Institute of Continuing Education (ICE)
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Heather teaches local and social history at Certificate, Diploma, Advanced Diploma and Masters level at ICE and also at the University of Oxford’s Department of Continuing Education. She is reviews editor for The Local Historian and editorial assistant for the Economic History Review.
Her forthcoming Certificate course on early modern culture will cover various aspects of everyday life in Tudor and Stuart England. Her main historical interests are social unrest and discord in early-modern communities and this is reflected in one of her current recent research projects, which concerns objections to a disorderly alehouse in Rickmansworth (Herts) in 1588. She has published several editions of texts including fifteenth century wills, the prospectus for a seventeenth century economic project, a book of eighteenth century recipes and letters written by the family of Humphry Repton, the landscape gardener.
Her course sessions usually comprise a combination of teaching, looking at online resources, and considering samples of documentary evidence from the period. Learning how to analyse such documents gives students an understanding of how historians assemble and interpret evidence and thus helps them to carry out their own historical research.
The later life and works of Humphry Repton, landscape gardener as revealed in the Repton papers at the Huntington Library, California. Having gained a temporary scholarship to examine the 200+ Repton letters in the Huntington Library, Heather has researched the people and places mentioned in them, with a view to publishing an annotated edition of the letters. An annotated edition of the letters has been published by the Norfolk Record Society.
Early modern riots and the preservation of custom: Her PhD thesis focussed on participation in particular enclosure riots that took place in Derbyshire and Cambridgeshire in the mid seventeenth-century and she has written several articles and chapters in edited collections based on that research.
Eighteenth-century cookery: whilst editing for publication the 800+ recipes of Baroness Dimsdale, Heather became interested in the ingredients and methods used in late eighteenth century cooking. Many of the recipes are far removed modern tastes but they are nevertheless fascinating. They include perhaps the earliest mention of doughnuts.
British Association for Local History. Reviews Editor
Hertfordshire Record Society, honorary secretary
Yorkist History Trust, trustee
Fellow of the Royal Historical Society
