bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Anatomy of an Oligarchy: the Oxford Town Council in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Authors: Hammer Carl I.
Published: February 2004

The conventional wisdom of English urban history holds that town government in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was coming increasingly under the domination of a tight, resurgent oligarchy. This view was embalmed by Jacob in his volume of the Oxford History of England, and is reproduced in the newest works on medieval and early-modern towns. Clearly, the doubts voiced at length by Mrs. Green in the late nineteenth century and developed quite vigorously by Bridbury in 1962 have found no echo, and the doctrine is now, in the words of one historian, “apparently beyond dispute.”

Yet, in spite of such remarkable unanimity, any student of urban history in this period must feel some unease due to the slender empirical basis upon which this view has been predicated. Monographs on late-medieval and early-modern English towns are few, and specialized studies of town government are equally rare. Indeed, Hoskins has recently identified “the personnel of the governing class” as “one important and almost unfilled field of urban study.” Thus, an extended examination of the structures and personnel of a late-medieval and early-modern urban “oligarchy” needs little justification because of its potential substantive and methodological implications for the constitutional, political, and social history of the English town.

The following study attempts to do this for Oxford, a middling urban center at this time, which, according to Mrs. Lobel, shared in the heightened oligarchy of the age. It is neither a proper study in constitutional history nor a narrative of local politics or governmental activities. Rather, it focuses upon the changing structures and personnel of the town in order to shed some new light on the problems raised above.
Continuity in Change: Bishops of London and Religious Dissent in Early Stuart England
Authors: Kalu Ogbu U.
Published: February 2004

A significant aspect of the religious scene in the early Stuart period was the survival of vibrant religious nonconformity in spite of Bancroft's “reconstruction of the English Church.” Historians have recently concentrated on the periods of excited religious politics under Elizabeth and the latter part of Charles I's reign and have tended to accept Hacket's Restoration apology that there was no serious opposition to official religious policy in the intervening years. But attempts to explain the phoenix-like rise of Puritanism in Caroline England by reference to socio-economic disequilibrium are not fully satisfactory.

Decades ago, Roland G. Usher, who did much to highlight Bancroft's reconstruction, explained the origins of the resurgent Puritanism of the Laudian period by pointing to the mid-Jacobean period. W. H. Clark concurred: lax ecclesiastical administration under Abbot made it possible for Puritans to re-group, starting from about 1614. Both men assumed that there had been effective enforcement of the new Canons of 1604, and of the official policy enunciated at the Hampton Court Conference, until Abbot came on the scene. Analysis of the Church court records indicates that this was simply not so. The number of Puritans continued to rise while vigorous enforcement was spasmodic.

Ironically, the years to which Usher and Clark attributed the origins of Caroline Puritanism were in fact the period when enforcement was possible. First, the Pamphlet War aroused by the new settlement had died down. Second, only two bishops, John King and George Mountain, held the See of London between 1611 and 1628.
The Privy Council and Problems of Enforcement in the 1620s
Authors: Hirst Derek
Published: February 2004

It has become the fashion amongst historians seeking to explain the collapse of early Stuart rule to ignore the center and to consider instead the alienation of the local communities and their leaders, on whose co-operation the execution of the crown's policy depended. G. E. Aylmer has become something of a lone voice in the respect that he accords to central government, and even he deliberately and cautiously refrained from commenting in his magisterial work on the efficiency and impact of the Caroline government. Scholars attempting to analyze the crown's problems in 1640 are increasingly turning to the concept of local inertia. Conrad Russell stresses declining collaboration between the crown and the parliamentary gentry in his discussion of the fate of parliamentary supply. Others in local studies have castigated the local magistrates for their destructive fiscal role, for lightening their own burdens, and looking on complacently when their neighbors and inferiors did the same. The gentry failed to give enough in parliament, and then ensured that the sums were even smaller when collected. Anthony Fletcher's verdict on the selfishness of the Sussex gentry is even more resounding than Russell's on the obtuseness of the parliamentary gentry: “The magnate gentry must bear full responsibility for the collapse of the subsidy as an effective fiscal instrument … as the King's servants in the county [they] acquiesced when the community at large followed their example and put the protection of their own pockets before the financial needs of the central government.”
Post-Restoration Landownership: The Impact of the Abolition of Wardship
Authors: Roebuck Peter
Published: February 2004

Major emphasis has been placed on the political significance of the final abolition of the Court of Wards and Liveries in 1660. Not only did it remove a substantial source of grievance against the crown but, as part of a wider settlement whereby Charles II surrendered ancient dues in return for revenue granted by parliament, it formed a major signpost on the road from a feudal to a constitutional monarchy. Historians have also stressed the importance of abolition to developments in landownership and agriculture. To Blackstone writing in the eighteenth century, abolition was “a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even Magna Carta itself.” A century later G. C. Brodrick felt it “at least possible” that “this great reform” had provided England with “an advantage in agriculture over her foreign rivals which has not yet been fully exhausted.” David Ogg went so far as to suggest that abolition “was possibly the most important single event in the history of English landholding.” While most recently, in analysing the economic causes of the English revolution, Lawrence Stone has argued that “it is surely significant that among those [things[ whch were not [restored in 1660] were feudal tenures.”

