bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Bishops’ Wars
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

As Charles prepared for war during the early months of 1639 he was confronted with three discouraging contrasts. One was between the grand sweep of his plan of campaign and his likely capacity to execute it. Another lay between the effectiveness with which the Scots mobilized their military resources and the dragging, bumbling efforts of the English. And behind both lay the third, which was between the passionate commitment of the Covenanters to their cause and the luke warmness of most Englishmen—and the downright hostility of some—towards the king’s.
The Second Civil War
Authors: Woolrych Austin
Published: November 2023

It is hard to give a fully coherent account of the second Civil War, because the war itself was such an incoherent affair. What Charles and the Scots hoped was that his English and Welsh supporters would rise in arms just when a Scottish army invaded, for their only chance of success against Fairfax’s and Cromwell’s veterans lay in diverting and dividing the latter by simultaneous insurrections in several parts of the southern kingdom. But the king was a captive, and for all the freedom allowed to his visitors, he had no underground organization capable of marshalling his followers nationwide. The Scots did not have an army ready until July, and long before it crossed the border a series of uncoordinated royalist uprisings in southern and southeastern England and in Wales had already spent their force. Most of them were spontaneous in origin, and motivated more by exasperation with the parliamentary regime than by positive enthusiasm for the king, and though some of his champions made heroic efforts to harness them to his cause they were suppressed or contained before Cromwell had to march against the Scots.
Service: Good Lordship and Retaining
Authors: Pollard A J
Published: November 2023

Service to lords and to the Crown was a central feature of all gentlemen’s lives; any discussion of it is bound to focus on retaining and bastard feudalism. This is not only the best documented, but also historiographically the most prominent feature. It is almost certainly the case, however, that the formal indenture of retainer and grant of an annuity were untypical and unrepresentative of the links between man and servant in fifteenth-century society. Informal ties and obligations resulting from myriad small services rendered by well-wishers in return for favours granted by good lords or masters were more characteristic of the relationship.
Lay Piety: Religious Practice and Belief
Authors: Pollard A J
Published: November 2023

Bishop Fox threatened excommunication of the borderers if they did not mend their ways. Presumably he had reason to believe that even they were sufficiently devout to take heed of such a threat. There can be little doubt that most of the inhabitants of the rest of the region would have taken it very seriously indeed. As the home of Mount Grace Priory, one of the leading centres of the school of English mysticism, the region could perhaps claim to be a particular focal point of Christian devotion. Before endeavouring to characterize the quality of northeastern piety, however, it is worth making some more general observations about the subject.
Feud and Civil War, 1455-1461
Authors: Pollard A J
Published: November 2023

What had begun in 1453 as an attempt to alter the balance of power in Yorkshire by force became after St Albans a feud which was to be inextricably bound up with the developing politics of the whole realm, and was not to burn itself out until after many more deaths and a change of dynasty. From that day in May 145 5 the fortunes of Neville were inseparable from those of York. At first the family benefited from the fruits of victory. Salisbury succeeded to the chief stewardship of the duchy of Lancaster north of the Trent, the chief stewardship of Lancashire, and probably the stewardship of Pickering after the death of Lord Cromwell in 1456. He and Warwick had their grant of the wardenship of the west march reviewed on more favourable terms. Thus their hold on the north was tightened. Warwick became captain of Calais; Fauconberg received a half share of the constableship of Windsor Castle (with Lord Berners ); and the bishopric of Exeter was secured for young George Neville.
The Hegemony of Richard of Gloucester, 1471-1483
Authors: Pollard A J
Published: November 2023

The history of north-eastern England after the fall of the Kingmaker at Barnet in April 1471 is dominated by the career of Richard of Gloucester. After his establishment in Warwick’s place in 14711 control of the region passed quickly and relatively smoothly into his hands. By the end of the decade Gloucester had established a personal hegemony in northern England that eclipsed even the might of Richard Neville at the height of his power. With such backing it was but a small step for Gloucester himself to take the throne in 1483. These momentous developments were not inevitable. In the first instance it was a deliberate decision of Edward IV to grant to his youngest brother the Neville of Middle ham estates and the northern offices previously enjoyed by the earl of Warwick. On his part, Richard of Gloucester exploited to the full his brother’s dependence on him to build up an unassailable power in the region, choosing to concentrate his landed estates in the northern counties.
The Reign of Richard III,1483-1485
Authors: Pollard A J
Published: November 2023

