ABSTRACT
Local history traces its roots to early modern antiquarianism, and was formalised as a discipline with the formation of the English Local History Department at the University of Leicester in 1947 and the publication of W.G. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape (1955) and Local History in England (1959).1 It is closely linked to the expansion of adult education and extra-mural university education during the post-war decades, and therefore is from the beginning tied to a sense of democratisation of learning and the expansion of academic boundaries. Hoskins argued that the upsurge in interest in the local was tied to a sense of the fragmentation of the world, a claim which is repeatedly made for the subject.2
According to Hoskins, there were particular themes that the local historian should pursue, or would unconsciously reveal: ‘the origin and growth of his particular local community or society’; ‘records about the ownership and occupation of the land’; ‘population changes over a long period of time’; and the way that the local community ‘has disintegrated during the past hundred years or so’.3 His colleague, H.P.R. Finberg, agreed, writing in 1952 that ‘the business of the local historian, then, as I see it, is to re-enact in his own mind, and to portray for his readers, the Origin, Growth, Decline and Fall of a Local Community’.4
This sense of decline is the overriding theme of all local history for Hoskins, the way that local areas have become ‘hollow shells from which the heart and the spirit have been eaten away by the acids of modernity’.5 This melancholic, conservative sense of the loss of local wholeness characterises the local as something precious and in some ways a set of practices and actions (a community) threatened by the wider sweep of history as a whole. Local history complements ‘history from below’ models of social history while at crucial moments providing a model in which the local is detached from the national and international. It also emphasises site-specific fieldwork: ‘no local historian ought to be afraid
to get his feet wet’.6 Hoskins’ emphasis here is that the text of a map may lie, and that the physicality of location is key to the search for truth: ‘some of the best documented local histories betray not the slightest sign that the author has looked over the hedges of his chosen place’.7 Hoskins’ approach was long on accuracy and warmly democratic:
