The unit of the parish was integral to everyday life in England and Wales throughout the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century. This seemingly straightforward and hugely important assertion has hitherto received no systematic study. Keith Snell's latest book emphatically fills the historiographical lacuna. Rather than choosing to examine central-local relations or the relationship between landowning elites and the poor, Snell has adopted the more archivally ambitious strategy of interrogating the documents of everyday rural life. This is not to say, however, that this is a “history from below” that ignores the importance of policy, polity, and the rulers of rural England and Wales. The rich and poor and the settled and the migrant are all central to the thesis.

Parish and Belonging is arranged around a series of thematic chapters that explore different aspects of individuals’ attachment to their settled parish. While several of these have already appeared, albeit in modified paper form, the “new” chapters on first glance indeed appear to be on almost entirely different topics. Closer inspection reveals that each chapter is writ through with the broader aim of exploring the manifold dimensions of the centrality and cultural potency of local attachment to the relatively narrow geographical confines of the parish.

The book starts with an analysis of the local “culture of xenophobia,” a concept that could be summed up as “[the] tendency to limit the exercise of humanity to parish confines” (16). Building upon the foundational work of E. P. Thompson, Snell suggests that class was only one sphere of tensions in past societies. Indeed, belonging was just as important as class. Moreover, understanding the culture of xenophobia also acts to undermine the view of many Marxist historians that working-class culture was both progressive and collectively embracing of those from other parishes. The consequences of being perceived as an outsider or foreigner were potentially severe and sometimes violent.

The book builds upon these core ideas in several ways, but the most striking chapter is “Rural Societies and Their Marriage Patterns.” Here Snell informs us that endogamous marriages, that is to say marriages where both the bride and groom were from the same parish, did not markedly decline until the latter decades of the nineteenth century. As such, it would appear that an attitude of parochial insularity, if not necessarily local xenophobia, persisted for much longer than had previously been thought.

In three of the other substantive chapters, parochial welfare provision is used as the lens through which attachments are understood. These chapters take a very different angle than previous analyses of welfare provision by demonstrating the ways in which parochial attachments not only influenced the implementation of the poor laws by parish officials but also how paupers negotiated their relief. Thus, in chapter 3 Snell asserts that while in recent decades historians of settlement have made considerable progress in better understanding the “fundamental connections between settlement and the poor laws” (83), such understandings are undermined by the fact that they have tended to ignore the importance of demonstrating belonging in the processes of gaining relief. Critically, overseers had the right to refuse relief toward nonparishioners; thus, to receive relief was to be entitled to belong. The other chapters focus more squarely on welfare provision under the New Poor Law. Chapter 5 details how the parish remained central to the relief of the poor for the simple reason that even under the workhouse system the majority of claimants continued to receive outdoor relief. Chapter 6 directs our attention to the critical role of the overseer in welfare provision beyond the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act. While these chapters contain much new information on some neglected aspects of welfare provision, some readers may think that it is problematic that these tend to focus so overwhelmingly on the period post-1834. If, as Snell suggests, there was significant continuity between both the administrative structures and the types of relief provided under the Old and New Poor Laws, perhaps these chapters would have been even more powerful if they had tried more explicitly to bridge both welfare eras.

The final chapters demonstrate how belonging was important to all members of rural society rather than just the poor. Chapter 8 forsakes the archive and enters the graveyard in order to better understand the ways in which individuals’ attachments to their parish were performed. While examining tombstone inscriptions—often of the form “of this parish”—is undoubtedly an innovative way of comprehending the complex nature of attachments, it is necessarily limited by the simple fact that only the relatively well-off could afford inscribed tombstones. Are we therefore to believe that the rituals of death and burial followed by the poor were no different from those of the rich and middle classes? Nevertheless, Snell's method tells us much about the ways in which attachment was publicly affirmed and thus belonging and community identities were openly constructed. This inevitably leads us to ask whether there were any other ways in which belonging was performed and paraded in the parish. Most critically, did the poor proclaim their attachments in ways over and above the claiming of relief and the resorting to xenophobic violence?

Chapter 7 is fundamentally different. In examining the creation of four thousand new parishes in the decades before 1900, Snell questions the ways in which new attachments were created and old attachments challenged. While such aspects add much to the overall argument, this topic is vast—as is the chapter—and would perhaps have been better served in a separate book exclusively devoted to parochial and boundary change.

Some readers may feel uneasy about the platform upon which the book has been presented: that parochial attachments have been undermined by globalization and the associated practices of global communication, travel, and global flows of capital, knowledge, and control. While in many ways this is a useful insight, academics in the broader social sciences are beginning to argue that no one has suddenly stopped “belonging” or having meaningful attachments to specific places. Rather, as Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian Longhurst argue in Globalization and Belonging (London, 2005), there has been a perceptible growth of “elective belonging.” Thus, belonging is not fixed to a “community, with the implication of closed boundaries, but is more fluid, seeing places as performing identities” (29). As such, belonging to the relatively narrow geographical confines of a parish may have less cultural cogency today, but attachment to place remains vital and vibrant.

Snell has to be congratulated for incorporating the use of a wide range of documents throughout the book: from parish registers, settlement examinations, and pauper letters to handbooks, contemporaries’ accounts, and the underused Parliamentary Papers. What is most refreshing is the author's consistent referral to the laws that parish officials and the parishioners themselves had to work with (and within). The blend of qualitative and quantitative methodologies is also to be welcomed. Thus, while many of the chapters deftly juxtapose a variety of written sources, others analyze large datasets. For instance, chapter 4 uses 18,442 marriage records gleaned from the published registers of sixty-nine parishes covering some eight different counties (202–4). Different methodologies need not be confined to narrow demographic, economic, or social styles of writing history.

This book is undoubtedly a major contribution toward understanding past societies. Of course, parochial belonging could have been analyzed from a number of different angles or other combinations of documents. But while the concept of “belonging” was embedded, performed, and experienced in a variety of ways and thus could have been explored in a variety of ways, this takes nothing away from the originality and power of his exposition and argument. Indeed, as Snell suggests, that further analysis around kinship networks, regional customs, and folklore would add much to our further understanding of belonging is a testament to the innovative nature of the book. Parish and Belonging will undoubtedly inspire many historians—and not only from the relatively narrow confines of England and Wales—to go back to the parish.