News & Information

The Oxfordshire County Concil digital map can be accessed by clicking here.

It contains

• Genealogy from a Graveyard
• Family History Show LIVE in BELFAST
• News from local FHS and from the Federation
• Family Finder (autosomal) DNA Kit Offer

You can find previous editions via the link.

Please visit https://oahs.org.uk/oxpast.php for further information, booking and programme.

Tickets for Oxfordshire Past cost £10 and must be booked in advance. The ticket includes tea/coffee but not lunch.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Visit their website for full details.

The Library includes the personal archive of Sandy Irving in the form of diaries, letters, photographs and artefacts. It will form the basis of a commemorative exhibition in the medieval Upper Library, open to the public from July.

Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irving attended Merton College between 1921 and 1924. He won a Blue in the 1923 Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race; participated in the 1923 University exhibition to Spitsbergen; and participated in the expedition to Mount Everest in the summer of 1924, dying with George Mallory on 8 June.
Merton is able to offer a preview of this exhibition for up to 20 members of the Society. Due to restrictions in the Upper Library, this will be divided into two – one group viewing the exhibition while the other is given a tour of the College and Fellows’ Garden by a student tour guide. The Garden is otherwise only open to the public for the National Gardens Weekend. After about 40 minutes, these two groups would then swap. The Library itself is also of interest, for its medieval stained glass, early sixteenth-century oak ceiling, and Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration and furnishing.

The visit will start at 14.30 and last for about an hour and a half. There is no charge for the tour but places are limited. Unfortunately, due to the historic nature of the building (the Library is accessed via steep stairs with no assisted access), this visit will not be suitable for those with restricted mobility.

The formal business will be followed at 2.30pm by the Open Meeting, comprising a talk on the subject of Banburyshire, given by Alan Crosby, editor of The Local Historian, an introduction to the collections and resources of Banbury Museum, and an opportunity to browse its galleries.

The event is free and open to all; the full programme is here.

Full details will be sent to all members, and will also be posted on the Society's website and Twitter newsfeed (@oxrecsoc) in a few weeks' time.

Wesleyan Methodism was the largest Free Church denomination in Victorian Oxfordshire, with a presence in many towns and villages as well as in the City of Oxford and its growing suburbs. This new volume is a study of the growth, people and impact of that church, as evidenced in the records of the Local Preachers of the Oxford Wesleyan Circuit.

Martin Wellings is a leading historian of Methodism, and former Superintendent Minister of the Wesley Memorial Church, Oxford.

Price: £35/$49.95

Published: June 2023

ISBN: 978-0902509795

368pp; 2 maps; 1 b/w illustration

Oxfordshire Record Society

Copies can be ordered online from Boydell & Brewer.

To start, she would like to find people from contrasting parts of the county, urban and rural, to write about what The Parish in Wartime: Bishop Gore's Visitations of Oxfordshire, 1914 and 1918, published by the Oxfordshire Record Society in 2019, says about their area during the First World War.

If you would like to volunteer for this interesting task, please contact Vanessa.

He was a Fellow of both the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Genealogists, was an active member of British Records Society and the Federation of Family History Societies, and was given a Personal Achievement Award in 2008, by the British Association for Local History.

After studying at the School of Printing and Graphic Arts (now the London College of Communication), he joined his family firm, Henry Stone & Son Limited (printers and cabinet-makers; Jeremy was Henry's great-grandson), in Banbury in 1956 and it was during his time there that he became involved with the Banbury History Society. He was a member of that Society's Committee from its foundation in 1957 until 2015, and served as its chairman and secretary at various points during that time, and also edited a record 37 of its publications as well as its journal.

This volume presents the contents of the sacramental records known to survive from the Oxford Catholic Mission, 1700–1875. Now held within the archives of the Oxford Oratory, the original registers are from Waterperry House, the chapel of St Clement's, Oxford, and the church of St Aloysius Gonzaga, Oxford, and together, comprise five volumes. The contents feature much common form and use of Latin, which Tony Hadland makes accessible by presenting them in transcribed, translated, and tabulated form.

Of use and interest to historians of religion, locality and family alike, the registers throw light on an era of 'country house' Catholicism when the practice of the faith was largely linked to the presence of local landowners. They illuminate the theory and practice of legal exclusion, the gradual movement to a more public faith, and the emergence of a confident and outward-looking Roman Catholic role. The names and identities recorded in the registers help identify the nature of congregations and how they changed and varied over time.

