bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Origins of the Medieval English Jury: Frankish, English, or Scandinavian?
Authors: Turner Ralph V.
Published: February 2004

Serious study of the origins of the jury began in the time of William Stubbs and F. W. Maitland, when the work of the German historical school of jurisprudence reached England. Until then knowledge of the medieval English jury before the time of Henry II had been more legendary than real. William Blackstone had traced the common law to a compilation that King Alfred supposedly commanded to be made. Blackstone had written in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, “Some authors have endeavoured to trace the original of juries up as high as the Britons themselves, the first inhabitants of our island; but certain it is that they were in use among the earliest Saxon colonies.”

In the mid-nineteenth century the Anglo-Saxon origin of the jury was still a popular legend in England, but the German school of legal history sought a more scientific study of the problem. A representative of that group, Heinrich Brunner, in his book, Die Entstehung der Schwurgerichte, rejected the traditional teaching that the jury was Germanic and popular in origin. Instead, he believed it to be royal in origin, an authoritarian means of gathering information, particularly information of a financial nature. It first appeared as the inquest of the Frankish kings, inherited from the imperial Roman fisc. It passed from them to the Norman dukes and then was introduced to England with William. According to Brunner the Norman kings reserved this fact-finding technique for themselves, extending it to their subjects in only a few cases.
Independents and Revolutionaries
Authors: Yule George
Published: February 2004

Who were the Independents? This is one of the unsolved puzzles of the English Civil War. Contemporaries gave differing answers. To some they were the godly; to others they were “the godly gang.” They were both a Puritan group and a political segment of the Long Parliament. S. R. Gardiner and the Whig historians tended to make a clear connection. Religious Independency was for toleration, and the political Independents were, simpliciter, the party of toleration opposed to the intolerant Presbyterians. This view was broadly accepted until 1938 when it was permanently shattered by J. H. Hexter, whose penetrating article showed that many political Independents (and for this purpose he defined them as the Regicides and those who survived Pride's Purge) were elders in the established church which after the Westminster Assembly had a Presbyterian form of government. He therefore urged that the term Independent was really a label for the most ardent political Puritans applied to them by the more conservative.

Then in 1953 H. R. Trevor-Roper in his brilliant essay on “the Gentry” introduced a new approach by equating the Independents with the lesser and declining gentry who had been shut out from the spoils of court office and therefore pursued a policy of decentralization.

It was at this stage that I wrote an introductory study on the problem of the Independents that questioned in part the suggestions put forward in both these works. Against Hexter I urged that the term Independent had a greater religious content that he allowed, for many of his “Independent” Presbyterian elders in fact became Independents in religion or certainly veered in that direction.
Henry St. John: a Reappraisal of the Young Bolingbroke
Authors: Dickinson H. T.
Published: February 2004

Few men have been studied more but understood less than Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. He has suffered at the hands of those writers who have written of other aspects, or concentrated on other personalities, of the age in which he lived. In one of his purple passages Winston Churchill, anxious to defend his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, dismissed St. John as an “unpurposed, unprincipled, miscreant adventurer.” Louis Kronenberger was even more vehement in his denunciation: “He had neither moral stamina nor intellectual honesty nor emotional benevolence; and as he was in his heart, so was he in his dealings with men. In short, he was a scoundrel.” In his biographers St. John has suffered almost as badly. Walter Sichel, who wrote two large volumes covering his whole career, fell into the obvious trap of being “excessively adulatory.” Sir Charles Petrie and Sir Douglas Harkness concentrated almost exclusively on his early career, and the older works by G. W. Cooke and Thomas Macknight have been largely invalidated by the discovery of a mass of new evidence and by new interpretations of eighteenth-century politics. Three recent works are really only studies of different aspects of his political philosophy and his published works rather than of his political career. Moreover, only one of all these studies on Bolingbroke has been written by a professional historian, and his study is based solely on printed sources. The result is that mistakes made by early biographers have been accepted uncritically by later writers on Bolingbroke.
Samuel Johnson on Swift: the Life of Swift and Johnson's Predecessors in Swiftian Biography
Authors: Warncke Wayne
Published: February 2004

Samuel Johnson's dislike of Jonathan Swift has provoked a continuing interest among scholars and critics. Commentators on the subject have described the attitude as an inherent prejudice and have questioned its possible causes. From James Boswell's repeated comments that Johnson apparently had an unaccountable prejudice against Swift and his pointed question to discover the source (“I once took the liberty to ask him, if Swift had personally offended him, and he told me, he had not”) to Walter Raleigh's facile summation that an essential difference in their characters separated them, speculation has been persistent, if not always rewarding. Perhaps the final statement of explanation is set forth in W. B. C. Watkins's essay, “Vive la bagatelle,” where Watkins maintains that though Johnson had “a residue of sheer, inexplicable prejudice” against Swift, much that appears prejudice can be made understandable. That understanding comes largely from Watkins's well-documented theory that Johnson and Swift were more alike than different: “Curiously, his antagonism is intensified by certain similarities between the two men in circumstance and personality.” Watkins's theory convincingly explains the source of a behavioral trait clearly revealed in Boswell's record of Johnson's conversation.

