bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
England's Ancien Regime as a Confessional State
Authors: Clark J. C. D. 
Published: November 2007

Any model of English society during the “long” eighteenth century whether briefly characterized as an ancien regime or a confessional state must rest on some consideration of its seventeenth-century antecedents, and include some account of how and why a quite different historiography was worked out in the nineteenth century. Similarly, any critique, to be fully effective, would need to range as widely in time and theme. The preceding articles by James Bradley, John Money, and John Phillips offer useful challenges to part of the wider thesis but so far lack a broad perspective. This in itself focusses attention on my own books at the expense of those of my colleagues. The historiographical element in my work has made explicit my indebtedness to the many other scholars whose research over three centuries of British history is congruent with my own: only that restricted horizon which limits some enquiries to one or two decades could lead critics to fail to do justice to what is, after all, the work of a generation of authors and not one of “revisionist” alone.It is because the new thinking which I addressed has been the product of a diverse generation of scholars rather than of a “school” of “revisionists” (let alone of an individual) that the restatements of an old orthodoxy have been so few. There has been no general counter-attack on the “revisionists,” and no alternative synoptic vision of the English past which remotely looks as if it could be a blueprint either for a revival of the old history or for some quite new vision. Replies have tried instead to defend some part of the old model on increasingly restricted ground. It has been suggested, for example, that “meaningful popular politics” can indeed be found in the borough of Maidstone in the late eighteenth century; but such an argument can only be sustained by not attending to the reasons which made Maidstone, and a few boroughs like it, unusual. Here as elsewhere, the pattern of response has been to defend a previous thesis by narrowing the frame of reference chronologically or geographically, searching for one area at least where it can be made to fit.
The Eternal Triangle and Court Politics: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas Wyatt
Authors: Warnicke Retha M. 
Published: November 2007

The opinion of modern scholars is divided about the nature of Anne Boleyn's relationship to Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor poet. On the basis of a few of his verses and three Catholic treatises, some writers have concluded that Anne and he were lovers. In these analyses not enough attention has been paid to the role of Henry VIII, the third member of this alleged lovers' triangle, who guarded his own honor and inquired into that of his wives, before, during, and after their marriages to him. A comment on the way in which the king viewed and defended his honor will be useful to this examination of the evidence customarily accepted as proof of Anne and Wyatt's love affair.A gentleman's honor, as Henry's contemporaries perceived it, was a complicated concept. First and foremost it was assumed that a man's birth and lineage would predispose him to chivalric acts on the battlefield where, in fact, only one cowardly lapse would stain his and his family's reputation forever. Secondly, the concept embodied the notion that it bestowed upon its holder certain social privileges and respect. During Henry's reign, moreover, the “realm and the community of honour” came to be viewed as “identical” with the sovereign power of the king at its head. One result of this “nationalization,” was that the behavior of crown dependants and servants affected the king's good name in both a personal and a public sense, and his ministers took care to do all that was appropriate to his reputation in settling disputes and in negotiating treaties.
Episcopal Reluctance: Lanfranc's Resignation Reconsidered
Authors: Ruud Marylou 
Published: November 2007

On 29 August 1070, the Norman monk, Lanfranc, was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury despite having recoiled at the prospect when informed of his appointment earlier that year. His alleged reluctance to undertake the business of the English Church is well known and accepted by Anglo-Norman historians. And the account that his compliance was forced only through the united persuasion of the king, the queen, his former abbot, Herluin of Bee, and the papal legate, Erminfrid of Sion, adds an element of unparalleled sincerity to his resolve. More than two years after his consecration, Lanfranc wrote a letter to Pope Alexander II reasserting his initial aversion to taking office: the foreign tongue and barbarous English inhabitants presented a greater challenge than he, personally unworthy and waning in vigor, wished to endure. Lanfranc then asked the pope to relieve him of his burdensome episcopal duties so he might return to the monastic life.Modern historians have equated this petition with his initial unwillingness to take office and have tacitly appended it to those humble actions usually associated with a monk bishop. Frank Barlow writes that Lanfranc had “suffered bitterly when he first went to England.” He infers from the resignation letter that all of the archbishop's passions “were diverted into conventional monastic virtues.” And Margaret Gibson advises that “No assessment of Lanfranc … can or should stray far from Lanfranc the monk.” Lanfranc had hesitated and been reluctant to accept Canterbury; therefore, the implication is that in 1072 he humbly wished to shed the office he had been compelled to enter.
Partner or Puppet? Lord John Russell at the Foreign Office, 1859–1862
Authors: Scherer Paul H. 
Published: November 2007