Price: £35/$49.95

Published: January 2023

ISBN: 9780902509771

240pp, 15 b&w illustrations, 23.4cm by 15.6cm

Oxfordshire Record Society

Copies can be ordered online from Boydell & Brewer.

There will also be an introduction to the collections and resources of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History, given by Professor William Gibson, Director of the Centre, which will be followed by tea and cake.

Attendance is free but registration is essential. For further details of the afternoon's timetable, and to book your place, please email the Secretary by 7th October 2022. Directions and information on parking and transport will be supplied on registration.

Christopher John Day, MA, FSA, was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1946, and remained a life-long supporter of Stoke City football club. He obtained a First in history at Manchester University and embarked on a PhD, but after being disastrously denied access to crucial documents in private hands he considered instead a career in the Civil Service. Despite spectacular success in the entrance procedures he decided to persist with historical research, which brought him to Oxford in 1975 to join the staff of the Victoria County History. There he was immediately thrown into the deep end, his first task being to research the modern history (since 1771) of Oxford city, where his expertise in Tudor history was of scant use. Even so his work on Oxford (published in 1979) was an outstanding achievement, and during his 20 years with the VCH (during which he contributed to a further four volumes) he remained a much loved figure within a harmonious team, his humour and vitality enlivening the routines of co-operative research. Such was his patience and understanding that he even forgave the loss of his handwritten draft chapter on (appropriately) Oxford communications from the back of the then Oxfordshire Editor's motorbike somewhere in the Cowley Road. He also published outside the VCH, contributing a substantial chapter to the multi-volume History of the University of Oxford, a chapter on the historiography of Warwickshire to a festschrift focused on early county histories, and book reviews in Oxoniensia and elsewhere.

Chris's talents as a communicator were already evident during his VCH years, and in 1994 (perhaps also spurred by the experience of surviving a near fatal attack of lymphoma in the early 1980s) he decided to split his time between the VCH and Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. In 1996 he moved to the Department full-time, where he directed and taught the Undergraduate Certificate (later Diploma) in English Local History, initiated the pioneering Advanced Diploma in Local History (delivered online at third-year undergraduate level), and contributed to the MSt (later MSc) in English Local History. The Advanced Diploma in particular opened up study at Oxford to students from many countries, providing a springboard for a significant number of them to progress to master's and doctoral work: a considerable achievement and legacy. In 2004 Chris succeeded Kate Tiller as Director of Studies in English Local History, before moving in 2006 to the Department’s International Programmes Division as Director of Academic Programmes. A Fellow of Kellogg College since 1994, he served as Admissions Tutor (2002-5), and Senior Fellow in 2007. He was elected to an Emeritus Fellowship in 2011.

Underpinning those achievements was Chris’s passion for teaching and his genuine interest in people, which is best summed up in his own words:

'I find adult learners more rewarding, more challenging because they’ve got a lifetime of experiences that they bring to the class. There’s a virtuous circle of learning, where you start off as teacher and they are students; but at some point, they become the teachers and you start to learn from them.... That’s the beauty of teaching. No matter how many books you read at home, that interaction with the tutor and with other people in the class makes it a three-dimensional learning environment.'

Alongside all this Chris somehow found time to continue as Honorary General Editor of the Oxfordshire Record Society (serving a 25-year stint), and had a long connection with the Oxfordshire Local History Association. Retirement, of course, meant no such thing – not only did he serve as a popular and effective President of OAHS from 2012 to 2017, but he also continued as Chairman of Deddington & District History Society (having moved there with his wife Alison several years earlier), and continued to direct the Oxford Berkeley Program at Merton College, a three-week summer school partnership with The University of Berkeley California, on which he had taught for many years. From 2013 he was also editor of Cake and Cockhorse, the journal of the Banbury Historical Society. In addition he continued his own research interests, including a long-term project on Thomas Walker of Woodstock, town clerk and agent to the duke Marlborough in the late 18th century, on whom he delivered a lecture in Banbury only last November, and which he was planning to publish in Oxoniensia.

To those of us who knew him, however, Chris's manifold professional and academic achievements are almost secondary compared with the delights of his company, and his less well-known talents as (inter alia) a brilliant cook and host. In the words of one former colleague, 'simply one of the best people we have ever known'.

