Perry Hall Yesterdays: Characters from a vanished past

A moat in a municipal park is almost all that survives of Perry Hall, the Elizabethan mansion in Staffordshire where the Stamfords and then the Goughs lived for generations. Gerald Stunt brings its occupants back: Sir William Stamford, a formidable judge under Mary Tudor; young Harry Gough, who sailed to China at eleven and rose to direct the East India Company; Richard Gough, the leading antiquarian of the eighteenth century; Jane Gough and her revealing diary; and Squire John Gough, so quarrelsome that one contemporary called him a libel upon mankind.

One chapter carefully unpicks the claim of Maryland's Goughs to Staffordshire descent, and a closing supplement reproduces Frank Nightingale's rare Edwardian postcards of the estate. Fully referenced and generously illustrated, it will delight anyone who loves local history told through vivid, wayward lives.