bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dioclea between Rascia and Byzantium in the first half of the twelfth century
Authors: Zivkovic Tibor
Published: November 2007

The conflict between Rascia and Dioclea began in the reign of King Bodin of Dioclea (1081-1099) and it was brought to an end during the rule of Stephen Nemanja, Grand Zhupan of Serbia about 1185. The historical sources, primarily the Chronicle of the Priest of Dioclea, give no indication of the causes of this conflict, nor do they explain why Byzantium found it necessary to intervene from time to time in Dioclea or Rascia. Although the family relations of the Rasican and Dioclean dynasties frequently provoked one state to interfere into the internal affairs of the other, they were certainly not the main generator of this century-long conflict. Since it was a process of long duration, it is quite likely that the main cause of the war between Rascia and Dioclea had to do with economic considerations, and the paper discusses this possibility. The rulers of Dioclea wanted to secure the raw materials for the maritime towns, primarily Cataro, which they had acquired around the middle of the eleventh century, and they sought to achieve that by conquest and the expansion of their influence in the inland regions ? in Travounia, Bosnia and Rascia. On the other hand, Serbia had become rapidly more powerful in the early twelfth century, and its rulers sought to impose their control on these maritime towns as nearest centres of commerce and production. During this contest, Byzantium interfered only when the geostrategic stability in the broader territory of the Balkan Peninsula seemed to be brought into question and when Dioclea or Rascia established closer links with the Venetians, Hungarians or Normans, thus jeopardizing its interests. Byzantium looked upon Rascia and Dioclea as its western outposts and was therefore anxious to have a reliable ruler in Rascia, so that it could control the Nis ? Branicevo ? Belgrade route to Hungary. Similarly, a dependable ruler in Doclea was a guarantor of the safety of the theme of Dyrrachion and of unimpeded communication with the remaining Byzantine possessions in the middle part of Dalmatia.
The scribe of the founder's inscription of Saint Sava in Studenica
Authors: Spadijer Irena
Published: November 2007

The founder's inscription situated at the foot of the tambour in the Church of the Virgin in Studenica originating from 1208/9, is one of the oldest dated specimens of Serbian literacy. It was uncovered in 1951, during the conservation works in the monastery. Former research (conducted by Dj. Trifunovic), has ascertained that inscriptions on the scrolls, books and frescoes in the monastery were written by the Greek artists who decorated the church. Scribal errors indicate beyond any doubt that Slavic was not the mother tongue of the scribes, and that they were not, or at least not sufficiently, familiar with the orthography of this language. In this paper the main focus has been directed at the founder's inscription, which has been put under detailed orthographic and palaeographic scrutiny. The morphology of some letters ? the Greek "K", non-distinguishing between izica (ippsilon) and the Cyrillic "C" ? clearly indicates that in all probability the author of the inscription was a Greek, perhaps the very painter who signed his name in the Greek language on the Mandelion beneath the large founder's inscription.
The Matter of the Missing Contests: Towards a Theory of the Mid-19th Century British Political System
Authors: Moore D. C.
Published: November 2007

General elections occurred in mid-19th century Britain for various reasons. Sovereigns died; prime ministers tried to enlarge their xsmajorities in the House of Commons—or to reduce their miniorities; and, of course, the Septennial Act put an outside limit upon the length of time a given Parliament might last. The seven year limit has since been replaced by a five year limit. Also, the death of a sovereign no longer requires the summoning of a new House of Commons. These changes are important. They have often been noted. But they are far less important than certain other changes to which less attention has been given. As a rule today a contest takes place in every constituency on every possible occasion. But at some general elections in the mid-19th century a contest took place in fewer than half of the constituencies.

Presumably, historians have always been vaguely aware that such was the case. But until fairly recently this awareness was indeed rather vague. To my knowledge Professor Gash was the first person to make a systematic count of the numbers of constituencies from which candidates were returned to Parliament without opposition. He made the count for each of the general elections between 1832 and 1847. And then, in a way that suggests his uncertainty what the phenomenon of the uncontested election really meant, when he published his figures in 1953 in his Politics in the Age of Peel, he did so not in the body of the book but in an appendix to which no significant reference was made. Since then others have continued to count. In 1965 Trevor Lloyd published a short piece entitled “Uncontested Seats in British General Elections, 1852-1910.”
Sir Arthur Hesilrige: The Forgotten Knight of the Long Parliament
Authors: Engstrom Hugh R.
Published: November 2007

On January 4, 1642, Charles I's ill-starred attempt to reassert his authority over Parliament led to the unsuccessful attempt to arrest five of the leading members of the parliamentary opposition on charges of high treason. Three of the men, John Pym, John Hampden, and Denzil Holles, were prominent members of the opposition party, well known to their contemporaries and posterity. The remaining two members, Sir Arthur Hesilrige and William Strode, were less well known to their contemporaries and by and large forgotten by later generations. The Earl of Clarendon quite easily dismissed them as minor figures when he came to write his great history.