There can be little doubt that the north provided the platform from which Richard III launched his bid for the throne in 1483. But there is no reason to believe that he created his northern hegemony for that purpose. Until Edward IV’s death in April 1483 Richard of Gloucester’s ambition was concentrated on creating a patrimony in the north-an ambition which culminated in the grant of the Cumbrian palatinate just two months before the king’s death threw his kingdom’s and brother’s future into jeopardy. In the developing political crisis of the early summer of 1483 Duke Richard’s aims appeared to contemporaries to be limited to securing the role of Protector for himself: an aim achieved dramatically and high-handedly at Stony Stratford on 30 April. In the few weeks that he allowed the minority of Edward V to run Gloucester made very few changes to the personnel of government. His close associate Francis, Viscount Lovell became butler, and some of his principal servants, such as Miles Metcalfe, John Kendal, and William Tunstall, were promoted and rewarded. Apart from a handful of grants to his own men it was very much business as before.
The Culture of Altruism Selfishness and the Decay of Motive
Authors: Collini Stefan
Published: November 2023

The coining of a new term may not always be a significant landmark in the history of thought and sensibility. Many such coinages, or attempted coinages, are unsuccessful after all, and even some of those that do manage to insinuate themselves into the company of the established vocabulary may only limp along after the main idiom, tolerated for certain special or technical purposes. But when a new term is so quickly and generally domesticated that within a few years its users treat it as an old familiar and exhibit no sign of remembering that it was once a gauche neologism, then the intellectual historian would usually do well to pause and reflect upon what is revealed by this linguistic success story.
Their Title to be Heard Professionalization and its Discontents
Authors: Collini Stefan
Published: November 2023

On 16 November 1872 a meeting was held at the Freemason’s Tavern in London to discuss the question of ‘University Reform’. In choosing that venue, the organizers deliberately recalled the historic meeting on 10 June 1864 of university reformers and leaders of Nonconformity to press for the repeal of the Test Acts, and thus to open the ancient universities to those who were not members of the Church of England. By 1872 the focus of attention had shifted rather to the internal organization of the universities and its bearing on what were increasingly recognized as their national functions: particularly at issue was the conflict between the traditional collegiate tutorial ideal and the newer schemes to promote ‘research’. The publication in 1867 of Mark Pattison’s book, Suggestions on Academical Organization, and an orchestrated campaign in the Academy, a journal founded in 1869 to help promote the cause of ‘the endowment of research’, had ensured that the question did not lack for public attention.
The Whig Interpretation of English Literature: Literary History and National Identity
Authors: Collini Stefan
Published: November 2023

Living largely in the imagination, we may begin by letting our minds play over two entirely imaginary episodes from an English history that never was.

The first is set in 1866, which, in this imaginary world, is the fiftieth anniversary of the Napoleonic conquest of Britain. The official language of government and education has now for two generations been French; the counties have been replaced by departements, and the real administrators are the prefets, appointed direct from Paris, though a regional assembly of co-operative notables has been allowed to stage a pastiche of Parliamentary debate in annual gatherings at Canterbury. But by the 1860s we have, as in so much of Europe, stirrings of nationalist discontent, and, as in so much of Europe, questions of language and literature and even philology are to the fore. Militant young members of the Guild of Wessex address each other in a laboriously learned version of Anglo Saxon; meetings of the Early English Text Society are officially illegal, yet the recovering and re-editing of ancient English texts is pursued with patriotic ardour. Clandestine reprintings of a popular edition of Asser’s Life of King Alfred can barely keep pace with demand.
Armaments and the Coming of War
Authors: Stevenson David
Published: November 2023

The global impact of the First World War dominated the history of the first half of the twentieth century. This major reassessment of the origins of the war, based on extensive original research in several countries, is the first full analysis of the politics of armaments in pre-1914 Europe. David Stevenson directs attention away from the Anglo-German naval race towards the competition on land between the continental armies. He analyses the defence policies of the powers, and the interaction between the growth of military preparedness and the diplomatic crises in the Mediterranean and the Balkans that culminated in the events of July-August 1914. Drawing on insights from political science, the book offers a fresh conceptual framework for the origins of the First World War, and provides a thought-provoking case-study of the broader relationships between armaments and international conflict.
Continental Equilibrium? 1904–1908
Authors: Stevenson David
Published: November 2023

The essential starting-point for the diplomatic origins of the First World War is the Great-Power realignment of 1904--7. Britain reached ententes, or under-· standings, with France and Russia, and although these began as efforts to liquidate extra-European disputes, they led on to habitual consultation and co-operation. The ‘encirclement’ of which the German leaders now began to speak was neither so rigid nor so thrfatening as they supposed, but their near isolation among the Powers, and their inability to break out of isolation by peaceful means, marked a fundamental change. The first Moroccan crisis, in 1905-6, was more a milestone in diplomacy than in defence policies, and in the period covered by this chapter land armaments remained in approximate equilibrium. By the end .of it, none the less, there was evidence that a much more dangerous situation was coming into being.
Introduction
Authors: Bergin Joseph , Brockliss Laurence
Published: November 2023

