bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Saint for Every Minster? Local Cults in Anglo-Saxon England
Authors: Blair John
Published: November 2023

There [Tavistock] the holy bishop Rumon lies and is venerated, and is endowed with a beautiful shrine, although no written evidence attests to his legend. You will find this not merely there but in many places in England: only the bare names of saints are known, and whatever miracles they may still perform. All evidence for their doings has been obliterated, I believe, by the violence of enemy attacks. On the face of it, William of Malmesbury’s comment seems more appropriate to Celtic regions than to England. The plethora of obscure local cults in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany is often thought to reflect a type of Christian organization fundamentally different from the more centralized and hierarchical church of the early English. The operations of the typical Welsh saint were small-scale, producing a pattern of very restricted, sometimes unique place-names and dedications which suggest, in How Pryce’s words, ‘intensely localized lay devotion’. In England, by contrast, the spotlight has been on a small number of major figures whose lives, or at least legends, are well recorded and well known: important prelates and abbesses, or politically significant royal martyrs.
Politics, Popularity, And Patriotism
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

Although not immediately recognized at the time, the failure of the’45 marked a major turning-point in English history. Henceforth the Stuart cause no longer seriously threatened the house of Hanover, the Revolution Settlement, and the Act of Union. As the Jacobite issue accordingly faded from view, and with it much of the significance of the traditional Whig-Tory divide, a rising generation of younger politicians began to address new issues of domestic and foreign policy created by a more diverse and forcefully expressed public opinion, as well as the continued growth of Britain’s maritime power and imperial presence overseas.
Ruling Institutions
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

Members of a Middlesex grand jury were informed by the magistrate Sir John Hawkins in 1770 that since Christianity was ‘part of the law of the land’, they had a duty to control ‘that licentious and daring spirit, which leads men to deny... or controvert its precepts, and by consequence to weaken, if not dissolve, the bonds of society’.1 The interdependence of law and religion in upholding the established order of things was an eighteenth-century commonplace. Yet Hawkins and his listeners would also have been well aware of the disruptive potential of religious differences, and the decidedly mixed reputation of the law and its practitioners.
Burdens and Fruits of Empire1763-1788
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

The peace which concluded the Seven Years War was ‘a damned bad one’ in the view of a London citizen, recorded by Boswell at Child’s coffee house on 11 December 1762. But although the Treaty of Paris saw Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Goree restored to France, while Spain regained Cuba and the Philippines, it nevertheless brought vast territorial gains, especially in India and North America. These massive acquisitions of lands and people inevitably focused attention on England’s extra-European interests and presence. The phrase ‘British Empire’ began to acquire a new significance, denoting the pos-session of lands and peoples across the seas, in addition to the more familiar assertion of commercial and maritime dominance.
Sense and Sensibility
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

England was ‘the country of philosophers’, according to a cosmopolitan French visitor in 1745 (echo Voltaire). Argument and disputation pervaded every level of society, from peers of the realm debating parliamentary business, to common sailors denigrating both French matelots and their own government. Foreign observers often attributed this contentiousness to the national obsession with political and religious liberty, which encouraged all aspects of individualism, including a questioning and rationalist outlook.
The State and Civil War, 1921-1923
Authors: O’Halpin Eunan
Published: November 2023

The nature and extent of independent Ireland were determined by two fundamental factors. The first was the settlement negotiated and signed by British and Irish representatives in December 1921. The second was the political and military conflict over acceptance of that settlement which followed in Ireland over the next two years. The divisions marked by treaty and civil war have haunted Irish politics ever since.
Unresolved Questions: Defence, Security, and Subversion since 1969
Authors: O’Halpin Eunan
Published: November 2023

The state’s experience since the late 1960s in the realms of internal security and external defence, while linked so much to the old problems of partition and republicanism, must be seen against the broader backdrop of the modernization and internationalization of the Irish economy, and of the transformation of the country’s relations both with the United Kingdom and with continental Europe.
Robert Surtees and Early Victorian Society
Authors: Gash Norman
Published: November 2023

Though for well over a century the novels of R.S. Surtees have maintained a steady readership, his books have been comparatively neglected in the literary and social studies of his period. Norman Gash's stimulating book is both a contribution to Surtees studies and to Victorian social history. It has often been observed that Surtees' fiction furnishes a wealth of material for social historians, and Professor Gash sets out to exploit the opportunities it offers. He places Surtees' novels in their historical context, and uses the novels and other writings to enlarge the historical evidence. Through the views of an unorthodox and sceptical early Victorian novelist, Norman Gash examines a familiar landscape from an unfamiliar angle, illuminating the conservative world of the countryside, small provincial towns, and the seedier side of London. This is a scholarly and entertaining study by an eminent historian of the nineteenth century.
Introduction
Authors: Zweiniger-Bargielowska Ina
Published: November 2023

