bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Visiting Entertainers At The Cluniac Priory, Thetf ord 1497-1540
Authors: Wasson John 
Published: November 2007

Except for the Visitations and occasional obedientary rolls preserved in cathedral libraries, the intimate records of English monastic life are disappointingly scarce. They are particularly scarce in East Anglia, where many documents had already been destroyed during the Peasants' Revolt, long before the usual ravages following the Dissolution. It is therefore surprising that one of the few important manuscripts which did survive has received very little attention from scholars. I refer to the priors' accounts from the Cluniac Priory of Our Lady at Thetford, Norfolk.While very little remains to tell us about life at the priory during the middle ages, we are at least fortunate to have these extremely detailed and almost complete priors' accounts for the final forty-four years of the priory's existence. They are now bound together in a single well-preserved volume, and are deposited at the University Library, Cambridge (Add. Ms. 6969). Although this lengthy manuscript has apparently been at Cambridge for a very long time, it was unknown to the great Norfolk antiquarian, F. Blomefield, when he wrote his History of Thetford (1739). Thomas Martin was unaware of the document when he published his own History of Thetford (1779)—even though he had access to other important materials, including notes from the priory's Cartulary which had perished in the disastrous Cotton Library fire of 1731. The manuscript was also unknown to the committee which compiled the Victoria County History of Norfolk in 1906, despite the fact that L. G. Bolingbroke had seen it and printed two entries from it in “Pre-Elizabethan Plays and Players in Norfolk.”
Three Pamphlets Concerning Father Edmund Campion, S. J.
Authors: Tempesta Joseph F. 
Published: November 2007

Anthony Munday was a protege of John Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Leicester himself was a member of the progressive Protestant nobility in Elizabethan England, which sought to turn completely away from Rome and toward Geneva. These progressives wanted vernacular translations of great works such as the Bible and the classics. They aimed at founding an English and Protestant tradition of literature.In 1579 Philip II of Spain continued to press for an alliance with Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth seriously considered marrying the Due d'Alencon. Such a marriage would cement ties between England and France. The leading progressives, Leicester, Walshingham and Cecil could tolerate neither one of these Roman Catholic alliances. Thus, Leicester intensified his patronage of Puritan propagandists.When the Campion controversy arose in 1581, it proved a boon to Leicester and the progressives. Here was an opportunity to garner Elizabeth's support, if they could prove that Jesuits and Roman Catholics were plotting regicide and the return of England to Roman Catholicism.Between 1581 and 1584 Munday produced a series of pamphlets designed to arouse English opinion against “popish recusants.” This essay deals with one of these pamphlets: A discoverie of Edmund Campion and his confederates, their most horrible and traiterous practices against her majestye's most royal person and realm. … In this essentially propagandistic tract, Munday equates priestly activity of the Jesuits with subversion. This equation was based upon a Parliamentary statute of 1581, which declared that priests sent from abroad to convert Englishmen were guilty of treason.
Opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts, 1864-1886
Authors: Hamilton Margaret 
Published: November 2007

Between 1864 and 1869, four laws, known as the Contagious Diseases Acts, were passed by the British Parliament in an attempt to reduce venereal disease in the armed services. These Acts, which applied to certain military stations, garrison, and seaport towns, gave a police officer authority to arrest any woman found within the specified areas whom he considered to be a prostitute. The woman in question was then brought before a magistrate who, if he agreed with the arresting officer, would order her to register and submit to a medical examination. If found to be suffering from venereal disease, she was sent to a hospital where she could be detained for three months or longer, at the discretion of the physican in charge. If she refused to submit to the examination or to enter the hospital, she could be imprisoned with or without hard labor.This legislation was enacted at the urging of officials in the War Office and the Admiralty who believed that the efficiency of the army and navy was being dangerously impaired because of the high incidence of venereal disease. Ultimately, they maintained, the security of the nation itself would be jeopardized.Parliament passed these laws very quietly, and the press referred to them only briefly, ostensibly because the subject was not considered seemly for public discussion. Little by little, however, English men and women became aware of this legislation, and with awareness came criticism.
The Origins of Modern Social Legislation: The Henrician Poor Law of 1536
Authors: Kunze Neil L. 
Published: November 2007

