bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Local Government and Administration
Authors: Pollard A J
Published: November 2023

Institutionally England was one of the more centralized of late-medieval European kingdoms. Even a region as distant from the ‘capital’ as the north-east was subject to royal control through scores of local officials-sheriffs, coroners, escheators, justices of the peace and their assistants-answerable to the offices of state at Westminster. In theory local government was the king’s. In practice, since royal officers in the localities were men of local roots and standing, and not the king’s paid agents, local government and administration was dominated by local landed elites. In the north-east, the resulting propensity for local government to fall under the sway of mighty subjects was intensified by the distance from Westminster, by the complex and fragmented structure of government in the region, and by the need to make special provision for the defence of the border. The structure of local government itself, as well as its staffing, tended further to enhance the power of the magnates at the expense of the Crown.
Relationships
Authors: Connolly S J
Published: November 2023

So far we have been concerned primarily with the Protestant population, and more particularly its upper levels. It is time to turn to a consideration of the wider framework of social and political relationships within which this elite existed. In doing so, however, we enter a zone of some confusion. To see this, it is only necessary to look at some of the different ways in which the governing class of eighteenth-century Ireland has been defined in recent historical writing. Its members appear variously as the ‘Anglo-Irish’, the ‘Anglo-Irish ascendancy’, the ‘Protestant ascendancy’, and ‘colonists’. Behind each of these terms lies a very different set of assumptions regarding both the character of the elite itself and its relationship to other parts of the population. Yet these differences are rarely considered, much less debated. What one enters, in fact, is less a minefield than a fun-fair.
Introduction
Authors: Harvey Barbara
Published: November 2023

Early in the period covered by this book, the Benedictine monks, to whom it will devote a good deal of attention, passed into the background of religious life: wherever the spiritual action was after the mid-twelfth century, it was not in their choirs and cloisters. Released from the burden of spiritual leadership, which passed to new orders and eventually to the friars, the Benedictines achieved a remarkable degree of identification with the secular life of their times, and particularly with upper-class life. Considered as an expression of human frailty, the extent to which this came about occasions no surprise. But given the fact that the monks continued to have liturgical duties which were not shared by secular society, and a distinctive horarium, or timetable for the day, to accommodate these, the extent to which they were not in fact separated from the society around them was indeed remarkable.
Diet
Authors: Harvey Barbara
Published: November 2023

A Recent notable work by a distinguished medievalist concludes with this testimony: ‘I do not think that enquiry must be defeated by lack of material.’ Many will recognize the source of this quotation: it is Professor Anne Hudson’s Premature Reformation. How much more do the historians of diet need the conviction it expresses than the historians of Lollardy, whose adherents so greatly esteemed the written word and did so much to procure its circulation! Historical sources on diet are at best reticent, and often fail us altogether. It will be clear that in what follows, and especially in what I shall say about quantities and the energy value of food, I make these words my own.
Religious Houses and Chantries: Dissolutions and Surrenders
Authors: Skeeters Martha C
Published: November 2023

The dissolution of religious houses, which occurred in Bristol between 1536 and I 539, and the suppression of chantries in 1548 involved two very different kinds of ecclesiastical institutions. The religious lived communally and were far more independent of lay influence than the chantry priests, many of whom were stipendiaries paid by lay trustees. Nevertheless the eradication of the religious houses and the chantries both mirrored and brought about dramatic changes in the urban community and caused lasting harm to the local church and clerical community. The dissolutions also reflected and effected changes in the status of the city’s clergy. Given the drama and significance of the changes, it is notable that there was no lay resistance to the dissolutions and among the clergy, only friars defied the authorities.It is understandable that by 1538 most of the beleagured clergy would see resistance as futile and would be ducking for cover. Much had occurred since 1533 when clergy of various groups had co-operated to oppose Latimer. It is, in fact, remarkable that three houses of friars refused to surrender for a brief time. The response of the city’s laity, however, requires further investigation.
Richard II ‘s Councils
Authors: Goodman Anthony
Published: November 2023

In the fourteenth century the king sought counsel from magnates, leading royal officers, ‘official ‘ councillors, and others who happened to be staying with him, and from certain members of his Household. More formally, magnates gave advice when summoned as Lords of Parliament, or to Great Councils meeting the king at one of his residences. Coincidentally, there developed a formal group of official councillors, the King ‘s Council. This met in regular sessions, and was often, but not exclusively, concerned with devising ways of executing policy decisions referred to it by the king, and with making decisions on minor or routine matters. Under Edward III, Professor Ormrod has remarked, ‘it is difficult to find any aspect of administration in which it [the King ‘s Council] was not involved ‘.Key bureaucratic features of the Council beeame fixed by or in the early fourteenth century. It was customary for councillors to be retained as such, for them to take an oath of office, and to receive fees or wages for conciliar service. The Council was composed chiefly but not exclusively of royal officials. The chancellor and the treasurer were ex officio councillors, but justices were summoned to sit at the Council board when legal issues were on the agenda, or when the Council was sitting as a court.
Richard II and the Literary Arts
Authors: Eberle Patricia ℱ
Published: November 2023

