The VCH examines the history of places in the round - using documents, maps, buildings, and archaeology to provide a comprehensive overview of the development of individual places. When studied together, settlement, social and economic history, religious life and the built environment often throw up connections which more orthodox approaches would miss. For example, the date and type of surviving buildings or the strength of religious nonconformity may be closely connected with patterns of landownership, population, or economic history, while a modern source can often cast light on the pattern of a place in the medieval period - or vice versa.
Researching
We usually start research on a VCH parish history by exploring the area on the ground, making contact with local people, and trawling through standard printed and manuscript sources on our extensive checklist. This can take several weeks. As well as documents in local record offices and in the National Archives in London, we hope to find archaeological data (usually in the county Sites and Monument Record), printed and manuscript map evidence (including Ordnance Survey maps, tithe or inclosure maps, and possibly estate maps), information about buildings (such as English Heritage listings), and visual evidence (such as photographs and topographical drawings). Later we locate and investigate other relevant archives do more intensive fieldwork and investigate buildings, which are usually visited by kind permission of local householders. Most county researchers store the information they collect in an electronic database. Even for a small rural village, this will contain several hundred separate records, which can be sorted and analysed in order to tease out a comprehensible story from the mass of detail.
Organising our accounts
For ease of reference and to aid understanding, VCH accounts divide the history of each place into separate topics such as Settlement, Religious History, Social and Economic History, and Buildings. A new framework for VCH parish histories was adopted in 2002 with the aim of helping readers understand the links between topics and to bring out underlying social or cultural trends which in earlier VCH accounts have not always been made evident - The meticulous attention to detail which underpins all good local history, and for which the VCH is rightly renowned, has of course not been sacrificed.
Final stages
The final stages of producing a parish history involve refining the text, checking details, and where necessary carrying out additional research. When an account has been finished we can draft the historical maps which draw on documents as well as on maps of many dates. Illustrations are carefully selected from among the photographs and drawings identified during research and from those specially taken for us. Finally, a draft account can be mounted on the county website and, after final editing, submitted for press.
