Common History

  One of my favourite activities when planning a trip to a new area is to open up a map and look at the best routes and any places of interest. These days I’m likely to look at the best route to take, avoiding known bottlenecks, or with interesting places to stop along the way. Our ea rly forebears might not have had maps, but they too would have known about perils and points of interest on their journey, from the names of the places they would pass through.     A traveller in the early medieval period might be wary of passing through Shackerley (in Lancashire, near Preston). The name means robbers wood!   Sceacere – robber, ley – a clearing in woodland.   Conversely a name ending in “ford” such as   Guildford reveals a river crossing.   Sometimes a ford would be named for the river it crossed, sometimes for the animals that used it – Swinford - swine ford, but could also be descriptive of the crossing – Fulford   or foul ford. This brief pos...

  Manorial court records are remarkably frustrating documents giving a limited peek into the lives of long-dead inhabitants.   The exist from the early 1200s onwards and can illuminate the lives of   ordinary people from the late medieval onwards.   I have investigated the early modern court records from Worfield in Shropshire and the details they reveal can be fascinating,   one presentment was to prevent pigs from being allowed in the churchyard!   However they are often overlooked as useful sources. This probably because of issues of accessing the information and the assumption that, with the end of the feudal era, they become less relevant.   However, even into the 16th and 17th century they contain valuable information about the lives of the manor’s inhabitants, especially when combined with other records such as constables accounts and lay subsidies. Although the records are kept in Latin, the courts were of course conducted in English, so the ...

  There is  considerable debate public about institutionalised racism and the way that the profits from slavery have funded contemporary institutions and businesses. It also shines a spotlight on the business of history; whose history is recorded,  who is commemorated, what assumptions have passed unchallenged and how do we ensure that the field of history reflects all our histories not just that of a privileged few.  In this piece, I want to look at one aspect of local history; the lost histories of black Britons in the Midlands before the First World War. It is commonly assumed that black Britons are generally descendants of the Windrush generation.  However, their story goes back much further than that.  Black Britons appear in the records from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, albeit in small numbers. It is shocking to learn that the last recorded slave sale in the Midlands took place in 1771 in Lichfield. There were others before that, and it is q...

  This is a post prompted by a holiday. Sometimes a seemingly straightforward question opens up an intriguing puzzle that can raise more questions than it answers. Recently we were in Cornwall, and while out for a coastal stroll, we happened on the parish church at St.Levan. I have a huge soft spot for graveyards and an indulgent wife. So we stopped for a look. Gravestones, graveyards and memorials are always interesting ( but that’s for another post) and St.Levan was no exception. The one that that stood out most was a substantial headstone erected in memory of Richard Maddern to which was appended the epitaph of his son. Richard Oliver Maddern “died on board HMS Rattler in 1863 on his passage from Nagasaki to Yokohama” when he was only 23. I had to read this a couple of times. At first, I assumed he was a sailor, not an unreasonable assumption in a coastal Cornish village.   But when I checked the listing for Cornish Naval deaths 1730-1960 (available at www.opc-cornwall...

  Everybody knows that mass production started with Henry Ford and his model T assembly line in 1913. Or did it? Whilst is is true that he is responsible for the first moving chassis production line, did you realise that the ideas actually came from the food industry?  Which by that time had used the assembly line principle for well over a hundred years.  The first product to be made on the assembly line principle was hardtack, otherwise known as ship’s biscuit. In the late 1700’s at the royal dockyards at Portsmouth an assembly line of bakery staff made 70 four-ounce biscuits per minute.   The varying fortunes of war also made them one of the earliest exponents of contract labour, employing a core work force which was supplemented by contractors.   This early assembly line was a manual process but organised to ensure that workmen’s movements were “economised to the utmost”. By 1833 a steam powered assembly line which was almost entirely automated enabled the ...