This short study of the history of Ledbury from Queen Elizabeth I's reign to the present day is sponsored by the Victoria County History of England and supported in sprightly manner by Sir Roy Strong. The Director of the Victoria County History claims that it uses the Victoria County History format, but this is not totally correct for both good and ill. The editor has produced a book that is easy to read and copiously and imaginatively illustrated. But although the narrative and conclusions are based on sound research, almost all the primary sources used are ones that are available locally. Despite what is stated in the bibliography, the footnotes show little sign of the great strength of conventional Victoria County History volumes, a thorough knowledge of national archives for the area being studied.

The chapters are topic based but within a chronological framework. They appear to have begun as a series of individually researched, detailed studies, which were then stitched together into an almost seamless cloak by Sylvia Pinches. The book lacks a preface, however, and it is therefore impossible to ascertain who is responsible for what. Occasionally the writers nod. The introduction to chapter nine, for example, implies, wrongly, that the population of Hereford only rose from 10,900 to 11,500 between 1851 and 1901. It also attributes the stability in the population of the county, and of Ledbury in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the Great Depression in agriculture which forced farm labourers and their children to go elsewhere in search of work. The Great Depression was, however, only one of the ‘push’ factors at work. Mechanisation also had a role to play, as well as various initiatives promoting emigration to the colonies. The ‘pull’ factors are similarly ignored, but the section in Rider Haggard's Rural Rides relating to Herefordshire is particularly good on this aspect of the ‘flight from the land’, and Pinches and her team could well have used nineteenth-century sources for the town to test the validity of some of what Haggard's informants told him.

What is more surprising is to find a second history of Ledbury in print only thirteen years after Joe Hillaby's Ledbury: A Medieval Borough was published by Logaston Press. However, the two do not cover the same ground. Hillaby is strongest on the town's medieval history but peters out in the late nineteenth century; the work of Pinches et al. is at its strongest when dealing with the ‘soft’ socioeconomic history of the town in the nineteenth and the twentieth century, a field in which its editor has an established academic reputation. In addition, where the two books cover the same ground they often complement one another. Hillaby, for example, has more than Pinches on the ecclesiastical history and on changes to the built environment in the eighteenth century, whereas Pinches begins with a most impressive chapter on the physical setting of the town and is very much stronger on the town's economy in the probate inventory era.

Where the two books directly overlap, the work of Pinches et al sometimes goes well beyond Hillaby. Both describe and set out to explain the great rebuilding of 1580 to1620, which Pinches elaborates by careful analysis of the Easter Book that covers much of the period. Both attribute the wealth that gave rise to the rebuilding to woollen cloth and leather goods manufacture, but I suspect that a third factor was at work. The period was one of high agricultural prices. North and central Herefordshire produced an agricultural surplus and this would have had easy access to markets along the Severn and the Bristol Channel via Ledbury and the river ports of Upton, Tewkesbury and Gloucester. On the other hand, Hillaby provides a more thorough coverage of ‘improvement’ in the town from 1660 to 1840. Neither, however, has contributed what others might regard as essential, a systematic analysis of the census enumerators’ returns of 1841 to 1901. Amongst many other things this would have provided context for the late nineteenth-century building boom in the town by showing when and under what circumstances the shopkeepers gave up living over the shop.

I have been more critical that I meant to be. Writing the history of a non-corporate town is a daunting task because there was no corporation to generate and preserve primary source materials. The book's aspirations are readability and sound scholarship. These it has achieved, and I feel sure that its contents will aid immeasurably in the transfer of accurate knowledge about Ledbury's past from the local historians to the wider community. However, for a consistent coverage of the period 1580 to 1840 I recommend that the book is read side by side with Hillaby.