bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A Defence of World History (The Prothero Lecture)
Authors: McNeill William H.
Published: March 2007

World history was once taken for granted as the only sensible basis for understanding the past. Christians could do no other than begin with creation and fit subsequent details into the framework of divine revelation. This ordering of the past survived into the seventeenth century as Bossuet and Walter Raleigh may remind us. But with the revival of antique letters, a different model for historical writing asserted itself that could not fit smoothly within the Christian epos. In effect, Thucydides and Tacitus challenged Augustine, presenting the history of states and their interaction as a self-contained whole. Guicciardini and Machiavelli wrote their histories accordingly, dismissing as irrelevant the world historical framework that had seemed essential to earlier believers.
English Jacobitism, 1710–1715; Myth and Reality
Authors: Bennett G. V.
Published: March 2007

A complaint frequently voiced by historians of Jacobitism is that their subject is plagued by a breed of authors with a passion for secret agents, romantic uprisings, and princes in the heather. It is not so often admitted, however, just how intractable the professionals themselves find the topic and their substantial failure to give any coherent account of it. Jacobitism appears as the major issue in British politics in the early-eighteenth century; it was associated with wide-spread disorder, recurrent national crises, and a series of rebellions and attempted invasions; but its actual organization and the extent of its support remains surprisingly obscure. This is partly so because the source-material is notoriously difficult to handle and ranges from a mass of ciphered correspondence in the Stuart papers to the diplomatic archives of half-a-dozen European states. To study it is to enter a world both of illusion and deliberate misrepresentation. Would-be revolutionaries tended to imagine themselves perpetually on the verge of success, while it often suited the interests of the British government to assert that the nation was threatened with subversion and imminent invasion. But the weakness of Jacobite historiography is more fundamental than a problem with the sources. It lies in an addiction to detailed narrative unsupported by adequate analysis and a fixed assumption that the importance of the movement was its potential for effecting a revolution by armed force. This paper adopts a different approach. It examines the structure of the Jacobite organization and questions whether it was at any time between 1710 and 1715 capable of realising its aims; it argues rather that its activities contributed to a great popular myth, which was to be of critical significance in the struggle of men and parties which preceded the establishment of the Whig oligarchy.
Social Mentalities and the case of Medieval Scepticism
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: March 2007

The history of mentalities has now become so widely accepted that even British historians sometimes refer to it: one hardly needs to talk aboutmentalitésany more, though the French word still sounds more modish. But the subject goes back at least to Vico. AlthoughWeltanschauungandZeitgeistsound old hat by comparison withmentalitésthe words remind us that nineteenth-century German historians were interested in the different ways past societies may have viewed the world, while F. W. Maitland and Henry Adams are obvious examples of Anglophones who in their different ways tried to understand medieval ways of thought. In 1933 Jean Guitton, a Frenchman, it is true, but one who presumably came out of that older tradition of intellectual history against which Lucien Febvre set himself, wrote about the need to study thementalitéof an age and summed up what he meant by this as ‘the totality of those implicit assumptions which are imposed on us by our environment and which rule our judgements.
The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century
Authors: Croft Pauline
Published: March 2007

On 29 April 1612 the London letter writer John Chamberlain penned another of his regular epistles to his friend Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador in Venice. For weeks a chief news item had been the declining health of the Lord Treasurer, Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury. ‘I wish I could send you better assurance’ Chamberlain wrote, ‘but as far as I can learn there is more cause of fear than hope’. Salisbury was journeying to Bath, where he had often sought relief before, but he had been ‘very yll by the way yesterday and was almost gon once or twise’. His death was assumed to be imminent. ‘He is alredy much lamented and every man sayes what a misse there wold be of him and indeed [he] is much prayed for’. The news later in June was more of a surprise. Salisbury's passing, on the return journey from Bath, had been followed not by the expected tributes to his irreplaceability, but by a flood of ‘outragious speaches’.
The Parliamentary Dimension of the Crimean War
Authors: Vincent J. R.
Published: March 2007

The central issue in most wars is how to win. The central issue in the Crimean War was whether there should be a war. Throughout most of the war, the question of peace or war remained an open one, dependent on military prospects, diplomatic vicissitudes, and the shuttlecock of parliamentary faction. That British public opinion was hotly for war was interpreted by players of the parliamentary game only as meaning that it might become pacific with equal volatility. The supposed political invincibility of Palmerston in 1855–6 had some reality outside Parliament, but little inside Parliament where it mattered. If events in Parliament varied in line with the war, it was also true that parliamentary prospects could affect the war.
The Problem of Popular Allegiance in the English Civil War (The Prothero Lecture)
Authors: Underdown David
Published: March 2007

