bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Looking for a Sign: The Quest for Nominalism in Chaucer and Langland
Authors: Minnis A J
Published: October 2023

Those who do not believe in Jesus Christ, declares Walter Hilton, are not eligible for the benefits made possible by his passion. Throughout time, no one was ever saved, nor will be saved, except through belief in Christ and his coming.
Ricardian Romance? Critiques and Vindications
Authors: Jacobs Nicolas
Published: October 2023

In proposing the concept of ‘Ricardian poetry’, John Burrow made what was probably the first attempt to see the poetry of the last quarter of the fourteenth century-perhaps the first period of English literature in which a number of major poets can be demonstrated to have been composing more or less contemporaneously as a coherent whole. After twenty years the time may have come to consider how the concept of a characteristic Ricardian manner has stood up. Rather than attempting to reconsider the work of Bur row’s four authors in its entirety, it may be useful to focus attention on particular kinds of literature and the attitudes towards them evinced in the poetry.
The English Heritage Film in the 1980s and 1990s: Mapping the Field
Authors: Higson Andrew
Published: October 2023

It is one thing to gather together a group of films and give them a collective name. It is another thing to justify that process of grouping and naming. I’ve deliberately used a variety of terms for the films this book is about: heritage films, costume dramas, period films. We might add others, some facetious (white flannel films, frock flicks, Brit-Lit movies), some focused on particular cycles (post heritage films, the Edwardian genre), some ideologically grounded (nostalgic screen fictions). Some of these films have also been discussed under the more general rubrics of the woman’s picture, the art-house film, and the quality film. The proliferation of labels is an indication of the diversity and richness of the films they identify, the range of interpretations generated around them, and the hybridity and interconnectedness of genre categories. This should no’t worry us unduly. They are just labels after all. On the other hand, academic film studies has invested much in the analysis of genre and of particular genres, establishing conventions and compiling taxonomies.
Conclusion
Authors: Higson Andrew
Published: October 2023

At the time of writing, a new English heritage film is doing excellent business at the box office in both the USA and the UK. The film is Gosford Park (2001), about an elaborate weekend party at a grand country house in the early 1930s, but also about the last of aristocratic England. We see as much of the enormous army of servants as we see of the hosts and guests, allowing the film to focus on relations between the different classes. If we are looking for an engrossing story, then we should surely concentrate on the narrative that emerges around Sir William McCordle, owner of the country estate and host of the house party. It turns out that he had several affairs with working-class girls who worked in his factories, two of whom are now on the staff at his estate. One of these affairs produced a son, who turns up at the house party as valet to one of the guests. The son apparently murders the father, although in fact his mother, now Sir William’s house keeper, has already poisoned him.
Mary Mollineux (née Southworth) (1651-95)
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

Her cousin Frances Owen, who provides a brief biography in her book Fruits of Retirement, notes that Mary was an only child, and her weak eyesight decided her faTher to educate her in Latin, Greek, arithmetic, ‘Physick and Chyrurgy’ raTher than conventional feminine skills.
Mary english (1652?-1694)
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

Mary English was an American, and an indirect victim of The famous Salem witch trials. She was The daughter of William and Elinor Hollingsworth, and married a well-to-do Salem merchant, Philip English, in 1675. He was an Episcopalian. She joined The Congregational church in 1681. Both were accused of witchcraft in 1692, and escaped to New York, but she died There, affected by The strain of imprisonment.
Marey Waller, Later More (Fl-1674)
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

Marey More was a lady, who I believe painted for her amusement, [and] was The grandmoTher of Mr Pitfield; in The family are her and her husband’s portraits by herself. In The Bodleian Library in Oxford is a picture by her that she gave to it, which by a strange mistake is called Sir Thomas More, though it is evidently a copy of Cromwell, Earl of Essex. Nay, Robert Whitehall, a poetaster, wrote verses to her in 1674 on her sending this supposed picture of Sir Thomas More.
Ephelia (Before 1678-After 1681)
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

Ephelia stands as The name on The title-page of an important collection, Female Poems on Several Occasions (first published in 1679), and also appears as The signature of a number of minor works; two broadsheets on political Themes, a manuscript poem now in The University of Nottingham’s Portland collection, and a play, The Pair-Royal of Coxcombs, of which only The prologue, epilogue, and songs survive, printed in Female Poems.
Anonymous Irishwoman
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

This Irish poem dates from The seventeenth century, and it is in a popular, raTher than a bardic metre, so is apparently one of The relatively few sets of amateur verses to survive from so early. Ireland had maintained a class of professional poets and guardians of culture, The filid, since before The birth of Christ, who passed knowledge from one generation to The next via a highly efficient system of oral teaching.
Mary, Lady Chudleigh (née lee) (1656-1710)
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

