Historical fiction lives or dies on the small stuff. Get the shape of a battle roughly right and readers will happily follow you; put a fountain pen in the hand of a character in 1790 and they will put the book down. The good news is that Britain is unusually well supplied with the raw material you need, and much of it is free to consult.

What follows is a practical checklist for anyone setting a novel in these islands, whether the year is 1381 or 1981. It covers where to look, what to listen for, and the traps that catch even careful writers.

Start with the record office, not the search engine

The National Archives at Kew holds the records of central government: census returns from 1841 to 1921, wills proved in the higher courts, military service papers, Admiralty and Home Office files. It is the obvious first stop, but it is rarely where the texture comes from.

That lives in county and city record offices, and in local studies libraries. Quarter sessions rolls, poor law guardians' minutes, coroners' inquests, school log books, estate maps, borough bye-laws: these are the documents that tell you what a wet Tuesday actually looked like. A school log book, for instance, will record epidemics, snow days, and the week the head teacher lost patience with a family.

Worth knowing about:

• The Archives Hub — searches across hundreds of UK repositories at once, useful when you don't know which county holds a collection.
• The British Newspaper Archive and local newspaper indexes — many record offices offer free terminals.
• The Old Bailey Proceedings Online — free, searchable, and full of ordinary voices, prices, insults and petty detail.
• Historic England's list entries — descriptions of listed buildings give you materials, dates and layout at no cost.
• The national libraries of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, plus the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, for material the London archives won't hold.

Voices: dialect before dialogue

Dialect is where well-researched novels often go wrong. Too little and every character sounds like a newsreader; too much phonetic spelling and the reader is decoding rather than reading.

Useful sources include Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, the Survey of English Dialects, county dialect society glossaries, and the British Library's archive of recorded speech. For slang, Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) is a gift, and Eric Partridge's dictionaries cover later centuries. The Oxford English Dictionary will give you first citations, but remember what those dates mean: the first appearance in print, not the first time anyone said it.

A workable rule is one strong dialect marker per page, carried by word order and rhythm rather than spelling. "I'll not be doing that" does more than a line of apostrophes.

Money, time, measurements and weather

Pre-decimal currency trips up a lot of writers. Until decimalisation in 1971 there were twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound, and a guinea was twenty-one shillings. Your characters will meet half-crowns, florins, tanners, bobs and ten-bob notes, and they will say "two and six" rather than "two shillings and sixpence".

Weights and measures were imperial: sixteen ounces to the pound, fourteen pounds to the stone, a hundredweight of 112 pounds. Land came in acres, roods and perches; distances in chains and furlongs as well as miles. Time was local until the railways forced standardisation from the 1840s, which is why a station clock might disagree with the church clock in the same town.

For weather, don't guess. Newspaper reports, weather diaries and agricultural journals will tell you whether your chosen year had a soaking June or a frost in May. The 1816 "year without a summer" is famous, but smaller local records are often more useful for a single scene.

Anachronism traps to check before you draft

Anachronism is rarely about big history. It is about objects, verbs and assumptions. Keep a running list and check each entry.

1. Objects. Friction matches arrive in the 1830s; tarmac roads in the early twentieth century; zip fasteners and ballpoint pens later still; antibiotics only from the 1940s. Before the match, your character is managing a tinderbox.
2. Light and water. Gas, electricity, piped water and indoor plumbing arrived at different times in different places, and by class. A factory town in 1900 is not a country rectory in 1900.
3. Words. "Hello" spread with the telephone. "Weekend" is late Victorian. "Teenager" belongs to the twentieth century. Nouns turned into verbs — "to contact", "to parent" — sound modern to most ears.
4. Post. The Penny Black and the uniform penny post date from 1840. Before that, letters were charged by distance and often paid for by the recipient, which changes how your characters write and what they can afford to say.
5. Police and courts. The Metropolitan Police were founded in 1829; county forces came later. Who investigates a crime in your year, and who has the power to arrest whom, matters to your plot.
6. Prices against wages. A price means nothing without an income to compare it with. Work out what your character earns before deciding what they can buy.
7. Titles and forms of address. How a maid speaks to a doctor, or a curate to a baronet, carries period information that no costume description can match.

Building a research method that survives a long draft

Research expands to fill whatever time you give it. The trick is to make it answerable.

1. Build a year-by-year timeline before you write scenes, so you know what has and has not happened yet.
2. Keep a facts file with a source note for every detail you use. If you cannot find the note later, treat the detail as unverified.
3. Read one thing written in your period for every three things written about it: letters, diaries, novels, sermons, trade catalogues.
4. Visit the place if you can. Stand where

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