Exactly why this Companion is now presented for review, 11 years after publication, remains shrouded in mystery. The reviewer hastens to deny that he has been sitting on it all through the 1990s. Even our most genial of editors would not have stood for that and he would have long since deleted my name from his Christmas card list. In an uncharitable mood we might infer that a new edition is imminent and that a canny reviews editor has decided to save a bawbee or two. If an air of unreality pervades what follows it arises from the book’s appearance in virtually every library, lending, reference, or both that caters to the slightest degree for local historians. And, when we remember the number of reference works that exist for this always popular subject, to state that it has quickly established itself as an indispensable guide is commendation enough. When John Campbell‐Kease retired from his business activities, in 1986, “to devote himself to historical research, writing, and idleness in equal proportions”, and decided to investigate the peculiar topography of the locality he moved into, he found it to be “a large village with no obvious centre ‐ the church was a mile from the village hall, the post office a mile from both, the pub was near none of these, and there was no village green”. To confound matters further “no one in the locality … had any real idea of the history of the place or why such a multi‐focal layout had come into being” except, that is, for some half‐baked “folk tradition” apparently dating from the early years of the twentieth century. There was no reliable printed material to fall back on and, having difficulty in finding a reference book of the sort he required, he sat down to write one himself. The rest, as they say, is local history.
Calculating that serious local historians needed an all‐ecompassing guide to such topics as archaeology, architecture, place and field names, and palaeography, in addition to events in national history, Campbell‐Kease divides his text into five sections, the first being an outline history and sources for local historians in four chronological chapters. This is followed by a single chapter on basic and essential record sources at the Public Record Office; the publications of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts; the Victoria County History; and various other sources of national and local history. In the third section the relevant records to 16 periods of English history are examined, from Saxon and Danish times to the present‐day Welfare State. The decision to focus on the connection between events and their related records is a sound one, for it is always to the records that local historians must turn. Next he deals with the special topics, archives and collections bearing on local history: geological and geographical factors, the evolution of towns and villages, chronology and dating problems, vocabularies and orthography ‐ nothing seems to be overlooked. The last section, “Writing a local history”, takes the form of an imaginary exemplar of how a parish history should be constructed and the type of information it should include. There are three appendices: the publications of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England; the status of the Victoria County History programme; and addresses of the specialist archives described earlier. Extremely informative, fully illustrated, and with a highly organised index, the Companion is now recognised as a standard text and, in a few more years, it will no doubt be acclaimed as a classic work of reference.