The future Lady Chudleigh was The daughter of Richard Lee of Winslade in Devon. In February 1674, at The age of 17, she married George Chudleigh, thirteen years her senior, The eldest son of Sir George Chudleigh of Ashton, Devon, to whose baronetcy he succeeded in 1691.
Anne Wharton (1659-1685)
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

Anne Wharton was The second daughter of Henry Lee of Ditchley, by Anne, daughter of Sir John Danvers of Combury, who was The heir-at-law to The estate of her uncle, Henry Danvers, Earl of Danby.
Anne Finch (née Kingsmill), Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720)
Authors: Stevenson Jane , Davidson Peter
Published: October 2023

Anne Kingsmill was born at Sydmonton, Hampshire in April 1661, The month of King Charles H’s Coronation. Her parents, Sir William Kingsmill and Anne Haslewood, were both members of old and respected Royalist gentry families. They had married in 1654, and Sir William, unlike many of his contemporaries, was able to keep most of his land intact during The Interregnum.
Modern Writers II: English Nausea
Authors: Trotter David
Published: October 2023

Like most recent critics of Daniel Deronda, I have stressed the novelty of Eliot’s conception of Grand court as an embodiment of pure malevolence. But it has to be admitted that he is in some respects ancient. For he bears, in status, manner, and sexual conduct, the mark of that tried-and-tested formula for pure malevolence, the ignobly noble rake of Gothic fiction. Eliot, indeed, goes so far as to reinforce his sempiternal qualities with a whiff of prehistoric swamp. To Gwendolen, Grandcourt seems ‘a handsome lizard of a hitherto unknown species, not of the lively, darting kind’ (DD 137). He gives his associate, Mr Lush, a look ‘as neutral as an alligator’: ‘there was no telling what might turn up in the slow-churning chances of his mind’ ( 157).
Summer in the Country( 1823—1825)
Authors: Gittings Robert , Manton Jo
Published: October 2023

Claire’s plan for travelling to Russia was bold enough to provoke Mary Shelley to rare amusement. ‘I hope she will … persuade her Count to bring her to Italy,’ she said. By March 1824 Mary’s habitual melancholy had returned: ‘hopeless-spiritless-I cannot write-I can hardly read ... I never prayed so heartily for death as now’. In this illness, anxiety and resentment fastened upon her stepsister. ‘No one has heard from Claire since last July,’ she wrote to Trelawny, ‘this is very cruel of her since she must be aware that we must all be very anxious about her. I strive to think that her silence is occasioned only by her love of mystery or some other caprice.’ Trelawny also had no news. Claire wrote no surviving letters during the year she lived as governess in Count Zotoff’s house in St Petersburg. Some critics have assumed disasters, which from obstinate pride she concealed.
A Galley Life ( 1836—1841)
Authors: Gittings Robert , Manton Jo
Published: October 2023

Godwin’s death presented an immediate problem, described by Trelawny to Claire as ‘keeping your mother afloat’. After thirty-five years of marriage, of copying manuscripts, and attempting to publish books, of unpaid rent and household bills, of bankruptcies and loans spent before they were received, Godwin’s widow was left with less than a hundred pounds. She proposed that Claire should keep house for her and her son’s widow Emily ‘in some village about town’, but Trelawny knew his old flame too well for this. It would be ‘a galley life’. The widow was ‘crony, rheumy-rheumatic and phtisicy … that will never do. Claire had better be housekeeper to my houseless self.’
The Shelley Papers( 1872—1879)
Authors: Gittings Robert , Manton Jo
Published: October 2023

In October 1872, a weatherbeaten man in his 40s called at Palazzo Cruciato and introduced himself in a New England accent as Edward Silsbee, sea captain, of Massachusetts. He had been a seafaring man since boyhood, at home with trade winds and distant ports. He spoke of himself as ‘an ardent Shelleyite’, though many acquaintances called him ‘Shelley mad’. Alone in night watches he had learnt Shelley’s poems by heart, and on the New England coast or in the drawing-rooms of the Florence expatriates would quote his favourites ‘with a trumpet-like twang, without reference to the conversation’. Richard Garnett, however, considered this maritime eccentric the best critic of Shelley he had heard.
Preamble
Authors: Havenstein Daniela
Published: October 2023

Responses to Browne’s first work were both immediate and strong. The texture of Religio Medici invited condemnation and praise alike. Francis Cheynell’s warning, quoted above, is part of his at­tack on Archbishop Laud in 1645. He was not alone in associating Browne with Laudian politics.
Introduction
Authors: Whitworth Michael H
Published: October 2023

