bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Ceremony and Politics: The British Monarchy, 1871–1872
Authors: Kuhn William M. 
Published: February 2004

Walter Bagehot divided the English constitution into two parts, the “dignified” and the “efficient.” The sovereign and the House of Lords were the dignified or the showy parts, imposing spectacles designed to serve as reminders of a glorious past and to impress an uneducated populace with the authority of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the real work went on, where men of business transacted affairs of state using the authority obtained by the dignified parts. So he wrote in the years preceding the second Reform Bill, when it was conventional to speak of the rudeness and unruliness of an uneducated people and of the hazards of admitting them to the franchise. Yet his book, animated in such large measure by the debates on parliamentary reform of the late 1860s, remains a much-quoted authority on the English constitution today.Perhaps one among the reasons for its enduring popularity is that he expressed so neatly a notion that certainly existed before as well as in his time and that survives today, namely, that governmental activity can be divided into ceremonial and political parts. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion is to reality, as artifice is to plain speaking. In affairs of state, the adjective “ceremonial,” when attached to words like “head of state” or “official,” has come to mean empty figurehead or powerless placeholder. Ceremonies of state—coronations, jubilees, openings of Parliament—are picturesque and pleasant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything powerful other than that which is powerfully sentimental, colorful, and evocative.
Redefining the Peasant Community in Medieval England: The Regional Perspective
Authors: DeWindt Anne Reiber 
Published: February 2004

Historians of the medieval English peasantry have tended to assume that the history of peasants and their culture can best be revealed through the history of the village as a social and economic unit. As a result, the important recent advances in our understanding of peasant culture have been made by historians who, borrowing heavily from the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, have written studies of particular villages or small towns. The mystique of the “village community” has retained a hold on the historian's imagination. Even as the peasant and his family now attract more attention from scholars, studies of family size, household structure, and inheritance and marriage patterns are usually carried out within the context of a particular village or small town, largely because collections of local records naturally coalesce around a parish name. These close examinations of specific vills have been made possible primarily through the exploitation of the village court rolls that survive from the mid-thirteenth century. Ironically, it has been these very village court rolls that, in the end, have forcefully demonstrated that the assumptions identifying peasant history with village history must now be abandoned.The numerous studies of medieval English villages that have made possible the study of peasant family structure and behavior are now demonstrating that the history of the peasant family and the history of the particular village must part company. Certainly, the study of a single series of village court rolls makes possible the discovery within the village of family groups with characteristic behavior patterns.
The Secret History of the Tudor Court: The King's Coffers and the King's Purse, 1542–1553
Authors: Hoak Dale 
Published: February 2004

In his presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society, G. R. Elton drew attention to the “points of contact” in Tudor central government, namely, the relations of court, council, and Parliament. Among other things, Elton's discussion revealed the need to integrate more fully the often separately related histories of those institutions. Although such an integrated history obviously lies beyond the scope of this essay, part of the subject, Privy Chamber finance, introduces an important, if often secret, point of contact between officers of the royal household and officers of “state”—the management of the king's money. A declaration of money disbursed from Henry VIII's Privy Coffers in 1542–48 and an audit of Edward VI's Privy Purse for the years 1550–51, both discussed here for the first time, disclose some previously unknown aspects of early Tudor government and finance. Taken together, these documents should provide the basis for a deeper appreciation of the dynamics of the English Reformation regime.IResearch of the past decade has revealed the place and importance of the Privy Chamber in the household and government of the Tudor kings. By 1540 a heretofore informal group of the king's body servants and boon companions had acquired wages and administrative functions to match their royally bestowed places and titles. The officers and staff of the king's private apartments now constituted a separate department of the royal household. Of the eighteen gentlemen in ordinary (i.e., in wages), two were honored by the title “chief” because of the intimate nature of their attendance on the king's person. One of them, the groom of the stool, became, ex officio, “first” gentleman.
Lord John Russell and the Church Rate Conflict: The Struggle for a Broad Church, 1834–1868
Authors: Ellens J. P. 
Published: February 2004

