Tim Wales
Visiting Research Associate
Address Department of History
King's College London
Strand
London WCR 2LS
Research interests
Tim Wales has worked on a variety of topics in early modern English social and political history. His main interest is in the history of poverty and relief, particularly the rise of parish relief between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the role of local administration in the restructuring of social relations in the changing demographic and economic conditions of the century after 1660. In another project which shares parallel concerns with the relationship between the local state and the poor family, he is concerned with the decline of infant mortality in Essex between 1875 and 1939, laying particular emphasis on public health policies and political culture in three case-studies: metropolitan and industrial West Ham, suburban and seaside Southend and rural North Essex. He is currently involved with three other projects: the Clergy of the Church of England Database; a biographical dictionary of parliamentarian army officers, 1642-1651; and transcribing the late-sixteenth-century parish clerk’s memoranda books for St Botolph without Aldgate for the ‘Life in the Suburbs’ project at the Centre for Metropolitan History, University of London.
Educational and Professional background
Tim Wales is a graduate of Cambridge University. He worked as a research assistant to (amongst others) Lawrence Stone on marriage litigation in England, 1660-1800, John Beattie on policing in London, 1660-1750, and John Morrill on the young Oliver Cromwell and the iconoclast William Dowsing. From 1994 to 1997 he was a Leverhulme Senior Research Officer at the University of Essex, and from 1997 to 2002 he was a Research Editor on the seventeenth-century section of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. From 2002 to the present he has been involved with the
Clergy of the Church of England Database, for three years as a Senior Research Officer.
Publications
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The Visitation of London begun in 1687, ed. T.C. Wales and C.P. Hartley, (Harleian Society, ns, 16,17). London: Harleian Society, 2004.
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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004 online), research editor and 20 articles including Daisy Parsons (1890–1957), suffragette; Sir Percy Alden (1865–1944), social worker and politician; Henry Box (1585–1662), educational benefactor ; John Nevison (d. 1684), highwayman; Jack Ketch (d. 1686) and John Thrift (d. 1752), public executioners; Edward Ivie (d. 1698), informer and coiner; Bodenham Rewse (d. 1725), thief-taker and prison warder.
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'Thief-takers and their clients in later Stuart London'. In P. Griffiths and M.S.R. Jenner (eds), Londonopolis: essays in the cultural and social history of early modern London (Manchester, 2000), 67-84
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'Poverty, poor relief and the life-cycle : some evidence from seventeenth-century Norfolk', in R.M. Smith (ed), Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge, 1984), 351-404.