Simon Townley with contributions from Alan Crossley, Eleanor Chance, Adrienne Rosen, Trevor Rowley, and Kate Tiller

(An online recording of Chris delivering his popular lecture on the history of Oxford University – with the typically intriguing title 'If I were you I wouldn't start from here' – is available here.)

Oxfordshire Record Society members may order copies at a 35% discount using the attached flier.

Click to download

A talk given at the 2009 AGM to mark the Society’s 90^th anniversary

Reverend Professor William Whyte, St John's College, Oxford, former General Editor of ORS

On 24 January 1919, the Oxford Chronicle carried a report on the first meeting of a new society. Squeezed in between articles on the Bishop of Oxford’s pointed enquiry ‘WILL GERMANY REPENT?’ and Hugh Walpole’s views on the Russian Revolution, there came an account of the inaugural meeting of the Oxfordshire Record Society. Two days earlier, with the historian Ernest Barker in the chair, a gathering of the great and the good and the simply antiquarian had met in New College Library to create a body which would yield an output ‘… so varied that all classes would get something of value and of use. There would be the generally intelligent reader, the technical, historical, and economic student, the teacher of history and geography in schools, including the elementary schools’.

This was certainly optimistic – especially as the committee elected to supervise the ORS reflected a far less diverse constituency. In addition to Ernest Barker (a fellow of New College), there was the Honorary Secretary, F. N. Davis (the Rector of Crowell), and the Treasurer, James Rose (a magistrate and Diocesan Registrar). As this suggests, the academic, the clerical, and the legal professions dominated: also on the committee were four other vicars; three Oxford dons; and another JP. Their interests were aptly embodied in the Society’s first publication: a transcript of the records produced by the commissioners on the seizure of church goods in 1552; a project that brought together the legal and the clerical, and which was carried out by Rose Graham, a member of the committee and a fellow of Somerville. Nonetheless, there were already 160 members – and the society is, of course, still going today.

It was in 1918 that the Oxford Archaeological Society first published a pamphlet bemoaning the fact that ‘Hitherto there has been no organised effort to render accessible to the economic historian, the archaeologist, the historian of the parish and the manor, the topographer, the genealogist, and others, the abundant material relating to Oxfordshire which exists in the great national collections in London, and in University, College, and other libraries’.

For 10/6d yearly, and an entrance fee of 5 shillings, it was argued, all this could be rectified. With a couple of hundred members, a couple of hundred pages could be produced each year. Yet if the immediate origins of the ORS lie in the First World War, then the inspiration for it was somewhat older. The start of the twentieth century had seen an efflorescence of record societies: Canterbury and York in 1904; Lincoln in 1910; Bedfordshire in 1912. The British Record Society had been founded as long ago as 1889. Oxfordshire was far from the first.

The impulse for this interest in local records was threefold. In the first place, it grew out of the well-documented rise in interest in local history experienced in the nineteenth century – a movement that had, of course, led to the establishment of the Oxford Historical Society in 1884. Secondly, the turn of the century had created a new demand for historical publications. The consolidation of the Grammar School system in 1902 and the establishment of new universities like Birmingham and Bristol – chartered in 1900 and 1909 respectively – all demanded new materials for students (and their teachers) to study. Thirdly, and just as importantly, the ORS was founded in an atmosphere of historiographical innovation: the product of historians’ interest in new sorts of history. The twentieth century witnessed a turn towards social and economic as well as political and constitutional history – and several of the Society’s founders were in the vanguard of this move. Ernest Barker, Rose Graham, and another member of the committee, the economic historian Elizabeth Levett, all worked in this area and it is clear that the ORS was funded to cater for these interests as much as anything else.

