bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Benefit Clubs
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

In 1801 Sir Frederick Eden estimated that there were 7,200 friendly societies in England and Wales, with about 648,000 members. Two years later poor law returns to Parliament recorded 9,672 societies and more than 704,000 participants. These figures almost certainly underestimate the incidence of clubs and scale of membership. Even so, they suggest that about 40 per cent of the working population in London were members of a friendly society, while at Oldham in Lancashire half the adult male inhabitants belonged to the town’s fifteen clubs, and the position was similar in South Wales. Moreover, unlike most other types of voluntary association, which were almost wholly based in towns, a growing number of box clubs sprang up in the English and Welsh countryside.1 Over the border in Scotland nearly 400 friendly societies had been registered by 1800 (again a serious under-count), major clusters occurring in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen, but clubs also appearing in lesser towns and some Lowland villages. Already in 1779 Glasgow’s eighty or so clubs claimed to represent 12,000 members, and in 1800 the eighteen societies at Dumfries had over 2,000 brethren. In contrast, Ireland returned only seven societies at the end of the century, the incidence probably affected by the political upheavals in the country, as well as by growing economic problems; in 1831 the figure was a more respectable 281 clubs, although getting on for half were concentrated in the Dublin area.
Conclusion
Authors: Clark Peter
Published: November 2023

The argument of this book has been that the early modern period saw the origin of a major new form of social institution in the British world, one which borrowed ideas and practices from other organizations-medieval fraternities, trade gilds, foreign academies, Protestant sects, other types of new-style public shoaling-but which was sui generis: an invention of the pre-industrial era. Primarily secular in format and voluntary in concept, clubs and suicides catered for a growing plurality of interests, with stages of activity in particular areas-propelled by fashion, competition, commercialism, and specialization. The Stuart preoccupation with leisure activity was overlaid in the eighteenth century by a new stress on public and personal improvement which, in turn, was complemented towards the end of the century by a growing stress on moral and social reform.
The Aged Landless Poor: Work and Welfare in Medieval and Early Modern England
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: November 2023

Possession of land enabled older people to try to control and plan their later lives in medieval and early modern England. The landless poor in all age groups and at all times found it much harder to patch together a living Their numbers grew in the century of population increase and land shortage which preceded the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century; the steady rise was resumed in the mid-sixteenth century. Since the poor leave fewest records behind, we know even less about them than about the better off in medieval England. But their strategies for survival, driven by necessity, appear to have changed little over the centuries and information about them becomes less scanty over time. The poor of medieval and early modern England, and indeed in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, struggled in an “economy of makeshifts’, that is, they patched together whatever resources they could gather, in ever-shifting combinations: paid work when possible, growing food, use of common rights, help from family, friends, charity, poor relief, debt and begging. The struggle grew harder with advancing age and the components of the economy of each individual shifted gradually from dependence upon work to reliance on the help of others. Some lost the battle. Old people died of neglect and starvation, such as the “old stranger’ found dead of cold and exposure in a cowshed in 1362.
Martyrs and Local Saints in Late Antique Britain
Authors: Sharpe Richard
Published: November 2023

St Alban of Verulamium is the only Romano-British martyr whose cult certainly continued after the Roman period in an enclave of British Christians. His basilica was later adopted by Anglo-Saxons, who preserved the cult in what became one of the major monasteries of medieval England. The Roman town of Verulamium has produced archaeological evidence from the last decades of the fifth century that has been seen as ‘a remarkable testimony to the survival of craftsmanship, engineering practice, and Roman habits of life’. As the decayed Roman town was finally abandoned, a new town started to grow up near the martyrial church across the valley, a pattern of development with noteworthy Continental parallels. And eventually the place took its name from the saint. Continuity of this kind is nowhere else so well attested in Britain. One response to that may be to regard St Albans as a site whose unique history should be attributed to the rare phenomenon of a martyr cult. Another is to suppose that such sites might have been recognized elsewhere, if the traces of post-Roman activity in lowland Britain had not been masked or even removed during the Anglo-Saxon period. A martyr Sixtus, for example, was still venerated at a now unknown location in southern Britain until Augustine of Canterbury suppressed the cult.
Settlement Deferred
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

