He has a research interest in British social and economic history, with an emphasis on the study of local and regional communities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He has written a book on the wool weaving village of Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, in this period, titled Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale, and is currently engaged in a study in historical demography of this same area, one that compares the reproductive behavior of the Anglican laity to that of Protestant Dissenters. He also studies popular religion and is engaged in reading a voluminous collection of manuscript sermons, composed and delivered by an evangelical Baptist minister active in the locale.