Yet the character of Johnson's biography of Swift has its own peculiar problem. Most of Johnson's attacks on Swift came at impromptu moments when conversation led Johnson to lash out hastily at the Dean. Boswell indicates that Johnson's behavior was habitual: “He attacked Swift, as he used to do upon all occasions.” Watkins explains this in part by referring to Johnson's belief that Swift was overpraised; thus Johnson voiced his irritation whenever excessive acclaim prompted a reply.
The Politics of the Whigs in Opposition, 1834-1835
Authors: Kriegel Abraham D.
Published: February 2004

From their dismissal in November 1834 to their return to power in April 1835, the Whig Party was confronted with the problem of how to function effectively in opposition and, ultimately, return to power. This problem contained a dilemma which disquieted the aristocratic leaders of Whiggery. The party could conform to a tradition that regarded association with more “radical” groups as contrary to its principles; or it could join the Radicals and Repealers in an attempt to overthrow the new Tory Government. Such was the choice that underlay the politics of the Whigs in the winter of 1834-35.

Historians have considered the “honorable” nature of the Lichfield House Compact and its strictly political consequences. One interpretation emphasizes the Whigs' dependence upon Daniel O'Connell and the Repealers during the second Melbourne administration. Another, perhaps closer to the truth, suggests that the Repealers rather than the Whigs became the captive party. The significance of the Lichfield House Compact is distorted when its political consequences, however immediate, are emphasized. It is best understood as a commentary on the immediate past. The question to be considered is how and why the Whig Party was maneuvered into its association with Radicals and Repealers. It must be examined in terms of the party's disunity and the temporary, if propitious, ineffectiveness of spokesmen of traditional Whiggery who could proffer no alternative means to return to power.
The Liturgical Dimension of the Oxford Tracts, 1833-1841
Authors: Barmann Lawrence F.
Published: February 2004

R. W. Church began his classic work on The Oxford Movement with the remark that “What is called the Oxford or Tractarian movement began, without doubt, in a vigorous effort for the immediate defence of the Church against serious dangers, arising from the violent and threatening temper of the days of the Reform Bill.” Historians of the Oxford Movement who, unlike Church, were not participants in the events of which they write need continually to remind themselves that the Oxford Movement was not a premeditated and carefully planned theological campaign. Rather, it was an ad hoc measure to meet a definite and immediate problem.

In the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, agitation for reform of all the national institutions swept across England, and included in these national institutions was the Church of England. In 1828 a resolution favoring the repeal of the Test Act was carried in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, and in 1829 the Relief Bill was carried, allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament and to hold offices under the crown. With the Reform Bill of 1832 the electoral structure for seating men in Parliament was brought into partial conformity with contemporary developments and population distribution. And with the success of parliamentary reform, English churchmen feared that church reform would soon be thrust upon them. The bishops as a group had been hostile to parliamentary reform and to reform in general, with the result that popular pamphlets against churchmen and demand for church reform reached alarming proportions.
Government and Resource Conservation: the Salmon Acts Administration, 1860-1886
Authors: MacLeod Roy M.
Published: February 2004

No area of Victorian administrative history is more richly documented or less adequately explored than that concerning the development of public policy by professional or scientific “specialists” within the civil departments of Government. Traditionally, texts on the evolution of the modern state have concentrated upon the role of political philosophy, economic motivation, and parliamentary expedience in determining the direction and timing of government involvement in the private sector. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in the anatomy and function of institutional change within the so-called “Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government.” Now a number of attempts are being made to describe the manner in which science, technology, and “special professional knowledge” were used administratively by the state to conserve and protect the wealth of the nation.