The study of literature and science raises an ontological problem: faced with two terms which are commonly understood as antithetical, we must explain in what sense we are comparing like with like; the problem appears particularly acute when we are examining the relation of literature to a mathematical science such as physics. As regards the present study, the short answer is that we are not so much examining relativity and modernism as examining certain metaphors in their textual and historical context; that these metaphors may be found both in scientific theories and in descriptions of modernist literary form is particularly convenient.
An Entente Cordiale? The New Relations of Literature and Science
Authors: Whitworth Michael H
Published: October 2023

Literary responses to new scientific theories and methods are framed by the literary culture’s construction of ‘science’ in general. Even when particular scientific innovations are warmly received within the literary culture, the warmth is tempered by an underlying belief that science is antipathetic to literature: that science prefers quantities to qualities, length and mass to colour and scent, mechanism to organicism, reason to imagination.
Conclusion
Authors: Whitworth Michael H
Published: October 2023

These continue to be valuable questions, not least because there are strong institutional reasons for the continued dominance of the ‘formula’ described by Hayles. The audience for most ‘literature and science’ criticism consists of academic literary critics: such critics are usually familiar with the author or literary culture being discussed, but unfamiliar with scientific theory.
The University’s Contribution to the Life Sciences and Medicine
Authors: Weindling Paul
Published: October 2023

In all ancient universities each age has tended to pursue the types of science and medicine most appropriate to its culture and social characteristics. Yet distinctive and developing continuities can be discerned which link Oxford’s medieval origins with our modern scientific age. The endeavours of late-medieval classical scholars, known as humanists, to establish the original texts of philosophers like Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates stimulated studies of the natural world and the human body. Such scholarship has sustained values linking medieval and modern medicine, medicine being one of the four essential branches of medieval learning. From the fourteenth century, when two Doctors of Medicine were included among the fellows of New College, to the early twentieth, when William Osler (1849-1919) consciously promoted the ideal of the humanist physician, Oxford medicine is best understood in the context of the tradition of classical scholarship and the Christian sense of duty to relieve suffering. The medical sciences and kindred disciplines like biology, anthropology, and psychology have been shaped partly by philosophical ideals deriving from classical studies and partly by new philosophies based on experiments, field studies, and physical and mathematical models.
The Growth of an International University
Authors: Darwin John
Published: October 2023

In the middle of the nineteenth century Oxford was a very different university in almost all respects from what it had become by the middle of the twentieth: in its size, in the scope of its studies, and in the kind of students it attracted. First and foremost, Oxford then existed as an academy for the English ruling elite and for those who aspired to join it. It offered formal instruction, primarily in the classics, of a kind designed to complete the classical education provided in the major public schools. Its students, if assiduous, were steeped in the major texts of ancient history and philosophy and equipped for life with an inexhaustible fund of classical tags.
The Impact of plague in Tudor and Stuart England
Authors: Slack Paul
Published: October 2023

This is a classic study of a disease which had a profound impact on the history of Tudor and Stuart England. Plague was both a personal affliction and a social calamity, regularly decimating urban populations. Paul Slack vividly describes the stresses which plague imposed on individuals, families, and whole communities, and the ways in which people tried to explain, control, and come to terms with it.
The Spoils of War
Authors: Kent Bruce
Published: October 2023

This is the first comprehensive account of the dispute over who should `pay' for the First World War - a dispute which poisoned international relations, destabilized the world's financial system, and encouraged the rise of the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. Dr Kent's systematic analysis of the origins and persistence of the financial demands made upon Germany after the war sheds new light on the `beggar-thy-neighbour' tendencies of liberal democracies in times of financial crisis. He argues that the victors had no coherent policy of eliminating Germany as a commercial or strategic threat. The indemnity illusion was fostered by British, French, and American statesmen to conceal the financial implications of the war and to defuse radical agitation for heavy taxation.
Introduction
Authors: Kent Bruce
Published: October 2023

A Cornerstone assumption of this study is that Germany was incapable of fulfilling the reparation demands of the victors in the conditions which prevailed after the war of 1914-18. Strictly speaking, any effort to make a belligerent pay subsequently for the cost of a-major war is ill conceived, since all wars, in so far as they are not financed by foreign loans, are paid for immediately by the diversion of human and material resources to the business of destruction. The nations which emerged victorious in 1918 could have made Germany defray the cost of their war effort to a meaningful extent only if they· had conquered an economically significant part of her territory soon after the outbreak of hostilities and forced its inhabitants to advance credits or donate goods and services to them for the remainder of the conflict. This method of shifting the economic burden of warfare, which. was used with such devastating effect by Nazi Germany at the expense of France and other European countries during the war of 1939—45, was not available to the Entente powers because they never succeeded in carrying the war onto German soil.1
Fixing the Bill, July 1920-May 1921
Authors: Kent Bruce
Published: October 2023

