bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The “Chiliasm of Despair” Reconsidered: Revivalism and Working-Class Agitation in County Durham
Authors: Jaffe J. A.
Published: February 2004

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.

It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”

There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.
The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual
Authors: Weber William
Published: February 2004

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.

The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.
Ethics in the Marketplace: Gerrard Winstanley's London Bankruptcy, 1643
Authors: Alsop J. D.
Published: February 2004

One of the casualties of the economic malaise occasioned by the English Civil War was the business career of an obscure thirty-four-year-old junior freeman of the London Merchant Taylors' Company. Had circumstances been otherwise, Gerrard Winstanley would never have gone on to become the eventual leader and spokesman of the Diggers or to develop some of the most innovative and challenging socioeconomic theories of the seventeenth century. Winstanley's bankruptcy of 1643 did not, of course, create by itself one of the foremost radicals of the English Revolution. But scholars are agreed that the failure provoked a significant break in the continuity of Winstanley's life that forced him to change his livelihood and to transport himself from London to Cobham in Surrey, the location of his Digger radicalism. Furthermore, Winstanley never forgot the experience. Throughout his writings of the later 1640s, the bitter contempt and frustration engendered by his financial failings were obvious. They also colored his perceptions of England's current character and its errors. His portrayal of all commerce as dishonest and corrupt is one of the most striking features of his writings:

For matter of buying and selling, the earth stinks with such unrighteousnesse, that for my part, though I was bred a tradesmen, yet it is so hard a thing to pick out a poor living, that a man shall sooner be cheated of his bread, then get bread by trading among men, if by plain dealing he put trust in any.

And truly the whole earth of trading, is generally become the neat art of thieving and oppressing fellow-creatures, and so laies burdens, upon the Creation, but when the earth becomes a common treasury this burden will be taken off.
Evangelists and Their Hearers: Popular Interpretation of Revivalist Preaching in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Authors: Landsman Ned
Published: February 2004

The most persistent difficulty confronting historical interpreters of popular religion in the early modern world is that of establishing the relationship between ideas enunciated by religious leaders and those held by their hearers. The causes of that uncertainty are obvious; where historical materials for the former are plentiful, sources that address the latter are far more difficult to obtain. The great majority of evidence that we have concerning lay religiosity derives from clerical rather than lay sources, and most of it tells us more about religious behavior than belief. Even those rare accounts we have that purport to narrate the spiritual experiences of ordinary people tend to be both unrepresentative and stylized, to the point where the ultimate implications of such materials for understanding popular belief often are far from certain.

Problems of documentation lead to equally significant but less often noted distortions in perspective. Where they have lacked adequate source materials for recovering the mental world of the laity, historians almost by necessity have had to approach their task as one of ascertaining the portion and proportion of the expressions of the ministry that lay men and women adopted. Thus deviations from clerical orthodoxy can only be understood as indicative either of a lack of intellectual sophistication on the part of the laity, or, at best, of a latent “folk” worldview that remains almost inaccessible to historical description. Yet there is ample documentation in the historical record that the laity possessed a rather remarkable capacity to integrate seemingly disparate beliefs and actively forge their own understandings of the delivered message and create their own religious symbols.
“So Few Prizes and So Many Blanks”: Marriage and Feminism in Later Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Levine Philippa
Published: February 2004

Marriage, for the nineteenth-century woman, was perhaps the single most profound and far-reaching institution that would affect the course of her life. For the woman who did not marry, whether by choice or by chance, spinsterhood marked her as one of society's unfortunates, cast aside from the common lot of the sex. For the woman who did enter wedlock, marriage spelled, simultaneously, a loss of freedom in both political and financial matters, perhaps domestic drudgery and frequent pregnancy, but undoubtedly a clear elevation in social status. Class position aside, marriage had a far greater effect on the lives of women than of men, and the pressures for women to marry were correspondingly far greater than those brought to bear upon men.

The meaning and significance of marriage in Victorian England represented a central pressure point in the lives of all women. It was undoubtedly one of the major agencies of socialization to which women were exposed; the pressures it imposed were enormously persuasive and difficult to resist. Family expectation and even self-esteem competed with the public assessment of women on the basis of their marital status. For women, marriage and its effects permeated every aspect of their daily existence and shifted the focus of their emotional and social contacts—what Patricia Jalland has dubbed their “bedroom-bathroom intimacy”—from their own families to those of their husbands.

