bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Conservation Policies in the Royal Forests of Medieval England
Authors: Young Charles R.
Published: November 2007

The whole subject of forests, especially forests in the Middle Ages, is overlaid with a great deal of romanticism. The picture of a heavily-wooded England with primeval forests dotted here and there with villages connected by meandering tracks to relieve their isolation is fixed. Only a handful of Robin Hood bands lived within the depths of the forest itself. The present concern for man's destruction of his environment has caused this idyllic picture to be contrasted with the denuded landscape of large areas today, and the pathetic remnants of Sherwood Forest can be used as a cautionary lesson on industrialization since the eighteenth century. In fact, that lesson needs to be extended backward in time and the picture of the untouched medieval forest abandoned, for the reality was that men in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made heavy use of the forests and encroached upon them just as man had done since he first came to the island or, more emphatically, since the Anglo-Saxon invaders began to make drastic changes in forested areas by their farming practices. However, after the Norman Conquest, the policies adopted for the royal forests did serve as some protection for the trees, even though the Norman kings no more had this as their purpose than had their predecessors. The thesis of this article is that the medieval English kings from the Normans on were conservationists in spite of themselves, even in the face of continuous demands from their own barons for disafforestment. Royal forest regulations enforced within the extensive areas under forest law protected the trees from complete destruction and slowed the inevitable encroachment of field upon forest.
Social Structure, Voting Behavior and Political Change in Victorian London
Authors: Baer Marc B.
Published: November 2007

During the past several years published studies of nineteenth-century parliamentary elections in several regions have failed to satisfy all those who have wished for a thorough understanding of the electoral structure of Victorian Britain. Perhaps the most important statements about these elections have been made by D.C. Moore, for he has been one of very few researchers to place his findings into a theoretical structure. Professor Moore's model for voting behavior is that of the deference community, which may be described as a group of individuals who, having close contact through occupation, residency, or other interests—or several of these—acknowledged a limited number of individuals as their social, economic and ideological leaders. According to Moore the deference community is a more powerful explanatory device than models based on class or individualism. He supports this with poll book data which suggest that, at least for rural constituencies prior to 1867, group networks were stronger than the ties of social status, and more apparent, than is evidence that electors voted only for their particular interests.

What influenced the decay of the deference community, Moore would argue, were those forces seemingly omnipresent every spring in Western Civilization classes—industrialization, urbanization, and migration. Moore suggests that the three forces weakened the traditional social nexus and hierarchical relationships. Voters thereafter could be recruited by Victorian election managers directly, that is as individuals and not as members of a community.
Approaches to the Chartist Movement: Feargus O'Connor and Chartist Strategy
Authors: Kemnitz Thomas Milton
Published: November 2007

In recent years, historians have departed from narrative histories to seek new approaches to the Chartist movement. Professor Asa Briggs has opened up an important avenue in emphasizing local studies of the movement. He has been concerned to place the Chartists in the perspective of local politics and class relations. Chartist Studies was the first result of his approach, and several other short essays have appeared subsequently. In the next few years, we can look for some substantial analyses of the movement from a local perspective. David Goodway is working on Chartism in London and Professor William Maehl is working on the Newcastle area in the Northeast. I have done a study of class relations and Chartism in Brighton, and James Epstein is working on Feargus O'Connor's relations with three Chartist communities. Epstein's work involves comparative area studies and points the way toward broadening local studies with the possibility of some very illuminating results. However, we must be careful that we do not get so caught up in local studies that they totally dominate our thinking.
Separating the Sheep from the Goats: Victorian Didactic Hymns
Authors: Tamke Susan Smith
Published: November 2007

Charles Kingsley complained in 1848, “We have used the Bible as if it were a mere constable's handbook—an opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded—a mere book to keep the poor in order.” Kingsley was outraged that religion should be used for the utilitarian purpose of keeping the lower classes in their place. And yet, in most societies religion has traditionally served the very practical purpose of supporting the established social order. To this end the Christian church—and in this regard it is no different than any other institutionalized religion—has preached a social ethic of obedience and submission to the government in power and to the established social order. The church does this by sanctioning a given code of behavior: those people who conform to the prescribed behavioral norm will achieve salvation, while those who fail to conform are ostracized from the religious community and, presumably, are damned. In sociological terms, the code of behavior approved by a given society is most often determined by that society's most influential groups, always with a view (not always conscious or deliberate) of maintaining the groups' dominance. From the point of view of the least influential classes, this didactic function of the church may be seen as an effort at social control, at internal colonialism—in Kinglsey's words, an effort simply to keep the “beasts of burden…, the poor in order.” In terms of biblical imagery the church's didactic function is to separate the sheep from the goats, that is, to set a standard of “respectable” behavior to be followed by the compliant sheep, with probable eternal damnation and temporal punishment for the recalcitrant goats.
Lay Anglicanism and the Crisis of the English Church in the Early Seventeenth Century
Authors: Schwarz Marc L.
Published: November 2007

One striking feature of the debates in the early stages of the Long Parliament was the universality with which the policies of the Caroline bishops were condemned. There is no more vivid evidence of how widespread lay disaffection from the episcopal bench had become by 1640 than the breadth of criticism leveled against it from all sides of the Commons. The new model Anglicanism erected by archbishop Laud and his supporters was shown to be a jerry built facade, a cadre of generals without battalions, a clerical elite without a lay following.

