English county histories

English county histories, in other words historical and topographical (or "chorographical") works concerned with individual ancient counties of England, were produced by antiquarians from the late 16th century onwards. The content was variable: most focused on recording the ownership of estates and the descent of lordships of manors, thus the genealogies of county families, heraldry and other antiquarian material. In the introduction to one typical early work of this style, The Antiquities of Warwickshire published in 1656, the author William Dugdale writes:^[1]

I offer unto you my noble countriemen, as the most proper persons to whom it can be presented wherein you will see very much of your worthy ancestors, to whose memory I have erected it as a monumentall pillar and to shew in what honour they lived in those flourishing ages past. In this kind, or not much different, have divers persons in forrein parts very learnedly written; some whereof I have noted in my preface: and I could wish that there were more that would adventure in the like manner for the rest of the counties of this nation, considering how acceptable those are, which others have already performed

Thus his work was designed primarily to be read by his fellow county gentry of Warwickshire, whose public lives and marriages were largely confined within their own county of residence, which they administered as Justices of the Peace and Sheriffs, and represented in Parliament. The genealogical and heraldic tradition continues with the series of Victoria County Histories commenced in the late 19th century.

Other forms recorded archaeological sites. A closely related genre, which emerged in the second half of the 17th century, was the county "Natural History", which focused on the county's flora, fauna and natural phenomena, but which also often included chapters on antiquities. The best known examples were Robert Plot's two volumes on Oxfordshire (1677) and Staffordshire (1686); and John Aubrey's unpublished work on Wiltshire.