bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Different Kind of Speenhamland: Nonresident Relief in the Industrial Revolution
Authors: Taylor James Stephen
Published: February 2004

“Speenhamland” is a word popularized by late nineteenth-century historians as a derogatory term for the systematic subsidization of laborers' wages by allowances paid from the poor rates. This system was thought to have flourished in southern and agrarian England in the early nineteenth century, the size of the allowances determined by the size of the family and the price of bread. The unwitting “villains” were the Berkshire justices who met at the Pelican Inn, located in a tithing of Speen Parish. Moved by corn dearth and a terrible winter, the justices on May 6, 1795, set in train the fatal hemorrhaging of the Old Poor Law that, in turn, led to the draconian Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Myth this may largely be, and it has been explored elsewhere; however, no one questions that subsidizing the employed from the poor rates, including allowances in aid of wages, occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is in this sense that “Speenhamland” is used here, but to suggest a radically different and mainly constructive consequence for British economic and social development.

For subsidizing the employed poor, when it took the form of nonresident relief, could function as a kind of “Industrial Speenhamland” (freshly coined), to wit: a system of parochially funded labor migration that promoted a work force for expanding industries. This subsidization could include allowances in aid of wages as well as other welfare benefits in times of sickness and unemployment—all at the expense of the home parish or township, not of the places in which the factories and industrial workshops were located.
Jurors of the Village Court: Local Leadership Before and After the Plague in Ellington, Huntingdonshire
Authors: Olson Sherri
Published: February 2004

Ellington, Huntingdonshire, a village belonging to the estates of the abbot of Ramsey from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, was a typical East Midlands open-field village of 2,700 acres, with a largely villein population and a mixed farming economy. In these and other respects, Ellington was fairly representative of the rural settlements that housed the vast bulk of European populations throughout the Middle Ages. In the last several decades historians have intensified their efforts to understand the economy and society of these peasant communities, using records of local provenance, primarily the minutes of the semiannual manorial courts. The present article, based upon a larger socioeconomic study of the village community of Ellington from 1280 to 1600, examines the local response of that community to the long-term crises engendered by the arrival of plague in the mid-fourteenth century. Here, we are interested in examining the social underpinnings of village government, specifically, the dynamic complex of community standards or expectations that informed the selection of local leaders in the village.

Thanks to the evidence of court rolls, which begin in the thirteenth century, and other local records uniquely available for the English peasantry, we can study a number of indices of change in peasant communities and thus identify some of the aspirations and choices that constituted one dimension of the “mental world of the non-literate folk.” A study of village government through local leadership is a direct and significant avenue of investigation, first, because the surviving data allow us to identify the village's official leaders, both as individuals and as a group.
The Fourth Earl of Dorset and the Personal Rule of Charles I
Authors: Smith David L.
Published: February 2004

The assembly of the Long Parliament in November 1640 witnessed an outburst of passionate hostility toward recent royal policies in church and state. “The Common-wealth hath bin miserably torne and macerated,” declared Harbottle Grimston, “and all the proprieties and liberties shaken: the Church distracted, the Gospell and Professors of it persecuted, and the whole Kingdome over-run with multitudes and swarmes of projecting cater-wormes and caterpillars, the worst of all the Aegyptian plagues.” Yet, as Kevin Sharpe has recently reminded us, “to those on the road during the 1630s, the journey seemed far from a headlong rush towards conflict.” Sir Henry Wotton could write in 1633 that “we know not what a Rebel is; what a Plotter against the Common-weal: nor what that is, which Grammarian[s] call Treason: the names themselves are antiquated with the things.” To resolve this flat contradiction requires much further research into the politics and government of Charles I's Personal Rule. In particular, a clear picture of the political behavior, relationships, and attitudes of many public figures is still lacking. This article therefore presents a case study of one prominent individual: Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, privy councillor and lord chamberlain to Henrietta Maria. These offices gave Dorset an exceptional opportunity during the 1630s to “see more clearly into [the king's] intents and actions.” Moreover, both official sources and personal correspondence should reveal his activities during the Personal Rule and his attitudes toward it. What follows will examine in turn Dorset's duties as the queen's lord chamberlain, the political influence that this office conferred, his work as a privy councillor, his relations with various factions, and his private opinions of the regime and of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.
“Nothing but Ceremony”: Queen Anne and the Limitations of Royal Ritual
Authors: Bucholz R. O.
Published: February 2004

In recent years, historians of the Augustan period have done much to rehabilitate the posthumous reputation of Queen Anne, a monarch traditionally viewed as dull, weak, reactionary, and easily led. Beginning in the 1920s with the work of W. T. Morgan, continuing with that of G. M. Trevelyan and G. S. Holmes, and culminating in the definitive biography by Edward Gregg, Anne has gradually emerged as a figure to be reckoned with. We have come to see her as a tenacious and often skillful navigator, charting a middle course between the opposing shoals of the Whig and Tory parties, in an attempt to preserve freedom of maneuver for the postrevolutionary monarchy.