The belief that the common people of England had little real sympathy for either side in the civil war—that they were mere cannon-fodder, targets for plunder, at best deferential pawns—has a long and respectable ancestry. Many of the combatants believed it, noting the automatic changes of local attitudes when news came of distant vic-tories or defeats. In postwar politics too they knew it was ‘safest to be in favour with the strongest side’. When they fought, it was because they had no alternative. How often, Anthony Ascham lamented, ‘ambitious or angry men forme subtilties and pretences, and afterwards the poore people (who understand them not) are taken out of their houses … to fight and maintaine them at the peril of one anothers lives’. Survival on the margin of subsistence was the universal motive. ‘The people,’ Sir Arthur Haselrig declared, ‘care not what Government they live under, so as they may plough and go to market.’ Looking back after 1660, men as various as Hobbes and Baxter took the same line. ‘There were very few of the common people that cared much for either of the causes, but would have taken any side for pay or plunder,’ Hobbes tells us. Baxter has been as often quoted: ‘The poor plowman understood but little of these Matters; but a little would stir up their Discontent when Money was demanded.’
From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England
Authors: Haigh Christopher
Published: March 2007

Robert Parsons, the Jesuit, compiled his account of the transition of English Catholicism from monopoly to minority status in 1599–1600, and called it ‘A story of domestical difficulties which the Catholic cause and promoters thereof hath had in defending the same, not only against the violence and persecution of the heretics but also by sundry other impediments among themselves, of faction, emulation, sedition and division, since the change of religion in England’. This version of Tudor ecclesiastical history supplements Nicholas Sander's attention to evil Protestants and politicians by an examination of the Catholic response to the Reformation. The Parsons story has two groups of villains, the bishops and the parish clergy, who betrayed their faith to hold on to their livings; it has two groups of heroes, who rescued the faith by their self-sacrifice, the Jesuits and the seminary priests they inspired, and the Elizabethan Catholic gentry; and it goes something like this. The early Tudor monopolistic Church was weakened by spiritual decadence and mere conformism, and its leadership divided by ambition and faction, so it could not resist the challenge of heresy.
The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration
Authors: Ó Tuathaigh M. A. G.
Published: March 2007

Unlike their American cousins, the Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Britain have, until recently, received comparatively little scholarly attention from historians. This is not to say that their presence in Victorian Britain has gone unnoticed; far from it. Throughout the nineteenth century the doings and, much more often, the mis-doings of the immigrant Irish were logged in massive detail by an army of social investigators, philanthropists, clergymen, royal commissions and parliamentary committees. But, with very few exceptions, the scholarly analysis of the data has only begun in earnest during the last two decades, and especially during the past few years. In a growing body of local and regional studies, and in studies of particular aspects of the Irish presence, the literature on the Irish immigrants is becoming not only more plentiful but also conceptually more sophisticated.
Historians, the Nationality Question, and the Downfall of the Habsburg Empire
Authors: Sked Alan
Published: March 2007

Was the Habsburg Empire doomed to collapse, and if so, at what point did its collapse become inevitable? This is a question which has been debated consciously and unconsciously by historians ever since 1918. Today, it is true, Austrian historians are warning against it— Professor Wandruszka even a decade ago advised us to do our ‘duty’ and accept ‘the tragic element in history’1—yet the issue is still discussed. Alexander Gerschenkron, for example, in his last work on Austrian history2 chose a counter-factual theme, and in the introduction to his book condemned historians—presumably those like Professor Wandruszka—who were ‘anxious to prevent people from asking pertinent and interesting questions and [had] neither the wit nor the imagination for asking those questions themselves’. Whether Professor Gerschenkron himself employed too much imagination is only one of the issues to be examined in this paper.
Women's Property Rights Under Customary Law: Some Developments In The Thirteenth And Fourteenth Centuries
Authors: Smith R. M.
Published: March 2007

MEDIEVAL England fell into that broader Eurasian region within which property from conjugal estates devolved on both men and women, either by inheritance or by certain mechanisms of pre mortem endowment. Although males were generally preferred heirs, demographic realities ensured that women would be found in a sizeable minority of instances as residual heirs. Given likely conditions of mortality and fertility, a wife would often have needed to bear at least four children to secure a sixty per cent chance of furnishing a son who would survive his father to inherit the estate. Indeed in stationary demographic conditions roughly twenty per cent of families would have only surviving daughters and no sons at the father's death. This female inheritance potential combined with the possibility of the transmission of pre mortem dowry to daughters in those families who were blessed with at least one male heir implies that considerable reorganization of land might occur at every generation.
Francois Chabot and His Plot
Authors: Hampson N.
Published: March 2007