In the literary as in the visual arts, the reign of Richard II coincides with a period of remarkable achievement. Although not all texts can be dated securely, this period includes the work of four of the most important poets in Middle English: Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, William Langland, and the anonymous poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Despite their wide variety in style and subject-matter, it is possible to find common themes among the works of these poets, including themes related to questions of kingship or governance, broadly defined. Any attempt to move beyond this very general statement, however, and establish a connection between individual works and the policies or literary tastes of Richard II himself is forced to confront the scarcity of direct evidence for royal patronage of those literary works most highly valued today.
The Breakdown of Equilibrium in the East: From the Bosnian Crisis to the Balkan Wars, I908 –I9I2
Authors: Stevenson David
Published: November 2023

Austria-Hungary’s annexation on 5 October 1908 of the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina ushered in six months of European tension. It resulted in a trial of armed strength, in the Balkan if not the broader Continental arena, and it set a menacing precedent. Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria all raised their armies above normal peacetime levels and. at the peak called out between them perhaps a quarter of a million extra men. By throwing into harsh relief the prevailing balance of forces, the crisis stimulated armaments development from the Baltic to the Adriatic. It ended a decade of Austro-Russian d éetente and revived the confrontation in the East between the two alliance blocs. Its profoundest impact was reserved, however, for relations between the Habsburg Monarchy and the South Slavs.
Richelieu, the Grands, And The French army
Authors: parrott David
Published: November 2023

The great aristocracy has traditionally been accorded a secondary, and essentially negative, role in studies of Richelieu’s ministry. As one historian pointed out in a recent article, the nobles in seventeenth-century France have been the victims of a crude historicism which sees the rise of royal absolutism as inevitable, and even praiseworthy, so that resistance by the nobility appears as mere short-sighted and futile obstructionism. The great aristocratic families have largely been depicted as a group acted upon by ‘new’ historical forces, rather than political actors in their own right. Allocated an over-simplified social structure and an apparently shared and undisputed set of political objectives, the grands can be wrapped up in convenient assumptions about feudal anachronism and group selfishness. Thus packaged, they are pushed to one side of the historical stage, in good time to be unveiled a few decades later, safely locked up in the ‘gilded prison’ of Versailles.
Loveday To Ludlow
Authors: Johnson P A
Published: November 2023

Duke Richard spent the summer of 1456 at Sandal, 1 whence he was supposedly defending the northern border, but was, in fact, expending most of his energies composing flamboyant letters of defiance to the Scottish king.2 Invasion scares in Cornwall (May), the Isle of Wight (June), and Kent (August)3 may have given his aggressive posturing a ready acclamation in the southern shires.4 In the North, his sympathies for the Nevilles left him with a more prejudiced audience.
Conclusion: The Secular and the Sacred
Authors: Henderson John
Published: November 2023

This book has examined one of the most ubiquitous forms of association in late medieval Italy, the confraternity. We have seen that in Florence it provided important spiritual and material support for its lay brothers and, in conjunction with hospitals, a significant form of relief to the poor beyond the membership. In this way the fraternity came to institutionalize the two main imperatives of the highest Theological Virtue, Charity: to promote the vertical links with God through the deepening of devotion among the laity and the horizontal links between men through neighbourly love and support
The Tariff Commission at Work
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

An examination of some of the day-to-day aspects of the administration and operation of the Tariff Commission between 1904 and the general elections of 1910 tells us much about the methods, biases, and attitudes of its organizers which does not readily emerge from its published writings. Recent research has increased our knowledge of the ideological baggage of the Tariff Reform League, particularly in the context of Edwardian right-wing nationalism, and of the TRL’s relationship with the Conservative Party. The paucity of records, however, has meant that less is known of its internal operation and decisionmaking, and of the interaction between League headquarters and the 250 provincial branches and forty women’s association branches. Of the Birmingham Liberal Unionist Association’s Imperial Tariff Committee, or of the Free Trade League, Free Food League, and Free Trade Union, even less is known.
The Cotton Industry and Retaliation
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

There was probably no manufacturing industry where Free Trade sentiment was so concentrated as it was amongst Lancashire’s cotton masters. And perhaps nowhere but Manchester was the merchant’s voice so synonymous with the city’s own image of its culture and its interest. With around 80 per cent of its output sent abroad, and with a long tradition stretching back well before the Anti-Com Law League, the industry’s attachment to Free Trade was an indefinable mixture of immediate practical utility and religious faith. Over generations, pragmatic self-interest had rationalized itself indistinguishably into economic and political principle.
Portraiture, Portrayal, and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women
Authors: Simons Patricia
Published: November 2023