It is the purpose of this essay to rescue the Henrician Poor Law of 1536 from its relative obscurity by examining the statute as the beginning of a new legislative era in English economic and social history. Although the non-exist ence of House of Commons Journals for this period prevents a detailed study of the making and makers of the Henrician poor law legislation, documents hitherto neglected, exist for a comparative study of Tudor poor law policy. Whether dealing with the nineteenth-century corn law question or with the sixteenth-century poor law policy, few historians give sufficient time and attention to a detailed analysis of the actual statutes of the realm.Historians have ignored the Henrician statutes and usually begin their discussions of English poor relief by describing and interpreting the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. If mentioned at all, the Henrician legislation is presented as an ineffective attempt to solve the problem of poverty. Often this legislation is the subject of unfavorable generalizations:The social legislation of Henry's Parliaments was not only scant but brutal and demoralizing in that it reflected a puritanical callousness in assessing poverty as the just desert of sloth and evildoing. … Thus Elizabeth inherited the problem of widespread poverty with her crown; and her legislative program was immediate, massive, and positive.
Social Service and Social Legislation in Edwardian England: The Beginning of a New Role for Philanthropy
Authors: Moore Michael J. 
Published: November 2007

Many historians have written about the impressive social achievement of the last Liberal Government which sat in Britain from 1905 to 1916. Prominent among them is Bentley Gilbert whose Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain importantly expands. Maurice Bruce's excellent survey The Coming of the Welfare State. Much of this work has emphasized the political maneuverings for legislation which increased the economic security of millions of British citizens. This paper takes a different, supplementary approach. It is an attempt to understand the impact of the Liberals' social reform program on a part of the philanthropic community which had asssumed an important role in meeting the problems of poverty. The focus is on the provisions for social welfare made by voluntary and statutory agencies in order to clarify the beginnings of their successful partnership which today operates in the Welfare State. David Owen, in his monumental study of English philanthropy, has rightly characterized the modern role for voluntary agencies as “Junior Partner(s) in the Welfare Firm,” but he has wrongly stated that this role was recognized only after the First World War. The voluntary-statutory partnership in social welfare was formed during the Liberals' legislative revolution from 1906 to 1911: voluntarists who were affected by it understood its signficance for their work.The welfare measures of the post-Second World War Labour Government gave final recognition to the fact that in Britain social development was no longer to be the by-product of economic development, and that the State must plan comprehensively to meet social needs rather than filling in the gaps left by private effort. In a very real sense the proposals of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, given shape in this new age by a Fabian disciple, William Beveridge, became the foundation of British policy. But the social legislation enacted by the Labour Government was implanted in ground haphazardly prepared by previous measures which provided for specific needs, but often with little reference to related questions.
Recent Trends In Anglo-Norman Scholarship: The New Political History
Authors: Hollister C. Warren 
Published: November 2007

The articles that follow employ quantitative and prosopographical approaches that, although not new to historical investigation, are new to the field of royal-baronial relations in Norman England. Traditionally, English medieval politics have been treated with a strongly constitutional emphasis. Barons have been viewed as a largely undifferentiated group whose relations with the monarchy were seen as a reaction against the advance of rational central government, or as a defense of traditional liberties against oppressive kings.The better historians, over the past century and more, have resisted such simplifications. John Horace Round, for example, attacked and ridiculed the anachronistic constitutional generalizations of some of his predecessors by producing a mass of detailed information on individual Anglo-Norman aristocratic families. Sir Frank Stenton, in a tribute to Round written soon after Round's death in 1928, summarized his contribution in these apt words:
Round's work forms an essential part of the very remarkable movement which rather more than thirty years ago created the modern study of feudal institutions.… No one had yet expressed, as Round was to express, the truth that the fabric of feudal history is composed of genealogical detail, that innumerable events which are unintelligible as realted by contemporary writers presuppose an elaborate nexus of family alliances and rivalries.Stenton, too, was an expert in aristocratic genealogy and family history; and with the sources of Saxon and Norman England at his fingertips, he was a master of the apt illustration.
The Second Labour Government and the Politics of Electoral Reform, 1929–1931
Authors: Fair John D. 
Published: November 2007