Rationing, austerity, and fair shares occupy a central place in British history during and after the Second World War, but there is no study which focuses on these policies throughout the entire episode from the outbreak of war in 1939 until the termination of rationing and controls in the mid–1950s. The purpose of this book is to explore this topic from a range of perspectives. Chapter 1 examines how rationing and controls were administered and assesses the implications of the policy on consumption and dietary trends. Subsequent chapters analyse the public response to the austerity policy by focusing on popular attitudes, women’s experiences, and the black market. The continuation of austerity after the war became increasingly controversial, and the final chapter discusses the party political debate about post-war austerity and its electoral implications.
Background: Immigration and Settlement
Authors: Marks Lara V
Published: November 2023

‘IMPOVERISHED’ and ‘destitute’ were the words frequently used by contemporaries to describe the East European Jewish immigrants settling in East London in the late nineteenth century. Migrating from areas facing great upheaval and poverty many of these Jews arrived penniless and without any possessions. Between 1895 and 1902 22 per cent of all the Russian, Romanian, and Galician immigrants arriving at the port of London claimed to be penniless. A further 15 per cent had less than 10s. per adult, and the average total was 26s. per adult.1 None the less, despite such poverty, it is a mistake to think of these immigrants as a socially and economically homogeneous group. Each immigrant came with differing levels of skill and economic resources. Some had migrated from towns, others from little villages. Similarly, while some travelled with their family or with friends, others came on their own. Such a variety of backgrounds not only shaped their ordeals on arrival and in subsequent years, but also the future of their children born in East London.
The Health of Jewish Infants and Mothers in East London
Authors: Marks Lara V
Published: November 2023

If the gentle reader desires to know what kind of blood it is that flows in the Chosen People’s veins, he cannot do better than take a gentle stroll through Hatton Garden, Petticoat Lane, or any other London ‘nosery’. I do not hesitate to say that in the course of an hour’s peregrinations he will see more cases of Lupus, trachoma, favus, eczema, and scurvy than he will come across in a week’s wanderings in any quarter of the Metropolis. Such words reveal the fear of many politicians and social campaigners at the turn of the century. They were anxious that the influx of East European Jewish immigrants would bring disease and physically deteriorate the health of the British population.2 This was a view promoted by ardent anti-Semites, such as the conservative Joseph Banister, as well as by social reformers such as the Fabian Socialists. Arriving at a time of grave anxiety over the future of Britain’s economic and military position in the rest of the world, East European immigrants provided a focus for these concerns.
Poor Law Institutions and Maternity Care
Authors: Marks Lara V
Published: November 2023

Visitors to the infirmaries, especially in the East End, will agree that the conditions in these places are altogether unsuited for Jews. The feeling between the Jew and non-Jew patients is somewhat strained, and the staff generally would rather prefer to dispense with the Jewish element. Here again the language difficulty is the main trouble. The very name ‘Infirmary’ seems to terrify the East End Jew. Such words used by Revd Wolf in 1909, vividly portray the discomfort many Jews experienced in Poor Law institutions. In these institutions Jews not only suffered the stigma of parish relief like everyone else, but also were disadvantaged by their immigrant status and non-Anglican background. This chapter explores what implications this had for Jewish mothers who, unable to seek care from their traditional or communal networks of support or to gain help from other host agencies, were forced to rely on the parish for their maternity care.
Kingdoms on the Periphery of Europe: The Case of Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavia
Authors: Poulsen Bjom
Published: November 2023

How did the relatively backward areas of Europe narrow the gap, in terms of economic and fiscal development, with the ‘more advanced’ areas? This chapter seeks to explain what might be called the ‘early harmonization’ of the European economy, which was the product of a long period of state formation in Scandinavia. During this process, three kingdoms came into being, namely Denmark, Norway and Sweden (with Finland). Other types of governmental structure formed on the periphery of these kingdoms. The Danish and German social and fiscal systems fused in Schleswig and Holstein, while peasant republics existed in Iceland and Ditmarschen on the west coast of Holstein. This chapter attempts to demonstrate how and why these early states moved towards the European level of fiscal development. The main emphasis will be on the majority of the population in these areas, the peasants, and on the mechanisms by which their economic surplus was transferred to the nascent state structure.
Early Modern Theories of State Finance
Authors: Bonney Richard
Published: November 2023

