5 April 2026

Most of us who dabble in family history eventually accumulate a shelf of old county histories and parish guides. Before long, we’ve built an antiquarian bookcase that looks rather impressive. There’s something about these volumes — the weight of the paper, the crispness of the type, the eccentric “instructions to the binder” — that makes it remarkably easy to feel in conversation with writers long gone.

Part of the charm lies in the books’ own biographies. Ownership inscriptions march across the flyleaves; maps and plates are carefully tipped in by past custodians; and every so often you realise your copy is a quiet marriage of two or three others. None of this diminishes their value. If anything, it deepens the sense of continuity.

Today, while revisiting one such volume — this one containing at least twenty “stranger” plates invisibly bound in — I stumbled upon a phrase I hadn’t encountered since my family trees first sent tentative tendrils into medieval genealogy.

Borough English.
The custom by which property passed not to the eldest son, but to the youngest.

And then came the author’s mischievous footnote: that Borough English supposedly proved the legitimacy of the eldest sons could not be trusted, thanks to droit de seigneur.

That was the moment I knew the topic deserved a podcast episode of its own.

Because droit de seigneur — the idea that a lord could claim the first night with a newly married bride — is pure fiction. There is no medieval evidence, no case law, no customary practice, no contemporary commentary that suggests it ever formed part of peasant life in England. The myth seems to have grown from later continental proclamations condemning abuses, but even those require a generous pinch of salt.

What fascinates me is how such myths cling to the edges of genuine customs like Borough English. They hitch a ride, distort interpretation, and distract from the real historical questions: why did some communities favour ultimogeniture, and what does that tell us about landholding, family structure, and local identity?

16 March 2026

Walking Among the Ghosts of Sherwood: Which Trees from Joseph Rogers’ Sherwood Forest Still Survive?

Following my previous blog, I buried myself in an old book, Sherwood Forest by Joseph Rogers, one of the most evocative aspects of the book is the roll-call and photographs of famous ancient trees: giants with names like the Major Oak, the Greendale Oak, and the Parliament Oak. These trees were already venerable when Rogers wrote about them in the nineteenth century, (my edition is dated 1908) and many had stood for centuries before that.

It raises a fascinating question for anyone with historical roots in Nottinghamshire or the surrounding counties: which of these trees still survive today—and which might our medieval ancestors actually have known?

The most famous of all Sherwood’s trees is the Major Oak.
Today, the Major Oak still stands in Sherwood Forest National Nature Reserve and is thought to be around 800–1000 years old. When Joseph Rogers wrote his book in the 1800s, the tree was already famous and probably about 700–800 years old.

If your ancestors lived in the Sherwood area during the late Middle Ages (1300–1500), it is quite possible that they walked beneath the same branches that visitors see today. The tree was already ancient by that time.

Several of the named trees Rogers described were already centuries old in medieval times but have since disappeared.

The Greendale Oak
Once one of the most astonishing trees in England, the Greendale Oak reportedly grew so large that a carriage could pass through its hollow trunk. It stood on the Welbeck estate in the wider Sherwood Forest landscape. The tree eventually died and was dismantled, but it may have been 700–1000 years old, meaning medieval travellers could certainly have known it.

The Shamble Oak (Robin Hood’s Larder)
This hollow oak gained its nickname from the legend that venison was hung inside it. The tree survived until 1961, when it fell in a storm. It may have been 600–800 years old, so it likely stood during the medieval period as well.

The Original Parliament Oak
Tradition holds that King John held a parliament beneath this tree in the early thirteenth century. The original tree declined long ago, but a descendant or regrowth still stands today near the road between Mansfield and Edwinstowe. The original oak may have been 700–900 years old.

Simon Foster Oak
This tree is known mainly from historical references such as Rogers’ work. It no longer survives, but it was likely a substantial veteran oak during earlier centuries.

One particularly evocative survivor is the Wounded Giant, a heavily damaged veteran oak in the Sherwood Forest reserve. Much of the tree is dead wood, but it still stands as a monument to the forest’s ancient landscape. Even dying trees like this are protected because they provide habitat for rare beetles, fungi, and birds.

Although many named trees have disappeared, Sherwood Forest still contains over a thousand veteran oaks, some between 500 and 1000 years old. The reason is historical: Sherwood was once a royal hunting forest, which meant large areas were protected from agriculture and timber felling.

These surviving oaks form one of Europe’s most important landscapes for ancient trees.

Why is this important for the family historian? Reading Joseph Rogers’ Sherwood Forest can therefore feel like stepping into a layered landscape of memory. Some of the trees he described have vanished, leaving only their stories. Yet others still stand, silently linking modern visitors with centuries of walkers, foresters, poachers and villagers. The trees remind us that genealogy is not about a pedigree on a page but, also doing something with it.  That can be a foundation for further research but it can be finding ways to keep in touch with the world of the old folk, well-gone-by.

If your ancestors lived anywhere near Sherwood in the Middle Ages, there is a good chance they knew at least some of these giants. And if you visit today, you may find yourself standing beside one of the very same trees.

Few historical connections are quite so tangible as that.

Ancient oaks grow slowly, die slowly, and often linger for centuries even after their hearts have hollowed. In Sherwood Forest, the boundary between living tree and historical monument is often beautifully blurred.