In his pioneering study of the British electoral system, David Butler notes that “One of the main problems of the historian of the second Labour Government is to discover what action the Liberals took to exact the fullest return for their support in the division lobbies.” Owing to the preponderance of economic issues in this period, however, scant attention has been focused on the constitutional question of electoral reform which had the greatest bearing on the relationship between the Liberal and Labour parties in Parliament. Robert Skidelsky's Politicians and the Slump, the most thorough economic and political analysis of the Second Labour Government, is curiously jejune on this subject. Recent biographers of Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George, the Labour and Liberal protagonists, describe in detail a series of joint enterprises between the parties, but they fail to delineate the precise nature of their relationship in light of the critical electoral reform question. And Butler was never able to come to close quarters because of a paucity of primary sources. Now, however, it is possible to merge these separate strands, along with a neglected Conservative view, into a comprehensive explanation of the Liberal-Labour nexus.Despite much suspicion by contemporaries, especially among Conservatives in Parliament and the press, of a supposed Lib-Lab “bargain, ” it was repeatedly denied by prominent Liberal and Labour members. In light of the inability of historians to produce even a shred of evidence to the contrary and the glaring lack of legislative cooperation, it must be concluded that there was never any formal alliance between the two parties. Nevertheless a strong, and as yet unspecified, attachment did exist as a result of the unique parliamentary circumstances emerging from the general election of 1929. What emerges is an unattractive picture of political manuevering, calumny, and subterfuge where the potential allies worked at cross-purposes—the object of the Government being to create conditions favorable to retaining office while the Liberals desired some greater prospect for attaining office in the future. Despite their interdependence, the party leaders were never able to reach an agreement on the vital issue of electoral reform, which would involve some possible sacrifice of their individual ends. The result was a process of mutual destruction which contributed to the fall of the Second Labour Government and opened the way for a Conservative bid for power.
The Yorkist Council, Justice and Public Order: The Case of Straunge Versus Kynaston
Authors: Lander J. R. 
Published: November 2007

The activities of the Yorkist council in administration are now known to have been much more extensive than Professor J. F. Baldwin, the author of the classic work on the subject, was prepared to allow. Nor can his account of its judicial work be considered definitive though, so far, this has not been investigated to the same extent as the council's administrative activities. In discussing the judicial effectiveness of the council Baldwin stated that its efforts to suppress disorder were conspicuously unsuccessful in the 1460s (by implication in contrast with earlier successes), and that even though there was a change for the better after 1468 “as regards rioters its administration was anything but vigorous or efficient.” He failed to find a single example of a prominent offender who was ever punished. In spite of this, however, he was somewhat puzzled to note a growing demand for conciliar justice towards the end of Edward IV s reign; a demand which grew to such an extent that under Richard III a clerk was specially paid to deal with the bills, requests and supplications of poor men.This view of the council's judicial work was based in the main on two things—a belief that until 1468 commissions of arrest, in the majority of cases, were ordered to bring offenders before the chancellor not the council and on the case of Lord Straunge v. Roger Kynaston which Professor Baldwin alleged exposed “the weakness of the council to an extent that is well-nigh incredible.
The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science: Its Contribution to Victorian Health Reform, 1857–1886
Authors: Huch Ronald K. 
Published: November 2007

The campaign for better public health was a major social issue in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. As in the case of Poor Law and factory reform, Edwin Chadwick stands as the person who directed public interest toward the need for sanitary reform. He did this through his association with the Poor Law Commission in the late 1830s, then through his seminal and widely read 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population. Chadwick's report captured the minds of many in the British upper middle class. The Health of Towns Association, founded in 1844, helped to diffuse information on the “physical and moral evils that result from the present defective sewerage, drainage, supply of water, air, and light. …” Although the sanitary reformers had made some minor gains by 1847, they had failed to produce a satisfactory bill that would allow government some role in coordinating sanitary improvement. At this point, neither Chadwick, nor any other leading proponent of sanitary legislation wanted to put full authority in the hands of the central government, but they did desire a more efficient combination of local and national control.The sanitary reformers, and particularly Chadwick, achieved a measure of success in 1848 when the Public Health Bill received parliamentary approval. It was hoped the Act would bring about a useful consolidation of responsibility for drainage, sewerage, water supply, and road maintenance. Instead, the legislation spurred a furious debate over how much national government interference was acceptable. It did little to improve public health because the argument over government interference for a time took attention away from critical issues of sanitation reform. Although never completely overcome, the argument over principles faded in the 1850s in the face of an urgent need for reform.
Lord Morley's Statements about Richard III
Authors: Warnicke Retha M. 
Published: November 2007