Jacob Burckhardt’s view of the Renaissance is summed up in the phrases ‘the Development of the Individual’ and ‘the Discovery of the World and of Man’ where the Italian ‘was the first-born among the sons of modern Europe’.1 Collectivity was replaced by autonomy, objectivity overruled interpersonal relations, secularization superseded blind faith, and mercantile imperialism extended man’s dominion. This patriarchal, bourgeois, nineteenth-century vision still influences characterizations of the Renaissance; those examining visual culture, for instance, tend to associate Burckhardt’s phrases with the institution of individualistic portraiture and naturalistic style.
Popular Culture
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

‘Popular culture’ is an elusive concept, and in this period can be distinguished only arbitrarily from ‘popular belief’. It can mean common social custom, such as the practice of strangers sharing a common bed in inns.2 It can be taken to be mass as opposed to elite culture, the village fair rather than the exclusive dances of the well-to-do.3 Seen from another angle, it can be contrasted to ‘official’ culture, almost as a sub-culture outside socially controlled modes of behaviour. This is the culture of wayfaring folk, journeymen, of the plebeian lower strata, as opposed to the regulated life of those organised in guilds or corporations. Another approach could define it as superstition, as a pattern of behaviour dependent on having access to and control over supernatural power.5 The use of skin taken from a hanged man as a talisman against evil exemplifies this definition. Finally, it might be related to elemental aspects of material life, to basic biological rhythms such as reproduction, nourishment and the cyclesofnature.6 Shepherds’ calendars and blood-letting tables illustrate this usage. The third and fourth of these definitions merge with ‘popular belief’, with attempts to contact or deal with the supernatural. Popular belief in this sense was often set apart from officially sanctioned belief, as unorthodoxy to which the Church either turned a blind eye, or which it sought to channel as far as possible away from heterodoxy. Popular devotion to the saints during the later middle ages was of this nature.
Emergence: to 1688
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

Iclubs and societies were clearly among the most numerous, diverse, and dynamic organizations in late Georgian society. Challenged only by drinking houses and churches in their level of support, they flourished throughout the urban system, and came to occupy a central position in British social life. Whereas diaries of the late seventeenth century recorded largely traditional social activities, with only minor reference to clubs and societies, by 1800 association meetings figure time and again in the pages of private journals. That of the American Samuel Curwen, who lived in London after 1775, shows him to have been a keen devotee of voluntary societies. Over two months, in February and March 1781, he took part almost twenty times in a society-related event, going to meetings of the SPG, the Je Ne Sais Quoi Club, and his great love, the masonic order, with its lodge nights and less formal gatherings of brethren. Though he went in smart company to auction rooms, taverns, coffee-houses, eating houses, and church, only private socializing, usually at home with fellow lodgers, surpassed his society commitments. Another London diarist, the artist Joseph Farington, noted how during the winter of 1793—4 he spent much of his time (apart from private socializing) at meetings of the Royal Academy, the Royal Academy Club, and the Society of Antiquaries. Particularly striking (as with Curwen) was the amount of time spent informally with other club members, away from formal meetings, suggesting a wider, ripple effect across social life. Club activities were even incorporated into the civic calendar, as can be seen from the journal of Richard Clark, lord mayor of London in 1784 to 1785, who was entertained at a succession of society dinners and events throughout the season.
Medieval Images of Old Age
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

The translation of surviving classical texts was most active in Europe, including England, from the twelfth century and reached its peak in the thirteenth. Classical ideas about the life cycle were disseminated through Latin dictionaries containing citations from the classics, selected by topic. On old age Seneca and Cicero were most often cited.1 The classical sources provided a language in which old age could be and was discussed and described, though its social meanings and the purposes of such discourse changed in the context of Christianity. Old age had a particular place in theological narratives.
Old Age in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

Minois believes that with the coming of the Renaissance, youth—associated with rebirth and creativity—was celebrated and hostility to old people pervaded European culture, creating a literature of lamentation and invective about old age, directed especially against old women.1 Keith Thomas has argued, in an English context,2 that the pace of change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially with the invention of printing and the wide dissemination of new religion and new science, led to the scorning of old people with old ideas.
An Unfailing Zest for Life’: Images and Self-Images of Older People in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

How did older people from differing backgrounds see themselves and how were they seen by others in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Diaries, letters, biographies, and autobiographies in particular give some insights into the lives of the many older people who were not poor and whose private lives, in consequence, were unlikely to be exposed in public documents. Some were powerful enough to be regarded by others as individuals worthy of interest, rather than as 4old people’ worthy of pity.
Pensions and Pensioners in War and Depression
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