EARLY on the morning of 14 November 1793 the Montagnard deputy, Chabot, woke up Robespierre and denounced a plot to destroy the Convention by corrupting some of its members and slandering those who could not be bought. He produced as evidence 100,000 livres in assignats which he said had been given to him to buy the signature of Fabre d'Eglantine to a fraudulent decree concerning the liquidation of the East India Company.
Why Did the Dutch Revolt Last Eighty Years?
Authors: Parker Geoffrey
Published: March 2007

THE Dutch Revolt lasted longer than any other uprising in modern European history—from the iconoclastic fury in August 1566 to the Peace of Munster in January 1648; and it involved more continuous fighting than any other war of modern times—from April 1572 to April 1607 (with only six months' cease-fire in 1577) and from April 1621 to June 1647. Its economic, social, and political costs were enormous. The longevity of the revolt becomes even more remarkable when one remembers that the two combatants were far from equal. The areas in revolt against Spain were small in size, in natural resources, and in population—especially in the first few years. In 1574 only about twenty towns, with a combined population of 75,000, remained faithful to William of Orange; Amsterdam, the largest town in Holland, stayed loyal to the king until 1578. Against the ‘rebels’ Philip II could draw on the resources of Spain, Spanish America, Spanish Italy and, of course, the Spanish Netherlands. Although by the seventeenth century the odds had narrowed somewhat—by then there were seven ‘rebel’ provinces with a combined population of over one million—Spain could still call on vastly superior resources of men and money. There were a number of occasions in the course of the war when Spain seemed to stand on the threshold of success. In 1575, for example, the con-quest of the islands of Duiveland and Schouwen in South Holland divided the rebel heartland in two and appeared to presage the collapse of the revolt. A decade later, in 1585, Antwerp was re-captured against all predictions, leaving Holland and Zealand dispirited and prepared to discuss surrender. As late as 1625, with the reconquest of Breda in Brabant and Bahia in Brazil, Spain's final victory seemed near. But total success never came. Spain never regained the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands and by 1648 Philip IV counted himself lucky to have retained the ten southern ones.
Renaissance Influences in English Colonization
Authors: Quinn D.B.
Published: March 2007

THE New World of the sixteenth century grew directly out of the Old not merely in a physical but in an intellectual sense. The men of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, who found the new lands overseas, were educated in a humanistic tradition which made the classical past, especially the Roman past, alive and relevant to them. Consequently, there is an element of continuity in the thinking about the discoveries and the problems they presented on the basis of older intellectual concepts, which continues to influence much of the thought of the sixteenth century about cosmography, natural history and about the planting of colonies in lands unknown to the ancients. It is astonishing how Ptolemy remained the standard bearer of the new discoveries: maps of the New World and other novel areas, added to his Geography for the first time in 1513, continued to proliferate in edition after edition until by the later sixteenth century the original maps and text had been so overlaid with new matter that they bore even less relationship to the original than the first issue of Gray's Anatomy has to the current edition. It was much the same with Pliny: the Natural History remained the starting point for New World and Asiatic botany and zoology throughout the sixteenth century. Oviedo in 1526 paid his respects to the master before suggesting that genuine novelties could now be added to his text: well before the end of the century Pliny too had been swamped in new material, though his text was also retained intact.
Elie Halévy and the Birth of Methodism
Authors: Walsh J. D.
Published: March 2007

Probably the most famous passages in Halévy's work are those attributing England's immunity from revolution after 1789 to the influence of Methodism. The ‘Halévy thesis’ encouraged, though it did not begin, a debate which still fizzes, jumps and occasionally explodes. Little attention has been given to Halévy's first essay in Methodist history, ‘The Birth of Methodism in England’, which appeared in La Révue de Paris in 1906, even though one of its central themes prefigured his famous thesis. After decades of neglect, this has been disinterred, translated and excellently introduced by Bernard Semmel. Compared with Halévy's major writings it is thin and slightly documented, for much of the primary research on which it was based was crowded into a few weeks in the Bodleian Library, after which he seems to have been discouraged by the misleading news that his subject had been pre-empted. The essay remained a rather slender piece, sweepingly written, which found its outlet in a cultural periodical rather than a learned journal. But it is something of a tour de force.
The Social History of confession in the Age of the Reformation
Authors: Bossy John
Published: March 2007

