bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Richard II and London
Authors: Barron Caroline M
Published: November 2023

Froissart, writing in the years immediately following the deposition of Richard, attributed a leading role in the king ‘s downfall to the Londoners who, ‘being rich from their trade, are enabled to live in state, and by whom the other parts of England are generally governed ... said to one another privately ... “if this wicked king Richard be suffered to rule according to his pleasure, we must all be ruined and the country destroyed. Ever since he began his reign, the kingdom has not prospered to the degree in which it did before “.,i Froissart ‘s analysis is neither particularly subtle, not particularly accurate. In fact, Richard probably disliked the Londoners rather more than they disliked him, and their role in his deposition was minor compared with that played by the retinues of the disaffected nobility. However, Richard could not ignore the men of London, even if he found their company uncongenial, and it is clear that at times he took trouble to cultivate their loyalty and to curb their lawlessness. It has been customary to consider the relationship between the Crown and the city from the point of view of the Londoners and to chart their struggles to win, and then to defend, their privileges and freedoms. In this chapter the focus will shift from the Londoners to the Crown.
Richelieu and the Arts
Authors: Caldicott Edric
Published: November 2023

The assessment of Richelieu’s career as a collector and a patron of the arts is beset with contradictions. He has been both condemned and praised for his involvement in the artistic life of France: condemned for self-aggrandizement, but praised for enhancing the authority of the king; accused of introducing forms of censorship, but lauded for bringing order into the intellectual and artistic periphery of the monarchy. In addition, the sheer scale of this activity, his building programmes, the size of his collections, the extent of his influence in literary reform, the weight of his authority in the creation of new publishing procedures, as well as in the administration of the arts, is such that it escapes quantification. Not only that but, as Deloche points out, the cardinal often disguised his hand by delegating responsibility for acquisitions to a limited number of tried and trusted créatures.
Individualism And The Organic Conception Of Society
Authors: Taylor M W
Published: November 2023

The politically conservative nature of Individualism is illustrated, not only by its transformation of the association psychology or of the liberal conception of progress, but also by the attempts of some Individualists to secure support for their principles from a biologically inspired science of society. In the first volume of The Principles of Sociology Spencer had drawn an extensive analogy between a biological organism and the social aggregate, and this conception of the ‘social organism’ did much to determine the principal concerns of social science in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The present chapter will be concerned with the attempts of Spencer and other Individualists to use the conception of society as an organism as part of the defence of an individualistic social order.
The Individualist Theory Of History
Authors: Taylor M W
Published: November 2023

The Individualist philosophy of history provides further evidence in support of the contention that the Individualists endeavoured to com bine liberal principles with a conservative defence of the late Victorian social order. It will be argued in the present chapter that the Individual ists’ interpretation of history enabled them to present themselves, in accordance with their claim to be the genuine heirs of the Benthamites, as the true progressives and correspondingly to portray the New Radicalism as a retrogressive creed. In their view, social reformers were engaged in a retrogressive rather than a progressive enterprise, since they were undermining the very conditions of progress and re-creating the repressive type of society from which mankind had only recently emerged. On the other hand, this same theory of history provided the Individualists with a justification for their conservatism, since they could argue that further progress required the maintenance of the free market and limited State of late Victorian Britain. Their interpretation of history enabled them to present institutional conservatism as the truly progressive creed and to claim that the New Radicalism served the cause rather of reaction than of progress.
Double Disappointment, I 802-1806
Authors: Ingram Edward
Published: November 2023

The challenge to Wellesley and his associates in India from the peace of Amiens was matched in I 802 by two local challenges: Daulat Rao Sindhia’s hostile response to the treaty of Bassein, the subsidiary alliance to which the peshwa at last agreed in December, and the murder at Bombay on 20 July of the Persian envoy to India, Haji Muhammad Khalil, by his sepoy bodyguard. Although the second event may seem trivial by comparison with the first, in one way they were similar: the quickest response to each was likely to be the most effective. Speed eluded Wellesley both times. Despite the remarkable victories won by his brother, Arthur, and General Lake over the Marathas in r So3, the Marathas’ staying power was more remarkable.
Failure
Authors: Johnson P A
Published: November 2023

According to Waurin, the Waterford conference, which must soon have transferred to Dublin, decided to look for more support from the English nobility, and agreed that York, having assembled an army in Ireland, should land in the north, Warwick in the south. The sympathy of Kent was noted, with the obvious implication that Warwick should land there. Just how reliable a record this is must be open to some doubt. Waurin, for example, has the duchess of York and the young George and Richard present at Waterford, which is wrong. Waurin may well be speculating, but his central proposition, a co-ordinated landing, has a plausible sound to it.
The Tariff on Iron and Steel
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

