ABSTRACT
It is arguable that what has most bedevilled the recent academic practice of history in Britain has been the triumph over integrative history – or that mode of history which seeks to reconstitute and to explain the multi-dimensional nature of past experience – of what might be called the disintegrative historical approach, that is, specialised thematic history. Local history has come to act as a means of sophisticating our knowledge of particular national processes at still acceptable levels of historical generalisation. In other words, academic local history now tends to be regarded from the outside as intellectually respectable only when it is relevant to the disintegrative form of history, rather than to an integrative version of the English past. The very distribution of the settlements inhabited by a local society, at any period of its history, can only be comprehended as an outcome of their earlier evolution and spatial patterning.
