Cemeteries and Graveyard
Celia Heritage • £15.99
pen-and-sword.co.uk
This comprehensive and fascinating guide from genealogist and historian Celia Heritage will prove indispensable for both local and family historians. A wide-ranging examination of historical and archaeological findings means that the book will also appeal to anyone with an interest in death and burial.
Celia throws light on changing social attitudes to death and burial from pre-historic times to the modern day, investigates the origins and evolution of cemeteries and graveyards, and discusses the many different types of graves and memorials as well as looking at how memorial designs have changed.
One chapter takes an in-depth look at the origins of the parish churchyard, while another looks at graveyards associated with nonconformist churches and institutions, including workhouses, asylums, hospitals and gaols.
Celia details a wide range of online and offline sources that will help locate burials and memorials, also offering vital advice regarding good research practice. There is plenty of detail about less well-known genealogy sources such as records relating to re-interment, undertakers’ and stonemasons’ records, together with better known sources such as burial registers and memorial inscriptions.
Throughout, there is a wide range of hands-on case studies which bring the subject to life and put it right into the hands of the researcher.
John Leland Itinerary: a Version in Modern English
Edited by John Chandler • £25
hobnobpress.co.uk
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John Leland’s Itinerary is one of the key documents of English local history, offering eyewitness descriptions of hundreds of towns and villages, castles, monasteries and gentry houses during the reign of Henry VIII, by one of the most intelligent and learned observers of his era. But it is not straightforward – Leland became insane before he had time to organise his notes into a coherent and systematic account of his journeys. John Chandler’s modern English version, based on the standard edition by Lucy Toulmin Smith of 1906-10, was first published in 1993 and has been long out of print. In it he identified place and personal names, and rearranged everything of topographical interest into historic English counties, with maps and a detailed introduction. For this new edition he has corrected the text, added parts of the material relating to Leland’s travels in Wales, revised the introduction, and established a reliable chronology for the surviving accounts of five journeys which Leland undertook between 1538 and 1544. This rendering into modern English offers an accessible and absorbing window on the world of our towns and countryside almost five centuries ago.