The Reverend Thomas Stebbing, an enthusiastic and early exponent of Darwinism and a leading natural historian of crustaceans, wrote with horror in 1906 that a recent history of Nottinghamshire ‘could claim to discuss its flora and fauna, while ignoring the whole zoology of invertebrate animals’. How could it be, he asked, that ‘spiders and flies, ants and grasshoppers, are treated as mere material for fables, and the great armies of beetles and bees and butterflies are left out of account, as though they had no essential part in the life and economy of the globe, and contributed nothing to the beauty and the marvel of man's surroundings?’Footnote ¹ Stebbing's comments appeared in the first volume of the Victoria County History for Nottinghamshire, and in this paper we examine the remarkable natural histories contained in the first volume of each Victoria County History ‘set’ published before the First World War. Founded in 1899, and unique in Europe, the Victoria County History was planned initially as a 160-volume series divided into county ‘sets’, usually containing four volumes, two of general essays and two of topographical entries. The first volume covered everything up to Domesday Book, beginning with geologyFootnote ² and natural history, and working through the prehistoric to the historic, from earthworks to archaeology. In this paper we ask why the Victoria County History was so committed to natural history in its early days and at what this says more generally about the relationship of local and natural history. We consider the association between local and national experts in the different fields of natural history, and we examine the extraordinary insight we can gain from both archival and published Victoria County History material into the world of the Edwardian naturalist. We use the contrasting counties of Herefordshire and Nottinghamshire to examine key intellectual debates about the role of the amateur and the expert; concern about nomenclature, classification and the state of knowledge; the crucial importance of the geography of the natural history; and a gathering apprehension concerning the extinction of species. Finally, we consider why the Victoria County History abandoned natural history and we assess the value of its published output for modern historical geographers, historical ecologists and environmental historians. We conclude that the Victoria County History not only made a substantial contribution to natural history, publishing something in the region of 1.4 million words on twenty-seven separate counties before the First World War (See Table 1), but provided a national and a consistent context which helped to develop knowledge of the natural world, rather than simply reflecting what was known in 1899.

Table 1

Victoria County History Volume Ones which include natural history or equivalent

County societies and natural history

Until relatively recent times, the study of natural history was indistinguishable from other local studies such as antiquarian and archaeological investigation. Contemporaries saw no reason to draw a firm distinction between disciplines. Several early seventeenth-century ‘local’ histories were referred to as ‘natural histories’, including Robert Plot's studies of Staffordshire and Oxfordshire, and John Aubrey's Wiltshire. Gilbert White's study of Selborne, was titled ‘natural history’, but it included material on antiquities, while Sir Richard Colt Hoare, for his Modern Wiltshire series, commissioned George Maton to write on natural history, and this appeared in volume six. From the sixteenth century ‘county history’ was usually written topographically with an emphasis on place, the parish, within administrative boundaries, the hundred or wapentake. Often, but not invariably, these histories included sections on natural history. Richard Clutterbuck's History and Antiquities of Hertfordshire included introductory sections on natural history, climate and plants.Footnote ³ W. Bartlett's edition of Thomas Wright's Essex, published in 1851 included sections on geology, fossil organic remains and vegetable species;Footnote ⁴ John Nichols's Leicestershire included a catalogue of rare plants found in the Leicester, Loughborough and Charnwood region,Footnote ⁵ and the third edition of Hutchinson's Dorset, published in 1861, included sections on natural history, geology and flora.Footnote ⁶

County archaeological and antiquarian societies set up during the nineteenth century often included natural history and architectural history in their remit whether or not the terms appeared in the organisation's title. The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society was founded in 1853 at Devizes, and still exists under the same title today. The inaugural meeting of the society resolved that it should ‘cultivate and collect information on archaeology and Natural History in their various branches and form a Library and Museum illustrating the History, natural, civic and ecclesiastic of the County of Wilts’. Despite these grand designs, the society showed little interest in natural history because its concerns were primarily with archaeology; indeed, natural history seems to have been included in the title only because Somerset had adopted it, and so it was ‘considered advisable to adopt this course as being likely to increase the success of our institution’.Footnote ⁷ The new society proceeded to divide up its queries between ‘parochial history, ancient buildings, monuments and antiquities, traditions and customs, idiom and dialect, the church, the churchyard, and questions on ornithology, entomology and geology’.Footnote ⁸ The Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society today calls itself ‘the Historical Society for the County of Somerset since 1849’, and notes on its website that it was one of ‘several such organisations established in the English shires during the 1840s [which] reflected the early Victorian flowering of interest in county history and archaeology, as well as the natural environment’.Footnote ⁹ Nor are these links surprising, given the fervour for collecting in Victorian England, even if it was often the piling of fact upon fact, rather than anything more profound. Discovering a new species of beetle was enough to keep many a natural historian happy.Footnote ¹⁰

The link between natural history and antiquarian and archaeological study was also found in religion: contemporaries still thought in terms of a partnership of natural and human history, and this attitude was encouraged because many of the founders of county societies were Anglican clergymen. Put another way, the phenomena of nature, and the events and remains of history, were both proof of the unfolding of a pre-ordained providential plan. History before man, or at least before man left records, was the history of nature.Footnote ¹¹

Even as clergymen and gentry were coming together in these societies, scientific investigation of the sort encouraged by antiquaries was raising new questions about the evolution of the natural order beyond and outside the divine fiat. The study of natural history was also changing, partly because it was considered to be one of the two great subject areas into which all knowledge could be divided: natural history and natural philosophy. Natural philosophy eventually evolved into physics and chemistry, and natural history into the biological and geological sciences, but this was still some way off in 1899. Meanwhile the intellectual tradition of the nineteenth century continued to see natural history as primarily about collecting and classifying, just as members of county archaeological and antiquarian societies also collected artefacts, documents and other remains. Men like the Lincolnshire antiquary R.W. Goulding thought nothing of being documentary historians and field collectors at one and the same time. Goulding spent his career as librarian at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire, and like many intellectuals concerned with natural history as well as other scientific issues he did not have a dedicated scientific background.Footnote ¹²