It is understandable that iron and steel was one of the industries at the forefront of the argument for Tariff Reform. To economic nationalists, it was central amongst the producer goods which formed the backbone of the economy, its strength fundamental to that ascendancy of heavy engineering which carried Britain into the late nineteenth century. It was of great importance for national defence-even Liberal governments allowed the Admiralty to specify British steel in contracts for naval vessels-and it had been particularly subject to American and German import penetration in the ‘invasions’ of the 1890s. Furthermore, the Tariff Commission’s enquiry into the industry began in propitious circumstances for the Tariff Reformers, since in the aftermath of the Boer War German and American steel producers once more turned their attention to the British market.
The Failure of the Scientific Tariff
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

The period 1906 to 1910 saw Hewins becoming more and more embroiled in Unionist Party affairs, the Commission machine becoming used more directly in support of Tariff Reform propaganda, and Commission strategy being bent to the dictates of Unionist Party unity. At a time when, as our survey of Chambers of Commerce has shown, there was a marked shift in the balance of business opinion towards Tariff Reform, it became increasingly evident to insiders that the construction of a scientific tariff, the primary purpose of the Commission, was not being achieved. There were three proximate reasons for this: the failure in later surveys to emulate the tariff schedules of the early single-industry reports, the failure to deal satisfactorily with banking and foreign investment, and the failure to produce an integrated tariff in a ‘Final Report’. Behind such factors lay the political dangers in exposing concrete Tariff Reform proposals to public scrutiny, and an increasing diversion of Hewins’s own attentions into political activity.
Swinging at Anchor
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

Until its final downfall in December 1916, Asquith’s cabinet moved towards mobilization for a war economy at a pace which left its critics increasingly dissatisfied. Recent research has shown that this apparent complacency was due less to an ideological aversion to intervention than to an initial belief that, as in Napoleonic times, Britain could confine her role to the maintenance of naval supremacy and the finance of her allies, and that it was compounded by administrative difficulties and poor information networks from which to judge the seriousness of the situation. Nevertheless, it would be unwise to dismiss totally the personal inclinations and instincts of cabinet members, or regard them as having been immune from the pacifist sentiments traditional within the Liberal Party. Furthermore, whilst Liberals always recognized that war required some temporary departure from strict Liberal principles and freedoms,2 it was only prudent to avoid any unnecessarily large interventions that might be harder to roll back in the peace.
The Laboratory of Safeguarding
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

By 1921 the McKenna duties had been supplemented by a Safeguarding of Industries Act and a separate measure for protecting the dyestuffs industry. The proportion of British imports covered by the safeguarding legislation was small, and the labour and capital employed in producing many of the items included insignificant-there was indeed a conscious hypocrisy in the criterion, written into the legislation, that the applying industry should be of ‘substantial importance’.2 Nevertheless, there is a tendency to regard safeguarding as a step on the road to protection, following the inexorable march to 1932 that had been set in train by McKenna. To Forrest Capie, the importance of the measures of the 1920s lay in ‘their inroads on free trade ideology’, and there can be no doubt that, if safeguarding was not always a vehicle of conversion, it did provide a sort of attitudinal preparation for the erosion of economic liberalism.
The Federation of British Industries and Protection
Authors: Marrison Andrew
Published: November 2023

To the confusion of Tariff Reformers, who saw the advances they had made in 1916 and 1917 as permanent, the popularity of post-war retaliation against Germany receded in the late wartime and immediate post-war period as it was realized that the Getman economy had been far more damaged by the War than that of the allies, and in the longer term as it was perceived that European recovery was a condition for the restoration of prosperity in the international economy. Merchants and shippers soon lost their enthusiasm for trade restrictions, mirroring, in their desire to resurrect the pre-war liberal international economy, the deep public yearning to return to normalcy. Many manufacturers, however, found the choice less easy. On the one hand, they looked to a rapid dismantling of internal controls and restrictions, and to a restoration of export markets. On the other, they were less certain than politicians and the public at large that currently prostrate Germany would continue to represent no threat, and were in any case unconvinced that Germany represented the only threat. They continued to hope for a government which would adopt a substantive Tariff Reform policy on the basis of the interventionist lessons of the War.
Introduction
Authors: Follis Bryan A
Published: November 2023