It has already been seen that the theoreticians of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance had developed sophisticated theories with regard to the nature of taxation, and that in some measure they had anticipated ‘modem’ debates on the ‘progressive’ or ‘regressive’ aspects of a fiscal system in terms of its economic and social consequences (Chapter 1). This chapter concentrates largely on what was new in the arguments of early modem theoreticians, on new disciplines such as the study of monetary circulation and its impact on the economy; on population growth and its implications for society, the economy and the state; and on the development of credit instruments and their relevance to the long-term growth of state finance. The aim of this chapter therefore is not to rewrite in entirety the history of those parts of political theory which relate to state finance; nor even to select certain particularly influential theorists and cover the entire corpus of their works. Instead, its purpose is to demonstrate the evolution of ideas in as brief a survey as possible so as to provide a context for the discussion which follows. A number of obvious questions present themselves.
Revenues
Authors: Bonney Richard
Published: November 2023

Where a programme of research covers such a vast area of study, it is necessary to begin by setting its parameters. It is impossible to study the evolution of the revenue systems of every European state, let alone the evolution of the main types of revenue in each one. Our more modest objective is to describe the evolution of certain types of revenue which we may take to be reasonably representative of their kind within western Europe, and to attempt to discern the relationship between these types of revenue and political and economic developments. In other words, certain types of political, economic and social development were necessary for particular forms of revenue to be adopted by states. As has been seen earlier (Chapter 6.5), at least by the eighteenth century, theoreticians were clear that some types of revenue were better adapted to particular governmental and economic systems.
Legislation, Justice and Political Power in Italian Cities, 1200-1400
Authors: Sbriccoli Mario
Published: November 2023

The experience of the communes of central and northern Italy may be considered, in its mature phase, that in which recourse to the juridical instrument as a means of organizing and guaranteeing political life was established with suffi cient clarity, and perhaps thoroughly for the first time. We are at a point at which it is possible to say that a great part of political theory is to be found in legal trea tises concerning institutions and forms of government:1 the relationship between the exercise of political power and legal processes is fairly clear, and it was brought to light some time ago by legal historians.
The Nobility-State Relationship
Authors: Mczak Antoni
Published: November 2023

‘A monarchy where there is no nobility at all, is ever a pure and absolute tyranny as that of the Turks. For nobility attempers sovereignty, and draws the eyes of the people somewhat aside from the line royal ‘, wrote Francis Bacon. ‘ ‘No nobility no king ‘, or ‘No Bishop, no King, no nobility ‘: these popular epigrams recorded in Bacon ‘s time were among many stressing the indivisibility of ruler and elites in the monarchy. Butifit is true that the nobility balanced the powers in the state, the problem is: What was the role of the state in the life of the noble, and what was the nature of their relationship? ‘
Introduction
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

The origins of the modern state are to be found in the Middle Ages—this was the conviction of the historians, legal historians, and political scientists who met in Strasbourg in 1987 to launch a research project which was to study and compare the structures and developments leading to the modern state as it appeared c.1800 in the different European countries. Half a millennium of European history would have to be reviewed.
Explanations
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

Compared to central Europe, peasant resistance in Scandinavia was modest. Violence was exceptional, and those violent actions which did occur took place at times of national crisis and cannot be explained in isolation from that context. Most of these actions were confined to the century between c.1430 and c.1540. Day-to-day resistance was channelled through a political system based on the principle of co-operation between rural communities and the royal or ecclesiastical authorities. The medieval state was built on the principle of local self-government. Kingship and community were tied together by strong reciprocal bonds. The administration of justice and military defence were communally organized, and as a rule the most outstanding peasants were tied to the Crown as lensmen, members of the royal hird,or simply as persons of high esteem available for public service. Likewise, this local élite was tied to the Church, acting as churchwardens or appointees of the bishops.
Introduction
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

Historians usually assume without question that the form of government of the civic community in the Middle Ages has something to do with the modern state. In construing the historical relationship of cause and effect, however, most historians use metaphors more than analytical categories. The city as a ‘hothouse of the modern state’ is such an image, borrowed from the vegetal world by a German legal historian,and the French historian Fernand Braudel used the fable of the hare and the tortoise to describe the relationship between city and modern state.According to Braudel’s analogy, the city was faster at first, as was the hare, but c.1500 the tortoise reached the goal first. In any case, neither the medieval nor the modern European state originates directly from cities, as did ancient Athens in the form of the clearly defined polis, and Rome, where Roman citizenship was expanded to include the entire Roman Empire— even though the words of European languages for citizenship in the national state (‘citizen’, citoyen, cittadino, Bürger) are derived from the words for the city inhabitant.
The Holy Roman Empire
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

