Description
Book SynopsisDr 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.
Table of Contents1. Introduction - Mark Bailey Part I: Medieval religion 2. Barnwell priory: tensions in the local community - Jacqueline Harmon 3. The donors of the glass in some parish churches of later medieval York - Claire Cross 4. The hermits of late medieval Norwich - Carole Rawcliffe 5. Glimpses of late medieval religion in Suffolk and elsewhere: evidence from the cult of King Henry VI - Heather Falvey 6. The will of Robert Scolys, vicar of Southwold 1444-1470 - David Sherlock Part II: Medieval trade and industry 7. The fairs of late medieval Thetford - Joanne Sear 8. Why did medieval industries succeed? Early-fourteenth-century Norfolk worsted and late-fifteenth-century Suffolk woollens - Nicholas R. Amor 9. Artisans and peri-urban development: a case study from the domestic building industry in the late Middle Ages - Alan Rogers Part III: Early modern 10. ‘Villaines enough’: political and personal feuding within Thetford Corporation 1658-1700 - Alan G Crosby 11. A local elite: a study of office holding in Long Melford, Suffolk - Lyn Boothman 12. Suffolk cheese and Scottish whaling - Evelyn Lord Part IV: Modern 13. Workhouse disorder in Suffolk, 1835-1855 - Harvey Osborne 14. The suburbanisation of Sutton, Surrey - David Woodward 15. Godmanchester and the census - Ken Sneath 16. Canon Arthur Pertwee’s Brightlingsea, 1872 - 1912 - Sean O’Dell 17. The concept of place in local history and regional literature: the fictional England of Bernard Samuel Gilbert - Andrew JH Jackson Bibliography of David Dymond’s writings