It has been suggested that the more substantial landowners benefited in three respects from abolition: fiscally; collectively, in relation to other groups in rural society; and managerially, insofar as the reform increased their capacity to conduct their affairs effectively. Their financial position improved with the disappearance of the feudal exactions associated with wardship to which the majority of them had previously been liable.
Bishops and Scottish Representative Peers in the House of Lords, 1760-1775
Authors: Lowe William C.
Published: February 2004

Despite all the attention lavished on the mid-eighteenth-century parliament, the House of Lords has been largely ignored by historians. The Whig historians of the nineteenth century were concerned with tracing the development of the House of Commons as the principal vehicle of constitutional progress, and in this century Namierites and neo-Whigs have alternately challenged and defended the Whig position, basing their arguments almost entirely on their views of proceedings in the lower chamber. The House of Lords was easy to neglect, one suspects, because most historians assumed that the upper House could be conveniently explained away as an appendage of the crown where an institutionalized majority of bishops, Scottish representative peers, placeholders, and newly-created peers could easily maintain a ministry. This, in turn, has led to a tendency to explain events in the House of Lords at any point in the century in terms of a static political structure, largely without regard to current issues or changes in the “structure of politics” at the national level.

The two most conspicuous segments of the “Party of the Crown” in the Lords (and the two most abused for their alleged political servility) were the bishops and representative Scottish peers. The second Earl of Effingham expressed the conventional political wisdom of the eighteenth century when he told the House in 1780 that “those two descriptions threw a great weight into the scale of the Crown,” and historians have generally echoed this view. In the past two decades scholarship has begun to modify this picture for both ends of the century, though the old clichés still hold sway for the decades from Walpole to North.
Authority and Rebellion in Victorian Autobiography
Authors: Krenis Lee
Published: February 2004

It has been a literary (if not strictly historical) commonplace that the later nineteenth century was a time of pervasive rebellion of sons against fathers. For example, Butler'sThe Way of All Fleshand Gosse'sFather and Sonare texts often cited as indicative of a broader social phenomenon. “As Irish life runs to secret societies,” observed V. S. Pritchett, “so English life seems to run naturally to parricide movements. We are a nation of father haters.” Yet father-hating did not become conspicuous until the Victorian period, when, in contrast to the reputed submissiveness of the eighteenth-century son, a “growing self-consciousness by the son of his role as liberator” surfaced in fictional and biographical writing. Whether such a rebellion actually took place on any large scale is impossible to determine. Few men record such things, and when they do their real feelings tend to remain concealed or not fully understood. The premise of this study, based on selected examples of autobiography, is that the peculiar desperation of many Victorians to buttress eroding forms of traditional patriarchal authority had its first and perhaps most crucial effects within the family itself, intensifying ordinary generational conflict and its usual quota of rebellion, guilt, and neurosis. Amidst the conventional catalogues of accomplishment, there is a striking pattern of childhood experience within the family that incubated some version of future rebellion and profoundly affected the writers' emotional lives.

Open warfare between generations is uncommon; most often rebellion instead employs a disguised language and context for its articulation.
The Struggle For Mastery in Britain: Lloyd George Versus Asquith, December 1916
Authors: McEwen J. M.
Published: February 2004

Myth and mystery continue to cloud the supersession of Herbert Henry Asquith by David Lloyd George half-way through the First World War. Then, and long afterwards, there was much talk of intrigue and conspiracy, often inspired by those who believed Asquith had been jockeyed out of the premiership by an unholy alliance of low schemers who scrupled at nothing. It is tempting to dismiss such charges as baseless, as the loser's perennial excuse. Yet in the records that have come to light there are enough gaps, irregularities, and teasing hints of suppressed evidence to keep alive old suspicions that some things occurred which many of the participants wished forgotten. Walter (later Viscount) Long, for instance, once wrote to Lord Beaverbrook in response to a request for his version of events: “I have omitted a great deal that happened at the time, as I believe I promised not to mention certain very interesting incidents.” Before he died Long seems to have weeded out of his private papers material relating to Asquith's overthrow. And in a massive three-volume biography of Lord Curzon there are only two slight references to the change of government in 1916, a remarkable feat of omission considering Curzon's role. The biographer, Lord Ronaldshay, later professed innocent astonishment at finding nothing pertinent to this great event in Curzon's voluminous papers. Another minister who was near the center, Herbert (later Viscount) Samuel, appears to have reshaped his chronicle of events in a manner more flattering to himself but less useful to historians.
The Moral Economy of the Crowd: Some Twentieth-Century Food Riots
Authors: Coles Anthony James
Published: February 2004

But often in the world's most crowded streetsAnd often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life ….