Among those who most forcefully challenged the policies of the prelates was Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, scholar, author, and host of the Tew circle, that discussion group of liberal laymen and clerics, immortalized by Clarendon, which met at Falkland's country seat in Oxfordshire during the 1630s.1 His views were particularly important, first because he was widely respected for his integrity and seriousness of purpose. As C.V. Wedgwood points out, for example, “Falkland was one of those men who carry in their faces and manner the unmistakable marks of extreme conscientiousness. When Falkland spoke, it was not from impulse, but conviction. …” Second, Falkland was known to be latitudinarian in his opinions, thus not affected by dogmatism on the one hand or zealotry on the other. His ideas would consequently be all the more significant, since they represented the results of considered examination rather than the fruits of doctrinaire sentiment.
Religious Patronage of Angevin Royal Administrators, c. 1170–1239
Authors: Turner Ralph V.
Published: November 2007

Ecclesiastical benefactions by English barons have provided topics for a number of scholars, but the professional civil servants, proto-bureaucrats, who first appeared in the twelfth century, are another group whose gifts to the Church deserve more study. In England, such men appear as early as Henry I's time, but they become more numerous in the reign of his grandson, Henry II. At first, such royal servants were men of all work, doing whatever the king assigned to them at the curia regis, in the counties, and abroad. By the last years of Henry II and in the reigns of his sons, however, some specialization was taking place, and this becomes easier to see in Henry III's early years.

It is next to impossible to probe these royal administrators' minds. They left few letters, no personal recollections, and they earned only a few anecdotes—mainly hostile—in the chronicles. For a number of years, I have been studying a group of fifty-two of these men, whose careers span the last third of the twelfth and the first third of the thirteenth centuries, chosen first chiefly because of their connection with the work of royal justice. They form a representative sample, ranging in rank from the justiciar to knights of the counties, from archbishops to men in minor orders, including roughly equal numbers of clergy and laity. They range from close associates of the king to largely local officials (see Appendix I).
Public Expenditure and Development in a Crown Colony: The Colonial Office, Sir Walter Egerton, and Southern Nigeria, 1900-1912
Authors: Carland John M.
Published: November 2007

Joseph Chamberlain startled many in Great Britain in 1895 when he informed Parliament that he “regarded many of our colonies in the condition of undeveloped estates. ” At the same time he announced the British Government's intention to consider “the judicious investment of British money” in British Crown Colonies to develop them “for the benefit of their population and for the benefit of the greater population which is outside. ” He thus not only signalled the Government's willingness to attempt alternative methods of development, but specifically proposed a new approach. However, this new approach required a change in attitude by those who supervised the colonial empire. The permanent officials at the Colonial Office had to be persuaded to give high priority to colonial economic development and to be more sympathetic to and cooperative with developmentally oriented colonial governors. The permanent officials were never so persuaded.
England Is No Longer an Island: The Phantom Airship Scare of 1909
Authors: Gollin Alfred M.
Published: November 2007

The British people and their rulers have always been concerned about the possibility of an invasion of their island home by a hostile power striking at them from the European continent. Arthur Balfour, the Prime Minister who did so much to modernize the defense arrangements of his country in the early years of the present century, was especially concerned with this problem of invasion. He called it “This eternal and most important question of our safety against invasion.” In 1908 an entirely new element was introduced into this area of strategic thinking when it was realized, for the first time, that Britain might be invaded from the air. Until this year the British could take comfort from the often quoted words of Admiral Lord St. Vincent to a group of nervous fellow peers at the time of the French invasion danger early in the nineteenth century: “I do not say they cannot come, my Lords, I only say they cannot come by sea.” Now, as a result of unprecedented technological developments it was possible for a vigilant and forward-looking observer to contemplate an air assault upon the United Kingdom that would put Lord St. Vincent's pithy maxim in an entirely new light. Eventually, the fear of air attack assumed a dominating position in the minds of British defense planners; but the origins of this problem have not been studied closely by scholars, even though they deserve attention.
Grammar Schools and the Games Ethic in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras
Authors: Mangan J.A.
Published: November 2007

