The following is an article written by the staff at the Wiltshire VCH which also appears on their web pages at www.wiltshirepast.net. It details the process by which the VCH staff research a parish. This article is reproduced with the kind permission of the Wiltshire VCH staff.
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Researching and writing a parish history is a fascinating, but time-consuming, project. In the process, we discover a lot more information than we can possibly fit into a short V.C.H. article, so that the writing-up process involves a lot of sifting and discarding of material which, however interesting, does not fit into the basic article structure. Briefly, this is what we have to do:
- Acquire photocopies of as many large-scale maps of the parish as we can, from the earliest ones through to the most recent. These help us to determine the pattern and chronology of settlement in your village, hamlet, or town, and to date houses whose exteriors may have been remodelled since they were built.
- Visit the parish. At least two visits are made.
- The first is to familiarise ourselves with the layout of settlements and how they fit into the landscape and agriculture. A camera and a pair of binoculars (as well as comfortable walking shoes) are essential.
- The second visit will be made towards the end of our research. One of our architectural editors based at the I.H.R. comes down and we visit, by arrangement with their owners, houses of particular architectural significance. Then the architectural editor helps us to describe the buildings in the context of the history of the parish.
- Examine as many printed sources relating to the parish as possible. Some of this is done in the Local Studies Library at Trowbridge; the rest, particularly old or rare publications, are looked at in the I.H.R. library in London or in the British Library . To help us in this, we use checklists compiled over many years which list all of the most essential sources for Wiltshire, supplemented by books and articles relating specifically to individual parishes.
- Study the relevant documentary sources. Most of the original documents we need to look at are either in the Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office or the Public Record Office at Kew, but some are held in other county or private archives, and so we often need to spend some research time in these repositories studying the documents there.
- Classify our notes according to the date of the source and the section of the article to which the information is relevant. The V.C.H. now provides staff with computers and database software to make this task easier. Each article, after a general introduction to the parish, gives information on its major landowners from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, its churches, chapels and religious and social life, its economic history, its schools, and the way local government has developed.
- Write the history of the parish. This takes more time than you would think. Producing a first draft often involves tracing other sources to fill in gaps in our information as well as checking notes taken from our research sources, and thinking time is essential; some older sources can give apparently conflicting information which needs to be weighed and balanced. In addition, producing an article packed with information which also reads well is a difficult balance to achieve. The contribution of the architectural editor will need to be incorporated into the text at this stage. The final draft is only arrived at when the county editor is satisfied that it meets the high standards demanded by the V.C.H.
Producing a volume for the Wiltshire V.C.H. usually takes between four and five years. All the articles have to receive the approval of the general editor before proofs are made. Proof-reading, making indexes, selecting illustrations, preparing maps, and setting out preliminary pages are all time-consuming - by the time one volume is published, research on the parishes to be included in the next one will already have been underway for some time.
