Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 319

It could be argued that Keith Snell has been working on the parish and local attachment for the whole of his prolific academic life: from the ground-breaking Annals of the labouring poor (1985) to the superb Rival Jerusalems (2000), not to mention his impressive inter-disciplinary work on the regional novel. Annals was a perfect demonstration of combining the quantitative and the qualitative; Rival Jerusalems showed the possibilities of high-level number crunching. There is no other historian like Snell; in terms of historical technique, energy, and range, he is like a one-person combination of E.P.Thompson and (the whole) Cambridge Group! So another book from the world’s leading historian of rural England is cause for celebration. And Snell has more to say about the parish and belonging: over 500 pages worth. One chapter, on the new poor law, is the size of a small monograph.

Parish and belonging has the Snell wit. This is, he writes, a book about belonging by someone with no ‘strong sense of belonging’ (p.3). There are quips about the tendencies of poor law guardians, including their inability to see their desks for the drawers (pp.246–7). We are told of the place called ‘Nowhere’ near Yarmouth (p.375). There are intriguing asides, including one about the impact of the 1850s drawing pin on church and chapel doors (p.344). The book has his unique combination of scholarly fetishism and diligence – footnotes jostle with the main text again and again, sometimes even achieving formatting dominance. There is much evidence of the Snell range: from George Eliot to the chants of Chelsea football fans; from folktales to the UK Data Archive, SPSS, and GenMap. The book has his local enthusiasms that become the reader’s enthusiasms – this time it is the Forest of Dean. It has impressive quantification expressed almost laconically: ‘To explore these issues more extensively, 18,442 marriages were analysed from the published registers of sixty-nine parishes, scattered across eight counties’ (p.168). ‘To explore the issue further I analysed about 16,000 gravestones in eighty-seven burial grounds’ (p.469). Finally, there are themes within themes: regional variation comes through strongly in chapter after chapter.

Most importantly, Parish and belonging demonstrates Snell’s ability to totally rethink accepted wisdom, and to do so openly: ‘When I began to explore this subject, I anticipated finding …’ (p.178). The marriage patterns that he established, different to those predicted, were an increase in endogamy (both partners from the parish) from 1740–1840, and with a decline when it came (Snell uses the work of others here) notable both for its lateness in the late nineteenth century and its rapidity. He establishes that relief under the new poor law (1834–1929) was in the local community, the parish rather than the workhouse, as it had been under the old poor law. Eighty per cent of poor relief was outdoor relief. The symbolism of the new poor law workhouse was powerful but scarcely represented the reality of day-to-day practice. Though this chapter returns to the theme of the centrality of the parish in the nineteenth and early twentieth century world, it could stand alone as the best short history of the new poor law. In short, the parish was important throughout the nineteenth century (Chapter 6 is a fascinating account of the role of the parish overseer); and may have actually increased in importance. Over 4000 new parishes were created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (see Chapter 7).

Parish and belonging is an impressive administrative history – one could call it ‘the new administrative history’ at the risk of unleashing another historiographical beast – but it is far more than that. Snell is concerned with cultural practice as well as structures. It is not mere chance that he begins the book with chapters on local xenophobia and the languages of settlement, and ends with one on the inscriptions on gravestones – that is, belonging demonstrated in widely differing cultural forms. Parish and belonging is a fine work of rural history by a masterful practitioner, rethinking, reconstruct-ing, ( gently) challenging, and dazzling at every turn of the page.