This widespread enthusiasm for practical natural history has been well documented in recent years.Footnote ¹³ This intense interest in the collecting and classifying of flowering plants, ferns, insects, birds, fossils and shells, spanned divisions of both class and gender. David Elliston Allen, in his ground breaking social history, The Naturalist in Britain, showed how the rise of local societies and organisations, combined with the publication of floras and other guides to identification, allowed a rapid growth in interest in natural history such that ‘by the 1840s, in one field after another, the signs were multiplying of a distinct deepening in penetration. Comparatively suddenly, British natural history had become noticeably acuter in its enquiries and more ambitious in its organisational reach.’Footnote ¹⁴ This great public interest was fuelled by many hundreds of popular and scientific publications dealing with diverse aspects of natural history.Footnote ¹⁵

The circulation of natural history knowledge, ideas and specimens took place within established scientific organisations and more informal networks of friends and associates. Anne Secord has shown the importance of natural history correspondence networks in her study of botanists, entomologists and zoologists in north-west Britain, noting particularly how the network ‘was largely oral and, deriving its sense of community from artisanal values developed in the workplace, entirely male’.Footnote ¹⁶ Reverend Octavius Pickard-Cambridge was typical. A country parson, he wrote numerous scientific papers on spiders, meteorology and general entomology, partly by maintaining ‘an unflagging correspondence with scientists all over the world. He was signed up as one of the natural history expert editors for the Victoria County History, and wrote the entries on spiders for twenty-two counties.Footnote ¹⁷ Another group of enthusiasts was based around Sherwood forest in the mid nineteenth century. January Searle who ‘was acquainted with most of the naturalists and literati of the north of England’, described his friend John Trueman as ‘a first-rate entymologist [sic], who although a shoemaker by trade, corresponds with the first men and societies in the kingdom, and is known as a valuable entymological contributor to the cabinets of our national institutions’. Trueman:

Many of the insects, ferns, seaweeds, birds, mammals and flowering plans which were collected were carefully identified and classified and ended up either in private collections or displayed in one of the many natural history museums to be found throughout Britain, run both by municipal authorities and local and national learned societies.Footnote ¹⁹

Popular interest in geology, in landscape, partly influenced by the Romantic movement, and in natural phenomena more generally, led to the formation of local scientific societies, and a growing interest in collecting, itself part of a wider associational movement dating from at least the 1780s.Footnote ²⁰ A survey of 1873 listed 169 local scientific societies in Great Britain and Ireland, of which 104 were field clubs, mostly formed since 1850. They included the Penzance Natural History and Antiquarian Society (1839), the Eastbourne Natural History and Archaeology Society (1867), the Bath Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club (1868), and the Hampshire Field Club (1885). Each member of the Hampshire club was expected to have an interest in an aspect of natural history or antiquities. It is not going too far to suggest that natural history reached a sort of cult status between the 1820s and 1870s. By the end of the nineteenth century nearly 50,000 people were members of natural history societies. For many, if not all, of these people, there was no recognised contradiction between combining natural history and archaeology with collecting and cataloguing finds, as well as undertaking excursions.Footnote ²¹ In addition, there was the growing influence of Darwinism in the 1870s and 1880s, and with it the idea that evolutionary theory needed to be reconciled to Christian doctrine, something which became easier when Archbishop Temple, an acknowledged Darwinian, became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896.Footnote ²² Gradually some order was introduced, with a rationalisation in the number of societies, particularly through mergers, and as a result also of the professionalisation of science teaching in the wake of the 1870 Education Act. The emphasis shifted from collecting to identifying types, partly through practical work in laboratories, while the growing interest in conserving nature, expressed through the work of the Commons Protection League, the Society for the Protection of Birds, now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and the National Trust all helped to emphasise the importance of understanding the natural world.

It was against this background that the Victoria County History was launched in 1899 as a ‘National Survey’ of England ‘at the commencement of the Twentieth Century’, designed to show ‘the condition of the country at the present day, and tracing the domestic history of the English Counties back to the earliest times’. The original framework for each county envisaged a largely chronological account covering a range of topics which included the four key concerns of the county societies: natural history, including geology, flora and fauna; archaeology in the form of pre-historic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon remains; architecture, through detailed descriptions of churches and important houses; and local history in the form of a series of essays on each county's ecclesiastical, social and economic, political and educational history, together with its sporting interests. These essays, according to H. Arthur Doubleday, general editor 1899 to 1904, were designed to ‘bring into prominence the main characteristics of every phase of county life’. Each set was also to include topographical entries on a place by place basis reflecting the style of the older county histories, and providing ‘such local details as go to the making of parish histories’.Footnote ²³

The agenda quickly became avowedly Darwinian. The Times noted that ‘the History of each county will open with its geology, pass on to its palaeontology, and so through the ascending scale of the floral and animal kingdoms until prehistoric man is reached’.Footnote ²⁴ A report drawn up in 1903 distinguished clearly between palaeontology, geology and flora and fauna, appointing separate editors for each section, and the emphasis on origins was reflected in the membership of the Advisory Council established to oversee the Victoria County History. It included the presidents of the Royal Society, the Linnean Society and the Zoological Society, as well as the Director of the British Museum.Footnote ²⁵ Of course, behind this also lay commercial considerations. The Victoria County History was funded by Archibald Constable and Company, the London publishing firm, and they certainly saw the market for the books among the country landowners. The evidence of early subscriber lists suggests that this supposition was correct, and the inclusion of natural history, as well as sport, and particularly hunting, shooting and fishing, was probably designed with the target auddience in mind. The Haddon House series on country sports published by Dent, and the Country Life Library of Sport, were both linked to the foundation of Country Life in 1897. The Victoria County History was aware of the need to appeal to the landed establishment, as well as to those who wished to join them by carrying their new money into county society. The desire for a formal link to the National Trust reflects similar considerations.Footnote ²⁶

