Charles Phythian-Adams

We have learned, with sadness, of the death of Emeritus Professor Charles Phythian-Adams, former Head of the Department of English Local History (now the Centre for Regional and Local History), who passed away on 13 May 2025.

Keith Snell writes:

Charles Phythian-Adams, who has died aged 87, was educated at Marlborough College and came to the University of Leicester from Hertford College, Oxford, at the request of his Oxford supervisor WG Hoskins. He was formatively in the Attenborough-Hoskins founded Department of English Local History through its famous years of Hoskins, HPR Finberg, Joan Thirsk, Alan Everitt, Margaret Spufford, David Hey, Peter Eden, Richard McKinley, Harold Fox and the large numbers of other scholars and countless students who made it internationally known as the ‘Leicester School’ of local history. For many years, Charles was head of the Department of English Local History, before it became a Centre within the School of History, now in the School of History, Politics and International Relations. 

The influence of WG Hoskins on Charles was long-lasting, and a driving motive for Charles was to protect local and regional history in the University of Leicester. This included urban history, for Charles was a close associate of Jim Dyos, Jack Simmons, Tony Sutcliffe, David Reeder, Peter Clark, all salient figures for the Centre for Urban History in Leicester. His first and very fine book, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, was a striking example of urban history, and he followed it with important publications on the interpretation of urban ritual in the late medieval and early modern periods. 

He was the key person in bringing about Dr Marc Fitch’s generous bequests to the Department of English Local History, allowing the Department to move from the 18th floor of the Attenborough Building to 3-5 Salisbury Road, which was bought and renovated with Marc Fitch money. Vice-Chancellor Bob Burgess subsequently added 1 Salisbury Road for further historical use. Indeed, for Charles this was a return to an earlier incarnation, as English Local History was initially sited in another building in Salisbury Road. He arranged the many bequests, of money and artistic valuables, micro-managed the renovations, and later supported the move of the Centre for Urban History to share the building, thus safeguarding that Centre at a time when the University was no longer able to pay for the building it occupied on Regent Road. 

It is fair to say that without Charles Phythian-Adams there would probably be no Centres of Regional and Local History, and Urban History, in Leicester, and thousands of publications, PhDs, MAs, major grants, lectureships elsewhere, and the like emanating from these two Centres would not have happened. The huge international reputation of English Local History – what Vice-Chancellor Kenneth Edwards called "a jewel in our crown" – would have been much diminished. Charles successfully arranged a government ‘new blood’ lectureship in regional popular cultures in 1985, augmenting his Department’s staff at a time when lectureships were in very short supply and academic cuts were pervasive. Charles thought that it was crucial to defend the two historical centres of excellence, highly praised in all government RAE and REF exercises, alongside the Department of Museum Studies, and in some cases this involved internal battles which took their toll on him. The stress was often considerable, yet the overall assessment must be one of great pride in what he achieved. 

As a historian, one of Charles’ most steadfast academic themes was the identification and analysis of persisting cultural regions or ‘provinces’, and their incorporation into the wider polity. This showed the influence of the French Annales school on him, which in many ways he replicated and encouraged in England, notably in Leicester. He believed that England over the past millennium could be divided into regional societies, manifested and noticeable in different ways, often linked to regional pays. Hence he studied the existence of Rutland – now topical yet again – publishing the seminal study of the county and its formation. The local issues were researched by him in publications on the Leicestershire-Warwickshire border, an area that he surveyed on the ground, archivally, and in Saturday Schools while living in Lutterworth. His Land of the Cumbrians: A Study of British Provincial Origins, AD 400–1120 fitted strongly into this theme, covering the region’s evolving border, leadership, and composition, as did his book Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History. His long support for the English Surnames Survey, hosted in the Department under Richard McKinley, Margaret Camsell and David Postles, was aligned with these interests, given the localisation of so many surnames. He advanced views of cultural watersheds and divisions, often (he thought) strongly linked to county boundaries, an argument that he made in his Re-thinking English Local History. These views about borders and provinces have been a major influence on subsequent work, such as that by Alan Fox, David Hey, Tom Williamson and others, and of course they were always highly relevant politically to issues of local government, voting patterns, and devolution. 