5 March 2026

Reading the Rings: A Lesson for Genealogists from Sherwood Forest

One of the pleasures of browsing local history is the sheer unpredictability of what you might stumble across. While leafing through a 1911 paper reprinted in Briscoe’s anthology on Old Nottinghamshire, I came across a small but fascinating account from Sherwood Forest that struck me as oddly familiar—not because of the trees themselves, but because of the method used to interpret them.

Victorian woodsmen felling trees in the forest sometimes discovered inscriptions carved into the trunks. These carvings had long since been swallowed by the tree’s subsequent growth, hidden beneath layers of new wood. When the trees were cut down, the marks appeared embedded inside the trunk—little time capsules from an earlier generation of foresters.

The figures carved into the wood were easy enough to read. They represented regnal years. The difficulty lay in interpretation. Did the number record the year the carving was made, or did it mark the year the tree was scheduled to be felled?

Rather than guessing, the woodsmen approached the problem with admirable ingenuity.

First, they estimated the shoulder height of the man who had originally made the mark. From that, they could judge roughly where on the trunk the carving had been cut. Next, they examined how much wood had grown over the inscription. That provided a clue about how many years of growth had passed since the mark was made.

They didn’t stop there. The men also studied the character of the new growth surrounding the carving—its depth, texture, and vigour. Drawing on practical experience of the forest and its trees, they estimated the stage of maturity the tree had been in when the inscription was cut.

The paper goes on into rather more technical territory than I can confidently follow, but the essence of the method is clear. By assembling several different indicators—growth rate, position, condition of the wood—they constructed a matrix of possible interpretations. Each clue narrowed the range of possibilities until a likely explanation emerged for both the date and the purpose of the carving.

Reading this, I couldn’t help thinking how familiar the approach feels to anyone working through a tricky family history problem.

Genealogists rarely have the luxury of a single, clear answer. Instead, we work with fragments: a census age that doesn’t quite align, a baptism recorded a few miles away, a will hinting at relationships without spelling them out. Each clue on its own may be ambiguous, but when combined thoughtfully they can begin to constrain the possibilities.

In effect, we build our own matrices—testing scenarios against the available evidence until the most plausible picture emerges.

The woodsmen of Sherwood Forest were not thinking about genealogy, of course. But their practical reasoning offers a neat reminder that historical puzzles—whether in timber or in family trees—often yield to the same patient method: observe carefully, consider multiple interpretations, and let several small clues work together to narrow the field.

You never quite know what you will learn when browsing through local history.

Sometimes, it even teaches you how to read the hidden rings in your own family tree.

Ougle J J Ancient Tree Markings in Sherwood Forest

Briscoe J P Old Nottinghamshire Hamilton Adams Notts. 1911

25 February 2026

The websites I visited most often in Febry, for my own research

1. British Newspaper Archive
2. TNA
3. LoC (Images)
4. FreeReg
5. familysearch
6. East London FHS
7. London Gazette
8. BHoL
9. Cambs FHS
10. Ebay for Antiquarian Books

28 January 2026

The Parish Recorder

I’ve been browsing along my Nottinghamshire bookcase again, and today I want to pull down a favourite: In and About Nottinghamshire, published in 1908. Before I read you a little from it, let me introduce the man behind it.

Every so often in Nottinghamshire history you meet a figure who feels less like an entry in a directory and more like someone you might actually bump into on a village street. Robert Mellors is one of those. Picture him around 1905: a county alderman with a neat beard, a bundle of committee papers under one arm, and—always—a notebook ready to catch some scrap of parish lore before it slipped away.

He wasn’t an academic historian, and he never pretended to be. What he gave us was something more homely and, in its way, more precious: those parishbyparish rambles, the suburban sketches, the little biographies of Nottinghamshire worthies. He wrote like a man who genuinely wanted his neighbours to know where they lived. And people warmed to that.

But even in his own day, reviewers hinted gently at the limits of his approach. One in The Spectator praised his diligence but made it clear his big county book was an introduction, not the last word. And modern historians tend to agree. Mellors could gather stories, but he didn’t always interrogate them. He repeated local traditions with a straight face, offered placename guesses that make linguists wince, and sometimes wrapped his history in a civicimproving glow that smoothed out the rough edges.

Yet that’s exactly why he remains so useful. Mellors captured Nottinghamshire as Edwardians understood it—its memories, its pride, its sense of itself. When we read him now, we’re not just learning about the county; we’re learning how the county once told its own story.

And that set me thinking about the first time I went looking for my own parish stories. This must be forty years ago now. I’d gone to the village where my grandmother’s people lived around the turn of the nineteenth century. I don’t know why I’m shy about naming it—Great Bradley, on the Suffolk–Cambridgeshire border. I was poking around the church, hoping for a parish history, and found only a folded leaflet on the architecture. But a local pointed me to a homemade booklet by someone who called herself the Parish Recorder. She noted who came and went, which buildings fell down and which went up. It was exactly the sort of thing Mellors would have approved of. And it made me think: why don’t we all do that?

One postscript. Familyhistory wandering brings unexpected rewards. When we were examining the site of the old windmill, the farmer’s wife came out to see what we were up to. Hanging around is always a good way of making contacts. Just stand there long enough and someone will come and check you out. My wife admired her peonies, and the next thing we knew the farmer’s wife was digging up a few roots for us. Those flowers are still flourishing in our back garden today. You can see them from the conservatory door—living reminders of a village, a visit, and the stories that stay with you.