In the past two decades Lord John Russell has suffered a decline in reputation which is undeserved. This has been especially true in regard to his role as foreign secretary in the second Palmerston government. The decline has not resulted from significant new evidence or from a new insight into existing evidence, so much as from a series of apparently accidental circumstances. The most important of these have been the fact that the only recent biography of Russell, by John Prest, placed little stress either on foreign affairs or on his post-1852 career, expressing the belief that he “should have retired” at the end of his first administration.Prest's influence has been intensified by several major studies of foreign policy, which have given a negative interpretation of Russell's role under Palmerston. Since each of these is the most important work on the topic concerned, their view of Lord John carries considerable weight. Yet, even more than was the case with Prest's biography, their comments about Russell appear on a very few pages, and suggest that the authors viewed the issue of Lord John's relationship with Palmerston as tangential to their research or analysis. The evidence they cite often falls into two categories: 1) statements of biased observers, who had grudges against Russell, or 2) material that is open to other interpretation or is an inadequate and misleading sample of the evidence available.
How the Normans DeterminedDomesday BookManorial Values for Essex County
Authors: Jackson Carl R. 
Published: November 2007

What determined the value recorded for a manor in theDomesday Book?This is a controversial question among scholars engaged in Domesday studies, and various arguments have been adduced as solutions to this problem. It has been suggested that the Normans calculated manorial value by using the quantity of a manor's sheep, its annual income, the amount of its tax units, or the number of its plow lands; but no one has proved which of these factors were used by the Normans in 1086 to compute manorial value. Many of these proposed solutions overlook the importance of agrarian agriculture, which was the basis of Domesday economy. Some historians disregard the contemporary meaning of Domesday terminology to advance their new and, as yet, unacceptable interpretations of how to compute the value of a manor. This article uses the contemporary meaning of Domesday terminology combined with traditional historical method and statistical analysis to argue that the Normans used plow lands as the basis for determining manorial value in Domesday Essex county.Before the arrival of modern computers, the vast amount of available information in theDomesday Bookobscured this simple solution to the problem. There was just too much data to be assessed accurately by pen and pencil. The unique qualities of the Domesday survey make it particularly suitable for a computerized statistical analysis of its database. This is because the survey employed a predetermined set of questions that yield data appropriate for statistical analysis, and manorial value is one of those questions.
ThePlaine MansPastor: Arthur Dent and the Cultivation of Popular Piety in Early Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Hudson Elizabeth K. 
Published: November 2007

With the collapse of presbyterian efforts to effect structural change in the Church of England in the 1590s, reformers were forced to realize that only widespread and sustained popular support could bring about further reform of the church. It is in this last decade of Elizabeth's reign that Christopher Hill sees the emergence of what he calls a “new Puritanism” designed to nurture such a broad base of support for further reform. This “new Puritanism,” which emphasized preaching and the cultivation of an individual piety rather than ecclesiastical reorganization, “with the household as its essential unit rather than the parish,” could also be described as a return to earlier values that had characterized Puritanism before the rise of the presbyterian party. Whether one chooses to interpret the trends of the late 1590s as “new” or “old,” what is important is that reformers by 1600 were making extensive use of both pulpit and press as instruments for influencing the hearts and minds of the English laity. An examination of the more frequently reprinted works of practical divinity in the first generation of the seventeenth century (which included much sermon literature) ought to reveal the themes that reformers hoped would strike a responsive chord with English readers.Surveying such publications from the 1580s into the early 1600s, we may be surprised to find that two of the most popular works were Protestantized versions of Catholic works: Thomas Rogers's translation ofDe imitatione Christi(1580) and Edmund Bunny'sA Booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to Resolution(1584), adapted from Robert Parsons'sFirst Book of the Christian exercise(1582).
Richard Harris, Slave Trader Spokesman
Authors: Rawley James A. 
Published: November 2007

“So little is known of the separate traders,” lamented the historian of the Royal African Company, K. G. Davies, that he was reduced to perceptive speculation about their activity. The authority, Basil Williams, writing about the period 1714–1760, asserted, “The traffic in negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company.…“ In actuality a great deal can be discovered about the separate traders and their activity. The papers of Humphry Morice provide a rich source for a merchant who was perhaps London's and Great Britain's foremost slave trader in the 1720s. The assertion that the traffic in Negro slaves was carried on mainly by the Royal African Company is easily refuted by materials in the Public Record Office. London separate traders dominated the trade for the first three decades of the eighteenth century giving way to Bristol traders in the 1730s, who in turn gave way to Liverpool ascendancy in the 1740s.The English slave trade between 1699 and 1729, energized by the end of monopoly and the booming international market for slaves in America, grew prodigiously. In these years England accounted for nearly one-half of all slaves exported from the west coast of Africa. London alone accounted for two-thirds of all slaves delivered by English ships.Although the period falls half a century and more before the classic exposition of the advantages of free trade over monopoly by Adam Smith, an English free trade doctrine had found expression in Sir Dudley North's pamphlet, Discourses upon Trade (1691), and parlimentary proceedings. Interlopers in the slave trade, smugglers in the lucrative Spanish-American trade who opposed parliamentary restriction on their activity, separate traders whose participation in the trade became legalized in 1698, and a variety of commercial, industrial, and planting interests all contributed in their fashion to an outlook favoring free trade in slaves.
The Stansfields of Halifax: A Case Study of the Making of the Middle Class
Authors: Smail John 
Published: November 2007