The growing demographic imbalance between the sexes during the course of the nineteenth century was viewed with alarm by contemporary commentators who feared that the changing ratio of men to women would increase the numbers of unmarried women.
Admirals as Heroes: Patriotism and Liberty in Hanoverian England
Authors: Jordan Gerald , Rogers Nicholas
Published: February 2004

In recent years historians have significantly broadened the parameters of popular politics in the eighteenth century to include the ceremonial and associational aspects of political life, what might be aptly described as popular political culture. Whereas the subject of popular politics was conventionally confined to the programmatic campaigns of post-1760 radicals and to the crucial but episodic phenomenon of popular disturbance, historians have become increasingly attentive to the anniversaries, thanksgivings, processions, and parades—to the realm of symbolism and ritual—that were very much a part of Georgian society. This cultural perspective has radically revised our notion of the “popular,” which can no longer be consigned unproblematically to the actions and aspirations of the subaltern classes but to the complex interplay of all groups that had a stake in the extraparliamentary terrain. It has also broadened our notion of the “political” beyond the confines of Parliament, the hustings, and even the press to include the theater of the street and the marketplace with their balladry, pageantry, and iconography, both ribald and solemn.

Within this context, the theme of the admiral-as-hero in Georgian society will be explored by focusing on Admiral Edward Vernon, the most popular admiral of the mid-eighteenth century, and Horatio Nelson, whose feats and flamboyance are better known. Of particular interest is the way in which their popularity was ideologically constructed and exploited at home. This might seem an unorthodox position to take. Naval biographers have assumed that the popularity of admirals flowed naturally and spontaneously from their spectacular victories and exemplary feats of valor. This may be taken as a truism. But it does not entirely explain their appeal.
Mazzini, Kossuth, and British Radicalism, 1848–1854
Authors: Claeys Gregory
Published: February 2004

The relative quiescence of British working-class radicalism during much of the two decades after 1848, so central to the foundations of mid-Victorian stability, has been the subject of many explanations. Though Chartism did not expire finally until the late 1850s, its mainstream strategy of constitutionalist organization, huge meetings, enormous parliamentary petitions, and the tacit threat of violent intimidation seemed exploded after the debacle of Kennington Common and the failed march on Parliament in April 1848. But other factors also contributed to undermine the zeal for reform. Alleviating the pressures of distress, emigration carried off many activists to America and elsewhere. Relative economic prosperity rendered the economic ends of reform less pressing, and proposals like the Chartist Land Plan less appealing. The popularity of various self-help doctrines, including consumer cooperation, also militated against collectivist political action. “Labour aristocrats” and trade union leaders, moreover, preferred local and sectional economic improvement to the risks and expense of political campaigning.

Accounts of mid-Victorian political stability have had little to say, however, about the impact of European radicalism on the British working-class movement after 1848. That the failure of the continental revolutions brought thousands of refugees to Britain is well known. But although useful studies exist of the internationalist dimensions of Chartism prior to 1849—and of some of the refugee groups generally in this period—the effects of the exiled continental radicals on British working-class politics in the early 1850s have remained largely unconsidered.
Military Force and Civil Authority in the United Kingdom, 1914–1921
Authors: Townshend Charles
Published: February 2004

If liberal England died strangely, no moment in its passing was more bizarre than the close encounter it experienced between the army and a political system from which the military had been banished since the seventeenth century. Habitually all but invisible at home, confining its exploits to lands without the law, and maintaining a political silence equal—though in easier circumstances—to that of the neighboring grande muette, the British army moved to the center of the public stage. It obtained a popular following. This was not merely the result of Britain's involvement in world war. Manifestations of popular militarism, albeit sporadic or marginal, were evident in the later nineteenth century. The second Boer War accelerated a shift in social attitudes. Hostility to “pro-Boers,” if not beginning to resemble the hysteria of 1914, adumbrated the response of a shaken community temporarily recovering cohesion through warlike solidarity. Most public energy was expended in mafficking, but vocal groups continued to campaign for national efficiency and universal military service. The scout movement was the precipitant of a considerable mass sentiment, solidarized by suspicion of Germany and giving back a faint but clear echo of the leagues formed to support the expansion of the German army and navy.