By the later Middle Ages, the German-speaking core of the Holy Roman Empire contained an extremely complex set of urban landscapes, which confront the urban historian as products of varieties of city building, from the Celtic and Roman foundations of ancient times to the early medieval coastal trading entrepôts— Henri Pirenne’s world—along the northern seas to the sites established by the great city-founding dynasties of the high Middle Ages, such as the Zähringen, who founded Berne and Freiburg im Breisgau. The great wave of urban foundations in this part of Europe culminated in the second half of the thirteenth century, when three times as many cities were founded as in the entire era before 1250. The wave then broke off abruptly around 1300, although many new very small towns (Minderstädte) appeared during the following 150 years. Then came the ‘urban trough [Städtetal]’—Heinz Stoob’s term—which coincides with the entire early modern era (1450–1800), and during which very few new cities were founded.The urban landscapes of the German-speaking world in 1800, therefore, had been created by 1300; the later Middle Ages witnessed their internal consolidation and the intensification of urban networks; and the early modern era formed an era of relative stasis with respect to the cities and urban life. This broad pattern is responsible for some of the great peculiarities of urban life in the German-speaking world: the lack, as contrasted with the states of Europe’s western tier, of a centre or several centres; the intense development of small urban centres; and a wide variety of urban social complexions.
The Common People and the Process of State Formation: Some Conclusions
Authors: Blickle Peter
Published: November 2023

The ‘modern state’ was shaped mainly by two developments: first by the monopolization of political power in the hands of a king or territorial prince in the early modern period, and, secondly, by the renunciation of the legitimacy of monarchic-aristocratic authority in the wake of the French Revolution. The revolutionary act of 1789 was the establishment of the tiers état in the nation as a sovereign power, thus turning the political power hierarchy, which had existed for centuries, upside down. Peasants and burghers, who before had been understood to be ‘subjects’, were politically emancipated, with the result that the monarchy as a form of government disappeared, whereas the state itself continued to hold a monopoly of power. Before, during, and after the French Revolution, not only in France, but throughout Europe, a programme was formulated and politically accomplished in the course of the nineteenth century, which proclaimed equality and freedom to be innate human rights and declared the welfare of its citizens to be the purpose of the state.
A Whig Education, 1779-1805
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

For the first three or four years of her reign, Victoria often found herself ensconced on a sofa in Windsor Castle, listening spellbound to Melbourne’s accounts of his youth. So much had happened between the 1780s and the 1830s, that his tales had the quality of describing a foreign country. It is on these stories that an account of Melbourne’s early life has to be built. Inevitably, they are partial, coloured, and no doubt much elaborated to tease the imagination of his young audience.
Collapse from Within, 1837-1841
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

The real threat to Melbourne's tenure of office came not from the Left or the Right, from Radicals and Tories, but from within the ranks of those he counted as his supporters. His government had been put together in a fragmentary way: one or two Foxite Whigs, the Grey family interest, and Palmerston as a law unto himself. He kept it together by umpiring in crises between departments, and by making personal appeals to whatever better nature his colleagues had. It was political juggling of a very high order, but it could not go on forever. Issues of any kind brought on new divisions. While the agenda of 1830-4 was continued and polished, there was a chance of minimum agreement, because his friends would be bound by previous decisions. On the other hand, new points of business would be devastating. Melbourne endlessly fought to divert the attention of his colleagues from anything that would demand new responses.
Introduction
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

The expression ‘a polite and commercial people’ was used by the distinguished academic, MP, and judge, William Blackstone, in his magisterial Commentaries on the Laws of England, published between 1765 and 1769.1 Blackstone is a fitting source for the title of this volume. His lifetime, 1723 to 1780, coincides with the period which it describes, and his varied career touched many of the themes with which it is concerned. But similar terms were commonplace in the 1760s and 1770s, and suggest something of a consensus about the central characteristics of mid eighteenth-century England. They also correspond well with the images of eighteenth-century life which were transmitted to posterity. Politeness conjures up some familiar features of Georgian society, its civilized if secular outlook, its faith in a measured code of manners, its attachment to elegance and stateliness, its oligarchical politics and aristocratic fashions. Politeness is stamped on the country houses and portraits which for many provide the most vivid introduction to the culture of the eighteenth century. It is to be found in the pages of the standard texts through which modern readers customarily encounter eighteenth-century literature, the Spectator’s journalism, Pope’s poetry, Horace Walpole’s letters, Gibbon’s history, Burke’s rhetoric, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Johnson’s own Lives of the Poets. Commerce is not less redolent of an era in which the empire, built on trade and extended by arms, expanded beyond the empires of ancient as well as modern times. Moreover, it will forever be associated with the enterprise of an age of extraordinary economic growth, accompanied by the first clear signs of industrialization.
Salvation by Faith
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