Amateur and professional experts

Given this context, the Victoria County History emphasis on natural history makes good sense, and an early decision was taken to employ specialists to undertake the work. This raises questions about the criteria that were used to select the experts and the methods taken to ensure that the information collected was consistent and accurate. A much travelled naturalist, Aubyn Trevor-Battye (1855–1922), was brought in to oversee natural history. Known for his interests in ornithology, and flora and fauna, Trevor-Battye was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in November 1896. In the spring of 1899 he was invited to take charge of the Victoria County History's natural history work, which was to include geology, flora and fauna. Trevor-Battye was to be paid ten pounds for each county entry that he edited, and one pound per thousand words for any text he contributed himself. Doubleday was anticipating around one hundred pages.of around five hundred words each, per county, which amounted to around two million words in total.Footnote ²⁷

Trevor-Battye was active in searching out and signing up expert contributors to fill the gaps which he was unable to cover himself, but having started the ball rolling he seems to have dropped out of the project, and by 1903 there was no overall editor for natural history.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, a number of separate section editors had been appointed for geology (Clement Reid, Horace R Woodward), palaeontology (Richard Lydekker), and flora and fauna (G. A. Boulenger, F. O. Pickard-Cambridge, H. N. Dixon, G. C. Druce, Walter Garstang, Herbert Goss, R. I. Pocock, Reverend T. R. R. Stebbing, B. B. Woodward and others).Footnote ²⁹ Lydekker, a geologist and palaeontologist of long standing reputation on the staff of the Natural History Museum, was signed up by Trevor-Battye in summer 1900 to write the palaeontology section for all forty counties. His attitude towards the work is clear from his letter of acceptance:

Other national experts were also signed up for the whole series. Reverend Thomas Roscoe Rede Stebbing (1835–1926) of Ephraim Lodge, Tunbridge Wells, the son of Henry Stebbing who had edited The Athenaeum, described himself as ‘a serf to natural history, principally employed about Crustacea’ and ‘an early and enthusiastic convert to Darwinism’. He wrote on ‘Darwinism, natural history, and theology’, including Essays on Darwinism published in 1871, and he became ‘increasingly unorthodox in his religious beliefs through the years’, as he developed a view that religion should be ‘consistent with the logic of science, but its roots were transcendental, emanating from a god of love and unselfishness.’Footnote ³⁰

Stebbing wrote on crustaceans for all forty counties. In March 1905 William Page, general editor 1902 to 1904 jointly and from 1904 to 1934 alone, sent him a timetable showing ‘the order and dates we shall want the articles on Crustaceans for the next three years’ for nine counties. Herefordshire was due on 1^st September 1906.Footnote ³¹ A letter of 1909, replying to a note from Page suggesting that there would be publication delays, reveals that Stebbing's working methods included visiting the counties he was writing about. Acknowledging the likely delay, he pointed out that:

He had heard rumours about ‘the financial position of the Victoria History’ and noted that the ‘merit of the History itself is so conspicuous that any shortcoming in the sale of it can only be due to the want of sufficient advertisement’ and he proposed that ‘some pressure should surely be put on the publishers to let wealthy country gentlemen know in their several counties that such a work is in course of production’.Footnote ³² In August 1915, and now ‘over eighty’ he noted in another letter to the Victoria County History that he had ‘proofs for 29 chapters, so that apparently there are ten besides the present one still only in manuscript or typewritten’.Footnote ³³

The true extent of Stebbing's commitment to the Victoria County History is shown almost poignantly in a letter of August 1915 in which he ‘troubles’ Page with his fortieth chapter on Crustaceans for the Victoria County History. He notes that ‘As I am now over Eighty, it would please me to have an early opportunity of correcting the press’. He is aware that Page's hands are probably ‘quite tied under existing circumstances, so that you cannot be influenced by autobiographical details. I merely give the information on the slender chance of its bearing fruit.Footnote ³⁴ Many of these chapters were never published, or even paid for. Stebbing was still owed eighty-two pounds after the war for his unpublished essays. Despite advancing years, he went on to publish Faith in Fetters (1919) and Plain Speaking (1926), books in which he ‘used the rationality of Darwinism to account for the origin of human behaviour and morality and to criticize tenets of the established church’ such as the divinity of Jesus and miracles.Footnote ³⁵ Other experts with a national remit on a county basis included F.O. Pickard-Cambridge who wrote on spiders for twenty-two counties and B.B. Woodward on non-marine molluscs for twenty-eight. Others came and went more sporadically including William Warde Fowler who contributed articles on beetles to ten counties.Footnote ³⁶

Doubleday preferred to work with such men. Not only were they reliable, although Stebbing had a tendency to write too much, but they met Doubleday's required standards for natural history ‘where scientific methods are required’.Footnote ³⁷ To achieve this, careful guidelines were laid down showing what was needed for each county, and the ‘system and nomenclature to be followed’.Footnote ³⁸ Yet he recognised that for both political and practical reasons he could not ignore natural historians specialising in particular areas. Writing to Sir Roper Lethbridge, who was busy in late 1899 recruiting support for the Victoria County History in Devon, he asked to be informed of any suitable authors for the natural history sections not already covered by national experts, although he admitted to some reluctance in employing such men: ‘it often happens that those who are locally based require a good deal of direction and assistance’.Footnote ³⁹ This scepticism was reflected in Doubleday's offer to Professor James Clark, Principal of the Truro Central Technical Schools, to contribute on natural history to the Victoria County History Cornwall. The tone of Doubleday's written invitation to Clark on 24^th June 1902 suggests that he was not exactly first choice:

Clark subsequently wrote almost all the zoology section and contributed as well on fishes, reptiles and mammals, although the slow pace at which he worked delayed the publication of Victoria County History Cornwall Volume 1 and annoyed the Central Office. Fast producers like Lydekker, who were used to writing to deadlines in order to make their incomes, were much to be preferred over provincial writers who might have the knowledge but could not be guaranteed to produce the goods. Clark's view that the work could not be governed by deadlines provided a sharp contrast.Footnote ⁴¹

The selection of experts in Herefordshire and Nottinghamshire

Our two case study counties provided very different challenges for the selection of suitable experts for the natural history sections of the Victoria County History. In Nottinghamshire there was a well established, large natural history museum associated with the University College founded in 1881. By contrast, in Herefordshire there was only a small museum and no institution of higher education. Moreover, in Nottinghamshire there had been no county history since the 1790s, whereas a competing study was in progress in Herefordshire when the Victoria County History was founded. The two counties also had very different geographies, with Nottinghamshire heavily industrialised and urbanised by 1900 whereas Herefordshire remained sparsely populated and agricultural.