Yet if a novel enthusiasm was eroding traditional aversion to the army, it was scarcely capable of creating a public tolerance for its involvement in domestic affairs. Unlike the navy, whose nature more or less precluded its domestic employment, the army was a suspect weapon. The cultivation of nonpolitical professionalism represented in part a functional response to such public suspicion. Modern major generals would not think of doing what their Cromwellian predecessors had done.
Lordship and Lawlessness in the Palatinate of Lancaster, 1370–1400
Authors: Walker S. K.
Published: February 2004

The precise connection between “bastard feudalism,” the characteristic form of aristocratic social organization in later medieval England, and the disordered condition of English politics in the later Middle Ages has long been a subject for debate among historians. While earlier writers had no doubt that the emergence of magnate affinities—bands of men bound to a lord by an indenture of retainer and a money fee rather than by a heritable fief in land—in the early fourteenth century had destructive consequences for the quality of public order, their unfavorable judgments have now been largely replaced by a more sympathetic account of the workings of magnate lordship, which portrays the late medieval affinity as neither an aberration nor a degeneration from the arrangements of an earlier age, but, rather, the logical successor to them. The creation of this consensus represents, however, only the first stage in the effort to reach a proper understanding of the mechanics of lordship in later medieval England, for it raises a number of secondary questions that have yet to be resolved. How pervasive, for instance, was the network of clientage and patronage represented by the magnate affinity?

One view holds that this network “formed the fabric of contemporary life”: a magnate could effectively control a county or counties by using his indentured retainers “to diffuse the lord's influence through the areas where his estates lay, into the wider affinity, and even among landowners outside the affinity, using above all the power they could wield as local administrators.”
Inventing Revolution: 1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics
Authors: Wilson Kathleen
Published: February 2004

TheRevolution, the Glorious British Revolution, which the Americans have rejoiced in, and will ever rejoice in as the pride of the age in which it was brought about, and the admiration and blessing of succeeding times, must be looked up to with reverence as a precedent, the grandest precedent, that modern times have exhibited for the justification of any people insulted, plundered, or in the least manner oppressed by the unfeelingness of arbitrary power; it having legalized the natural right of resistance. [Public Advertiser, November 1, 1788]

Over a decade ago, Tom Nairn alleged that lack of a populist potentially revolutionary nationalism in England was due in large part to the effective co-option of seventeenth-century upheavals by ruling elites. From his perspective, the Revolution of 1688 constituted only an episode in the “long, successful counter-revolution of the propertied classes” against the subversive ideological potential of the first English Revolution that has continued to the present day. This provocative and unrepentant neo-Marxist reading of English history has, ironically, become part of the new orthodoxy on 1688 that has emerged in the revisionist, anti-Whig historiography of the past fifteen years. The series of events once heralded as the foundation of modern parliamentary democracy is now presented as but a troubled and confusing hiatus in patrician politics, unrelentingly “conservationist” in ideological and political effect, in which Whig and Tory leaders managed to rid themselves of an unacceptable monarch without recourse to the political or ideological extremism of Charles I's reign.
Disraeli as Political Egotist: A Literary and Historical Investigation
Authors: Weeks Richard G.
Published: February 2004

Not many statesmen of world renown have had reputations as accomplished novelists. Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81) was a novelist who wanted to become a politician, a great politician. He succeeded and, in so doing, challenged his biographers to make connections between his thought, as expressed in his numerous political writings and novels, and his actions, as evidenced by his career as a leading Conservative politician in Victorian England. Disraeli's novels were like masks. Whatever the story line, whatever the configuration of main characters, the ambitious Disraeli, hungry for recognition, can be found somewhere inside. His psychology, his values, his objectives all can be discovered with greater or lesser facility in his novels. The writings of Disraeli the novelist serve as an instrument to penetrate the facade of Disraeli the politician.