In the summer of 1920 Allied statesmen and financial experts embarked on nine months of fitful negotiations with their German counterparts about implementing the reparation provisions of the treaty. Although the Spa Conference of July 1920 yielded a viable six-month agreement on the important side issue of coal, less success attended discussions on the central question of the total reparation bill. Progress was impeded by the unwillingness of all the creditor powers, including America, to dispel the financial illusions they had encouraged and by constant Anglo-French manreuvring over the distribution of the spoils. The situation was also complicated by the swing to the right at the Reichstag elections of June 1920 and, paradoxically, by the gradual restoration of normal economic and social conditions in Germany, which threw into sharper relief the increasing, but still by no means intolerable, burden of preliminary reparation payments and deliveries.
From Cannes to the Ruhr
Authors: Kent Bruce
Published: October 2023

Instead of precipitating a renegotiation of the post-war financial settlement, the collapse of the London Schedule led only to a makeshift adjustment of Germany’s reparation obligations. The granting of a partial moratorium in January 1922 reduced the budgetary and balance of payments burden of reparations to a level which might have been tolerable in optimum conditions. The prospect of obtaining an international loan also encouraged the Wirth government to prolong a half hearted attempt at financial reform until the middle of the year. Yet a settlement was prevented by the regressive inertia of French budgetary policy under Poincare and the persistent refusal of the German industrial elite to countenance an effective stabilization policy which would jeopardize their inflation profiteering. Tension was increased when Lloyd George’s European reconstruction pipe-dream was rudely shattered by the signature of a pact of mutual financial renunciation by the two debtor powers, Germany and Soviet Russia, at Rapallo on 16 April.
The Turkana and Eturkan
Authors: Lamphear John
Published: October 2023

The Turkana people of north-western Kenya belong to the Ateker group of the Eastern Nilotic linguistic family. Currently numbering over 200,000, they are the largest community of that group. Earlier population data are sketchy, but at the beginning of the twentieth century the Turkana probably numbered between 30,000 and40,000.
Apetaret: ‘The Scattering’
Authors: Lamphear John
Published: October 2023

Toward the end of 191 7 Harry Rayne exchanged messages with officers in the Sudan and Uganda to explore, once again, the possibility of joint operations against the Turkana. Everyone agreed that their dangerous ‘expansion’ had to be countered, and the ‘hectic condition’ prevailing in the district rectified. Noting that the ‘Turkana tribe had ... consistently opposed any attempt by the Administration to settle its country’, Rayne was anxious this time to assemble a force large enough ‘to ensure them such a whacking ... as to finish this thing once and for all’. He also hoped that the expedition finally would expel all Ethiopians from territory claimed by the British and that a strike could be made against the Nyangatom and Dassanetch as well.
History
Authors: Borsay Peter
Published: October 2023

From 1830 Georgian Bath became, by definition, a piece of history. Whereas the previous chapter focused on eighteenth-century Bath’s perception of its present and past, this chapter investigates how that representational legacy was interpreted and reinterpreted by subsequent generations. The elevation of Nash and Rome, and the displacement of Bladud, sowed the seeds for what was to prove the classical monopoly, or Roman and Georgian duopoly, of Bath’s history. Today these two periods dominate views of the city’s past, leaving huge portions of its history subject to a state of collective amnesia. That this should have occurred, and more specifically that the Georgian image came to be so influential, was far from inevitable. Eras of great change and innovation can be quickly forgotten, their material forms lost through destruction or neglect. Even where the records, remains, and memories of recent periods survive these can be disparaged or simply ignored. The post-Georgian evolution of Bath’s Georgian image needs, therefore, to be seen as part of a historical process, as each generation re-evaluated and repackaged its eighteenth-century inheritance. To make sense of this process five broad periods of change have been identified; Victorian (1830–79), late Victorian and Edwardian (1880–1918), inter-war (1919–39), modern (1940–69), and post-modern (1970–c.2000). No great precision is claimed for the chronology adopted here, but it is argued that each of these eras witnessed major readjustments in the city’s reading and utilization of its Georgian heritage.
Commerce
Authors: Borsay Peter
Published: October 2023

So far the thrust of this study has been the investigation of Georgian Bath as an object in itself; its contemporary construction, its historical evolution, its structure, and the media through which it was expressed. This image has been analysed in the way a work of art often is, as something possessing an autonomous existence separate from that which it represents. Such an approach was deliberate. It was important to establish that the image had an independent identity and impact, and was not simply a reflection of some ‘objective’ reality. It was also crucial to emphasize that this book is not a history of eighteenth-century Bath, but a study of a cultural artefact and myth, whose veracity is not be judged by the extent to which it does or does not conform to a ‘real’ past. Yet inevitably assumptions about historical reality have kept breaking in on the analysis. Indeed, no serious progress in the argument could have been made otherwise. Given the aims of this study, it has been important to stress the power of imagined over real phenomena, and the extent to which what we often take to be hard and objective turns out to be malleable and culturally constructed. But it is also true to say that imagination and myth are influenced and constrained by material realities and possibilities. At the deepest level the imagined and the real, the cultural and the material are in perpetual interaction, part of a seamless process in which neither the substructure nor the superstructure exert primacy.
Psychology
Authors: Borsay Peter
Published: October 2023