The evangelical revival had its origin in a period when conventional religion was under pressure from fashionable deism. The doctrine of _justification by faith permitted a rebellion against the early eighteenth century’s attachment to ‘natural’, ‘reasonable’ religion. It attracted diverse groups, including parish clergy who accepted the authority of the established Church. Wesley himself was an opponent of those who wished to separate from the Church and also of those who could not accept its Arminianism. None the less he was often seen as a threat to the forces of tradition and order. His appeal to the poor aroused much suspicion of his motives. Neither the Church nor the Dissenting sects could readily match the dynamism of the revivalists. Resistance to Methodism was often violent, reflecting popular hostility as well as genteel disapproval. The Church used its episcopal powers and legal privileges to combat lv1ethodist influence. Clerical dislike of the evangelical model of the priest hood was heightened by Wesley’s reliance on lay preachers and encouragement of pious women. Lady Huntingdon’s Connection came in for similar censure. Uniting the enemies of the evangelical movement was a profound distrust of its emotionalism and ‘enthusiasm’. Polite literature was steeped in the Newtonian view of the world: between the enlightened empiricism of the educated and the primitive superstition of the uneducated there was a widening gulf The popular reception of reforms like the repeal of the Witchcraft Act and the introduction of the Gregorian calendar confirmed the belief of polite society in the barbarity of its inferiors.
Philipon and the Illustrated Press, 1830–1836
Authors: Kerr David S
Published: November 2023

The vast majority of the political caricatures produced in the early 1830s were drawn for, and appeared in, the illustrated newspapers owned and directed by Charles Philipon. All newspapers develop a collective identity which imposes certain obligations upon their contributors; the ideological and stylistic constraints imposed upon the contributors to Philipon’s newspapers were especially strong. With La Caricature, Philipon invented a new type of satirical newspaper. His interventionist management transformed the illustrated newspaper from a fashionable review decorated with a disparate collection of lithographic imagery into a formidable machine de guerre. The artists and writers who worked for La Caricature and Le Charivari were keenly aware that they were participating in a common endeavour: they worked as a team, borrowing themes and motifs from one another constantly. Philipon’s newspapers posed a challenge to their readerships. To understand their humour fully, readers had to be able to follow the multiple cross-references between successive caricatures and between the caricatures and the newspaper articles. Scholarly monographs which artificially isolate the work of individual artists and treat their prints as if they were autonomous works of art have ignored the conditions under which caricature was produced. An adequate understanding of caricature in the 1830s can only be achieved by examining the mechanics of the illustrated press and by studying the newspapers as a whole rather than the contribution of single artists.
‘A United People’: Charles Knight and the Making of a Picturesque History of England
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

As the 1840s novels of W. H. Ainsworth show, the growth of picturesque historiography fostered an new interest in the history of the everyday lives, customs, and habits of the British people, and the physical remains of the national past. For much of the eighteenth century, these subjects were the preserve of antiquaries and were passed over by most philosophical historians.
The City Magistrates and the Process of Prosecution
Authors: Beattie J M
Published: November 2023

Unlike France, which by the early eighteenth century had a system of police, both national and local, and a particularly well-organized force in Paris under central control and with a finely graded hierarchy of authority, policing in England was entirely local and fragmented.1 In the City of London, many of the activities we would summarize as ‘policing’ were carried out by a variety of officials and by private citizens. These forms of policing were, however, to be extended and increasingly co-ordinated in the eighteenth century, impelled by a search for more effective surveillance of the streets, and more effective prevention and prosecution of criminal offences. Largely as a result of these changing practices, the word ‘police’ came into more common use and took on a variety of shifting meanings over the century.
The geographical element in Irish history
Authors: Andrews J H
Published: November 2023

of all geographical boundaries the seacoast is the most easily apprehended. It is the one line that can be trusted to appear on even the oldest and crudest of early maps; and as the antiquity of many insular names suggests, it is the island, among all varieties of region recognised by geographers, that makes the readiest psychological appeal. However closely Ireland resembled the neighbouring countries, acre for acre, it was to be expected that insularity in itself would create an impression of individual character or personality in the mind of any commentator, at any historical period, who knew the country to be enclosed by water.
Iron-age Ireland
Authors: Raftery Barry
Published: November 2023

Already in the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries b.c. there is evidence from Greece, Slovakia, and elsewhere that meteoric iron was cold-hammered to form rings and other small items, and it now seems that forged iron was already being produced on a small scale in western Europe soon after the middle of the same millennium. The Hittite kingdom of Asia Minor was an important centre of iron-working from about the fourteenth century b.c. onwards, but seems not to have had a monopoly of industrial production as was once believed. Towards the end of the millennium the knowledge began to spread across the west on a significant scale.
Ireland, 400–800
Authors: Cróinín Dáibhí Ó
Published: November 2023