In the election campaign of 1859, after twenty-five years of tirelessly defending the church rate principle that ratepayers of all religious denominations were liable to the rate levied for the maintenance of Anglican parish churches, Lord John Russell declared that he had come to favor abolishing church rates. The Tory Standard railed that the aging statesman had caved in to “senile ambition,” while another conservative critic charged that Russell had agreed to sacrifice church rates at the Willis's Rooms meeting in 1859 as part of a deal made to win the political support of Protestant Nonconformists. Spencer Walpole, the High Church chancellor of the Exchequer, was more charitable and more accurate, however, when after the election he responded to Russell's decision by acknowledging that the establishment was indebted to Russell for stalwartly having defended the church rate for decades as a bulwark of the church establishment.Although Russell was too clever a politician to disregard political advantage or public opinion during his quarter-century fight to retain church rates, it was not his Whig politics but his Broad Church ecclesiology that best accounts for his long and dogged defense of the church rate. From 1834 through 1837, during the first four years of the church rate conflict, Russell's stance appeared to be that of the Whig statesman. First in Earl Grey's administration and then in Lord Melbourne's, he attempted to reform the church rate system sufficiently to satisfy Dissenters that they could count on the Whig party as the party of reform.
Origins of the Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Revival: England and New England Compared
Authors: Crawford Michael J. 
Published: February 2004

Current interpretations of North America's first Great Awakening present a paradox. Historians commonly interpret the Great Awakening as part of the revival of evangelical piety that affected widely scattered elements of the Protestant world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; however, studies of the Great Awakening have almost exclusively focused on the particular local circumstances in which the revival movements developed. Since historians of the Great Awakening have emphasized the peculiar circumstances of each of the regional manifestations, the Revival often appears in their writings to have been composed of several distinct movements separated in time, character, and cause and united only by superficial similarities. In contrast, to say that the local revival movements, despite their distinctive characteristics, were manifestations of a single larger movement is to imply that they shared the same general causes. If we suppose that the Great Awakening was part of the Evangelical Revival, our attempts to explain its origins should take into account those general causes.Two recent reconsiderations of the eighteenth-century revival movements in their broader context come to opposite conclusions. Jon Butler underscores the span of time over which the revivals occurred across the British colonies, their heterogeneous character from one region to the next, and the differences in cultural contexts in which they appeared. He concludes that “the prerevolutionary revivals should be understood primarily as regional events.” Although he sees the eighteenth-century American revivals as part of the long-term evangelical and pietistic reform movement in Western society, he denies any common, single, overwhelmingly important cause.
Edward III and His Family
Authors: Ormrod W. M. 
Published: February 2004

The chroniclers and poets of the later Middle Ages credited Edward III with many successes, among which the production of a large family rated highly. The king had a total of twelve children, of whom no fewer than nine—five sons and four daughters—survived to maturity (fig. 1). Historians have not always been enthusiastic about the generous provisions made for this large family. Edward's very fecundity, viewed by fourteenth-century writers as a sure sign of God's grace, has been seen as a political liability because it exhausted resources, created a political imbalance between the crown and the younger branches of the royal family, and led ultimately to the deposition of Richard II and the Wars of the Roses.It is possible, however, to view Edward III's family arrangements in a different and rather more favorable light. Since the loss of many of their overseas territories in the thirteenth century, the Plantagenet kings had come to regard their remaining possessions as an inalienable patrimony to be handed on intact from father to eldest son. Unless younger children were able to create titles for themselves in foreign lands, kings had no option but to reward their sons with English earldoms. This was not a policy guaranteed to benefit the crown: the bitter quarrels between Edward II and his cousin Thomas of Lancaster showed very clearly the dangers that might arise when cadet branches of the Plantagenet dynasty became bound up with the English aristocracy.
Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes
Authors: Lemire Beverly 
Published: February 2004

