John Broad's History Projects

My current projects nearing completion include work in a number of areas:

Publication of the edition of Bishop Wake's Visitation returns for a British Academy series. This has been completed and is going through the press's various processes of scrutiny. I am concurrently working to update the database of information in it, and to link it to the parish GIS mapping facility at the History of Population and Social Structure Research Group at Cambridge where I am currently Visiting Academic (2009-).

Completing my research on the Rural Housing for publication by Continuum books. This is now in its final stages and is being written up. It has produced spin-offs and papers, some of them published, or in the course of publication, and future papers include discussions of detached kitchens, the Great Rebuilding, and squatter dwellings.

Updating and extending the Regional History of the South Midlands I completed some years ago for publication.

Completion and submission for publication of articles on a) Women's work and dairying in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries (with Dr Nicola Verdon and Dr Anne Meredith) b) Engiish rent levels 1690 - 1750: a revision c) The fate of the Windsor Blacks: the English forests after the Black Act of 1722 d) Women's property and inheritance.

Projects in preparation for the next five years include:

A major project on Landownership and farm size c.1800 involving an innovative methodology to compute and map the 1798 Land Tax returns. This project is in conjunction with Prof. Richard Hoyle (University of Reading) and Dr Leigh Shaw Taylor (University of Cambridge).

An edition of Buckinghamshire Glebe Terriers for the Buckinghamshire Record Society, based on those Glebe Terriers in the archives at Lincoln, and therefore less available to those in Buckinghamshire.

A study of the Social Structure of eastern England c.1710, based on the Wake Visitation returns, using the database and the GIS mapping facilities.

An online index to the Verney Letters on microfilm (available at the British Library, Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, University of Princeton, Darmouth College, New Hampshire). This will be based on a merging of the calendars of letters drawn up by myself and Dr Susan Whyman in the course of our researches in the Verney archives, and an extension to include those letters not calendared by either of us.