With one or two exceptions, serious historical studies devoted to the ministry of Cardinal Richelieu only began in the Third Republic, thanks especially to the Herculean efforts of Avenel in gathering together and publishing many of the cardinal’s more accessible papers. Though far from complete—the archives of the Quai d’Orsay were originally closed to Avenel-his editorial labours made it possible for the first scholarly biographies to be written. The most notable of these was the six-volume monument to Richelieu that began issuing from the pen of Gabriel Hanotaux in 1893, the year before he became France’s foreign minister. The verdict of French historians like Hanotaux at the turn of the twentieth century on Richelieu’s ministry was unequivocal. The cardinal was one of the truly great figures, not just in the history of France but in the history of Europe. At home, Richelieu laid the foundations for the French absolute monarchy by taming the great nobility, subduing the military might of the Huguenots, and centralizing the state bureaucracy under the all-seeing eye of the royal council and its intendants.
Richelieu and his bishops?
Authors: Bergin Joseph
Published: November 2023

It is striking that, despite the wide-ranging contributions of modern scholarship towards a better understanding of seventeenth-century France, religious and ecclesiastical issues should, to a considerable extent, still run somewhat parallel to the central concerns of political history, however broadly defined. The subject of the present essay forms an interesting case in point. To the historian of French church, the period of Richelieu’s ministry generally represents a strategically important phase in the development of the Counter Reformation in France, which is usually seen as being borne along by the ever-widening influence of the dévots. To the political historian, it is a period when the monarchy tightened its grip on the levers of power throughout the kingdom, in the course of which Richelieu himself survived the most serious political challenge of all to his ministerial position from the same dévots whose influence he then proceeded to shatter.
Richelieu, Education, And The State
Authors: Brockliss Laurence
Published: November 2023

On his death Richelieu bequeathed an unspecified, but modest portion of his fortune to endow a new collége de plein exercice at the University of Paris. On first sight the cardinal’s limited generosity seems scarcely worthy of comment, all the more since the mooted college was never established. After all, it had long been common for princes and prelates to curry favour with posterity and appease the wrath of their God by leaving money for educational purposes. Arguably, Richelieu was merely acting within a hallowed tradition. Indeed, the cardinal had little choice in the matter for the bequest was not so much a gift as a debt repaid. In the late 1620s another Parisian college de plein exercice, the College de Calvi, had been pulled down in order to enlarge the Sorbonne and construct the magnificent college chapel in which the cardinal intended to deposit his bones.
The Personnel
Authors: Hamilton C I
Published: November 2023

In the days of sail, a simple equation seemed largely to account for the relative standing at sea of the various nations: naval power equals the number of seamen in the population. Landsmen could be sent to sea, and very often were, but it was the men brought up from their youth as seafarers, whether on fishing vessels, merchantmen, or warships, who were thought of as best fit to man the war fleet. In the long series of wars between Britain and France, from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, the French government often had cause to be conscious of the great superiority in size of the British seafaring population over their own. British naval power depended only to a certain extent on the skills of admirals or financial strength: what underpinned it were the ‘nurseries of the Royal Navy’—the thriving merchant and fishing fleets.
Collusion: Patterns Of Complicity
Authors: Fulbrook Mary
Published: November 2023

In the aftermath of the collapse of the GDR, accusations and counteraccusations were flung about with abandon concerning degrees of complicity in sustaining a dictatorial regime. Who had been a Stasi informer? Who had made what compromises in order to further his or her career? Would the regime have collapsed much sooner, had the people not fitted into its patterns of pressure, participation, and conformity? To what extent was the successful exertion of domination by a narrow political elite actually predicated on the deep penetration of society, the monitoring of, and interference in, a whole range of everyday social processes, by the multiple, ubiquitous tentacles of the Stasi? What, in short, was the role played by the vast masses of the East German people in allowing the East German dictatorship to reproduce itself and develop over such a considerable period of time?
The Growth Of Political Activism
Authors: Fulbrook Mary
Published: November 2023

The East German regime never succeeded in quelling dissent, discontent, or opposition. What was new about the 1980s was not the ‘growth of opposition’-as so often argued-nor even the growth of discontent, but rather a combination of other factors. These include: the changing organizational forms and cultural orientations of a growing minority of political activists, who were seeking, not to overthrow the regime, nor even to escape from the GDR, but rather to improve it from within; the changing domestic political context of their actions, including both the growth of structural spaces within which to act, and the changing responses of the state to what they denigrated as ‘hostile-negative forces (feindlich-negative Kr  üfte)’; and, finally, changing aspects of the international context.
The Peculiarities Of The East German Dictatorship
Authors: Fulbrook Mary
Published: November 2023