Enthusiasm, and the presumption of an interested audience, was naturally not enough to get the enterprise going. For the Society to flourish, it needed members and it needed publications. It was agreed at the very first meeting of the ORS Council that ‘complete volumes rather than small portions in serial form should be aimed at’, but this of course meant that the editors were effectively producing whole books – and books take time to write. J. R. H. Weaver’s Medieval Oxford Wills was first promised in 1931, and continued to be ‘forthcoming’ for the next quarter of a century, finally appearing in 1958. The production of the Henley Borough Records proved equally taxing. It was initially discussed in 1928 and was eventually published in 1960 – having in 1936 prompted the resignation not only of Professor Maurice Powicke, but also the Honorary Editor, John Hautenville Cope. Powicke objected to ‘certain things’ that Cope had done; Cope objected to the criticisms made against him by Powicke. Still more striking is the case of the survey of Oxfordshire parish sources, which was first proposed by C. H. Firth, then Regius Professor of History, in November 1919. It remained a mere suggestion until 1928, when a committee was formed and a questionnaire sent out to all the incumbents of the county. Within months, 55 replies were in, and the following two years were spent chasing up those who had not answered. Inertia then set in, as other projects dominated the Society – not least the establishment of the County Record Office. In 1936, another attempt was made – and another in 1939. But it was a project destined never to be completed, and the War killed it off in the end.

If publishing proved problematic, then this was nothing compared to the continuing problem of both recruiting members and exacting fees from them. Within four months of the Society’s establishment, it was already being remarked that 56 members had not paid their dues – ‘but were expected to do so when reminded.’ By 1923, it was agreed that ‘Steps should be taken to increase the membership of the Society’, and the secretary agreed to ‘circularize possible supporters among landowners, magistrates, county councillors and others.’ Similar calls came in 1927, 1932, 1935, and most years thereafter. The Council also intended (as they put it in 1930) that ‘each new volume should be of sufficient value to attract subscribers and bring in fresh offers of help’, but practice did not always live up to this commendable theory. In 1934, R. H. Gretton recommended her own Oxfordshire Justices of the Peace in the Seventeenth Century, on the grounds that ‘when it was published she believed it would bring an increase in members.’ It was a nice idea – but, unfortunately, membership actually fell. In 1939, an appeal for members was published and efforts were made to persuade the 92 defaulters to bring their subscriptions up to date. This was, however, a hard slog – and even the leading lights of the ORS could not be trusted. At the AGM for 1924, for example, it was reported that ‘two members of the Council appeared to have ceased interest in the Society’s work and had not paid their subscriptions for several years.’

The first twenty years of the Society consequently saw a number of – rather familiar – problems as well as the predictable teething troubles of a new organisation just setting out in the world. In 1928, indeed, Bodley’s Librarian, Falconer Madan urged the merger of the ORS and the Oxford Archaeological Society. Nonetheless, more remarkable than these difficulties was the success of the Society in its first two decades. Not only did it manage to produce a range of publications – but it did so almost every year and to some significant acclaim. Herbert Barnett’s history of Glympton, for example, attracted letters from across the world, with admirers writing from America, Australia, and beyond. Moreover, despite the Council’s worries about membership, it continued to grow throughout the 1920s and 1930s: reaching 229 in 1929 and 250 only five years later. Indeed, by the mid-1930s, the ORS was the largest county record society in England.

After the Second World War, the Society was to grow still larger. By 1959, in fact, there were 339 subscribers. This was despite the rising cost of membership and the increasing expense of publication. Paradoxically, in fact, the doubling of subscriptions from a half to a whole guinea in 1953 was marked by a gain of 89 members. A further doubling of membership fees in 1969 and another in 1974 did not, alas, have quite the same effect. But there were still very nearly 300 members as late as 1980. The cause of this remarkable increase in size is clear. Just as the Society was brought into to being to cater for a new sort of readership, so it grew when new sorts of institutions joined it. Individual membership remained stable, but by the mid-1950s, more than 100 libraries were subscribing. Many of these were public libraries – but most were connected to the new and expanding universities of the period. And this growth was not confined to Britain. The universities of Upsala, Stanford, Tokyo, and elsewhere, all signed up. By 1980, the institutional subscribers outnumbered the individuals for the first time.

Growth did not obviate old problems. It remained the case, of course, that getting money of these members was hard work. In 1976, with subscription at £4 a year, it was reported that some subscribers were paying the old rate of £2 and still others were paying the still older rate of £1.05. Others were (as ever) paying nothing at all. The rising cost of printing and the problem of finding editors with the time and the skills to produce volumes also created difficulties. From the mid-1970s onwards, the ORS tended to publish bi-annually rather than yearly. There was also always the difficulty of dealing with what W. O. Hassall described as a ‘group of learned scholars whose decisions are unpredictable’. As the Honorary Secretary from 1946 until 1976, he was well placed to know.

