The King's England: Nottinghamshire

I spent an industrious few weeks in December scanning a battered copy of The King's England volume on Nottinghamshire edited by Arthur Mee, converting the text to HTML, adding a large number of carefully chosen images (in addition to the ones in the book) and uploading the pages to my Nottinghamshire History website.

Mee's King's England series was an ambitious project to produce guides to the counties of England and 41 volumes were produced. Nottinghamshire: The Midland Stronghold appeared in 1938. Most of the research was undertaken by Mee's sister and her husband and Mee himself had a close connection with the county having been born in Stapleford in 1875.

There is an entry for virtually every town and village in the county and although the focus tends to be on the architecture of the parish church and local notable families or personalities it makes for a fairly interesting read. However, the content has been criticised by the author of the Suffolk Churches website for being 'verbose, sentimental. nationalistic and just plain old-fashioned inaccurate' and warns that if you read other volumes in the series 'after a while all England becomes a blur of romantic twaddle.'

See what you think!

• Arthur Mee's The King's England: Nottinghamshire

EVENT: 'A Medieval Miscellany' on 21 March 2015 at Ravenshead

The next day school organised by The Nottinghamshire Local History Association will be 'A Medieval Miscellany' on the 21 March at the Village Hall in Ravenshead.

Speakers include Claire Taylor on King John and Magna Carta, David Crook on the Robin Hood legend and Nottinghamshire, Michael Jones on the White Book of Southwell and David Marcombe on the Green Men of Southwell.

Further details on the event are available on the NLHA website.