A central theme of this book has been the past. The Georgian image, in its modern reincarnation, is a historical phenomenon, and much of its impact has derived from this fact. Chapters 8 and 9 explored the economic, social, and political uses of history; this chapter investigates the psychological role of the past. Four topics will be examined: Bath as a place of historical resonance; the benefits of consolation and identity from contact with the past; myth; and the twentieth-century debate over the claims of past and present in the city.
Food And The German State
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

In wartime Germany rations fell too low to maintain body weight for long periods of time and getting hold of sufficient food became a matter of survival. A large fraction, one-fifth to one-third of the food, could only be obtained through illegal channels.1 Food rationing brings out the most far-reaching form of “war socialism”-the principle of distribution according to need. Both Germany and Britain attempted to distribute food equally during the First World War, though they used different approaches. It is curious that societies so deeply committed to inequality should revert to egalitarian principles in wartime. Apparently this answered to a need for equity: ‘We are all Germans now, ‘ the Kaiser declared, and the myth of solidarity is one of the strongest bonds in wartime.
The Sod House Against The Manor House
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

None of the common explanations for the decline of British wheat produition is sufficient on its own. Tariffs, steam power, soil, climate, consumer tastes, land values, labour productivity all had an effect, but they only teill half a story. They did not disable any other large producer. Natural condtions were benign. The question remains: why was British adaptation sp poor? Some of the causes may be found in the social forms of wheat production which had developed in Britain before 1870.
Coast, Interior And Metropolis
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

Economic opportunities facilitated the movement of people from Britain overseas and helped to form new societies. The new communities did not have to reinvent civilization and within one or two generations they had erected urban societies equipped with most of the trappings of provincial Europe. Locked up in the bush or the veldt, these new lands possessed a latent productivity beyond the needs of their small populations. The road to prosperity lay in the transition from pioneering self-sufficiency to exports.
Mackenzie King ‘S Odyssey
Authors: Offer Avner
Published: October 2023

After the Vancouver riots Laurier sent one of his senior civil servants, the Deputy Minister of Labour William Lyon Mackenzie King, to investigate. King was thirty-three years old at the time, and already rising rapidly in a career that would make him Prime Minister of Canada for a total of twenty-two years between 1921 and 1948. In going to Vancouver he unwittingly embarked upon one of the great adventures of his life, and one that also provides a unique insight into the issue.
Resolution by Force November 1917-November 1918
Authors: Stevenson David
Published: October 2023

From its Balkan origins the war had grown into a world-wide conflagration that a triple military, diplomatic, and domestic political stalemate fuelled until the end of 1917. It kindled a multiplicity of successor conflicts, one of which-the Russian Civil War-claimed more lives than did the contest between the Allies and the Central Powers itself. As long as the central struggle continued, it and local wars across the globe were liable to intermesh. In 1918 intervention in Russia by both sides was the most dramatic case in point. But once the central struggle had been resolved, the peripheral ones could be fought out with largely local forces, and gradually brought to an end. This chapter will therefore concentrate on the suspension of hostilities in the war that had begun in 1914. It will examine the separate treaties concluded on the Eastern Front in the spring of 1918; the intervention in Russia, in spite of this, by the Central Powers and the Allies in the summer; the commitment by the Allies to dismember Austria-Hungary; and the Southern and Western European armistices at the end of the year. As in 1917, an underlying theme of these developments was the failure of conciliation. But all three elements of the previous deadlock were now crumbling, and political decisions acquired a new finality as the war of movement returned. The relationship between military and political developments was, as ever, intricate. But for statesmen at the time it was omnipresent.
The Fruits of Victory November 1918-November 1920
Authors: Stevenson David
Published: October 2023

The peace treaties emerged from a sequence of compromises between the victor Powers, and from their attempts to impose those compromises on their smaller partners and the defeated enemy. In much of Europe they had little capacity to implement their wishes, and as time passed they were defied with increasing success. But they dominated the Peace Conference itself, and its history is best understood as a process of inter Allied bargaining in which the ascendancy gained by American diplomacy at the Armistice was gradually dissipated. Wilson had manifestly failed in his attempt to remould the international order even before the American Senate in its votes of November 1919 and March 1920 withheld ratification from the Treaty of Versailles.
The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs
Authors: Phillips John A
Published: October 2023

