Common History

  Manorial court records are remarkably frustrating documents giving a limited peek into the lives of long-dead inhabitants.   The exist from the early 1200s onwards and can illuminate the lives of   ordinary people from the late medieval onwards.   I have investigated the early modern court records from Worfield in Shropshire and the details they reveal can be fascinating,   one presentment was to prevent pigs from being allowed in the churchyard!   However they are often overlooked as useful sources. This probably because of issues of accessing the information and the assumption that, with the end of the feudal era, they become less relevant.   However, even into the 16th and 17th century they contain valuable information about the lives of the manor’s inhabitants, especially when combined with other records such as constables accounts and lay subsidies. Although the records are kept in Latin, the courts were of course conducted in English, so the ...

  There is  considerable debate public about institutionalised racism and the way that the profits from slavery have funded contemporary institutions and businesses. It also shines a spotlight on the business of history; whose history is recorded,  who is commemorated, what assumptions have passed unchallenged and how do we ensure that the field of history reflects all our histories not just that of a privileged few.  In this piece, I want to look at one aspect of local history; the lost histories of black Britons in the Midlands before the First World War. It is commonly assumed that black Britons are generally descendants of the Windrush generation.  However, their story goes back much further than that.  Black Britons appear in the records from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, albeit in small numbers. It is shocking to learn that the last recorded slave sale in the Midlands took place in 1771 in Lichfield. There were others before that, and it is q...

  This is a post prompted by a holiday. Sometimes a seemingly straightforward question opens up an intriguing puzzle that can raise more questions than it answers. Recently we were in Cornwall, and while out for a coastal stroll, we happened on the parish church at St.Levan. I have a huge soft spot for graveyards and an indulgent wife. So we stopped for a look. Gravestones, graveyards and memorials are always interesting ( but that’s for another post) and St.Levan was no exception. The one that that stood out most was a substantial headstone erected in memory of Richard Maddern to which was appended the epitaph of his son. Richard Oliver Maddern “died on board HMS Rattler in 1863 on his passage from Nagasaki to Yokohama” when he was only 23. I had to read this a couple of times. At first, I assumed he was a sailor, not an unreasonable assumption in a coastal Cornish village.   But when I checked the listing for Cornish Naval deaths 1730-1960 (available at www.opc-cornwall...

  Everybody knows that mass production started with Henry Ford and his model T assembly line in 1913. Or did it? Whilst is is true that he is responsible for the first moving chassis production line, did you realise that the ideas actually came from the food industry?  Which by that time had used the assembly line principle for well over a hundred years.  The first product to be made on the assembly line principle was hardtack, otherwise known as ship’s biscuit. In the late 1700’s at the royal dockyards at Portsmouth an assembly line of bakery staff made 70 four-ounce biscuits per minute.   The varying fortunes of war also made them one of the earliest exponents of contract labour, employing a core work force which was supplemented by contractors.   This early assembly line was a manual process but organised to ensure that workmen’s movements were “economised to the utmost”. By 1833 a steam powered assembly line which was almost entirely automated enabled the ...

  Epidemics, bad behaviour and blaming are a common occurrence during outbreaks of disease, whether in 21 st century Britain or in ancient Athens.   Had I realised this at the beginning of lockdown, I could have produced a prophecy, not a blog post. One of the earliest reliable descriptions of an epidemic and its impact was written by the Athenian historian Thucydides, who wrote in the 5 th century BCE. He tells how during the Peloponnesian War there was an outbreak of plague in Athens. When the disease first emerged it was attributed to the Peloponnesians having poisoned their water supplies,   an idea with contemporary Trumpian parallels.   As the epidemic spread, those accusations faded away, but other familiar aspects emerge. People died in isolation as friends and relatives stayed away for fear of contagion,   some heroic individuals cared for the sick but at the cost of their own lives.   Finally, as the scale of the calamity was revealed, pu...

 Local historians, especially those of us not working in academia, often ignore quantitative history as it can be more challenging, particularly if you are not comfortable with maths or statistics. But we should be bold; it is all too easy to drift into narrative history, especially when focusing locally. Digging about in the numbers can reveal interesting information and can be the springboard for further investigations. Excel and its open-source alternatives have powerful tools for crunching number and producing charts, and there is plenty of help on the internet, Google is our friend! This blogpost is about using quantitative data to reveal trends and spark further investigations.  Back in the 1970s Roger Schofield and Tony Wrigley produced an excellent study of England’s population across the last 500 years using data taken from the parish registers of 404 English parishes. Subsequently, this data was expanded to produce data for baptisms, marriages and burials aggregated ...