On 23 December 1920 the Government of Ireland Act, 1920, received the Royal Assent and thus became law. The Act provided for the setting up of two legislatures in Ireland, one for Northern Ireland and one for Southern Ireland. The parliaments, each consisting of the Sovereign, Senate, and House of Commons, were based on the Westminster model which they were devolved from and subordinate to. The northern parliament was responsible for the defined area of the parliamentary counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry, and Tyrone, and the parliamentary boroughs of Belfast and Londonderry.
Prolusion
Authors: Gombrich E H
Published: November 2023

It being now 5.30, the time has come for me to make the introductory remarks with which you have been threatened on the programme. No, it was not a slip of the tongue when I said 5.30, despite what your watch and the programme says. We have all set our watches to British summer time which is an hour ahead of sun time, to bamboozle us to get up earlier and to enjoy as much daylight as possible in the evening.
The Donation of Constantine: A New Source for the Concept of the Renaissance?
Authors: Black Robert
Published: November 2023

The concept of the Renaissance presupposes a vision of history, a historical scheme. For there to be rebirth, there must have been birth followed by death—or, to change the metaphor, a period of light must have been followed by a time of darkness: the Renaissance was, then, renewing this original time of light. During the Renaissance, these historical concepts were repeatedly and explicitly discussed by humanists and others, who spoke of a revival of the arts achieved in their own or recent times after a long period of decay.
Creating Memory: Monumental Painting and Cultural Definition
Authors: Hood William
Published: November 2023

The aspect of Florentine culture that I discuss in this essay is the use of monumental painting for corporate self-representation in the first half of the fifteenth century.1 The relationship between medium and message was synergetic, and it provides a helpful perspective on cultural definition in the Renaissance, whatever one thinks of the use fulness of ‘self-representation’ as a category for cultural definition of the Renaissance. In this paper I shall limit myself to some remarks on how reform movements in the religious orders, usually called ‘observances’, represented their institutional ambitions through the mural paintings in their cloisters. A broader and lengthier treatment, however, would show that self-definition contributed to the meaning of other works of art commissioned by religious orders in the period, and of secular projects as well.
The Humanist Villa Revisited
Authors: Lillie Amanda
Published: November 2023

The accepted view of the early Renaissance villa—that is the one embraced by Georgina Masson, Andre Chaste!, Ludwig Heydenreich and James Ackerman, and to a lesser extent by David Coffin and Cristoph Frommel—is an idealized one, ‘a fantasy impervious to reality’, as Ackerman has described it in his recent book on The Villa.1 The fantasy has an impeccable ancient pedigree, for it can be traced back to Greece of the eighth century BC in the Works and Days of Hesiod, and it flourished in the Rome of Caesar and Augustus with the agricultural treatises of Varro and Columella, not to mention the pastoral verse of Horace and Vergil.
Printing, Prints and Propaganda
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

This book is a study of visual propaganda, and of its role in the dissemination of the evangelical movement during the first half-century of the Reformation in Germany. A good deal has been written about the importance of printed propaganda for the spread of the Reformation, and the contribution of visual propaganda to this process has often been recognised, but it has been the subject of no thorough or systematic investigation. This study attempts to plug that gap, but it also seeks to go further, and to examine how the Reformation may have impinged on the broadest masses of the people in sixteenth-century Germany. This is the sense in which the term ‘popular’ is used in the title, rather than the other meaning ‘most acclaimed’ or ‘most sought after’. Its argument is that through a study of visual propaganda we may gain a wider understanding of how the Reformation appealed to common folk than by concentrating attention more narrowly on printed propaganda alone.
Images of Luther 1519-25
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

In any discussion of the Reformation, the first name mentioned is invariably that of Luther. The first mass awareness at the beginning of the 1520s that some great religious upheaval was under way was linked to his person. It is, therefore, most important to ask how Luther was depicted or represented during these years. We can trace numerous published Luther portraits from the early 1520s. Allowing for variations and modifications, there were no less than twenty-six different versions. Luther also appears in nineteen illustrations, that is, depictions containing a narrative element or some form of action which includes other figures besides Luther. He features as well in decorative borders of several title pages, although the overall effect is intended to be more than merely ‘decorative’: for example, where Luther points to the risen Christ in another part of the border.2 These depictions can be used to analyse the semiological importance of Luther’s image during the decisive early years of the Reformation.
Enemies of the Gospel
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