Reform of the English grammar school system in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries owed much to the prestigious public schools of England. Institutional instruments of cohesion, control and status, proven in the public schools, were admiringly adopted. The evolution of the grammar school involved in large measure, imitation of its upper class superiors and segregation from its working class inferiors. In an accurate reflection of public school priorities, games and games fields were the expensive symbols of emulation, distancing, ambition, and success. The reason is not hard to find. Technological competence in an industrial era was less valued than an image of gentility in a strongly hieriarchical social system. The deferential absorption by grammar schools of the athletic mores of the public schools reveals a significant cultural hegemonic process at work. A bewildering variety of autocratic headmasters of differing persuasions and backgrounds served as agents of this diffusion, assimilation, and implementation of philathletic public school values. This fact, in conjunction with support at the higher administrative level of government for extension of the public school ideal of education into state secondary schools, ensured that the model for secondary education in the first half of the twentieth century was the late nineteenth century games-orientated public school rather than the technically-orientated late-eighteenth century dissenter academy.
The Danish Connection: A Note on the Making of British Old Age Pensions
Authors: Levine Daniel
Published: November 2007

In the continuous discussion of how and how much Lloyd George was influenced by Germany in formulating Old Age Pensions and National Insurance, attention seems to have been almost wholly diverted from the degree to which the Danish example was discussed, recommended and clearly present in the consciousness of those who made the British Old Age Pension Act of 1908. There is no discussion of the issue in the standard work on the subject, Bentley B. Gilbert's The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain, (London, 1966) nor even any mention of “Denmark” in the index. The subject is likewise missing from Francis H. Stead's How Old Age Pensions Came to Be, (London [? 1910]), which Gilbert calls “indispensible.” Patricia Mary Williams barely mentions the subject in her detailed dissertation, “The Development of Old Age Pension Policy in Great Britain, 1878-1925” (University of London, 1970), and does not even do that much in the book she wrote under the name Pat Thane, Foundations of the Welfare State (Essex, 1982) nor in the chapter on old age pensions in the book she edited, Origins of British Social Policy (London, 1978). Hugh Heclo in Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, 1974) mentions (p. 167) that the proposals of the commission in 1899 “resembled” the Danish system, but Heclo does not say how or why, and then never mentions the subject again. John Grigg, in his biography of Lloyd George is concerned with the man more than the issue, and does not analyze the source of the ideas behind the old age pension bill of 1908 in his Lloyd George, The People's Champion (Berkeley, 1978).
Milites as Attestors to Charters in England, 1101–1300
Authors: Fleming Donald F.
Published: November 2007

While discussing the status of knights in the eleventh century, F. M. Stenton observed briefly in a footnote:

the word miles is rarely added as a mark of distinction to the names of individuals granting or attesting charters of the twelfth century. In the course of the thirteenth century it becomes customary for the principal lay witnesses of a charter to be distinguished as milites, and to many clerks of this age knighthood entitled a witness to the prefix dominus in front of his name.
The Funeral of Henry Percy, Sixth Earl of Northumberland
Authors: Broce Gerald , Wunderli Richard M.
Published: November 2007

The staging of aristocratic funerals was among the variety of ideological controls and display employed by Henry VIII to reduce the great magnate families of the north and place the country under central authority. An examination of the funeral of Henry Percy (1502/03?–1537) may be especially instructive because of the important and unusual relationship between the Crown and Percy. In fact, the sixth earl's funeral is worth examining in detail because it clearly reflected not only this personal and family relationship but also one step in the transfer of power from the north to the court.

It was not at all unusual that the College of Arms should have been a main instrument by which Henry VIII manipulated the ceremony. As marshalls of aristocratic Tudor funerals and prominent participants in them, the heralds of the College customarily used the occasions to convey an abundance of political information whose display was intended to serve the interests of the Crown. This included information about the rank of the deceased, his or her relation to the Crown, and the enduring authority of the elite, all of which could be represented in symbols so conventional that their array and magnificence would communicate clear meaning. Henry VIII's subordination of the College and his support for it — increased prestige and employment for the heralds, for example, and their expansion from registrars to regulators of armorial bearings or insignia — may therefore be seen as attempts to help manage the aristocracy in a time of rapid social change.
The Duke of Northumberland's Army Reconsidered
Authors: Braddock Robert C.
Published: November 2007