The political novel allows the reader to experience political constructs in context. Political tracts seldom have the power to draw their readers into a sense of intimacy with their implications for everyday life. To the extent that a novelist can generate empathy in the reader for his characters, the reader can begin to feel the outrage, despair, joy, or tediousness of a political or social circumstance. Disraeli employed the novel to good purpose to express and spread his political ideas. But these ideas represented less of a coherent political platform than an agenda of his personal reactions to the politics of his day, particularly as they related to his own political advancement.
The Peasants' Revolt and the Government of England
Authors: Ormrod W. M.
Published: February 2004

The outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt in the summer of 1381 was arguably the most serious threat ever posed to the stability of English government in the course of the Middle Ages. All historians are agreed that government policy was in large part responsible for the rising. The failure of the crown to maintain its hold over territory in France and to defend the coasts of England, the tendency to bow to pressure from the landed classes and restrict the economic and legal rights of the peasantry, and the outrageous and inequitable taxes of the 1370s, culminating in the commissions to enforce the poll tax in the spring of 1381, all these factors combined to provoke a widespread and perhaps coordinated outbreak of rebellion in southeast England, as well as many more spontaneous and isolated revolts in the West, the Midlands, and the North. Not surprisingly, in most areas the rebellion was directed principally against the agents of the crown. The young Richard II may have been immune from attack, but this only served to increase criticism of his ministers and agents, who were believed to have usurped royal authority and abused the trust placed in them by king and community.

Considering the dramatic events surrounding this assault on royal government and the wealth of material available in the chronicles and the official records, it is surprising that so few historians have examined the specific question of how administration was affected during and after the events of 1381.
The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England
Authors: Cressy David
Published: February 2004

Under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts the English developed a relationship to time—current time within the cycle of the year and historical time with reference to the past—that set them apart from the rest of early modern Europe. All countries followed a calendar that was rooted in the rhythms of ancient Europe and that marked the passage of time by reference to the life of Christ and his saints. But only in England was this traditional calendar of Christian holidays augmented by special days honoring the Protestant monarch and the ordeals and deliverances of the national church. In addition to regulating the seasons of work and worship, the calendar in England served as a reminder of the nation's distinctiveness, of God's mercies, and of England's particular religious and dynastic good fortune. Other Protestant communities, most notably the Dutch, enjoyed a comparable myth of historical exceptionalism—a replay of the Old Testament—but no other nation employed the calendar as the English did to express and represent their identity. Early modern England, in this regard, had more in common with modern America, France, or Australia (with Independence Day, Bastille Day, Australia Day, etc.), than with the rest of post-Reformation Europe.

This article deals with changes in calendar consciousness and annual festive routines in Elizabethan and Stuart England. It examines the rise of Protestant patriotism, and the shaping of a national political culture whose landmarks were royal anniversaries, the memory of Queen Elizabeth, and commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot. It opens a discussion on the vocabulary of celebration and the degree to which festivity was sponsored and orchestrated in the interest of national consolidation or partisan position. And it will show how calendrical observances that at first helped unite the crown and nation became contentious, politicized, and divisive.
The Landed Elite and Political Authority in Britain, ca. 1760–1850
Authors: Jupp Peter J.
Published: February 2004

Significant change in the relationships between rulers, elites, and political authority is a common feature of the major European states in the last half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. In Russia, under Peter III and Catherine II, the nobility was released from the obligation to serve the state as established by Peter the Great and allowed to own property, engage in trade and manufacturing, and participate in local assemblies. In the course of the nineteenth century the hereditary landowning nobility, particularly the wealthiest elements of it, became firmly entrenched in the upper reaches of the bureaucracy without ever being able to dominate it. In Prussia, under Frederick the Great and Frederick William III, noble and gentry landowners were allowed to filter into the ranks, especially the higher ranks, of the bureaucracy; this reversed the embourgeoisement that had occurred under Frederick William I, but not so far as to threaten seriously the bureaucracy's loyalty to the Hohenzollerns or to weaken its reputation for efficiency. Thus the great reforms that followed the defeat by France in 1807 and were designed in part to lay the basis for recovery were executed by a combination of noble and non noble officials, and the latter were especially encouraged in order to ensure that merit rather than birth prevailed as the qualification for state service. In both cases, it could be argued, rulers found it necessary to recruit officials as well as an officer corps from the landed classes when war and territorial aggrandizement expanded the scope of government; they were loath to encourage the idea that landed wealth could automatically bestow political authority.
Changing Perceptions of the New Administrative Class in Anglo-Norman and Angevin England: TheCurialesand Their Conservative Critics
Authors: Turner Ralph V.
Published: February 2004