This is a study of popular political behaviour both before and after the Great Reform Act of 1832, the impact of which has long divided historians, some heralding it as the dawn of a new age, others dismissing it as an irrelevance. Professor Phillips has built up an extensive computer database from all available sources of information about early nineteenth-century electors - including for example poll books, tax rolls, and parish records - thus creating a uniquely comprehensive set of files containing dozens of variables about thousands of voters that permit cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. Using these techniques, he has undertaken the first systematic consideration of electoral behaviour in eight diverse English boroughs. He explores the nature of parliamentary representation in the pre-Reform era and assesses the effects of the 1832 Act, and shows that the unreformed electoral system permitted extensive popular political participation. Nevertheless, the Reform Act politicized the electorate to a degree not possible or even imaginable before, and his book establishes the role of Reform as the catalyst which shaped a new pattern of politics and launched the struggle for parliamentary democracy in Britain.
The Family
Authors: Moreton C E
Published: October 2023

Until the later fifteenth century the Townshends were unknown as gentry, although Townshends had lived in their part of north-west Norfolk since the mid-fourteenth century and perhaps earlier. The first Townshend known as a ‘gentleman’ was a self-made man, the prominent lawyer Sir Roger Townshend I (d. 14-93). Before his lifetime the history of the family is clouded in obscurity and downright invention. This was partly the fault of the Townshends themselves because, in common with other families, they fabricated a pedigree during the heraldic visitations of the second half of the sixteenth century in order to disguise their true origins. A fictitious family tree, sometimes including Norman ancestry, was perpetuated by successive generations of gullible antiquarians and local historians.
Sheep
Authors: Moreton C E
Published: October 2023

Although part of the history of their estate, the Townshends’ sheep-farming warrants a chapter to itself, for it was a major source of their wealth and they were among the greatest of the great gentry sheep-farmers of late medieval and early modern Norfolk. It is, however, of interest to more than just economic and agricultural historians, since gentry sheep-farming on such a scale could not fail to have a significant local impact. Inevitably it came to threaten the interests of the lesser man and played a major part in the political and social unrest of the period.
The Machinery of State
Authors: Doyle William
Published: October 2023

In the later eighteenth century most people who thought about public affairs were convinced that the power of governments had increased, was increasing, and ought to be diminished. They were right in believing that states now wielded more power than they had a century beforehand. Yet governments were largely staffed by men who shared completely the attitudes and outlook of the governing groups who formed the political nation in each state. They had seldom sought to accumulate power for its own sake. They simply had no alternative if they were to continue to do adequately what was traditionally expected of them- -something that was not possible without trespassing increasingly in fields traditionally felt to be beyond a government’s competence.
International Relations
Authors: Doyle William
Published: October 2023

The power of governments did not grow for its own sake. Most rulers accepted that governments existed to uphold and not disturb the established order of things, and that to attempt to extend their power was a hazardous process. But they had to defend themselves, and to maintain or improve their position against foreign competitors-the most fundamental obligation of all. States which neglected their own security laid themselves open to incalculable dangers in an age when new powers of unprecedented strength and predatory appetite were increasingly active in international affairs. So international competition and war were the main spur to domestic innovation. Eventually, these innovations provoked severe crises within several of the greater states, to shake their fabric even more seriously than foreign enemies could. But it is hard to see how they could have been avoided without taking international risks that most governments would have regarded as irresponsible.
The Revolutionary Impact
Authors: Doyle William
Published: October 2023

The age of revolutions saw the origins of many of the forces that were to shape the modern world. It saw the beginnings of most of the institutions and habits which we still recognize and practise. Equally, it heralded the end of an older order of things. The French Revolution gave the Old Order the name by which we still know it. In doing so it emphasized the scale of its break with the past. But historians have been disputing about the question ever since. Were the changes brought by the revolutionary age as rapid, or as decisive, or as profound as contemporaries liked to believe? Did the decade of revolution destroy the old Europe in one short but epic struggle? Or did it merely mark the opening shot in a battle which was to rage on into the twentieth century? To answer these questions fully would involve us in investigations that go far beyond the range of this book. Here, we can do no more than try to assess how much of the pre-revolutionary world had already gone for ever by 1800.
Carnival Or Consent?
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

The Scaffold Crowd Was So Complex In Its Behaviour (AS the last chapter shows) that it could be argued about in quite con trary directions. On the one hand, it could be claimed that the spectacle of execution was awesome enough to induce the watching populace to consent in the law’s magnitude, and that they did consent on the whole, as when they applauded murderers’ hanging. On the other hand, it has been argued just as plausibly that it was the populace, not the law, that controlled the scaffold arena, converting the ritual to carnival as their parodies turned the world upside down. Each perspective has much to say for itself. None the less, this chapter argues that the truth was more complex than these stark alternatives suggest.
Broadsides And The Gallows Emblem
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