The state pension, low and means-tested though it was, gave a regular and secure income to a higher proportion of old people than the poor relief system had ever done. It rescued some of them from painful and degrading labour, enabled more of them to keep independent households, and assisted families to support ageing relatives. It even stimulated saving among older people.
Érlam.The Patron-Saint of an Irish Church
Authors: Charles-Edwards T M
Published: November 2023

In Patrick’s Confessioa story is told about a vision that the saint saw in a dream when he was at home in Britain, after he had been a slave in Ireland, and before he returned as a missionary. In this dream he saw a man called Victricus give him a letter, which began ‘The Cry of the Irish’; and, as he read those words in his dream, he heard ‘the cry of those who were by theWood of Voclut, which is by the Western Sea, and they cried out as if from one mouth: “We ask you, deeply respected young man, to come and walk among us “.’ By the time of TÍrechán’s Collectaneain the late seventh century, this had been transformed into a cry uttered by children who were still in their mothers’ wombs; in the Tripartite Life of St Patrick, a century or two later, the story was attached to a particular church, where the mothers, from whose wombs the summons to Patrick had gone out, now named Creibriu and Lesru, were the patron-saints: ‘It is they who are the érlamaof Cell Forclann among the UÍ Amalgada west of the Moy.’ Patrick’s text, therefore, engendered a story that took on a life of its own, and acquired topographical precision, being attached to named persons buried in a named church.
The Saints of SouthWales and the Welsh Church
Authors: Davies John Reuben
Published: November 2023

There is not a land in all Christendom of like size with so many saints therein as there were of old among Welshmen. This romantic reflection of Wales’s saintly heritage came from the pen of a Welsh Recusant writing around 1583. Y Drych Cristianogawl, ‘The Christian Looking Glass’, was part of a literary campaign to recall the Welsh to the glories of their pre-Reformation past. Wales was the land of saints— not unlike Ireland, ‘the island of saints’. In fact, as far as the anonymous author of Y Drych Cristianogawlwas concerned, even Rome did not surpass Wales in its contribution to the heavenly population of Confessors
The Civilianization of Internal Security, 1923-1932
Authors: O’Halpin Eunan
Published: November 2023

The four years between April 1923 and August 1927 saw the steady consolidation of the new state, beginning with republican collapse in the civil war and culminating in de Valera’s grudging entry to the Dail. In retrospect the victory of constitutional politics has the appearance of inevitability. At the time, however, matters (1:-1 not seem so simple: the violent deaths of key political figures mark key point:, 111 the period. The republican irreconcilable Liam Lynch was killed in action in April 1923, and Kevin O’Higgins, the passionate advocate of the rule of law, was assassinated while walking to mass in July 1927. As he lay dying O’Higgins forgave his killers but warned his friends to beware of de Valera. He was right: his death forced Fianna Fáil into parliamentary politics. In so doing it wrought not only the marginalization of militant republicanism which O’Higgins had hoped for, but also the electoral triumph in 1932 of the man whom he and his colleagues loathed the most.
The Black Market
Authors: Zweiniger-Bargielowska Ina
Published: November 2023

The black market casts doubt on the myth of shared sacrifice on the home front. This chapter aims to transcend the conventional image of 1940s Britain characterized by a commitment to the overriding principle of fair shares. According to this image, common sacrifice fostered national unity during the war. After 1945 Labour tried to harness this spirit to its reconstruction programme and particularly the export drive. The following discussion shows that the black market was extensive during and after the war. The emphasis here is not on theft and receiving of stolen goods but on endemic circumvention of the emergency legislation which confronted many citizens with the prospect of law breaking for the first time. There are countless examples of exploitation of loopholes and breaches of the legislation controlling production, distribution, and supply of consumer goods. These provide a good indication of the limits of public acceptance of the austerity policy. The black market has received insufficient attention in the literature and, in contrast with Smithies who details examples of spectacular rackets based on local newspapers or Hughes who provides an impressionistic account of the spiv in the late 1940s, this chapter examines the topic from an administrative perspective. The administration had to ensure that the controls were at least reasonably well observed. There were numerous changes of the control orders, while the public had to cope with an avalanche of new laws and regulations.
Party Politics
Authors: Zweiniger-Bargielowska Ina
Published: November 2023

This chapter analyses the party political debate about rationing and controls and the electoral implications of the austerity policy from the end of the Second World War and Labour’s landslide election victory of 1945 until the general election of 1955 when the Conservatives were returned to power with an increased majority. It examines the connection between consumption and politics and illustrates the changing relationship between state and society in war and peace, in the sense that public acceptance of sacrifice in wartime did not necessarily imply that this would be equally forthcoming after the immediate transition period. Labour assumed after 1945 that the electorate shared its wider purpose of building socialism even if this required continued sacrifice. In the event, the Attlee government’s failure literally to deliver the goods undermined its initial popularity and the campaign against austerity provided a focus for the Conservative recovery of the late 1940s.
Italy
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

