ABSTRACT
In the year 1700, at the age of 66, the Shropshire yeoman, Richard Gough of Myddle, set out to write the history of his parish. A year later, having completed a creditable, though largely conventional, antiquarian and institutional study of the parish, he added to it an altogether more original piece of writing: his ‘Observations concerning the Seates in Myddle and the familyes to which they belong’. Beginning with a seating plan of the parish church, he proceeded to provide individual histories of the families who occupied its pews. In this compilation of anecdotes, spiced with his own sometimes censorious, sometimes wryly humorous comments, the seventeenthcentury village community, which Gough knew so well and viewed with both affection and candour, is resurrected ‘warts and all’.1