This article will explore a heretofore neglected aspect of the queen's political helmsmanship: the attempt to make her person and crown a focus for national (i.e., English) unity through the revival and exploitation of royal ritual and symbol. It will be argued below that Anne—alone among the later Stuarts—made extensive use of the arsenal of ceremonial paraphernalia, what David Cannadine has called “the theatre of power,” which is normally associated with her Tudor and early Stuart predecessors. This essay is thus intended not only to contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Anne's political role but also to help fill a gap between the wealth of fine work on pageantry at those earlier courts and the work Linda Colley and others have done on the reign of George III.
Richard Cobden and the International Peace Congress Movement, 1848–1853
Authors: Nicholls David
Published: February 2004

Between 1848 and 1853 a series of major peace congresses was held—in Brussels (1848), Paris (1849), Frankfurt (1850), London (1851), Manchester (1853), and Edinburgh (1853). This midcentury period was one of great confidence and optimism in the likely success of the cause. Indeed, reading the reports of the congresses today, one is struck by the at times naive overoptimism of many delegates. This may in part have been the product of the millenarian atmosphere of the period. However, it has to be said that the congresses were also characterized by a strong sense of the practicality of their proposals and the steady progress toward their goal that implementation of such proposals would achieve. Above all, the efflorescence of the peace movement in the short six years around the midcentury was the product of a class confidence, of a momentary triumphalism that inspired a section of the bourgeoisie to believe that the scourge of war could be eradicated at last.

The nineteenth-century peace movement effectively began with the establishment toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, independently and virtually simultaneously, of peace societies in the United States and Britain. They were dominated by men of religion, particularly Quakers, and for a quarter of a century their work was essentially that of proselytizing the peace cause through publicity, petitions, and lecture tours. In connection with the last, the London Peace Society sent emissaries on tours of continental Europe in the early 1840s to spread the peace message.
The Religion of the Child in Edwardian Methodism: Institutional Reform and Pedagogical Reappraisal in the West Riding of Yorkshire
Authors: Green S. J. D.
Published: February 2004

Much has been written in recent years about the history of childhood in Edwardian Britain. To some extent, that concentration of scholarly effort reflects a profound shift in academic concerns away from the superficially extraordinary and noteworthy to the apparently mundane and neglected that has characterized much of the so-called new social history, and from which redirection of academic attention the history of childhood in modern Britain has been only one of many beneficiaries. But perhaps to a greater extent, the outpourings of recent historiography on the changing nature and changing significance of childhood in Britain during the first decade of the twentieth century and in the years immediately leading up to the outbreak of the Great War reflect an intellectual preoccupation that would have been perfectly comprehensible to the Edwardians themselves: a preoccupation, during the first decade of the twentieth century, with the discovery of “child life,” that is, with a form of mental, emotional, and psychological life peculiar to the child.

Precisely what that life consisted in, how it was discovered, and what, having unearthed it, the Edwardians made of it, is a subject too vast to be explored here. This article draws attention to only one aspect of that life and of the Edwardian discovery of and uses of it that has been largely neglected in modern historical writing. This is the religious life, religious education, and religious development of the child, particularly of that life as it was lived, nurtured, and brought (or not brought) to fruition in the Sunday schools of Edwardian England.
Saye No More
Authors: Kishlansky Mark A.
Published: February 2004

What makes a historian master of his craft is the discipline of checking findings, to see whether he has said more than his source warrants. A historian with a turn of phrase, when released from this discipline, risks acquiring a dangerously Icarian freedom to make statements which are unscholarly because unverifiable. [C. S. R. Russell]

In December 1990 I published an essay critical of the work of Dr. John Adamson. I cited numerous examples of what I consider systematic misuse of evidence, including selective quotation and misquotation, tendentious interpretation, and the citation of sources that either have no bearing on the point being substantiated or are so tangential to it that no reasonable researcher would consider the cited material to constitute evidence within the canons of accepted scholarly practice. I came to these conclusions after a long period of checking citations. What I found was that the evidence for these questionable practices was embedded in Adamson's work and concealed from the view of his readers. Because he uniformly preferred to cite from manuscripts and disdained cross-reference to readily available printed editions, only someone whose familiarity with the materials nearly rivaled his own could be aware of the problem. Dozens of manuscript citations were offered as evidence for self-confident assertions, but time after time no quotations were provided in either text or footnote to make the assertions concrete. When sources were quoted, the quotations were largely run into Adamson's sentences rather than appearing in their own contexts.
Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation
Authors: Carlson Eric Josef
Published: February 2004