It is ironic that the most popular image of Luther during the early years of the Reformation should have been Luther as monk. From the beginning, monks were regarded as his chief opponents, lll’.ld early propaganda for the evangelical movement was directed largely against the institution of monasticism. This is hardly surprising, for there was a long tradition of popular criticism of clerical laxity, and the humanists had already waged an energetic campaign against monasticism. It was only natural that the image of Luther as a man living a pious Christian life should have been juxtaposed to a picture of monastic vice.
Popular Belief
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

Popular belief may, in general, be regarded as the belief held by the mass of the people, by contrast to that held by the religious elite who make up the clerical hierarchy of the Church, the ‘professional men of religion’. But this distinction should not be too rigidly drawn. The rural parson or the wandering friar, for example, may well have shared the belief of the masses, or at least have adopted some of their attitudes, rather than those officially approved by the Church. This concept of popular belief is expressed clearly enough in the medieval saint and miracle cults. Such a definition, however, tells us only where popular belief is to be found, but little about its nature. One of the most persistent dilemmas in the study of religion is whether to approach it as a set of held beliefs or as a set of practices. The dilemma is the more acute in the case of popular belief, where the ideas behind religious practices are rarely formulated clearly and concisely in any formal conceptual structure. Often they appear only through the practices, yet they also give meaning to them. The two must be studied as inextricably linked.
Antichrist and the World Turned Upside-Down
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

The Antichrist is one of the most fascinating figures of late-medieval popular thought, and illustrates the very broad penumbra between official faith and doctrine and popular belief. In .essence, the Antichrist was a diabolical answer to the incarnation, for he was the antithesis of Christ, his personal history a black parody of the Saviour’s. He is born in Babylon from the tribe of Dan, the son of a whore and the Devil. Like Christ, he spends his youth away from the place of his birth, and is brought up by witches and magicians who initiate him into the black arts. At the age of thirty he goes to Jerusalem and is circumcised. He proclaims Jesus to be a fraud and himself to be the true messiah, convincing the Jews of this claim by promising to revive the Mosaic Law. He rebuilds the destroyed temple in three days, sets up his throne there and proclaims himself as God. Through miracles, bribes and force, he quickly gains a huge following, but his rule lasts only three and a half years. During this time he is not unopposed. God sends two prophets, Enoch and Elias, to preach against him, but he slays them.
Teaching the Gospel: Propaganda as Instruction
Authors: Scribner R W
Published: November 2023

Two kinds of process were involved in the propaganda we have examined so far. One was largely negative, to denigrate papal belief and to present evangelical belief as its antithesis. The second looked backwards, presenting the Reformation through the familiar and the traditional, using the associations of popular culture and popular belief. It was no less important to establish the Reformation in more positive terms, as a movement with a distinct theological viewpoint and definite religious characteristics of its own. We shall now analyse how it set about this task.
National Expansion: 1688-1760
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

Between the Glorious Revolution and the death of George II clubs and societies matured as a national social institution. Hitherto largely confined to London and a handful of other centers, they now sprang up across the English provinces and also appeared in growing numbers elsewhere in the British Isles. Small clusters even developed for the first time m British settlements overseas. They remained almost exclusively an urban phenomenon, but, in Britain at lea t, they began to flower in a m1xtd variety of towns. It 1s not just the geographical penetration that is striking; there seems to he a widening of social participation as well. In terms of organization, the trend was towards greater formality, evinced by detailed rules an regulations, a higher frequency of meetings (with the eventual decline of the feastday societies), and more clearly defined aims. Associated with this was the emergence of the first ‘national’ bodies, like the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), which created a network of contacts with local religious societies and corresponding members across the provinces. Some ‘national’ societies went further and acquired an international profile, most notably the English, Scottish, and Irish grand lodges of freemasons, which soon had a battalion of affiliated lodges across the British t:’.mpire and, to a lesser extent, in continental Europe.
Introduction
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

Throughout the world at the end of the twentieth century societies are ageing. A growing proportion of their populations are living into their sixties and seventies and often well beyond. The process may continue, and even accelerate, in the next millennium, due to a combination of declining birthrates and declining death-rates. In 1900 about 7 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom was aged 65 or above; in 2000 about 18 per cent; from 2020 the percentage is projected to rise still further. The proportion of these who were very old, 75 or over, rose from 21 per cent in 1901, to 26 per cent in 1951 to 38 per cent in 1991. An average of 74 people a year reached the age of 100 in England and Wales between 1911 and 1920; in 1997, 3,000 people did so.
Did People in the Past Grow Old?
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

