ABSTRACT
Local history, despite attempts to bring it into line with other forms of historical practice, is still very much the province of enthusiasts. The merest squiggle on a parish register may set the historian’s imagination alight-a reference to the death of a ‘nurse child’ or the marginal note of some ancient local cure. Or he may be horrified by the casual brutality revealed in workhouse records or the ‘removals’ itemised in parochial accounts, such as those reproduced by Reginald Hine, the historian of Hitchin, in his Relics of an Un-Common Attorney (these examples are from 1710):
For a woman’s lodging and victuals and to be rid of her, 1s 3d. Paid to a woman big with child and two children to go out of town, 4d. Paid Mary Gregory to go away, her children having the Small Pox, 7s. (Hine, 1946)
An old smithy or brewhouse may set him on the track of local trades, or a rusty old adze, hanging on its hook, or the chance discovery of a Day Book. He may be excited by a story in an old newspaper (or by the advertisements, or by the inquests, or by police court reports); fascinated by Roman remains; or puzzled by the legend of some halfremembered incident which demands an explanatory setting (the Grimsby riot is a good example). Or again, his sympathies may have been aroused by the struggle of his forebears, as they were for Methodist writers of the nineteenth century, tracing the humble origins of the chapel, and as they are for the trade unionist, writing of Tolpuddle times-or the General Strike-today. The sources, once a project has been taken up, are infinitely various, encompassing archaeological finds as well as literary remains, material culture as well as manuscripts and archives, dialect and speech as well as the printed word. Yet they are never so unlimited that the researcher is likely to get lost in them, and much of his time (or hers) will be spent in chasing fugitive facts, dating a wall or a building, mapping a driftway, completing a family tree. Harvesting, at least for the historian of early modern times, is not so much a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff as of reaping (or gleaning) the solitary ear of grain.