The abolition of clerical celibacy in England was, according to its first great modern student, Henry Charles Lea, “a process of far more intricacy than in any other country which adopted the Reformation.” Since Lea wrote, historians have come to accept an outline of that process. According to this standard view, it was Henry VIII, acting out of his own personal conservatism, who retained and defended mandatory celibacy in the first stage of the English Reformation. Once the king had died and his leaden foot was removed from the brake, the clergy were able to overwhelm ineffective conservative opposition in the Edwardian government and legalize clerical marriage. The gains of the Edwardian years gave way before the reaction of the Marian period, and they were not reinstated after Mary's death because of the anticonnubial tastes and religious conservatism of Elizabeth I. Throughout this period, so the story goes, the clergy (a majority of them, at least) struggled for the right and privilege of marriage, only to find royal resistance (except briefly under Edward VI) impossible to overcome.

This traditional outline is misleading in several respects. Elizabeth I's attitude toward the marriage of the clergy is far more complex than has been recognized. Specific regulations of such unions developed from her desire to establish an ordered church worthy of popular respect and cannot simply be ascribed to a general, almost pathological, personal distaste for marriage or quirky personal religious views.
The Fearefull Estate of Francis Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England
Authors: MacDonald Michael
Published: February 2004

This is the story of a story. It all began in May 1548, when an Italian Protestant named Francesco Spiera recanted. He had been denounced to the Inquisition the previous November, and, fearful that he would lose his wealth and beggar his family, he renounced Protestantism publicly both at St. Mark's in Venice and in his hometown of Citadella, near Padua. It was a painful decision. Even before his second recantation, he began to hear a voice warning him not to apostatize, and soon after it the voice returned, admonishing him for denying God and sentencing him to eternal damnation. Convinced that he had been forsaken by the Lord, Spiera fell into despair. He removed with his family to Padua, where his woeful condition quickly came to the attention of prominent theologians, including Pier Paolo Vergerio, the bishop of Capodistra, and Matteo Gribaldi, like Spiera, a civil lawyer and a professor at the University of Padua.

As Spiera's despair deepened, he was consoled by these eminent scholars and by as many as thirty other men. He suffered terribly, refusing food and rejecting their attempts to persuade him that he was not damned. The days and weeks passed; he maintained his conviction that God had forsaken him. He argued brilliantly with his learned visitors, displaying a remarkable grasp of Scripture and theology, which he deployed to prove his own damnation. He declared that he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, the single fault that places one beyond the Lord's mercy.
The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s
Authors: Clark Anna
Published: February 2004

Who are compelling women and tender babes to procure the means of subsistence in the cotton factories—to be nipt in the bud, to be sacrificed at the shrine of Moloch? They are the rich, the capitalists. [Speech by Mr. Deegan, Chartist, at Stalybridge, 1839]

A [Malthusian] pretended philosophy . . . crushes, through the bitter privations it inflicts upon us, the energies of our manhood, making our hearths desolate, our homes wretched, inflicting upon our heart's companions an eternal round of sorrow and despair. [Letter from George Harney to Yorkshire Chartists, 1838]

Toryism just means ignorant children in rags, a drunken husband, and an unhappy wife. Chartism is to have a happy home, and smiling, intelligent, and happy families. [Speech by Mr. Macfarlane to Glasgow Chartists, 1839]

Chartist political rhetoric was pervaded by images of domestic misery typified in these quotes. Historians have traditionally understood this stress on domesticity as a simple response to the Industrial Revolution's disruption of the home, either denigrating it as inchoate proletarian rage or celebrating it as a heroic defense of the working-class family. But domestic discontent was nothing new in the 1830s, for drink, wife beating, and sexual competition in the workplace had plagued plebeians for decades—if not centuries. Why then did it become such a potent political issue in the 1830s and 1840s? Following Gareth Stedman Jones, the question must be answered by analyzing Chartist domesticity not just as a reflection of social and economic changes, but as a trope that performed specific political functions in Chartist language.
The Egalitarian Giant: Representations of Justice in History/Literature
Authors: Patterson Annabel
Published: February 2004

In Franz Kafka'sThe Trial, a horrifying fable of human alienation from human institutions, there is a central encounter between Kafka's persona K. and the painter Titorelli, whose task is to reproduce endlessly the icons of the judicial system—arbitrary, logically absurd, yet cruel and inescapable—of which K. has become the latest victim. Approaching a painting in progress, K. recognized its subject as a judge, but could not identify a large figure rising in the middle of the picture from the high back of the judicial seat:

“It is Justice,” said the painter at last. “Now I can recognize it,” said K. “There's the bandage over the eyes, and here are the scales. But aren't there wings on the figure's heels, and isn't it flying?” “Yes,” said the painter, “my instructions were to paint it like that; actually it is Justice and the goddess of Victory in one.” “Not a very good combination, surely,” said K., smiling. “Justice must stand quite still, or else the scales will waver and a just verdict will become impossible.” “I had to follow my client's instructions,” said the painter. “Of course,” said K., who had not wished to give any offense by his remark. “You have painted the figure as it actually stands above the high seat.” “No,” said the painter, “I have neither seen the figure nor the high seat, that is all invention, but I am told what to paint and I paint it.”
The Great Council of Parliament and the First Ordinances: The Constitutional Theory of the Civil War
Authors: Mendle Michael
Published: February 2004

In the militia ordinance of March 5, 1642, the houses of Parliament declared an emergency and “ordained” a solution. The emergency was the “imminent Danger” posed to king, Parliament, and kingdom by the “Rebellion and Insurrections” of “Papists, and other ill-affected Persons.” The solution was the selection of suitable county lieutenants, who were authorized to appoint deputies and officers and otherwise perform their duties.

Charles rejected the ordinance, ensuring a double confrontation: an arms race and the public exchanges known as the “war of words.” The Civil War—the predictable outcome of the rattling of words and swords—was bound intimately to the defense or attack of the three propositions stated or implied by the militia ordinance: that there was an emergency, that to address it the two houses required control of the militia, and that an “ordinance” was the appropriate constitutional strategy for the occasion.

The third matter is the focus of this study. But the genius of the militia ordinance and, more generally, the central constitutional assertion of the two houses on the eve of civil war was that the emergency, the mobilization of force, and the ordinance were intertwined beyond untangling. It was not merely that the militia ordinance was a response to an emergency situation beyond the reach of exact precedent. It was equally true that the constitutional thinking of parliamentary leaders, developed well before the militia ordinance and the train of events to which it specifically refers (the Irish rebellion of October 1641 and the attempt upon the five members of January 1642), more or less obliged them to produce an emergency as the grounds for the type of action they took.
Popular Radicalism and the Socialist Revival in Britain
Authors: Lawrence Jon
Published: February 2004

The twentieth century has not been kind to the “Whig interpretation of history” with its emphasis on the inexorable triumph of reason and progress. Mortally wounded on the battlefields of Flanders, the liberal certainties that underpinned it were finally laid to rest in the shadow of the Holocaust. With the Whig interpretation died the tradition of seeing nineteenth-century politics in terms of the gradual, but uninterrupted, evolution of democratic principles and institutions. In its place emerged a new orthodoxy that stressed the discontinuities of popular politics during the nineteenth century and argued for three distinct phases of political development. The first, a phase of militant, semirevolutionary politics, coincided with the “industrial revolution” and led up to the defeat of Chartism in the late 1840s. This, it was argued, was followed by a period of stabilization during the mid-Victorian decades characterized by relative prosperity and political docility among the working classes. The final phase began with the economic downturn of the late 1870s and was said to have witnessed the reemergence of working-class militancy and socialist politics and to have culminated in the formation of the class-based Labour party.

This three-phase model emerged in embryonic form between the wars in the agitprop histories of Marxist writers such as Theodore Rothstein and T. A. Jackson and in the more influential works of G. D. H. Cole and the Hammonds. At the same time, many of the reductionist assumptions that underpinned it were simultaneously finding favor within Britain's emergent school of economic historians.
Arbitration and the Growth of Urban Liberties in Late Medieval England
Authors: Attreed Lorraine
Published: February 2004

In December 1448, the city of Exeter agreed with the bishop and dean and chapter of the cathedral church to abide by the arbitration of two local magnates who settled a complex dispute over urban jurisdiction. That the arbitrators decided against the city, which suffered a slight constitutional setback as a result, is only one of several important conclusions to be drawn from a study of the dispute and its resolution. The nature of the argument and the procedures by which both parties sought to resolve it shed light on the character of urban constitutional growth in the later Middle Ages, on legal procedures and what medieval people thought about the law, and on the lengths they were willing to go to assure a decision that was as favorable as possible without poisoning relations between two institutions that coexisted within city walls. The case also illustrates the important role arbitration played in dispute settlement and reveals this method to be as viable an alternative as recourse to the common-law and equity courts of the royal government.