The Buried Life, Matthew Arnold

Any comparison between historical phenomena is fraught with many dangers, particularly where a century separates their occurrence. Nevertheless, it is proposed to compare certain aspects of social protest in 1916-17 with the disturbances more closely associated with the final decade of the eighteenth century — the form of protest in question being taxation populaire. For, while examples of such riots can be found from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, as R. B. Rose has written, “… we shall be justified in regarding taxation populaire as primarily and typically an eighteenth century phenomenon.” E. P. Thompson, moreover, considers that “… the final years of the eighteenth century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market.” In both periods the country was suffering from wartime inflation, and food shortages caused by failures in domestic harvests and interruptions in imported supplies, threatened to cause breaches in social harmony. And in both cases the two national governments that emerged were fully prepared to repress the threat to national security posed by outbreaks of working-class unrest. Besides such central parallels, others of a more trivial nature spring to mind. Not too much imagination is needed to see the spirit of the Church and King Mobs marching amongst the ranks of those who attacked pacifist meetings and the property of those with German names; though it may be considered outrageously fancilful to see the devilry of Arthur Thistlewood behind Mrs. Wheeldon's plot to poison Arthur Henderson and Lloyd George.
The English Crisis of 1297 in the Light of French Experience
Authors: Wood Charles T.
Published: February 2004

Among the familiar sights crowding the landscape of English history from the dooms of Ine to that crown plucked from a hawthorn bush at Bosworth, none is more deeply cherished than the crisis of 1297 and the “Confirmation of the Charters” to which it gave rise. For, despite all the sharp differences over detail that the documentation for this crisis has engendered, scholars have shown remarkable agreement in seeing it as the one defeat suffered by Edward I in a long and notably successful reign. And to that defeat they have attributed great constitutional significance. Stubbs set the pattern, calling the “result singularly in harmony with what seems from history and experience to be the natural direction of English progress,” and Wilkinson is only one among the many who have recently elaborated on that theme:

The crisis of 1297 … placed a definite check on the tendencies which Edward I had shown, to ignore the deep principles of the constitution under stress of the necessities which confronted the nation … It was a landmark in the advance of the knights … toward political maturity. It helped to establish the tradition of co-operation and political alliance between the knights and the magnates, on which a good deal of the political future of England was to depend …. What the opposition achieved, in 1297, was a great vindication of the ancient political principle of government by consent ….
Richard II's Archers of the Crown
Authors: Gillespie James L.
Published: February 2004

The reign of Richard II has been one of the most popular subjects of attention for medievalists in recent years. As a result of this renewed interest, the ‘tyranny’ of Richard II's final years has been resurrected in the past decade in a new form by R. H. Jones as well as in its more traditional guise which can be found in the pages of T. F. Tout by Caroline Barron. This resurrection has not, however, gone unchallenged. Richard G. Davies has recently demonstrated the inadequacies of such a view in relation to Richard II's ecclesiastical policy, and research is now under way in regard to both Ireland and the Ricardian household which seems to limit still further the confines of the ‘tyranny.’ At the very heart of this concept is the condemnation of the King by both his contemporaries and modern historians for his development of a large military establishment which he employed to enforce his own will. This establishment has been pictured as a praetorian guard composed of the very dregs of society and eager to join Richard in a policy of absolutism. The archers of the crown deserve study in any attempt to examine the royal military establishment and to assess the tyrannical intentions of this ill-fated ruler.

Richard II, confronted with the recurrent efforts of a faction of magnates to control the governance of the realm, responded with an attempt to assert his personal will.
Poor Relief in London During the English Revolution
Authors: Herlan Ronald W.
Published: February 2004

In recent years the interest of English historians in poverty and poor relief during Tudor-Stuart times has grown appreciably. Besides new research on certain cities, towns, and counties, a number of studies, both published and unpublished, focus attention on the vital center of English poor relief operations — the parish. This growing emphasis on parochial responses to the problems associated with poverty and the poor in England reflects the view of a recent student of English poor relief, Geoffrey W. Oxley, who has insisted that there really can be no history of poor relief per se, “only the history of poor relief in particular parishes.”

