘kings and battles’, or ‘past politics’; it wrote the ordinary man (and increasingly woman and child) back into the human story As social history began to make its presence amongst the academic community felt, local history began to gain traction too Reading University appointed a research fellow in local history as early as 1908, while the University of Leicester created the first professorship in the subject in 1964, the honour going to HPR Finberg The pioneering position of Leicester is no coincidence, for there had, over the middle decades of the twentieth century, developed there a culture of scientific enquiry into the history of English local communities, and they had opened their department of local history in 1947 The key personality here was W.G Hoskins, a Devonian economic historian who was then pioneering the in-depth study of both local communities and the development of the English landscape His greatest work, The Making of the English Landscape, hit the shelves in 1955, and remains one of the most wonderful works of history today, even if many of its arguments are long out of date But his legacy at Leicester was perhaps equally important to us today, for the in-depth study of English communities, particularly looking back to the medieval and early-modern past, became embedded in the academic mainstream in the 1960s and ‘70s We now call it the ‘Leicester School’, and in its most hardcore form it tended to focus on the economic and social structural history of individual places But really the influence was far wider-ranging than that, for even many historians who would never consider themselves ‘local’ historians (and I would put myself, partly, in this category), did local history They wrote county studies of the impact of the Civil War, of the Reformation, or of crime, or of sexual behaviour and its regulation In fact, if we were to take a tour of some of the introductory textbooks I set my students of British history here at Oxford, the striking thing is how often the people who wrote them began their careers with some kind of local study Teaching social history, I set textbooks by Keith Wrightson and Jim Sharpe, both wonderful, lively and thoroughly scholarly books Sharpe’s first work was a study of crime in Essex; Wrightson began his career with a doctorate comparing puritanism in Essex and Lancashire and then moved on to produce two highly influential village micro-studies, one looking at Whickham on the Newcastle coalfield, the other – the most influential – looking at social relations in the Essex village of Terling Nor is this confined to social history, either When I teach the Reformation, I set them Christopher Haigh’s English Reformations Haigh is one of the most important and radical revisionist historians of the sixteenth century: his first book was on the Reformation in Lancashire Or Diarmaid MacCulloch: now one of our most highly respected academics, whose History of Christianity TV series won huge acclaim in 2009, making a successful transition from BBC4 to BBC2 His first book was an excellent study of Tudor Suffolk And scholarship of the British Civil Wars of the middle of the seventeenth century is dominated by people who have done local studies Take John Morrill, again, one of the greatest historians of the period alive today, and a revisionist of huge academic importance He began his career with a study of the Civil War in Cheshire In fact, I was really heartened to read an interview with Professor Morrill, in which he explicitly described his doctorate as being in local history II So why is it that local history has had such a profound impact on academic history in the second half of the twentieth century? What is it about the discipline that has allowed it to launch so many scholarly careers? One of the reasons is purely practical: in the short timespan that you have to complete a doctorate, the local study is achievable; national surveys of – say – crime would simply be impossible But this is not the whole story Local studies are important also for two more scholarly reasons First, they reflect the social reality that our lives are lived out in particular localities: our place in the geography of the world is a major determinant of our lives in that world Second, local studies allow a degree of depth that simply isn’t possible in more wide-ranging studies It allows us to get ‘under the skin’ of a historical community, to understand peoples’ relations to one another in much more detail than if we had simply seen them is part of a faceless mass of national statistics Taking the first of these, the point that local history is important because, to our daily lives, locality is importance Historians have recognized that even in a society as nationally unified as England was (at least from Tudor times and quite probably from much further back in time), where you lived was a critical determinant of your social life If you lived in London, for example, your access to print, and to the consumer goods of the opening global trades such as coffee and tea, were much greater But your physical place in the geography of the world also meant you were more likely to live in overcrowded accommodation, much more likely to die of the plague, indeed, much more likely to live a shortened, sick existence than if you lived in the countryside Your location dictated your economic prospects: in Devon the economy was dominated by cattle, Norfolk by sheep and corn If you lived in Yorkshire you wove worsted, if in Lancashire you made fustian Sometimes, such differences influenced social life more broadly Cloth towns had more contact with the wider world than agricultural