If, As Time Passed, The Old Tyburn And Canting Ballads were heard less frequently on the streets, the same cannot be said of the noisy vending of trial and execution broadsheets. There was a mounting tide of these, swelling first in the mid to later eighteenth cen tury and again in the second quarter of the nineteenth. These make up a second corpus of plebeian texts on the scaffold. They expressed popu lar understandings about life’s chances and death’s certainties just as eloquently as the ballads did, but to very different effects.
Theprerogative Of Mercy And The Practices Of Deference
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

their families-indeed of the ‘people’-only in the cries and gestures of the condemned on the scaffold or obliquely in the ballads and broad sides which commented on their plights. There remains a third set of texts, not in the public domain, which takes us behind the scenes observed hitherto, and closer even than ballads and broadsides do, to the attitudes and feelings of those convicted and doomed to face death or distant exile. They also show how capital law worked; and we use them extensively in later chapters.
Anxiety And Defence
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

In 1813 The Novelist Maria Edgeworth Pertly Wrote To A friend that she was pleased to live in an age when newspapers ‘give subjects of conversation in common to people in the most distant parts of the country’. She was particularly grateful that executions were one of the subjects, because execution reports exposed the variety of human character wonderfully. ‘Do you recollect’, she chatted gaily, ‘our seeing in the news-paper an account of a man who poisoned several racehorses by putting arsenic in the water-troughs? Also an account of a horrid woman who made her servant boy murder her husband; and ordered him to go back and finish him as composedly as if she had told him to kill a pig?’ When this man was brought out for execution, he was more cool and com posed than any other person present. When the cord was to be put about his neck it was perceived that it was too short and that it could not well reach him. He pointed to the hassock on which he had been kneeling and made a sign to them to put it under his feet! The woman who murdered her husband was an extraordinary compound of insensibility and sensibility. While sentence was pronouncing upon her, she shewed no symptom of feeling, but from the moment she was condemned she would not let any creature see her face. She kept it constantly hid, even till she was executed. On hearing the sermon the evening before her execution, she wept and sobbed bitterly yet in the morning seemed quite insensible and eat [sic] a hearty breakfast.
Executing Traitors
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

1820 Saw The Last Executions For High Treason In The Old fashioned way. In that year eight men were publicly hanged and decapi tated. Five of them had led the plot laid in Cato Street to assassinate the Cabinet at dinner; they were executed before a Newgate crowd of 100,000 on 1 May. The other three were Scottish radicals who had attempted an abortive uprising, and they were executed in Stirling and Glasgow in August and September. In each case, after conventional hanging, their corpses were taken from their nooses and laid in coffins on the scaffold platform. One by one their heads were lifted out to rest on a block to enable the executioner to hack at their necks with a knife. Then, dripping gorily on to sawdust, each head was held up to the spec tators, the executioner crying out its name. Only three decades earlier the bodies would also have been eviscerated to convey the magnitude of their offence a little more clearly.
Furred Homicides, Sable Bigots
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

We May As Cheerfully As We Like (In Part Iv) Survey The penal critiques of the 1770s and 1780s, their rearticulation in par liament in and after 1808, the mounting vociferousness of radicals, prison reformers, and Quakers, and the gentler pressure of those who used the mercy process on others’ behalf. Yet the outcome of none of these pressures was assured; for decades yet there was little for reform ers to celebrate. With conditions in prisons still remote from those envisaged by advocates of separation and solitude, men and women hanged as numerously as ever. It bears repeating that in the post-war quinquennium 1816-20 over three times as many people were con demned to death in England and Wales as in 1806-10, and in 1826-30 three and a half times as many. Moreover, more were hanged in the 1820s than in the pre-1815 decade. And 325 hanged in London between 1816 and 1830 as against only 181 in the years 1801-15. Also, Home Secretary Peel still defended the main bastions of the bloody code, con vinced that his holding operations would last a generation or two. In England and Wales in 1829, the last full year of his office, 74 people were hanged. With hindsight we know it could not last. As the Introduction suggested, too many more people were being prosecuted after the peace, too many more had to be capitally convicted under the statutes and too many more were therefore having to be pardoned-for the hanging law’s credibility to be long sustained. Yet decision-makers at all levels were determined to perpetuate it so far as possible.
Theking In His Council
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

Everyone Knew That The Quality Of Mercy Was Supposed To drop as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath; that it was an attribute to awe, majesty, and God himself; and that royal power was most like God’s when mercy seasoned justice. Peel the home secre tary told the Commons that the exercise of mercy ‘ought to be as prompt and as pure as the visitation of justice’. Alas for the sorrier truth of the matter. Eavesdroppers on the king’s Council as it reviewed the Old Bailey’s capital sentences might have given away their presence behind the arras by involuntary snorts. In no other context was the power of life and death wielded with such remote and capricious dis dain. Enmeshed in courtly rituals, insulated from the cramped worlds of those whom they decided to kill, half-attentive to the death-dealing business in hand-most of the Council’s members present themselves as aloof, arrogant, and merciless beings. As ever in this book, this judge ment is endorsed by the fact that some contemporaries said so too--at least in so far as they knew what went on, which was not much.
Mercy And Mr Peel
Authors: Gatrell V A C
Published: October 2023