Hesilrige along with Mr. Strode were persons of too low an account and esteem; and though their virulence and malice was as conspicuous, and transcendant as any man's yet their reputation, and interest to do any mischief, otherwise than concurring in it was so small, that they gained credit and authority by being joined with the rest, who had indeed a great influence.

Thus were Hesilrige and Strode consigned to the dustbin of history. In Hesilrige's case such treatment did not accord with all the facts as recorded by Clarendon, nor apparently did it coincide with the opinion Charles I held of Hesilrige. The Earl, by his own account of events, leaves little doubt that Hesilrige was capable of doing great mischief although he always preferred to see the knight as the instrument of other men's designs. As for the King, who was fighting to save his ancestral throne, Hesilrige must have appeared as the bitterest of enemies, and it was with good reason that Charles included Hesilrige among the five members.
Science and Literature: The Virtuoso in English Belles Lettres
Authors: McCue Daniel L.
Published: November 2007

In the year 1676 there appeared on the London stage a new kind of comedy. The play was The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell; and the new element was its satire on the contemporary amateur scientist called a “virtuso.”

Shadwell's play marked the beginning of a trend. For the next hundred years the “virtuoso” became a familiar figure in English literature. He was described, mocked, praised and lectured in plays, poems, and essays. He attracted the attention and interest of such authors as Dryden, Addison, Swift. Pope, Akenside, Johnson, and Shenstone.

Exactly what was a virtuoso? Originally he was a Renaissance gentleman of wealth and leisure who, inspired by the revival of classical learning, became a collector of Greek and Roman antiquities — paintings, sculptures, coins, and medals. His motives were varied: partly sheer curiosity and delight in knowledge for its own sake; partly the need for occupation as an escape from boredom and melancholy. But it must be genteel occupation: one suited to his class and fortune, divorced from manual labor or money-grubbing, and from any kind of practical utility. The reputation to be gained by a note-worthy collection furnished added incentive. Finally, sensibility played a part: the romantic desire for “some living contact, however vicarious, with the heroes of old, classical and national.”
Checklist of Holdings of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History
Authors: Cole Maija J.
Published: November 2007

The Yale Center for Parliamentary History (YCPH) was organized in 1966 by Professor J. H. Hexter to continue the work begun by Professor Wallace Notestein in the study of English Parliamentary History. Aside from the primary task of editing the proceedings in the House of Commons in 1628, the Center, at its inception, undertook to collect and make available to scholars all known accounts (published and unpublished) of the proceedings in the English parliaments from 1558 to 1660, and relevant materials relating to the M.P.s who sat in those parliaments.

The YCPH's collection of manuscript materials is composed principally of photographic reproductions: microfilms, photostats, and xeroxes. We are indebted to various English archival repositories for having permitted us to film these materials. There are, however, certain restrictions on their use. The Center has agreed with the archival institutions not to make copies of the photographic reproductions supplied to the YCPH. In accordance with the 1956 Copyright Act scholars must secure permission from the owners of the original manuscripts if they desire to publish in toto or to quote extensively from filmed manuscripts studied at the Center. The situation vis a vis transcripts is somewhat different. In some cases the Center has made transcripts of manuscripts in the course of its editorial work. These transcripts are the property of the YCPH and, with permission, may be quoted in scholarly works, cited as “Transcripts), YCPH.” Certain of these transcripts are also available on loan from the Center (postage and, if necessary, xerox costs to be assumed by the requester). In other cases scholars working elsewhere in the country in Tudor-Stuart history have generously deposited copies of their transcripts for use at the Center. Permission to quote from these transcripts deposited at the Center must be obtained from the individuals who made them.
British Chemistry and the Concept of Science in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Donovan Arthur
Published: November 2007

Eighteenth-century British chemistry presents the historian with an interesting paradox. As theorists, the British hardly distinguished themselves. Joseph Black, the foremost professor of chemistry during the second half of the century and a man of great intellectual ability, began his career with a brilliant paper on pneumatic chemistry and then promptly abandoned the world of published research. Skillful investigators such as Stephen Hales and Joseph Priestley made many important discoveries, but the theories they offered as interpretations of their observations created as many difficulties as they resolved. Although British chemists hypothesized with gusto, the aethers and phlogistons they invoked to explain chemical phenomena lacked intellectual as well as physical gravity and historians of chemistry have not yet succeeded in clarifying the relationship between this welter of ideas and Lavoisier's successful recasting of chemical theory during the final decades of the century. Despite the inadequacy of its theoretical concepts, however, philosophical chemistry flourished in Great Britain during the eighteenth century. Although the absence of a unifying theory led to a rather undisciplined pattern of growth, the number of chemists actively studying philosophical problems certainly increased. Why did so many natural philosophers become interested in such a theoretically impoverished subject, and why, after two generations of intense investigation and reflection, were they unable to formulate an adequate general theory?
“The Man on the Spot”: Independence of the Australian Governor, 1788-1850
Authors: McCulloch Samuel Clyde
Published: November 2007