In Nottinghamshire the great majority of the different sections within natural history, apart from those written by the London specialists, was contributed by John Wesley Carr (1862–1939). Carr had a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge and was a Fellow of both the Linnean and Geological Societies. He had been appointed curator of Nottingham University College's Natural Science Museum in 1886 and was Professor of Natural Sciences between 1893 and 1927.Footnote ⁴² The historian Professor A. C. Wood assessed his talents rather waspishly: ‘Primarily he was an entomologist, and belonged to the museum rather than the classroom. He possessed a wide knowledge of insects, loved collection and classification, and was never so happy as when bending over his trays of empaled Lepidoptera’. Wood thought that:

Despite this appraisal, Carr's enthusiasm and depth of knowledge was amply demonstrated in his Victoria County History contributions. On occasion, his entomological fieldwork actually took place within his museum: he recounts with relish how he found ‘several examples’ of Lathridius bergorothi on 13^th November 1900 ‘feeding on a dried specimen of burdock in a parcel of British plants which I was incorporating in the herbarium at Nottingham University College’.Footnote ⁴⁴

One of Carr's colleagues, Professor J. F. Blake wrote on geology and the section on birds was compiled by the leading Nottinghamshire ornithologist Joseph Whitaker (1850–1932), a wealthy naturalist and sportsman who lived at Rainworth Lodge. His memoirs Nimrod, Ramrod, Fishing-Rod and Nature Tales (1909) included chapters entitled ‘How five guns shot 187 brace of partridges on a November day’, ‘A wonderful run with the South Notts Hounds’ and ‘The best rabbit day I ever had.’ He wrote several books on shooting and ornithological topics, but of most relevance to the Victoria County History was his Descriptive List of the Birds of Nottinghamshire written in 1879 with W. J. Sterland.Footnote ⁴⁵

The selection of experts in Herefordshire was rather more complicated. Writing to Doubleday on 24^th April 1899, George Strong of Ross, Herefordshire, was able ‘to enclose the names of some scientific gents, who may assist in your grand undertaking’.Footnote ⁴⁶ He noted that ‘For myself, my contribution has been “The Heraldry of Herefordshire”,Footnote ⁴⁷ & “Handbook to Ross & Archenfield”’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The first of these had been published fifty-one years previously and the second, which included sections by other authors on the geology and botany of the Wye Valley, had been published in 1863. The ‘scientific gents’ he named were ‘Mr Henry Southall, Ross, a learned & prosperous Tradesman, Capital Botanist & Meteorogist (sic). Rev. W. H. Purchas, Aston Vicarage, Ashbourne, Derby. Botany & Trees of Herefordshire. Mr James Davis, Solr Hereford. Antiquarian. Dr Moore, near The Cathedral, Hereford. Rev . . . Ley, Sellack vicarage, Ross. Birds.’ Some of these provided further names, and the Reverend Augustin Ley later wrote a section of the Victoria County History, albeit on botany rather than birds.

Strong's book of 1848 was intended in part to ‘form a supplement to Duncumb's county history’. This history had been a long time in the writing. Initiated by the Duke of Norfolk in 1780, the first volume written by John Duncumb, consisting of a general history of the county and the city of Hereford, was published in 1804 and the first part of a second volume in 1812. This second volume was completed by Judge W. H. Cooke in 1866 who published another volume in 1882. In what appears in hindsight like a frenzy of activity, another volume was completed in 1897. It was at this point that letters advertising the new Victoria County History were received locally. This created potential conflicts of interest for men who had previously joined the Herefordshire county committee for the long running project. Joseph Carless, a Hereford solicitor, told Doubleday that:

Carless was concerned that ‘having regard to the advertising of your County History Series’ three hundred pounds that had been guaranteed ‘may be lost and the work incident to the publication under the auspices of the Local Committee have to be given up’. He hoped that the Victoria County History might ‘take up the work and keep up the old name and so continue it’ and offered ‘every help’ in providing access to ‘invaluable papers local archives . . . collected over a series of years.’

The Victoria County History was designed to be a new study and Doubleday was not interested in taking over existing projects. As a result, Herefordshire found itself briefly in the Edwardian period in the luxurious position of being subject to the scrutiny of experts composing two major county histories. Volume 1 of the Victoria County History for Herefordshire was published in 1908, and Volumes 5 and 6 of Duncumb's history, compiled by John Mathews, were published in 1912 and 1913. There is little evidence of interconnections between the two histories although some surviving correspondence between Lord Biddulph and Doubleday indicates that the local committee asked advice about the appointment of a new editor. Doubleday told Lord Biddulph, in a rather Olympian manner, in 1903 that ‘The qualifications needed for the post are possessed by but few people, and in the case of the Victoria History I have had to arrange a system whereby the work is not dependent on expert local assistance’.Footnote ⁴⁹

As elsewhere, the final list of Herefordshire writers included a mixture of nationally established figures, who were specialists in particular groups of species, and local men, and one woman, who had years of experience. They were listed in the Victoria County History as follows:

