Victoria County History Project

The main Cumbria-wide heritage organisations and universities have been working over the past two years to establish a way to restart work on the VCH for Cumbria, in a form which meets the changing needs of local historians and communities. For more general information on VCH please click here www.victoriacountyhistory.ac.uk

About the VCH Cumbria Project

The ultimate aim of the project is to write the history of places, of parishes and townships, from the earliest written records up to the present day, for Victoria County History covering the modern county of Cumbria. But that is a very long-term project, and in the medium term the work will be focused on producing histories of individual places which will be published on the web. A Project Plan for 2011-12 was agreed in April 2011.

Such a project must have an overall geographic structure. The historic counties of Cumberland and Westmorland are expected to require some fifteen volumes, each containing histories of all the communities in that part of Cumbria.

Townships and Parishes

The VCH Cumbria project is using the Civil Parishes as they existed around 1900 as the basis for dividing the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland into units for the preparation of articles. This is a break with VCH conventions, as separate articles are written for each ancient ecclesiastical parish in other counties.

In Cumbria the ancient ecclesiastical parishes often covered vast areas, embracing numerous ‘townships’ or ‘constablewicks’, the civil administrative divisions (please view the map showing the relationship between parishes and townships in part of Cumbria). Civil Parishes are often reincarnations of former townships, rather than ancient parishes. We are using them because it was often the township, rather than the parish, which functioned as the basic local administrative entity and many townships formed separate manors or estates. Some of the largest ancient parishes were notional, even for ecclesiastical purposes, as they were divided into chapelries, each of which functioned as a separate parish.

So, the Civil Parishes, set up under the Poor Law Amendment Act 1866, will provide the basic structure. We are using the Civil Parishes as they existed at the end of the 19th century, as later amalgamations and boundary changes, particularly those resulting from the Cumberland Review order of 1934, have disrupted the historic administrative pattern.

These links will take you to the 311 places, 198 in Cumberland and 113 in Westmorland for which separate VCH histories will be written.

Project Direction

All the work is being done by volunteers, under the overall direction of Dr Angus Winchester of Lancaster University, and with volunteer guidance and support provided by Dr Sarah Rose, Volunteer Co-ordinator. A free training programme will be provided to help volunteers, and ensure that together we maintain the high standards of scholarship expected from the Victoria County History, and that our work provides a factual, reliable and authoritative work of reference for everyone with an interest in the history of their town or village - and possibly their family too.

Angus Winchester