The ‘diary’ of Henry Townshend, which has recently been re-edited for publication, is a key source for the civil war politics of Worcestershire. This article explores the composition of what is a complex text, and sets it in the context of reading and writing when transmission of news and other information content both by scribal publication and by the medium of print were effective and authoritative. It examines in particular Henry Townshend’s use of accounts of events in parliament, and suggests that he showed a greater interest in understanding the failure of the first parliament of 1640 (the Short Parliament) than in the reforming achievements of the second (the Long Parliament). It is argued that Townshend was likely to have been embedded in a scribal community focused on his home territory, which is likely to have included the Worcestershire gentry and the higher clergy of the see of Worcester.

This article explores the driving forces acting upon the Warwickshire land market between 1284 and 1345, utilizing the feet of fines of this period as its key source. Previous historiographical inquiry has either focused primarily on external factors or else the ‘family-land bond’, neglecting the concept of individualized property management as an explanation, something this paper seeks to rectify. Firstly the article examines exogenous forces in the form of grain prices to test the popular hypothesis as to whether the land market was ‘harvest-sensitive’. Comparative analysis of these prices with land transfers recorded in the fines determines that outside forces played a key role, although this was primarily during periods of economic crisis. The paper then explores the role of the period’s most prolifically active individuals, reconstructing their lives through cross-referencing of the feet of fine evidence with other relevant sources. This clearly reveals the powerful influence these property magnates exerted on the land market, often fluctuating according to their personal needs and desires. The result is to build a clear picture of land market dynamics, which draws on both external and internal forces, defining their roles in relation to periods of stability and crisis.

This article re-examines the circumstances of King Edmund’s murder at Pucklechurch, Gloucestershire in May 926. It argues that the accepted version that the death was a mischance arising from a brawl with an outlaw is unlikely and is based on medieval accounts that are clearly contradictory and unconvincing. It suggests that the persona of the king’s killer as the thief, Leofa, was a construct by later chroniclers designed to counter rumours that the king was the victim of a political assassination.

Recent scholarship has revised and refi ned our understanding of the outbreak of the First World War, both in Britain and across Europe.1 The picture of a Europe somehow politically and culturally readied for war by decades of nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and propaganda has been replaced by that of a Europe in which the great powers were not seeking war, certainly not a general European war, the outbreak of which came as a profound shock. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 seemed to be a ‘little local diffi culty’ that would eventually be dispersed by diplomacy. The ‘July Crisis’ that came in the wake of the assassination was, in reality, a ‘last week of July crisis’, provoked by the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. The British cabinet did not discuss the European situation at all between 28 June and 24 July, being fully focused on trying to prevent civil war in Ireland. Only The Times among British newspapers took a consistently interventionist line. The Liberal press was equally consistently against intervention, right until the end. There is no evidence of a public clamour for war. This is a theme discussed below by Nick Beeching in the context of Worcestershire and its Unionist newspaper, Berrow’s Journal. British national unity was preserved, above all, by the disastrous German decision to violate Belgian neutrality, in the wake of which anti-war agitatio n disappeared almost overnight. The war on which the British government embarked during the fi rst week of August 1914 was not the war that was anticipated. The appointment of Lord Kitchene r as Secretary of State for War was to change the war fundamentally from a British perspective. Asquith had been doubling up as Prime Minister and Secretary of State for War since March 1914, when the Curragh Incident resulted in the resignation of Colonel Jack Seely. Asquith’s decision to invite Kitchener into the government was something of a shot in the dark, as the Prime Minister himself realised. Kitchener’s impact was instantaneous. He argued that Britain must raise a mass army and keep

Early in the 1520s Robert Silkby was burnt as a heretic at Coventry. As a consequence, Silkby’s property in the city was forfeit to the crown. This note transcribes and discusses a petition that Silkby’s widow presented to Henry VIII in the hope of reclaiming his estate.

This paper takes as its subject the gardens and gardening activities of the rural county gentry in early seventeenth-century England. Extant gardens from this period are extremely rare and current knowledge is largely limited to the well-documented, but unrepresentative, and extravagant showpieces of the nobility. However, close examination of manuscript collections, household accounts, and contemporary maps, plans and engravings has offered valuable insight into gardens at gentry level, providing new evidence about what was actually happening in the generality of such gardens during the period. Focusing here on the examples of two Midlands gentlemen, Sir Thomas Temple (1567–1636) and Sir Richard Leveson (1598–1661), who were both engaged in creating gardens during the early 1630s at their respective estates in Warwickshire and Staffordshire, it has been possible to add new facets to our fragmentary knowledge of gardens and gardening in the early modern period, as well as to give consideration to the idea that gardens were an appropriate way for a gentleman to demonstrate his standing in society.

Nottingham’s Conservative-led inter-war municipal housing policy is widely acknowledged to have been progressive and a model of its kind. This is at odds with traditional views of Tory housing policy between the wars. This paper examines the development of the city’s inter-war housing strategy and identifies key stages and trends. Events in Nottingham are explored through an examination of conflicts and tensions within the city council, and by considering the effect of party politics on municipal housing policy. This research quantifies the city’s achievements and finds explanation in a combination of consensus politics, Tory paternalism, and private enterprise failure.

Typing 'Alum Rock Birmingham' into the Google or YouTube search fields generates references to crime, gangs, cars, terrorism-related arrests and severe economic deprivation. At first sight few areas offer such a challenging context for testing whether diversity, equality and solidarity can be easily reconciled in contemporary cities. Yet an ongoing series of interviews with local residents in this area of east Birmingham, and related archival research, is uncovering richer and more complex stories. The main commercial artery, the Alum Rock Road, has been not just a major focus for potentially misleading representations of the locality as a 'no-go area', but a site of considerable emotional resonance. These deep-seated, often ambivalent attachments to place are woven into both personal and spatial biographies and tend to be overlooked in contemporary debates about social cohesion. These issues are focused through a series of representations of Alum Rock: a set of photographs taken for the Community Development Project in 1976, a 1970s local community newspaper, street art, an exhibition and recent YouTube videos. These sources illustrate how localities contain multiple 'subjugated knowledges' which need to be excavated, captured and articulated, for they form an integral part of the spatial biographies of places like Alum Rock.

The project entitled Legacy of Partition, 1947–2009, funded at the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland by the Museums, Libraries and Archives partnership, was aimed at gathering the memories of Leicestershire people who lived through the upheaval of Indian partition in 1947 and exploring the understanding of these events among the younger generation today. The article explores the methodology of the oral history interviews, the new resources collected by the archive as a result of the project, the inter-generational learning that resulted in the schools which piloted the teaching resources, and the implications of such community projects for the traditional archive, involving people who never thought of themselves as having any interest in history as depositors of records for the future.