The motives of the selected experts were of course varied. Most of them were not expecting to make much money from their writing and in the case of enthusiasts such as Augustin Ley and Carleton Rea the payments, although useful, were clearly not of enormous importance. At the other extreme were those for whom the payments were essential, such as the extraordinary and entertainingly troublesome Clifford Cordley, who was commissioned to write the section on sport for Herefordshire. He lived in the village of Colwall, near Malvern, and was in his own words ‘a man in a good social position, & I have been well-known in the realm of letters & journalism for 30 years’. He was the author several short stories including ‘Up in a Balloon’, Chums (5^th April 1893) and pieces such as ‘The Second Horseman’; ‘A Poor Man's Stud’ and ‘A Quist Crusade’ for Fore's Sporting Notes and Sketches descriptive of British, Indian, Colonial and Foreign Sport (Vol. XX, 1903). But he was very short of cash and used a long string of reasons why Doubleday should pay him in advance for his contribution. On New Year's Eve 1908 he wrote that:

This seems to have worked because in April 1909 he noted that ‘I have already received £10 on account’ but that:

And a month later he begged:

But these later demands were in vain, and in the end his section on sport still remains to be published.Footnote ⁵⁰

Some of the local experts had considerable national as well as local knowledge. Carleton Rea (1861–1946) was a leading botanist and mycologist who was secretary of the British Mycological Society from 1896 to 1920 and President in 1908 and 1921. He was also President of the Worcestershire Naturalists’ Club from 1902 to 1906, 1934 to 1938 and 1946. With John Amphlett he published Botany of Worcestershire in 1909 and British Basidiomycetes in 1922 and a fungus, Hygrophorus reai Maire was named after him. Rea was born and died in Worcester and practised as a barrister on the Oxford Circuit although he is reputed to have ‘spent most of his time on circuit playing billiards’ and ‘he gave up his profession as his expenses were barely covered by his fees’. His fellow mycologist, Dr J. Ramsbottom, noted that ‘neither his manner nor his speech were such as to inspire the confidence necessary for legal success’. He was ‘difficult to follow’ and his ‘reading of a paper was nearly always an affliction on the audience, for he read badly, and would delight in making the subject-matter mostly strings of names’. He was left well off by his father, who had been City Coroner of Worcester and although friends claimed he was ‘at heart. . . kindly and courteous’ his ‘displeasure if arrangements were not entirely to his liking often struck terror into the hearts of more timid members’. He would stay up until two or three in the morning, writing up notes for the British Mycological Society, and then ‘come down at eleven in the morning, wanting a proper breakfast – so trying for the servants!’Footnote ⁵¹

Carleton Rea wrote to Trevor-Battye in 1900 providing detailed advice on the nomenclature and classification of fungus, drawing on international literature:

This rapidly changing state of knowledge and shifting international classifications made the choice of nomenclature to be used by the Victoria County History problematic. There was also a more practical problem of access to costly information by field workers. Rea noted that the:

He pointed out, however, that as Saccardo's work was ‘very costly’ it was ‘in the hands of few mycological workers’ and that ‘though they are obliged to consult it from time to time at our national institutions’ the ‘adoption of this book as a basis would cause our present mycologists great difficulty’.

Carleton Rea highlighted the rapidly changing state of knowledge about the existence and distribution of fungi. Like other specialists he regretted the relative lack of interest in his area of enthusiasm. He thought that ‘few botanists seem to care to take up this neglected branch of study’ but argued that were they to do so ‘what great additions thereto should we not have to record’. Indeed ‘my own private opinion is that the British list is nearer 6000 than 5000 + will continue to increase’. He stressed that if the Victoria County History required full lists of species then ‘they will be very long, if short no mycologist will know how to compress it as at present the distribution is entirely unknown + what is common in one area may be a good thing in other parts’.

Although Carleton Rea had initially raised many difficulties with the collection, collation and categorisation of information about the fungi for the Victoria County History he did eventually agree to contribute a section for the Herefordshire volume. He told William Page that:

Augustin Ley is a good example of a deeply rooted local specialist. He was commissioned by Doubleday to be responsible for the whole of the Botany section of the Herefordshire Victoria County History and agreed to subcontract responsibility for mosses and fungi to two other experts: ‘Would you kindly allot the 20,000 words allowed for the whole article among the various sections. May I leave it, therefore, with you to communicate with the Rev. C. H. Binstead and Mr Rea with regard to their subject?’Footnote ⁵⁷

Augustin Ley and Charles Binstead were both Herefordshire clergymen. Augustin Ley (1842–1911) was born at Hereford and after Oxford went on to become a clergyman like his father. He was a curate at Buxton from 1867 to 1871 and then ‘returned to Sellack in order to assist his father with his duties at Kings Caple, and lived in his home county for the rest of his life’. He married in 1878, but his wife died the same year and he:

When his father died in 1887 Augustin Ley became vicar of Sellack and Kings Caple, where he remained until his retirement. He travelled widely including visits to Norway, the Alps, the Riviera and Scotland. He wrote, with Reverend William Purchas, A Flora of Herefordshire (1889) and many papers for the Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club. Ley was also keen bryologist but did not join the Moss Exchange Club founded in 1896 ‘probably because by then his eyesight had begun to deteriorate’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In later years he specialised in the identification of difficult groups of plants including Rubus (brambles) and Sorbus. In 1896 he discovered a new species of whitebeam which was named after him in 1934: Sorbus leyana.