The Salmon Acts administration reveals this phenomenon of development particularly well. These acts embodied what one contemporary observer called the first permanent attempt by Parliament to protect and regulate private property in the public interest. Their administration involved the first permanent staff appointed to supervise the fisheries of England and Wales and laid the foundations for British nature conservancy policy. Government intervention in the salmon fisheries followed different lines of development in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales during the course of the century. The following pages, however, will be confined to salmon administration in England and Wales during the period 1860-86, in what was essentially the “heroic age” of policy-making by the salmon inspectors at the Home Office and the Board of Trade.
The Dismemberment and Revival of the Ashanti Confederacy
Authors: Tordoff William
Published: February 2004

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Britain joined other European nations in the scramble for territory in Africa. Guided largely by strategic considerations, she showed little interest in exploiting the areas which she had acquired. In what might be called the first phase of colonial rule, lasting until about 1914, a thinly staffed colonial administration was preoccupied in each tropical African dependency with maintaining law and order and achieving economic self-sufficiency. To this end Africans were encouraged to grow crops such as cocoa and coffee, while a rudimentary communications system was established so that produce might find its distant markets. European plantation agriculture was allowed in only a few enclaves, such as the highlands of Kenya, but substantial mining concessions were widely granted to European companies. Politically, normal British policy was to retain and rule through such large traditional units of government as existed; among them were Buganda and the emirates of northern Nigeria. This policy was substantially modified in Ashanti, which therefore furnishes an important exception to the general pattern.

British policy remained essentially empirical throughout the second colonial phase, which roughly coincides with the interwar years. With the growth, however, of the notion of trusteeship, the British Government recognized a duty not only to govern but also to develop its dependencies economically, socially, and politically. After 1918 a modest expansion of government agricultural, medical, and educational programmes therefore took place — mainly financed, however, from local revenues.
King Henry I's “Old Men”
Authors: Walker Barbara MacDonald
Published: February 2004

King Henry I “created men,” thenovi hominesof the chronicles. He also sustained, supported, and rewarded the “old men,” those men, or their descendants, who had held substantial estates in Normandy or in England prior to 1100. The “old men” who remained prominent in the reign of Henry I, however, were those willing to accept his authority, to lay down anarchical broadswords and seek peace through their loyalty to a nascent idea of the Crown, an Anglo-Normanregnumpersonified in the King. Loyalty was the stern arbiter, and Henry's feudal justice could be deaf to the entreaties of both family members and friends. While military organization was essential to peace and lawful order in Anglo-Norman society, the Conquest was past and soldierly virtue alone was not sufficient; Henry's kingly task was to mold the energies of his barons into administrative and judicial talents, and to cast those talents into a coherent framework of government. The paternal inheritance, as he viewed it, was an Anglo-Norman polity, its ruling class a nobility with cross-channel relationships in estates and blood ties. Whether or not the link with Normandy was deleterious, it was real to the King and his contemporaries, at the heart of the problems of the reign.

Henry drew upon his nobility for the work of governing, but “new men” also rose to prominence. The degree of attention given to the “new men” has created a congregate conception for assessments of the reign.
The English Aristocracy, Its Crises, and the English Revolution, 1558-1660
Authors: Hexter J. H.
Published: February 2004

“A landmark in the historical landscape” —The Economist; “A major contribution … an impressive achievement, which must in future put all historians in his debt” —The Listener; “A remarkable achievement … an outstanding study of a very real and great value” —History; “A mammoth and marvellous book” —American Historical Review; “Immense value” —English Historical Review; “A model” —Journal of Economic History; “A major historical contribution … a magisterial and seminal work” —Journal of Modern History; “A brilliant and original contribution” —New York Review of Books; “Social history at its absolute best” —Past and Present.

Such was the chorus of critical encomium that greeted the publication of Lawrence Stone'sCrisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641. Despite the chorus Stone could hardly have helped being disappointed at the actual reviews. One or two were almost as fatuous as they were brief. Others, sensible within their limits, were still too short. This seems to have been the fault of editors, so intimidated by the pejorative sense of the term “discrimination” that they refuse to discriminate between a work worth more than twenty pages and one worth less than twenty words, performing their editorial duties in the matter of book reviews with a sort of timorous and lunatic egalitarianism. Moreover, in considering Stone's work, many of the reviewers hastily plunged into what has come to be called “the gentry controversy” or “the storm over the gentry,” and some became almost totally immersed in it.
The Independents Again
Authors: Underdown David
Published: February 2004

George Yule's “Independents and Revolutionaries” suggests that in many respects he and I are not so far apart. We agree that a “rigid two-party view” of Interregnum politics is a mistake, that not all members of the Rump were political Independents, that “Independent” was not commonly used as a political term after 1648, and that the clue to the events of 1648-49, the climax of the Puritan Revolution, lies in the existence of a group of genuine radicals who can and ought to be identified. He also seems to agree in one place that the criticisms of his statistical methods in The Independents in the English Civil War which I advanced in “The Independents Reconsidered” are justified, though in another he argues that the table in The Independents enables the reader to surmount these difficulties. This being so, if a technical dispute over methodology was all that remained between us, his latest article might well be left unchallenged. It contains, however, a number of assumptions about seventeenth-century religion and politics which are either unfounded or need serious qualification, and on which a few further comments are necessary.

