This is the first in a series of blogs we will be running whereby we speak to different academic users of Dorset History Centre, ask them some questions, and thereby gather insight into their interests, and discover how accessing our collections can assist and add to their research.
To begin this series, we are delighted to be joined by Professor Henry French from the University of Exeter.
Name: Henry French
Position: Professor of Social History
Institution: University of Exeter
What collection(s) have you used in your research at DHC?
I have used many different collections in the Dorset History Centre over the years, notably the borough records of Lyme Regis, parish records of Beaminster, Yetminster, Netherbury and Sherborne, and lots of probate inventories for all these places.
I have also looked at the Bankes Archive (D/BKL) more recently. However, the archive that always sticks in my mind is for the Weld family of Lulworth Castle (D/WLC), particularly the letters that Edward Weld Sr. exchanged with his sons Edward Jr. and Thomas, when they were at school in France in the 1750s.
Why were you drawn to this collection?
We looked at this archive when we were doing research for the book Man’s Estate. Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660-1900 published by Oxford University Press in 2012. The Welds were a Catholic family, and so chose to educate their sons at the Jesuit colleges of Watton and Douai). Their sons left home aged 6 or 7 years, and hardly returned to England again until they were in their early 20s. Thomas Weld wrote to his brother in 1766 that after a decade in France it was more difficult for him to speak and write in English than in French. The letters are poignant, because these children were separated from their parents at such a young age.
What has this added to your research knowledge?
These letters convey a real sense of what it was like to be inside this school. Until the nineteenth century it is very difficult to recover much about daily life in (public) schools. Often the only things to survive are the school’s financial accounts and its rules and regulations. The Weld archive is full of family letters from the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s. The Welds were determined to recreate the Catholic system of education in the unlikely setting of Protestant England, and Thomas Weld was behind the opening of the Catholic College at their house at Stonyhurst in Lancashire in 1791. So, these childhood letters detail the experiences that led Thomas Weld to become one of the founders of Catholic education in Britain.
Can you describe the benefits more generally of working directly with primary sources?
The difference between understanding by just reading books compared to going to the archive yourself is the difference between reading about how to ride a bike and riding a bike yourself. We can never go back in time, but looking at historical documents begins to take us back in time. Seeing this adds an immediacy that you would never get from reading this in the cold type-face of a transcript.