Charles Herbert Binstead (1862–1941) was brought up in the Lake District, moved to Herefordshire in 1890 and spent most of the rest of his life as curate, vicar and rector of a succession of Herefordshire parishes: Eardisley (1890–1897), Breinton (1897–1906), Whitbourne (1906–1912) and Mordiford (1915–1923). He was a founder member of the Moss Exchange Club in 1896 and President of the British Bryological Society from 1926 to 1928. In addition to the work for the Victoria County History, he wrote papers on mosses of the English Lake District and the French Riviera.Footnote ⁵⁹ Both Ley and Binstead were deeply immersed in Herefordshire natural history and together they brought years of expertise on the botany of Herefordshire that they could rapidly deploy and summarise for the Victoria County History. Indeed Ley was able to reply to a Victoria County History request in February 1906 that ‘I shall be happy to undertake it, so far as regards the flowering plants: and my friend Rev. C. H. Binstead has agreed to undertake the mosses: indeed the m.s. of these parts is now practically ready.’Footnote ⁶⁰

Expert contributors were offered a fee of one guinea per thousand words, and they were sent a copy of ‘Instructions to Contributors on Natural History subjects, in which you will see the form of the article required’.Footnote ⁶¹ The careful balance required between scientific and popular language is revealed in the correspondence between William Page and Lindsall Richardson who was writing on the Geology of Herefordshire. Page asked Richardson to modify his article telling him that he should ‘keep in mind that the article is not only for the expert geologist but for zoologists, botanists, antiquaries and historians. I should be much obliged if you would kindly revise your article’. Equally, the articles should not be too popular. Page had received a referee's report from ‘one of the Jermyn Street geologists’ which commented that: ‘“Archæn plutonics” is rather slangy – the plutonic rocks of Archæn age or the Archæn plutonic rocks would be preferable’. The referee asked ‘What is “sinuine”? The use of unintelligible words is to be deprecated. It may be of American origin; but every reader cannot keep up to date with the new words that are coined in that country.’Footnote ⁶² Richardson replied to Page within a month: ‘I send you another article, which I hope will be nearer your requirements than the first. I have endeavoured to make it more generally readable. . .. I have. . . cut my remarks down & popularised.’Footnote ⁶³ The fear of popularising worried other potential contributors to the Victoria County History, among them Joshua Brooking Rowe who held out for several years against Doubleday's invitations to play a significant role in the Victoria County History Devon.Footnote ⁶⁴

State of natural history knowledge

Carleton Rea's concern about the rapidly changing state of knowledge in relation to the existence and distribution of fungi was replicated with other groups of species. What the Victoria County History did, or at least what it set out to do, was to capture the state of knowledge about species distribution at the end of a century of amateur collection, identification and classification. London based experts understood what was meant by capturing the current situation, but where the Victoria County History encountered difficulties was with men like Clark in Cornwall who insisted on doing new research: ‘Your last letter’, he told the Victoria County History general editor in 1906:

This type of concern came to the surface on other occasions, for example in discussion of the extent and quality of knowledge for groups such as flowering plants and birds. Charles Binstead was reasonably happy with the state of knowledge on mosses. He argued that the publication of the detailed county flora by Purchas and Ley in 1889 had popularised the study of botany and mosses. He noted that the mosses of Herefordshire:

But many of the experts expressed varying degrees of disquiet about the lack of interest in their groups of species, the poor quality of information and the importance of one or two individual collectors and enthusiasts. Professor Carr emphasised that the:

The rapid increase in knowledge about fungi in the county is emphasised by the fact that most of the list published in the Victoria County History was the result of a four day visit of the British Mycological Society to Sherwood Forest based at Worksop in September 1897. This ‘systematic investigation of the fungi of Sherwood Forest’ resulted in the addition of 250 species ‘to the fungus flora of the district’. One of the key identifiers was Carleton Rea and Professor Carr stated:

Here the national amateur expert was educating the local academic professional.Footnote ⁶⁷

Canon Fowler stressed that the state of knowledge about insects in Herefordshire was poor. He noted that:

He emphasised the importance of the enthusiasm of individual experts ‘the list of the Lepidoptera is by far the best, and that of the Diptera is also a valuable one: these are due to the work of Dr Wood of Tarrington, Hereford’. J. H. Wood was the author of the sections on butterflies, moths and flies in the Victoria County History. But Fowler uses the dismal state of knowledge as a call to arms for further investigation:

The extent of knowledge was patchy, depending on where individual entomologists lived and different areas were classed by the experts as ‘worked’ and ‘unworked’:

Moreover knowledge of the underlying geology was used to predict areas of the county where entomologists should focus their activities: ‘The north side especially, where the surface is bold and in part mountainous, and the Silurian Limestones have broken through the Old Red just as they have in the south-east, is quite unworked ground.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Evidence of the novelty of natural history knowledge and its precarious base on one or two experts is provided by Diptera. Doctor Wood noted in Victoria County History Herefordshire that:

The Reverend Octavius Pickard-Cambridge, ‘foremost expert on the spiders of these islands’,Footnote ⁷¹ and one of Trevor-Battye's nominated national experts, was in a good position to judge the state of knowledge about spiders in the different counties. And he was particularly critical of the state of knowledge in Herefordshire. He starts with a complimentary if distant tone:

But he goes on to emphasise that the listed species ‘are mostly, as a matter of course, among the common and generally distributed known British spiders’. He concluded that ‘It is evident that only ninety-five species of spiders, out of nearly or about 550 known British forms. . . are not an adequate representation of the Arachnids of a county like Hereford’. He gave out some hope that ‘a little more expert and close collecting would very soon double or treble the number of species met with.’ Footnote ⁷²

Here the Victoria County History was being used as a platform from which both to castigate the lack of interest in spiders and to encourage new research. The Nottinghamshire experts expressed a similar view. John Carr felt that ‘nothing whatever appears to have been known concerning the arachnids of Nottinghamshire before 1903 when the present writer began to pay attention to them for the purposes of this History.’ He collected 169 species of spider in ‘the course of two seasons’ and considered that ‘more extended research will doubtless result in the discovery of many more species’. Here we see the Victoria County History actually instigating interest in a species group. Indeed Carr noted that ‘in a group so little worked as the arachnids, and one presenting so many difficulties in the identification of the more obscure or closely allied species, it is of the utmost importance that the determinations should be beyond question’. Consequently, he sent his entire collection to ‘our highest authority on those creatures, the Rev. O. Pickard-Cambridge, F.R.S., who most generously undertook the examination of the entire collection’ and vouched for the correct identifications.Footnote ⁷³ The story is repeated for molluscs: Herefordshire was ‘not a very happy hunting ground, the soil not favouring molluscan life’, and moreover B.B. Woodward noted that ‘Several records have had to be rejected on account of error in locality, a collection in the Hereford Museum having been labelled “Hereford” that had been brought together from many parts of England.’ It was hoped, however, that ‘several more species should be forthcoming with further research.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Thomas Stebbing stressed the lack of research on his own group, crustaceans, but used this to enthuse naturalists to study them. He argued that:

But in the:

He held out great hope that ‘there are numbers of species for him to find, and almost every one of his discoveries will be a new record for Herefordshire’. He notes that ‘land crustaceans’ were often ignored and had their ‘true place in classification disguised by the nickname of woodlice’.Footnote ⁷⁵

Stebbing saw the Victoria County History as a means of popularising his Darwinian approach:

Geography of natural history

The space given to natural history in the Victoria County History was a cause for concern among the historians. As The Times put it, ‘the birds of Norfolk do not differ essentially from those of Suffolk and Essex, though the northern county catches a few migrants that do not visit the neighbours’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Neither, of course, do flora and fauna generally recognise where one county begins and another ends, and some of the topographical writers objected that the emphasis on natural history took up space that they could much more usefully devote to local history. Reverend William Oswald Massingberd, appointed local editor for Lincolnshire, complained in 1906 that ‘One wishes the birds and creeping things could be put into a smaller space, the more as most of them are the same as in other counties’. His complaint was rejected by the General Editor, but since Victoria County History Lincolnshire Volume 1 was a victim of the financial crisis which temporarily stopped all work on the Victoria County History in 1908, the material was never published anyway.Footnote ⁷⁸

The natural historians could in any case argue the importance of local differences. Augustin Ley identified several important features of Herefordshire which tended ‘to enrich the flora of Herefordshire’. These included the large area of woodland:

Other positive features were the ‘influence of the Wye system and the Welsh borderland which adds a good many montane species’. He also recognised limitations: the complete absence of sea coast and tidal estuary; the very small and diminishing area of bog and marsh land; and the comparatively small area of open common and heath land. Taken together these conditions greatly limited the number of species.Footnote ⁷⁹ Ley was generalising from a lifetime's knowledge of the botany of the county, and he used arguments which would be taken up sixty years later by historical ecologists on the difference between long established woodland and plantations, to provide an original understanding of woodland history:

He also understood that woodland management was crucial for the survival of certain species: ‘A grass rare inland (Gastridium lendigerum) occurs occasionally in and near dry Herefordshire woods, appearing after the coppice has been felled and then disappearing for many years’.Footnote ⁸¹

Entomologists also valued particular types of habitat. Apple orchards were particularly common in Herefordshire at the end of the nineteenth century and J. H. Wood makes special mention of two insects:

Several of the Victoria County History authors identified specific areas in the county rich in groups of species or rare species. Ley picked out the Doward Hills of the lower Wye Valley as particularly meritorious: ‘The area of these hills is about 2,126 acres; and in this limited space 682 species and named varieties of flowering plants and ferns and 223 of mosses have been recorded’. He emphasised the richness of this area by noting that ‘In a single winter day's ramble on these hills the writer saw and catalogued 120 species of mosses. These totals are year by year being added to.’Footnote ⁸⁴

J. H. Wood who wrote on butterflies, moths and flies, emphasised the importance of small, sometimes ephemeral, habitats. At Tram Inn the value of ‘rough unreclaimed pastures very wet in places, in which snipe still breed annually, and with a flora as interesting as the fauna’ was celebrated. ‘Scattered about are certain shallow circular depressions, under water in the winter, but drying up in the course of the summer. These curious places are the special habitats of various good Sciomyzids.’ The:

While:

In these celebrations of particular places, the diversity of insects merges with picturesque aesthetic and local pride.

Nottinghamshire did not have a large number of flowering plants compared to some neighbouring counties and John Carr argued that the ‘apparent poverty of our flora’ was largely due to the lack of coastlines and mountains and the ‘comparative lack of variety in the physical conditions of Nottinghamshire combined with the highly cultivated state of most of its area.’ He argued that:

But Sherwood Forest was a celebrated for other groups of species. Carr noted that the ‘rich district of Sherwood Forest – perhaps one of the best collecting grounds in the country – has been thoroughly investigated. . . and many rare species’ had been discovered by workers such as the Reverend Alfed Thornley, M.A., ‘who has devoted many years to the investigation of the Coleoptera of the county, and who has generously placed all his records at the writer's disposal.’Footnote ⁸⁶ Another enthusiast was the Reverend A. Matthews who studied rare beetles associated with the ancient oaks: Trichopteryx carbonaria was found ‘by sweeping under oaks’; Trichopteryx obscaena was ‘once taken in faggots by Mr. Matthews in Sherwood Forest’ and Ptilium halidayi was ‘under bark of dead oak’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Joseph Whitaker celebrated ‘the considerable area of ancient woodland, largely consisting of fine old oaks, with a sprinkling of birch and an undergrowth of bracken,’ surviving in Sherwood Forest as excellent for birds.Footnote ⁸⁸ The ‘rare’ Woodchat Shrike, for example, had ‘occurred once in Nottinghamshire, when a male was shot in May 1859 in Sherwood Forest near “The Buck Gates”, Thoresby Park, by Mr. H. Wells’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Threats to natural history

The natural historians of the Victoria County History were not ignorant of the threats to which their favourite species were exposed. For some this was seen as a natural consequence of agriculture. Gerald Leighton wrote that ‘the civilisation of the low-lying land under farming operations has driven the adder to seek the seclusion of bracken and lonely woods of Garway Hill and neighbouring districts’.Footnote ⁹⁰ At the same time he reminded the reader of the potency of this snake by recounting ‘A fatal case in a Hereford cow, which had captured the adder lying beside its victim on a farm on Garway Hill. As is usually the case the bite was on the udder.’ Ferns were also thought to be threatened by agriculture. Augustin Ley argued that the climate of Herefordshire was ‘too dry to admit of a vigorous growth of those plants, and moreover it is becoming drier through progressive denudation of timber and other causes, and the fern flora is consequently shrinking or dying out’. A rare example of the loss of a species of fern was ‘Tunbridge filmy fern (Hymenophyllum tunbridgense)’. Found in the Ross district in 1883, this ‘has since that time disappeared, not through depredation, but entirely through climatal change’.Footnote ⁹¹

