Professor Angus Winchester

PhD Supervision Interests

I welcome enquiries from students interested in writing dissertations and theses on topics that would fall under the following headings:

Current Teaching

HIST226, 324, 415, 423

Research Interests

My research falls under two headings: landscape and environmental history, particularly of upland areas; and the local and regional identity in northern England, especially Cumbria. The focus of my work lies at the interface between past human societies and their environments at local and regional level, using Cumbria and elsewhere in northern England as the laboratory in which to explore questions and test hypotheses. My particular interests are the appropriation and exploitation of land in the medieval and early-modern periods and I am keen to offer a distinctive upland and northern perspective to balance the predominantly lowland, southern models of rural landscape history.

Much of my recent work has been on the history of resource management on common land and, in particular, the role of manor courts. My study of manor court byelaws and the management of common land, published as The Harvest of the Hills (2000),led on to further work on the records of manorial administration, including the Cumbrian Manorial Records Project and a sister project in Lancashire.  My work on common land has also been developed further in the 'Contested Common Land' project, a major project in collaboration with Newcastle Law School, which formed part of the AHRC Landscape & Environment Programme. A successor project, the 'Building Common Knowledge' project, seeks to engage local commubnities in gathering evidence about the recent history of commons in England and Wales.  I am also currently working on Village Byelaws, building a corpus of byelaws from medieval and early modern northern England in order to analyse environmental management strategies by local communities, and to enable comparisons with byelaws from elsewhere in Britain and continental Europe.

Another strand of my research focuses on the history of Cumbria. In particular, I have prepared scholarly editions of key archival sources for the history of the region. My edition of Thomas Denton's Perambulation of Cumberland, 1687-8 (published in 2003) has made accessible one of the most detailed 17th-century topographical descriptions of an English county, while my edition of John Denton's History of Cumberland (published in 2010) provides a modern scholarly edition of the earliest attempt at a history of the county, compiled c.1600. I also direct the Victoria County History of Cumbria project, which works with volunteer local historians to research and write the history of every community in the county.

Professional Activities

• Member of the Review Panel of the European Science Foundation EuroCORECODE programme
• Member of Victoria County History National Advisory Board, Institute of Historical Research, London University
• Member of The National Archives' Manorial Documents Advisory Panel
• Past President of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society.
• Vice-President and Joint General Editor, Surtees Society.
• Member of the Lake District National Park Authority's Historic Environment Advisory Group
• Director of the Centre for North West Regional Studies.
• Member of Editorial Board of Quaker Studies and of Advisory Panel, Centre for Postgraduate Quaker Studies, University of Birmingham

• Victoria County History 2012-14

  01/10/2012 →
  Angus Winchester, Sarah Rose
  A community local history project, involving over 90 volunteers working under supervsion from Lancaster University towards creating parish histories for the Victoria County History (VCH), the leading ... Read more»

• Building Commons Knowledge

  01/07/2012 → 30/06/2013
  Angus Winchester, Eleanor Straughton
  This project arose out of the AHRC-funded ‘Contested Common Land’ project, undertaken in a collaboration between Newcastle Law School and Lancaster University History Department between 2007 and ... Read more»

• Common Rules: the regulation of institutions for collective action 1100-1800

  01/09/2011 → 31/08/2014
  Angus Winchester
  Focusing on common land in western Europe, this project aims to understand how efficient and effective regulation can be developed, executed by well-functioning institutions. Commons are a type of ins ... Read more»

• Manorial Documents Register for Lancashire

  06/06/2011 → 03/06/2012
  Sarah Rose, Angus Winchester
  ... Read more»

• Village Byelaws from Northern England

  01/01/2009 →
  Angus Winchester
  The specific focus of this project is to create a corpus of village byelaws from manors across northern England for the purpose of comparison and analysis. The objective is to publish a collection of ... Read more»

• Findings of Major Research Project Published

  09/11/2010
  The findings of a major three-year research project funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council are now available in a newly-published book from Earthscan, entitled Contested Common Land: Env ... Read more»