Exeter's case is unique in that so much written evidence survives to testify to the financial investments and political aims of both parties involved. Comparisons will be drawn to other boroughs that endured similar jurisdictional disputes in the fifteenth century, but their evidence is far less revealing of decision and motivation than that remaining for Exeter. Although many of the major documents associated with the case have been in print for over a century, and examined in some detail in a brief monograph published over fifty years ago, the nature of the records has focused more attention on the city's participation than on that of the cathedral.
Puritan Self-fashioning: The Diary of Samuel Ward
Authors: Todd Margo
Published: February 2004

14 June 1595. My negligence is not calling upon God before I went to the chapel, and the little desire I had there to call on God, and my drowsiness in God's service. My sins even through the whole day, being Sunday: (1) my negligence aforesaid, (2) my hearing of the sermon without that sense which I should have had, (2) [sic] in not praying God to bless it to me afterward, (3) in not talking of good things at dinner being the posteriorums day, (4) in the immoderate use of God's creatures, (5) in sleeping immediately after dinner, (6) in not preparing me to sermon til it tolled, (7) in sluggish hearing of God's word, and that for my great dinner, (8) in hearing another sermon sluggishly, (9) in returning home and omitting our repetition of sermons, by reason that my countryman Eubank was with me, (11) [sic] in not exhorting him to any good thing, (12) in not going to evening prayers, (13) in supping liberally, never remembering our poor brethren, (14) in not taking order to give the poor women somewhat at 7 o'clock, (15) my dulness in stirring of my brother to Christian meditations, (16) my want of affections in hearing the sermons repeated, (17), my sluggishness in prayer, and thus sin I daily against thee, O Lord.

On such diary entries as this one of Samuel Ward's, historians have built an edifice called “puritanism.” It is rigid, narrow, and quaintly absurd in design. It is the sort of structure on which twentieth-century people can look down with complacency from the heights of their own intellectual towers. It makes one glad to have escaped the confining corridors of faith and piety by rendering them dark, small, and rather shabby.
Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism
Authors: Eastwood David
Published: February 2004

Whether he traced historic truths with zeal,Whether he traced historic truths with zeal,

For the state's guidance or the public weal;

Or fancy, disciplined by curious art,

Informed his pen; or wisdom of his heart;

Or judgements, sanctioned in the patriotic mind

By reverence for the rights of all mankind:

Wide were his aims, yet in no human breast

Could private feelings meet in holier rest.

[From William Wordsworth's public epitaph on Robert Southey]

The language of politics is, by its very nature, both imprecise and artificial. Its meaning is shaped, not so much by linguistic conventions, but by the very political processes of which language constitutes the essential currency. One can, therefore, only understand the nuances of a given political vocabulary when one relocates it within those historical and political frameworks that it both animated and circumscribed. Once political language is viewed as central to the political process, one can begin to appreciate the extent to which even the basic vocabulary of politics must itself be plastic. One might indeed go further and suggest that the dynamism of a given political system is reflected in organic transformations in the political language it employs. These transformations are most apparent in the radically different meanings that are imputed to terms such as “legitimate” and “constitutional,” on the one hand, or “liberty” and “equality,” on the other. The process of political evolution can be traced as clearly in the development of political vocabulary as it can in the reform of political institutions. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that one of the principal impacts of the French Revolution in Britain lay in its stimulating a renewed struggle over the language of politics.4 Nowhere was that struggle more apparent than in the transformed language of patriotism that emerged from the debates of the 1790s.
Britishness and Otherness: An Argument
Authors: Colley Linda
Published: February 2004

There is no more effective way of bonding together the disparate sections of restless peoples than to unite them against outsiders. [E. J. Hobsbawm,Nations and Nationalism since 1780(Cambridge, 1990), p. 91]

Britain is an invented nation, not so much older than the United States. [Peter Scott,Knowledge and Nation(Edinburgh, 1990), p. 168]

The morning of Saturday, September 14, 1793, was bitterly cold, and George Macartney, Viscount Macartney of Dervock in the county of Antrim, had been up since four o'clock, making final preparations for his audience with the emperor of China at his summer palace at Jehol, just north of the Great Wall. He stood waiting in the large, silken tent for over an hour before Ch'ien-lung eventually arrived, “seated in an open palanquin, carried by sixteen bearers, attended by numbers of officers bearing flags, standards, and umbrellas.” To the fury of the watching Chinese courtiers who had wanted him to execute the full kowtow (three separate kneelings and nine knockings of the head on the floor), Macartney went down on one knee only and presented the emperor with a letter from George III in a gold casket covered with diamonds. He followed this with other gifts—pottery, the best that Josiah Wedgwood's factory in Staffordshire could produce, a diving bell patented by the Anglo-Scottish engineer John Smeaton, sword blades from Birmingham, an orrery, a telescope, and some clocks.
Beyond Identity? The Reconstruction of the Welsh
Authors: Jones R. Merfyn
Published: February 2004