When I offered to read a paper on this subject, I had a particular hypothesis in mind. I thought—perhaps it would be more honest to say, I hoped—it would be possible to show that, during a period roughly contemporaneous with the Reformation, the practice of the sacrament of penance in the traditional church had undergone a change which was important in itself and of general historical interest. The change, I thought, could roughly be described as a shift from the social to the personal. To be more precise, I thought it possible that, for the average layman, and notably for the average rural layman in the pre-reformation church, the emphasis of the sacrament lay in its providing part of a machinery for the regulation and resolution of offences and conflicts otherwise likely to disturb the peace of a community. The effect of the Counter-Reformation (or whatever one calls it) was, I suspected, to shift the emphasis away from the field of objective social relations and into a field of interiorized discipline for the individual. The hypothesis may be thought an arbitrary one: we can but see. I think it will be admitted that, supposing it turned out to be correct, we should have learnt something worth knowing about the difference between the medieval and the counter-reformation church, and something about the difference between pre- and post-reformation European society. If if did not turn out to be correct, we might nevertheless expect to pick up some useful knowledge about something which is scarcely a staple of current historical discourse, though it threatens to become so.
Idealists and Realists: British Views of Germany,1864–1939
Authors: Kennedy P. M.
Published: March 2007

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.
War and Peace in the earlier Middle Ages
Authors: Wallace-Hadrill J. M.
Published: March 2007

Men of the earlier Middle Ages knew what they meant by war and peace. Their definitions are not hard to find, even though, when found, they prove to be inconsistent. They knew that there were just and unjust wars, good kinds of peace and bad, and they could envisage war and peace as two poles of a single concept. My intention is not to survey this large and ramshackle field but simply to enquire how far some of the definitions tallied with the facts of war and peace; and whether, at the end, the pressures making for peace had affected the nature of war. To ask whether Western Europe in the days of King Alfred and the later Carolingians was more or less peaceful than it had been four centuries earlier is not very meaningful, since an entirely new situation was created by the attacks of the Vikings, Arabs and Magyars; but it is meaningful to ask whether four centuries of additional experience had caused men to look at war and peace in a different way.
Domesday Book and Anglo-Norman Governance
Authors: Harvey Sally P. J.
Published: March 2007

Domesday Book stands accused of isolation and its historians stand convicted of isolated devotion to Domesday studies. The isolation is not entirely splendid. ‘An inestimable boon to a learned posterity but a vast administrative mistake’ was the brief verdict of Mr Richardson and Professor Sayles in their treatment of the governance of England from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta. Reviewing recent Domesday studies Dr King judged that research ‘in so arid a climate’ has maintained the gap between Domesday Book and its use in eleventh-and twelfth-century government, and made ‘the inquiry into the resources of the tenants-in-chief look rather more lonely than before, and rather less necessary’.
Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century III. Self-Help and Outdoor Relief
Authors: Thompson F.M.L.
Published: March 2007

An ultra-slow motion serial whose episodes appear at intervals of twelve months needs a recapitulation of the story so far, however excellent the retentive capacity of scholars in comparison with soap opera audiences. The characters in question are the landowners, great and not so great, and the landed families who were already wellestablished on their estates and in their country houses in late Victorian Britain: and also the newcomers who have continued, throughout the twentieth century, to purchase landed estates and country houses. The main plot concerns the structure and distribution of landownership, and I have suggested that reports of the virtual disappearance of great estates in the last hundred years have been greatly exaggerated. There have been great changes, but while some individuals or entire families have fallen off the boat others have clambered aboard, so that in the 1990s perhaps one-third or more of the land of Britain is held in sizeable estates of 1,000 acres and upwards, compared with radier over one-half in the 1890s. The changing composition of the cast of landowners, and the wildly fluctuating fortunes of particular members of the cast, have fascinated many observers of the social and political scene, and these features provide the sub-plots. The undoubted decline of landed and aristocratic political and social predominance, leading to the virtual elimination of their influence on public life, and the equally undoubted decline, impoverishment, and extinction of some once great and famous landed families, have tended to become confused as cause and effect in some accounts.
Catholic, Anglican or Puritan? Edward Sackville, Fourth Earl of Dorset and the Ambiguities of Religion in Early Stuart England
Authors: Smith David L.
Published: March 2007