Since the publication of Paul Murray Kendall's sympathetic biography of Richard III in 1955, scholars have been debating with renewed intensity the fate of that monarch's two young nephews, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York. In addition to numerous books and articles on his reign, including a study by Charles Ross in 1981, Alison Hanham published a volume in 1975 on the contemporary or near-contemporary historians of Richard III. Since the appearance of these publications, two original sources, which were almost certainly unknown to them and to other Ricardian scholars, have been identified. In a 1981 article in the English Historical Review, Richard Firth Green described one of these documents as a merchant's commonplace book, written between 1483 and 1488. The second relevant source, “Account of Miracles performed by the Holy Eucharist,” is a collection of religious anecdotes written by Henry Parker, Lord Morley. It has remained in manuscript although several excerpts, including one about Richard III, were printed in the introduction of Hubert G. Wright's 1943 edition of Morley's version of De Claris mulieribus by Boccaccio.The “Account” is now Add. MS. 12,060 at the British Library. A small quarto with a leaf missing at the end, it was a New Year's gift to Queen Mary, probably in 1554. In its next to last anecdote, Morley made a revealing remark about Richard III. Early on the day this king died at Bosworth Field, he wrote, God would not permit him to “se the blyssed sacrament of the Allter, nor heare the holy Masse, for his horrible offence comytted Against his brothers children,” a statement that surely reflected Morley's belief that this monarch was punished at Bosworth Field for the deaths of his two nephews. Any consideration of the author's negative comments must necessarily take into account two facts. First, they occur in only one of several anecdotes in the manuscript, the purpose of which was to venerate the Holy Eucharist. The inclusion of the Ricardian story was not essential to the author's primary goal of detailing the miraculous efficacy of this sacrament, for the Holy Eucharist, not Richard III, was the primary focus. Secondly, the anecdote was written in a low-key and matter-of-fact style. Morley made no reference to the many Tudor embellishments of the king's personality and appearance, including the infamous stories of his withered arm and hunched back.
The Impact of Eamon De Valera: Domestic Causes of the Anglo-Irish Economic War
Authors: Canning Paul M. 
Published: November 2007

When analyzing the origins of the Anglo-Irish “economic war” of 1932-1938, historians have focused primarily on two precipitant causes: the destablizing effect on Anglo-Irish relations of Eamon de Valera's return to power in Ireland in 1932, and the reaction to the resulting situation by the British Government. Underlying both were unresolved constitutional and financial questions. Chief of these were the oath of allegiance to the king, which de Valera had pledged, if elected, to remove from the Free State Constitution, and the land annuities, which were annual instalments paid by Irish tenant farmers purchasing their land through loans advanced by the British Government under the Land Purchase Acts of 1870-1909. These payments de Valera had promised to withhold from the British Government.Although the dispute between de Valera and the British Government has been studied extensively, the political context in which it was carried on has not. This is especially true on the British side. The British Government and its Dominions Secretary, J.H. Thomas, are often criticized for their handling of the affair. F.S.L. Lyons, for example, writes that Thomas “sniffed the approach of treason in every tainted breeze and saw in the return to power in 1932 of the intransigent republican of 1922 a direct threat to the whole basis of the settlement so painfully reached in the Treaty.” A.J.P. Taylor, though no less critical of Thomas, sees the whole affair more broadly as “a last kick of the old rule that English statesmen took leave of their senses when dealing with Ireland.”
Puritan Humor, or Entertainment, for Children
Authors: Sommerville C. John 
Published: November 2007

When Keith Thomas wrote “The Place of Laughter in Tudor and Stuart England,” he could not ignore the so-called Marprelate Tracts, which are famous lampoons on Queen Elizabeth's bishops. But they are a problem, because they are examples of what can only be termed Puritan humor. No one yet has described them as the work of a “funny Puritan.” Those words repel each other. So we usually say they were the work of a “Puritan sympathizer.” Funny Puritans don't exist, almost by definition. Professor Thomas searched for an acceptable expression and finally dismissed the episode—seven pamphlets which have been called “The best prose satires of Elizabeth's reign”—as “bizarre.” In his view, then, it is all simply inexplicable, and he hastens to assure readers that “not only the Church but also its Puritan opponents condemned Martin [the pseudonymous “Martin Marprelate”] for treating the matter with such levity.” Here we have the Puritans we know and love, the ones whom H. L. Mencken defined as those who live with the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.But English Puritan literature for children reveals other anomalies in this characterization. Puritans and (after 1660) “Dissenters” wrote a great deal for children, more than any other group in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of it is tedious if not downright grim, including some of their attempts at humor. But much of it was intended to give pleasure. The purpose of this article is to look into the strangely neglected subject of Puritan humor through the prism of their works for the entertainment of children.