A complaint among twelfth-century English moralists and chroniclers was that monarchs were choosing “men raised from the dust” to be their ministers and counselors instead of members of old noble families. They charged that the king was choosing as his courtiers orfamiliareslow-born men—plebes, ignobiles, evenrusticiorservi—allowing them to usurp places that belonged to the aristocracy. This chorus of complaint began in the time of William the Conqueror's sons. Only then didnobilesandcurialesbegin to divide into two distinct groups, and new administrative posts provided opportunities for new men to rise to greater wealth and influence.

The early twelfth-century monastic chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that William the Conqueror “raised up the lowest of his Norman followers to the greatest riches.” Often cited is his complaint about Henry I, “So he pulled down many great men [illustres] from positions of eminence …. He ennobled others of base stock [de ignobili stirpe] who had served him well, raised them, so to say, from the dust, and heaping all kinds of favors on them, stationed them above earls and famous castellans.” The author of theGesta Stephanialso complained that Henry I took men of low birth [ex plebeio genere], who had entered his service as court pages and enriched them, endowed them with wide estates, and made them his chief officials. Another chronicler, Richard of Hexham, made a similar comment, although in admiring rather than condemning language, “He oppressed many nobles because of their faithlessness; he elevated to high honors many commoners [ignobiles], whom he found to be upright and loyal to him.”
A “Radical” Problem: The Poor and the English Reformers in the Mid-Seventeenth Century
Authors: Mulligan Lotte , Richards Judith
Published: February 2004

Debates about poverty in mid-seventeenth-century England have, for some years, been a staple of historical studies. In our own time, where the numbers of the dispossessed continue to challenge the success of current modes of social and economic organization, such an interest is understandable and to be welcomed. But the relevance of studies of past problems and solutions and their applicability to present purposes is more complex than is usually recognized.

The immediate benefit of studying discussions for change in mid-seventeenth-century England is that they provide an unusual insight into how members of that society conceived of it. In particular, their observations about the problems of poverty and the role of the poor offer us an understanding of the perceived social structure, the ethical bases for social differentiation, and the degree to which the future could be envisioned as differing from the past or present. Such understandings of proposed social change are invaluable for historians wishing to grasp the underlying assumptions on which past thought and action was predicated.

Past proposals for social reform, however, have also been the focus of a significantly different enquiry by historians. In order to render those past programs more comprehensible (and more directly “relevant”) to modern readers, they are often placed on a “conservative” versus “radical” continuum, one end of which has sometimes been marked “extreme left wing.” This article argues that any such classification inevitably leads to misunderstandings of the authors and of their programs and, consequently, misrepresents both to the present.
Thomas Manley and the Rate-of-Interest Debate, 1668–1673
Authors: Keirn Tim , Melton Frank T.
Published: February 2004

Historians have seen the mid-1660s as a period of significant distress in many sectors of the English economy. With population pressure diminishing, agricultural prices moved away from the benefit of producers, and rent and land values stabilized. Indeed, landowners were futher burdened by the imposition of higher levels of taxation in the wake of debts generated by the Civil War and the Commonwealth. Moreover, English merchants complained that Dutch competition limited the expansion of their overseas commerce, while the Second Dutch War (1664–67) severely dislocated trade and incurred heavy public expenditure and even higher levels of taxation. The outbreak of plague in London, followed by the Great Fire, further interrupted trade at the commercial and transport nexus of the economy. Hence, war finance and the rebuilding of London put pressure on the stock of loanable funds in a period characterized by a generally low level of prices. Interest rates had fallen gradually with the increase in the availability of capital in the first half of the seventeenth century, yet this trend, according to Christopher Clay, “was unquestionably retarded by the extensive government borrowing associated with the succession of civil and foreign wars between 1642 and 1674.” Of course, in seventeenth-century England, a maximum rate of interest was set by statute. The medieval prohibition on usury was first broken in 1545, setting a ceiling of 10 percent per year.
The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in the 1620s
Authors: Cogswell Thomas
Published: February 2004

