By the eighteenth century Norwich was one of the main trading and manufacturing centres of England, if slightly past its hey-day. Like most provincial cities it was to some extent ignored by the mainstream of national history, as it was then emerging. Daniel Howse argues that a different kind of history – a local history arising out of antiquarian practices – catered for such places, restoring or even creating a civic identity related to, but not dependent on, national political trends.
The antiquarians’ process of collecting and representing historical papers left them uniquely well-placed to write local histories; and, with their sources’ inevitable bias towards local nobility and local government, these histories tended to have strong sense of civic particularism. Of course, this did not necessarily lead to a host of identical interpretations of local history, but those disagreements which did ensue were based on representations of the city first, and only secondarily on the city’s relation to the national polity. This led to local histories being part of a “vernacular”, a conception of history and politics not only more provincial, but more popular, than the grand national narratives.