Nevertheless, the slow but steady accumulation of material continued, and in 1976, the Society was able to celebrate the publication of its fiftieth volume. To mark the occasion, David Vaisey, then Keeper of Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian, was asked to address the AGM. He made a call for more and better lists: for catalogues of visitation returns and indexes of school log books. He argued for the publication of more industrial records: for the publication of material relating to the Oxford canal, for example. He also made a plea for someone to edit the manuscripts of the local Poor Law Guardians. Most strikingly, however, he attempted to revive Firth’s idea of a survey of Oxfordshire parish sources. It would be, he claimed be an ideal volume for the Record Society: informative, interesting, valuable, useful for both members and non-members, for the serious scholar and the antiquarian … what an opportunity we now have to fulfil not only a great need but also one of the original suggestions of the founding fathers of this society. We are, of course, still waiting for someone to take up the challenge.

David Vaisey’s speech (made when I was not quite a year old) seems a good place to stop this brief tour of the last nine decades. Founded in the aftermath of the Great War, the ORS was a response to new ideas about history and was intended to be of use to a new public, a new sort of readership – whether it be in the Grammar Schools or the universities. It grew as the educational system grew, with the advent of mass higher education increasing membership despite the rising cost of annual subscriptions. Its focus – on local history, on economic, social, and institutional history – likewise reflected trends in scholarship: the Society has kept alive by keeping up to date. But the ORS has also held on to certain key ideas since it was founded, too. This is a story of continuity as well as change. The belief that its publications should appeal to those beyond the academy; the notion that the Society should reach out to county as well as university; the impulse to reach the ‘generally intelligent reader’ has never gone away. It is that which has sustained the ORS since the start – and that which still informs it. And, who know, perhaps one day it may even mean that it will publish a survey of Oxfordshire parish sources, just as it has tried to do since it was founded in 1919.

Linda Devlin and Kate Tiller

We are a century on from one of the greatest upheavals experienced in the history of rural counties such as Oxfordshire. This was the great wave of sales of landed estates that began with the return of peace in 1918 and continued through the 1920s. In terms of potential for local research it is one of the most widespread and significant themes from this period as Oxfordshire researchers are beginning to find. The sales of estates were happening in many parts of Britain. By the end of March 1919 well over half a million acres were on the market and by the mid-1920s between 6 and 8 million acres of land had changed hands in England. This was a transformation compared by modern historians with the impact of the property confiscations and sequestrations during the17th-century civil wars, the permanent transfers of land at the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century, and the shifts of power at the Norman Conquest. F.M.L.Thompson (in English Landed Society in the 19th century, 1963) concluded that the consequences of the sales led to the disappearance of much of ‘the great estate system’ and the ‘formation of a new race of yeomen’, that is the owner-occupying farmers (many former estate tenant farmers) who by 1927 occupied 36% of the total acreage, compared with 11% in 1914. Alun Howkins (in Reshaping Rural England, 1992, p.281) reckons that between 1918 and 1925, ‘The focus of power and deference finally shifted…from the landowners to the farmers.’

One local initiative exploring this theme has been started by the Heritage Centre at Churchill in north Oxfordshire. They have begun a new volunteer project to research and record the 1922 Sale of the Sarsden Estate. The property, on offer in 65 lots, comprised 3,785 acres including ‘practically the whole of the village of Churchill’. It was up for auction at the Randolph Hotel, Oxford on 30 August, 1922. The sale had a profound effect on the villages of Churchill, Sarsden, Chadlington and Lyneham.

The Heritage Centre’s Project ‘22 will include the history of the Sarsden Estate, the reasons for the sale and the subsequent history, owners and occupants of the land and buildings involved, up to the present day. A group of volunteers,16 in total, with Linda Devlin as the Co-ordinator has been formed to carry out this research. They have started with the Sale Catalogue and maps which have details of the various lots, photographing and using Google Earth to look at the properties as they are now and collating as much information as possible from residents – such as deeds, old photographs, postcards, etc. to chart the history of the properties from the sale to the present day. One member is researching the impact on agricultural life and the working of local farms. Earlier maps and the 1910 Valuation records are amongst other sources. Volunteers are making use of on-line research facilities and hope to resume visits to libraries and archives as soon as possible post-Covid-19.