How should one seek to understand the dynamics of the development, stabilization, and ultimate demise of the GDR? What specific concepts, and what broader interpretive framework, have most purchase in seeking to explain both the quiet longevity and the rapid collapse of the GDR? A number of hypotheses have been advanced in the course of this book, which must be addressed more explicitly here. And how, in broader terms, should this remarkable experiment be evaluated, both historically and morally? Was the communist project inevitably doomed to fail, foundering on the rocks of its internal contradictions? Were the intrinsically humanistic and emancipatory goals of Marxism inevitably jeopardized by internal contradictions, by an essential Lebensunf  ühigkeit (non-viability)? Or was the ultimate collapse more a matter of unfavourable historical conditions for the communist project? Clearly these are exceedingly broad philosophical as well as socialhistorical questions, which-even prior to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe-have exercised thinkers grappling with the distortions of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism, and succeeding variants of communist repression, for many decades.
Renovatio or Conciliatio? How Renaissances Happened in Venice
Authors: Brown Patricia Fortini
Published: November 2023

Paradigms, once fixed, are notoriously hard to put aside. A recent book on the city-state in five cultures from the Bronze Age to the modern period offers a case in point. Seeking to broaden the canon by taking a comparative and global approach, the book also inadvertently highlights the problem facing students of European history in the Renaissance period. The section on Italy features a three-part bibliography with the following headings: (a) Italian city-states generally; (b) Florence; and (c) other city-states. These categories tidily sum up the historiographical problem. Cities as disparate as Ferrara, Genoa, Milan, Orvieto, Padua, Perugia, Pistoia, Rome, Siena, and Venice are relegated to a miscellany, effectively serving as foils to Florence, the ultimate paradigm, not only of the Renaissance city state, but also of ‘Renaissance’ as a cultural phenomenon. Indeed, despite efforts to widen the canon, Florentine studies still tend to hold the field and to dominate the literature.
For the Sake of Simple Folk
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

In this book R. W. Scribner provides the first detailed analysis of the forms of propaganda - such as illustrated broadsheets, picture books, title pages, and book illustrations - which were aimed at the illiterate and semi-literate during the Reformation, and reproduces many of the vast corpus of prints which still survive in scattered locations in Germany. Dr Scribner advances new and original interpretations of these illustrations, revealing how visual propaganda exploited popular belief and the coarser aspects of popular culture, while at the same time being a product of them. This, he suggests, explains why the Reformation appealed to the broad masses of sixteenth-century people, even though the propaganda was unable to educate them in the more complex theological aspects of the Reformation message. As well as raising important questions about the Reformation as a religious phenomenon, the book is a contribution to the understanding of early modern popular culture, and the nature of propaganda in a pre-industrial society; it is also a detailed historical study of the sixteenth-century woodcut. In develolping an interdisciplinary analysis combining the methods of iconography, semiology, sociology, and folklore, Dr Scribner presents a fruitful new approach to the study of popular mentalities. Hailed as a pioneering study of great importance on its original publication in 1981, For the Sake of Simple Folk is now available in paperback for the first time, with a new Introduction and additional chapter. 'The reproduction of such a formidable body of "documentation" in the text is a major achievement . . . important and pioneering study', Journal of Ecclesiastical History
Old People and their Families
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

It is a mystery how so many poor people survived so far into old age on the resources described so far. It is improbable that paid work, charity and poor relief on the scale known to be available, however ‘packaged’, could have provided for the survival of most poor old people. Some historians have suggested that support from the family might have filled the gap. Non-historians often take for granted that the family must have been the mainstay of older people in pre-industrial England. On the other hand, historians of the family have created conflicting images of the relationships of old people with their families, and historians of household structure have asserted that younger people had little obligation to support their elders.
The Campaign for Old-Age Pensions
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

Not all old people were poor—some were wealthy and powerful—but many were very poor in the later nineteenth century when poverty in old age was defined as a social problem more distinctively than before. Increasingly state pensions were demanded as the solution to this problem. This discourse about aged poverty contributed to the construction of a definition of old age which was to be influential throughout the twentieth century: the ‘old-age pensioner’ emerged as the archetypical older person.
The ‘Menace’ of an Ageing Population, the 1920s to 1950s
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