Australians recognize distance and isolation as a mold which shaped their history. Geoffrey Blainey observes this in his brilliantly provocative book, The Tyranny of Distance, and points out the consequences of Australia's geographic situation. Australia is at least 12,000 miles from England, and her continental perimeter is another 12,000 miles. Because of slow and uncertain communications between Australia and Whitehall from 1788 to 1850, the governor was really “the man on the spot”; he had often to act more independently than his instructions intended, and at times he defied both Whitehall and the colonists, sometimes at the same time. Although his link with the Colonial Office was direct, the secretaries of state to whom he was responsible changed frequently; yet much of our information comes from the dispatches between these officials.

The colony of New South Wales comprised nearly all of eastern continental Australia until 1850. It was founded as a penal colony in 1788. The commission of the first governor, Arthur Phillip, gave him almost complete autocratic powers over the colony, prompting a military attaché to observe: “I never heard of any one single person having so great power vested in him as the Governor.” This commission stood, with some slight exceptions, for more than thirty years.

Because of these extraordinary powers, the early governors were called autocrats. Although the British government decided how many convicts were to be sent and the colonial secretaries in London issued frequent instructions, the distance and slow mails — three to six-month voyages en route each way — placed the governor in complete control of the colony's expansion. Thus, the disposal of land, labor, and capital depended on each governor's individual discretion. After 1824, when George Arthur became lieutenant governor, Tasmania became independent from New South Wales. Eventually, these two autocratically ruled prison farms became prosperous self-governing colonies after 1850. Meanwhile, Western Australia and South Australia were founded sans convicts in 1829 and 1836, respectively. This paper will deal first with New South Wales, and more briefly with Tasmania, Western Australia, and South Australia.
Anarchy in England, 1135-54: The Theory of the Constitution
Authors: Patterson Robert B.
Published: November 2007

The constitutional arrangement of December 1135, under which Stephen of Blois won England with the support of the Londoners and of the administration at Winchester, with unction from the archbishop of Canterbury, and with recognition from the pope, did not prevail, as all know. Eighteen years later, the Treaty of Winchester legitimized the dynastic transfer from the house of Blois to the house of Anjou. By its very nature, the treaty constituted an endorsement of the Angevin rebellion against King Stephen. In the theory and mechanisms by which it provided a legal basis for the ultimate transfer of government to Henry Fitz Empress, Winchester relied upon certain crucial ideas and institutions: hereditary succession; the church as a guarantor of social and political order; the legal force of conciliar decisions; and the bonds created by fealty and homage. Such notions are supported in one way or another in the writings of men who observed Siephen's passage from dynastic victory to defeat. These commentators are thus an important gauge of the constitutional thought of Stephen's reign and of the early part of Henry II's, particularly for the right of rebellion, and they provide a context for appreciating the constitutional settlement which terminated Stephen's reign. The literary style of these observers is also worth notice for its effect on the historiography of Stephen's reign, chiefly in its contribution to the hard-to-eradicate image of this nineteen-year period as “the anarchy.”
Geoffrey Plantagenet's Will and the Angevin Succession
Authors: Keefe Thomas K.
Published: November 2007

Count Geoffrey Plantagenet's sudden death in September 1151 came at a most inopportune time for his eighteen-year-old son, Henry. Having just concluded a peace with their French overlord in which Henry's recent investiture with Normandy was formally recognized by Louis VII, father and son were about to launch a combined Angevin-Norman invasion of England. This invasion, it was hoped, would finally settle the issue of the English succession, reuniting the Anglo-Norman state under Henry l's intended heir. When this long-awaited goal was achieved, the young king/duke would rule over England and Normandy, while his father continued in the governance of Anjou. But the Count's illness and impending death brought forth a more immediate and unexpected issue: the Angevin succession.
The Prince of Wales's Children Act, 1889
Authors: Sacks Benjamin
Published: November 2007

Nothing was more abrasive to the popularity of the British monarchy than the civil list during the reign of Queen Victoria. The repeated requests to parliament for annuities and dowries for her children brought accusations against the sovereign of evading the responsibility to take care of her own family. The chief critics were the Radical M.P.s, a sort of left wing in the Liberal party. A few were theoretical republicans but tempered their views by an acknowledgement that the constitutional monarchy was in reality a veiled republic capable of yielding the most advanced political and social reforms. Their twin interests would seem to have been 1) to complete the Gladstonian principle of fiscal economy by its extension to the royal family and 2) to make court life a model of simplicity in harmony with the nineteenth-century goal of human dignity.