In the preceding article, Dr. William Tighe has drawn attention once again to a central mystery surrounding those ill-understood weeks between the death of Edward VI and Queen Mary's triumphal entry into London which I initially commented upon in this journal in 1974. The problem involves the rapidity with which Northumberland's army collapsed. The traditional interpretation has long been that the duke's forces consisted only of unreliable mercenaries and that he lacked support from the ruling elements which could have given him the means to carry out his coup. In my article I suggested that this was not the case. Gentlemen had been willing to risk their lives in his cause, and although it was impossible to know the relative strengths of the two sides with precision, I found no evidence that contemporaries found them to be unequal. Nor did I find support for Professor Jordan's contention that Northumberland was a reluctant conspirator who really wanted to surrender power and retire to his estates. Examination of accounts in the files of the great wardrobe also led me to conclude that so far as the gentlemen pensioners were concerned, military men had supported the coup while politicians had taken the side of legitimacy. Admittedly the definitions were not precise, but in the absence of other records, it seemed to enhance understanding of the deliberations taken in those fatal days.

Since the publication of my article, other scholars have also pointed to the vigor and quality of Northumberland's leadership. Dale Hoak has recently extended the “rehabilitation” of the Duke of Northumberland begun by Barrett Beer. Hoak showed that Northumberland was far from reluctant to use force and political guile to achieve his purposes. He took control of the royal household in order to control access to the king. He also created a special household bodyguard, known as the gendarmes, to secure his coup and overawe potential troublemakers. To complete the picture of a man determined to hold on to power, Hoak showed how Northumberland had managed to manipulate the young king by planting suggestions which the boy then incorporated into his desires. Thus the alteration of the succession should be seen as Northumberland's own scheme to retain power, and not the dying king's. Although the gendarmes had proved too costly to maintain and had to be disbanded, Northumberland's plan was clear: maintain control of power by using the king's household in both its military and political aspects.
“The Rope That Connects Me Directly with You”: John Wain and the Movement Writers' Orwell
Authors: Rodden John
Published: November 2007

No British writer has had a greater impact on the Anglo-American generation which came of age in the decade following World War II than George Orwell. His influence has been, and continues to be, deeply felt by intellectuals of all political stripes, including the Marxist Left (Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson), the anarchist Left (George Woodcock, Nicolas Walter), the American liberal-Left (Irving Howe), American neoconservatives (Norman Podhoretz), and the Anglo-American Catholic Right (Christopher Hollis, Russell Kirk).

Perhaps Orwell's broadest imprint, however, was stamped upon the only literary group which has ever regarded him as a model: the Movement writers of the 1950s. Unlike the above-mentioned groups, which have consisted almost entirely of political intellectuals rather than writers—and whose members have responded to him as a political critic first and a writer second—some of the Movement writers saw Orwell not just as a political intellectual but also as the man of letters and/or literary stylist whom they aspired to be.

The Movement writers were primarily an alliance of poet-critics. The “official” members numbered nine poets and novelists; a few other writers and critics loomed on the periphery. Their acknowledged genius, if not leading publicist, was Philip Larkin, who later became Britain's poet laureate. Orwell's plain voice influenced the tone and attitude of Larkin's poetry and that of several other Movement poets, especially Robert Conquest and D. J. Enright. But Orwell shone as an even brighter presence among the poet-novelists, particularly John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose early fictional anti-heroes were direct descendants of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939).
Levellerism in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Authors: Donnelly F. K.
Published: November 2007

This article explores the connections between the seventeenth-century Leveller movement and the democratic radicalism of the period 1790 to roughly 1840. At first glance the two appear to have much in common. Both were concerned with the extension of the franchise, the idea of a written constitution, and the equality of citizens before the law. Various commentators on the subject, including some historians, have suggested that such a continuity does indeed exist. Unfortunately this conclusion has been based for the most part on vague connections indicating a lack of solid research on this topic. An exception in this regard is the 1962 essay of Olivier Lutaud which traced many of the linkages of Leveller ideas and phrases in European literature.

By contrast historians of seventeenth-century England have tended towards a too ready acceptance of a discontinuity between the Levellers and the democrats of the post-1788 era. They have been content to consign the Levellers to “relative oblivion” and “near-oblivion,” and to assert, quite erroneously, that Leveller pamphlets were not reprinted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time we must be aware that the historian of early nineteenth-century radical movements is not confronted with a powerful body of evidence indicating strong Leveller-radical connections. The influence of Levellerism on subsequent radical-democratic movements was subtle and somewhat oblique in nature.
The Historians and the Decline of the Liberal Party
Authors: Thompson J. A.
Published: November 2007

The dramatic collapse of the Liberal party during the second decade of the twentieth century has long fascinated academic historians, but only in the past twenty years has it become one of their major preoccupations. Every history of modern Britain now has a discussion of the causes and course of the Liberal collapse, and the specialized literature on the subject is voluminous, much of it highly technical and sophisticated.