One of them, possibly Cormac mac Cuillenáin, abbot of Cashel and king of Munster (902–8), chided his predecessors for their remissness in this task. In addition, he chastised the Irish people in general for what might nowadays be regarded as an uncharacteristic indifference to their own history: In stating his purpose in this way, however, our author was in fact perpetuating a lie, for the scheme of things that he then goes on to relate represents a view of early Irish history that was of relatively recent date.
The Viking Age
Authors: Byrne F J
Published: November 2023

They are quite coldly matter-of-fact. The figures they give are not exaggerated, and so, when an act of particular atrocity is recorded, we may have some confidence in its historicity. Nothing in the contemporary Irish sources equals the ferocity of the Norse literary evidence, some of which, it is too often forgotten, was composed in the Viking period by pre-literate skalds. A healthy scepticism as to the absolute historicity of the Icelandic sagas and other medieval Nordic sources, combined perhaps with the fact that most recent work on the Vikings has been dominated by the archaeological evidence, has led to a neglect of the skaldic evidence and of the runic material which demonstrates the folly of regarding the Scandinavians as totally illiterate.
Ireland and her neighbours, c.1014–c.1072
Authors: Byrne F . J
Published: November 2023

His claim to be imperator Scottorum, inscribed by his notary Máel Suthain in the Book of Armagh on his visit there in 1005, may indeed have implied overlordship not merely of Ireland but also of the Gaelic realm in Britain, and such wider authority is implied in the unusually fulsome obitu-ary accorded him by the Armagh annalist. It curiously anticipates Toynbee’s concept of the ‘abortive’ north-western civilisation embracing Saxon, Celt, and Dane that was brought to an end by the Norman conquest of England
Introduction
Authors: Blackbourn David
Published: November 2023

At the beginning of July 1876, the United States of America stood on the eve of its centenary, the festive preparations only slightly clouded by news of General Custer’s fate on the Little Bighorn the previous month. European eyes were fixed on the Balkan battlefields, where the revolt of Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria against the Ottoman empire had just been joined by Serbia and Montenegro.
The State Climbs Down
Authors: Blackbourn David
Published: November 2023

Was Prussia a state bound by the rule of law? Events in Marpingen caused many to doubt it. After the village schoolteacher Andre had been summarily transferred to Tholey, Father Schneider wrote to a clerical friend in Trier asking for legal advice on the situation. The reply was that an action of this kind was impermissible without formal disciplinary proceedings—’but in Russia everything is possible’. The equating of Prussia and Russia gives an indication of Catholic bitterness over Marpingen. A friend of Neureuter’s from Zwolle wrote in the following terms, in a letter that ironically enough was seized by the authorities, having arrived shortly after the parish priest had been taken into custody: ‘Are you ill or in prison; for anything is possible—silence is golden in Germany, even if elsewhere the problem is lead. Moreover, private letters should not be sniffed at by everyone and in Prussia-Germany only the cabinet of the chancellor is private.’ The actions of the state in Marpingen worried many beyond the ranks of Catholics, from the Frankfurter Zeitung on the left to the Kreuz-Zeitung on the right. For the latter, the dubious role played by Meerscheidt-Htillessem and the treatment of the visionary children were ‘weak points that the government might well find it difficult to defend’. Police measures had been an inappropriate choice of weapon, and the government might regret its methods if ‘absolutely tangible and convincing evidence’ of deliberate deception and criminal actions could not be produced.
Introduction
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

I HAVE had the notion of trying to examine two separate years of early Soviet history. I fell upon this idea because I think it may have certain methodological advantages (as well as some disadvantages) in the treatment of Soviet politics and history. When I came to look at other historians and other countries and periods I could find very few scholars who had in fact chosen single unimportant years of past time and studied them in any detail. It has been undertaken in studies of 1848 in Western Europe, but of course 1848 was a very significant revolutionary year. In this book I take two apparently insignificant years, 1922 and1926, and examine and compare them. I wish later to explain in some detail why I thought of taking up this approach. Let us look first of all at contemporary observers of the year 1922 and then turn to look at how the period is treated in present-day studies. Inside the Soviet Union around the year 1922, it is true that there were a few historians, some of them professional, who were sympathetic enough to the Bolshevik cause to write about it. Unfortunately, they were so preoccupied with the struggle of living that they had little time to comment on passing events. After 1917 Professor Pokrovsky could only take off half an evening a week for historical research. He devoted most of his energies to the organization of elementary education. In any case, Pokrovsky and others urged that the study of history should be replaced by the study of what they called ‘socio-economic formations’. Russian history was not taught for some years during this period in Russian schools. A very small number of active politicians turned their minds to general surveys.
Bolshevik Controls
Authors: Pethybridge Roger
Published: November 2023

