Clifford Darby: an appreciation

Abstract

Clifford Darby's considerable influence on historical geography reflects both the originality of his research and his impact as a teacher on successive generations of students at Cambridge, Liverpool and University College London. Since graduating at Cambridge in Geography in 1928 (at an age when many presentday undergraduates are just going up to university) his writings over sixty years have been wide-ranging but marked by considerable and singular consistency in their objectives and methodology. It is this which, despite their primary focus on England, gives Darby's work a universality which has been a model for studies in historical geography in many parts of the world. His impeccable scholarship is based on fidelity to the historical record; scrupulous care in interpreting and remaining within the (largely) written evidence; and an emphasis on the analysis of geographical features--the spatial patterns and landscape--of the problem or area under consideration. Much of his own research and that of many of his students has been based on the geographical interpretation of major historical records. His Domesday geographies, while regarded by some commentators as cautious and unnecessarily concentrated upon the great Survey itself, are one of the single most influential pieces of historical and geographical scholarship of the past fifty years, a remarkably sustained and consistent example of comparative analysis, the full impact of which emerges in the concluding volume. 1q Domesday geographies also generated numerous parallel studies of population and wealth in medieval and early modern England through studies of the Poll Tax, Lay Subsidies and the like. I21 They also influenced research on the geographical analysis of other major historical records--the Tithe Returns, the 1801 Crop Returns, the Census--carried out, frequently by Darby's pupils, over the past forty years. I31 Grounded firmly in map analysis and usually focused on a specific time period, they demonstrate the effectiveness of this pragmatic, empirical approach to the writing of historical geography. A second feature of Darby's writings reflects the importance of formative influences in his training and early research. He himself has recalled the emphasis on the role of geographical influences on and of the need to reconstruct, over time, changes in the environment and human activities of particular areas. N His early published papers, especially two on The role of the in English history (1931) and The medieval sea state (1932) evidence the influence of the strong tradition in English academic history, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, of the study of the geography behind history. I51 His Fenland in English history paper was delivered in the afternoon of Wednesday August 13th 1931 in the University of Li6ge, at a session on Physical