First, as to method. It is true that the table referred to enables the reader to obtain Yule's estimates of the total numbers in various groups, such as (a) “Fled to Army, 1647,” (b) purged, 1648, and (c) Rumper, and of how these break down by social position and religious affiliation. But nowhere is there any entry for all of Yule's allegedly Independent M.P.s and of the breakdown for these, nor is there any way of obtaining it from the table.
A Village Aristotle and the Harmony of Interests: James Anderson (1739-1808) of Monks Hill
Authors: Mullett Charles F.
Published: February 2004

Who indeed can say, in answer to Sir Thomas Browne's searching question, “whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable men forgot”? Even though the making of books promises to leave no person “forgot,” the question still abides. More than that, it accents a paradox: under the spell of behavioral science the historian wrestles with vast impersonal forces and reduces personalities to a footnote, yet biography flourishes as never before. Whether the harvest reflects academic search for topics, popular interest, or plain conviction that first and last history is about people, their thoughts, their deeds, and their influence, or, for that matter, all three, some aspiring Ph.D. may decide. Here it is enough to consider another facet of Sir Thomas's inquiry. Puzzling in itself, that question becomes even more troubling when the historian is confronted with a man whose legacy does not put him in the calendar of great men, yet whose career warrants far more attention than that given to paltry politicians, incompetent generals, and notorious whores, and indeed may take precedence over that of more highly rated contemporaries in probing the intellectual milieu. James Anderson is such a man.

The notice of his death on October 15, 1808, means little except to the initiate: “At Westham, Essex, James Anderson, LL.D of Mounie in the county of Aberdeen. He was the author of several works on Agriculture, Political Economy, and other subjects of general interest.” So concise a notice scarcely did justice to its subject, and before long magazines repaired the defect, one adding a “faithful portrait of the learned and ingenious Dr. Anderson.”
Salisbury, Rosebery, and the Survival of Siam
Authors: Klein Ira
Published: February 2004

Siam's struggle for survival against imperialism reached its nadir in the crisis of 1893. The beginning of its emergence from danger is generally marked by the Anglo-French guarantee of the integrity of the Menam basin in 1896. A number of questions remain unanswered regarding these critical three years. What was the Siamese role in the precipitation of the crisis and the formulation of the Menam guarantee? Was there a meaningful change in Great Power policy which relieved Siam from its extreme danger and brought it apparent safety? British policy lay very much at the crux of Siam's survival. This study concentrates on the impact of British diplomacy and, particularly, on the conduct of the two principal British Foreign Secretaries, Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery, during the crisis and the creation of the Menam guarantee. British endeavors to limit French expansion at Siam's expense significantly reveal the likenesses and differences between the diplomacy of imperialism of Lord Salisbury's Conservative Governments and the policies of the Liberal regimes of W. E. Gladstone and Rosebery.

Lord Salisbury fretted that the diplomatic need for secrecy regarding his maneuvers to achieve the Menam guarantee deprived him of acclaim for a strategic victory over France. “In Siam,” from 1893 to 1895, he wrote privately, “we found France in full process of absorbing the country.” France had taken much territory by a successful war in 1893, and “Rosebery had been unable to prevent her.” Because Britain had “no treaty rights whatever to interfere in behalf of Siam,” it would have been impossible to have “induced the English nation to go to war” over Siamese affairs.
Britain Debates Justice: an Analysis of the Reparations Issue of 1918
Authors: Rodman Barbee-Sue
Published: February 2004

It has been noticed by various observers that in the election campaign of 1918, which focused on the issue of “reparations” versus “indemnities,” the debate was dominated not by discussions of the practical issues of international relations, national interests, or economic possibilities, but rather by abstract moral arguments about “justice” — a “just peace” and a “just punishment” for Germany. It has not been noticed, however, that these arguments about justice were very largely carried over into international politics from the sphere of domestic criminal law, to such an extent that positions expressed vis-à-vis the Prison Acts of 1908 foreshadowed the positions expressed in foreign affairs in 1918.

When, only three days after the Armistice, a parliamentary election was announced for December 14, there was little expectation that the terms of the treaty would be part of the electoral battle. It quickly became apparent, however, that despite the pre-Armistice agreement limiting German responsibility to reparations for damage done to Belgium and to the civilian population of Allied countries, there was a widespread public desire to force Germany to pay an indemnity for the entire cost of the war. Although Labour and the Asquithian Liberals refused to abandon their commitment to “reparations but no indemnity,” the Coalition leadership succumbed, though hesitantly, to popular pressure. Despite the private convictions of both David Lloyd George and Bonar Law that an indemnity would be unwise and harmful, the Coalition committed itself, before the campaign closed, to demanding the “entire cost of the War.”
The British Veterans' Ticket of 1918
Authors: Ward Stephen R.
Published: February 2004

