1. H. P. R. Finberg, ‘The Local Historian and His Theme,’ in The Changing Face of English Local History, ed. R. C. Richardson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000), 115. Originally published as The local historian and his theme; an introductory lecture delivered at the University College of Leicester, 6 November 1952 (University College of Leicester, 1954).
2. Eamon Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); David Underdown, Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
3. James Horn, for instance, has written convincingly of the integrity of the hundred (an administrative unit that encompasses several parishes) in Adapting to a New World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 78–84, 118–119. Many writers have asserted the existence of self-conscious gentry ‘county communities’ prior to and during the Civil War. See, for example, Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (New York: Longman, 1975).
4. See Alan Everitt, Landscape and Community in England (London: Hambledon Press, 1985); and Joan Thirsk, Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History in England, 1500–1750 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
5. Christopher Lewis, Particular Places: An Introduction to English Local History (London: British Library, 1989), 35.