Many of the problems of non-Marxist feudalism in Italy are similar to those of French feudalism that were sketched at the beginning of the last chapter, in particular the problems created by the imposition of categories created by later historians. The historiography of Italian feudalism, however, includes its own paradoxes. Although the whole idea of feudalism originated from a north Italian book, the first post-medieval French scholars who used the Libri Feudorum to elucidate French history were so anxious to play down any dependence of France on Roman law or Lombard precedent, and their successors had their eyes so firmly fixed on the north, that Italy came to seem as marginal to feudalism as feudalism did to the history of Italy. Carlo Sigonio (d. 1588) derived the origin of fiefs from the time of King Authari (584–90), but, after French historians had effectively postponed their appearance in France to the Carolingians, it must have seemed reasonable to attribute their introduction into Italy to Charlemagne. By the nineteenth century feudalism had become closely connected with an agricultural stage of human evolution, while medieval Italy was seen as the land of urban continuity and the rebirth of civic culture. Italian feudalism had to be squashed in chronologically between the Romans (or even the Carolingians) and the age of the communes. C. G. Mor’s L’ Eta feudale started in 887 and ended in 1024, paradoxically missing both the introduction of Carolingian benefices verbo regis at one end and the ordinance of Conrad II that is generally taken to have formed the basic text of the Libri Feudorum at the other.
The Kingdom of France, 1100–1300
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

The evidence that I have examined for the terminology of property in twelfth-century France is at first confusing. On the one hand the growth of evidence confirms the suspicion expressed at the end of chapter 5 that, as rulers and landlords became more demanding and more effective, the distinction between full and subordinate property became in some ways blurred. On the other hand, there is also evidence that during the twelfth century rulers began to exploit a distinction between what the records explicitly call alods and fiefs. By the thirteenth century it is clear that this was not the same distinction as that drawn in the ninth century between alods and benefices. What we seem to have is a new term-inology that gradually resulted in the construction of new categories. By the thirteenth century the word alod was restricted in many areas, chiefly if not exclusively, to the property of the relatively humble, while the property of people of high status, which would once have been considered alodial, was described as fiefs. Fiefholders were beginning to be occasionally called vassals, though this was still rare and probably indicates the influence of lawyers with some knowledge of the academic law of fiefs. Exceptions and anomalies were many and various, not least because the actual rights and obligations of property were seldom changed when the words changed. Rationalization of past custom into rules so as to create categories of even approximate coherence and consistency was a slow business which would be the work of professional and academic lawyers over centuries.
Conclusion
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

A Good deal of this book has been rather negative in tone. Many sentences have begun with ‘It is not clear that ... ‘, ‘There is no evidence for ... ‘, ‘There is no reason to believe . . .’, and similar phrases. That has been inevitable. My purpose has been to compare the medieval evidence of property relations and political relations with the concepts of the fief and of vassalage as they are used by medieval historians. I started with some doubts about fiefs and considerable scepticism about vassalage, but I have found much less evidence to support the traditional picture of either, and of their connection and development, than I expected in my most sceptical moments. I hope that I have not overstated my case and understated the evidence. I have tried not to do so.
Medieval and Renaissance Theories of State Finance
Authors: lsenmann Eberhard
Published: November 2023

The Middle Ages witnessed both the development of more differentiated and varied forms of taxation and-at least in most states-a more sophisticated financial administration. Contemporary theories of state finance comprise a broad spectrum of views, from legal and moral statements, maxims and principles to relatively simple ideas. Yet the Middle Ages also saw the emergence of comprehensive and far-reaching theories relating to the legal foundation and justification for imposing taxes; the classification of the various types of revenue and taxes; the techniques of assessment; the question of fiscal equity and fairness of both the tax assessments and the tax burden; and finally the interrelationship between taxation and the economy, the social order and the political system.
The Spanish System: Centre and Periphery
Authors: Muto Giovanni
Published: November 2023

There was a close connection between the process of state formation and the development of state finance in early modern Europe. This took different forms according to the nature of the state (whether it was a republic, a principality or a monarchy), its structure (whether it was a nation state, an empire or a confederation), and the political objectives that each state set itself During the early years of the sixteenth century, monarchs and their advisers realized, if it had ever seriously been doubted, that territorial control and the assertion of their rule were impossible to achieve without adequate financial resources. Yet to obtain these resources was no easy task. The state met with numerous difficulties in finding the right solutions to ensure that money flowed into its coffers or to those places which most urgently required the payment or remittance of funds. Not all states succeeded in establishing the most suitable financial system for the requirements of their political development (this was the case with France, for example, in its mid-sixteenth-century crisis). Success or otherwise crucially affected the hierarchy of states, and the place of each state within the system of international relations.
Church and State in Medieval and Early Modern Denmark. The Legal Issue
Authors: Uruszczak Wadaw
Published: November 2023