It is common knowledge that London parish records have enormous value for students of English poor relief. A careful survey of essential documents such as accounts of the churchwardens and overseers of the poor, vestry minutes, and parish registers which survive for London's 108 parishes led to the selection of the seven parishes in this study. Regrettably, the ravages of time and circumstance have destroyed a substantial proportion of the City records of this type which once existed for the period. Almost without exception the larger, densely populated, and generally poverty-stricken parishes outside London's walls suffered the greatest losses. Consequently, the study which follows represents only the range of responses for ameliorating poverty which emerged within a limited sample of smaller, less highly congested, intramural City parishes.

At the same time this group of London parishes provides a fuller awareness of the ways in which England's poor relief regime developed and functioned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Active Irish Peers in the Early Eighteenth Century
Authors: James F. G.
Published: February 2004

At the close of the seventeenth century the English House of Lords played an important role in government. It was the highest court in the kingdom as well as the upper house of the legislature; and, as A. S. Turberville observed, the Lords still considered themselves the “hereditary counsellors” of the crown. The prestige of the peerage was such that well into George I's reign most leading ministers were, or sought to become, peers. Although over twice as large as a century earlier, the English House of Lords retained its exclusive character with a total membership of only 165-169 lay peers plus twenty-six bishops. Furthermore, thanks to William III's bipartisan creations, the upper house remained more or less evenly balanced between Whig and Tory sympathizers so that it acted as a counterweight to party fluctuations in the Commons. In addition, a number of peers exerted extensive control over elections to the Commons.

The Irish House of Lords between 1692 and 1727 did not constitute so influential a part of the Irish government, yet in most respects it resembled its English counterpart. It too served as a high court, with all members (as in England) joining the law lords in considering and rendering judicial decisions. As counsellors to the lord lieutenant (viceroy) Irish peers and bishops were, in fact, more active since they provided about half the membership of the Irish privy council. Unlike the English privy council, that in Ireland was a relatively small functioning body, meeting regularly with the lord lieutenant to review all proposed legislation.
Civic Humanism and Parliamentary Reform: The Case of the Society of the Friends of the People
Authors: Hampsher-Monk Iain
Published: February 2004

The tradition of thought known as civic humanism has recently occupied the attention of a number of commentators. Not only has it been examined in the place of its birth, Renaissance Italy, and more especially Florence, but in a recent work J. G. A. Pocock has traced the influence of the tradition in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and finally in the New World. The question considered here is the particular use to which civic modes of thought and argument were put by a group of moderate reformers in the debates on parliamentary reform in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Although this period has received attention from social and constitutional historians, it has not been discussed by historians of ideas.

Civic humanism is both an analysis of a political problem and a range of recommendations as to how the problem is best to be solved. The problem is defined in terms of the deleterious effects of time on political organization. Human organizations rely on the ordered and rule-governed behavior of individuals. Such behavior exhibits, over time, a constant tendency to disintegrate into selfish action. Political and legal institutions provide the immediate incentives to prevent this happening. Yet how can these institutions themselves be safeguarded or rendered self-regulating?

The solution to the problem of achieving political stability through time is seen essentially as a moral solution, that is to say it is seen to lie in the creation of a particular set of attitudes towards political life amongst the citizens of the polity.
The Making of a Radical: The Case of James Burgh
Authors: Hay Carla H.
Published: February 2004

During the decade before the American Revolution, the dissenting schoolmaster, James Burgh, became one of England's foremost propagandists for radical reform. All of the recent works on English radicalism and the ideological origins of the American Revolution recognize the important place of Burgh'smagnum opus, thePolitical Disquisitions, in these movements. Burgh himself, however, has remained a shadowy figure. The process whereby he became a radical has not been explored; important nuances of his political philosophy are unknown; the scope of his radical actions are insufficiently appreciated; and the extent of his influence has not been fully evaluated. In short, there exist some rather incredible gaps in our understanding of the author of a work uniformly agreed to be the “standard source book for reform propagandists in the 1780's,” and “perhaps the most important political treatise which appeared in England in the first half of the reign of George III.” More importantly, in rectifying this situation it becomes obvious that Burgh's career raises some important questions about the character and development of late eighteenth-century English radicalism and suggests the need to qualify or modify certain current perceptions of that movement.