The British birth-rate started to fall from the later nineteenth century. One outcome was a change in the age structure of the population and the beginning of a dramatic long-run increase in the proportion of older people. Old people became more numerous, in absolute and relative terms, over the twentieth century. Decline in the birth-rate was not accompanied by rising mortality among older age groups, indeed rather the reverse, hence British society was ‘older’ in the inter-war years than it had been since the mid-eighteenth century. The percentage of the population of Great Britain composed of males over 65 and females over 60 was 6.2 in 1901, 9.6 in 1931, 12 in 1941, 13.5 in 1951, and the rise continued thereafter. Also the labour force was ageing. The percentage of the 15 to 65 age group (the bulk of people of working age) who were over age 40, had been 35 in the mid-nineteenth century and was 45 in 1947. Britain was undergoing a decisive shift from a predominantly youthful age structure in the mid-nineteenth century to a predominantly older one. The fact of this shift and the realization that its economic and social implications were likely to be profound were gradually recognized and discussed.
Inventing Geriatric Medicine
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

One response to the growing proportion of older people in twentieth-century societies has been greater attention to their health. Interest in the (ill) health of older people has a very long history1 but it was always a marginal and unfashionable enterprise among medical specialists, and by the early twentieth century both medical understanding of older people and capacity to cure their ailments remained severely limited as, indeed, did the capacities of most medical specialisms.
The Making of a Local Saint
Authors: Thacker Alan
Published: November 2023

In 695Seaxburh, abbess of Ely, took an important decision. She ordered that the bones of her predecessor, Æthelthryth, who had died sixteen years earlier, be raised from their resting-place in the nuns’ cemetery and placed in the abbey church in a new shrine (locellus). Brethren from the monastery, ordered to go out and search for blocks of stone from which to make this sepulchre, returned with a sarcophagus beautifully made of white marble, which they had found outside the walls of the deserted Roman fortress of Grantchester. These preliminaries accomplished, the abbess proceeded to the solemn ceremony of raising the body. A tent was erected over the burialplace, and the whole congregation of the double monastery, divided into choirs of men and women, stood around it chanting psalms. The abbess and a few companions went inside and the onlookers heard a loud cry: ‘Sit glorianomini Domini’. The abbess in the act of raising her predecessor’s remains had discovered them to be incorrupt. Shortly afterwards the entrance to the tent was opened, a doctor was called, and Æthelthryth was seen lying on a bed like one asleep, the linen clothes in which her body had been wrapped as fresh and intact as on the day that they had first covered her body. The nuns washed the corpse, wrapped it in new robes, carried it to the church, and placed it within the new sarcophagus which the brethren had brought from Grantchester.
Universal and Local Saints in Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: Cubitt Catherine
Published: November 2023

Although contemporary writers regarded all saints as sharing one life, that of Christ, saints and their cults were not uniform or unchanging phenomena. Rather they were complex and variable features of early medieval society in which they held a central place. Saints’ cults functioned in different ways for different communities and interest groups. This paper will explore the cult of local saints in Anglo-Saxon England and its relation to that of universal saints. This distinction immediately raises a problem of definition. What was a universal saint? There is no simple opposition between universal and local saints: even so widely venerated a saint as Peter acted as the local patron of Rome. The transfer of relics from one church to another transplanted the cult of a saint local to one place to another. For the purposes of this essay, I have defined a universal saint as one whose cult transcended regional boundaries and exclusive monastic affiliations and was widely celebrated throughout the early medieval West.
A Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Saints
Authors: Blair John
Published: November 2023

This is a preliminary list of saints whose principal cult sites are known to have existed, or can reasonably be inferred to have existed, in pre-Conquest England. It does not claim to be more than a first step towards what should eventually be a book-length work, and its main purpose is to provide some foundation for the arguments offered in Chapter 13 above. No attempt is made to give full biographies or bibliographies for major figures; the saints most fully treated here are on the whole the obscure or previously unknown ones, for whom no ready means of reference exists. Welsh, Cornish, and Continental saints are omitted, even if they appear in the resting-place lists, except when their principal relics are known to have been imported into England before 1066. Also omitted are cults of major figures, for instance archbishops of Canterbury or people mentioned by Bede, which have no pre-Conquest evidence and are best interpreted as late extrapolations from historical sources. Names in both these categories which occur in any of the resting-place lists are included in a summary list at the end, which therefore provides, in conjunction with the main catalogue, a complete index to the lists. Like wise omitted are English saints (e.g. Willibald or the Hewalds) whose careers were abroad and whose shrines and cult sites were outside England. Obscure saints with Anglo-Saxon names known only from late or anecdotal sources (e.g. St Ælfgar of Selwood Forest) are, however, included: this may bring in some ghost figures, but it seems better to be as inclusive as possible in the hope of further evidence coming to light. However, the names of saints for whom, or for whose cults, there is no explicit evidence before 1066 are printed in italics, to signal their hypothetical status.
Local Saints and Place-Names in Cornwall
Authors: Padel O J
Published: November 2023

