It is entirely fitting that the University of Leicester should celebrate the life and work of its erstwhile researcher, Joan Thirsk, with a conference and now essays written ‘in the spirit of Thirsk’ that prove to be far more than a celebratory work. She was, as one of the editors Richard Jones, puts it: ‘a pioneer’ who ‘in exploring parts of history overlooked or deemed beyond reach by others, became one of the most influential figures in her field, and who has left us an enduring intellectual legacy’ (p. 157).
These essays are now encapsulated in volume 8 of a relatively new series published by University of Hertfordshire Press aiming to produce concise books in the area of local and regional history, superseding the series of Occasional Papers started in 1952 by what is now called the Centre for English Local History, a year after Thirsk had been appointed as Senior Research Fellow in Agrarian History.
Christopher Dyer provides a more comprehensive account of Thirsk's spell at Leicester University than has appeared in obituaries to date. In fact, she always lived in London while working in agricultural and local history in Leicester, and was effectively able to bring the vast riches of the Public Record Office and other London archives to bear on the rural history of the Midlands. Probate inventories, for example, revealed the rich detail of farming households for the first time. Dyer's piece is fascinating in the way it charts Thirsk's place in a flourishing phase of the academic study of British economic and social history in the mid-twentieth century, yet still at a time when the discipline was considered to be outside the dominant pursuit of political history.
The main body of the book divides into three parts, all of which were central to Thirsk's academic agenda. First there is the question of distinct agricultural regions – a topic explored with nuance in Thirsk's editing of the agrarian history of England and Wales, and much of her other work, including the succinct and valuable 1987 volume published by the Economic History Society: England's agricultural regions and agrarian history, 1500–1750. The late David Hey plumbs his speciality, the connection between regional surnames and agricultural areas, using entirely modern methods such as genetic maps. John Broad explores 50 years of scholarship on regional economies and ecotypes, and John Chartres examines how improved transport had broken down regional specificity by the early nineteenth century.
It is more than fitting that the middle section of the book examines social relations and the land. Thirsk's own work on the common fields, though not universally well received, injected new life into a debate ongoing since the early twentieth century, as Tom Williamson explains in chapter 5. James Bowen puts the micro-spotlight on Shropshire, with Thirsk's formulations in view. Nicola Whyte provides a perceptive piece on the way in which social relations influenced farmers as much as economic rationality.
Part 3 examines innovators in the early modern countryside – spinners (Muldrew) and shopkeepers (Stobart). The final section pays tribute to Thirsk's observation that there would have been no reason for innovation in agricultural supply without the demand for it. Thirsk's own contribution to our understanding of clothing, footwear and accessory fashion in the countryside is complemented by Susan North's new insights into lace. Finally, with echoes of Thirsk's interest in local markets and diet, Mark Dawson considers the regional specificity of the oatcake. Richard Hoyle, Thirsk's last doctoral student, has written an exceptionally interesting piece on meat through the lens of the diary of Peter Walkden, early eighteenth-century nonconformist clergyman and farmer.
This valuable collection of essays highlights the activities of many more of the ‘projectors’ of early modern England. They made a living from the land and the locality in varied ways and, in so doing, developed elements of the consumer society that Thirsk so cogently explored.