The monarchy’s reinstatement in 1660 was far from inevitable. In modern parliamentary democracies oppositions proverbially do not win elections: governments lose them. Likewise the Stuart restoration would not have occurred if the various anti-royalist forces had been able to overcome their mutual antagonisms and combine against the common enemy. But Oliver Cromwell’s death in September 1658 removed the one person capable of both controlling the military and managing the parliamentary republicans. An officers’ coup six months later, which effectively deposed his son Richard from the Protectorship, plunged the country into prolonged political chaos, with army factions and civilian politicians struggling for ascendancy. Even so, Sir George Booth’s attempted royalist uprising in August 1659 attracted little support outside his native Cheshire, and was easily crushed by a combination of professional troops and county militias.
The Last French Wars, 1793-1815
Authors: Prest Wilfrid
Published: November 2023

Despite the powerful loyalist reaction against French revolutionaries and their English sympathizers, France’s actual declaration of war on I February 1793 evoked widespread misgivings. Thecultivated Sussex clergyman Thomas Twining (1735-1804), an anti-democrat who professed disgust at Gallic atrocities (that ‘ferocious and butcherly mob’), nevertheless questioned the necessity of hostilities and feared their outcome, correctly predicting that ‘war will unite the French nation’.1 In this respect Twining endorsed the views of Fox, who steadfastly maintained that for all their faults the French people were defending liberty against monarchical despotism, and hence should be treated as allies, not enemies. The underlying implication, that Robespierre posed less of a threat than George III, led inevitably to the disintegration of the Foxite Whigs, although it was not until mid-1794 that Portland formally brought his depleted parliamentary following intocoalition with Pitt.
Ireland’s Defence Dilemma, 1923-1932
Authors: O’Halpin Eunan
Published: November 2023

Resolution of the problem of the army’s domestic intelligence activities was only one in a number of dramatic changes of status, scale, organization, purpose, and prospects endured by the army between 1923 and 1932. Much of this was, at least in principle, as welcome to the military as it was vital for the government. In practice, the changes represented the progressive marginalization of the army in Irish political life. In April 1923 the government was utterly dependent on the military; by 1932 the army was cowed, emaciated, and resigned to further decline. This transformation in military fortunes was wrought by a government which, in common with most of its successors, stead-fastly refused either to articulate or to make provision for a coherent national defence policy.
Security Operations and Covert Activities, 1939-1945
Authors: O’Halpin Eunan
Published: November 2023

The state was relatively well prepared for the acute security problems which it faced in the autumn of 1939. Many essentially technical matters such as the control and censorship of communications, and supervision of the movements of people into and out of the state, had been under consideration for some time, while the continuing threat to Anglo-Irish relations posed by the IRA had been brought home by its English bombing campaign. Problems of espionage by both sets of belligerents, and of covert interference in Irish affairs, were also anticipated. The result was the rapid imposition of a highly intrusive domestic security regime. These drastic arrangements and practices won both public acceptance and the eventual grudging private commendation of the Allies. Irish security successes against Axis and republican activities undoubtedly contributed considerably to Allied acceptance of military neutrality; successes against Allied covert activities also made a useful contribution to the management of the state’s external relations.
Introduction
Authors: Marks Lara V
Published: November 2023

In the care of their children the Jewish mothers are a pattern to their Gentile neighbours in the East End. Go and visit the schools in the East End and see the Jewish children. They stand out in marked contrast to other children for bright ness and healthy appearance. That is only due to the Jewish mothers. SUCH visions of Jewish women as good mothers with robust children were portrayed by many medical practitioners, voluntary workers, and statesmen in late nineteenth-century England. Much of their praise focused on the good care Jewish mothers took of their families and in particular of their infants. Indeed, Jewish mothers were presented as models to other mothers. They were not only seen to be scrupulous in the attention they paid to household chores, but were also lauded for ceasing to work early in pregnancy, and for their good breast-feeding habits. The remarkably low rates of mortality among Jewish infants in East London and elsewhere were also attributed to the exemplary care Jewish mothers took of their babies.
Vassalage and the Norms of Medieval Social Relations
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: November 2023

Before one can criticize the concept of vassalage as it is used in discussions of feudo-vassalic relations it is necessary to indicate as clearly as possible what it means there. This section is therefore intended to describe the main features of vassalage as it seems to be understood by those who use the word or who talk about vassals as a general category within medieval society. On occasion I shall note differences of opinion among those who use the concept, but I shall not at this stage say anything about those who reject it or criticize it radically. The first necessity is to get clear what it is that they or I reject. Clarity—or relative clarity-in this case may produce crudity and over-simplification, combining together views which some hold and others reject, but I do not intend to produce a caricature or straw man in order to make it easy to knock him down in later sections. In order to avoid clumsy repetitions I have not inserted phrases like ‘some historians say’, ‘it seems to be generally thought’, or ‘vassals are (or have been) held to be this or that’ in every sentence. The whole section must nevertheless be taken as a kind of indirect speech, even if it is more like rumour—and perhaps out-of-date rumour at that-rather than the accurate report of any one historian’s views.
Legislation and Justice
Authors: Padoa-Schioppa Antonio
Published: November 2023