villages, so they were more likely to come into contact with new ideas from outside In the North, it was the textile-working areas that embraced the Protestant Reformation and the cause of Parliamentarianism more quickly than the agricultural ones One historian of the Civil War, David Underdown, has even suggested that minute differences in local ecology could create profound ones in local culture It’s a question, he argues, of chalk and cheese In the chalk hills of his area: Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset, agriculture was based on large co-operate arable fields, under the thumb of the local gentleman Such communities, which were clustered in proper villages, tended to be close-knit and conservative In the cheese country, where farms were scattered across the countryside, and there were few complex co-operative fields, attitudes were more individualist: people were more capitalist, more free-thinking, and more likely to embrace religious radicalism and the parliamentary cause So Underdown argued So location is of crucial significance, but my second point is just as important: and it is in essence that local history is a method as well as a subject It is a way of seeing It is a microscopic way of seeing: it allows us to peer deep into past societies and to see their very DNA At the beginning, I described the Westmorland Gazette as one of the two greatest ever publications in the English language, and I’m sure you’re eagerly wondering what the second is; well, I can now – exclusively – reveal that it is a small book, written by a small farmer from Shropshire at the beginning of the eighteenth century The man in question is Richard Gough, and the book is his history of his village: Myddle It uses the parish church as its hook, taking each pew in turn and telling the stories of the family that occupied it We learn of their lives, their loves, their crimes and their foibles It is wonderfully detailed Yes, it is parochial, but by being so it can probe deeper than any widerranging history Its aim is to describe human nature, as shown by the lives of Gough’s neighbours; you’ll have to read it yourselves to judge whether it succeeds, but I think it is safe to say that it provides one of the most vivid and startling pictures of life in any pre-modern society I know of Its glory is in the detail, in the fact we can get to know the characters it describes In fact, Gough’s History of Myddle is a distant precursor of what is now a well-worn academic form: the micro-study In the last thirty or forty years, historians have begun to recognize the very real academic value of looking at the past through a microscope Individual court cases, one-off events, and the lives of obscure men and women have been the subject for some of the most influential of historical studies And here the key influence here has not so much been local history, but anthropology It may perhaps not be obvious at first, but anthropologists and local historians are really academic bedfellows They both employ the microscopic approach They both probe deep into local communities to see how they work It’s just that anthropologists go and live in the local community of their study, local historians have to relive it through documents Perhaps the most influential anthropological work for social historians has been Clifford Geertz’s classic study of a cockfight in Bali He employed a technique known as ‘thick description’ in which a particularly striking event, in this case a Balinese cockfight, is picked over in exhaustive detail, drawing out the significance of the tiniest of actions or turns of phrase Historians picked up on this, and some of the most widely-read social and cultural histories have employed something akin to Geertz’s ‘thick description’ There’s Natalie Zemon Davis’s classic short book on The Return of Martin Guerre, which analyses an extremely peculiar but wellknown incident of marital complexity in sixteenth-century France Or Carlo Ginzberg’s study of the cultural world of an individual miller in sixteenthcentury Italy, The Cheese and the Worms, which introduced the strange and attractive cosmos of poor Menochio to historians Or Robert Darnton’s essay on what appears to be a ritualized execution by apprentices of their mistress’s cats in pre-Revolutionary France, ‘The Great Cat Massacre’ All these classic texts deploy close analysis of a particular event in a particular place to excavate much wider themes And of course there is Montaillou Some of you may have heard of, or even read Montaillou, by the great French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie It is a study of a small village in the Pyrenees around the start of the thirteenth century The village was one of the last centres of Catharism, a medieval heresy strong in the south of France, and as a result it suffered heavily at the hands of the Inquisition But what was a dreadful tragedy for the villagers presented a great opportunity for Ladurie, for he was able to use the Inquisitor’s interrogations to reconstruct in great detail the social and mental worlds of the peasants of this remote corner of Languedoc Montaillou is one of the great canonical works of medieval social history, but it is also a brilliant example of the local historian’s art, of the historical microscope as a way of seeing the past III I hope I’ve convinced you that local history, in the sense of the scientific pursuit of the human story of particular places, is of academic importance But I want to leave you with a thought that is rather more political Sometimes I worry about the future of social history, or at least the social history I’ve grown to