Common History

With an upcoming general election and rumblings about voter ID, electoral fraud, proportional representation and lower voting ages, I’ve been inspired to look at how the business of elections has changed and to understand how our Parliament evolved.    This vote from  Terry Pratchett's Dig seemed to me to be a good summation of recent elections. "When people are faced with lots of troubles and they don't know what to do, there's always someone ready to say anything, just to get some power,'" These days, anyone registered to vote ( https://www.gov.uk/vote-uk-election )   can choose any one of several candidates; they then vote by secret ballot for one MP to represent their constituency.     In the 21 st century, there are 650 parliamentary constituencies,   each one (roughly) having the same number of voters. The Parliament that is elected will then sit for up to five years. But it wasn’t always this way; early parliaments were only called at the rule...

  One of my favourite activities when planning a trip to a new area is to open up a map and look at the best routes and any places of interest. These days I’m likely to look at the best route to take, avoiding known bottlenecks, or with interesting places to stop along the way. Our ea rly forebears might not have had maps, but they too would have known about perils and points of interest on their journey, from the names of the places they would pass through.     A traveller in the early medieval period might be wary of passing through Shackerley (in Lancashire, near Preston). The name means robbers wood!   Sceacere – robber, ley – a clearing in woodland.   Conversely a name ending in “ford” such as   Guildford reveals a river crossing.   Sometimes a ford would be named for the river it crossed, sometimes for the animals that used it – Swinford - swine ford, but could also be descriptive of the crossing – Fulford   or foul ford. This brief pos...

  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...

  Thanks to Ancestry, FindMyPast, ScotlandsPeople and a host of other websites we can all look for our Victorian British relatives with comparative ease. And we do; according to the ONS (Office for National statistics) over 386 million people have accessed census data since 2002. However, there are many traps that the unwary researcher can fall into; ages get rounded, districts go missing and the whole process is, as with any human endeavour, prone to occasional errors. It might be assumed that the British national censuses are definitive but in fact it relied on household schedules which were then then copied by the enumerator into the official books; the Census Enumerator’s Books (CEB). The schedules for each residence were completed by the head of the household, and Victorian literacy levels were variable. If they were wholly illiterate the schedules were completed by the enumerator. Those original census schedules were destroyed, so until 1911 we only have the CEB. Unfortunatel...