Bredon

During the course of contextual research, I uncover many interesting things – fragments of local history that don’t always have an immediate place in the final house history. Researching a house in a rural location brings particular challenges, not least that you often have to learn more & more about an area simply to trace the specific place you are trying to identify in the records.

In earlier documents, houses & even roads are frequently unnamed. The only way into the past of a place may be through the names of people, so research often has to proceed sideways before it can move forward. You keep digging until, hopefully, a pattern or order begins to emerge.

Lateral thinking, an openness to unusual record types, & what I think of as the ‘research imagination’ are all invaluable here, along with a discipline for staying on track. It would be very easy to disappear off on a tangent otherwise. I keep a careful filing system for these discoveries, saving material to return to if it becomes relevant later, without losing focus or time.

In the research for my own house, many of these ‘asides’ relate to the history of Bredon: its people, places, and landscape. Others extend into surrounding villages such as Bredon’s Norton & Bredon’s Hardwick, Westmancote, Kinsham, & Kemerton. Over time, these fragments have begun to form a wider picture of the area and its past.

Inadvertently, drip by drip, I have gathered a substantial body of locally relevant material. In time, I hope to develop this into a growing and extendable resource. For now, this blog is a place to begin weaving those threads together – sharing some of the stories I have encountered as part of my research, & returning to places, themes, & documents as they continue to surface.

Much of this work has grown out of the same careful process I use when researching individual houses: looking closely at buildings, following people through records, and placing small pieces of evidence within a wider historical landscape. It is often from these wider contexts that the most revealing details about a particular house, or place, finally emerge.