No enquiry into the making of the modern European state can ignore the part played by law. This comprehensive scholarly volume examines in detail how states availed themselves of juridicial techniques in order to mould their institutions, to take control over their territory, and to exercise power over their subjects. The contributors are leading scholars in the field, who explore the administration of justice and the promulgation of legislation across Europe over a period of several centuries, in order to uncover the role of the law in the birth and development of the European state. The Origins of the Modern State in Europe series arises from an important international research programme sponsored by the European Science foundation. the aim of the series, which comprises seven volumes, is to bring together specialists from different countries, who reinterpret from a comparative European perspective different aspects of the formation of the state over the long period from the beginning of the thirteenth to the end of the eighteenth century. One of the main achievments of the research programme has been to overcome the long-established historiographical tendency to regard states mainly from the viewpoint of their twentieth-century borders.
Royal ordonnances in Medieval France
Authors: Couron Andre
Published: November 2023

Nowadays, legislative acts seem to be more a consequence of state power than its instrument of; for medieval states, we have to adopt a different, indeed almost the opposite, point of view. Obstacles to medieval legislation were numer ous. Particularly in a France which (because of the political weakness of the earli est Capetians) did not possess a legislative tradition, and which lacked a centralized administration or a common past among populations subject to various feudal powers, any royal legal competence faced huge impediments. Under such condi tions, French medieval kings, when enacting written rules, were creating the tools of their power more than drawing on the consequences of their strength. To ignore the political situation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries would lead scholars to misunderstand some aspects of medieval legislation. Royal enactments were not necessarily to be observed immediately and uniformly. To legislate often meant to make an attempt, and was the only way the royal government had for testing possible resistance. This must account for some features of medieval legis lation, such as frequent shortcomings, because at times enactments were consid ered a last resort, or repetitions in several enactments, because royal government sought to enforce previous legislation more effectively.
The Centralization ofJustice and the Formation of aJudicial Hierarchy in the Early Modern State: The Principality of Hesse
Authors: Stryk Karin Nehlsen-von
Published: November 2023

In contrast to other West European countries, the formation of the modern state in Germany proceeded not at the royal and national level but on a princely and regional one. The German principalities, such as the electorates of Brandenburg, Saxony, and the Palatinate, the archbishoprics of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, the duchies of Bavaria, Wilrttemberg, Jillich-Berg, Brunswick Lilneburg, and Mecklenburg, the margravate of Baden, and the bishoprics of Munster, Wilrzburg, and Bamberg, were recognizably developing from the thirteenth century onwards in the direction of institutionalized territorial states, with the ultimate goal of unitary systems of administration and oflaw under the control of a single sovereign, the ruler of the principality. The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, by contrast, right down to its demise in 1806, continued to remain in the older world ofhierarchical and feudal relationships.
Power Elites and the Prince: The State as Enterprise
Authors: Descimon Robert
Published: November 2023

Theories of modernization are prone to confer on the state the mission of enabling society to escape from the forces of inertia embedded in traditional forms of social domination. But the state also develops ‘laterally ‘, that is, in conjunction with the dominant social forces. The action of the state upon itself and upon society implies an endless series of compromises designed to find the channels necessary for the implementation of policy. In this regard, nothing is more significant that the failure to transplant the Polizeiordnung of German cameralism to the Russia of Catherine the Great, which lacked both the intermediary corporate bodies and the mainly urban cultural models which had ensured the triumph of the well-ordered police state in its various forms.
The Home Office, 1830-1834
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

Melbourne was Home Secretary from November 1830 to July 1834. For most of that period, he employed his brother George as Under-Secretary. Few holders of this office can have faced more turbulent situations. In addition to the grave disturbances that punctuated the years in which the first Reform Bill was debated and passed, protest was taking institutional form. Political Unions and Trade Unions presented the Home Office with new challenges, which could not be ignored. Inevitably too, the Irish, like the poor or bad weather, still demanded attention. Emancipation in 1829 had not drawn the sting of Catholic protest. It had merely diverted it into other channels. For all these reasons, Melbourne was suddenly in the full glare of public scrutiny. As the minister responsible for law and order, he had much to do. His reputation as a politicalflaneur would either be confirmed, or abandoned in favour of something a little more complimentary.
Feminism and the Woman Citizen in the Interwar Years
Authors: Caine Barbara
Published: November 2023