A confident and victorious David Lloyd George entered Central Hall, Westminster, on the morning of November 16, 1918. Five days earlier the Germans had agreed to an Armistice, and the “Welsh Wizard” was acclaimed by his countrymen as the architect of victory. His political coalition, formed in the dark days of December 1916, had successfully prosecuted the war; now he called together political elements of that coalition to continue in peace. There were Conservatives, Liberals, a few Labour men, and others who agreed that a peacetime coalition was best for Britain and that Lloyd George should continue as its leader. These men gathered to hear the Prime Minister announce an election for the second week of December. It was his intention, he told them, to present a unified front to the nation. He wanted the best men of each party on his side.

I wish it had been possible to get every party, every section of the community united for this task — the best brains of every party. Every party has good traditions; every party has traditions which it would rather forget. (Laughter and cheers.) Let us each own up for the other party. (Renewed laughter.) I would like to see for the next four and a half years the two — the three parties together. (A voice: What about the ex-soldiers?) Ah! He surely is in, he is not a separate party; you will find that in this election.

But the Prime Minister erred, for he found a party of veterans in the election.
Proctorial Representation in the House of Lords during the Reign of Edward VI
Authors: Snow Vernon F.
Published: February 2004

This is the third in a series of studies dealing with the history of the proxy system in the House of Lords. The first, after tracing the origin of proxies to the Roman law of agency, dealt with the emergence and spread of representation by proctors in the ecclesiastical and political assemblies of medieval England. The second study demonstrated how the proxy system was perfected in the upper house during the reign of Henry VIII and how the Crown benefited from that system. The ensuing article concerns proctorial representation during the crucial years of the Edwardian Reformation. Because of the brief period under consideration — only six years — it seemed best to cast the study in an analytical rather than a chronological framework. The first section deals with the general characteristics of proctorial representation in mid-Tudor times; the second and third sections cover the spiritual and temporal lords, respectively; and the fourth section treats the relationship between the proxy system and conciliar government.

I

Knowledge of the proxy system in the mid-sixteenth-century House of Lords remains somewhat fragmentary and limited in scope. A satisfactory treatment of the subject does not exist. Constitutional and legal historians have paid little attention to proxies and less to the procedure governing their use in the upper house. As one might expect, Bishop Stubbs dealt with proxies in medieval Parliaments and correctly associated them with parliamentary privileges, but at the same time he concluded that “its history has not yet been minutely traced.
Cotton Textiles in England: the East India Company's Attempt to Exploit Developments in Fashion 1660-172
Authors: Douglas Audrey W.
Published: February 2004

Men and women who wish to uphold the interests of the textile trade should “make fashion follow the trade, and not trade the fashion,” declared Daniel Defoe in 1705. But long before this time the East India Company had discovered that the exploitation of fashion for profit is a more artful business than a mere dictatorship exercised by the “trade.” After 1660 the Company's policy regarding the import of cotton textiles was particularly concerned to influence the type and design of goods produced in India to make them serve current English needs and trends in taste. Striking success was achieved by the end of the century, but thereafter the flow of cotton manufactures was impeded by serious difficulties, chiefly the restrictions imposed on the trade by prohibition acts in 1701 and 1721, together with the competitive development of domestic calico-printing.

The English had of course been familiar with cotton for several centuries before 1660, although the acquaintance brought little opportunity to build up technological skill in the processing of pure cotton goods from the raw state to the finished piece. Imports had included raw “cotton-wool” from the Levant for use in stuffing and quilting and fustians of European manufacture containing cotton. But probably it was not until the sixteenth century that a cotton weft was used in the production of domestic fustians, and not until the seventeenth that cotton was brought into linen and smallwares manufacturing. The early history of pure cotton fabrics in England is debatable ground, partly because of confusing terminology; so-called “cottons,” for instance, were produced in England before 1660, but the term is descriptive of the finishing process, or “cottoning,” rather than of content.
The Introduction of Task Work into the Royal Dockyards, 1775
Authors: Haas James M.
Published: February 2004

Looking back on his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1771 to 1782, Lord Sandwich considered that one of his most important accomplishments was the introduction into the royal dockyards of task work for shipwrights — “a matter very little known in the world, but the only material improvement … which will enable us to build and repair a much larger number of ships.” Task work had long been universal in private shipyards, and its use in the navy's own yards was discussed at intervals for eighty years at least before its adoption in 1775. But opposition to the method — from the Navy Board and the shipwrights and their officers — was entrenched. Arguments against it, having once prevailed, afterwards were seemingly invincible, their mere invocation being enough to stop further consideration. The obstacles after so long a time might have been insuperable to one less confident and determined than Sandwich. Indeed, the innovation when it was made produced a strike of shipwrights which forced its partial abandonment before the scheme had properly been tried.