The secondhand clothes trade was a vital reflection of consumer demand in preindustrial and early industrial England, one that has gone unrecognized because of the nature of the trade. It did not involve the manufacture, finishing, or refining of raw materials or the sale of new commodities. It was largely invisible trade, leaving few records and generating no legislation. Yet the trade in secondhand clothing was a common feature of English life and met the needs of much of the English population in a way that other manufacturing trades and industries did not. Historians considering the characteristics of the domestic market in this era have naturally focused on the new manufactures and the widening range of goods produced in response to domestic demand both in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—everything from caps, stockings, and pottery to the products of the British cotton industry. The growth of these industries has been seen as a testament to a strong demand among consumers for varied, attractive, and inexpensive goods. But the extent of demand among the various ranks of people and the intensity of this demand cannot accurately be determined solely from the development of new industries and the sale of new commodities.The demand for clothing, textiles, and other consumer goods was not the sum total of the consumer impulse. An equally powerful drive was manifested not through the purchase of new commodities but through the sale, trade, and purchase of secondhand merchandise. Joan Thirsk has noted that “the labouring classes found cash to spare for consumer goods in 1700 that had no place in their budgets in 1550.”
New Light on Mansfield and Slavery
Authors: Oldham James 
Published: February 2004

Popular history often credits Lord Mansfield with freeing the slaves in England by his decision in the Somerset case. That he did not do so is by now agreed and is a point featured in modern scholarship on slavery. This is the main burden, for example, of F. O. Shyllon's Black Slaves in Britain (1974). How extensively the popular history should be revised has not been settled. Newly discovered sources now permit a reassessment of this question.When the Somerset case arose in 1772, it was brimming with portent. The largest specter was the supposed mercantile dislocation that would follow abolition. Additional questions seemed unavoidable, such as the legality of a contract between a slave and his master, and the implications for other contracts if the slave contract were invalidated. The protracted case was an occasion of high drama in which early abolitionist efforts (especially those of Granville Sharp) were pitted against vested trading interests.Mansfield was caught in the middle. He was genuinely ambivalent about the subject of slavery. He accepted and endorsed the widely assumed mercantile importance of the slave trade, yet he doubted the validity of theoretical justifications of slavery, and he sought to redress instances of individual cruelty to slaves. By drawing on previously unexamined manuscript reports of the Somerset case, Lord Mansfield's trial notes, and newspaper accounts of the Court of King's Bench activity, this article will demonstrate the extreme delicacy of Mansfield's position and will establish more fully than has before been possible the ways in which Mansfield accommodated the various competing interests. In the process, the question of exactly what Mansfield said in his Somerset opinion should be put to rest.
Moral and Physical Force: The Language of Violence in Irish Nationalism
Authors: Curtis L. Perry 
Published: February 2004

In recent years Irish historians have begun to look more closely into the strategies and tactics of nineteenth-century nationalism, exposing some of the disunities and inconsistencies in a movement long considered monolithic by generations of patriots and ideologues. Although we may rightly claim to know a good deal more than our predecessors about the contours and contents of Irish nationalism, there are still a number of ambiguities and unknowns about its nature, not to mention its significance. Indeed, if K. T. Hoppen is to be believed, most historians have erred by concentrating on the nationalist campaigns of the O'Connellites, Fenians, and Parnellites while neglecting altogether the arena of local politics. Stressing the “deep and constant” importance of “the parish pump,” Hoppen insists that the Repeal and Home Rule agitations were simply “unusual superimpositions upon the deeply pervasive and enduring localist traditions of Irish political life.” Irish voters, then, especially those in the boroughs, lived by and for local issues, personalities, and parties, and many were willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder or the biggest spender.Such a strong dose of historical revisionism may have its uses, but Hoppen's book, for all its massive documentation, verve, and erudition, does not provide any explanation for the huge outpouring of support given to O'Connell, Parnell, and other advocates of “national” as well as “nationalist” issues. Only an incisive and far-ranging study of political propaganda, ideology, and the mobilization of voters and nonvoters alike in nineteenth-century Ireland can hope to resolve this controversy over the priorities of local and national as well as nationalist issues.
The British State and the Structure of Political Opportunity
Authors: Cronin James E. 
Published: February 2004

