Charles Phythian-Adams

Charles Vevers Phythian-Adams (28 July 1937 – 13 May 2025) was an English local historian and the head of the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester.^[1]

Life and career

Phythian-Adams was born on 28 July 1937.^[2][3] Of a gentry family, he was the eldest of three sons of the Rev. William John Telia Phythian-Adams [Wikidata] (1888–1967), DSO, MC, and Adela (née Robinson). He was educated at Marlborough College and Hertford College, Oxford, where he took an M.A.^[2][4]

Phythian-Adams died on 13 May 2025, at the age of 87.^[5]

Selected publications

• Societies, Cultures and Kinship, 1580–1850: Cultural Provinces and English Local History
• Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages^[6]
• Re-thinking English Local History^[7]
• Land of the Cumbrians: A Study of British Provincial Origins, AD 400–1120
• The Norman Conquest of Leicestershire and Rutland
• Local History and Folklore: A New Framework