One of eleven children, Burgh was born in late 1714 in the rural Scottish community of Madderty, Perthshire. His father Andrew was minister of the parish Church of Scotland. His mother Margaret was an aunt of the famous Scottish historian William Robertson. Although almost nothing is known of James's youth, his writing indicates that his childhood was happy and the force of his parents' example was considerable.
The Peculiar Pattern of British Strikes Since 1888
Authors: Cronin James E.
Published: February 2004

Strikes are like certain bitter-sweet varities of sin. However frequently and violently they are denounced and however painful the consequences to those who indulge, they continue to flourish. V. L. Allen noted this curious role of strikes in industrial society some time ago. “Strikes,” he wrote,

take place within a hostile environment even though they are a common every-day phenomenon. They are conventionally described as industrially subversive, irresponsible, unfair, against the interests of the community, contrary to the workers' best interests, wasteful of resources, crudely aggressive, inconsistent with democracy and, in any event, unnecessary.

Strikes have become so common in modern society that they seem to be a normal part of the social landscape. This is perhaps one reason why historians have tended to ignore them and their history. Upon reflection, it is indeed surprising how little attention the history of industrial conflict has received from historians. Of course, certain dramatic events, like the General Strike of 1926 or the London dock strike of 1889, are relatively well chronicled, but even these are sorely under-analyzed. There are not even competent narratives of other episodes, like the explosion of militancy just after the First World War; and we know still less about the persistent dynamics of strikes throughout British industry. In this respect, historians lag well behind other social scientists who have been studying industrial strife for many years, but whose work is unfortunately limited by their frankly ahistorical or even anti-historical approach. It is time for historians to remedy this deficiency, and this essay is intended as a first, very small effort in that direction.
Bede's Ecclesiastical History and the Material Conditions of Anglo-Saxon Life
Authors: Rosenthal Joel T.
Published: February 2004

The author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People was the greatest historian writing in the West between the later Roman Empire and the twelfth century, when we come to William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, and William of Tyre. Bede's qualities as a historian are well known and widely appreciated, and they need no further exposition here. Instead, we propose to be perverse and to attempt to read Bede's text as though he had been a sociologist or an economic anthropologist: What can we learn from him about the “material conditions” of life in post-Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England, especially about life in the sixth and seventh centuries. This is surely a strange purpose for which to use the Ecclesiastical History. We do so both to show that Bede is so rich and so multifaceted that he is immensely valuable for many purposes besides those of greatest obvious interest to him, and because the sources for social and economic life in those years are so poor that everything available is legitimate grist for the mills of our analysis.

Actually there are two reasons why Bede might have furnished us with the kind of information we are seeking. One is that among classical and early medieval historians there was a considerable tradition of describing the barbarian world, of paying particular attention to the institutions, mores, and customs of the Germanic people or whoever might be the subject of the tale.
The English Church and Royal Propaganda During the Hundred Years War
Authors: Jones W.R.
Published: February 2004

The main force shaping English institutional development during the late middle ages was the intermittent but seemingly endless war with France—a war that was occasionally expanded to include the struggle with France's enthusiastic Scottish ally. Hardly an aspect of English society remained unaffected by these conflicts: the crown was obliged to organize and manage the war effort; the nobility and many freemen had to fight; and most of the population, with few exceptions of class or status, bore the cost. Even if the average Englishman had been able momentarily to forget the continuing state of emergency prevailing in his country, such things as commissions of array, requests for subsidies, seizures of goods and services, alerts and alarms against invasion, and barrages of propaganda and counter-propaganda would have reminded him of the burdens of war. Especially after the formal beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1338, enormous pressures were placed on the institutions of English public administration by the demands of a war waged simultaneously on several fronts.

Associated with the expansion of the wartime activities and needs of royal government was the emergence both in England and France of an official mentality attuned to the importance of public opinion for facilitating the exploitation of community resources for military purposes. The inherent nature of feudal monarchy, which was heavily dependent on the cooperation and voluntary service of the governed, had always obliged medieval kings to recognize and respect the vox populi; but official awareness of the value of favorable publicity for conducting the domestic and foreign affairs of the crown increased notably from the late thirteenth century as a result of the French and Scottish wars.
The Social Background of Seventeenth-Century Emigration to America
Authors: Salerno Anthony
Published: February 2004

Students of twentieth-century migration generally agree that in any analysis of human migration two essential questions must be answered: Who are the migrants? And why did they leave? The questions seem obvious, but as they relate to seventeenth-century emigration to the American colonies, they are difficult to answer with precision. The records cannot be expected to reveal much about the emigrants as persons because they were ordinary people. If they could write—and most could not—the seventeenth-century emigrants left few diaries or letters to aid those who would study their movements. In fact, it is a rather fortunate researcher who uncovers even the few basic facts of their lives in the parish registers of christenings, burials, and marriages.