‘Why do so many place-names contain the names of unheard-of saints?’ is a question asked by visitors to any Celtic region, including Cornwall. Attempting to answer the question raises important issues concerning differences between Celtic- and English-speaking areas in matters such as settlement-patterns and the conversion to Christianity. It would be impossible to deal fully with these issues within the scope of one article. The aim here is, by examining closely one Celtic area, Cornwall, to draw attention to these differences between Celtic- and English-speaking areas, and to suggest a partial answer to why the differences exist. The topic of saints and placenames has previously been studied by scholars in various disciplines, most thoroughly perhaps in Brittany by Largillière in the 1920s; but his discussion is by now somewhat dated, so the time is right for another look, and for placing the particular problems of one Celtic area before scholars in other fields.
Albion Ascendant
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

Between the restoration of Charles II and the battle of Waterloo, England gradually emerged as the core nation of the most formidable superpower the world had yet seen. Wilfrid Prest investigates this remarkable transformation from domestic instability and external weakness to global, economic, and military predominance. Geographically, the main focus is on England and Wales, but Prest also analyses the broader British context, discussing the role played by Ireland and Scotland, as well as the interrelations between England, Europe, and the wider world. He examines the lives of ordinary people as well as the ruling elite, and explores the distinctive nature of women's experiences, allowing the voices of the past to speak directly to the modern reader. The result is a lively, up-to-date, and comprehensive overview of Britain's 'long eighteenth century'. It will remain a standard text on the subject for many years to come.
Defending Ireland
Authors: O’Halpin Eunan
Published: November 2023

This book is the first to draw together the various strands of Irish national security policy and practice in a single chronological study, from independence in 1922 right up to the present day. Dr O'Halpin analyses the rapid emergence of a complex external security policy combining an absolute commitment to military neutrality and independent defence with close co-operation with Britain over issues of joint concern such as security and immigration. He traces the development of the army and police force in the new Irish state; and examines the state's reaction to the enduring republican threat, casting fresh light on how far the state was willing to put key constitutional protections into abeyance in its conflict with the republican movement. The book also examines the clandestine intelligence activities of belligerent powers during the Second World War, documenting the growth of the state's close wartime security understandings with the Allied powers, and the evolution of Cold War links with MI5 and the CIA. It investigates the evolution of post-war defence policy, and the activities of the defence forces in relation to the Northern Ireland crisis, as well as in their primary tasks of defending the state from external aggression and of contributing to UN peace-keeping operations. Dr O'Halpin highlights continuities as well as innovations in state security policy as the obligations and opportunities of European Union membership grate more and more against the absolutist rhetoric of neutrality. This book is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the development of the Irish state in the twentieth century.
The Man And His Books
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

That such an unlikely figure as Surtees ever became a novelist is largely ascribable to the fact that he was born a younger son and remained in that inauspicious state for the first twenty-six years of his life. He came of an old but not particularly wealthy family of small landowners in County Durham, another branch of which had produced his namesake and cousin, the well-known antiquarian and local historian. His name and local connections provided him therefore with a more spacious background than his actual prospects seemed likely to perpetuate. Like many a thrifty squire’s son he was educated locally, first at a small private school in the neighbourhood, and then for one year at Durham Grammar School. At the age of 14 his formal schooling came to an end. He thus escaped one of the worst misfortunes that could have befallen a future novelist-six or seven years unrelenting subjection to the mechanical grind of Latin and Greek which passed for education in the great public schools and the two ancient universities of England at that time. Whatever else can be said of Surtees’ style, it is free from the ponderousness and rotundity which characterize the prose of most formally educated mid-Victorians.
Morals
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

In 1856 Lady Charlotte Schreiber received a letter from her 21-year-old son who had just sat his final degree examination at Cambridge. It announced that he was going to Paris for a few days with some friends. ‘God grant,’ she wrote anxiously in her journal, ‘he come out safe from that hotbed of iniquity.’ In all probability, like most mothers, she was thinking of sexual iniquity; and with over 50,000 prostitutes registered there in 1854, there was some foundation for her opinion of the French capital. Any doubts about the equal claims of London, however, must have been extinguished by the publication in 1862 of the fourth volume of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, which dealt with prostitutes, thieves and swindlers, and beggars. The section on the first of these categories, written mainly by one of Mayhew’s collaborators, the journalist Bracebridge Hemyng, was by far the largest of the three.
Popular Attitudes
Authors: Zweiniger-Bargielowska Ina
Published: November 2023