In all Charles’ work, the long durée of historical phenomena attracted him. He was almost unique among historians in having a formidable chronological range. Indeed, he sometimes complained that Hoskins had made him teach across such enormous spans of time, from Anglo-Saxon charters through to twentieth-century folklore or local government. His technical ability was accordingly superb, his Latin or early modern palaeography always up to the job – there were no periods of English history whose records Charles was unfamiliar with. Nobody else could publish The Norman Conquest of Leicestershire and Rutland, and also a modern study entitled Local History and Folklore: A New Framework. Teaching across such a breadth of history, it became second nature for Charles to analyse English history over the very long term: to see major continuities in identities, dialect regions, folklore, religion, boundaries, vernacular forms, and political structures. 

Running through these concerns was the fact that Charles was a northerner in mentality, brought up in Carlisle, the son of a Canon of Carlisle Cathedral (who had been chaplain to many monarchs and a notable archaeologist), someone with an eye to the periphery and borders. His Land of the Cumbrians book, or his essay on Northumberland in Robert Colls’ book Northumbria: History and Identity, 547-2000, were examples of his north-leaning academic sensibility. In this respect his succession as Head of Department after the Kentish Professor Alan Everitt was significant. He would have liked to expand the remit of ‘English Local History’ to Scotland and Wales, indeed to an Irish Sea civilisation, though the famous trademark name for the University, and the influence of Hoskins, held him back. He would have no problems with the recent renaming to ‘The Centre for Regional and Local History’ under the current designated and affiliated staff, headed by Angela Muir and Richard Jones. 

All those who knew Charles were struck by his friendliness, charm, tact, extreme vitality, capacity for rapid association of ideas and lateral thinking, great interdisciplinary interests, and enthusiasm for local and regional history. He was the most supportive and encouraging of departmental heads. Postgraduate students in particular, and he supervised countless numbers of them, will always remember him with much affection and respect. And for nearly four decades he enjoyed and was sustained by his marriage to Judy – another northerner, who herself did so much for the University of Leicester’s School of History as its head administrator – and by his two talented daughters and grandchildren, to whom our deepest sympathies go on the sad occasion of his death. 

Chris Dyer writes:

Charles Phythian-Adams’s time at Leicester coincided with the last years of WG Hoskins (1965-8), and continued with Alan Everitt, until Charles himself became head of the Department, later the Centre of English Local History. Before arriving in Leicester he had been a research student at Oxford, working on Coventry with a focus on the early sixteenth century. The result was a remarkable book, Desolation of a City, published in 1979, which revealed the severity of the urban crisis in Coventry, and underpinned the idea of general urban decline in the later medieval and early modern periods. The debate on this theme began in the late 1970s and continued through the 1980s; it was initially applied to England but sparked some interest among continental urban historians. It helped to stimulate a revival of interest in the urban history of the pre-modern period that still continues. The Coventry book was also important because it analysed an urban society in new ways, breaking away from the traditional obsession with guilds, and instead drew on anthropological approaches to examine families and households, life-cycle, social mobility, and mentalities. While defining social inequalities, Phythian-Adams also devoted chapters to servants and children, reflecting the stratification of society in age cohorts. An interest in anthropology has now become a commonplace among social historians, but he was a pioneer. He published a pamphlet entitled Local History and Folklore which gave historical meaning to the customs and festivities that had previously only been of interest to antiquarians. He ruefully acknowledged later that the strand of anthropological thought that had influenced him later fell out of favour, but that is a hazard for anyone engaging with other disciplines.

Although much of his work dealt with the late medieval and early modern periods, he had a long-term interest in the early middle ages, and wrote a study of the origins of Rutland, and of a Leicestershire village, Claybrooke Magna. His most ambitious project in this period was a study of the early history of Cumbria, emphasising its British origins in the post-Roman period. 

In later years he devoted his work in teaching MA students as well as in publications, to new thinking about regional differences, which had always been a concern of the ‘Leicester school’ since the days of Thirsk and Everitt. He showed how regions were defined by well-defined boundaries, often coinciding with rivers, or with the high ground between river valleys. He explored the social, economic and cultural importance of the territories into which England was divided.  The sources for defining the boundaries of ‘cultural provinces’ included marriage registers and bus timetables. 

Phythian-Adams avoided clichés, received wisdom and repeating well-rehearsed ideas: he sought originality and achieved it.