What brought the matter to a climax was the prospective requests in the eighteen-eighties for the children of the Prince of Wales. As the Radical M.P.s saw the issue, parliament was about to be asked to take care of the Queen's grandchildren numbering more than a score. What seemed imperative was the appointment of a select committee to determine both the extent of the legal obligation of parliament and the ability of Queen Victoria to find the money from her available funds. Sir Charles Dilke, Chelsea, whose outbursts against civil list expenditures had aroused the anger of the Queen in 1871-72, had been suggesting such a body. But he agreed that the children of the Prince of Wales (whom he met frequently at social events) merited grants as they were in the line of succession but not those of the Queen's younger sons and daughters. Dilke was more specific on May 27, 1883 (or as Lee states May 7), when he dined at Marlborough House. The Prince of Wales raised anew the needs of his children. Dilke assured him of support and favored a lump sum to be distributed by the Prince of Wales rather than piecemeal legislation as had been the case with the Queen's own children.
The Impact of the Ulster Crisis (1912–1914) on the British Labour Party
Authors: Shefftz Melvin
Published: November 2007

The British Parliamentary system has broken down in Ulster as it has broken down many times in Ireland in the past. In fact, many events in the current agonizing crisis of Northern Ireland suggest scenes from the past. The mutual hatreds of Catholics and Protestants seem unchanged from the seventeenth century world of Cromwell and William of Orange. The Orange Lodges of 1973 seem the same as those of 1795. William Craig's Ulster Vanguard is a conscious revival of Sir Edward Carson's Ulster Volunteers of 1912-1914. The Provisional I.R.A. in 1973 attempts to re-enact the history of the Irish Republican Army of Michael Collins in 1920 and 1921. One element from past Irish troubles, however, is fortunately lacking. This breakdown in Ireland, unlike all earlier breakdowns, has created no crisis in Britain. In the past, British Governments have been badly shaken by Irish troubles. This time, however, there is no battle over Ireland either within the British parties or between the British parties.

It was dramatically different in the months between April, 1912, and August, 1914, the period of the battle over the Third Home Rule Bill and the starting point for this paper. This Ulster crisis brought Ireland to the brink of civil war, turned the Conservative Party into sponsors of rebellion, and produced something like a mutiny among the officers of a British Army unit. These events have been described in several books and in many chapters of political histories and biographies. Indeed, the Ulster crisis and the reactions of the Conservatives, Liberals, and Irish Nationalists have been amply studied. Only one group in the story has been neglected. With the exception of George Dangerfield in his Strange Death of Liberal England, writers on the Ulster crisis virtually ignore the Labour Party. This is easily understood. The battle over Home Rule which initiated the Ulster crisis of 1912-1914 was waged between the Liberal Government allied with the Irish Nationalists on one side and the Conservative Party with their Ulster Unionist wing on the other.
The Mystery of Lord Haldane and Early British Military Aviation
Authors: Gollin Alfred
Published: November 2007

In December 1905 R.B. Haldane, later Viscount Haldane of Cloan, became Secretary of State for War. Among his fellow politicians Haldane, at this time, was looked on as an intriguer who combined habitual meddling in high places with a curious and remarkable interest in German philosophy. The Prime Minister of the day, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who had good reason to dislike Haldane, nicknamed him “Schopenhauer.” Both men knew that the War Office had ruined the reputations of several of Haldane's predecessors. “We shall now see,” remarked Campbell-Bannerman, in a phrase that later became famous, “how Schopenhauer gets on in the Kailyard.” Despite this unpromising start Haldane's military reforms were so successful that they established his reputation in history as one of the great servants of the state in the pre-1914 era. His work and accomplishments in the field of military aviation, however, have been criticized very severely. In fact, the matter is so complicated that one aviation authority has written of the record in this area that “Haldane's actions behind the scenes may never be known with certainty.”

Even some of his closest subordinates in the field of military aeronautics were very critical of Haldane's attitude and outlook. In February 1911 a major step was taken when, by an Army Order, a unit known as the Air Battalion of the Royal Engineers was created. This Battalion was entrusted with the duty of training a “body of expert airmen.” The Battalion's first commander was Major Sir Alexander Bannerman, an officer who knew little about airplanes, but was instead a balloon expert with experience in the South African and Russo-Japanese wars.
The Generation Gap of 1173-74: the War between the Two Henrys
Authors: Jones Thomas M.
Published: November 2007

Revolts against English monarchs, varying in scope and intensity, marked every reign from 1100 to 1272. After that, if we consider what happened to Edward II and Richard II, and the Wars of the Roses and the troubles of the first Tudor, we see pattern emerging in the shape of constitutional change induced through revolt. Even in the context of that centuries-long pattern, there was something special in the revolt of 1173-4, when three sons of Henry II united with an array of anti Plantagenet barons and continental neighbors to try to unseat the powerful king of England, who also held Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and the feudal conglomeration that comprised Aquitaine.

