iii. Nottinghamshire Historical Writing, 1677-1997
The very existence of Thoroton’s great Antiquities of Nottinghamshire in some respects stifled the subsequent development of local history in the county, as many later writers simply quoted his facts ad nauseam. The first county history to do this was the Rev. Thomas Cox’s Nottinghamshire contribution to Magna Britannia, which appeared in 1727. The main thrust of the Georgian antiquaries was however towards town histories, possibly inspired by Charles Deering’s Nottinghamia Vetus et Nova, published in 1751. William Dickinson (alias Rastall)’s histories of Southwell (first edition 1767) and of Newark (1806) were rivalled a few years later by R.P. Shilton’s histories of the same two towns (1818 and 1820 respectively). These no doubt helped to inspire W. Harrod’s Mansfield (1801), John Blackner’s Nottingham (1815), J. Holland’s Worksop (1826), and John Piercy’s Retford (1828). Most of these historians resorted to the familiar formula of dealing with the history of the corporation, charities, parish churches and ancient buildings, illustrated with contemporary engravings.
Charles Deering’s Nottingham was perhaps the second most important work of Nottinghamshire historiography. Although, like Thoroton, Deering was a doctor, the two could not have been more dissimilar. Deering was a German who had come to London in 1713 in the diplomatic service; he later studied medicine in France and came to Nottingham in 1735. He was an unhappy figure, unsuccessful as a doctor and unable to gain access to local society. However, by 1738 he had published a catalogue of the local flora which was one of the earliest scientific surveys of its type. Encouraged by a member of the town gentry, John Plumptre, he then turned his hand to local history and topography, and compiled his major work on Nottingham in less than four years. Unfortunately he failed to find a publisher, and the work eventually appeared posthumously. He died in 1749, and it was published in 1751 by a local printer, George Ayscough, complete with numerous illustrations.[10] It is chiefly of value for his contemporary description of the town. Deering’s scientifically-trained and enquiring mind sought out information on such matters as demography, food supply, climate, and local industries; the latter included a detailed drawing accompanied by a minute description of the hand-operated stocking-knitting frame. In the mid-eighteenth century framework-knitting was Nottingham’s fastest growing industry.
The centenary in 1777 of the appearance of Thoroton’s county history stimulated two proposals to publish a reprint. They proved abortive, although a few copies of the first instalment mainly the Hundred of Rushcliffe were printed by W. Whittingham of King’s Lynn in 1781. However, by 1796 a complete new and updated edition in three volumes had appeared, compiled by John Throsby, a Leicester antiquary and parish clerk. Throsby made no attempt to revise Thoroton, but under each town or village entry he reprinted Thoroton’s text verbatim, and then added his own contemporary comments under a separate heading. Throsby began ‘following the track of Thoroton’ in August 1790 and toured the county, visiting churches and country houses and collecting information from local personalities. Like Thoroton’s, his work is biased towards the south of the county. He was discouraged both by the distance from Leicester and the poor roads in the clay country of the north; hence his description of the highways around South Leverton as ‘intolerable for poor curates’. He did not have the entrée into gentry circles that Thoroton had enjoyed and he was refused access to certain country houses. He did not use original archives. Some parish entries consist of little more than a few factual notes. However, he had nearly all of Thoroton’s engravings redrawn, and he added contemporary views of his own, mostly of country seats. At the time Throsby’s volumes appeared, Charles Mellish of Hodsock (1717-97), Recorder of Newark and amateur antiquary, was compiling notes for another projected history of the county, but this never materialized.[11]
The early nineteenth century witnessed the first appearance in Nottinghamshire of that distinctive genre which had appeared in the more ‘picturesque’ counties earlier in Georgian times - the historicallybased topography aimed mainly at upper and middle-class tourists. G.A. Cooke’s Topographical and Statistical Description of Nottinghamshire was published in 1810, and was followed by the Nottinghamshire section of F.C. Laird’s Beauties of England and Wales (1813). The Rev. J. Curtis’s Topographical History of Nottinghamshire (1843-4) quoted extensively from Thoroton, but by that date the first expanded commercial directories were being published, usually with an extensive history of the county as well as parish histories. The first Nottinghamshire directory to adopt this wider format was compiled by William White of Sheffield in 1832, and it was followed by updated versions in 1844, 1853, and at regular intervals thereafter. A county history with a difference was Thomas Bailey’s four-volume Annals of Nottinghamshire published in 1853-55. Bailey set out a narrative history of important events in chronological order. A similar but more useful venture relating to Nottingham and district only was The Date Book of Remarkable Events... (covering 1760 to 1884) compiled by J.F. Sutton and largely based on contemporary newspaper reports.