The prospect of l'Europe des régions, which appears to promise a simultaneous migration of power outward to a wider federal Europe and downward to the devolved regions — both goals to be achieved at the expense of the presently constituted national governments — has raised expectations in the periphery as well as concern in the established centers. The question of national identity is suddenly on the agenda and has evoked a response throughout the countries of Europe: an attempt to define a specifically European identity to accompany the little maroon passports carried by its citizens has also caused confusion in capital cities and thrown out a challenge to the peripheral nations and regions. In some respects such areas might already have arrived at the destination, for, unlike the English or the French, the Scots and the Welsh have for centuries sustained an identity without the protective buttressing of a state of their own. The Welsh, in particular, have survived despite the lack of a separate legal and educational system and a recent history that has witnessed massive immigration and integrationist pressures. A series of traditional identities of and for the Welsh has suddenly been rendered as redundant as a coal miner. The Welsh, nevertheless, are, in their contrasts and diversity, yma o hyd— “still here,” in the words of a popular song. It might be that there are pointers in the Welsh experience of national identity of how to move beyond the confines of that debate itself, a debate only just beginning among the English.
History and Sovereignty: The Historiographical Response to Europeanization in Two British Cultures
Authors: Pocock J. G. A.
Published: February 2004

When we were a little tiny colony of Britain(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)Our feckless history began to be written(And the waves break busily night and day).When first we fought in an Empire's cause(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)It wasn't for the loot, nor yet for the applause(And the waves break busily night and day).Then when we came to Dominion Status(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)Nor slump nor squeeze could alienate us(And the waves break busily night and day).

These are lines in which Allen Curnow, New Zealand's most important living poet, responded in his secondary capacity, as Whim Wham, a weekly contributor of comic verse to newspapers, to the decision of Great Britain to seek entry to the European Community. He could see as everyone could that this would mean a dissolution of Britain's role in a global community and, in particular, of a relationship with Britain that had hitherto given meanings good and bad to New Zealand's history, its sense of itself, and the meaning of its existence.

Sir, have you thought what it's like to be(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves)All, all alone on a wide, wide sea?(And the waves break busily night and day).Much can happen in a very short time(With a heigh ho, the winds and the waves).A feckless history, a foolish rhyme!(And the waves break busily, night and day).
Culture, Britain, and Europe
Authors: Eley Geoff
Published: February 2004

We are in the midst of a remarkable moment of historical change, in which the very meaning of “Europe” — as economic region, political entity, cultural construct, object of study—is being called dramatically into question, and with it the meanings of the national cultures that provide its parts. While perceptions have been overwhelmed by the political transformations in the east since the autumn of 1989, profound changes have also been afoot in the west, with the legislation aimed at producing a single European market in 1992. Moreover, these dramatic events — the democratic revolutions against Stalinism in Eastern Europe, the expansion and strengthening of the European Community (EC) — have presupposed a larger context of accumulating change. The breakthrough to reform under Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Solidarity crisis in Poland, and the stealthful reorientations in Hungary have been matched by longer-run processes of change in Western Europe, resulting from the crisis of social democracy in its postwar Keynesian welfare-statist forms, capitalist restructuring, and the general trend toward transnational Western European economic integration.

Taken as a whole, these developments in east and west make the years 1989-92 one of those few times when fundamental political and constitutional changes, in complex articulation with social and economic transformations, are occurring on a genuinely European-wide scale, making this one of the several great constitution-making periods of modern European history.
Decolonizing the English Past: Readings in Medieval Archaeology and History
Authors: Biddick Kathleen
Published: February 2004

Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and sociologists are accustomed to categorizing the inhabitants of the rural farming households of medieval England as peasants without questioning the disciplinary implications of imposing such a category on historical subjects. Foundational categories, such astheworker,thepeasant,thewoman, become so familiar that they appear natural and divert us from studying the historical and power-charged processes involved in their constructions, past and present. The century-old debate over views of medieval English peasants as bound statically by custom, on the one hand, or as dynamically diverse or mobile, on the other, perhaps expresses embedded disciplinary tensions in the historic division of labor between anthropology (including archaeology) and history. From their disciplinary formation in the early modern period, anthropology and history together have constructed and guarded an imaginary but nevertheless potent boundary between the historical and the primitive, a boundary that divided the European colonizer from the non-European colonized and that within Europe divided the historical past from the traditional past. Who gets an anthropology and who gets a history therefore becomes a question of historic and power-charged disciplinary practices. As a foundational category, “peasant” straddles both disciplines and both divisions of the past, historical and traditional.