For reasons that I shall attempt to develop, the complex events of those two years constituted a watershed for mediaeval England, separating an age of feudal institutions from an age of royal bureaucracy that bore hints and suggestions of the modern era. The generational gap between sons and father added drama to the conflict, and psychological forces were inextricably bound to political forces as the revolt developed.
Newcastle's Mob
Authors: Fitts James L.
Published: November 2007

“I love a mob,” the aging Duke of Newcastle said in 1768, “I headed a mob once myself. We owe the Hanoverian succession to a mob.” As I read those words I wondered if the good Duke, who was 73 when he said them, had slipped into senility or into an aged-ripened concept of the past, for the textbooks tell of the Jacobite rioting at George I's accession and during and after the Rebellion of 1715, but not of mob action in support of the Hanovers. The more specific histories of the period such as George Rude's Hanoverian London show that some of the events which we interpret as riots were actually pitched battles between mobs of Jacobite sympathizers and friends of the new government. This shows the existence of rival forces but where was Newcastle's mob? This paper attempts to define that mob, to explain the reasons for its formation, to show its organization around the young Pelham-Hollis, Duke of Newcastle, and to illustrate its activities.
Sir Edward W. Hamilton and Tariff Reform, 1903-1905: A Study of Conscience vs. Policy
Authors: Lipchitz Joseph W.
Published: November 2007

It is a commonplace to assume that in any given Government members of the civil service and other non-elected employees will be loyal to the elected officials of the Government and will carry out the policies determined by these officials. But what happens when a policy is at odds with a man's conscience? Recently we have seen one solution in the release of the Pentagon Papers. Other solutions include burial of one's personal beliefs in commitment to duty, quiet resignation from the Government, or dedication to serve the country's best interests according to one's conscience while remaining within the Government. An example of such dedication, which exceeded partisan considerations, was that displayed by Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, permanent financial secretary to the British Treasury, during the 1903-1905 campaign for tariff reform.

From his birth in 1847, Hamilton was destined to be a free trader. His father, Walter Kerr Hamilton, was the Bishop of Salisbury and a close friend of William E. Gladstone. In 1870, Hamilton entered the temple of free trade, the Treasury Department. (Britain had been a free trade nation since midcentury, and permanent members of the Treasury Department had come to consider the fiscal policies of Peel, Gladstone, and Sir Robert Lowe as their own.) He served as private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Robert Lowe, from 1872 to 1873, to Prime Minister Gladstone for the remaining months of his first administration (1873-1874), and again to the Prime Minister during Gladstone's second administration (1880-1885), becoming imbued with his mentor's ideas. Hamilton worked his way up the ranks of the Treasury Department and in 1902 became permanent financial secretary and joint permanent secretary with Sir George Murray. Although not brilliant, Hamilton was a capable civil servant, and in general, gained the confidence of the chancellors whom he served; this close association with the great men of the moment became important to his social ego.
Advise and Consent: Parliament and Foreign Policy Under the Later Stuarts
Authors: Lacks Phyllis S.
Published: November 2007

This essay examines the role of Parliament in the formation and conduct of foreign policy after the Restoration. My principal interest has been to see how the Members of the House of Commons viewed that role. I have, therefore, focussed on the parliamentary debates rather than the diplomatic correspondence in order to observe the changes and limits of the parliamentary position.

These limits can be observed initially in a view of the prerogatives of the Crown. Charles II was a francophile king. He loved the country of his mother; he openly admired the absolutism of his cousin, the Sun King; he secretly cherished the Roman Catholic faith which he associated with successful Kingship. Like his model, the King of France, Charles interested himself actively in foreign affairs. Although not remarkable for diligence and industry in many aspects of government, he was a regular attender at the Committee on Foreign Affairs. The membership of this group fluctuated at the royal will, but always included the two Secretaries of State. Sir Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, as Secretary of State for Southern Europe, was virtually Minister for Foreign Affairs for about a dozen years. The King, acting with the Secretaries in Committee, instructed diplomats, who negotiated treaties independently of Parliament. The Triple Alliance of 1668, for example, although publicly known, was concluded while Parliament was not in session. Occasionally, Charles II acted without even these intimate advisors. The classic example is the secret Treaty of Dover of 1670 whose real provisions were kept even from some members of the Foreign Committee.
Visiting Entertainers At The Cluniac Priory, Thetf ord 1497-1540
Authors: Wasson John
Published: November 2007

Except for the Visitations and occasional obedientary rolls preserved in cathedral libraries, the intimate records of English monastic life are disappointingly scarce. They are particularly scarce in East Anglia, where many documents had already been destroyed during the Peasants' Revolt, long before the usual ravages following the Dissolution. It is therefore surprising that one of the few important manuscripts which did survive has received very little attention from scholars. I refer to the priors' accounts from the Cluniac Priory of Our Lady at Thetford, Norfolk.