As with all English counties, the late Victorian and Edwardian eras saw a proliferation of local antiquarian works of variable quality. Among the potentially most useful were the unfinished Notes on the Churches of Nottinghamshire by J.T. Godfrey, an attempt to emulate the Rev. J.C. Cox’s four-volume work on Derbyshire. Only two volumes eventually appeared, covering the Hundreds of Rushcliffe (1887) and Bingham (1907). Further town histories included studies of Worksop by Edwin Eddison in 1854 and Robert White in 1875, Mansfield by W. Horner Groves in 1894, and Newark by Cornelius Brown in 1879. The last was later expanded into a monumental two volume study published in 1904-7, soundly based on the borough archives and other original records. Brown also made the only attempt at a county history in this period, with his contribution to the ‘Popular County History Series’ published in 1891.
During the Victorian period local libraries, museums, and private collectors began amassing collections of local historical books and manuscripts; they included bodies such as the Bromley House Subscription Library, the Mechanics Institute, and the Public Library, all in Nottingham. Several bibliographies of local history were published, some of them listing the contents of institutions or private libraries, such as those of James Ward (1891 and 1896), and Lord Belper (1915), the latter’s library being given to the County Council in 1912.
These initiatives were parallelled by a movement towards publishing vital archive sources, beginning with the first volume of the Records of the Borough of Nottingham (covering 1155 to 1399) edited by William Stevenson in 1882. A further five volumes were published before the First World War, with three more in the 1 940s and 1950s, which eventually brought the published records down to 1900. A less ambitious attempt to emulate this series for the county was commenced by H. Hampton Copnall, the Clerk of the Peace. He transcribed the county quarter sessions records from their commencement in 1604 to the end of the seventeenth century, and published them in the form of a classified narrative calendar in 1915. A companion volume for the eighteenth-century county records was compiled by Copnall’s successor, K. Tweedale Meaby, in 1947. In the meantime there were other initiatives. The Thoroton Society launched its Record Series in 1903 with an edition of seventeenth-century Bishops’ Transcripts.
A parallel interest in genealogy gave rise to the published series of pre-1812 marriage register transcripts between 1898 and 1938. Edited by Thoroton Society founder W.P.W. Phillimore, the series eventually covered 219 parishes. A similar but occasional series of complete early register transcripts was published by G.W. Marshall. Other early independent record publishing ventures included Robert White’s The Dukery Records of 1904, which included transcribed documents relating to the Bassetlaw area, and the edition six years later of the important Rector’s Book of Clayworth. The complete population listings of 1674 and 1688 in the Clayworth book have provided vital national evidence for modern historical demographers such as Peter Laslett.[12] Also at this period the reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission drew attention to the wealth of information in private archives, particularly those of the Dukes of Portland at Welbeck Abbey (10 vols, 1894-1931) and Lord Middleton at Wollaton Hall (1911).
As in so many counties the appearance of the Victoria County History marked the emergence of the first ‘modern’ county history, even though it carried chapters on hunting, fishing, racing and other preoccupations of the Victorian gently. Two volumes on Nottinghamshire, edited by William Page, were published in 1907 and 1910 respectively. They broke new ground by including chapters on social and economic history and industries as well as political history, by basing the research soundly on the public records and other archive sources, and by having major sections written by professional female research assistants attached to the VCH staff: Miss Hewitt and Miss Locke (their Christian names were not recorded!). The more conventional chapters were entrusted to well-known local antiquaries – earthworks to W. Stevenson, and religious houses and forests to the Rev. J.C. Cox, the Derbyshire focused clergyman with a national reputation for his antiquarian publications. Schools were covered by the educational historian A.E. Leach, and Domesday studies by a rising young scholar from Nottinghamshire, Frank Stenton. The descendant of an old-established family from Southwell, Stenton later became one of the foremost authorities on Anglo-Saxon England. Although his career was spent outside his native county he retained many local ties, not least his reputed ownership of several strips in the unenclosed common fields of Eakring.’[13]
Since 1914 the study of Nottinghamshire’s history and antiquities has taken a number of different directions. Some of the more traditional writing has come from the pen of A.C. Wood. His Nottinghamshire in the Civil War is one of the most exhaustive studies of the war in any county. The book examines the social, religious and political background of the ruling community and provides a detailed chronological narrative of local events. Wood made extensive use of the ‘Memoirs’ of Colonel John Hutchinson, written by his wife Lucy after the Civil War. The ‘Memoirs’, which had been in print since 1806, described the career and local activities of the Parliamentarian governor of Nottingham Castle.