State formation in medieval Denmark may well be seen as an immediate consequence of the Danes adopting Christianity. The medieval Danish kings seem to have wanted it to be so, for reasons not entirely revealed to posterity. And the Danish Church was, on the eve of the Reformation, to be remarkably wealthy, in comparison with other north-European churches.
Royal Power and its Legal Instruments in France, 1500-1800
Authors: Durand Bernard
Published: November 2023

The power of the state in France saw the establishment of its sover eignty as early as the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries. The king was no longer merely a suzerain: he was sovereign, exercising an institutionalized power the content of which-making ordonnances ordinances-was new. ‘Li rois’, Beaumanoir wrote, ‘puet fere teus establissemens pour le commun pour fit, et ce qu’il establist doit estre tenu [The king can make such dispositions for the common profit, and what he establishes must be kept]’.1 But if the king, like the Roman emperor, was already the holder of this power ‘de faire des ordon nances qui vaillent loy [to make ordinances which are valid as law]’, as Boutillier put it, he was also, and more so at this time, the possessor ofjurisdictio.As source de toute justice (the fount of all justice), the king obtained from this right the power of administering justice, reducing and subordinating first feudal lords, then ecclesiastical judges, in short, accumulating the ‘rights’ that it would be impossible to draw up a list for this period because they were so numerous and constantly expanding.
Rulers, Representative Institutions, and their Members as Power Elites: Rivals or Partners?
Authors: Bulst Neithard
Published: November 2023

To understand the role of power elites in their respective societies we must be aware of the social, legal, political, and institutional framework in which they developed, acted, and played their part in the process of the formation of the modern state. It could undoubtedly be maintained that the development of representative institutions was an important factor in the process of state formation, and they have often been considered in this context. However, even this statement is disputed today Research, particularly on absolutism, has denied the role of representative institutions in state formation, or at least of many of them in a number of different countries.
Great Friends and Small Friends: Clientelism and the Power Elite
Authors: Lind Gunner
Published: November 2023

‘You may beasperfect as a man can be, without patrons you will always be sailing against the stream. ‘ So wrote Professor Simon Paulli in the 1640s when dedicating a book to Christian Thomesen, chancellor of the king of Denmark. Few contemporaries would have used words like ‘patron ‘ or ‘client ‘, common to the learned professor and modern scholarship. Still the phenomenon was well known to them, indeed to most people of medieval and early modern Europe. They would describe it with other words, the most important being ‘friendship ‘.2 A patron-client relationship is the friendship between unequals: the powerful patron and the humble client. The lack of equality transforms the emotional content of the relationship. It tends to reduce it, compared with friendship in our conventional sense. Still the connection does indeed resemble friendship: a lasting bond where services are exchanged.
English Feminism 1780-1980
Authors: Caine Barbara
Published: November 2023

Barbara Caine offers the first complete overview of the history of `modern' English feminism, from the French Revolution through to the advent of Women's Liberation. Her analysis of feminist organizations, debates, and campaigns shows a keen sense of the relationship between feminist thought and actions, and wider social and cultural change. The result is a fascinating study with a new perspective on feminists and feminist traditions, which can be used both as an introductory text and as an interpretative work. Professor Caine examines the complex questions surrounding the concept of a feminist 'tradition', and shows how much the feminism of any particular period related to the years preceding or following it. Though feminism may have lacked the kind of legitimating tradition evident in other forms of political thought, the ghost of Mary Wollstonecraft is seen here as something which all nineteenth- and twentieth-century feminists had to come to terms with. Her story was a constant reminder of the connection between the demand for political and legal rights, and its conflation with the issues of personal and sexual rebellion. Like Mary Wollstonecraft, every woman pioneer into the public arena was faced with assaults on her honour as well as on her intellectual position. Professor Caine also addresses the language of feminism: the introduction and changing meanings of the term `feminist'; the importance of literary representations of women; and the question of how one defines feminism, and establishes boundaries between feminism and the `woman question'. She ends with a discussion of the new emphasis, post-1980s, on the need to think about `feminisms' in the plural, rather than any single kind of feminism.
Afterword: From Feminism to Feminisms
Authors: Caine Barbara
Published: November 2023

