This collection of essays originated as a series of papers delivered at a conference in September 2006 entitled Dugdale and his Warwickshire, a belated celebration of the 400th anniversary of Dugdale’s birth in 1605 and the 350th anniversary of the publication in 1656 of The Antiquities of Warwickshire. It consists of eleven papers with an Introduction and Conclusion by Christopher Dyer. The first essay, by Graham Parry (author of the article on Dugdale in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), entitled ‘The antiquities of Warwickshire’, places Dugdale’s great work in context with preceding histories of other counties. Whilst following their form and concentrating on heraldry and genealogy, local offices and institutions, the scope of his work and depth of his research was much greater than his predecessors and he also linked local matters with national affairs. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was for Dugdale the most signal disaster in the nation’s history and the Reformation in his eyes was too severe. The first volume of Dodsworth and Dugdale’s Monasticum Anglicanum had been published in 1655 and, as the principal scholar of monastic history, Dugdale was able to convey to his readers the sense of the lost society that existed before the Dissolution as he proceeded through the description of towns and villages in Warwickshire. As a herald, he was well placed to record heraldry and genealogy and understood visual impact and the importance of illustration: his employment of Wenceslas Hollar transformed The Antiquities of Warwickshire with views of towns, monuments, windows and heraldic shields.

Whilst there is much fascinating material, the book is not a biography of Dugdale and so does not bring out his remarkable energy and the volume and consistent quality of his scholarship. The last four pieces, in particular, follow a theme referred to in the Introduction in that the authors were invited to illuminate for modern readers those dimensions of seventeenth-century Warwickshire that Dugdale would not have thought appropriate for inclusion in his account of the county. These are ‘Late seventeenth-century Warwickshire society’ by N W Alcock, ‘Sir Richard Newdigate and the “Great Survey” of Chilvers Coton’ by Steve Hindle, Peter Borsay’s ‘Warwickshire towns in the age of Dugdale’ and Catherine Richardson’s ‘Material culture in early-modern Warwick’. The Great Survey of Chilvers Coton – produced by a jury empanelled by Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd Bt (1644–1710), in 1684 – listed the names, occupations and ages of all those (including infants) who lived in the 176 households in Chilvers Coton. The author states that the Newdigate–Dugdale connection can be traced back in the Newdigate archive at least to the early 1680s and adds: ‘The context, of course, was Dugdale’s role, as Garter King of Arms, in organizing the Visitation of Warwickshire in 1682/3.’ As Garter, however, Dugdale had no role in organizing the Visitation. Visitations were organized by the provincial Kings of Arms, whereas Garter dealt with peers. The article also refers to Gregory King (1648–1712) and states: ‘By 1682 King was Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, acting as one of the two deputy heralds to Sir Henry St George, Clarenceux King of Arms, for the Warwickshire and other Midland County Visitations.’ Deputy heralds were local deputies appointed by the Kings of Arms, the best known being the four generations of men named Randle Holme in Chester. King was not a deputy herald but was one of the two ‘Deputies and Marshalls to Clarenceux King of Arms for the County of Warwick’ for the purpose of the Visitation. The provincial Kings of Arms regularly appointed other officers of arms to act as their deputies for Visitations but they were not, as a result, deputy heralds.

In his article on Warwickshire towns, Borsay states that Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire reveals, on the face of it, very little about the lives of contemporary – and even historical – townspeople: first, because Dugdale ‘appears to have possessed a pathological aversion to the present’, secondly because he displayed ‘little interest in matters economic and social’, thirdly his ‘social sights are firmly set on the gentry and manorial descents’ and fourthly his unit of investigation, the county, ‘was of little significance in the way towns practically operated’. A herald naturally views history and the landscape through the rise and fall of families, so this is not surprising; and when the author states that the largest occupational categories in the Stratford seventeenth-century inventories are yeoman and husbandman, Dugdale and a herald today would regard a yeoman as a degree or rank below that of gentleman and not an occupation per se.

Dugdale was an able businessman who obtained financial subsidies from those whose houses he illustrated and whose prodigious output included commissions such as The History of Imbanking and Drayning (1662, though the index gives 1657, the year it was commissioned) for which he was paid £150. His vehement campaigns against professional competitors such as Randle Holme iii (1627–1700), who was fined £20 for his encroachment on Dugdale’s privileges at Stafford Assizes in 1688, are mentioned in Stephen K Roberts’s ‘ “Ordering and Methodizing”: William Dugdale in Restoration England’. This article suffers from reliance on an article in the Oxford DNB which refers to Randle Holme as a ‘deputy of the College of Arms’ and ‘the son of a deceased member of the College’. The College of Arms does not appoint deputies. The Kings of Arms were empowered in their patents of appointment to appoint deputies so that Holme was appointed by, and only had authority to act, as Dugdale’s own deputy, which helps to explain the reason for the case. Holme’s father, as a previous deputy herald, was not a member of the College of Arms.

Jan Broadway’s ‘Unreliable witness: Sir William Dugdale and the perils of autobiography’ is of particular interest. It reveals some of the contradictory aspects of his character in that he glossed over his initial subordinate status as a research assistant to others and underplayed the role of his patrons and the extent to which his scholarly labours were available for a fee. Whilst undertaking meticulous work on other pedigrees he was remarkably silent on his own. This is confirmed by records in the College of Arms not referred to here. Dugdale’s father recorded the briefest of pedigrees at the 1619 Heralds’ Visitation of Warwickshire, commencing with his own father, James Dugdale of Clitheroe, and omitting his mother’s Christian name. Although not mentioned in this article, the heralds allowed Dugdale’s father the arms confirmed and crest granted in 1560 to John Dugdale of Clitheroe, whose relationship is unknown and so the entitlement must be doubtful. When Dugdale himself entered a pedigree at the 1682 Visitation he began with his parents, and nowhere in the records of the College of Arms did he record that he had a half-brother – Arthur Miller, one of the three children of his mother’s first marriage. The questionable status of the arms is emphasized by the 1698 grant of an augmentation to the arms and crest made to Dugdale’s grandson William ‘to distinguish their arms from all other branches of that family’.

There is other material of interest in Ann Hughes on Dugdale and the Civil War, Richard Cust on Dugdale and the honour politics of Stuart Warwickshire, Vivienne Larminie on gentry culture in the seventeenth century and Geoffrey Tyack on Dugdale and the Warwickshire country house. As the original emphasis of the conference was on Dugdale and his Warwickshire it is understandable that there are few references to his great Baronage of England (1676–7), to the History of St Paul’s Cathedral (1658), with its plates by Hollar, the lasting record of the pre-Great Fire Cathedral, and Origines Juridicales (1666), his history of the Inns of Court. There is a good index.