In the 1890s and more particularly the early twentieth century, the question of women’s rights finally became a matter of intense public and political debate. After decades of discussion of the ‘woman question’ amongst activists, writers, artists, scientists, moralists, and educators, questions about the nature and the situation and the demands of women began to feature in the popular imagination-as Punch cartoons of the late 1880s and 1890s, featuring powerful and athletic women on bicycles or cricket fields, or bullying effeminate men at cocktail parties, serve to show.’ Public discussion and press coverage became even more extensive with the advent of militancy and the massive suffrage demonstrations which developed after 1907.
A Polite and Commercial people
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

This book, the first volume to appear of the New Oxford History of England, offers the most authoritative, comprehensive general history of England between the accession of George II and the loss of America. Though conventionally seen as static and politically stable, the eighteenth century was an age of extraordinary vitality and variety, of contrasts and change. Beneath the serene surface of aristocratic government, stately manners, and Georgian elegance, lay a less orderly world of treasonable plots, riotous mobs, and Hogarthian vulgarity. While rapid commercial growth and burgeoning bourgeois pretensions gave rise to the positive achievements of military success and imperial expansion, cultural confidence and polite manners, tensions and contradictions simmered and threatened. Evangelical enthusiasm jostled with scientific rationalism, oligarchical politics with popular insubordination, entrepreneurial opulence with plebian poverty, sentimentality with utilitarian reform. Using the most up-to-date research, Paul Langford reveals the true character of the age, and demonstrates that eighteenth-century society was both strengthened and stretched by the changes to which it was subjected. The New Oxford History Of England series (General Editor: J. M. Roberts) The first volume of Sir George Clark's Oxford History of England was published in 1934. Over the following fifty years that series established itself as a standard work of reference, and a repertoire of scholarship for hundreds of thousands of readers. The New Oxford History of England, of which this is the first volume, is its successor. Each volume will set out an authoritative view of the present state of scholarship, presenting a distillation of the new knowledge built up by a half-century's research and publication of new sources, and incorporating the perspectives and judgements of a new generation of scholars. It is the intention of the General Editor and the Publisher that shall worthily take the place of its predecessor as the standard authoritative account of the national history and achieve a similar classic standing.
The Progress of Politeness
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

However difficult to quantify, the growing affluence and influence of the middle class ‘f!}ere widely recognized. Luxury and refinement seemed within the reach even of relatively humble families. The pursuit of genteel status and the acquisition of polite manners in some measure united a class which in other respects appeared diverse and divided. Educational institutions were reshaped to meet its needs, with the emphasis on the acquisition of useful skills and social graces. The old grammar schools and universities came under heavy criticism and were compelled to adapt to changing requirements. Some of the most notable cultural developments of the period, for example the expansion of the market for books and the immense popularity of novels and histories, reflected the taste of middle-class consumers. So did the ubiquity of the assembly as a focus for ordinary social life and the proliferation of spa towns and seaside resorts for bourgeois recreation. Middle-class women shared in the literary and social opportunities of the period, but found themselves increasingly excluded from gainful employment.
Industry and Idleness
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

Social problems, the subject of some cynical Augustan satire, were treated in an increasingly serious and didactic manner in the literature of the 1740s. Practt#x2019;cally, too, there were new initiatives. Characteristic expressions of early eighteenth-century benevolence, the societies for the reformation of manners and the charity school movement, were less . favoured under George II. Institutional charity was concentrated on the rapid expansion of hospitals, in the provinces as well as in London, and on philanthropic experiments in the grand manner, notably the Found ling Hospital and the Magdalen House. This concern with curing disease and saving lives had much to do with the high mortality rates recorded in the second quarter of the century. It was accompanied by acute anxiety about the indiscipline and immorality of the lower classes, supposedly evidenced by the popular taste for gin and the rising level of crime. The emphasis was on heightening the deterrent force of the criminal law rather than reappraising the causes of criminality. A sim£lar inflexibility governed attitudes towards the poor. With real wages at a relatively high level, poverty was attributed to temporary misfortune or culpable fecklessness.
Patriotism Unmasked, 1742-1757
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