The reduction of consumption was the most important consequence of the war for the civilian population alongside air raids, evacuation and disruption of family life. In contrast with air raids or evacuation, rationing and shortages affected everybody, and the end of the war did not put an end to austerity, which persisted until the early 1950s. Drawing on a range of contemporary surveys, this chapter shows that attitudes to rationing and austerity varied depending on the policy as well as between social groups. The austerity policy was generally accepted as a necessary sacrifice for the war effort and fair shares were popular, although the public was not always convinced that a particular scheme was fair. At times there was widespread discontent, especially with regard to certain aspects of food policy, but generally morale was maintained during the war. The continuation and, indeed, intensification of austerity after the war, in the face of expectations of improved consumption engendered by victory, depressed morale and contributed to growing disaffection with the Attlee government while the Conservative critique of austerity was instrumental to the party’s recovery after 1945.
Conclusion
Authors: Zweiniger-Bargielowska Ina
Published: November 2023

Rationing, austerity and fair shares were essential components of the British war effort and post-war reconstruction. The policy was the principal means by which the government facilitated the dramatic reduction of civilian consumption and reallocation of resources for mobilization in a total war. Rationing and controls were never just a straightforward response to scarcity but comprised a major element of external and internal economic policy which, after the war, came to be associated with a distinctive ideological perspective. Domestic austerity was a response to balance of payments constraints both during and after the war by economizing on imports, especially from the dollar area, as well as contributing to the export drive. Simultaneously, rationing and controls of and subsidies on basic goods were an integral element of anti-inflationary policy under full employment. Over and above these policy objectives, ideological considerations came to the fore after 1945.
Fiefs And Vassals
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

Fiefs and Vassals sets out to change our view of the medieval world. It offers a fundamental challenge to orthodox conceptions of feudalism. Susan Reynolds argues that the concepts of the fief and of vassalage, as understood by historians of medieval Europe, were constructed by post-medieval scholars from the works of medieval academic lawyers and that they provide a bad guide to the realities of medieval society. The rules of the late medieval law-books did not derive from earlier relations between lords and their warriors; in so far as they derived from anything before the twelfth century it was from practices developed by great churches to safeguard their property. Both in detail and in general, however, they were not a direct reflection of social values at any time. This is a radical new examination of social relations within the noble class and between lords and their vassals, the distillation of wide-ranging research by a leading medieval historian. It will revolutionize the way we think of the Middle Ages.
The Problem of Feudalism
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

Feudalism, to any members of the general public who ever refer to it, stands for almost any hierarchical and oppressive system. Bosses or landlords who bully their employees or tenants are being feudal. If they bully them fiercely they are worse: they are positively medieval. Medieval historians may dislike this hostile sidelight on their period but they are not on the whole much more precise in their use of the words feudal and feudalism. As E. A. R. Brown and C. van de Kieft both pointed out independently in 1974, feudalism can mean a lot of different things. A good many medievalists have, however, continued to maintain that, whatever the difficulties of describing medieval society in general as feudal, there is a narrow, technical, more precise sense to feudalism which retains its utility. This is characterized by such words as ‘the system of feudal and vassal institutions’, les liens feoédo-vassaliques, i rapporti feudo-vassallatici, or das Lehnswesen, for which I shall use the rather ugly and clumsy, but convenient, expressions feudo-vassalic relations or feudo-vassalic institutions.
Fiefs and Medieval Property Relations
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

This section, like that on the concept of vassalage in the last chapter, is not a statement of what I believe but of what I take to be the general view taken by those who write about fiefs. As I explained more fully at the beginning of chapter 2, it must be read with that in mind. References to vassals, and in particular to fiefholders as vassals, that appear to ignore the arguments of that chapter are made here because the historians whose views I am trying to summarize very often refer to fiefholders as vassals .
Gaul and the Kingdom of the Franks
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

By the time of the Merovingians, ideas and norms about property seem to have been fairly similar all over Gaul. Everywhere the basic form of landed property was what Levy called ‘private ownership’, and there now seems no reason to suppose that the barbarian invaders of Gaul had recently been converted to this from more primitive and communal ideas. The traditional belief that Franks, Burgundians, and Visigoths progressed at different rates from ‘Germanic’ clan property towards absolute ownership according to their degree of Romanization rests on little but a priori and outworn theories of social evolution. Roman forms and traditions survived better in the south than the north, but to judge from the law-codes the chief difference between the laws of property in different parts of Gaul, apart from differences in terminology and procedures of litigation, may have been in the rules of inheritance. In practice, even when those who had to resolve disputes were agreed about the appropriate code to follow and knew what it said, they may well have found that it did not cover their case. The varying drift of local custom, subject to all the pressures of power and influence, must have created many more haphazard variations, whether cases were decided by what people at the time may have called Roman law or whether they followed what historians call barbarian law. None of these variations affects the fundamental ideas and norms about the landed property held by nobles and other free persons.
England
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