In this essay, I wish to examine the powerful yet unacknowledged ways in which these disciplinary practices inform medieval peasant studies. I shall focus especially on the study of the material culture of the medieval English peasantry. Both history and archaeology claim the medieval English peasant to justify disciplinary narratives.
The Origins of the Scottish Plantations in Ulster to 1625: A Reinterpretation
Authors: Hill J. Michael
Published: February 2004

There is no question that the plantation of Ulster during the reign of James I had a profound effect on the course of British history. However, the nature of that plantation has been either misrepresented or misunderstood. In order to overcome this problem, we must address two provocative questions: (1) Were the Scots-Irish, the largest group of settlers, predominantly Celtic or non-Celtic ethnically and culturally? and (2) If they were mainly Celtic, why were they better able than non-Celts to establish viable settlements in Ulster, a predominantly Celtic area? A reexamination of the origins of the pre-1625 Scottish settlers and their methods of settlement indeed casts the problem of the Ulster Plantation in a new light.

For the last two decades, historians have begun to question the portrayal of the Scots-Irish, or Ulster Scots, as frugal, hardworking, anglicized Presbyterian Lowlanders who brought the light of civilization to a benighted Celtic backwater. For example, Nicholas Canny correctly dismisses the “myth” of Ulster's material transformation by pointing out that the province, unlike Leinster and Munster, was settled by British planters from less economically advanced areas of the archipelago. But, again, he does not adequately examine the cultural and ethnic background of the dominant Scots-Irish. Traditionally, they have been classed as “Lowland,” non-Celts rather than as “Highland,” Celtic Scots. These designations are misleading because they oversimplify Scotland's historical and cultural divisions that had been in place as early as the Norman invasion.
From “Fiscal-Military” State to Laissez-faire State, 1760–1850
Authors: Harling Philip , Mandler Peter
Published: February 2004

The recent historiographical revolution in our understanding of the eighteenth-century state has broad implications, analytical as well as empirical, that are only beginning to be plumbed. Due largely to the work of Patrick O'Brien and John Brewer, the old picture—of a small, amateurish, corrupt central apparatus largely maintained (between sporadic wars) to dignify the crown and assist gentlemanly (i.e., parliamentary) plunder—has been pretty completely effaced. We now see that by the end of the French wars the British state was one of the largest and most efficient in Europe; certainly it engorged the largest proportion of national product by means of a ruthlessly regressive tax system. The French wars were the climax, not the sole begetters of this system, which had been spawned by a chain of wars mounting in scope and sophistication since the late seventeenth century and requiring commensurate improvements in fiscal policy: thus Brewer's memorable naming of the system as the “fiscal-military state.”

For historians of the early nineteenth century, this revision raises a host of questions about the relationship of social change and social class to government growth. Particularly, it casts doubt on the customary association made between growth in the size or scope of government and the rise in the Industrial Revolution of new social and economic questions and a bourgeoisie to answer them; that is, it casts doubt on the implicit “modernization” model that hitches together economic growth, government growth, bureaucracy, professionalism, and embourgeoisement.
A New Look at the Reformation: Aristocratic Women and Nunneries, 1450–1540
Authors: Harris Barbara J.
Published: February 2004

Ever since the first flowering of scholarship on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, convents have occupied a central place in historians' estimate of the position of women in medieval and early modern Europe. In 1910, Emily James Putnam, the future dean and president of Barnard College, wrote enthusiastically inThe Lady, her path-breaking study of medieval and renaissance aristocratic women, “No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it.” In equally pioneering works published in the same period, both Lena Eckenstein and Eileen Power recognized the significance of the nunnery in providing a socially acceptable place for independent single women.

Many contemporary historians share this positive view of convents. InBecoming Visible, one of the most widely read surveys of European women's history, for example, William Monter wrote approvingly of convents as “socially prestigious communities of unmarried women.” Similarly, Jane Douglass praised nunneries for their importance in providing women with the only “visible, official role” allotted to them in the church, while Merry Wiesner, sharing Eckenstein and Power's perspective, has observed that, unlike other women, nuns were “used to expressing themselves on religious matters and thinking of themselves as members of a spiritual group. In her recently published study of early modern Seville, to give a final example, Mary Perry criticized the assumption that nuns were oppressed by the patriarchal order that controlled their institutions; instead, she emphasized the ways in which religious women “empowered themselves through community, chastity, enclosure and mystical experiences.”
Willingly to School: The Working-Class Response to Elementary Education in Britain, 1875–1918
Authors: Rose Jonathan
Published: February 2004

In Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1914, J. S. Hurt employs what has become a classic opening in works of social history. “Much of the history of education,” he declares, “has been written from the top, from the perspective of those who ran and provided the schools, be they civil servants or members of the religious societies that promoted the cause of popular education. Little has been written from the viewpoint of those who were the recipients of this semi-charitable endeavour, the parents who paid the weekly schoolpence and the children who sat in the schoolrooms of nineteenth-century England.”