John Rous did more than record the news that reached his isolated parish in Suffolk; he also recorded the local discussions of these reports. The latter practice was potentially dangerous. Two recent royal proclamations had expressly prohibited discussions of “affairs of state,” and, as Rous's diary reveals, these private talks could easily become extended critiques of royal policy. Perhaps for that reason Rous, the local parson, consistently sought to be a moderating influence: “I would alwaies speake the best of that our King and state did, and thinke the best too, till I had good groundes” to do otherwise. Unfortunately for Rous, he found it increasingly difficult to “speake the best” in the mid-1620s as Charles I dissolved parliament after parliament, collected taxes of dubious legality, and experimented with the established church; “our Kings proceedings have caused men's mindes to be incensed, to rove, and projecte.” Popular projections, moreover, led to the edge of “an insurrection”; in such an increasingly tense atmosphere, Rous was fearful that one misplaced word would fuel reports that “the whole state were revolting.”

His most severe trial came in 1627 when Charles I interrupted an otherwise disastrous war against Spain to invade France. The motive for the Ré expedition quite simply baffled Rous's parishioners. When the parson refuted the criticism of Mr. Paine, one of his parishioners, Paine simply “would not heare it by any meanes: but fell in generall to speake distastfully of the voyage and then of our warre with France.”
Reinterpreting the Elizabethan Commons: The Parliamentary Session of 1566
Authors: Alsop J. D.
Published: February 2004

Sir Geoffrey Elton has breathed new life into the putrefying corpse of Elizabethan parliamentary history. In conjunction with others, notably Michael Graves, Norman Jones, and David Dean, he has succeeded in demolishing the standard interpretation of high politics, spirited opposition, and principled conflict perfected by Sir John Neale. Elton's analysis of the early Elizabethan Parliaments provides, for the first time, the detailed revisionist argument, one capable in many respects, moreover, of logical extension over the remainder of the reign and buttressed by a series of general overviews. For all the necessary emphasis on cooperation, bill procedure, and “business as usual,” Elton is well aware that politics intruded on legislative affairs, and at no time was this more obvious than during the troubled 1566 session. Neale had devoted forty-seven printed pages to his interpretation of constitutional crisis during these three months. Elton provides a far briefer, more taut, coverage but nonetheless the session figures very prominently in his portrayal of “great affairs.” It is not the intention of this article to dispute Elton's general interpretation of a political crisis orchestrated in good measure by privy councillors intent on exerting pressure on the queen to settle the succession issue. That portrayal is sensible and, in its broad outlines, generally supported by the known evidence. Nevertheless, in his desire to purge Neale's interpretations from the corpus of Elizabethan parliamentary history, Sir Geoffrey has, in a number of instances, permitted his arguments and beliefs to outrun his evidence. These occasions are important for the understanding of events and themes within Parliament.
Political Canonization and Political Symbolism in Medieval England
Authors: Theilmann John M.
Published: February 2004

Political legitimacy was a shifting concept in medieval England. On the one hand were the tangible aspects of power such as control over appointments and the purse; on the other were the symbolic attributes of power. Baronial rebels were able to gain control over the material aspects of political power on more than one occasion, and they also tried to establish control over the symbolic aspects of legitimacy. Here, they usually failed, for medieval people generally failed to accept baronial use of political symbols as legitimating future developments. Monarchs, on the other hand, were more successful in exploiting the symbolic aspects of kingship to further legitimate their power.

The simultaneous success and failure of royal and baronial efforts at establishing legitimacy bear further scrutiny. After viewing the problem of the establishment of legitimacy, this essay focuses on two related episodes during the reign of Richard II: the attempted canonizations of King Edward II and Richard FitzAlan, earl of Arundel. Richard II's reign is chosen for three reasons. First, there was a clearly articulated struggle between king and barons that was fought out in both the physical and symbolic arenas. Second, the process of political canonization produced a royal and a baronial saint during the reign. Although not premeditated on either side, there was a conjunction of events and a desire by the king and the barons to manipulate the symbolic aspects of these events during the reign. The final reason for subjecting saintly symbolism in Richard's reign to examination is that the process of political canonization reached its zenith then.
Policy on the Run: Henry II and Irish Sea Diplomacy
Authors: Hays L. , Jones E. D.
Published: February 2004

The activities of medieval monarchs were severely circumscribed by the environment in which they had to operate. They were at the mercy of events in a more acute sense than many modern historians realize. Difficulties of communication in particular could play havoc with royal policy such that a mooted response to a problem that had arisen could be redundant before effected. Most difficult of all would be consistency in terms of royal policy except in the most general understanding of that term, and indeed it could be argued that those historians who do tend to see “consistency” in the policies of medieval monarchs are superimposing onto their subjects an order they desire for their own mental processes.