love: the history of the ordinary, the everyday; the real struggles and triumphs of ordinary people through the ages Today’s academy is increasingly in a thrall to the discourse, to the literary representation of things rather than the things themselves Social history has taken a ‘linguistic turn’, which has taken it deep into the back alleys of the published world: too often, to the English early-modernist, the printed output of a select group of London authors is taken as indicative of the culture of the age I worry, too, that our own society’s obsession with celebrity represents the turning of our backs on the democratic: on the ordinary men, women and children who make up our world, and who really make it work In a recent talk by Philippa Gregory, a hugely successful author of historical fiction, she was challenged on the grounds that her stories about aristocratic women essentially wrote out the vast majority of humans from history She responded that the lives of peasants were less interesting than those of the aristocracy And how many times we watch Who Do You Think You Are? to find that the focus is not on the lives of the farmers, the coalminers, and the textile workers, but on some obscure connection to royalty or some great man It’s all, I think, a symptom of our celebrity obsession: the rich, the famous and the powerful are somehow more interesting than the grassroots: the real people who till the fields, raise and educate the children, manage the businesses and work the shifts that actually keep our species going and prosperous This worries me, not just because it cuts against my own historical interests, but because it is profoundly anti-democratic So, every time you watch The Tudors (which, in fairness, is nowhere near as bad as it could have been), or David Starkey, or follow some celebrity’s family roots into the dark corridors of power, or read an historical novel about aristocrats; think about the ordinary folk who are being written out of the story by our own modern prejudice against the everyday Think of the peasants who grew the grain that made the King’s ale, of the poor northern clergyman whose world is turned upside down by the break with Rome, of the ordinary women who can no longer venerate their saints When you visit some National Trust stately home, almost always the house of an aristocrat, think not just about their connection to the King or the Georgian government; don’t even restrict yourself to thinking of the servants who worked there: notice the houses of the Corfe Castle (Dorset): A famous castle, slighted during the Civil War But Tudor and the village of Corfe also contains some wonderful vernacular buildings – testimony to the many local people who lived their lives in the shadow of Stuart the great castle Photo: Jim Champion peasantry you drove past in the nearby village, notice the memorials to the churchwardens, or the box for donations to the poor, in the parish church Think about the village that was cleared to make way for the landscape garden; notice the ancient lanes that generations of peasants drove their animals through; look closely at even something as mundane as the fields themselves Look at the field boundaries, are they straight, or they curve, or they appear utterly random? Maybe some of the pasturelands still have the earthworks of the medieval ridge and furrow, an old field system that was worked over by generations of peasants trying to make a living in a world without much technology, where organic farming was the only way, where everything was recycled This is human history: it tells a story as important as kings and their battles, as aristocratic women, as royal bastards It is our story: our story as a species But as I worry about this, I’m also hugely heartened Because although the academy seems to think that the study of the printed words of Londoners can pass for social history, there are literally thousands of people out there writing local histories which are profoundly democratic Some of them are simply writing their family tree: constructing new personal identities full of generations of ordinary farmers, and weavers, and shopkeepers, and coalminers Genealogy, for all the concerns that academics have about its rigour (and many family historians are sadly not very rigorous), is a profoundly, and wonderfully democratic pursuit But also, there has never been more local history available Local history websites, and publications, are of hugely varied quality of course, but they are there And this gives me huge hope, for I am now confident that if the academy turns its back on the people, in favour of the rich, the powerful, the literate and metropolitan, then the people themselves: the most dedicated local historians there are, will keep the flame burning If academics, even social historians, forget that most people in history have not been Kings, Queens, or celebrities; then we local historians might be the only ones holding on to this knowledge Local history is not just a wonderful tool for understanding the past, it is the people’s history: this is why it matters  ... he explicitly described his doctorate as being in local history II So why is it that local history has had such a profound impact on academic history in the second half of the twentieth century?... story As social history began to make its presence amongst the academic community felt, local history began to gain traction too Reading University appointed a research fellow in local history as... only ones holding on to this knowledge Local history is not just a wonderful tool for understanding the past, it is the people’s history: this is why it matters