The mid-Victorian state was a modest, and only moderately democratic, affair. It was modest both in its size and in what it set out to do. There was no pretense that the government could do much on its own to remedy or compensate for social ills, and there was no party in the land with a serious program of state intervention. This minimalist character of the state, whose restricted ambitions were underpinned by the constraints of Gladstonian finance, was reinforced by its inaccessibility. Political participation was the preserve of a distinct minority, less than 15 percent of the male population after the reform of 1832. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 widened the franchise further, to about 35 percent of men, but political citizenship continued to be denied to the bulk of the working class and to all women.By contrast, few people—scholars or laymen—would attach the label “modest” to the state in the twentieth century, and, for all the flaws and imperfections that reduce its representativeness, it is obviously part of a highly democratic polity. The sphere of state action has expanded enormously since 1850, and, despite the recent efforts of Conservatives, the government still bears responsibility for numerous aspects of its citizens' well-being. Over roughly the same span of years the British political system has been democratized. Successive installations of reform in 1867, in 1884–85, in 1918, and in 1929 have brought first working-class men, then middle-class women, and finally all women into the formal political system. These two processes—the expansion of government and the democratization of British politics—constitute the major transformations in public life in modern Britain.
The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism
Authors: Kent Susan Kingsley 
Published: February 2004

The outbreak of war in August 1914 brought to a halt the activities of both militant and constitutional suffragists in their efforts to gain votes for women. By that time, the suffrage campaign had attained the size and status of a mass movement, commanding the time, energies, and resources of thousands of men and women and riveting the attention of the British public. In early 1918, in what it defined as a gesture of recognition for women's contribution to the war effort, Parliament granted the vote to women over the age of thirty. This measure, while welcome to feminists as a symbol of the fall of the sex barrier, failed to enfranchise some five million out of eleven million adult women. When war ended, feminists continued to agitate for votes for women on the same terms as they had been granted to men, but organized feminism, despite the fact that almost half of the potential female electorate remained disenfranchised, never regained its prewar status as a mass movement. By the end of the 1920s, feminism as a distinct political and social movement no longer existed. This was due to the impact of the war on cultural perceptions of gender. Feminists' understandings of masculinity and femininity became transformed during the war and in the immediate postwar period, until they were virtually indistinguishable from those of antifeminists.As I have argued elsewhere, prewar British feminists regarded their movement as an attack on separate-sphere ideology and its constructions of masculinity and femininity.
Popular Conservatism in Britain: Continuity and Change, 1880–1987
Authors: Pugh Martin 
Published: February 2004

During the century that has elapsed since Gladstone's famous Midlothian Campaigns of 1879–80, the British political parties have had to adjust to a series of major changes and developments in both the structure and the substance of politics: the extension of the parliamentary vote to all men and women over the age of eighteen; the move toward the direct taxation of incomes; the rise of a “welfare state”; the steady, if unspectacular, decline of British industry; two debilitating world wars; the retreat from empire; and the loss of major-power status. At first sight every one of these changes represents a problem for British Conservatives: they appear to have been perpetually working against the grain of history. Yet in the general election of 1885 the Conservatives achieved a 43.5 percent share of the popular vote, while in the election of June 1987 they won just 43 percent. Far from being pushed to the margins by more adaptable or more popular parties, they appear to be as strong and as central in the British political system as they ever were.Of course, Conservative support has not been quite as stable as a comparison between 1885 and 1987 suggests. Their vote has indeed fluctuated, though within a fairly narrow range; the minimum is usually 38 percent to 39 percent, and the maximum around 48 percent (table 1).
Advance by Retreat? The Formation of British Labour's Electoral Strategy
Authors: Wald Kenneth D. 
Published: February 2004

Every step towards our goal is dependent on gaining the assent and support of at least a numerical majority of the whole people. Thus, even if we aimed at revolutionizing everything at once, we should necessarily be compelled to make each particular change only at the time, and to the extent, and in the manner which ten or fifteen million electors, in all sorts of conditions, of all sorts of temperaments, from Land's End to the Orkneys, could be brought to consent to it.Now, anybody can see the difficulties which politicians must encounter when they are trying to get votes from the West End of London and South Wales at the same time.Whatever else it might be, whatever its other functions or activities in modern democratic societies, a political party is first and foremost an organization that seeks control of government through the electoral process. Unless it first attains the legitimate governing authority that accompanies majority status, a political party cannot implement the policies necessary to realize its vision of the just society, nor can it fulfill the other roles assigned to parties by modern democratic theory. For just such reasons, it is commonly said that votes are to political parties what profits are to corporations; just as corporate behavior would be incomprehensible without reference to the profit motive, so party behavior is often inexplicable without recognizing the centrality of electoral competition. For parties with normative goals in countries with democratic political systems, the drive for electoral supremacy must be a constant concern.