Much of what has been said so far is applicable to Henry II in his dealings with Irish Sea politics. Henry was overlord of a vast empire through which he constantly circulated and in which the Irish Sea region was but a small part. It was seldom his most important consideration. In his dealings with Ireland and its neighbors, it should always be remembered that this was a region that commanded his attention fitfully, either on its own or as part of a larger whole. It would appear that Henry did try to pursue some limited kind of consistency in areas of his Irish Sea diplomacy. He could also be inconsistent. He could and did find himself at the mercy of events and had to react accordingly.
Profit and Purpose in the Development of Thomas Cromwell's Landed Estates
Authors: Robertson Mary L.
Published: February 2004

Despite the very considerable scholarly attention focused on Thomas Cromwell in recent decades, surprisingly little is known or written about his private financial affairs and, in particular, about the acquisition and management of his landed estates. His principal but badly outdated biographer, R. B. Merriman, was content with a few sweeping generalizations about immense ill-gotten wealth; the only modern biography devotes to this topic barely two paragraphs; and G. R. Elton, who began and sustains the Cromwellian renaissance, is concerned primarily with the public man.

Yet at the time of his arrest in 1540, Cromwell was one of the biggest landowners in the southeastern home counties, the end result of an active decade of buying and selling lands, augmented by large monastic and other royal grants. With Cromwell's creation as earl of Essex, his appointment as lord great chamberlain, and his son Gregory's marriage into the Seymour family (becoming thereby uncle to the future Edward VI), the uninitiated might well be pardoned for seeing here the origin of still one more powerful landed political dynasty which, like the Seymours themselves, the Russells, the Paulets, and the Cecils, owed its beginning to political skill and the opportunities of a fluid sixteenth-century land market.

Certainly this new style of service aristocracy, founded first on office in the central government and concentrating on London and the court, with landed wealth frequently coming later as a reward rather than first as a birthright, was perfectly consistent with the major realignment of relations between king and nobility which characterized the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs and their leading ministers.
Reformation of Manners and the Social Composition of Offenders in an East Anglian Cloth Village: Earls Colne, Essex, 1531–1642
Authors: von Friedeburg Robert
Published: February 2004

The relationship between population growth and growing social differentiation and the appeal of Puritanism to—and its effect on— parts of English society has been the subject of much debate ever since the publication of Christopher Hill'sSociety and Puritanism. The problem was reformulated and elaborated by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, whose studies focused on the village level. They described in detail the effect of Puritan preaching on local society and what parts of local society were particularly attracted by Puritan preachings, taking as an example the village of Terling, Essex. From the late sixteenth century on, Puritanism proved to be a means to enforce public discipline. Keith Wrightson pointed out the concern for order in Puritan preachings. Puritan preachers reminded assize juries of their responsibility to enforce morals and to restore order. Thus they provided a mental framework for the local “better sort,” who wished to readjust their relations to the growing number of local poor. The enforcement of morals was carried out by wealthy local officeholders by means of sweeps of the alehouses, for example, and served as such an adjustment in the village of Terling. Religion, then, ceased to be a vertical bond tying local society together but added instead a cultural dimension to the already existing differences in property and income.

