Professor Charles Phythian-Adams, 28 July 1937 – 13 May 2025
A personal memoir by K.D.M. Snell.
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 W.G. Hoskins. He was formatively in the Attenborough – Hoskins founded Department of English Local History through its famous years of Hoskins, H.P.R. 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 Hoskins on Charles was long-lasting, and a driving motive for Charles was to protect local and regional history in Leicester. This included urban history, for Charles was a close associate of Jim Dyos, Jack Simmons, Tony Sutcliffe, David Reeder, Peter Clark, founders of 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 urban ritual. He was the key person in bringing about Marc Fitch’s generous bequests to the Department of English Local History, allowing us 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 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 into our building. Without him 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 Centres would not have happened. He thought it was crucial to defend the two centres of excellence, highly praised in all government RAE and REF exercises, alongside Museum Studies, and in some cases this involved internal battles which took their toll on Charles. I recall his loud cries of “Oh no!” when yet another bureaucratic hurdle or obstacle appeared. The stress on him was damaging and frequent, yet the main assessment must be one of overwhelming pride in what he achieved.
One of Charles’ most steadfast 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, with the 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 our 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 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 to me 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. Who 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.
And running through these concerns was the fact that Charles was in so many ways a northerner in mentality, brought up in Carlisle, disposed to retire to Brampton, someone with an eye to the periphery and borders. Whenever I spoke of my own family background from the Gower peninsula and north Cornwall, let alone my mother’s maiden name of Hoskins, it seemed to trigger a related Celtic sensibility and familiarity in Charles. His Land of the Cumbrians book, his essay on Northumberland in Robert Colls’ book Northumbria: History and Identity, 547-2000, his persistent warmth towards northerners like David Hey and Paul Slack, were all features of his north-leaning academic sensibility. In this respect his succession as Head of Department after the Kentish Alan Everitt was marked and significant. He always wanted to expand the remit of ‘English Local History’ to Scotland and Wales, indeed to an Irish Sea civilisation, though the trademark name and the influence of Hoskins held him back. He would, I think, have no problems with the recent renaming to ‘The Centre for Regional and Local History’ under Angela Muir and Richard Jones’ guidance.
I first met Charles in 1985, when, frustrated as a lecturer only teaching twentieth-century economic history at York’s Department of Economics, I came to Leicester for my interview. The job had been spotted and strongly recommended to me by no less a person than Donald McCloskey, the famous American economist, then a visiting professor in my department, who admired the Leicester scholars. Charles had managed a successful submission for a ‘new blood’ lectureship on regional popular cultures, at a time of severe academic job shortages and cut-backs. The job remit was close to his interests. I was immediately struck by Charles’ friendliness, charm, tact, extreme vitality, capacity for rapid association of ideas and lateral thinking, great interdisciplinary interests, and enthusiasm for northern and western history. In a pre-interview meeting we largely talked about anthropology. My readiness to discuss the Vale of Pickering during the interview was warmly received. At the end of the interviews, Charles asked if I would accept the job – I said “Of course” – and thus began an association of 40 years during which we never fell out about anything. I even learnt to read his miniscule handwriting, and at least two secretaries used to invite me in for deciphering sessions. His encouragement of scholars around him was legendary, even though one or two of them verged upon eccentricity. I dedicated my best book “To Charles Phythian-Adams, learned colleague and friend”. I long dreaded the day when I would survive him, for Charles did not seem blessed with longevity and told me of his eminent father’s first thrombosis at 61 years. As it happened, thankfully, he lived for much longer than he expected. And for nearly four decades he enjoyed and was sustained by his marriage to Judy – another northerner, who herself did so much for our School of History as its head administrator – and by his two talented daughters and grandchildren, to whom our deepest condolences and sympathies go.
Keith Snell
