Simon Sandall

I am Senior Lecturer in Early Modern British History. I joined the History Department at Winchester in September 2012, having previously held positions at the University of East Anglia and the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester. I completed my BA in English Studies and MA in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. In 2009 I completed my PhD at the UEA as part of an AHRC-funded project on popular memory.

My research interests are in the areas of custom, law and community, particularly how these relations underpinned popular politics and popular protest in Early Modern England. My doctoral work examined the nature of collective memory and its relation to the organisation of popular protest in the Forest of Dean between the 16th and 19th centuries and forms the basis of my 2013 monograph. My current research pursues the role of popular litigation in containing violence, reassessing the relationship between the central state and local communities during this period.

I am Co-Convener of the interdisciplinary Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Research.

Higher Education Teaching Qualification: Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

• Pre-industrial popular politics
• Custom and popular memory
• Protest and rebellion in Early Modern England
• Popular perceptions of the landscape and material environment
• English Civil Wars
• Local history approaches to the past

Supervision of research students

I am currently Director of Studies and co-supervisor for a number of research students. I welcome enquiries about possible supervision; my areas of supervision are: social, cultural and economic history of Early Modern England (esp. riot, rebellion and popular protest between the 16th and 18th centuries); English civil wars; gender and the church courts; popular memory; social change and the Poor Law; politics of Reformation; English local history.

Books

• Experiences of neighbourliness in Europe, 1200-1700 (co-edited with B. Kane) (Routledge, 2021).
• Custom and popular memory in the Forest of Dean, c. 1550 – 1832 (Scholars’ Press 2013)

Articles and book chapters

• 'Custom, memory and the operation of power in seventeenth-century Forest of Dean', in F. Williamson (ed.), Locating agency: space, power and popular politics (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010)
• 'Uses of church court records in Early Modern Social History', Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 83 (2011)
• 'The Jerningham family of Costessey: recusant gentry in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century East Anglia', (University of East Anglia, 2011).
• 'Representing Rebellion: Memory and Social Conflict in Sixteenth-Century England', Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science,46:4 (2012), pp. 559-68.
• 'Pre-modern court records in England (c. 1400 - 1809): overview and research trends', Frühneuzeit-Info, 23.2012, Heft 1+2.
• 'Industry and community in the Forest of Dean, c. 1580 - 1700', Journal of the Family & Community Historical Research Society, Vol. 16/2, October 2013, pp. 87-99.
• Custom, common right and commercialisation in the Forest of Dean, c.1605-1640’ in Bowen, J. and Brown, Alex (eds.) Custom and Commercialisation in English Rural Society, c.1350-c.1750: Revisiting Postan and Tawney (University of Hertfordshire Press, 2016), pp. 161-179. ISBN 978-1-909291-44-7
• ‘Remembering protest in the Forest of Dean: c.1612-1834’ in C. J. Griffin and B. McDonagh (eds), Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality and Landscape (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).