Project ’22 was launched on 30 January 2020 at a packed meeting in the Village Hall in Churchill. The hall, built as a Reading Room in 1870, is just one of an array of estate benefactions around the green which continue to signal the village’s earlier identity as an estate village. The Sarsden estate, big house and surrounding villages, was bought by the Langston family, London bankers, in the 1790s. Not only did they develop Sarsden House and grounds but, particularly in the time of J.H.Langston, MP (died 1863) and his daughter and heir, Julia, wife of the 3rd Earl of Ducie, created a Victorian estate whose influence, on employment, farming, housing, religion, charity and recreation are reflected in buildings still to be seen-church, schools, memorial fountain, reading room, forge, estate housing and farm buildings.

The reasons for estate sales often reflected general as well as local and personal factors. So it may have been at Sarsden. The latter phases of the war saw increased agricultural production and high prices for produce enhanced by protective government intervention, factors that continued after 1918 and were reflected in increased demand for agricultural land. By contrast the owners of landed estates were faced with increased death duties, high taxation and historically low rent levels, likely incentives to sell at least some of their land. Family circumstances might also contribute to decisions. The 3rd Earl of Ducie died in his nineties in 1921, the year following his 63-year-old only son, leaving the title to the Earl’s aged brother, a Queensland cattle- and sheep-farmer. Also in 1921, the government unexpectedly ended guaranteed grain prices, the so-called ‘Great Betrayal’ which reduced prospective agricultural returns and with it the pace of sales and the prices to be had for land. Who was it who bought the Sarsden estate farms and cottages in 1922, speculators or local tenants?

There will be many interesting questions and pieces of evidence for members of Project ’22 as they pursue the why? when? how? and consequences of the Sarsden estate sale of 1922. The project will run for two years – until 2022, the 100 year anniversary of the sale. The group will present their results in the Village Hall and a display in The Heritage Centre. An archive of information and images about the Sarsden estate, its sale and subsequent history will be created. We would be interested to know if others are researching the sale of landed estates in Oxfordshire or elsewhere.

LINDA DEVLIN is Project Co-ordinator for Churchill Heritage Centre.

KATE TILLER spoke at the launch of Project ’22 on ‘Village and Estate 1914-1939. Times of Change’.

THE PARISH IN WARTIME: Bishop Gore's visitations of Oxfordshire 19l4 and 1918 edited by Mark Smith (Oxfordshire Record Society vol.73 2019 cvi+601pp ISBN 978 0 902509 75 7) £35

Here is another beautifully produced annual publication by the Oxfordshire Record Society in association with Boydell and Brewer. The Society's volumes are always absorbing, and this reviewer was captivated from the start when its editor, Mark Smith, used his acknowledgements to praise the 'excellent coffee' of the Oxfordshire History Centre (a thoroughly accurate observation) as well as the remarkable people who had assisted him, including Kate Tiller, who also wrote the foreword.

As Dr Tiller explains, ecclesiastical visitation returns have been frequently published; they are often the documents of choice of the local historian researching in record offices for evidence of parochial ecclesiastical and social change. However, such interest has mainly concentrated on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Church. Victorian visitation returns, in particular, could be comprehensive. Incumbents were often asked to complete the answers to more than thirty questions (often subdivided). Subjects included patronage; residency; stipends; tithe income; parish registers; the physical state of churches and glebe houses; and church attendance figures. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century when sacramental worship was becoming popular in the Church of England, interest developed in baptism, the regularity of holy communion and the numbers taking it. There was also enthusiasm for parochial education in church schools, even down to the minutiae of school reading-book preference. As Mark Smith's excellent introduction makes clear, Victorian visitation returns exude purposive energy.