Ten years after his Civil War history, Professor Wood published a new History of Nottinghamshire, commencing in Roman times but ending somewhat abruptly with the Parliamentary Reform Act in 1832 after which, he claimed, ‘it is hardly possible... to isolate county history for separate treatment’. Consequently, ‘henceforward the history of Nottinghamshire was inseparable from that of the larger unit, nation and empire, to which it belonged’! The stated intention of Wood’s work was a synthesis of the latest research ‘buried’ in local monographs and national histories in order to produce a franidy popular county history. In this he succeeded, as his book is academically sound yet eminently readable. It is the only analytical history of the county as a whole, but its approach is traditional, concentrating mainly on political, religious and administrative matters. Regrettably, no doubt because of its popular audience, it contains neither footnotes nor bibliography.
Wood’s approach to the history of the county was in sharp contrast to the work of Professor David Chambers, first professor of Economic History at the University of Nottingham. His Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century: a survey of life and labour under the squirearchy (1932) adopted what was at the time an innovative approach with a strong emphasis on the social and economic structure of the county. For the second edition, published in 1966, Chambers wrote a new introduction on ‘the experience of regional economic growth’, and it was the regional emphasis that was most clearly displayed in his The Vale of Trent, 1670-1800: a regional study of economic change (1957). In this monograph he used new demographic techniques to measure population trends based on parish register data.
Chambers also inspired others to work along the same lines that he had adopted, notably Arthur Cossons and W.E. Tate. A pamphlet by Arthur Cossons on The Turnpike Roads of Nottinghamshire was the first definitive survey of the county’s turnpike network based on the Acts of Parliament, and was published jointly by the Historical and Geographical Associations as a national model. Also during the 1 930s, when Chambers was active in Adult Education, W.E. Tate, the left-wing village schoolmaster from Sutton Bonington, began studying the archives held by local parish churches through a series of WEA classes. He later extended it into a national study: The Parish Chest, published in 1946, contains many Nottinghamshire examples.
Chambers was also fascinated by the village of Laxton, where the open field system of farming continues to the present day. The village first attracted academic attention in the 1930s with the publication of the classic study The Open Fields by Dr and Mrs C.S. Orwin in 1935. It was a pioneering work, combining the fruits of practical farming experiments with analysis of historical records, notably the outstanding estate map and survey of 1635 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Later studies of Laxton by Professors Chambers and J.V. Beckett have extended and up-dated their work.’[14]
Other notable milestones in the further development of county history were the local volumes of two national surveys. The first was the Place Names of Nottinghamshire, compiled by J. Gover, A. Mawer and Frank Stenton (1940) and the second the county volume of Nikolaus Pevsner’s Buildings of England series (1951, revised 1979). Pevsner had already written about the outstanding medieval carvings in the chapter house at Southwell Minister in The Leaves of Southwell (1945).
The awakening interest from the 1960s in vernacular buildings nationally was partly inspired by Professor Maurice Barley, whose English Farmhouse and Cottage was published in 1961. In subsequent years his influence could be found behind numerous papers on the history of smaller buildings throughout the county, many of them published in Transactions. As a result of his work and that of his friends and colleagues, including Dr Norman Summers, the number of house histories available in print is the envy of many counties.’[15]
No further scholarly county histories have appeared in recent years, but more general surveys have included David Kaye’s Nottinghamshire in the Darwen County History Series (1987) and Christopher Weir’s The Nottinghamshire Heritage (1991). The wealth of material now available, both in archive and published form, makes the task enormously complex: perhaps one might be forgiven for echoing Thoroton’s pleas about his county history: ‘I allow no man for a judge who hath not done something of this nature himself’.’[16]