Task workers, instead of being employed for a fixed daily wage with an additional allowance for overtime, were paid according to the amount of work actually performed, the ship itself being divided into parts, for each of which an over-all labor price was established and apportioned equally among the men. The advantages of the method appear on the face of it overwhelming. The shipwrights were encouraged to work steadily and rapidly in order to increase their earnings, which thus were greater than those of the day workers.
Bradford and the American Civil War
Authors: Wright D. G.
Published: February 2004

In recent years the received picture of contemporary English attitudes to the American Civil War has been considerably modified. It has been demonstrated that there were a great many more currents of feeling, cutting across both party and class lines, than the traditional version, sowed by pro-Northern propagandists, allowed. Liberals, Conservatives, and intellectuals were all divided among themselves to some degree. If there was a good deal more pro-Federal sympathy among the English ruling class than was once thought, there was more pro-Southern sympathy among the middle and working classes, at least before 1863. At the same time, the British Government was more sincere in its stance of neutrality than was formerly suggested. The purpose of this article is to examine responses to the Civil War in Bradford, a West Riding industrial town where opinions were strongly influenced by newspapers, chapels, and Radical politicians — in other words, the kind of town where the Federal cause could expect to obtain solid support.

II

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Bradford's population had grown from thirteen thousand to over 100,000. By 1861 Bradford was the ninth largest town in the country. Now almost the whole of Britain's worsted industry was concentrated in an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire around Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, and Huddersfield. Within this area Bradford had replaced Halifax as “the principal seat and emporium of the worsted manufacture.” The town was predominantly nonconformist in religion and Radical in politics; in fact the two were closely linked.
Mid-Victorian Public Opinion, Polish Propaganda, and the Uprising of 1863
Authors: Kutolowski John F.
Published: February 2004

I can only say that the insurrection, however much of heroism and patriotic devotion it has subsequently embodied, appears to me to have been to a great extent artificially stimulated by a wonderfully dextrous management of the press and the telegraph and by a social machinery which no other nation than one of generations of illustrious exiles can command.

Henry Hotze

The character of public opinion concerning contemporary foreign problems, despite abundant data and sophisticated analyses, is sometimes elusive; it is of course more tenuous respecting issues of an earlier era when polling techniques were unknown. Studies of mid-Victorian public opinion and foreign policy by B. Kingsley Martin on the Crimean War and Miriam B. Urban on the Italian War of Unification have by necessity equated the attitudes of the press, Parliament, and public addresses with public sentiment. They often assume that, under circumstances such as Russophobia and sympathy for national liberty, certain pin pricks of events elicit spontaneous and genuine expressions of public opinion. To be sure, this assumption has some validity. But owing to the paucity of documentary evidence, propaganda has received altogether too little attention.

The writings of Polish agents for 1863 provide a basis for illuminating an instance of propaganda in the mechanics of mid-Victorian public sentiment. Yet J. H. Harley and K. S. Pasieka, while charting the course of English opinion in 1863, have almost completely ignored propaganda, while Henryk Wereszycki has treated it cursorily. This essay, consequently, aims to draw back the curtains a bit, go backstage, and observe how actors received suggestions, inducements, and sometimes even scripts to perform their roles.
New Elitism: Social Psychology in Prewar England
Authors: Soffer R. N.
Published: February 2004

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a widespread effort to reassess Victorian values so that they might be retained, but in a more viable form. The new democracy was the catalyst in this introspective process which affected political thought most of all. Before the Great War the anomalous behavior of the new citizen, in the streets and at the polls, compelled thoughtful attention to political problems in England. In reaction to the unreasonable and unpredictable behavior of the new democracy, a new democratic liberalism and a new elitism came into being. New liberalism, in trying to qualify rationalist assumptions and transform the negative program of nineteenth-century liberalism, largely succeeded. New elitism, like old elitism, in concluding that the great majority were fit only to be governed, largely failed. But the elitist critique of mass urban democracy was as compelling to many people as the new liberal's defense. While liberalism has received critical comment, discussions of elitism have been limited to Fabian methodology or subordinated to analyses of Utopian programs. Yet the most formidable elitist argument came from the infant science of social psychology, developed concurrently by William McDougall, a physiologist, and Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon and neurologist. In prewar Britain, social psychology was the basis for a political critique of democracy presented as a scientific analysis of behavior.