IT was seen in the previous chapter that there were initial attempts in early NEP to adopt a less centralist approach to the railways and to the press for technical and cultural reasons respectively. Thus Dzerzhinsky on the spot in Siberia discarded faulty theoretical calculations made in Moscow, and in the spring of 1922 railway administration in general was partly decentralized. Yet soon thereafter political fear led to the chairman of each local board becoming a direct representative of the central Commissariat. It was the same with the local press. The Eleventh Party Congress instructed editors to adapt their articles to local needs and educational levels, but by 1923 most peasant correspondents were expected to toe the line on central directives and were discovering how unpopular they were in the countryside as a result. In this chapter some Bolshevik systems of nation-wide control are examined. They depended heavily for the efficient dissemination and harvesting of personnel and information on the more technical communications that have just been considered.
Disjunctions
Authors: Vital David
Published: November 2023

Few in Jewry anywhere in Europe had anticipated emancipation. All that was certain about it when it was first enacted in France and as the prospect of its enactment elsewhere began to loom, was that it augured unprecedented but also irreversible change in the structure and character of the Jewish people. From this point on, the questions on which virtually everything of importance in the lives of the Jews of Europe would turn was whether, if only as a hypothesis, such change was to be welcomed or rejected; and whether the welcome—or rejection—was to be flat or qualified. Upon these issues Jews in all parts of the continent would now begin to be deeply and, in the course of time, irreparably divided.
Questions from Without and Within
Authors: Vital David
Published: November 2023

In its modern, secular, and political form the notion that the Jews, collectively, presented a threat to the other European peoples was in the main the invention of men of letters—scholars, philosophers, publicists—and serious political dissidents. So was its corollary: that the role the Jews played in society and in the economy was at once an acutely representative symbol of the times and one of its governing factors. In certain interesting ways the idea had roots in ancient, especially Christian, theses and sentiment. In other ways it constituted a departure from them, reflecting changes in social and political conditions at all levels of European society and the common thinking on public affairs. However, the rapidity and avidity with which it was taken up and propagated cannot be fully accounted for except in the light of the advance of the process of Jewish emancipation and of its twin, the admittedly incomplete, but still noticeable and continuing integration of the Jews in society at large. Such was the case where emancipation had been decreed and embarked upon. Such too was the case where it was contemplated from afar and denied. Some of the early formulations of the conceit dated from just before the collapse of the ancien régime, elements being present in the minds both of those who had decreed measures of emancipation and those who had sought actively to obstruct it, the entire process, as we have seen, being shot through therefore with reservations and internal contradictions.
Crystallization
Authors: Vital David
Published: November 2023

One cardinal respect in which something of the old world of unemancipated, unacculturated Jewry survived the great social changes undergone in the nineteenth century was the rule of mutual assistance: the fundamental operative principle on which the unity and integrity of Jewry in its entirety relied. It may never have been absolutely and in all circumstances operative. But it spoke, and it continued into the modern era to speak, to all Jews of certain common, rock-bottom interests, responsibilities, and obligations. It lay at the heart of the greater part of Jewish public business. It was the Archimedean point on which all calls for aid and co-operation and all efforts to respond to them turned: thus within particular communities, thus across communal and state boundaries as well. For actual force and effectiveness it depended partly on the sympathy-but perhaps more especially the empathy—which supplicants for assistance normally evoked. It depended equally on it being recognized as the incontestable moral obligation of all collectivities, institutions, and individuals in Jewry—notably, of course, but not exclusively, those perceived as well placed and fortunate—to render whatever aid and protection they could muster to the less fortunate, above all to those in immediate, evident distress.
Sweden: The Mass Burnings (1668-1676)
Authors: Ankarloo Bengt
Published: November 2023

THE oldest recorded Swedish laws were written down in the thirteenth century. A comprehensive national code was enacted around 1350. These early legal sources reflect an agrarian society in transition from primitive to feudal forms of production. In the labour force, slavery (thraldom) was still important, but was gradually giving way to newer forms of exploitation such as servitude and tenancy. The social difference between the landowning warlord elite and the productive majority was relatively advanced already in the Viking era (c.800-1000), but was to some extent mitigated by the existence of a class of free farmers, the size of which varied over time and from region to region.
Society and the Economy
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

The second half of the nineteenth century down to the outbreak of the First World War was decisive for the social and economic development of Rumania. In many areas she moved toward modem forms. Population grew steadily and became more urban, industrialization gained momentum, and the infrastructure of an advanced economy began to fill out. The Liberal and Conservative parties encouraged private enterprise, but the role of the state as an entrepreneur and regulator proved indispensable for economic progress.
Society and the Economy 1919–1940
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