The religion of Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, foxed his contemporaries, and he has proved an equally slippery customer for those modern historians who wish to see unbridgeable confessional gulfs opening up in the 1620s and 1630s. A detailed study of him reveals ambiguities of position that confused his contemporaries and confound modern categorisation. Those who knew Dorset differed dramatically in their perception of his religion. To one French ambassador, Tillières, he was ‘un puritain’; while to William Middleton, Lord Fielding's chaplain, he appeared ‘strong for Precisians’. By contrast, another French ambassador, Fontenay, believed that Dorset ‘n’est pas trop ennemy de nostre religion' and the papal agent Carlo Rossetti thought him ‘assai fautori nell’ intrinseco dei Cattolicci’. In 1641 Sir Walter Erle even opposed the re-enfranchisement of Seaford on the grounds that ‘the lord of the town [i.e. Dorset] [was] a papist'. Dorset was called everything from a puritan to a papist—and other things besides. In dedicating his ‘account of religion by reason’ to Dorset, Sir John Suckling wrote that the tract—which was widely condemned as Socinian—‘had like to make me an atheist at Court and your lordship no very good Christian’. Whereas Professor Hexter addressed ‘the problem of the Presbyterian-Independents’, contemporary images of Dorset present the even more bizarre spectacle of a puritan-papist-pagan. Where, that is, they mention his religion at all. For time and again we find that descriptions focus mainly on Dorset's courtly and chivalric qualities. Clarendon portrayed Dorset as ‘a man of an obliging nature, much honour, of great generosity, and of most entire fidelity to the Crown’; but made no mention of his religious attitudes. When authors dedicated their writings to Dorset they consistently highlighted these same secular traits: Sir Richard Baker praised his ‘publicke vertues’, Edward May his ‘noble nature’; and even John Bastwick called him simply ‘illustrissimus’.
The War of the Scots, 1306–23
Authors: Duncan A. A. M.
Published: March 2007

The life of Robert I, king of Scots, written by John Barbour archdeacon of Aberdeen is the fullest of any medieval king in the west, a chronicle of chivalry in vernacular octosyllabic couplets, on which much of our understanding of the events and ethos of the Scottish war depends. In this paper I discuss some aspects of the king's reign which Barbour ignored: pro-Balliol sentiment which lingered in Scotland and at the French and papal courts; and also aspects of the war where Barbour's narrative is incomplete or misleading, but which illustrate the growth of King Robert's military effort from that of a very uncertain factional rising to one which matched the rhetorical claims (in die Declaration of Arbroath) of a people at war. I shall be treading ground already mapped in Professor Barrow's masterly study, seeking only to point out features to which Barbour has, by omission or commission, drawn my attention.
Country, County and Town: Patterns of Regional Evolution in England
Authors: Everitt Alan
Published: March 2007

It is a remarkable fact, and one that needs to be pondered, that almost all our current regional terms in this country are of very recent origin. Expressions like Tyneside and Merseyside, the West Midlands and the North-East, have no very lengthy lineage; such phrases as the Home Counties cannot be traced back beyond the early decades of the railway era; the present usage even of a genuine historic name like Wessex is no more than an antiquarian revival; while the current reanimation of Mercia seems to be chiefly attributable to a contemporary police force. Perhaps the only regional name of this kind with a continuous history to the present day is East Anglia. In other words, behind most of our modern expressions, ideas and preconceptions lie implicit that were not necessarily of much significance to the people of earlier centuries. A phrase like the Home Counties, for example, implies a kind of regional unity between the shires surrounding London which until recent centuries—and in many respects until recent generations—is entirely fallacious. There was no connexion between the origins of settlement, for example, in Hertfordshire and in Sussex, and next to none between settlement in Essex and in Kent. Even in the Civil War period there was singularly little contact and no cohesion, as parliament quickly found to its cost, between the counties surrounding the capital.
Presidential Address: Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: III. Patronage and Politics
Authors: Holt J. C.
Published: March 2007

ON a previous occasion I posed a question: family relations mattered, or did they? I now intend to investigate in what way they mattered. It is a complex problem. In the middle ages men were reminded more frequently than now by the varied representation of the tale of Cain and Abel that family relations are not always easy; they could be supportive, cohesive, quarrelsome or murderous. So it is reasonable to ask: why the one rather than the other? Behind that there are other questions: when did the family matter and when not? Why did it matter when it did and why when not? A long established tradition in Anglo-Saxon scholarship has been concerned with the respective roles of kinship, lordship and local association. What can be said on the same topics for the post-Conquest period? For it is plain that there can be no secure conclusions about the family unless it is correctly located and properly embedded in the matrix of social and political relationships within which men lived their lives.
The Anarchy of King Stephen'S Reign
Authors: King Edmund
Published: March 2007