The task of identifying and reconstructing the thoughts and motives of such an anonymous body of people is therefore a formidable one. Those who have pursued the task, first in regard to the so-called “Puritan Hegira” of the 1630s to New England, have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question of motivation, and have failed to consider who the emigrants were. Only in a recent study of East Anglian and Kentish emigration to Massachusetts Bay in 1637 has there been a systematic analysis of the ordinary settlers. Yet, no attempt has been made either to identify emigrants or to investigate motives behind several considerable movements to America from areas outside East Anglia and southeastern England, thereby to test the various emigration theses based exclusively on those models.
Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism
Authors: Kinnaird Joan K.
Published: February 2004

In 1675 Mrs. Hannah Woolley, schoolmistress and writer of books on cookery and household management, published The Gentlewoman's Companion. Her Introduction contains this unexpected diatribe:

The right Education of the Female Sex, as it is in a manner everywhere neglected, so it ought to be generally lamented. Most in this depraved later Age think a Woman learned and wise enough if she can distinguish her Husbands Bed from anothers. Certainly Mans Soul cannot boast of a more sublime Original than ours, they had equally their efflux from the same eternal Immensity, and [are] therefore capable of the same improvement by good Education. Vain man is apt to think we were meerly intended for the Worlds propagation, and to keep its humane inhabitants sweet and clean; but by their leaves, had we the same Literature, he would find our brains as fruitful as our bodies. Hence I am induced to believe, we are debar'd from the knowledge of humane learning lest our pregnant Wits should rival the towring conceits of our insulting Lords and Masters.

Mrs. Woolley's complaint was intended for a female audience only, but the themes of her indictment—male oppression, the equal intellectual capacity of the sexes, the injustice of barring women from higher learning—appear openly and often in the literature of Restoration England. Rebellious daughters and emancipated wives, female virtuosi, “she-philosophers”—all rebels against male authority—crowd the Restoration stage. So many took up the cause of women in the “Battle of the Sexes” in the last decades of the century that one scholar has found in the pamphlet literature of the time “a large and well-defined movement, an early ‘liberation war’ of the sex.”
The Structure of Electoral Politics in Unreformed England
Authors: Phillips John A.
Published: February 2004

Discussions of the unreformed English electoral system usually revolve around its three major flaws: the control of borough seats in the Commons by individual patrons, the general lack of opportunities for popular participation, and electoral corruption. The standard examples of Old Sarum (for patronage), the election of 1761 (for the lack of participation), and the Oxfordshire election of 1754 (for corruption) have been cited so often that certain bits of disparaging information, such as the 20,000-pound Tory expenditure in Oxfordshire in 1754, are permanently imbedded in the secondary literature and have resulted in dismissals of eighteenth-century popular politics as unworthy of serious consideration. Instead of using such extreme examples to illustrate the depths to which electoral politics could sink, this more systematic inquiry into the nature of electoral politics enumerates both electoral patronage and electoral participation over the entire eighteenth century, and considers electoral corruption in a necessarily more speculative fashion. From this broader perspective, it is clear that the dismissals of popular politics in England before the Reform Act are unwarranted. Electoral politics played an increasingly important role in the political system during the reign of George III, and to neglect its importance is to misinterpret the political environment of unreformed England.
Emily Davies and the Women's Movement, 1862-1867
Authors: Rosen Andrew
Published: February 2004

Emily Davies' reputation rests almost entirely on her role as founder of the first Cambridge college for women—so much so that her biographer, Lady Barbara Stephen, entitled her lengthy and scholarly work (still the standard life fifty years after its publication)Emily Davies and Girton College. In keeping with her focus on Emily Davies as an educational pioneer, Lady Stephen paid little heed to the blind alleys that Davies first entered and then retreated from during the 1860s—the abortive editorships of theEnglishwoman's Journal and Victoria Review, not to mention her brief and vexing stint as secretary of the first women's suffrage organization established in Britain.

Emily Davies' involvement with the nascent women's suffrage movement was not long lived, and was terminated with such ruffled feelings that she remained aloof from the suffrage cause for most of the rest of her career. Yet it was largely between 1865 and 1867, the years during which she played a central role in founding and then leading the first women's suffrage society, that the institutional and ideological strengths and weaknesses that were to characterize the suffrage movement for the next thirty years were shaped.