Between the World Wars Rumania presented striking contrasts between entrenched underdevelopment and burgeoning, if un even, industrialization and urbanization. On the one hand, her economic and social structure preserved in broad outline its prewar configuration. Agriculture remained the foundation of the country’s economy. and its organization changed but little, despite an extensive land reform. The great majority of the population continued to live in the countryside and to draw its income primarily from agriculture. In international relations Rumania remained dependent. on the West as a market for her agricultural products and raw materials and as a source of many kinds of manufactured goods and investment capital.
Power And Influence In Paris, 1418-1436
Authors: Thompson Guy Llewelyn
Published: November 2023

This chapter is about the administration of Paris during the English occupation. It is concerned less with the major strategic decisions of the Lancastrian council than with local justice and government. As a brief consideration of the network of jurisdictions will show, legal institutions were subject to the vagaries of their own inherited structures and of the human agents who worked within the system. What is true of the judicial system is true of every part of the administration. There were many anomalies, skilfully exploited by those who operated the machinery of government. well informed: it was filled by men who came to power in the Burgundian coup of 1418; from 1422 it was headed by the regent, the duke of Bedford, who delegated everyday administration while keeping key political matters in his own hands.
Defence And Security
Authors: Thompson Guy Llewelyn
Published: November 2023

Anglo-Burgundian Paris was a town at war. One only need tum the pages of the Journal d’un Bourgeois to see how, even when the battles were far away, the war could still be near at hand. This was the dominant consideration of the town’s politicians and an inescapable fact of life for everybody else. Thus merchants bringing cattle for the butchers of Paris came with an armed guard. To understand what it was like to governor to live in-the Paris of the 1420s and 1430s involves knowing how the town responded to the menaces of war, to the occasional serious assaults and raids, and to the constant fear of surprise attacks. Privileged to live behind strong walls, the Parisians had to face the fact that towns, by reason of their military power, were bound to be strategic targets in any long war. The problem was not only one for the citizens: from 1420 the government in Paris was led by an English regent, for whom possession of the French capital gave credibility to claims to the French throne.
Politics and Parliament
Authors: Haigh Christopher
Published: November 2023

IN 1530 the English Church was suddenly confronted with an unexpected and unwonted challenge. In July, the attorney-general filed praemunire indictments in King’s Bench against eight bishops and six other ecclesiastical officials. It was alleged that, by entering into compositions with Wolsey for the exercise of their jurisdiction, they had implicated themselves in an illegal assertion of his legatine powers. By September it was rumoured that another 200 clergy would be indicted, and by 21 October Henry VIII had agreed that the whole clergy of England should be charged. The rule of Wolsey had given the common lawyers a powerful weapon against ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and the king was apparently willing to let them use it. The penalties for praemunire offences were loss of property and life imprisonment. Henry could hardly imprison all the clergy, but they were now at his mercy. It seemed that, in an unexpected fall from power in 1529, Cardinal Wolsey might bring the authority of the English Church crashing down with him.
From Resentment to Recusancy
Authors: Haigh Christopher
Published: November 2023

IN July 1578 the churchwardens of Weaverham in Cheshire compiled their report for the archbishop of York’s visitation. We do not know what they concealed; what they admitted was a catalogue of disobedience and omission. The church did not have the Book of Common Prayer for services, or a Bible, or a copy of the Homilies; there was no cloth for the communion table, and no chest for the parish register. An altar in the church had not been demolished, and crosses still stood in the churchyard. The parishioners would not join the Rogation tide perambulations, or send their children to catechism classes; some went to alehouses instead of church, and were not fined for absence; those who did attend chattered through the services. None would take communion three times a year, or receive ordinary bread, as prescribed in the Prayer Book; communicants insisted on the traditional wafers. On All Hallows’ eve the bells tolled for souls departed, and ‘Jane, an old nun, is an evil woman and teacheth false doctrine’. After almost two decades, the ecclesiastical provisions of 1559 were still comprehensively ignored in this mid-Cheshire parish: the third political Reformation had apparently failed.
Subsistence and Markets
Authors: Dyer Christopher
Published: November 2023

We must accustom ourselves to the paradox that in a period of recession, and particularly in the fifteenth century, the structures of society and economy were changing in ways that make them appear more ‘modern’, which flies in the face of our customary assumptions about the link between growth and ‘progress’.

The argument presented in this chapter is that while the volume of economic activity contracted, the ingrained habits of marketing and the employment of credit and money continued. This was an age of opportunity and prosperity for many individuals, and various groups carved out a new place for themselves in the social hierarchy. These arguments will be demonstrated with an example of a particularly significant group of entrepreneurs, the farmers.