Hurt's point is well taken, but he leaves himself open to the retort that he also draws his information mainly from official sources. The parents rarely speak in his book, the children almost never. One could make the same criticism of Phil Gardner's The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England. Gardner claims that the so-called dame schools, the private venture schools that served a large fraction of the Victorian working class, were unfairly disparaged and suppressed by educational bureaucrats. But he too depends largely on bureaucratic reports to reconstruct the history of schools outside the state system. Neither Gardner nor Hurt quite succeeds in plumbing educational history to the very bottom: they do little to reconstruct the classroom experience from the viewpoint of the working-class child.

What sources could we use to recover that history? There are, of course, the reports of school inspectors, but Gardner warns us that they had a vested interest in condemning dame shools.
Early Whig Ideology, Ancient Constitutionalism, and the Reverend Samuel Johnson
Authors: Zook Melinda
Published: February 2004

In 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense with sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's works.” The “Johnson” to whom Coleridge referred was not the celebrated Doctor Samuel Johnson of the eighteenth century but instead the late seventeenth-century Whig clergyman, the Reverend Samuel Johnson. Reverend Johnson's single volume of complete works impressed Coleridge; he scribbled laudatory remarks throughout the margins of a 1710 edition. Coleridge admired the directness of Johnson's style and his persuasive method of argumentation. Johnson would have appreciated Coleridge's comments. They reflected the way he himself understood his work—as sound constitutional doctrine, plainly put.

Yet for all its clarity and consistency, Johnson's political thinking was not always appreciated by England's political elite of the 1680s and 1690s. The implications of Johnson's political ideas—much like those of his contemporary John Locke—were understood as far too revolutionary and destabilizing. However, Johnson's fiery prose and sardonic wit often proved useful to the political opposition: from the Whig exclusionists of the early 1680s, to the supporters of William and Mary in 1688/89, to the radical Whigs and country Tories of the 1690s and early eighteenth century.

Johnson's career as a Whig propagandist spanned 1679 to 1700. Among his contemporaries, he was undoubtedly most renowned for his strident anti-Catholicism and for the brutal punishments that he endured for his radical politics.
Charity and Gild Solidarity in Late Medieval England
Authors: McRee Ben R.
Published: February 2004

When officers of Ludlow's Palmers' Gild composed their reply to a royal inquiry into the state of English gilds in 1388–89, they included the following description of their organization's plan for assisting indigent brothers and sisters:

When it happens that any of the brothers or sisters of the gild shall have been brought to such want, through theft, fire, shipwreck, fall of a house, or any other mishap, that they have not enough to live on; then once, twice, and thrice, but not a fourth time, as much help shall be given to them, out of the goods of the gild, as the rector and stewards, having regard to the deserts of each, and to the means of the gild, shall order; so that whoever bears the name of this gild, shall be upraised again, through the ordinances, goods, and help of his fellows.

The same gild also offered aid to sick, aged, and wrongfully imprisoned members and set aside money for dowries so that daughters of families that had experienced unexpected misfortune might marry or enter nunneries.

The Palmers' Gild was a religious fraternity, a type of voluntary association that enjoyed tremendous popularity during the late Middle Ages. These gilds were lay associations of men and women that devoted themselves to a variety of religious and social undertakings. Unlike the more well known craft fraternities, religious gilds drew their members from a variety of professions and made no attempts at industrial regulation.
The Creation of a “True Antient and Indubitable” Right: The English Bill of Rights and the Right to Be Armed
Authors: Malcolm Joyce Lee
Published: February 2004

The seventh of the thirteen “ancient and indubitable” rights proclaimed in the English Declaration of Rights was neither ancient nor indubitable. It declared “that the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by Law.” The right of ordinary subjects to possess weapons is perhaps the most extraordinary and least understood of English liberties. It lies at the heart of the relationship between the individual and his fellows and between the individual and his government. Few governments have ever been prepared to make such a guarantee, and, until 1689, no English parliamentary body was either. Its elevation that year to the company of ancient and indubitable rights unmasked the deep-seated distrust between the governing classes and the crown. Together with the equally novel article that gave Parliament greater control over standing armies, this right was meant to place the sword in the hands of Protestant Englishmen and the power over it in the hands of Parliament.

The actual novelty of this right had eluded historians for a variety of reasons. First, its framers were taken at their word when they described it as ancient and indubitable. Indeed, Whig historians preferred to believe there had been a conservative revolution. Thomas Macaulay rejoiced that “not a single flower of the crown was touched. Not a single new right was given to the people. The whole English law, substantive and adjective, was, in the judgment of all the greatest lawyers … almost exactly the same after the Revolution as before it.