Ever since Sir Henry Spelman used the words of French feudists, backed by what was in the circumstances an impressive amount of genuine medieval evidence, to explain ‘the original, growth, propagation and condition of feuds and tenures by knight-service, in England’, ideas about feudalism in England have been derived from ideas of feudalism in France and yet, paradoxically, have been different from them in several ways. Deep-rooted traditions of linguistic and pseudo-racial nationalism have fostered the belief that feudalism came to England from France as a result of the Norman Conquest, yet attention here has always been focused on military service and the rights of kings over those who held their land directly from them, both of which, as I have argued, seem hard to find in anything like comparable form in France. One reason why the paradox has not attracted more critical thought is that these phenomena were very early on incorporated into the general model of non-Marxist feudalism, so that those who started from the model and were primarily—or only—interested in England naturally took them for granted, just as those who were primarily interested in France took for granted the contrasting situation there. The model has obscured the evidence for historians both sides of the Channel. Another reason is that since the twelfth century the peculiar development of English law has discouraged English lawyers and legal historians from looking at all closely at other countries.
The Emergence and Consolidation of the ‘Tax State’. The Sixteenth Century
Authors: Schulze Winfried
Published: November 2023

The early modem period is crucial for the development of modem structures of political organization and their legitimation: this seems to be a truism after so much research emphasis on national history, and rather less on comparative research. In nearly all political units the power of the centre was enhanced, marginalizing the regions and localities. Although there were specific differences within each ‘national’ development, there were also a great number of similarities in the processes of historical change. Indeed, by viewing historical change as a series of processes which do not fit a tidy model of periodization we can study parallel historical phenomena which interrelated in the process of change. Such an approach facilitates comparative research, even if the separate ‘national’ cases retain their own chronological distinctiveness.
I. The Finances of the Austrian Monarchy and the Italian States
Authors: Capra Carlo
Published: November 2023

The emergence of the Austrian monarchy as a great power is one of the central features of European history in the decades around 1700. After the Turks were routed under the walls of Vienna in 1683, the whole of Hungary and Transylvania was subjected to Habsburg rule, and the frontier with the Ottoman empire was pushed further south with the conquest of Belgrade and the Banat in 1718. Meanwhile, the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713-14 had left Austria in possession of modem Belgium, the duchies of Milan and Mantua and the kingdoms of Naples and Sardinia, the last to be exchanged for Sicily in 1720. In less than forty years, the Habsburg territories had more than doubled in extent, while their overall population had grown from some 7 to over 18 million inhabitants.
The Struggle for Great Power Status and the End of the Old Fiscal Regime
Authors: Bonney Richard
Published: November 2023

Mercantilist and Cameralist ideas had made a lasting impression on European rulers by the eighteenth century. ‘A financial system’, wrote Frederick the Great in his memoirs, ‘handed over by father to son and constantly improved, can change a government’s position. From being originally poor it can make a government so rich that it can throw its grain into the scales of the balance between the great European powers.’ Rulers recognized that there was an intimate connection between economic growth, the prosperity of the inhabitants of their lands, and the growth in their fiscal and military power. Joseph II claimed that he was ‘no more attached to the military than to finance’; had he been able to reduce the size of his army and make his subjects labourers he would have done so; but his responsibility was to ‘combine the necessary security with the country’s welfare’. On another occasion, he denounced rulers preoccupied with ‘insignificant conquests’ and ‘futile advantages’ while they diminished the true capital of the state and weakened its resources for years into the future. Similar concerns were expressed by rulers of quite small states.
Public Credit
Authors: Komer Martin
Published: November 2023

The earlier chapters of this section dealing with the financial structures of the state revealed the fact that the inadequacy of states’ fiscal foundations constantly compelled those in power to borrow money (Chapter 13), and that servicing the debt, which included both the payment of interest and the repayment by instalments of the money borrowed, constituted in most states one of the most significant, if not the most significant, items of expenditure (Chapter 12). The state which successfully repaid its debts and managed to produce an annual surplus-in short, the ‘savings state’-was the exception. Where this happened, the problem was how to manage the profits-whether this should be by creating a cash reserve, by purely financial investments, or by other forms of profitable investment.