Secret Rutland By Daniel J Codd Published in 2018 by Amberley Publishing. Paperback, 96pp, illustrated - ISBN 978 1 4456 856 0 Oh dear. Well, I suppose the title should serve as a warning. I think I can best describe this book as a disarticulation of history. The author, described not at all in the book but appearing in the accompanying press release as ‘a lifelong student of history, criminology, folklore, the out-of-place and the paranormal in Britain’, has cast his net wide and worked hard to haul in a very varied catch amply reflecting his wide interests. The problem is that he has done so indiscriminately and without sufficient or informed evaluation of what he has harvested. It is impossible for the innocent or credulous reader to judge what is fact supported by evidence, and what is hearsay or invention or exaggeration – or indeed what is simply erroneous. One example may suffice. On pp6–7 we are told that some people say that ‘sometimes you can still hear the church bells chiming underneath the water’ of Rutland Water, and so on, and in the same paragraph we are referred to ‘an even older legend that there were once seven churches in the vicinity of Upper Hambleton, but Cromwell had six of them pulled down when attempting to take Burley House during the Civil War’. Yes, people have said all kinds of silly things about what may or may not have been submerged beneath the reservoir – we know for certain that all of the relatively few buildings that were lost were completely demolished and there was not a church among them – but to repeat this nonsense without disabusing the uninformed reader is unhelpful. Likewise, Burley House was indeed seized by parliamentarian forces in 1643 and a garrison installed under the command of Col Thomas Wayte (not Cromwell), and, yes, we know that medieval Hambleton had an important mother church and seven berewicks, which Victoria County History interpreted as probably represented today by the parishes of Braunston, Normanton, Lyndon, Martinsthorpe, Edith Weston, Manton and Market Overton, but the author does not tell us how these facts may have been conflated into the alleged ‘even older legend’ which is patently untrue but which he does not debunk. The greatest problem with trying to use this book, which despite such drawbacks throughout and an overall lack of structure does include much genuine historical fact, many intriguing diversions into the by-ways of our past, and much of proper interest, is that so little is referenced to source and that therefore so little can easily be checked or substantiated. There is neither bibliography nor index. However, we do know that one of the author’s principal sources, duly acknowledged, was the two-volume Villages of Rutland, originally published by the then Rutland Local History Society, which like other titles in that series made a valiant effort to put on record historical detail and reproduce old photographs which would otherwise have been lost, but often relied on uncorroborated hearsay and half- checked information, revealed few sources and lacked academic rigour. Unfortunately, Secret Rutland falls into the same category: I fear the reader will require many pinches of salt. Tim Clough