Walpole ‘s fall was followed by demands for con stitutional reform and the punishment of Walpole himself. They were effectively blocked by the new ministry. The patriot cause seemed comprehensive y to have foundered. George II and Carteret were the principal beneficiaries of the crisis of I 742, but their foreign policy provoked an outburst of anti-Hanoverianism, and the King was forced to experiment with a Broad-Bottom coalition of Whigs and Tories. Open war with France preceded a Jacobite rebellion which was quelled only with difficulty. The Tory party showed httle interest in a Stuart Restoration but remained alienated from the court of George I I. In the midst of this crisis Henry Pelham was able to construct a lasting ministry. He used it to carry through an ambitious legislative programme for Scot land, and to bring the war to an end. The Pelhamite peace was somewhat marred by factious disputes within the government.
The Fortunate Isle
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

In the middle of the eighteenth century Britain enjoyed remarkable prestige among other Europeans. The British themselves considered their reputation entirely deserved. Religious tolerance and liberty under the law were much prized. But reality did not always accord closely with expectations. The rights of religious minorities were variable and uncertain. The execution of the laws was lax and discretionary rather than liberal. There was bitter criticism of lawyers and the judiciary. The legal privileges treasured y propertied Englishmen were not all available to their poorer compatriots. New legislation and administrative procedures put strains on traditional assumptions about civil liberty. Anxiety on this score was matched by concern about Britain’s less impressive reputation in cultural matters. The arts seemed disturbingly dependent on foreigners for their excellence, and even for their existence. Englishmen sought solace in the glories of their language and literature, in the triumph of the ‘natural’ garden, and in the adoption of Italian and classical models with which to express the native English genius. Under George II they received little encouragement from the court. But George lI I provided well-intentioned patronage, including an important part in the foundation of the Royal Academy. English xenophobia complicated the adoption of Continental tastes. It also caused problems within the British Isles themselves. Celts seeking a share in the new prosperity of the period suffered greatly from the national prejudices of Englishmen. Scots, in particular, found themselves victimized thanks to the political influence and unpopularity of Lord Bute during the early years of George III. There were clearly defined limits to the enlightenment and liberality which commentators commonly identified as hallmarks of British life.
Macaroni Manners
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

The economic growth of the 1760s and 1770s had important consequences for public and private finance. A wave of speculation and gaming, some of it associated with the State lottery, caused intense anxiety in the early seventies. The financial crash of 1772 revived memories of the South Sea Bubble and aroused exaggerated fears of impending national bankruptcy. Such concern also reflected the growing belief that the age was peculiarly afflicted by the vices of luxury, extravagance, and immorality. This was the heyday of the macaronis, outrageous offenders against the canons of bourgeois respectability, not least in the effeminate dress and manners which they adopted. Marital fidelity and family life were widely thought to be threatened. The moral standards of the new King and Queen visibly clashed with the supposed degeneracy of upper-class life. Scandals associated with other, less disciplined members of the royal family, enhanced this impression of a crisis in the highest reaches of polite society. Aristocratic power and values generally came under increasing criticism. ‘Chesterfieldism’ seemed to embody all that was most cynical and depraved in an outmoded concept of gentility. The sexual freedom of educated women, and the prominence accorded female writers and artists, gave rise to an increasingly tense debate, as scholarly argument combined with sensational journalism to investigate the changing roles of the sexes.
The Cobhams: The Family and Their experience
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

By the late fourteenth century the Cobhams, the lords of Cobham, were among the leading landowning families of south-eastern England. For three generations from 1313, the heads of the family were honoured with personal summonses to parliament.
The cobhams of Sterborough
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

The monuments of the Cobhams of Sterborough constitute the finest and most numerous to any branch of the Cobham family outside Cobham. In their burial church at Lingfield are tomb effigies to two members of the family and brasses to three others. The Cobhams of Sterborough were for over a century the most successful of the Cobham collateral branches. Reginald, Lord Cobham, the second of his line, who died in 1361, was one of the outstanding figures of his day: a brilliant war captain and a respected royal councillor. He and his son were both summoned to parliament as peers. But the family’s ascendancy did not last: after two generations their star faded and they sank back into the gentry. The Sterborough line’s changing fortunes are vividly reflected in their monuments. A brief overview of the familis rise and decline will allow us to set those monuments in their context.
The Brasses and Monuments at Lingfield
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

