100 Years of Somerset & Dorset Notes & Queries, 1888-1988

The following article by C.R. Elrington was first published in the September 1988 centenary year issue of SDNQ, Vol. 32, pp.689-694:

The century of SDNQ is an occasion for congratulation on its survival. An account of the formation and early management is given in the issue of March 1988 (Vol. 32, pp.641-3).  The centenary also prompts a backward look to what SDNQ was like when it started and a consideration of the circumstances of its beginning, of the fortunes of its contemporaries, and of the purposes which such periodicals serve.

SDNQ is notable not only for its survival but also for its continuity. From 1888 to 1960 it was printed in Sherborne by the same firm, Sawtells, and has had only two changes of printers since, to Hammetts of Taunton in 1961 and to C.J. Creed of Bridport in 1974. Inevitably the editors have changed rather more often, but have had some long terms of office. From the beginning there have been separate editors for Somerset and for Dorset. The founding editor for Dorset, the Rev. Charles Herbert Mayo, continued until 1921, and has had only six successors. The Somerset editors have been even fewer, only five in all, including the noted Somerset antiquary F.W. Weaver, for 26 years from 1890, the Rev. G.W. Saunders from 1916 to 1950, and T.J. Hunt for nearly 26 years between 1951 and 1976. Loyalty or staying power of that sort is presumably one of the reasons why SDNQ has kept going when most comparable journals have failed.

Of course there have been changes. The  most striking in looking back to the first volume, for 1888-1890, is the greater amplitude of those days. Each issue was larger than those of today, and publication was quarterly, as it remained until 1950, becoming three times a year in 1951 and twice a year in 1957. Successive volumes on the shelves are all much the same length, but until the First World War each volume covered only two years compared with the five years to a volume now. The separate contributions, however, tended to be short: although a few ran to half a dozen pages, the average was two thirds of a page.

In the content of the issues the balance between Somerset and Dorset seems to have been kept fairly well; it looks as though the Somerset editor or the editor for Dorset (who for reasons unknown observed that distinction of style) was ready to put in a relatively substantial items relating to his county if he felt that the other county was getting more than its share. There was no formal distinction or separation between Notes and Queries, and when all the contributions tended to be short it was not always clear to which class they belonged: many notes included if not an actual query at least an expression of doubt or an invitation for further information, and few of the queries failed to impart some relatively arcane knowledge. On a very rough calculation, the notes (including comments on earlier notes or answers to queries) outnumbered the queries about three to two, and about half the queries received an answer.

More difficult than distinguishing the notes from the queries is classifying the subject matter which they cover. Rather more than a third of the contributions related to history and particularly local history, in which church history figured largely, not surprisingly since the clergy were a high proportion of the subscribers and the contributors. The historical content of the journal is much greater if it is taken to include the items on genealogy and biography, which between them provided nearly a fifth of all the items in the first volume, apart from a significant number on heraldry. Place names, still a subject where the amateur could dabble without fear of rebuke from the expert, were a frequent source of speculation and overlapped with the discussion, almost as frequent, of language and dialect which in turn merged into questions of folklore. Prehistoric and Roman archaeology made a surprisingly small showing, and natural history did little better notwithstanding numerous contributions from the author and local landowner J.C. Mansel-Pleydell.

Some contributors wrote frequently, including some of the local clergy, but by no means all of even the regular contributors were local. From Oxford wrote the Rev. Professor John Earle, the distinguished Anglo-Saxon scholar, and the professor of anthropology, Edward (later Sir Edward) Burnett Tylor. Several of those writing from London and other major cities were evidently professional men, like J.S. Udal of the Inner Temple, or scholars like E.A. Fry of King’s Norton, Birmingham. Contributions came not only from distant parts of the country but also from New York and other places in the United States, most of them being genealogical inquiries.

Many other counties had Notes and Queries but few kept them going for long. Nearly all were started within a short period: leaving aside the Warwickshire Antiquarian Magazine, published from 1859 to 1877, Gloucestershire Notes and Queries, in 1879, was the first of fifteen that had been launched by 1895. Most of those were also short lived, only six surviving to publish in1900, along with Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries started in that year and the Home Counties Magazine started the previous year (see table below). Sussex Notes and Queries, a latecomer in 1926, and the Cheshire Sheaf continued until 1971. In several counties, after separate publication had ceased, the county Notes and Queries survived for some years as a section of another journal, often the transactions of the county archaeological society. In a few counties the Notes and Queries were not an original publication but the reprinting of items that had first appeared in a local newspaper.

Apart from SDNQ the only county Notes and Queries to remain in publication in 1988 is Devon and Cornwall Notes and Queries. Perhaps a pair of counties is better able than one alone to sustain such a periodical, or perhaps something in the character of the south-west is conducive to the study of history, archaeology, and genealogy. Mention should also be made, however, of the Bedfordshire Magazine, begun in 1947 and still going strong, since its content is much more similar to that of Notes and Queries than to that of glossier and more superficial publications with names like Loamshire Life and Barsetshire Countryside.