In recent years both Margaret Spufford and Martin Ingram have questioned this connection of Puritanism and the growing difference between rich and poor in many villages. Spufford claims that, despite growing social differentiation, religion still worked as a common bond for poor and wealthy villagers alike.
The Myth of the English Reformation
Authors: MacCulloch Diarmaid
Published: February 2004

The myth of the English Reformation is that it did not happen, or that it happened by accident rather than design, or that it was halfhearted and sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism; the point at issue is the identity of the Church of England. The myth was created in two stages, first in the middle years of the seventeenth century, and then from the third decade of the nineteenth century; and in either case it was created by one party within the church, largely consisting of clergy, with a particular motive in mind. This was to emphasize the Catholic continuity of the church over the break of the Reformation, in order to claim that the true representative of the Catholic church within the borders of England and Wales was not the minority loyal to the bishop of Rome, but the church as by law established in 1559 and 1662. In the seventeenth century the group involved was called Arminian by contemporaries, and in later days it came to be labeled High Church, or Laudian, after its chief early representative William Laud. In the nineteenth century the same party revived was known variously as Tractarian, Oxford Movement, High Church, Ritualist, and, most commonly in the twentieth century, Anglo-Catholic. Here are two characteristic quotations from one of the most distinguished of this nineteenth-century group, John Henry Newman, before his departure for Rome and a cardinal's hat. First, when defending himself against the charge of innovation: “We are a ‘Reformed’ Church, not a ‘Protestant’ … the Puritanic spirit spread in Elizabeth's and James's time, and … has been succeeded by the Methodistic. …We, the while, children of the Holy Church, whencesoever brought into it, whether by early training or after thought, have had one voice, that one voice which the Church has had from the beginning." Second, introducing the characteristic Anglican expression of the idea of continuity, the notion of the via media: “A number of distinct notions are included in the notion of Protestantism; and as to all these our Church has taken a Via Media between it and Popery.
The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment
Authors: Goldie Mark
Published: February 2004

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scott'sRedgauntlet, set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scott's tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement.

It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.
The Court and Its Neighborhood: Royal Policy and Urban Growth in the Early Stuart West End
Authors: Smuts R. Malcolm
Published: February 2004

The early Stuart period witnessed a startling transformation in the physical environment of the royal court. At James I's accession, Whitehall and the great courtier's palaces along the Strand still lay in an essentially rural landscape. To the south, Westminster was a compact town of perhaps 6,500 people, while to the north and east, the three Strand parishes of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, St. Mary le Savoy, and St. Clement Danes contained another 6,000, mostly concentrated in a narrow ribbon along the Strand itself. North of the Strand, the landscape remained open except for a thinner ribbon along High Holborn. Covent Garden was a pasture and orchard, containing a number of fine timber trees, St. Martin's church was still literally “in the fields“ and Lincoln's Inn Fields comprised over forty acres of open land. Dairying and market gardening were going concerns over much of what soon became the West End. Only a few years before, St. Martin's parish had experienced an enclosure riot.

On the eve of the Civil War, a continuous urban landscape extended from Temple Bar as far as Soho, and ribbons of development spread along both sides of St. James's Park, as far as Knightsbridge and Picadilly. The population of old Westminster had increased by about 250 percent, while the Strand area grew even more rapidly, with St. Martin's-in-the-Fields experiencing more than a fivefold increase to as many as 17,000 people. Had they been independent settlements, all three of the large West End parishes of St. Margaret's Westminster, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and St. Clement Danes would have ranked among the half dozen largest English provincial cities. In all, the western suburbs' population probably stood between 40,000 and 60,000.
Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in Southeast England, 1690–1760
Authors: Monod Paul
Published: February 2004

For historians, as for revenue officers, the bold English smuggler of the eighteenth century has been an elusive figure. His motives, the structure of his business, and his relationship to broader social and economic trends, remain far from clear. This is partly because the sources for histories of smuggling are fragmentary and obscure, but it also reflects the inadequacies of proposed interpretations. The early chroniclers of the smuggling trade represented it as an assertion of popular rights, bravely, if at times violently, defended against the agents of an intrusive government. This somewhat romantic view has recently been reformulated by Cal Winslow, who has depicted southcoast tea smuggling in the 1740s as a “social crime,” sanctioned by the laboring classes but condemned by those in authority. Conversely, economic historians have written of smuggling as a “big business” that accounted for one-third of English trade with France and Holland and had an effect both on the level of prices and the distribution of goods. The tea smuggler, as Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna Mui have noted, “was indeed an important complement to his legal counterpart and as such contributed to the commercial expansion of the kingdom.” He “became a virtual pioneer in developing trade facilities,” especially in remote areas, and helped to expand the market for luxury commodities like brandy and tea by undercutting the prices of the great merchants and established companies.