The historical development of the mausoleum at Lingfield stands in sharp contrast to that at Cobham. At Cobham, the whole commemorative scheme was informed by the defining vision of one highly influential figure: John, 3rd Lord Cobham. While it is true that the two dozen or so brasses at Cobham cover a period of 150 years, it is the vision and ambition of John, Lord Cobham that dominate. At Lingfield the position is very different. At Lingfield there was no presiding genius of comparable importance to the 3rd Lord: no one who was equally influential in shaping the development of the mausoleum. In consequence, a greater variety of taste is to be found in the monuments. The remarkable consistency which characterizes the memorials at Cobham is absent. Brasses alternate with full-relief effigies. Some of the brasses are canopied, while others are not. Identifying and isolating the various influences at work is less straightforward than at the sister church.
Brasses elsewhere to the Cobhams
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

The Cobhams’ appetite for commemorative display is amply attested by the two sets of monuments at Cobham and Lingfield. However, these are by no means the only memorials to members of the Cobham family. There are some half-dozen others-all of them brasses—in as many churches. For the most part, the people commemorated are Cobham spouses or collaterals. There are wide variations in the size and character of the memorials. The largest of the group, the brass at Chrishall (Essex), is a big triple-canopied composition, while the others are all in varying degrees smaller. To consider the brasses as a group risks imposing a somewhat artificial unity on them, for they are a scattered series, laid at different times in different places, and their shared characteristics are few. None the less, the risk is probably one worth taking. When considered as a group the brasses yield further insights into the Cobhams’ commemorative tastes and self-image.
Angels, Monks, and Demons in the Early Medieval West
Authors: Leyser Conrad
Published: November 2023

If the monk wants to spit, or to blow mucus from his nose, he should not aim in front of himself, but behind-because there are angels standing in front of him, as is shown by the prophet, ‘In the sight of angels, I will sing psalms for you Lord, and I will worship at your sacred temple’ [Ps. 137-1].
King Henry II and the Monks of Battle: The Battle Chronicle Unmasked
Authors: Vincent Nicholas
Published: November 2023

As defined by the introduction to its most recent edition, ‘The Chronicle of Battle Abbey is a roughly chronological account of legal and administrative affairs of Battle Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Sussex, from the foundation of the house in the late eleventh century until the n8os’ . It survives today in a single, incomplete manuscript: London, British Library, Cotton Domitian A ii. It has twice been printed, most recently by Professor Eleanor Searle, much of whose career was spent in the study of Battle Abbey, its lands and records. Professor Searle judged that the Chronicle was composed towards the end of the reign of King Henry II, drawing for its earliest materials upon late eleventh-and early twelfth-century narrative and administrative records, but from the n3os onwards representing the work of a single man, ‘the chronicler', who could himself recall an event that took place during the time of Abbot Warner (n25-38).
Conclusion
Authors: Kerr David S
Published: November 2023

In one sense Stendhal was correct. Philipon’s newspapers were a central component of a broad culture of opposition which enabled civil society to cast a critical eye over government. After 1830 politicians and governments, who theoretically derived their legitimacy from the nation as much as from the king, feared public ridicule more than their predecessors under the Restoration had done; Louis-Philippe himself could not treat the murmurs of dissent with Charles X’s unfailing disdain. But Stendhal drastically overestimated the practical influence of public ridicule. The governments of the July Monarchy systematically refused to modify their policies to take account of the feelings articulated through the opposition’s various organs: the immense public sympathy for the Polish revolutionaries and the opprobrium heaped on the politicians who abandoned them to the Russians did not force Louis-Philippe to go to war; all the charivaris meted out on the ventrus did not prevent them from accepting honours and sinecures from the cabinet. The opposition’s attempts to bring public pressure to bear on the government were only successful on two major issues: the abolition of the hereditary peerage in 1831 and the project to fortify Paris in 1833. There are few recorded instances of caricature directly influencing government policy.
Introduction Picturing the English Past in Nineteenth Century Britain-Historical Consciousness and National Identity
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

I have been thinking a great deal about the plan of reading history in the most useful manner ... The great preliminary matter is if possible to create a taste for the study ... Pictures and prints I have found ... a very good mode of fixing attention ... it is not to children alone that such illustrations are useful ... The taste for history being once formed the course of reading becomes a subsequent and easier subject of consideration... I would take the outline from one historian of modern date and resort to old chronicles for illustrations of such facts as are told with more naivete or piquancy of detail by co[n]temporaries ...
Publishing the Past: Text and Image, Author, Illustrator, and Publisher
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

That the study of two different artistic media presented in one format-as in the case of the illustrated text-still requires some initial explanation is perhaps surprising in this multi-media age. Nevertheless, despite the development of cultural studies in general, and text and image studies in particular, over the last few decades, the acceptance of these disciplines, and the integration of the insights which they afford us, into more traditional areas of research has been slow.
True Stories and Solid Facts: The Evolution of the English History Textbook
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