The quiet, sometimes imperceptible, ebb and flow of feminist activities which continued more or less from the First World War until the late 1960s was dramatically altered by the advent of the Women’s Liberation movement in the early 1970s. This movement exploded onto the public and media stage in Britain in 1970 with the staging of a demonstration against a Miss World beauty competition in London.1 Just as the beauty contestants were lined up on stage in front of Bob Hope, ‘a posse of ill-kempt women, who contrasted bizarrely with the gloss and glamour of the occasion, burst onto the stage mooing like cows, blasting whistles, whirring football rattles and bearing placards with the titles “Miss-conception”,... “Miss-treated”,... “Miss-placed”,... and “Miss-judged”’.2 They threw flour-, smoke-, and stink-bombs, and leaflets at the stage, from which Bob Hope and the judges immediately fled, followed by a crowd of tearful beauty queens. Order was finally restored by the police who arrested five of the miscreants.
Patriotism Restored, 1757-1770
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

The years between the formation of the Pitt Newcastle ministry and the appointment of Lord North as Prime Minister had a shattering effect on the political stability associated with the early Hanoverian reigns. The dominant personalities of these years, Pitt, Bute, and George III, were all in some measure com mitted to the patriot creed evolved by the opponents of the Walpole and Pelham regimes. They did not, in the event, succeed in initiating a new erq of patriotic harmony; they did, however, transform the nature of party pol£tics. Initial y, the public response. to their declared ideals was euphoric. No less striking was the popular enthusiasm for the military successes of the Seven Years War. Thereafter, disillusion and dissent set in. The accession of a new king resulted in the humiliation of the Whig magnates who had dominated government for half a century. It also fed fears of royal favouritism and a sinister influence ‘behind the curtain’. The ensuing years were marked by recurrent political controversy and an almost permanent sense of instability and crisis. In America and in India the legacy of the war and the imperial intervention which it stimulated brought a host of problems. At home the turbulent career of John Wilkes testified to a new spirit of challenge and criticism, threatening to render Englishmen as ungovernable as their colonial compatriots. The aim of the well-intentioned patriots who had created this state of affairs was to restore the ancient liberties and conventions which the corruption of early Hanoverian government had supposedly violated; paradoxically their achievement was to change the language and the substance of politics in directions that were very largely novel, and for most of those involved by no means welcome.
Conclusion: Lineage and Commemoration
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

If monuments can be said to bring us closer to the commemorated, then the monuments at Cobham, Lingfield, and elsewhere bring us very close to the Cobhams. The surviving tombs and brasses to the family—totalling some two dozen in all—are notable as much for their distinctiveness as for their near-uniformly high quality. The assumption underlying this study is that by attending closely to their witness we can learn something of the hopes and anxieties of those they commemorate.
Virgin Queens: Abbesses and Power in Early Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: Ortenberg Veronica
Published: November 2023

‘Seta Eormenhild virg’; ‘scta Sexburga virg’: thus do Anglo-Saxon calendars, litanies, and various other liturgical, narrative and hagiographical texts describe several women, ex-queens or royal widows who retired to monasteries after divorcing their husbands or after their husbands’ deaths. I have long been struck by the deliberate choice of ‘virgo’, ‘virgines’, to designate women who were clearly anything but virgins, technically speaking. It is true, of course, that ‘virgo’ can just mean ‘(young) woman’; however, there can be little doubt, in view of the context and the way the word is deployed, that the intended sense in these cases was indeed ‘virgin’.
The Strange Affair of the Selsey Bishopric, 953-963
Authors: Wormald Patrick
Published: November 2023

In the middle of the tenth century, just before the eruption of the crisis which has for a millennium been considered (somewhat optimistically) a ‘Tenth Century Reformation’, two curious things happened in the English Church. First, there was an unparalleled outburst of bishops with the name Brihthelm. The best-known was briefly archbishop of Canterbury in 959 before being elbowed out in a shameless putsch by Edgar and Dunstan. There also seem to have been Brihthelms at London (c.951-7), Wells (?956-73/4), and Winchester (958/9-63), while (an)other(s) feature(s) in documents of 956-7, first as ‘bishop elect’ and then with no title. Most important for present purposes, a Brihthelm appears as bishop of Selsey in two charters of 956 and 957, one highly questionable, the other not above suspicion but of great importance: yet he is not in the Selsey episcopal list, which offers no name between a bishop whose last attestation was in 953 and one whose dated debut was 963.
Unity, Order, and Ottonian Kingship in the Thought of Abbo of Fleury
Authors: Peden Alison
Published: November 2023

At the turn of the year 996-7 the emperor Otto III asked Gerbert of Aurillac, in exile at the imperial court from the archbishopric of Reims, to ‘fan our spirit with the flame of your knowledge’ and to ‘explain to us the book on arithmetic’-the de luxe copy of Boethius, DeArithmetica made for Charles the Bald which Gerbert is thought to have presented to Otto. It is not just the academic interests of the young emperor that are notable, but also their implications for our understanding of the Ottonian vision of political unity and imperial order. Henry Mayr-Harting has demonstrated the fundamental importance of art as an articulation of Ottonian reflection on the regime;3 his new work on the scholarship of Cologne shows that engagement with the liberal arts was considered a vital element of rulership of any kind: lordship over a part of the cosmos requires understanding of its structure, values, and ultimate destiny.
Ranulf Flambard and Christina of Markyate
Authors: Moore R I
Published: November 2023