However, rather than choosing to revisit those well-mined visitation returns, he has broken new ground by selecting the Oxfordshire visitation returns of Charles Gore from two First World War years, 1914 and 1918: a most suitable selection for a publication marking the end of the decade that included the centenary of the war as well as the founding of the Oxfordshire Record Society. While the contents allow us to observe continuity between Victorian visitation returns and those of the second decade of the twentieth century their importance also lies in the noting of differences between responses at the beginning of the war and near its end. Though there were fewer questions in war-time questionnaires compared with their Victorian counterparts, some (on sacramental ministry and religious education) were highly similar, but others, such as on mission overseas and lay representation on church councils, were different. They no longer included questions on the size of congregations. Some 226 parishes responded to the 1914 survey, giving a picture of parochial life in what Smith terms 'the last unclouded summer before the war': a picture that was in many senses very similar to that of the late-Victorian parish. The 1918 survey, sent out in March when the war seemed never-ending, was different. There were only eleven queries contained in six questions, two of which asked for untrammelled clerical comment rather than statistics, the aim being to discover change and innovation under wartime conditions. Perhaps the most significant question from the local historian's viewpoint, asked, 'What can you report as to the moral and spiritual effect of the different classes in your parish: a, of war time, b, of the National Mission?' Other questions concerned changes in worship patterns and clerical methods as a result of the war; lay representatives to parochial church councils; and reforms in religious education. There were 229 returns.

One advantage of consulting visitation returns is the mining of specific facts and figures to create statistics through which findings may be compared, either between parishes or over time. When additional research tools are used, the results gain added weight. Mark Smith's use of the 1911 census and various diocesan records is a good example of this technique. His helpful graphs and charts are testimony to its success, revealing at a glance statistical information on the age of the clergy; their educational background; how long they waited to secure an incumbency; their preference for sacramental worship; the number of Church schools; and much more. But, as he remarks, analysis of the returns is actually more complex, the clergy demonstrating many different views, 'produced at least as much by differences in character as by their parochial experience'. Such complexities appear in the questions which required discursive replies, resulting, for instance, in differing opinions on whether immoral conduct was caused by the war, and on the efficacy of the National Mission of Repentance and Hope of 1916. The National Mission was the Church of England's major response to the war. It asked people to consider whether wars were caused by corporate and individual sin, and urged them to respond through repentance and increased Christian worship. Messengers were sent to preach in cities and towns, and special services and prayers took place throughout the country. Historians have frequently considered the National Mission to have been a failure, but Smith's analysis of the Oxfordshire replies reveals positive as well as negative results. Nevertheless, the discursive nature of the replies, clerical 'differences of character', and the fact that Bishop Gore was particularly keen on the Mission, all suggest that the responses should be viewed with a degree of scepticism. Readers might wish to analyse the results for themselves, in conjunction with local newspaper reports, parish magazines and parochial records, and come to their own conclusions. Indeed, one of the joys of The Parish in Wartime is its potential influence on local historians to encourage them to examine and compare the visitation returns of their own diocese, and perhaps engage with groups elsewhere to compare and contrast results nationally.

Mark Smith's eventual conclusion is that the parochial efforts of the Church of England during the First World War had a decided impact on those who were already regular churchgoers, but that others were hardly touched, leading him to suggest that, during the twentieth century the National Church would slowly become a gathered Church. It is to be hoped that others will emulate him by asking questions of twentieth century bishops' visitation returns in their own dioceses, and that they will share their findings with others.

JANE PLATT is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an archivist at the Oxford, Centre for Methodism and Church History, Oxford Brookes University. She is the author of Subscribing to Faith? The Anglican Parish Magazine 1859-1929 (2015), editor of 'The Diocese of Carlisle 1814-1855: Chancellor Walter Fletcher's 'Diocesan Book' (2015), and author of Making their Mark: Learning to read and write in nineteenth-century Cumberland (2019). She is currently editing the six volumes of late-seventeenth century notes on the history of Westmorland written by the antiquarian clergyman, Thomas Machell.

Review from The Local Historian, volume 50, No 3, July 2020.

The MDR was established in 1922,to protect tenant rights when manorial court powers were abolished. It now enables local and family historians to discover what records, including court rolls, surveys, maps and leases, survive for their local places.

In 2019 a national project to revise and digitise the MDR reached Oxfordshire and the results can be searched via the National Archives’ excellent Discovery website.

An example is Cuxham, the subject of a classic collection of manorial records, published by ORS (Vol.50, 1974). Its editor, Paul Harvey, is also the author of A Medieval Oxfordshire Village. Cuxham 1240-1400 (OUP 1965) which shows just how much of the life of a community can be discovered with manorial records as a primary source. As the MDR reveals, there are 21 collections of Cuxham manorial records in three different archives- Merton College, Oxford, the National Archives and the Oxfordshire History Centre. They date between 1275 and 1847. Manorial records can have uses well beyond the medieval period.