Victoria History of the Counties of England

The Victoria History of the Counties of England, commonly known as the Victoria County History or the VCH, is an English history project which began in 1899 and was dedicated to Queen Victoria with the aim of creating an encyclopaedic history of each of the historic counties of England. In 2012 the project was rededicated to HM Queen Elizabeth II in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee year. Since 1933 the project has been coordinated by the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London.

The history of the VCH falls into three main phases, defined by different funding regimes: an early phase, 1899–1914, when the project was conceived as a commercial enterprise, and progress was rapid; a second more desultory phase, 1914–1947, when relatively little progress was made; and the third phase beginning in 1947, when, under the auspices of the Institute of Historical Research, a high academic standard was set, and progress has been slow but reasonably steady. These phases have also been characterised by changing attitudes towards the proper scope of English local history. The early volumes were planned on the model of traditional English county histories, with a strong emphasis on manorial descents, the advowsons of parish churches, and the local landed gentry: a prospectus of c. 1904 stated that "there is no Englishman to whom [the VCH] does not in some one or other of its features make a direct appeal". More recent volumes – especially those published since the 1950s – have been more wide-ranging in their approach, and have included systematic coverage of social and economic history, industrial history, population history, educational history, landscape history, religious nonconformity, and so on: individual parish histories have consequently grown considerably in length and complexity.

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