Whitfield Book Prize

The Whitfield Book Prize is a prize of £1,000 awarded annually by the Royal Historical Society to the best work on a subject of British or Irish history published within the United Kingdom or Republic of Ireland during the calendar year. To be eligible for the award, the book must be the first history work published by the author.

History of the prize

The prize was founded in 1976 out of the bequest of Archibald Stenton Whitfield. Originally, the prize was £400; five years later, it was increased to £600. Currently, the prize is £1,000.

Previous winners

Source: Royal Historical Society

Year	Winner(s)
1977	K. D. Brown, John Burns
1978	Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession
1979	Patricia Crawford, Denzil Holles, 1598–1680: A study of his Political Career
1980	D. L. Rydz, The Parliamentary Agents: A History
1981	Scott M. Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536–7
1982	Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute: Parliament and the Settlement of Religion, 1559
1983	Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A social history, 1200–1830
1984	David Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850
1985	K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor
1986	Diarmaid MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors: Politics and Religion in an English County, 1500–1600
1987	Kevin M. Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The politics of literature in the England of Charles I
1988	J. H. Davis, Reforming London, the London Government Problem, 1855–1900
1989	A. G. Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200–1540
1990	Duncan M. Tanner, Political change and the Labour party, 1900–1918
1991	Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640
1992	Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401 -1499
1993	Jeanette M. Neeson, Commoners: common right; enclosure and social change in England, 1700- 1820
1994	Vic Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English people, 1770–1868
1995	Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785
1996	Paul D. Griffiths, Youth and Authority Formative Experience in England, 1560–1640
1997	Christopher Tolley, Domestic Biography: the legacy of evangelicalism in four nineteenth-century families
1998	Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
1999	John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers
2000	Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700
2001	John Goodall, God's House at Ewelme: Life, Devotion and Architecture in a Fifteenth Century Almshouse
	Frank Salmon, Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture
2002	Ethan H. Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation
2003	Christine Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England
2004	M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral reform in England, 1787–1886
2005	Matt Houlbrook, Queer London
2006	Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex and Marriage in Britain, 1918–1960
2007	Stephen Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late Anglo-Saxon England
	Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900
2008	Stephen M. Lee, George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801–1827
	Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain
2009	Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2009) ISBN 978-0-521-11525-4
2010	Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) ISBN 978-0-521-89676-4
2011	Jacqueline Rose (historian), Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–1688 (Cambridge University Press, 2011) ISBN 978-1-107-01142-7
2012	Ben Griffin, The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2012) ISBN 978-1-107-01507-4
2013	Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2013) ISBN 978-0-674-07309-8
2014	Dating changed from "year published" to "year of award"
2015	John Sabapathy, Officers and Accountability in Medieval England 1170-1300 (Oxford University Press, 2014) ISBN 978-0-199-64590-9
2016	Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2015) ISBN 978-1-107-03952-0
2017	William M. Cavert, The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge University Press, 2016) ISBN 978-1-107-07300-5
	Alice Taylor, The Shape of the State in Medieval Scotland, 1124-1290 (Oxford University Press, 2016) ISBN 978-0-198-74920-2
2018	Brian N Hall, Communications and British Operations on the Western Front, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) ISBN 978-1-107-17055-1
2019	Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770-1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2018) ISBN 978-1-108-47565-5
2020	Niamh Gallagher, Ireland and the Great War: A Social and Political History (Bloomsbury, 2019) ISBN 978-1-788-31462-6
2021	Jackson Armstrong, England’s Northern Frontier: Conflict and Local Society in the Fifteenth-Century Scottish Marches
	Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity. Civility and America in the Jacobean Metropolis

See also

• Alan Ball Local History Awards
• Gladstone Prize
• List of history awards
• Wolfson History Prize