Between the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, four generations of the Stansfield family lived in Halifax—an upland parish in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Although its politics were calm, the century and a half between England's two great “revolutions” was not devoid of change in other respects. Significant social, economic, and cultural developments during this period laid the foundations for the ferment of the Industrial Revolution. The history of the Stansfield family is an excellent illustration of these changes, for there was a world of difference between the great-grandfather, Josias Stansfield, who was in his prime at the Restoration, and his great-grandsons, George and David Stansfield, who were in their primes a century later.For his part, Josias was recognizably a man of the middling sort. A yeoman engaged in farming and small-scale textile production, his economic activities and his social standing place him in the ranks of families who fell between the few gentlemen who lived in the area and the mass of simple artisans and laborers who had to struggle just to survive. Josias's great-grandsons, George and David Stansfield lived in a different world. By the mid-eighteenth century, Halifax's textile industry was increasingly dominated by large-scale production of which George's large putting-out concern and David's substantial export business were typical. George and David's social position was also quite different. No longer merely comfortable, these two second cousins were among the wealthiest residents of their respective townships, and they had assumed an appropriately significant share of the political and social leadership in the parish.
Wellington and the “Open Question”: The Issue of Catholic Emancipation, 1821–1829
Authors: Davis Richard W. 
Published: November 2007

For all the recognition of the immense importance of Catholic Emancipation, both in itself and for what it is supposed to have led to (most notably, parliamentary reform), significant questions still surround it. Why, after Daniel O'Connell's victory in County Clare in June 1828 precipitated a crisis, did that crisis drag on for more than six months of perpetual wavering and mixed signals from the British government? Why was a cabinet not summoned? Why did the prime minister so long refuse either to confide in or to remove the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland? Finally, what was the likely effect of these months of shuffling and confusion in shaping the course of politics in the years to come?The Duke of Wellington is central to answering such questions. Before 1828, Wellington was a key player whose doubts and fears were broadly representative of those that reshaped the positions of many of emancipation's most powerful opponents and brought them around to the necessity of accepting the measure. In 1828 and 1829 as prime minister, Wellington made decisions that were critical in determining how the measure would be carried. Some of those decisions had an important bearing on how emancipation was received in the country and therefore on the political divisions that followed.The explanation usually given for the government's failure to act is that the king refused to permit it and would not allow the cabinet to consider the matter. In January, when the king asked Wellington to form a government, he had stipulated and the duke had agreed that Catholic Emancipation should not be a government measure.
Heroes or Villains?: The Irish, Crime, and Disorder in Victorian England
Authors: Swift Roger 
Published: November 2007

During the Victorian period the link between Irish immigration, crime, and disorder in England was widely regarded by contemporary observers as axiomatic. In 1836 the Report on the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain devoted four pages to the examination of Irish criminality, noting that “the Irish in the larger towns of Lancashire commit more crimes than an equal number of natives of the same places,” and in 1839 the Report of the Constabulary Commissioners observed that in the towns of South Lancashire, “when large bodies of Irish of less orderly habits, and far more prone to the use of violence in fits of intoxication settled permanently in these towns, the existing police force, which was sufficient to repress crime and disorders among a purely English population, has been found, under these altered circumstances, inadequate to the regular enforcement of the law.”The belief that the Irish in England were the harbingers of crime was by no means novel. With the substantial increase in Irish immigration during the early Victorian period, the host society's widespread belief in the innate criminality of the Irish—and, more particularly, of the Irish poor—formed an integral component of the negative side of the Irish stereotype. Witness, for example, Thomas Carlyle's much-quoted view that “in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence” the Irishman constituted “the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder,” or Henry Mayhew's assertion that “as a body, moreover, the habitual criminals of London are said to be, in nine cases out of ten, ‘Irish Cockneys,’ that is, persons born of Irish parents in the Metropolis.”
“A Tonic to the Nation”: The Festival of Britain, 1951
Authors: Leventhal F. M. 
Published: November 2007