In 1831 Edward Gibbon Wakefield Raised A Key Question. Lately released from three years in Newgate for abducting an under age heiress, scales had dropped from his eyes in that dark place. Gentleman though he had been and would become again, he had lost the politeness which inhibited questions as rude as this. This question was in effect: how could these men bear to send people to the gallows with such equanimity? He had the home secretary Robert Peel in mind: Almost every Old Bailey Sessions subjects the Secretary of State to the pain of denying, absolutely or for a time, the prayer of some heart-broken wretch, who face to face with the judge, half choaked with grief, and perhaps kneeling at his feet, pleads for the life of a father, a husband, or a child. To undergo this pain, not less probably, on the average, than once a month, must, one would think, injure the health, so as to shorten the life, of him who suffers the pain. Yet the late Secretary who had suffered it for a great many years, was, at the end of his career, and in his legislative capacity, adverse to abolishing the pun ishment of death Mr Peel’s long practice in that one matter had rendered him callous, and had led to his piquing himself on his firmness.
Introduction The Human Factor
Authors: Grassby Richard
Published: October 2023

The popularity of historical biography has varied inversely with the prestige of the social sciences. Like narrative history, it has languished for a long period in the wilderness exiled by both structural and quantitative social and economic history.1 To those anxious to explain how a whole society or economy works, the life of one person is a statistically insignificant event, which can illustrate but not demonstrate a general thesis. Even historians who prefer the microscope to the telescope, who study the process as well as the structure of particular sectors, institutions, and regions, proceed not by particular example, but by systematic accumulation of data.2 The theoreticians reject even cumulative case-studies as too subjective and limited a tool for analysis and prefer to construct objective, explanatory models which do not depend on empirical evidence or on the chronology of events.3 The biographical approach has been dismissed as impressionistic, intuitive, and amateurish, a luxury of a pre-numerate society, and an indulgent waste of academic resources.
The Civil Servant
Authors: Grassby Richard
Published: October 2023

Dudley’s career as an administrator followed a typical pattern. For nine years he was Treasurer of the Levant Company in Constantinople. When he returned to England, he served on the governing bodies of three commercial Companies and assumed the routine burdens of management. He was elected one of the eighteen Assistants of the Levant Company and he also served in every office in the Royal Africa Company and was Governor of the Russia Company.
The Urban Gentleman
Authors: Grassby Richard
Published: October 2023

Dudley was ‘very much a gentleman ‘ and, unlike Nathaniel Harley, he never doubted that business was compatible with gentility. He noted that the Italian nobles enjoyed the privilege of retailing wine and he intended one of his sons for trade. Dudley did not recognize any conflict between the landed and monied interests and he viewed the divisions in English society as horizontal rather than vertical. Nor did he consider that the professions and office-holders were more public spirited and less acquisitive than businessmen. He felt no need to conceal his occupation and he did not suffer from any feelings of social inferiority. Although proud of his landed ancestry, he was confident that he had earned his right to social recognition. Consequently he did not succumb to the false modesty and pomposity which so often accompanies self-help.
The Family Man
Authors: Grassby Richard
Published: October 2023

Dudley ‘s objective, when he went to Turkey was ‘to return honorably rich, to be well matcht and have hopeful issue ‘.1 But the marriage market could be as unpredictable and hazardous as the commodities market.2 Widows and well-endowed daughters certainly provided opportunities for rapid capital accumulation, but marriage created additional ties of kinship, imposed new financial and emotional obligations, and required adjustments in personal life-style. Dudley was not indifferent to the financial and social inducements of matrimony and he wanted to marry a person of breeding and property. But his primary purpose was to secure a companion and a loving partner, to have his own household, and to raise children who would bear his name and perpetuate his fortune.3
The Political Economist
Authors: Grassby Richard
Published: October 2023

Dudley ‘S contribution to economic thought, like that of any other author, must be placed in its specific historical context as well as judged by universalistic criteria. Debates over policy in the seventeenth century did raise theoretical issues and slowly advance the study of political economy. But they were grounded in political and economic realities. Because Dudley ‘s ideas translate fairly readily into the terminology of classical economics, later commentators have been tempted to read into his Discourses whatever their particular interpretation requires, to regard him as one link in an evolutionary chain. Although Macaulay excoriated Dudley ‘s politics, his lax principles, and unfeeling heart, he credited him with rare mental endowments and hailed him as a prophet of the In visible Hand emerging miraculously from the intellectual wilderness of the Levant.