It is widely believed that in the pre-industrial past it was rare to grow old. This is generally because life expectancy at birth is taken as evidence of survival to old age. Life expectancy at birth averaged around 35 years between the 1540s and 18001 and is unlikely to have been higher at any earlier time, but high infant and child mortality rates drastically pulled down such averages. Those who survived the hazardous earlier years of life in medieval and early modern England had a respectable chance of living at least into what would now be defined as middle age—that is, their late forties or fifties— and often for longer still, though the risk of adult mortality fluctuated in different periods.2 Even in medieval times the death of someone in their later thirties was not regarded as ‘timely’ or normal.
Representations of Old Age in Ancient Greece and Rome
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

Human beings seek to explore and to express the meanings of existence through a range of symbolic as well as material forms. Symbols and images—visual and linguistic—express shared meanings and ingrained beliefs and also influence actions and attitudes. Such beliefs assist individuals to construct their own paths through life. 4Old age’ is a symbol into which multiple, often conflicting, meanings have been poured over time and at any one time. The aged body has been employed as a ‘metaphor for the transience and vanity of this world’.1 In any time narratives of ageing and old age may as readily express personal fears and hopes as observations of lived experience. Meanings are as often expressed in myth and metaphor and in other forms of symbolic representation as in straightforward descriptive or prescriptive language.
Independent Old People: Making a Living in Medieval England
Authors: Thane InPat
Published: November 2023

Old people were a substantial presence in past societies and they had an unmistakable presence also in the self-images of those societies, as expressed in a variety of forms of representation. But how did they perceive themselves and how did they live through the experience of ageing? Material resources were obviously crucial. In medieval Europe to have sufficient personal resources for a comfortable life required ownership or secure tenure of real property, though cash resources became increasingly important over time. Such material security enabled older people to be agents in the management of their own lives and extended the range of options available to them.1 Those who could afford it might extend their landholdings as their families grew and might adjust to ageing by gradual disposal, beginning when they were in their fifties, though the possibility of making such transactions depended upon local custom and upon the state of the property market.2 Property might be transferred to offspring, as a means of discharging the strong social obligation upon parents in England to assist their children to acquire independence.3 If children were already provided for, or there were none, property might be leased or sold to others, the ageing tenant living on the income, retaining such property as he or she could manage; or ageing people could pay others to work the land.
‘Lives of Expedients’: Old People and the Old Poor Law
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

It has been suggested that, especially in its treatment of older people, the Old Poor Law, far from being as harsh as was once thought, was a ‘welfare state in miniature’, even that the Poor Law could be more generous to old people than the British welfare state of the late twentieth century. Whatever the inadequacies of the modern welfare state, there is an important difference between the certainty of basic income support and health care at a certain age which it ensures and the extreme uncertainty which continued to characterize access to poor relief into the nineteenth century
‘The First Piece of Socialism Britain has Entered upon’? The Introduction of Old-Age Pensions
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

In 1906, after a decade of Conservative and Unionist government, the Liberal Party won a clear majority The election was also notable as the first in which Labour members won a significant number of seats (29) and the Labour Party became firmly established. The new Liberal government was to introduce an impressive succession of social welfare measures. It is often stated that the Liberals came into office uncommitted to any specific social reform including pensions. This is so in the sense that neither they nor the Conservatives published party programmes, hence neither party was formally committed to anything. However, both parties ‘more than made up for this by flooding the electorate with propaganda leaflets on all the major topics of the day.’ In addition, most candidates issued their own election leaflets, which ‘presented a kind of programmatic choice to the electors that was clear enough’. Russell’s analysis of the election addresses shows that 59 per cent of Liberal candidates supported pensions. It was less prominent than Free Trade, which was almost universally supported, or amendment of the Education Act and reform of the government of Ireland, but none the less, substantial.
‘Shocked into Idleness’: The Emergence of Mass Retirement
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

How did the spread of pensions in post-war Britain affect the lives of older people? If there has been one period of especially dramatic change in the history of the lives of old people it is the mid-twentieth century By the 1950s, for the first time in history, the overwhelming majority of people in Britain could expect to live from birth to their sixties and beyond as a result of falling death-rates at younger ages, especially in infancy, through the earlier part of the century Even the poorest people could expect a secure, if not necessarily a generous, pension at a fixed, predictable, and early age. Most could expect a period of ‘retirement’ between the end of their working lives and the onset of serious physical dependency, if they indeed experienced this, since it was and is by no means universal. They could all expect secure access to health care, which, though often imperfect, was, especially for poorer women, better than anything available ever before. All of this amounted to an important cultural shift in experiences and expectations, in the ways in which people could imagine their life-courses.
The Family Lives of Old People
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