IN the late 1140s William d'Aubigny, Earl of Chichester, wrote to all his men both French and English, to say that he had sinned and that he was very sorry. He had made many exactions on the churches and the lands of those in the bishopric of Chichester and under my authority (sub potestate mea). A few years earlier Gilbert Earl of Pembroke had written to Theobald Archbishop of Canter-bury to tell him that there is a place in Wales called Dungleddy, and that it lay in those regions which by divine mercy have recently been added to our authority (potestasagain). And from the last few years of the reign there is a well-known agreement between the earls of Chester and Leicester, designed to keep the peace in Leicester-shire. In it each party made specific promises, intended to reduce the damage should they have to fight against each other for their different lords. At the end of each set of promises there was a statement in this form: the earl of Leicester ought to guard the land and the goods of the earl of Chester which are in the power (in potestate) of the earl of Leicester without ill-will; the earl of Chester gave an undertaking in the same words. There are four earls here, and three different regions. They speak the same language, and that language reflects the same pattern of thought. They think in terms of territorial lordship: the bishopric of Chichester, the county of Leicester, the regions of Wales.
Politics as Theatre: Metaphors of the Stage in German History, 1848–1933
Authors: Blackbourn David
Published: March 2007

ALL the world's a stage, as we know, and the concept of atheatrum mundiis a venerable one. So too is the specific idea of politics as theatre. As an idea it may not seem very remarkable. Politics lives off metaphor, after all, and theatrical metaphor might seem especially appropriate to describe political activity. Do we not refer naturally to the political stage, to politicians assuming roles, to dramatic political scenes? This very naturalness, derived from repeated usage, presents a challenge. For one of the tasks of the historian is to show how what has come to seem natural came to seem so: to restore the novelty of artefacts and institutions we take for granted, to recover the impact of ideas and metaphors worn smooth by repetition. I want to argue below that metaphors of politics as theatre can be more than just a figure of speech: that they had specific and revealing meanings in the period of German history from the revolutions of 1848 to the advent of National Socialism.
Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property: Collapse and Survival
Authors: Thompson F. M. L.
Published: March 2007

The death rattle of the landed order, like the death knell of capitalism, has been clearly heard dozens of times over the last hundred years and more. Yet there is a suspicion that the sounds have been mis-heard misinterpreted, for collapse and decomposition have never followed the symptoms of sickness and crisis. The Churchill family have played their part in crying ‘wolf’. In 1885 the 8th Duke of Marlborough, reflecting on ‘the organised agitation against the present ownership of land’, asserted that ‘were there any effective demand for the purchase of land, half the land of England would be in the market tomorrow’. He had inside information, the Blenheim estate being heavily indebted. A generation later his son, the 9th Duke, having helped stave off disaster by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, wrote in his turn to The Times. Under the heading ‘Old Order Doomed’ and the shock of the 1919 Budget, with its ‘confiscatory’ increase in death duties to a rate of 40 per cent on estates of £2 million and over, he stated that ‘[the] fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality’ and forecast that ‘the new tax must make it impossible for the heirs of these men—[the landed magnates]—to carry on the tradition’. Whether the heirs have carried on the tradition is debatable, but it is indisputable that in 1989 his grandson, now the 11 th Duke, is still seated in Blenheim Palace, surrounded by an estate of 11,500 acres. That may be no more than half the acreage owned by his great-grandfather but it is nevertheless a very large estate, and a principal reason for placing the IIth Duke among the 200 wealthiest people in Britain.
Enterprise and Welfare States: a Comparative Perspective
Authors: Harris Jose
Published: March 2007

DO ‘welfare states’ enhance or subvert economic enterprise, civic virtue, private moral character, the integrity of social life? Though these questions have a piquantly contemporary ring in modern British politics, they are nevertheless old quandaries in the history of social policy. Since the seventeenth century, if not earlier, practitioners, theorists and critics of public welfare schemes have argued for and against such schemes in contradictory and adversarial terms; claiming on the one hand that social welfare schemes would supply a humanitarian corrective to the rigours of a market economy; and on the other hand that they would support and streamline market forces by enhancing individual and collective efficiency. Similarly, for several hundred years models of civic morality which emphasize independence and self-sufficiency have jostled with alternative models which emphasize paternalism, altruism and organic solidarity. Few phases of social policy in Britain and elsewhere have not contained elements of more than one approach. Even the New Poor Law, notorious for its subordination to market pressures, nevertheless harboured certain residual anti-market principles and often lapsed into practices that were suspiciously communitarian; whilst Edwardian New Liberalism, famous for its philosophy of organic solidarism, in practice tempered social justice with the quest for ‘national efficiency’. These varying emphases have all been reflected in the fashions and phases of welfare state historiography—fashions and phases that appear to have been at least partly determined by the vagaries of prevailing political climate. Thus, in the aftermath of the Second World War, historians tended to portray the history of social policy as a series of governmental battles against private vested interests—battles in which the mantle of civic virtue was worn by an altruistic administrative elite, while civic vice was embodied in the motley crew of doctors, landlords, employers and insurance companies who viewed social welfare as a commodity in the market.
The Problem of ‘Atheism’ in Early Modern England
Authors: Hunter Michael
Published: March 2007