This paper deals with the validity of social psychology as a reading of history which concluded in political elitism. The accuracy and significance of the social psychologists' explanation of behavior are assessed solely in terms of its political implications as a plea for government by an Elect of social scientists, a plea hidden within a purportedly scientific account of social evolution.
The Anglo-French Compromise on Arms Limitation, 1928
Authors: Carlton David
Published: February 2004

The British General Election of May 1929 was a disaster for Stanley Baldwin's Government. The Conservatives lost 155 seats in all and in consequence became the second largest party in the House of Commons for the first time since the General Election of December 1910. The formation of a Labour Government appeared to be so unavoidable that the Prime Minister did not even wait to meet Parliament but resigned office at once, advising King George V to send for Ramsay MacDonald.

In attempting to explain this Conservative failure, historians have tended to stress the persistence of the unemployment problem and the alleged folly of Baldwin in choosing “Safety First” as his campaign slogan. Even a cursory examination of the Government's record during 1927 and 1928, however, lends support to the suspicion that a succession of controversial decisions in the field of foreign affairs may also have contributed, albeit marginally, to the magnitude of the Conservative failure in 1929. Certainly more than one well-wisher thought it necessary to warn the Conservative cabinet that its conduct of foreign policy — and especially those aspects relating to international disarmament negotiations — might have significant electoral implications. For example, on October 12, 1928, the British Ambassador in Paris, Sir William Tyrrell, wrote to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, Lord Cushendun:

I think this question [disarmament] is going to play a great part next year in the coming election and I feel convinced that if you succeed in persuading the country that you have already done a great deal to promote disarmament and have a settled policy with regard to it you will defeat both Ramsay MacDonald and Lloyd George.
Patronage and Administration: the King's Free Chapels in Medieval England
Authors: Jones W. R.
Published: February 2004

During the later Middle Ages in England both church and state were multiplying their pretensions and powers. The growth of spiritual and temporal administration alike depended upon the availability of bureaucrats willing and able to serve the two powers in the fields of finance, law, administration, and diplomacy. In the absence of cash for paying for services of this kind, popes, prelates, and princes developed means for subsidizing their civil services from sources of revenue to which they were able to invent and enforce claims. This reliance upon the community of the clergy for official service and upon benefices of the church for their maintenance and compensation had the effect of coloring certain ecclesiastical offices down to the Reformation. Prebendal canonries, archdeaconries, and even parish churches came to be viewed more and more as simply sources of emolument — as sinecures to be bestowed upon members of the clergy for the performance of services other than those demanded by the offices given them. For identical reasons English kings, Roman popes, and native prelates laid claim to a variety of ecclesiastical offices and the revenues attached to them in order to obtain the services and skills without which neither church nor state could function effectively in the increasingly complex world of the later Middle Ages. All of this is, of course, well known, and modern scholars have explored rather thoroughly the composition and growth of royal and ecclesiastical administration and the major ways in which each was subsidized.
John Twyne: a Tudor Humanist and the Problem of Legend
Authors: Ferguson Arthur B.
Published: February 2004

John Twyne deserves to be better known. Any man raised as he was in a society still not accustomed to drawing a clear line between history and myth, yet who struggled as valiantly as he did to make the nation's distant past comprehensible to men of reason, merits more than a second glance – if only because his failure to free himself completely from the myths and legends against which he was contesting tells as much about the limitations of humanist scholarship as his partial success tells about its potentialities. As it is, no one but the rare scholar interested in Geoffrey of Monmouth's reputation or the fortunes of the Brutus legend in Renaissance thought is likely ever to have heard of him. His one known work, the engagingly levelheaded (and at times engagingly wrongheaded) dialogue,De rebus Albionicis, Britannicis atque Anglicis, remained in the limbo of forgotten books until Sir Thomas Kendrick restored it to its proper place as one of the most resourceful critiques of the British History to appear in the century.

It is less, however, for his substantive contribution to the controversy over the Trojan origin of the British people that Twyne rates additional attention than for his approach to the problems involved in it – a fact which helps account for the neglect he has suffered. An original rather than a profound mind, not quite in the first rank of scholars despite his considerable classical learning, he nevertheless makes possible the examination, in a rarely revealing example, of the sense of temporal perspective then emerging in Renaissance England.
Postscript to an Awfully Long Review
Authors: Hexter J. H.
Published: February 2004

Two careful readings of Lawrence Stone's “Postscript to Eight Hundred and Forty-one Pages” did not relieve me of an uneasy sense of puzzlement. Even second time around the “Postscript” still seemed to be not quite relevant to the section of my article on “The English Aristocracy, Its Crises, and the English Revolution, 1558-1660” to which it purported to address itself. Somehow Stone seemed either to misunderstand or to misconstrue all my main intentions. If he did so, there are at least two possible explanations for the misconstrual.

