Elmdon is a social history of a village in north-west Essex between 1861 and 1964. Throughout this period the population of Elmdon, which lies only fifty miles from London, was comparatively small, and this has enabled Jean Robin to follow the lives of individuals and families in the village in a degree of detail which can illuminate many areas not always thoroughly explored. Using the records, electoral rolls and other written sources, as well as information obtained through anthropological techniques of interviewing, carried out between 1962 and 1972 by students from the Department of...

This title was first published in 2000: The Way We Lived Then is a detailed study of a nineteenth-century community. It is based on the life histories of all the inhabitants of the parish of Colyton in Devon, covering the period from 1851 to 1891. The book gives a brief history of Colyton, which was mentioned in the Domesday book, and which suffered raids by soldiers, house searches, looting and even executions during the Civil War and the Monmouth rebellion, events which strengthened the townspeople's leaning towards Protestantism. The central section of the book is concerned with the...