A persistent theme in Western culture over many centuries, as we have seen, has been the conviction that younger people in each generation, more than in The past’, neglect their older relatives, even their parents, both emotionally and materially. This belief has survived tenaciously, despite equally persistent assertions to the contrary. Before the twentieth century evidence either way is scanty and anecdotal. The uneven survival of historical sources makes it easier over long time periods to study the structure of households, who lives with whom, than to understand relationships within families, who may, or may not, share a household. Only after the Second World War were there systematic studies of the relationships between old people and their families which clarify the role of intergenerational family relationships within English culture, in the twentieth century.
‘You’re as Old as you Feel’: Images and Self-Images of Older People at the end of the Millennium
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

It is commonly claimed in late twentieth-century Britain that in ‘the past’ old people were more respected and culturally less marginalized than in the present; that the modern world especially values youth, and far more than in ‘the past’, old people are stereotyped as decrepit, dependent burdens; that old women are regarded more negatively than old men; and that in other, distant, countries they do things differently and better and show more respect for elders.
Into the Twenty-First Century: An Ageing Society—Burden or Benefit?
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

Throughout the world in the later twentieth century populations are ageing. The process will continue, and probably accelerate, in the next millennium. It is far advanced in most developed countries and is visible and projected to advance further and faster in less developed countries, where an assumed Trisis’ of low fertility and ageing populations is overtaking the long-established concern with high fertility and youthful populations. Internationally the change is due to historically unprecedented trends of long-run decline in birth-rates combined with declining death-rates.
England and the English
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

Precise and uniform measurement of time, to which we today attach such importance, was neither feasible nor necessary in early modem England. Clocks, found mainly in churches and other public buildings, rarely possessed minute hands until the late seventeenth century, while portable watches were expensive and inaccurate curiosities. Most people relied upon church bells or sundials for the hour of day or night, and no standard clock time was kept throughout the country. The fact that the south-western port of Plymouth ran a quarter-hour later then London hardly mattered much when communications were slow, and the pace of human activities was still governed largely by movements of the heavenly bodies and the passage of the seasons.
Glorious revolution?
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

One reason why the events following hard upon William of Orange’s landing came to be known as the Glorious Revolution was that-in England at least¬ they involved almost no armed conflict or loss of life.1 This remarkable contrast to Monmouth’s recent invasion, let alone the mid-century civil wars, resulted largely from James H’s failure to make a determined military stand against the numerically inferior forces commanded by his nephew and sonin-law. Physically debilitated, stricken by recurrent nosebleeds (here indeed the Revolution was far from bloodless), apprehensive for the safety of his family as well as himself, perhaps also fearful that William’s safe arrival signified a loss of heavenly favour, James vacillated. His decision to tum back towards London from Salisbury on 23 November without giving fight merely hastened his already demoralized army’s disintegration. Lieutenant-General Churchill, the King’s former military protege and commander at Sedgemoor, now headed a stream of officers and men defecting to William’s camp. As the Prince moved slowly onward from Exeter, with declarations of support coming in from all over the country, James’s military and political position collapsed.
War and the State
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

Between 1699 and 1703 Joseph Addison (1672-1719), a rising Oxford don and budding man of letters, travelled around Europe in order to prepare himself for future employment as a diplomat. From Italy Addison addressed to his Whig patron Charles Montagu, Baron Halifax (1661-1715), a verse letter which suggests that the beauties of the local landscape were largely negated by its oppressive political system. Although bleaker and colder, ‘Britannia’s Isle’ is the home of that ‘Liberty’ which ‘makes the gloomy face of nature gay’.
Trade and the Towns
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

The year 1688 is less obviously an economic than a constitutional and political turning point. By establishing parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law, the Revolution gave property owners a degree of security vis-à-vis the state which may well have been a desirable or even necessary precondition for further economic development over the medium to long term, including the financial innovations discussed in the last chapter. Nevertheless, the events of 1688-9 plainly had less immediate and obvious impact on the economy than on, say, Crown-Parliament relations.
From Party Strife to One-Party Rule
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