To speak of ‘atheism’ in the context of early modern England immediately invites confusion, and it is for this reason that I shall place the word in inverted commas throughout this paper. On the one hand, I intend to deal with what a twentieth-century reader might expect ‘atheism’ to imply, namely overt hostility to religion. On the other, I want to consider at some length the profuse writings on ‘atheism’ that survive from the period: in these, as we shall see, the word if often used to describe a much broader range of phenomena, in a manner typical of a genre which often appears frustratingly heightened and rhetorical. Some might argue that this juxtaposition displays—and will encourage—muddled thought. But, on the contrary, I think that it is precisely from such a combination that we stand to learn most. Not only are we likely to discover how contemporaries experienced and responded to the threat of irreligion in the society of their day. In addition, by re-examining the relationship between the real and the exaggerated in their perceptions of such heterodoxy, we may be able to draw broader conclusions about early modern thought.
The Treatment of the News in mid-Victorian Newspapers
Authors: Brown Lucy
Published: March 2007

This paper is concerned with the way in which news was handled by the four main London dailies, The Times, the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph and the Standard which, by the late 1870s, enjoyed the largest circulations. They differed from each other considerably in character and history, and in the kind of historical record which they have left behind. Much more is known about The Times than about any of the others. In the 1860s it was a 16-page paper, costing 3d, with a circulation declining slowly from 65,000 to 60,000. The fact that it could maintain this circulation, when it was three times as expensive as its main rivals, is by itself evidence of the value that contemporaries placed upon it. It had far greater assets than any of its rivals, and the Walter family were willing to invest heavily in the paper as and when funds were needed. Its greater resources were shown, partly in its technical equipment, and partly in the range and quality of writing in the paper itself. The Times had more correspondents reporting more frequently and fully from more European capitals than its rivals, and much of its prestige had been derived from that fact. It also employed in London a staff of educated writers such as George Brodrick and Robert Lowe. Unlike its rivals it could afford to pay salaries which enabled it to impose on its writers the condition that they wrote for it exclusively. (The lives of a number of notable late nineteenth-century journalists show that they tried to make up income by writing too much simultaneously, for too many different publications.)
The Magic of Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education 1900–40
Authors: Sutherland Gillian
Published: March 2007

It has been a characteristic of studies of social policy-making in England to lay considerable stress on the importance of quantification, of precise measurement, in the evolution of any given policy. It has been suggested that the power of the evidence, once properly assembled and measured, could on occasion be sufficient to dissolve previous certainties and act as a catalyst of new thought. It is perhaps not entirely fanciful to see links between this aspect of the historiography of social policy and the preoccupation of English social thought with empiricism, a preoccupation which led sometimes to the presentation of empiricism as an alternative to social theory. All of this enhances the importance of attempts to assess the role of measurement in any given field of policy and to confront directly the questions of its autonomy and the power of its advocates.
The County Community and the Making of Public Opinion in Fourteenth-Century England
Authors: Maddicott J. R.
Published: March 2007

‘The “county”’, said Maitland, ‘is not a mere stretch of land, a governmental district; it is an organized body of men; it is a comnumitas’. For the most part it has not been medievalists who have taken up that theme but historians of the early modern period. Much recent writing on the politics of sixteenth and seventeenth century England has turned on the county and its institutions, for it was there that the ambitions and loyalties of the gentry often found expression and the factions and rivalries of the 1640s first developed. The grand dénouement of the Civil War has stimulated historians to look beneath national and parliamentary affairs to the attitudes of the shires, which so frequently obstructed and distorted the policies devised at Whitehall and Westminster.
Peace never established: the case of the Kingdom of Jerusalem
Authors: Riley J. S. C.
Published: March 2007

No historian of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is likely to ignore the hostile environment in which the western settlers found themselves and the effects of military needs on their politics, government and society. The Latins’ war establishment has long been the subject of study, with historians naturally concentrating upon the actual manifestations of conflict: invasions and defence, feudal institutions and the use of mercenaries, castle-building and tactics in the field. Other less tangible factors, quite as important in contributing to the stresses to which society in Palestine was subjected, are rarely considered. The Latins believed themselves to be engaged in a sacred task in maintaining Christian presence on the holiest soil in Christendom; others believed this too, and military reverses in the East aroused in the West bitter criticism of them. They found themselves, moreover, in a situation in which, for reasons outside their control, permanant peace with their Muslim neighbours was impossible. It is this ideological background to the history of the defence of the kingdom that is discussed in this paper.
After Waterloo: British Society and the Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars
Authors: Gash N.
Published: March 2007