Emily Davies' father, John Davies, was an Evangelical minister. In 1815, at the age of twenty, he had left his native Wales to attend Queens' College, Cambridge, which had become one of the focal points of the then burgeoning Evangelical movement. He subsequently became both clergyman and schoolmaster, living mostly in Chichester until 1840, and then at Gateshead (near Newcastle) for the next twenty-two years.
The Burden of Proof: J.H. Hexter and Christopher Hill
Authors: Palmer William G.
Published: February 2004

“If I desire to pass over a part in silence,” wrote Claudian in his account of Stilicho, the consul, “whatever I omit will seem most worthy to have been recorded. Shall I pursue his old exploits and early youth? His recent merits recall themselves to mind. Shall I dwell on his justice? The glory of the warrior rises resplendent before me. Shall I relate his strength in arms? He performed yet greater things unarmed.” Such was a fifth-century poet's assessment of some of the historian's most persistent problems: how should the historian select his evidence and, once selected, when can this evidence be said to constitute a historical proof? That this problem has not been solved to everyone's satisfaction is evidenced by the recent exchange between two historians of the seventeenth century, J.H. Hexter and Christopher Hill.

Few historians are more qualified to enter the vast historical minefield known as the history of seventeenth-century England than J.H. Hexter. Though he has done some narrative studies, most of his work has been devoted to attacks on conventional ideas. In these works, Hexter has revealed himself as a gifted critic and polemicist, performing the same sort of demolition of established ideas about the English Revolutionary era that Alfred Cobban has provided for the French period. At various times Hexter has denounced theories of new monarchy, the Tudor middle class, the rise of the gentry, the fall of the gentry, historical relativism, and history as social science.
The Fall of Hubert De Burgh
Authors: Carpenter David
Published: February 2004

Few incidents in the reign of Henry III excited more interest and amazement than the fall of Hubert de Burgh. Between 1215 and 1232, Hubert held the office of chief justiciar. After 1219 he progressively dominated the government of England. “He lacked nothing of royal power,” commented the Waverley annalist, “save the dignity of a royal diadem.” Then suddenly in 1232 “the great judge” was swept from court and stripped of all his lands and offices. He became a hunted fugitive. He was dragged from a chapel in which he had taken sanctuary, and incarcerated in chains in Devizes castle. Historians have been attracted by the drama of these events, but they have never provided a coherent explanation of Hubert's dismissal. The accounts of Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris are confused. Those of Sir Maurice Powicke, though illuminating, are discursive and inaccurate.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the fall of England's last great justiciar. It is hoped to show that Powicke exaggerated the extent to which the justiciar's demise was consciously planned by the king, and that he underestimated the force of Hubert's struggle to stay in office. Powicke also failed to stress the connection between the justiciar's fall and events in the early years of the minority. Although Henry III came fully of age in 1227, the politics of the period 1217-34 must be viewed as a whole. Conflicts that burgeoned between 1217 and 1224, and were in some respects the legacy of the reign of John, cast a malign shadow over the next decade.
Crown Land and Royal Patronage in Mid-Sixteenth Century England
Authors: Wyndham Katherine S.H.
Published: February 2004

Yf you thincke yt to be suche lande as I maye geve wythe my honor, I shall thincke yt verye well bestowyd, for that he is one that hathe well desarvyd yt and hathe had no kynde of recompence.

So wrote Mary Tudor to the Marquis of Winchester in 1554. The subject of the Queen's approval was Sir Edmund Peckham, one of her most trusted councilors. The result of that approval was an outright gift of land worth nearly one hundred pounds a year.

Land, the basis of the social structure of the age, was one of the crucial instruments of patronage. The crown estate not only had its financial function as a regular source of income and an emergency source of realizable capital, but one directly relevant to social control and to government. It was a means by which past services to the prince could be rewarded and future services perhaps anticipated. The way land was used for this purpose and whether the frequency and extent of its usage can throw any light on problems and methods of government are questions meriting close consideration. The period taken here—the late 1530s to the early 1570s—spans several very different phases of government: how far did policy towards patronage vary from phase to phase? And how far did these variations reflect the needs of each successive government?

