The Composition of Thomas Habington’s ‘Survey of Worcestershire’

Thomas Habington of Hindlip (1560–1647), a Catholic gentleman, was the first historian of Worcestershire. Had it not been for the English Civil War, his Survey of Worcestershire would probably have been published in the 1640s. In fact it was not published until the 1890s, and then in a form and order which was very different from what he had intended. Others who worked on the history of the county (William Thomas, Bishop Charles Lyttelton, Peter Prattinton and, most importantly, T. R. Nash, whose ‘Collections’ for a history of the county appeared in 1781–2) did so on the basis of Habington’s unpublished manuscripts. In this article the genesis of the ‘Survey’ will be examined, the way in which his conception of its scope altered, his method of gathering materials, the additions he made to the work up to the time of his death in October 1647, and the relevance of his Catholicism to the Survey.