While very little remains to tell us about life at the priory during the middle ages, we are at least fortunate to have these extremely detailed and almost complete priors' accounts for the final forty-four years of the priory's existence. They are now bound together in a single well-preserved volume, and are deposited at the University Library, Cambridge (Add. Ms. 6969). Although this lengthy manuscript has apparently been at Cambridge for a very long time, it was unknown to the great Norfolk antiquarian, F. Blomefield, when he wrote his History of Thetford (1739). Thomas Martin was unaware of the document when he published his own History of Thetford (1779)—even though he had access to other important materials, including notes from the priory's Cartulary which had perished in the disastrous Cotton Library fire of 1731. The manuscript was also unknown to the committee which compiled the Victoria County History of Norfolk in 1906, despite the fact that L. G. Bolingbroke had seen it and printed two entries from it in “Pre-Elizabethan Plays and Players in Norfolk.”
Three Pamphlets Concerning Father Edmund Campion, S. J.
Authors: Tempesta Joseph F.
Published: November 2007

Anthony Munday was a protege of John Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Leicester himself was a member of the progressive Protestant nobility in Elizabethan England, which sought to turn completely away from Rome and toward Geneva. These progressives wanted vernacular translations of great works such as the Bible and the classics. They aimed at founding an English and Protestant tradition of literature.

In 1579 Philip II of Spain continued to press for an alliance with Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth seriously considered marrying the Due d'Alencon. Such a marriage would cement ties between England and France. The leading progressives, Leicester, Walshingham and Cecil could tolerate neither one of these Roman Catholic alliances. Thus, Leicester intensified his patronage of Puritan propagandists.

When the Campion controversy arose in 1581, it proved a boon to Leicester and the progressives. Here was an opportunity to garner Elizabeth's support, if they could prove that Jesuits and Roman Catholics were plotting regicide and the return of England to Roman Catholicism.

Between 1581 and 1584 Munday produced a series of pamphlets designed to arouse English opinion against “popish recusants.” This essay deals with one of these pamphlets: A discoverie of Edmund Campion and his confederates, their most horrible and traiterous practices against her majestye's most royal person and realm. … In this essentially propagandistic tract, Munday equates priestly activity of the Jesuits with subversion. This equation was based upon a Parliamentary statute of 1581, which declared that priests sent from abroad to convert Englishmen were guilty of treason.
Opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1864-1886
Authors: Hamilton Margaret
Published: November 2007

Between 1864 and 1869, four laws, known as the Contagious Diseases Acts, were passed by the British Parliament in an attempt to reduce venereal disease in the armed services. These Acts, which applied to certain military stations, garrison, and seaport towns, gave a police officer authority to arrest any woman found within the specified areas whom he considered to be a prostitute. The woman in question was then brought before a magistrate who, if he agreed with the arresting officer, would order her to register and submit to a medical examination. If found to be suffering from venereal disease, she was sent to a hospital where she could be detained for three months or longer, at the discretion of the physican in charge. If she refused to submit to the examination or to enter the hospital, she could be imprisoned with or without hard labor.

This legislation was enacted at the urging of officials in the War Office and the Admiralty who believed that the efficiency of the army and navy was being dangerously impaired because of the high incidence of venereal disease. Ultimately, they maintained, the security of the nation itself would be jeopardized.

Parliament passed these laws very quietly, and the press referred to them only briefly, ostensibly because the subject was not considered seemly for public discussion. Little by little, however, English men and women became aware of this legislation, and with awareness came criticism.
The Origins of Modern Social Legislation: The Henrician Poor Law of 1536
Authors: Kunze Neil L.
Published: November 2007

It is the purpose of this essay to rescue the Henrician Poor Law of 1536 from its relative obscurity by examining the statute as the beginning of a new legislative era in English economic and social history. Although the non-exist ence of House of Commons Journals for this period prevents a detailed study of the making and makers of the Henrician poor law legislation, documents hitherto neglected, exist for a comparative study of Tudor poor law policy. Whether dealing with the nineteenth-century corn law question or with the sixteenth-century poor law policy, few historians give sufficient time and attention to a detailed analysis of the actual statutes of the realm.

