Lichfield and the Lands of St Chad: Creating Community in Early Medieval Mercia

industrial and then post-industrial community. It also has gaps and uneven levels of coverage, leaving unrealized potential for developing existing and additional evidence. The circumstances of the Ibstock publication point to some wider trends and dilemmas for the VCH as a national project, still seeking to operate in several Midland counties. Begun in 1899 and, since the 1930s, headquartered at the University of London, the University has, for some years, proved unable to adequately fund the research, writing and publication of the VCH, with its aim of producing authoritative and comparable histories of every place in England, county by county. Resourcing has increasingly shifted to individual counties. The number of active VCH counties has declined, and a majority of those continuing can no longer pursue the original intention to produce large volumes bringing together multiple histories of neighbouring parishes and towns, often with introductory overviews and prepared by professional historians. As the project has lost both momentum and capacity, some counties have sought rapid print publication by producing isolated histories of single parishes with limited resources but still harking back to an inherited rubric derived from earlier years. The tensions in combining a history to meet local needs and the requirements of a national reference series are highlighted by this history of Ibstock.