Among the legends of north-east England is the story of the pickled parson of Sedgefield in County Durham. Telling of the surprising posthumous fate of the parish rector, the tale is traditionally thought to originate in the eighteenth century. This article presents and analyses newly uncovered manuscript evidence which dates it a century earlier, to the period of the English civil war, and suggests that the story of the pickled parson may plausibly have a basis in real events. This article also provides a previously unknown identity for the clergyman (who was also the direct ancestor of two British prime ministers). In the light of this discovery, the article uncovers the political and religious context of a story which provides a remarkable micro-history of the turbulence that affected the English parish during the 1640s and 1650s.

This article develops academic literature on the history of the Hospital League of Friends, using the Halifax League as a case study. The League of Friends of the Halifax Hospitals was one of the first Friends groups to be newly founded in the wake of the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS). At the outset, its predominantly middle-class membership and Conservative and Liberal leadership sought to safeguard the perceived benefits of the voluntary hospital system within the new Service. By providing amenities and personal service they contributed strongly to the care provision in Halifax, particularly in the former Public Assistance Institutions used to house the elderly. In doing so, the group sought to maintain continuities between the previous period and the new National Health. This article charts their work during the first phase of the NHS (1948–1974) primarily using local newspaper sources to do so. It argues that the Friends offer a window into both middle-class opposition to the NHS in the early period, and into hospital care more widely.

Although the coal industry in the Northeast of England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been the subject of extensive study by historians over many years, most research has focussed mainly on larger centres of the coal trade such as Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland. Less well known is the significant contribution to coal exports made by some of the smaller communities and harbours along the Northumberland and Durham coasts. During the latter years of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth century the small coastal village of Cullercoats, just North of Tynemouth, became a significant coal and salt exporting port following the development of a colliery at nearby Whitley. Customs records of Cullercoats coal exports were included, as a Lesser Creek, in the Exchequer Port Books of Newcastle upon Tyne. Two Newcastle Exchequer Port Books containing complete records of Cullercoats coastal exports for 1702–1703 and overseas exports for 1698–1699 have survived, these include the names of the people and ships involved and provide a fascinating insight into the impact of the coal trade upon a small coastal port and it’s local community. Although its coal trade was relatively short lived, Cullercoats continued to thrive as a flourishing fishing port and during the nineteenth, twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries as a popular holiday resort frequented by many well-known and successful artists.

Reeve's monograph refreshingly focuses on a new area of British war studies - it uses a local studies lens to explore the coastal towns in the North-East of England and their experiences in the First World War. Reeve compellingly argues that the experiences of people living in the 'coastal-urban environment' need to be understood in order to contextualise wider war narratives within a historiography which overwhelmingly focuses on the metropolitan experience of war.

"STEVE BOARDMAN and DAVID DITCHBURN (eds), Kingship, Lordship and Sanctity in Medieval Britain: Essays in Honour of Alexander Grant, St Andrews Studies in Scottish History, X." Northern History, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–4

"KATE GILES, The Wall Paintings of Pickering Church: Their Discovery, Restoration and Meaning." Northern History, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2