Now that I am free of the REF and the discipline of university employment, I research and write what I want: what I find interesting, innovative, and rewarding. I tend to move between projects and pick them up and put them down as priorities change and new opportunities arise. I have never seen any contradiction in moving between instance/counter-instance forms of writing and analyses based on based on the statistical analysis of big datasets, so a variety of approaches can be found in my writing. In recent years I have picked up my research on aspects of the history of the Yorkshire Dales. I could categorise my research, but in fact many of its outputs span categories: so my paper on the Yorkshire Dales National Park can be seen as ‘local’ to Yorkshire, but actually emerges out of a long-standing interest in non-productive uses of the countryside and the tensions between landowners and people wishing to use the countryside for recreation.

I am happy to give lectures and seminars on work in progress. Please contact me if interested.

Projects in Economic and Social History

Tenure in Tawney’s Century (OUP)

This book draws together 40 years of intermittent research in the archives on tenure, its prime concern being to trace the development of customary tenure between c. 1500 and 1640. A context is established by seeing this as the second great age of custom in British Isles (the book contains a discussion of the evolution of Irish tenant right). The treatment of copyhold by the common law in the sixteenth century is discussed. It is shown that it was quite late in the century before the common law courts offered protection to copyholders. Until then customary tenants had the protection of the equity courts, Chancery in particular. The first half of the book is largely based on the 400 or so Chancery decrees concerning tenure. This enables us to define the area in which copyhold is found and identify the strategies which manorial lords used to try and rid themselves of it, and copyholders to defend it. The second part of the book is chiefly concerned with tenant right in the north of England. Here we can see a form of customary tenancy taking form and winning the protection of the law. The conclusion discusses custom in a long perspective. It is seen as a form of property right created by tenants where there were no formal rights which met their need to buy, sell, mortgage, lease and inherit property.

Custom

I intend to publish a number of early modern custumals with commentary over the next few years. This is, in part, material collected as part of the Tenure in Tawney’s Century project. Amongst the first will be the succession of custumals for Thornbury (Gloucestershire).

Grain trade and supply

I have accumulated a great deal of unknown (or unexploited) material on the eighteenth-century grain trade, both imports and exports from England and Scotland and will publish this data in the near future.

Democratic institutions in early modern England

I am collecting instances of communities electing clergy, schoolmasters etc in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, really through to the Great Reform Act of 1832. This is a subject that I have spoken about on a couple of occasions. The distinction I make is between the right of appointment as a form of property and election by forms of ballot. The latter if found where a community has taken the initiative to develop a school or a chapel, or pays for an officer to undertake tasks for the community (most obviously schoolmasters). Here the right of appointment is vested in a wider body. This is more common than has been appreciated, but I invite colleagues to send me more examples of the practice.

‘How bureaucratization created a problem: poor relief in the liberty of Shrewsbury, c.1629-60’

This paper uses what may be the largest poor law archive of a rural area to show the transition from informal methods of poor relief (begging, local arrangements for the care of poor children) to a rate-based system, and demonstrates how this was largely driven by the borough of Shrewsbury. (A paper on poor relief in Shrewsbury itself will follow, but not for a few years.)

Non-productive uses of the countryside

Following on the edited collection, Our Hunting Fathers (2008), I continue to work on the non-productive uses of the countryside in the twentieth century, for sport and recreation, including the evolution of the national parks, and mid-century planning. The next paper to appear has the working title of ‘The consequences of a bungalow at Malham Cove: inter-war planning in the West Riding Yorkshire Dales’. What can it be about?

Yorkshire

I continue to be active in the history of Yorkshire, writing both ‘local history’ and landscape history.

The History of Giggleswick School

This is the quincentennial history of the school (the traditional date for the school’s foundation being 1512). The commission fell to me after the author originally invited to write the history died suddenly: we could not discover that he had written any of it so what was initially envisaged as an editing and completion job turned into a full-scale history starting with the cataloguing of the school archive. The history is likely to appear in two volumes, one tracing the history of the School to the beginning of the twentieth century, and the other through to relatively modern times. The first of the two is likely to appear in 2021. The story is one of constant adaption to changing circumstances.

The Folly: a late seventeenth-century townhouse in Settle

The Folly is a seventeenth-century townhouse in Settle with a weathered datestone over the front door which reads either 1675 or 1679. The house has long been recognised as significant: there is nothing else quite like it anywhere. There is a prodigious amount of window in the facade. Elements of the house are judged to be innovative, for instance the use of columns to support the corners of the building where windows wrap round two sides of the building.

Previous (but unpublished) work of mine has identified the builder as a Settle attorney, Richard Preston (d. 1695/6). The paper in preparation will draw together what is known about Preston (although does not resolve all the questions about him, including the identity of his wife, Lettice or the source of his money. A bar of Kendal mint cake is still offered for anyone finding a marriage of Richard Preston and Lettice c. 1670.). The paper continues to offer a full account of the house, offers an explanation of some of its odder features and describes the evidence for antecedent structures on the site. The description and interpretation differs from the ones previously published by other writers. The paper concludes by looking at other lawyer’s houses in the district, and finds parallels with The Folly including its cousin, destroyed by fire in 1935.

VCH Shropshire

As chair and General Editor of VCH Shropshire, I am contributing text to forthcoming VCH publications on a number of fronts, mainly in areas of economic and social history, but also on subjects such as the Public Preachers of Shrewsbury.