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About the Book

Studies in Regional and Local History, Volume 18

Dr David Dymond is one of Britain's most highly respected local historians. He is a Vice President of the British Association for Local History and of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History, President of the Suffolk Records Society, and an honorary fellow of the University of East Anglia.

The author of several valued books about the practice of local history, notably Researching and Writing History, his contribution to the study of local history generally, and in his adopted county of Suffolk in particular, has been immensely influential.

The essays in this Festschrift are offered as a token of esteem and affection by colleagues, friends and students of David. They consist of new research on aspects of local history from the medieval period to the twentieth century, with a particular focus on Eastern England.

Taken together, they illustrate David's philosophy of local history (that it should be ‘wide‐ranging, inclusive, integrating and interdisciplinary’).

In his introduction, Professor Mark Bailey pays tribute to the breadth and depth of David's scholarship and to his passion for teaching. These essays, in turn, aim to reflect the values that have always characterised David's approach: a focus on primary sources meticulously interrogated and a concern to avoid the pitfalls of parochialism by remaining sensitive to the wider influences upon communities.

From papers exploring aspects of medieval religion, the contributors move on to medieval trade and industry in Norfolk, Suffolk and Lincolnshire.

Two studies of the structures of local elites provide fresh insights into communities at later periods, while the final selection of essays consider fascinating and wide-ranging aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century commerce, society and culture.

The very varied contributions to this collection aptly reflect the breadth and depth of David Dymond's own scholarship whilst offering a rich choice of material to anyone with an interest in local history.

Dr Evelyn Lord was the course director for the University of Cambridge's Master of Studies in Local History and tutor for local history at the University of Cambridge, Institute for Continuing Education. She is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and is currently chair of the Cambridgeshire Association for Local History and a member of the Cambridgeshire Records Society executive committee.

Dr Nicholas R. Amor is an honorary fellow of the University of East Anglia and the University of Suffolk and chairman of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and history.

ISBN 978-1-912260-22-5, Jul 2020, 242pp, Hardback

Reviews

“The book's principal value is in setting out the range of methods, sources and approaches currently adopted by leading local and regional historians, and making these accessible to a wide readership… There is a good chronological spread of topics, with notable strength at the medieval end… [T]here is much here to interest socio-economic historians, religious historians, and local historians concerned with a sense of how people and places shape one another.” Andrew Hopper, Midland History

“I really enjoyed these succinct essays, and whilst their focus is generally on the East of England, they paint pictures that would undoubtedly be replicated in many other towns and cities across the country.” Paul Gaskell, Oxfordshire Family Historian