No event of the post-Second World War decade in Britain is recalled as affectionately or enveloped in such an aura of nostalgia as the Festival of Britain, a five-month series of cultural events and exhibits, with its centerpiece at the South Bank in London. But the Festival dear to the recollections of those growing up during and after the war diverged sharply from the original conception of its progenitors.In 1943 the Royal Society of the Arts, partly responsible for the Great Exhibition of 1851, suggested to the government that an international exhibition along similar lines be staged in 1951 to commemorate the earlier event. To propose a celebratory occasion in 1943 was an act of faith that the war would not only end successfully, but that Britain would have recovered sufficiently by 1951 to warrant such a demonstration. In September 1945, with the war over and Labour in power, Gerald Barry, the editor of the News Chronicle, addressed an open letter to Stafford Cripps, then President of the Board of Trade, advocating a trade and cultural exhibition in London as a way of commemorating the centenary of the Crystal Palace. Such an exhibition would advertise British products and display British prowess in design and craftsmanship. He favored a site in the center of London, such as Hyde Park or Battersea, either of which would provide ample space for such an exhibition. What prompted these suggestions was the need to provide practical help to British commerce at a time when it was clearly under pressure shifting from wartime controls to peacetime competition.
“Let Truth Be Free”: John Bunyan and the Restoration Crisis of 1667–1673
Authors: Greaves Richard L. 
Published: November 2007

In the mid-1980s Stuart historians began a major re-evaluation of the restoration era. Among the principal themes are the period's unsettledness, the continuing impact of the radical tenets that had been manifested so forcefully in the mid-century upheavals, the significance of religion and ideology, and renewed debate over the origin of political parties. As I have suggested elsewhere, the period is most accurately conceived as a time of recurring crises of varying magnitude and duration. The first extended from Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658 to the passage of the Conventicle Act in 1664, the second from 1667 to the enactment of the Test Act in 1673, the third from the revelation of the spurious Popish Plot in 1678 to the repression of the Rye House schemers and the Monmouth/Russell/Essex cabal in 1683, the fourth the rebellions of the earl of Argyll and the duke of Monmouth in 1685, and the fifth the crisis that entailed the collapse of James II's regime and the constitutional settlement of 1689.Bunyan lived through the first four periods of crisis and died amid the final one. It is appropriate to ask how this reinterpretation of the restoration period affects our interpretation of Bunyan. Elsewhere I have offered some suggestions, particularly with respect to the crisis of 1678–83 and our understanding of The Holy War, Of Antichrist and His Ruine, and Seasonable Counsel: or, Advice to Sufferers. This essay will focus on the crisis of 1667–73, the principal interpreter of which is Gary De Krey. For him this controversy at root entailed a crucial debate about liberty of conscience—a revival of the debate that in his judgment was central to the mid-century revolution. De Krey makes a compelling case for the significance of the debate in the period 1667–73 because it challenged many of the assumptions on which the restoration settlement was founded, including the limits of political authority, the relationship between church and Crown, and the rights and obligations of subjects. In their various assertions of the right of conscience, nonconformists rejected the restoration settlement by insisting on God's ultimate sovereignty in the spiritual realm and “the autonomy of the conscience as God's vicegerent in that sphere.” For them the issue was not parliamentary versus royal sovereignty—not least because the policy of persecution was parliamentary—but the sovereignty of the conscience against any persecutorial authority.
Eighteenth-Century English Politics: Recent Work
Authors: Black Jeremy 
Published: November 2007

This article is intended as a sequel to that written in 1992 and published in Albion the following year (vol. 23, 2 [Fall 1993]: 419–41). It reflects the wealth of scholarship published in recent years, evidence, if any is needed, that the eighteenth century is far from dead; however, it is more than an update or appendix. One of the major problems with review articles and historiographical surveys is that they can range so far back in time that they seem to repeat the controversies of the past rather than to take sufficient note of those of the present or to point the way to those that may be imminent.Too much historiographical work relates to long-published scholarship. Though this older work was important, surely less emphasis should be placed today on Butterfield and Namier. Not only do their studies appear dated or superseded; they are of interest from the point of how we have got to where we are, while no longer throwing much light on matters. The same is true of works that caused a splash when they appeared, but now seem very much of their time, such as John Brewer's Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (1976).We are all devoured by time. One of the great pleasures of scholarship is that others come along and build on, revise, or reject our work. Thus, one of the advantages of writing a sequel is that adopting the historiographical longue durée is not necessary and going for the here and now is possible. As with my former essay, there is a powerful element of choice and subjectivity.