It is easy to see why the Liberal decline appeals to historians. It has personal drama: the contest between Herbert Asquith, “the last of the Romans,” and David Lloyd George, “the Welsh Wizard.” There is the larger drama associated with the collapse of a great party and the rise of another. There are the large silent “revolutions” historians have found behind the political changes: the rise to maturity of the working classes, the evolution of British capitalism, and a vast cultural shift ushered in with the First World War.
The Thomason Collection: A Reply to Stephen J. Greenberg
Authors: Mendle Michael
Published: November 2007

Stephen J. Greenberg's recent article in these pages, “Dating Civil War Pamphlets, 1641–1644,” commendably calls attention to the two nearly identical manuscript catalogues that George Thomason had drawn up to catalogue his collection. Quite properly, Greenberg emphasizes the manuscript catalogues' difference from (and for some purposes, superiority to) the printed catalogue of the collection edited by G. K. Fortescue. A generation ago Lois Spencer did the same thing in two important articles on Thomason and his collection, but for lack of a follow-up, her insights have been largely ignored. Greenberg also attempted some statistical comparisons of dates of Fortescue's catalogue, Thomason's catalogue, and the Stationers' Registers.

Greenberg's study of the Thomason collection grew out of his project of discovering the time lag between the occurrence of an event and its publication in the press. While Greenberg's interest in the collection is welcome, his efforts are misleading, and in some respects, seriously flawed. My purpose here is to clarify the nature of the Thomason collection, which is still surprisingly misunderstood, and to assist other researchers in its most profitable use.
Speech, Text, and Time: The Sense of Hearing and the Sense of the Past in Renaissance England
Authors: Woolf D. R.
Published: November 2007

Midway through his account of the reign of King Edward III, John Speed paused to remind his readers of what had gone before, an account of Edward's wars in France, by way of leading into his next subject, the king's godliness. “You have heard a part of great king Edward's victorious fortunes in battle, both by land and sea; be not ignorant of his pietie.” Speed's choice of language is striking: “You have heard.” Many early modern authors employed this same peculiar device. In 1600, Thomas Danett commenced a chapter of hisA continuation of the history of Francewith the sentence, “You have heard how a truce for five years was concluded betweene the kings of Fraunce and Spaine.” Thomas James, translating a French work on the Stoics, wrote, “You have heard discoursed unto you the principall lawes which the Stoickes thincke expedient….” To justify the printing of a quotation from a medieval manuscript, William Camden urged his reader to “heare the verie words out of that private historic” Richard Verstegan directed the reader to “heer the testimony of sundry ancient and approved authors.” The anonymous author ofThe historie of Mervine(1612), a chivalric romance, reminded the reader of an earlier event with the remark: “the childe (as you have heard) was baptized….”

As historians, we have all had occasion to refer the reader back to earlier points in our articles, theses, and books. As a rule, such passages begin with a phrase like “we have seen,” or “it has been shown,” not “you have heard.”
Episcopacy and Reform in Mid-Tudor England
Authors: Beer Barrett L.
Published: November 2007

InTudor PrelatesandPolitics, Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote sympathetically of the dilemma faced by the conservative bishops who saw control over the Church of England slip from their grasp after the accession of Edward VI in 1547, but he gave less attention to the reforming bishops who worked to advance the Protestant cause. At the beginning of the new reign the episcopal bench, according to Smith's calculations, included twelve conservatives, seven reformers, and seven whose religious orientation could not be determined (see Table 1). The ranks of the conservatives were thinned as a consequence of the deprivation of Stephen Gardiner of Winchester, Edmund Bonner of London, Nicholas Heath of Worcester, George Day of Chichester, and Cuthbert Tunstall of Durham. On the other hand, eight new bishops were appointed between 1547 and 1553. These new men together with the Henrician reformers, of whom Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was most important, had responsibility for leading the church during the period which saw the most extensive changes of the Reformation era. This essay examines the careers of the newly-appointed reforming bishops and attempts to assess their achievements and failures as they worked to create a reformed church in England.

The first of the eight new bishops appointed during the reign of Edward VI was Nicholas Ridley, who was named Bishop of Rochester in 1547 and translated to London in 1550. In 1548 Robert Ferrar became Bishop of St. David's in Wales. No new episcopal appointments occurred in 1549, but during the following year John Ponet succeeded Ridley at Rochester while John Hooper took the see of Gloucester.
“Gold and Mud”: Capitalism and Culture in Victorian England
Authors: Wohl Anthony S.
Published: November 2007