For our ancestors the end of the twenty-year conflict with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France came with the signing of what was called the ‘General Peace’ in April 1814. All over the country the occasion was celebrated with thanksgiving services, public feasts, open-air sports, fireworks and processions with tableaux depicting Wellington, Blucher, the Tsar Alexander and the vanquished Bonaparte. At Gainsborough in Lincolnshire the future Chartist Thomas Cooper, then nine years old, and some other boys dressed themselves up in ribbons and hats, labelled with the names of these contemporary military heroes (Cooper was Wellington), and went round the neighbouring squires and farmers soliciting money. They sang some of Bishop Ken's hymns and at theend, in imitation of what they had heard on procession day, shouted ‘Peace and Plenty! God Save the King!’ followed by three cheers, for which one benevolent old squire gave them a whole half-crown.
General Franco as Military Leader
Authors: Preston Paul
Published: March 2007

BOTH during his lifetime, and after his death, General Franco was reviled by his enemies on the left and subjected to the most absurd adulation by his admirers on the right. As the victor in a bloody civil war which inflamed passions throughout the world, that is hardly surprising. Leaving aside his personal political success in remaining in power for nearly four decades, his victory in the Spanish Civil War was his greatest and most glorious achievement, something reflected in the judgements of detractors and hagiographers alike. For the left, Franco the general was a slow-witted mediocrity whose battlefield triumphs were owed entirely to the unstinting military assistance of Hitler and Mussolini. For the right, Franco the general was the twentieth-century incarnation of Alexander the Great, of Napoleon and of the great warrior hero of Spanish legend, El Cid.
The Failure of Socialist Unity in Britain c. 1893–1914
Authors: Laybourn Keith
Published: March 2007

SOCIALIST unity became an issue for the British left with in a year of the formation of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884. The secession of William Morris and his supporters from the SDF and the formation of the Socialist League in reaction to the autocratic leadership of Henry Mayers Hyndman brought about a fundamental division within British socialism. Subsequently the creation of other socialist parties, most particularly the Independent Labour Party (ILP) led to further disunity within die British socialist movement. Nevertheless, notwidistanding die proliferation of British socialist societies with their distinctive socialist credentials, diere were several attempts to form a united socialist party between 1893 and 1914. They were normally encouraged, on the one hand, by advocates of the ‘religion of socialism’ such as William Morris, Robert Blatchford and Victor Grayson, and, on the other, by Hyndman and the SDF. The aim of these efforts was to strengdien socialist organisation in times of both political failure and success, but in every instance diey failed due to the intractable problem of bringing together socialists of distinctively different persuasions under the umbrella of one party. These failures have led recent historians to debate two major questions connected with socialist unity. First, diey have asked at what point did socialist unity cease to be a viable alternative to the Labour Alliance between the ILP and the trade unions? Stephen Yeo feels that socialist unity became impossible after die mid 1890s, David Howell suggests that this ‘suppressed alternative’ became unlikely about five to ten years later, as die leaders of die Independent Labour Party opted for the trade union rather than socialist alliance,
‘An Airier Aristocracy’: The Saints at War (The Prothero Lecture)
Authors: Holdsworth Christopher
Published: March 2007

I want to plunge into my subject by adopting that practice well known to our medieval predecessors, namely to use anexemplum, because at once it transports us into the heart of the problem to be addressed. The event is recounted by Orderic Vitalis in Book Six of hisEcclesiastical History, and describes the practice of a Norman priest called Gerold who served in the household of the great earl of Chester Hugh of Avranches (1071–1101). Gerold was, apparently, a devoted priest who regularly said the offices for the day and offered Mass, but beyond this he wanted die men of the earl's household to live a better life. That desire he discharged by telling them about how some of their forebears had lived:

To great lords, simple knights, and noble boys alike he gave salutary counsel and he made a great collection of tales of the combats of holy knights, drawn from the Old Testament and more recent records of Christian achievements, for them to imitate. He told them vivid stories of the conflicts of Demetrius and George, of Theodore and Sebastian, of the Theban Legion and Maurice its leader, and of Eustace, supreme commander of the army and his companions, who won die crown of martyrdom in heaven. He also told diem of the holy champion, William, who after long service in war renounced die world and fought gloriously for die Lord under die monastic rule. And many profited from his exhortations, for he brought them from the wide ocean of the world to die safe haven of life under the Rule.