The first two Hanoverian kings are traditionally dismissed as boorish foreigners, who lacked (in Macaulay’s words) ‘those personal qualities which have often supplied the defect of a title’.1However xenophobic, this judgement does point to a fact of prime importance. As prince-electorsof Hanover, ruling a relatively small and recently emerged state in north-west Germany, George I and II never focused exclusively on matters British. This geopolitical schizophrenia tended to marginalize their status within the British polity, and accentuate their dependence upon the ministers who formally served but in many respects actually managed them.
Production and Consumption
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of the eighteenth century England was still an overwhelmingly agricultural economy and society. It has been estimated — no precise measurement is feasible — that in 1700 agricultural production accounted for over 40 per cent of total national output, even excluding crops and livestock consumed on the farm rather than brought to market. Agriculture provided artisans and manufacturers with most of their raw materials: ‘Wool, flax, silk, cotton, hides, leather, hair, fur, straw, wood’. Around three-fifths of the adult male labour force then found employment on the land. But because farm work was still essentially a family concern, nearly a million women and children field-workers easily outnumbered some 595,000 men. And for all the glamour, rapid recent growth, and frequent high profitability of finance and overseas trade, political rights and social status continued to be most closely linked to the ownership of land.
People
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

England’s population apparently did not surpass its mid-seventeenth-century peak of 5.3m. until the early 1720s. Population growth continued very slowly for the next twenty years or so, held in check by the severe if intermittent impact of harvest failure and epidemic disease (influenza, smallpox, dysentery, and typhus, but significantly not bubonic plague) between 1727 and 1730, and again in 1741-2. Then from c.1750 the yearly demographic growth rate steadily climbed above 0.5 per cent. By the last decade of the century it had reached the unprecedented level of 1.2 per cent, producing a total of some 8.6m. inhabit¬ ants in 1801.
Retrospect and Conclusion
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

The proverbial long-lived time-traveller who visited England after Charles II’s restoration in 1660, then returned again to hear the news of Waterloo, would have found much that appeared unchanged. In 1815 England still retained a hereditary monarchy, ruling with a bi-cameral Parliament and an avowedly un¬ democratic, gender-biased, property-based political nation; agriculture was the largest economic sector in terms of both employment and production, aristocratic landowners dominated high politics, and most people lived in rural villages rather than towns; poverty was massive, social inequality pervasive; the Church of England retained a privileged status, with its bishops holding seats in the Lords and its clergy supported by compulsory universal payment of tithes and other church dues. Yet on closer inspection many of these apparent continuities turn out to be formal rather than substantive, while others were offset by real and significant change, in kind as well as degree.
Town And Country
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

In his novels Surtees ignores industrial Britain. He has no interest in the cotton operatives of Manchester, the out-workers of Birmingham, the handloom workers of Spitalfields; none in Chartism, or the distress and rioting of 1842. The nearest he comes to the problems of the Industrial Revolution is in Hillingdon Hall, where much of the plot revolves round the intervention of an AntiCorn Law candidate in a local parliamentary election. Yet it would be wrong to conclude that this omission makes him less representative of his age than, for instance, Charles Dickens or Mrs Gaskell. In his lifetime England remained a largely rural and agricultural country-provided, that is to say, the criterion is not statistics of manufacture and commerce but how people lived and what they saw around them in their daily lives.
Squires And Peers
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

One of the interesting minor debates in Victorian public life was over the definition of a gentleman: a debate which, if it did not reach a definite conclusion, at least revealed the confused standards of a rapidly changing society. Historically the term indicated a describable, if not definable, social status. It was the closest post-medieval England came to a caste. In their memoirs men could write without selfconsciousness that ‘I was born a gentleman’; on their tombstones ‘Gent.’ would appear after their name as a sufficient description of their rank. In this time-honoured sense, ‘gentlemen’ and the collective word ‘gentry’ were an extension of the hereditary aristocracy: men of good blood but not necessarily with a title. The gentry class was not a close caste; it was always losing impoverished members and gaining affluent recruits. The duke of Wellington was fond of a saying attributed to Charles II that he could make a hundred noblemen but not a single gentleman. ‘Foreigners’, he told Raikes, ‘hardly know our definition of the term.
Woman And The Pursuit Of Man
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

In her book How I Managed My Children, published in 1865, Mrs Warren propounded two axioms, that ‘married life is a woman’s profession’ and that ‘it is the concealed hope of all girls to marry’. As propositions they were neither new nor peculiar to her time. By most middle- and upper-class families it was taken for granted that a girl’s probable destiny was marriage and that it was only prudent for parents to guide their daughters towards a suitable match. Exceptions are not difficult to find. There were girls who did not wish to marry; girls who defied their parents and married for love; parents who neglected their responsibilities for safeguarding their daughters’ future, or more culpably kept them at home to act as unpaid companions and nurses. Yet, when the exceptions are noted and proper reservations made, the characteristic quality of young women in the early-Victorian period seems to have been the realism with which they, as well as their parents, confronted the problem of matrimony.
Manners
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