I confess at the outset that I am somewhat surprised at the direction my response to Bernard Porter's vigorous and provocative essay has taken. That I find his acceptance of Laing's Theorem (“Art flourishes in inverse proportion to Capitalism”) and his assertion that “free market capitalism [is] fundamentally philistine” (p. 253) reductionist may possibly be due to the fact that, as I proofread this, Texaco, one of capitalism's giants, is about to air its 1,000th opera broadcast on the New York Times' WQXR (one of the glories of commercially-sponsored East Coast culture), or that my college, like many others, receives generous funding from philanthropic capitalism, and indeed would not even exist without the vision and culture of a “bourgeois” brewer, Matthew Vassar. But there are other, deeper, reasons. I say my response surprises me, for I once thought that Matthew Arnold had it right and that the Victorian middle classes were uncultured (“bourgeois” = “philistine”), and that “free market capitalism” was infused with the conviction (Arnold's scorn notwithstanding) that civilization could be measured in, even achieved through, coal or cotton. This was nowhere better expressed than by Richard Cobden in his rhapsodic paean to Manchester's civilizing mission.
The Buccleuch Marriage Contract: An Unknown Episode in Scottish Politics
Authors: Lee Maurice
Published: November 2007

On October 5, 1663, the Scottish Parliament took an action unique in its long and variegated history. It ratified a marriage contract between two of the king's subjects. Not ordinary subjects, to be sure—they were the duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest bastard, a lad of fourteen, and Anna Scott, countess of Buccleuch, aged twelve, who had been married the previous April. Persuading Parliament to ratify this contract was potentially a very tricky business; the king entrusted the handling of it to the earl of Lauderdale, the secretary of state, normally resident in Whitehall, who had been sent to Scotland to manage this session of Parliament. The ratification was a private act, one of a large number passed at each session of the Scottish Parliament in favor of private individuals and corporations: towns, universities, etc. Because it was a private act Osmund Airy, the editor of the Lauderdale papers, our principal source for the day-to-day doings of this Parliament, ignored it in making his selection from the vast Lauderdale correspondence. So the episode has gone completely unnoticed by historians. This is a pity, not only because the story of the marriage contract and its ratification is fascinating in itself, but also because it was important for Lauderdale's political future. Lauderdale's success in getting the ratification passed without backlash helped to convince King Charles that he was the man to manage Scottish business from now on.

The political history of Restoration Scotland has been largely neglected by historians. Lauderdale was the dominant figure for most of Charles's reign, but it was some years before he achieved that eminence. Lord Chancellor Clarendon, until his fall in 1667, was Charles's principal adviser for all of his three kingdoms, a fact that Lauderdale resented but had to live with. Clarendon did not like Lauderdale, who, he wrote, had been a leader of the Covenanters' rebellion “when he was scarce of age, and prosecuted it to the end with the most eminent fierceness and animosity.”
Parnassus Restored, Saints Confounded: The Secular Challenge to the Age of the Godly, 1560–1660
Authors: George C. H.
Published: November 2007

The conception of English culture in the century that was brought to a climax in Cromwellian triumph and tragedy has suffered from a flatness of historical perception, one major cause of which has been insufficient recognition of the thought and esthetic creativity of nominal Christian and emphatically non-Puritan intellectuals and artists. We have concentrated too much on defining the novelties, indeed often inappreciable differences, that characterized pre-revolutionary and revolutionary Christian factionalism in England: Anglicanism, Puritanism, Sectarianism, Laudianism, and now Arminianism. I want instead to make a case for the neglected power, pervasiveness, and perdurability of varieties of secularism in the age of the Godly.

Although a growing number of scholars are aware of the importance of literature to the dynamics of this astonishing epoch, the redoubtable spirit of William Haller prevails still in historical efforts to reconstitute the cultural context of that literature. The pagan bedrock laid down by a century of humanist imports is obscured by the flood of ephemeral sermons and miscellaneous religious discourse. Recent literary scholarship, on the other hand, having shaken the incubus of F. R. Leavis and not yet succumbed to post-structuralism, has given us models with which to illuminate prerevolutionary English culture: the monographs of Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Dollimore, and Stephen Orgel investigate the penetration of secular humanism into literature, historical writing,and popular and court theatre. They could lead us out of the fog created by the supersaturated climate of Protestant culture.
“Enhancements and Importunate Charges”: An Analysis of the Tax Complaints of October 1536
Authors: Bush M. L.
Published: November 2007