In Nottinghamshire the effects of industrial and residential development were plain to see. John Carr noted that:

He knew there had been many introductions of new plants, but recognised these as neither beneficial nor as a potential threat:

Some introductions appear to have been welcomed for their exotic novelty:

Birds were recognised as particularly under threat, but it was here that the tension between capture, killing and identification was most telling. In Herefordshire, E. Cambridge Phillips described the short eared owl as ‘a rare winter visitor to the county, where also very few have been observed’, but it was noted that specimens had been shot in the county at Kington, Mordiford, Marden and Ross. The common buzzard was:

The paradox of preservation and shooting is brought out by comments on the hobby:

While the bittern was ‘Formerly a not uncommon resident here, but now very rare, if not extinct. . .. The Hereford Museum specimen was shot at Eastnor Castle in 1854, and was one of a pair which might have bred if unmolested.’

In Nottinghamshire Joseph Whitaker recounted several stories of rarities which could only be listed because they had been shot and preserved for identification. The role of the provincial taxidermist in natural history remains underestimated. A two-barred crossbill which was ‘in most beautiful plumage’ and ‘a most interesting county specimen’ had been shot by George Emery at Southwell in 1875. It was taken in the flesh to F. Schumach, the local taxidermist for preservation. After his death it was given to Whitaker by his son. Sometimes the taxidermists did not know the value of what they held. Whitaker recounted how:

Some of the descriptions of birds amount to a plea for landowners to reduce the intensity of their game keeping. The black grouse was ‘an occasional resident’ although a few birds had been shot in recent years including ‘on 22 November, 1894, the Rev. G. H. Davenport forwarded to Ashdown a grey hen taken at Foxley’. E. Cambridge Phillips noted that ‘If the grey hens were spared for a few years this beautiful game bird would undoubtedly increase’.Footnote ⁹⁶

The essay on mammals, written by Miss B. Lindsay, the only female natural history contributor in Victoria County History volumes before the First World War, noted that:

This sentiment was reinforced by an anecdote involving Reverend S. Cornish Watkins. He recounts that on:

Miss Lindsay saw this almost as a parable: ‘We should not have to deplore the rapid extinction of our native fauna, if other naturalists would copy the example of Mr. Watkins, who adds: “Needless to say, I did not do her or the young any damage”’.Footnote ⁹⁸

The erasure of natural history

The general enthusiasm that greeted the Victoria County History, together with the not unnatural tendency to start at the beginning, ensured that a disproportionate number of volume 1s made it into print before the Victoria County History ran into major financial difficulties in 1908. In the years preceding the First World War the Victoria County History published the first volume for no fewer than twenty-seven counties. Since the average length was proposed as 100 pages of 500 words per page, this was somewhere in the region of 1.4m words, without any doubt a major addition to the literature.Footnote ⁹⁹ When work on the Victoria County History resumed in the 1920s following a hiatus during the First World War, further natural history sections were published for Huntingdonshire (1926), Cambridgeshire (1938) and Oxfordshire. Victoria County History Oxfordshire Volume 1 noted that although published only in 1939, most of the work was undertaken before the First World War. The natural history articles were taken to represent the state of knowledge up to the end of 1936.

Given that three-quarters of all English counties had their natural history written and published there was clearly less to be done in the future, and given also that for financial reasons the Victoria County History has been more successful in producing the first volume of each county set than any of the others, it might be argued that it was purely a statistical aberration that so much natural history was written and produced. In fact, there was a change of thinking. For work undertaken since the Second World War in counties which had not previously had a Volume One in their sets, the Victoria County History omitted natural history as a separate section. The first volumes for Cheshire, Middlesex and Wiltshire simply include a brief discussion of geology.

Since much of the material for these, and other counties without a Volume One, had been written but not published, questions were posed as the value of the material. In January 1950 Miss Joan Gibbons of Lincoln borrowed the unpublished Lincolnshire botany section. This had been written by the noted local natural historian and pioneer ecologist Reverend Adrian Woodruffe-Peacock, and delivered to the Victoria County History on 4^th August 1903.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Miss Gibbons subsequently suggested to the Victoria County History Central Office that rather than keep the material ‘in cold storage’ it might be published separately. She convened a meeting in Lincoln to consider publishing the material on flora, and she learnt that another contributor had received proofs of the Lincolnshire mycology and cellular cryptogams to check, ‘but as publication was delayed he put them in his strong room and never returned them’. Miss Gibbons pressed the Victoria County History Central Office further in 1952 and again in 1954, when she was told that:

Despite this claim, no one chased up Miss Gibbons, who still had custody of the botany sections in 1965 when manuscripts, typescripts and proofs of unpublished natural history sections for Cheshire, Dorset, Lincolnshire, Westmorland and Wiltshire were deposited in the Natural History section of the British Museum. This was tacit evidence that the Victoria County History had now definitively abandoned natural history in its pre-First World War form.Footnote ¹⁰² Unfortunately this material now seems to have been lost altogether since the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, have no record of it amongst their deposits.Footnote ¹⁰³

The intellectual climate changed in the course of the twentieth century as science splintered into separate disciplines such as physiology, botany, zoology, geology and palaeontology, leaving the term ‘natural history’ to become, much like ‘antiquarian’, something of a term of abuse directed at amateurs operating outside science proper. In this process it was also clear that natural history was less to do with history than it was to do with science, now a separate discipline. Only in the study of biology, and particularly ecology, does it survive in any recognisable form. County and local societies continue with their recording role, but it is now seen in a scientific rather than a historical context. Local history has instead followed the path of economic and social history, and is now concerned rather more with landscape and environment.