About our Publications
For over 170 years, the Chetham Society has maintained a regular output of valuable (and often essential) works of scholarship that make important contributions to the study of the history of Lancashire and Cheshire.
The Society’s important role in making primary historical documents and original research more readily accessible is widely recognised: Chetham Society texts are used as key sources not only by students but by national, regional, and local historians. Many of these texts have international significance, and numerous of their editors and authors rank amongst the most distinguished scholars and historians of North-West England.
Since 1843, over 275 volumes have been issued in three series: the Old Series, comprising 116 volumes (1843-88); the New Series, comprising 110 volumes (1883-1947); and the Third Series, comprising over 50 volumes (published since 1949).
Chetham Society publications cover an impressive and remarkable diversity of materials, subjects, and periods. Texts have ranged from diaries and journals, deeds and cartularies, and municipal records and manorial surveys, to biographies and autobiographies, histories of individual communities, and works on social, economic, industrial, and urban topics.