Historians differ widely in appreciating the fiscal grievances of the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Following the Dodds, some dismiss them as a marginal concern, while others regard them as a major cause of revolt. No matter where they stand, historians have handled these grievances without careful analysis. This seems to stem from a debate that has dogged both rebellions. The complexity of the rebels' complaint is obscured by a simplistic desire to show that the revolts were primarily of religious provenance, notwithstanding the variety of causes evident in the rebels' demands. Furthermore, the two main advocates of secular motivation, A. G. Dickens and R. R. Reid, perversely mention the fiscal grievances only in passing. Yet they were there, firmly declared in the rebels' bills, petitions, and songs. A pervasive force affecting the whole range of society, they sustained the rebel view that the government had to be checked not only to prevent the subversion of the Church but also the decay of the commonwealth. They were also present in the revolts of 1537 as northerners rose again, this time to protest against a breach of promise committed by the government's attempt to collect the lay subsidy and clerical tenth before the York Parliament had met to determine whether or not they should be collected.
Viewing the Scaffold from Istanbul: The Bendysh-Hyde Affair, 1647–1651
Authors: Fissel Mark Charles , Goffman Daniel
Published: November 2007

Slightly more than two years after the decapitation of Charles I, the Commonwealth of England inflicted the same punishment on the same block against his follower, Sir Henry Hyde. The failure to reach a settlement in the aftermath of the British civil war led to the king's beheading. Explaining Hyde's execution, however, requires a geographically broader context, for Sir Henry undertook his treasonable activities against the overseas interests of the English Commonwealth and Sir Thomas Bendysh, who had served as English ambassador in Istanbul since 1647, when he assumed the role of protector of English merchants. Although Bendysh later quarreled with his charges, the unexpected appearance of Henry Hyde in Istanbul in 1650 rallied the merchants behind him, for Hyde represented to them a return to the recent past, with its governmental interference and royal regulation of commercial activity. His presence also forced merchants to choose sides, thereby transposing upon Levantine commerce the divisions that had emerged during the civil war. Just as most Company members supported Parliament, so did their factors in the Levant back Bendysh, a known quantity, a clever negotiator, and a pragmatist. In his brief tenure, Bendysh had proven his ability to strike bargains with the Ottomans and stimulate commerce. He also personified the interests of the Council of State and the Levant Company directors, thereby linking the disparate but inter-dependent network of Levantine commerce.
John Tucker, M.P., and Mid-Eighteenth-Century British Politics
Authors: Harris Bob , Black Jeremy
Published: November 2007

John Tucker was a member of Parliament for the borough of Weymouth between 1735–47 and again between 1754–78. The relevant entries for him in the volumes of the History of Parliament are exiguous. He appears to have made only two interventions in Commons debates, on 27 February 1771 and 30 April 1772. In John Brooke's words, both were “slight and short.” According to the History of Parliament, Tucker's political stance was determined largely by his relationship with George Bubb Dodington, although the evidence is capable, as we shall see, of being read in a different way. Romney Sedgwick quotes from a letter Dodington wrote to Sir Robert Walpole in 1737, following the famous division on the Prince of Wales's allowance, that “the connexion between these gentlemen [those identified with his interest, including Tucker] and me was such that we should not have differed in opinion” even had he decided to vote for the motion. Tucker emerges from the History of Parliament volumes as a man without political views of his own and as an individual tightly caught up in a politics shaped principally by interest and management.

This article exploits a hitherto neglected source to reconstruct more fully John Tucker's political world and views, to present a different account of his political stance and importance, and thus to throw considerable light on politics in the mid-eighteenth century. This source is a manuscript collection that the Bodleian Library acquired in 1969 and 1970. The collection mostly comprises the papers of John Tucker's father, Edward, his brother, Richard, and John himself.
Business and Banking: Ethics and White-Collar Crime in Norwich, 1825–1831
Authors: Moss David J.
Published: November 2007

The industrial revolution greatly expanded opportunities to become wealthy, but not all opportunities were “legitimate.” Most writers emphasize that the context, or social structure, in which laws are framed make aspects of commercial behavior “illegal” or “criminal.” The context is an imposed evaluation of modes of behavior and action based on conflict resolution. This generalization has merit and, irrespective of ideological nuance, neatly packages the process through which social interest is said to attain legislative legitimacy. Such achieved legitimacy is, however, sometimes challenged, notwithstanding the participation of the challengers themselves in the process of formulation. The letter as well as the spirit of laws may be ignored, and illegal activities may flourish. These white-collar crimes—offenses against property committed by persons of “respectability and high social status”—tend to be ascribed to individual greed and opportunities created by weaknesses in the enforcement of the laws. Businessmen are damned by implication, and the solution usually recommended is more consultation, more laws, and better enforcement. Recent studies of the increasing incidence of such crimes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries have adopted this interpretation to criticize the new entrepreneurial culture. Complaints have been directed particularly at a “chaotic” banking system that abetted supposedly widespread speculation and fraud during and following the Napoleonic wars. Proofs of misconduct rest on contemporary calls to curb the extravagances of entrepreneurs and private bankers, on references to repeated financial crises, on a few famous cases of fraud and robbery, and on a more general indictment culled from literature's many mustache-twirling villains.
How Socially Conservative Were the Elizabethan Religious Radicals?
Authors: Kaufman Peter Iver
Published: November 2007

Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals—puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics—were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the “firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish” promoted a “sense of social distance” between themselves (“the better sort”) and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson's and Levine's study of social discontinuity, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, seemed a splendid occasion to revisit the intersection of religious conviction and social practice and to ponder the precision with which puritanism's supposed contributions to social stratification—and the stratification itself—have been, and can be, measured.