That in the course of the nineteenth century English society had become quieter, more orderly, more disciplined, and more humane was never doubted by educated Victorians. To explain why it had happened was more difficult. Many influences had been at work and many of them had started long before Victoria ascended the throne. Eighteenth -century rationalism, Benthamite utilitarianism, humanitarianism, political fears and aspirations, had all played their part. What they had in common was a more serious attitude towards social problems; and at the heart of this greater moral seriousness was evangelical religion. From its origins in the Methodist movement of George II’s reign, Evangelicalism had, during the age of the French Revolution and the post-Waterloo period, filtered into every class of English society. The various Churches which made up the collective religiosity of early Victorian England were not all Evangelical in the narrower meaning of the term but they shared the Evangelical emphasis on personal behaviour and sensitivity to moral issues in national affairs.
The Limits Of Prudery
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

Of all Surtees’ satirical remarks on the foibles of his society, perhaps the most startling comes in chapter xiv of Plain or Ringlets. In giving an account of the swim ming race at the Roseberry Rocks Regatta, he describes how a score of hobbledehoys strip off their clothes in a boat lying offshore, in full view of the spectators on the beach, ‘in a way that but at the seaside would have a very embarrassing effect’. He then talks about sea-bathing in general and reflects how circumstances affect conventions of modesty in women.
Stage-Coaches, Steam, And Speed
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

Half-way through Surtees’ life began the revolution in transport which more than anything else separated the Victorian age from all that had preceded it. The coming of the railways provided the country with a cheap and comprehensive system of moving people and goods long distances at speeds which bore no recognizable relationship to what had previously been possible. In the space of a few years the British public was able to travel three times faster than it had been accustomed before. The whole popular concept of speed was transformed. The limitations imposed by the rate at which a horse could gallop, oars propel a boat, or wind drive canvas, were now irrelevant.
Austerity in Britain
Authors: Zweiniger-Bargielowska Ina
Published: November 2023

Austerity in Britain is the first book to explore the entire episode of rationing, austerity, and fair shares from 1939 until 1955. These policies were central to the British war effort and to post-war reconstruction. The book analyses the connections between government policy, consumption, gender, and party politics during and after the Second World War. The economic background to austerity, the policy's administration, and changes in consumption standards are examined. Rationing resulted in at times extensive black markets and popular attitudes to the policy ranged from wartime acquiescence to post-war discontent. Austerity in Britain qualifies the myth of common sacrifice on the home front and highlights the limitations of the fair-shares policy which failed to achieve genuine equality between classes or between men and women. The continuation of rationing and austerity policies after 1945 was central to party politics. Disaffection, particularly among women, undermined Labour's popularity while the Conservatives' critique of austerity was instrumental to the party's victories at the general elections of 1951 and 1955.
Domiciliary and Dispensary Maternity Provision
Authors: Marks Lara V
Published: November 2023

Much of the care Jewish mothers in East London received before, during, and after childbirth was provided outside hospitals. Most charitable provision was available to mothers in their own homes and did not bind them to restrictions imposed on those confined within institutions. Nevertheless these services had their own demands which could be problematic for Jewish mothers. This chapter examines the forms of support which were available outside the hospitals in East London, and the interactions which Jewish patients had with these services. Directories for East London charitable organizations between 1870 and 1939 indicate an enormous number of organizations working for the benefit of the mother and child, beyond what might perhaps be expected for such a poor area, and starting from a very early period. In his study of poverty in East London, Charles Booth revealed a complex network of district nursing organizations,
The Holy Roman Empire as a Legal System
Authors: Willoweit Dietmar
Published: November 2023

The early modern state did not develop in Germany, as it did in other European countries, out of a whole nation, but out of the territories of princes, which were connected with each other as part of the Empire through common institutions, and whose political independence was therefore restricted. In order to comprehend the process of creating a state in Germany, it is therefore necessary to take the structures of the Empire into account. It then becomes clear that the mechanisms of jurisdiction, which elsewhere played a decisive role in cementing the state authority, performed essential functions of state within the Empire as pre-state and transboundary organizational forms. In other words, in considering the importance of the law for the emergence of the modern state, it must be pointed out that in the Holy Roman Empire the traditional legal structures hin dered the process rather than furthered it. This does not equally apply to the leg islation.