Historians have ignored the Henrician statutes and usually begin their discussions of English poor relief by describing and interpreting the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. If mentioned at all, the Henrician legislation is presented as an ineffective attempt to solve the problem of poverty. Often this legislation is the subject of unfavorable generalizations:

The social legislation of Henry's Parliaments was not only scant but brutal and demoralizing in that it reflected a puritanical callousness in assessing poverty as the just desert of sloth and evildoing. … Thus Elizabeth inherited the problem of widespread poverty with her crown; and her legislative program was immediate, massive, and positive.
Social Service and Social Legislation in Edwardian England: The Beginning of a New Role for Philanthropy
Authors: Moore Michael J.
Published: November 2007

Many historians have written about the impressive social achievement of the last Liberal Government which sat in Britain from 1905 to 1916. Prominent among them is Bentley Gilbert whose Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain importantly expands. Maurice Bruce's excellent survey The Coming of the Welfare State. Much of this work has emphasized the political maneuverings for legislation which increased the economic security of millions of British citizens. This paper takes a different, supplementary approach. It is an attempt to understand the impact of the Liberals' social reform program on a part of the philanthropic community which had asssumed an important role in meeting the problems of poverty. The focus is on the provisions for social welfare made by voluntary and statutory agencies in order to clarify the beginnings of their successful partnership which today operates in the Welfare State. David Owen, in his monumental study of English philanthropy, has rightly characterized the modern role for voluntary agencies as “Junior Partner(s) in the Welfare Firm,” but he has wrongly stated that this role was recognized only after the First World War. The voluntary-statutory partnership in social welfare was formed during the Liberals' legislative revolution from 1906 to 1911: voluntarists who were affected by it understood its signficance for their work.

The welfare measures of the post-Second World War Labour Government gave final recognition to the fact that in Britain social development was no longer to be the by-product of economic development, and that the State must plan comprehensively to meet social needs rather than filling in the gaps left by private effort. In a very real sense the proposals of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, given shape in this new age by a Fabian disciple, William Beveridge, became the foundation of British policy. But the social legislation enacted by the Labour Government was implanted in ground haphazardly prepared by previous measures which provided for specific needs, but often with little reference to related questions.
“An Handful of Violent People”: The Nature of The Foxite Opposition, 1794-1801
Authors: Willis Richard E.
Published: November 2007

One of the largest remaining lacunae in the modern analysis of Great Britain's parliamentary opposition is located in the years between the breakup of the Whig Party in 1794 and the end of Henry Addington's ministry ten years later. From the fall of North's government to their fragmentation in 1794, the whigs have been systematically scrutinized by Professors Christie, Cannon, Mitchell and O'Gorman, while Professors Roberts and Mitchell have provided similar service for the years from the Ministry of All the Talents to the Reform Bill crisis. But the state of the opposition during the years immediately following 1794 has not been extensively considered; in particular, the question of how any opposition managed to survive the traumas of the 1790's has been a subject for suggestion rather than analysis. And yet the question is an important one, if only because the coalition of 1794 is frequently interpreted as having produced a political and ideological alignment which in its main outlines was to dominate British politics until the emergence of the Labour Party. If true—although the geneology of the two-party system remains a productive controversy—this lends an added dimension to the perpetually enlightening study of opposition during the stress of a great war, and to the particular question of how the Foxite rump managed to endure the overwhelming ministerial dominance of the 1790's.
Recent Trends In Anglo-Norman Scholarship: The New Political History
Authors: Hollister C. Warren
Published: November 2007

The articles that follow employ quantitative and prosopographical approaches that, although not new to historical investigation, are new to the field of royal-baronial relations in Norman England. Traditionally, English medieval politics have been treated with a strongly constitutional emphasis. Barons have been viewed as a largely undifferentiated group whose relations with the monarchy were seen as a reaction against the advance of rational central government, or as a defense of traditional liberties against oppressive kings.

The better historians, over the past century and more, have resisted such simplifications. John Horace Round, for example, attacked and ridiculed the anachronistic constitutional generalizations of some of his predecessors by producing a mass of detailed information on individual Anglo-Norman aristocratic families. Sir Frank Stenton, in a tribute to Round written soon after Round's death in 1928, summarized his contribution in these apt words:

Round's work forms an essential part of the very remarkable movement which rather more than thirty years ago created the modern study of feudal institutions.… No one had yet expressed, as Round was to express, the truth that the fabric of feudal history is composed of genealogical detail, that innumerable events which are unintelligible as realted by contemporary writers presuppose an elaborate nexus of family alliances and rivalries.