The historiographical evolution of Hume’s History of England, examined in the last chapter, was similar to-but was not mirrored by-the transformation of the nineteenth-century English history textbook. These more obscure works passed through the same historiographical revolutions, influenced in succession by philosophical history, picturesque history, and scientific history: they evolved from story-books with pictures, intended for consumption in a domestic and informal setting, to closely printed, fact-laden texts, suggestive of the wider context of a nascent national education system.
Separate Spheres and Early Women’s History
Authors: Mitchell Rosemary
Published: November 2023

‘... history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in ... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all’. Catherine Morland’s well-known opinion of ‘real solemn history’ might well serve to summarize those of many other women in the late eighteenth century.
Domesday
Authors: Roffe David
Published: November 2023

Domesday Book is the main source for an understanding of late Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest. And yet, despite over two centuries of study, no consensus has emerged as to its purpose. David Roffe proposes a radically new interpretation of England's oldest and most precious public record. He argues that historians have signally failed to produce a satisfactory account of the source because they have conflated two essentially unrelated processes, the production of Domesday Book itself and the Domesday inquest from the records of which it was compiled. New dating evidence is adduced to demonstrate that Domesday Book cannot have been started much before 1088, and old sources are reassessed to suggest that it was compiled by Rannulf Flambard in the aftermath of the revolt against William Rufus in the same year. Domesday Book was a land register drawn up by one of the greatest (and most hated) medieval administrators for administrative purposes. The Domesday inquest, by contrast, was commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1085 and was an enterprise of a different order. Following the threat of invasion from Denmark in that year it addressed the deficiencies in the national system of taxation and defence, and its findings formed the basis for a renegotiation of assessment to the geld and knight service. This study provides novel insights into the inquest as a principal vehicle of communication between the crown and the free communities over which it exercised sovereignty, and will challenge received notions of kingship in the eleventh century and beyond.
The Inquest and Government
Authors: Roffe David
Published: November 2023

Domesday Book, With near-contemporary sources, described itself as a descriptio, that is, a writing down. The nearest English term is perhaps ‘survey’, and indeed the word is widely used of the process that was set in train in 1085. Historians further characterize that survey as an inquisition or inquest. The term inquisitio does not appear in English sources until the twelfth century, but it is used with some reason in this context. It signifies a questioning and in its essentials it consisted of a panel of jurors drawn from the local community who were sworn to answer truthfully to the questions put to them by the king or his agent. It was a device that was widely used in England throughout the medieval period. The verdict became the touchstone of a host of legal and administrative activities that impinged on almost every aspect of public life. As an instrument of government it was particularly effective, for it harnessed the local community to the crown. Much of the Angevin revolution in government was founded on the device, and in consequence it has often been seen as both the cause and effect of the formation of a powerful monarchy in England. Superseding the more primitive procedures of Old English law, the inquest brought the king into the business of the shire and shone a light of reason into the mire of tribal custom.
Commissioners and the Limits of Their Commission
Authors: Roffe David
Published: November 2023

As An Instrument of government the inquest was an extraordinary enterprise. Although it might avail itself of the usual processes and personnel of central and local government, it was not bound by normal procedures. The commissioners were the king’s representative, his legati or barones, and were free within the bounds that the commission assigned them to expedite the business in hand. Like justices in eyre, they were empowered to call all manner of witness before them. They were no mere chairmen presiding over the business of others. They were the occasion and the instrument of definition and were therefore both conduit and agent. Through them the inchoate was realized. The commissioners were a vital element in the process that was set in train in 1085. Their actions were various.
Circuit Reports
Authors: Roffe David
Published: November 2023

By Its Nature the inquest was reflexive. The king issued a commission of inquiry to inform himself of the facts in question and the commissioners were bound to furnish a reply. From long scholarly usage that reply is known as a return. As has been seen, however, this term is a misnomer. Inquests were the start rather than the finish of enterprises, and the idea of the return, marking as it does the end of a bureacratic legal process, is hardly appropriate to the procedure. In the following discussion the word ‘return’ is eschewed in favour of the more neutral ‘report’. What those reports consisted of is illustrated by the extant documentation of later medieval inquests.
Introduction: The Crime Problem
Authors: Beattie J M
Published: November 2023