This image of action, however, may prove deceptive. Closer readings of the vitae of eleventh-century reformers reveal that while they may have been ‘men of action’ negotiating their way through tumultuous events rather than holy men of contemplation, they were inevitably acted upon by the authors of their Lives. Although this is true of all Christian hagiography where rhetorical and other needs led biographers to claim any number of fictitious deeds, it is important to take into account how the special circumstances of eleventh-century reform may have animated these authors.
The Letter-Writing of Archbishop Becket*
Authors: Matthew D J A
Published: November 2023

Historians constructing accounts of Becket's dispute with Henry II make extensive use of the lives written after his martyrdom. Traces of this hagiography inevitably resurface in even the most secular of writers. It may seem impossible now to recover a sense of the affair as it appeared in Becket's lifetime, when no one prominent in the controversy divined his potential for sanctity. His own letters do, however, offer a direct view of him through pre-martyrdom sources, and although they have been used to fill out the details of the exile, they have not hitherto been studied as a group.
Introduction
Authors: Kerr David S
Published: November 2023

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the history of political caricature. While cartoons continue to enliven the pages of general histories, where they are too often presented rather uncritically as limpid reflections of popular feeling towards the events or personalities lampooned, specialists in political culture have begun to treat caricature in a much more sophisticated manner. Scholars have analysed the nature of the genre and its place in the political process, focusing less on caricature’s descriptive or illustrative function than on its prescriptive role in the creation of political imagery and the formation of public opinion.’ To be effective, such studies must be grounded upon a firm knowledge of the identity and motivation of both artist and audience. This study is an attempt to lay the foundations for an appreciation of the place of caricature in the political culture of the July Monarchy, by assessing the means by which it was produced and distributed, the manner in which caricaturists responded to current events, the nature and scope of their public, and the relationship between caricature and other forms of contemporary political-cultural discourse.
Domesday and Title to Land
Authors: Roffe David
Published: November 2023

Executive Processes Come in many different forms, but none is entirely bureaucratic. Some accounts of the workings of royal government in Angevin England give the impression of a smoothly running engine which only rarely missed a stroke and then was quickly adjusted by an omnipresent ministering justice. But the most cursory reading of court procedures reveals a reality of muddle, misunderstanding, and incompetence.
‘What was best of every language’: the early history of the Irish language
Authors: Russell Paul
Published: November 2023

Ten years after the dispersal of the languages from the Tower of Babel (Nimrod’s Tower), Fénius Farsaid was asked by the school in Egypt to abstract a language from the many languages then in existence. That language was assigned to Góıdel mac Aingin meic Glúinfind meic Láimfind meic Agnumain of the Greeks and was thus called Góıdelc‘Irish’.
The Irish church, 800–c.1050
Authors: Hughes Kathleen
Published: November 2023

Ireland at the beginning of the ninth century was a stable society, and the church was well established. The country had absorbed one major foreign element, Christianity, and integrated it with her own legal structure and to some extent with her own culture. Churches had been set up all over Ireland, living off the land like the raths of secular lords, the major monasteries having churches within their paruchiaemuch as a had his subkings.
Coins and coinage in pre-Norman Ireland
Authors: Kenny Michael
Published: November 2023

The third, apart from its starting-point, is considerably less so. The periods and approximate dates are as follows: first, the coinless period, until the end of the ninth century; second, the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ period, from the end of the ninth to the end of the tenth century; and third, the ‘Hiberno-Norse’ period, from the end of the tenth to the middle of the twelfth century. Although the third period has been traditionally referred to as ‘Hiberno-Norse’ in numismatic textbooks, it must be emphasised that this is largely for convenience purposes.
Latin learning and literature in Ireland, 1169–1500
Authors: Scott A B
Published: November 2023

It may well be argued that there is nothing to survey; that writings in Latin among the Gaelic Irish had already become infrequent and quite devoid of any literary interest well before the establishment of the Anglo-Norman colony, and that Anglo-Norman society itself produced little that could be called literature. What survives is mostly philosophy and theology, with some canon law, annals, and hagiography. More important, none of this body of writings is united by having any Irish or Celtic characteristics. FitzRalph’s ‘Summa de questionibus Armenorum’ or Thomas of Ireland’s ‘Manipulus florum’ were written by members of the Anglo-Irish colony who had become part of the intellectual world that embraced England and western Europe.