Measurements of a vastly different kind preoccupied Elizabethan religious theorists interested in gauging the effects of election and thus discovering whether they and their parishioners had been elected or chosen by God and redeemed. Assurances of election and of eternal reward were difficult to identify, because everything that Christians did or dreamed up was so deplorably flawed. “There remain relickes of syn” in the most righteous persons on earth, William Fulke preached in 1574; Christians desperate for assurance invariably experienced (and measured) those “relickes” as tokens of divine displeasure.
State Versus Private Ownership: The Conservative
Governments and British Civil Aviation
1951–62
Authors: Devereux David R.
Published: November 2007

Studies of post-1945 Britain have often
concentrated upon political and foreign policy
history and are only just now beginning to address
the question of the restructuring of the British
economy and domestic policy. Civil aviation, a
subject of considerable interest to historians of
interwar Britain, has not been given a similar
degree of attention in the post-1945 era. Civil
aviation policy was, however, given a very high
priority by both the 1945-51 Labour government and
its Conservative successors. Civil aviation
represented part of the effort to return Britain
to a peacetime economy by transferring resources
from the military into the civil aircraft
industry, while at the same time holding for
Britain a position of pre-eminence in the postwar
expansion of civil flying. As such, aviation was a
matter of great interest to reconstruction
planners during World War Two, and was an
important part of the Attlee government's plans
for nationalization.

Civil aviation was expected to grow rapidly
into a major global economic force, which
accounted for the great attention paid it in the
1940s and 1950s. Its importance to Britain in the
postwar era lay in the value of air connections to
North America, Europe, and the Empire and
Commonwealth, and also in the economic importance
of Britain's aircraft industry. In a period when
the United States was by far the largest producer
of commercial aircraft, the task of Labour and
Conservative governments was to maintain a viable
British position against strong American
competition. What is particularly interesting is
the wide degree of consensus that existed in both
parties on the role the state should play in the
maintenance and enhancement of this
position.
The Case of the British Inquisition: Money and Women in Mid-Eighteenth-Century London Debating Societies
Authors: Thale Mary
Published: November 2007

In 1754 when the London debating societies were non-profit entertainments exclusively for men, the well-known actor Charles Macklin attempted to commercialize and feminize them in one step. Ostensibly the time was ripe for these changes because the popularity of the public debating societies demonstrated their potential profitability and because the exclusion of women from these artisan societies was being seen as out of step with the trend of public entertainment and manifestations of the Enlightenment. The temporary success of Macklin’s British Inquisition documents the readiness of a growing middle class to extend the range of their commercialized leisure; more significantly, the failure of the British Inquisition reveals the hazards of violating male space and trying to gentrify a workingmen’s entertainment in one stroke. Macklin’s ambitious attempt to cash in on the cultural trends of mid-century London merits a place in the study of the commercializing of popular entertainment and the feminizing of masculine entertainments for commercial ends. Its inclusion of women in public debating foreshadows the later participation of women in public debates and the consequent assigning to public culture values previously regarded as feminine, or, in Terry Eagleton’s phrase, the “feminization of discourse.” Macklin’s enterprise changed significantly the questions debated at these public meetings. However, the failure of his enterprise shows the difficulty of deliberately attempting to change the character of popular culture and to expand gender conventions exponentially.
“We Few of an Infinite Multitude”: John Hales, Parliament, and the Gendered Politics of the Early Elizabethan Succession
Authors: de la Torre Victoria
Published: November 2007

Towards the end of the 1563 Parliamentary session, John Hales, Clerk of the Hanaper and an M.P. sitting for the Borough of Lancaster, wrote and circulated a tract entitled,A Declaration of the Succession of the Crowne Imperiall of Ingland. In this work, Hales argued that until such time as Queen Elizabeth married and produced an heir, the law clearly designated a successor—Catherine Grey, the leading Protestant claimant and heir according to the terms of Henry VIII’s will, which had been enacted into law. The leading Catholic claimant, and heir by strict hereditary descent, Mary Stuart, was, Hales contended, legally ineligible to succeed to the throne. Crucially, Hales concluded that in the face of inadequate governance by a female monarch wherein the queen violated the law regarding the succession, Parliament would become the rightful body to exercise the queen’s governing power for the good of the people.