There was a common perception in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that crime was a serious problem. The offences that caused the sharpest anxieties and triggered the strongest responses were those that threatened individual victims in their person or property, offences the law defined as felonies. They were the visible centre of the crime problem, and provoked a continuing undercurrent of anxiety, Such offences were widely viewed as transgressions of the moral order, the results of choices made by individual men and women, and to be but one aspect of a broader constellation of illegal and immoral behaviour. But for some time by the late seventeenth century crime had also been coming to be seen not only as a collection of individual actions, but as a social pathology, or at least a social problem.
William Thomson and Transportation
Authors: Beattie J M
Published: November 2023

William Thomson was the son of a prominent London lawyer of the same name who had risen to the rank of serjeant at law and had been awarded a knight hood. The young Thomson grew up in Essex, attended Brentwood school and Cambridge, and followed his father and brother to the Middle Temple and to the bar. He was early drawn into the factional politics of lpswich, allied initially with a tory who was elected recorder and who appointed Thomson his deputy in 1705, but he soon switched allegiance to the main political manager in the borough who had begun to support whig candidates for office. It was by these self-serving means that Thomson was selected recorder of lpswich in 1707, at the age of 31.
Bronze-age Ireland
Authors: Kelly M J O’
Published: November 2023

The more excavation and study that are undertaken, the more blurred become the dividing lines between one period and another. Although many scholars have discarded the old nomenclature, they have been forced to substitute other descriptive terms for them, so that in effect the divisions remain and only the names are altered. It is proposed here to retain the old divisions, employing the terms ‘bronze age’, etc., but in the knowledge that a good deal of so-called bronze-age activity actually took place before bronze was in use, just as neolithic activity took place in areas such as the shores of the River Bann, in the north of Ireland, before the implications of a neolithic way of life had fully dawned. It is proposed to deal first with some of the earliest signs of change in the neolithic way of life.
Early Irish law
Authors: Charles-Edwards T M
Published: November 2023

Although the surviving written texts must be our evidence, they are not identical with the subject to be investigated. The great bulk of legal activity was oral, and on this the written sources often shed only an indirect light. In spite of this difficulty, however, we must be concerned with the totality, both written and unwritten, since otherwise explanation will be impossible. It will also be necessary to examine the principal Irish text of canon law, the ‘Collectio canonum Hibernensis’. I shall refer to the vernacular texts as native Irish law or as secular Irish law.
Manuscripts and palaeography
Authors: Sullivan William O’
Published: November 2023

Unhappily, even in the hands of the leading practitioners of the art—for science it is not—Ludwig Traube, E. A. Lowe, or T. J. Brown—the study of Irish script is still far from fulfilling this function. However, although general agreement has not been reached, there have been considerable advances from the early part of the twentieth century, when the Book of Kells could be placed in the seventh century. A great deal of the work has been done by linguists and art historians, and—as we shall see in the case of the Book of Durrow—it is time palaeographers cried halt and started to put their own house in order.
Ireland before the battle of Clontarf
Authors: Byrne F . J
Published: November 2023

The ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ tells us that they had come from Brittany to the Bristol Channel earlier in the year, that they had raided all around the Welsh coast, captured Cyfeiliog, bishop of Archenfield, who was ransomed by King Edward for forty pounds of silver; that their subsequent attempts at plundering further inland had been thwarted by the forces of Hereford and Gloucester, and that they had finally been stranded starving on the island of Steepholm off Barry, on the coast of south Wales, whence they moved to Dyfed and Ireland. They were led by two jarls, Hroald and Ottar, and the latter’s arrival in Britain is mentioned briefly in the Welsh annals.
The Apparitions and State Repression
Authors: Blackbourn David
Published: November 2023

One of the most important differences between Marpingen and other German apparition sites of the I 870s was the degree of force employed against it by the state. This cannot be ascribed to some innately repressive character of the Prussian state. After all, Dittrichswalde in the Prussian Ermland, as well as Bavarian Mettenbuch, were spared coercion. What Marpingen revealed was a Prussian state that was indeed latently repressive, but was also cumbersome, inflexible, and unprepared for such incidents, both because it found them profoundly alien, and because bureaucratic parsimony left the normal police presence overwhelmed. The scale of the Marpingen events and the delay before the civil authorities had word of them produced an initial over-reaction by officials on the spot. Once the mailed fist had been shown, the agencies of the state were placed in a quandary. Soldiers, civilian bureaucrats, judicial officials, and policemen found themselves in a situation from which they were unlikely to emerge with either success or credit, and the frustrations of dealing with a refractory population brought instinctive fears and prejudices to the surface. The actions that followed were painstaking and petty, comic and vindictive by turn.