A quick survey suggests that if other journals with the character of Notes and Queries are also counted (the Cheshire Sheaf, the East Anglian, the Home Counties Magazine, and the Westmorland Note Book), 21 English counties or groups of counties had their own Notes and Queries. Eight of those 20 publications relate to two or more counties: five to pairs of counties, the East Anglian to Cambridgeshire, Essex, Norfolk, and Suffolk, the Home Counties Magazine to Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey, and Northern Notes and Queries to the four northern counties; five counties figure in the list more than once. Of 39 counties it seems that only six have not had at least a share in a Notes and Queries: Herefordshire, Huntingdonshire, Lancashire, Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, and Worcestershire.

In the order of the foundation of county Notes and Queries, SDNQ comes right in the middle. The first editors were aware of a following trend: ‘It has been widely felt that the Counties in question should not be the last to possess a Repository for the preservation of facts relating to the present or past history of the district, and a medium of intercommunication among those who are connected with it by ties of birth or interest, and it is in obedience to repeated calls, which it was felt could no longer be disregarded, that this periodical is now placed in the hands of the subscribers. The success which has attended the appearance of “Notes and Queries” in other quarters encourages the Editors in the belief that earnest supporters will not be wanting for this youngest candidate for popular favour.’

The heyday of county Notes and Queries in the 1880s and 1890s seems to follow the establishment of county archaeological societies by a decade or so. It looks as though the transactions published by those societies were too narrowly historical and archaeological in their range of interest and too much given over to full-length articles and reports of meetings to satisfy the needs that county Notes and Queries were intended to meet. The characteristic choice of title indicates a sense of affinity with the national weekly Notes and Queries (fortnightly from 1942, quarterly from 1984). That periodical, established in 1849, was itself continuing a tradition which may be traced back to such 17th century publications as the Athenian Gazette or Casuistical Mercury, published from 1691 to 1696, ‘resolving all the most nice and curious questions proposed by the ingenious’. For 100 years or more from 1731 the Gentleman’s Magazine provided its readers with a monthly died that included general news, literary criticism, and antiquarian and topographical items.

By 1849 the significance of the Gentleman’s Magazine among English periodicals had declined, but if the original purpose of Notes and Queries was to fill the gap its approach was more practical and utilitarian. Taking its motto from Dickens’s Captain Cuttle, ‘When found, make a note of’, it declared in its first editorial that half the lies that are current in the world owe their origin to a misplaced confidence in memory and that those who are best informed are generally the most ready to communicate knowledge (the notes) and to confess the ignorance (the queries). The national Notes and Queries included items on archaeology, local history, dialect, and folklore, but those topics were to be more conveniently covered by local journals. When after 30 years of Notes and Queries the county Notes and Queries began to multiply, the national weekly became more predominantly literary and linguistic.

The need for county Notes and Queries was evidently not strong enough for more than eight such periodicals, of which half related to more than one county, to survive into the 20th century, but it remained strong enough for three more to be started or revived later. Clearly one of the chief difficulties was to maintain a steady supply of short contributions, and it is easy to understand why the interval between publication and the contributions themselves gradually lengthened. The same difficulty presumably explains why the editors, of SDNQ as of other county Notes and Queries, took to publishing longer items as serials. Sometimes they were extended essays or articles which might alternatively have appeared in the journal of the local archaeological or historical society; more often they were editions of long documents. While it is better to have those editions in serial form than not to have the documents in print at all, it is an unsatisfactory way of publishing extensive historical texts, which are better included in series devoted to publishing records. Short texts are another matter.

The growth in the number of record-publishing societies is perhaps a small contributory cause of the decline of county Notes and Queries. More significant causes are the reduced reliance on the printed word as a means of communication, increasing specialization of interests, the greater number of specialist national journals, the growing use of newsletters, and a widening of horizons which perhaps more than offsets the expansion of interest in archaeology, local history, and family history over the last 40 years or so. Typewriters, telephones, television and radio, word processors, conferences, and photocopiers are some of the things that have ousted the printed word, even for those with old-fashioned interests. A hundred years ago, the reader who wanted to know about long barrows was expected to want to know also about names in-ing and inquisitions post mortem and borough seals and May Day customs, but not any more. Today, moreover, to inform himself on any one of those topics, he subscribes to at least one national specialist periodical; to discover where the topic is being discussed or to announce his interest he resorts to a newsletter; and in pursuing his studies he will seek comparative material from other parts of the country or the world.

Nevertheless, there remains a need for a county Notes and Queries. First, a periodical that is more frequent, shorter, more digestible, and more varied than, say, the annual transactions of the archaeological society or the occasional volume of the county record society both encourage and satisfies interest in local studies. Secondly, some things that are worth publishing can and should be put quite briefly, and relatively short items fit better into a slim Notes and Queries than into a larger publication. Thirdly, many articles deserve to be published that combine more than one subject or bridge the gaps between subjects, and that is perhaps especially true within what may be defined as local history in the widest sense, embracing archaeology, topography, genealogy, folklore, and much else. Lastly, and particularly close to the present writer’s interests, it is enormously useful to have a place for publishing short items on documents, whether discussions, lists, calendars, abstracts, transcripts, or translations.

For those reasons, and also for the high quality of the publication, the counties of Somerset and Dorset are fortunate in having had a hundred years of SDNQ. Long may it flourish.

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