First, quite understandably, Stone may have been just plain weary of the whole subject (the title of his reply somehow suggests this), so that he did not given his full attention to what I was saying. Or second, my indications of purpose may have been unduly opaque or ambiguous. After further careful scrutiny of both Stone's postcript and my article, I am inclined to suspect that a bit of both is involved, but a bit more of inattention on Stone's part than of opacity on mine. In any case, here is an attempt to straighten out any confusion as to what I was up to that may remain either in Stone's mind or in the minds of the readers of my article.

Stone ascribes to me the view that “the English Revolution cannot have had deep social causes because it did not have deep social consequences” and then suggests that I have “fallen for the theory of intended consequences, the notion that in history things turn out the way the actors intended them to.”
What Was Neo-Classicism?
Authors: Johnson James William
Published: February 2004

There seems to be no doubt about it: the century-old truisms about the literature variously called “Augustan” and “Neo-Classical” are in the process of dissolution. Premises induced by J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, explored by Oliver Elton, dogmatized by G. E. B. Saintsbury, and summarized by Leslie Stephen now appear inadequate to more recent scholars, whose research and rereading of Neo-Classical texts run counter to the general testimony as well as the specific judgments of their grandfathers. For the past few decades at least, published commentary has increasingly indicated the need to overhaul received ideas about those writers identified with the revival of classicism in England following the Restoration of Charles II and continuing throughout the eighteenth century.

The deficiencies in Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about Neo-Classicism revealed by latter-day findings are several, some of them due to false criteria of taste, morality, and literary excellence. But chiefly the research of the present age has disclosed a vast range of literature simply ignored — or, perhaps, suppressed — by earlier critics. Based as they were on a limited, prejudged selection of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the premises inherited from Victorian criticism have naturally failed to account for the discoveries of twentieth-century scholars.

The resulting disparity between limited assumptions and expanded information has called into question the very possibility of formulating any critical schema that accurately describes the characteristics of English literature between 1660 and 1800. The relativistic — not to say atomistic — inclinations of contemporary scholarship enforce the view that indeed no schema is possible.
British Attitudes to the Colonies, ca. 1820-1850
Authors: Shaw A. G. L.
Published: February 2004

In an article in the Journal of British Studies in November 1965, Helen Taft Manning, referring particularly to the period 1830 to 1850, asked the question, “Who ran the British Empire?” She was especially concerned with the influence of the famous James Stephen, but her question raises matters of wider concern.

“Patterns of historical writing are notoriously difficult to change,” she wrote.

Much of what is still being written about colonial administration in the nineteenth-century British Empire rests on the partisan and even malicious writings of critics of the Government in England in the 1830s and '40s who had never seen the colonial correspondence and were unfamiliar with existing conditions in the distant colonies. The impression conveyed in most textbooks is that the Colonial Office after 1815 was a well-established bureaucracy concerned with the policies of the mother country in the overseas possessions, and that those policies changed very slowly and only under pressure. Initially Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Charles Buller were responsible for this Colonial Office legend, but it was soon accepted by most of the people who had business to transact there.

This legend is still to be found, as Mrs. Manning says, in general textbooks, among the more important of the fairly recent ones being E. L. Woodward's Age of Reform, and more surprisingly in the second volume of the Cambridge History of the British Empire. Of course, Wakefield and the so-called colonial reformers are well recognized as propagandists.
The “dependence of license upon faith”: Miss Gertrude Himmelfarb on the Second Reform Act
Authors: Smith F. B.
Published: February 2004

When Miss Himmelfarb published “The Politics of Democracy: the English Reform Act of 1867” in this journal in November 1966, she drew one courteous protest, the substance of which, on W. E. Gladstone as “Utilitarian,” she has silently admitted in the essay as republished in Victorian Minds.

Nevertheless, some important misinterpretations survive in the new text. It appears with several notable essays on Victorian thinkers, and the collection is likely to be widely read; given the confidence of Miss Himmelfarb's style and footnote polemic, both alluring to undergraduates, it seems worthwhile to correct four main props in her argument. Miss Himmelfarb is concerned to establish that Benjamin Disraeli (the Earl of Derby is virtually ignored with four minor references) throughout 1866 and 1867 believed in a “national” inclusive electorate and that this faith permitted him an ease of manoeuvre and a hardheaded realism in the power struggle denied to the “Utilitarian” Whigs, Liberals, and Radicals. This ideological difference, she insists, is the key to the Liberals' failure and the Conservatives' triumph in 1866-67. The argument may well be true, but at two central points the evidence she adduces does not establish it.

Her view involves Miss Himmelfarb in attempting to show that both parties were committed to reform in 1866 and had been so committed at least since 1858. One would never know from her account that between 1851 and 1864 these Disraelian Conservatives attacked and repulsed three unofficial motions for extension of the franchise and three Whig Government reform bills, apart from seven motions for the ballot.