To acquire an accurate picture of the use of the crown's estate, some localized knowledge is essential.
The Puritan Work Ethic Revisited
Authors: Seaver Paul
Published: February 2004

Whether Puritanism gave rise to a “work ethic,” and, if so, what the nature of that ethic was, has been a source of controversy since Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism more than seventy years ago. Experienced polemicists have waged international wars of words over its terms, and tyros have won their spurs in the battle. With repect to England, there is at present no agreement either about the reality of a peculiarly Puritan work ethic or about the impact, if any, that such an ethic might have had on the attitudes and behavior of the emerging capitalist bourgeoisie, if such a species indeed existed as a distinctive social class or group in the early modern period. In fact, since perfectly sane and competent historians have questioned on the one hand, whether “Puritanism” is more than a neo-idealist reification of a nonentity, and on the other, whether the early modern middle class is more than a myth, it might be the better part of wisdom to inter the remains of these vexed questions as quietly as possible. What follows is not a perverse attempt to flog a dead horse, if it is dead and a horse, but rather on the basis of a different perspective and different evidence to resurrect a part of what Timothy Breen has called “the non-existent controversy.”
The County Community in Stuart Historiography
Authors: Holmes Clive
Published: February 2004

The 1635 ship money writ elicited a “common feeling of dissatisfaction” throughout England. It was the general belief that the tax contravened “fundamental law,” and that in its imposition Charles “had deliberately treated the nation as a stranger to his counsels, and that if his claim to levy money by his own authority were once admitted, the door would be open to other demands of which it was impossible to foresee the limits.” Contrast this account by S.R. Gardiner with a more recent analysis of the response to ship money provided by J.S. Morrill, a scholar who has acknowledged a substantial intellectual debt to Alan Everitt, the progenitor and leading exponent of the concept of the “county community” in seventeenth-century England. “The King's right to levy the rate was rarely questioned in the provinces. Ship money was hated for its costliness and its disruptive effects on the social and political calm of the communities … Above all,” the levy was detested because “it exemplified the government's insensitivity toward localist sentiment and belief.”

In these divergent accounts, a fundamental difference emerges between the traditional school of English historians and the county community school of local historians. For Gardiner, seventeenth-century Englishmen were fully aware of and vitally concerned about the actions of their national rulers, actions they evaluated against the touchstone of constitutional principle. Everitt and Morrill insist, by contrast, that even the gentry were “surprisingly ill informed” about “wider political issues”; they were “simply not concerned with affairs of state.”
The Bristol Bridge Riot and Its Antecedents: Eighteenth-Century Perception of the Crowd
Authors: Jones Philip D.
Published: February 2004

The Bristol Bridge Riot of 1793 was one of the most serious riots, in terms of killed and injured, to occur in Britain during the last half of the eighteenth century. George Rudé lists it as second in violence only to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Yet, because it defies classification, it is rarely listed in the categories of riots so meticulously set out by Rudé and others. It was neither a turnpike riot transferred to an urban setting, nor was it the expression of long-held social grievances. It was a demonstration of dissatisfaction with official incompetence and deception. In many respects it was a riot caused by officials whose perception of the crowd led them to overreaction and violence.

The tendency by recent writers has been to see riotous activity in the eighteenth century as a sort of class warfare between the “people” and the “establishment,” represented by land owners, entrepreneurs, or parliament. This class warfare is presented as taking various forms under the categories of food riot, urban riot, country riot, and the like. While classification of riots may serve useful purposes and there may sometimes be more than a grain of truth in the class-war interpretation, it must be acknowledged that the resulting impression of uniformity in eighteenth-century riots is misleading. In the case of Bristol riots, in particular, it is the differences rather than the similarities that are of significance in understanding the changed perception of the crowd that caused the tragedy of 1793.
Arthur Wellesley and the Cintra Convention: A New Look at an Old Puzzle
Authors: Schneer Richard M.
Published: February 2004

News of a great victory over Napoleon's forces in Portugal was published in London on the morning of September 2, 1808. The celebrations that began the night before with the firing of cannon in the parks and the pealing of the city's church bells spread from one end of the country to the other and did not subside for nearly two weeks: it was the first important victory for a British army since the war began in 1793. Ever since, the glorious Battle of Vimeiro has been associated with the name of Wellington who, as young General Sir Arthur Wellesley, won his spurs on that occasion by (in his own words) winning “a complete victory” with only half his army over “the whole of the French force in Portugal … under the command of the Due D'Abrantes in person.” Following publication of his vainglorious communiqué and the more sober official announcements, the country waited impatiently for details of the French surrender.

Historical accounts of the event are all in agreement as to what happened after the battle and who was to blame for what proved to be a fiasco in Portugal: after leading his troops to victory, Wellesley (through no fault of his own) had been superseded on the field by General Harry Burrard who, in turn, was replaced on the following day by General Hew Dalrymple. These peculiar revolutions in the command are traceable to political in-fighting at home and the vagaries of travel in the days of sailing ships and have nothing to do with the story except that it was Dalrymple not Wellesley who was in command when the armistice between the contending forces was negotiated. Dalrymple, according to the orthodox exegesis, a stubborn blunderer, negotiated the agreement with the French representative, General Kellermann, and literally gave away the hard-won fruits of Wellesley's victory.