Stenton, too, was an expert in aristocratic genealogy and family history; and with the sources of Saxon and Norman England at his fingertips, he was a master of the apt illustration.
The Second Labour Government and the Politics of Electoral Reform, 1929–1931
Authors: Fair John D.
Published: November 2007

In his pioneering study of the British electoral system, David Butler notes that “One of the main problems of the historian of the second Labour Government is to discover what action the Liberals took to exact the fullest return for their support in the division lobbies.” Owing to the preponderance of economic issues in this period, however, scant attention has been focused on the constitutional question of electoral reform which had the greatest bearing on the relationship between the Liberal and Labour parties in Parliament. Robert Skidelsky's Politicians and the Slump, the most thorough economic and political analysis of the Second Labour Government, is curiously jejune on this subject. Recent biographers of Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George, the Labour and Liberal protagonists, describe in detail a series of joint enterprises between the parties, but they fail to delineate the precise nature of their relationship in light of the critical electoral reform question. And Butler was never able to come to close quarters because of a paucity of primary sources. Now, however, it is possible to merge these separate strands, along with a neglected Conservative view, into a comprehensive explanation of the Liberal-Labour nexus.

Despite much suspicion by contemporaries, especially among Conservatives in Parliament and the press, of a supposed Lib-Lab “bargain, ” it was repeatedly denied by prominent Liberal and Labour members. In light of the inability of historians to produce even a shred of evidence to the contrary and the glaring lack of legislative cooperation, it must be concluded that there was never any formal alliance between the two parties. Nevertheless a strong, and as yet unspecified, attachment did exist as a result of the unique parliamentary circumstances emerging from the general election of 1929. What emerges is an unattractive picture of political manuevering, calumny, and subterfuge where the potential allies worked at cross-purposes—the object of the Government being to create conditions favorable to retaining office while the Liberals desired some greater prospect for attaining office in the future. Despite their interdependence, the party leaders were never able to reach an agreement on the vital issue of electoral reform, which would involve some possible sacrifice of their individual ends. The result was a process of mutual destruction which contributed to the fall of the Second Labour Government and opened the way for a Conservative bid for power.
The Yorkist Council, Justice and Public Order: The Case of Straunge Versus Kynaston
Authors: Lander J. R.
Published: November 2007

The activities of the Yorkist council in administration are now known to have been much more extensive than Professor J. F. Baldwin, the author of the classic work on the subject, was prepared to allow. Nor can his account of its judicial work be considered definitive though, so far, this has not been investigated to the same extent as the council's administrative activities. In discussing the judicial effectiveness of the council Baldwin stated that its efforts to suppress disorder were conspicuously unsuccessful in the 1460s (by implication in contrast with earlier successes), and that even though there was a change for the better after 1468 “as regards rioters its administration was anything but vigorous or efficient.” He failed to find a single example of a prominent offender who was ever punished. In spite of this, however, he was somewhat puzzled to note a growing demand for conciliar justice towards the end of Edward IV s reign; a demand which grew to such an extent that under Richard III a clerk was specially paid to deal with the bills, requests and supplications of poor men.

This view of the council's judicial work was based in the main on two things—a belief that until 1468 commissions of arrest, in the majority of cases, were ordered to bring offenders before the chancellor not the council and on the case of Lord Straunge v. Roger Kynaston which Professor Baldwin alleged exposed “the weakness of the council to an extent that is well-nigh incredible.
The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science: Its Contribution to Victorian Health Reform, 1857–1886
Authors: Huch Ronald K.
Published: November 2007

The campaign for better public health was a major social issue in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. As in the case of Poor Law and factory reform, Edwin Chadwick stands as the person who directed public interest toward the need for sanitary reform. He did this through his association with the Poor Law Commission in the late 1830s, then through his seminal and widely read 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population. Chadwick's report captured the minds of many in the British upper middle class. The Health of Towns Association, founded in 1844, helped to diffuse information on the “physical and moral evils that result from the present defective sewerage, drainage, supply of water, air, and light. …” Although the sanitary reformers had made some minor gains by 1847, they had failed to produce a satisfactory bill that would allow government some role in coordinating sanitary improvement. At this point, neither Chadwick, nor any other leading proponent of sanitary legislation wanted to put full authority in the hands of the central government, but they did desire a more efficient combination of local and national control.

The sanitary reformers, and particularly Chadwick, achieved a measure of success in 1848 when the Public Health Bill received parliamentary approval. It was hoped the Act would bring about a useful consolidation of responsibility for drainage, sewerage, water supply, and road maintenance. Instead, the legislation spurred a furious debate over how much national government interference was acceptable. It did little to improve public health because the argument over government interference for a time took attention away from critical issues of sanitation reform. Although never completely overcome, the argument over principles faded in the 1850s in the face of an urgent need for reform.