By the time Henry II imposed a large donum on cities, knights, moneyers, and Jews in 1159, the English Jewry dwelt in at least eleven communities throughout the realm. Of these, the London community was certainly the oldest, having been established by the Conqueror. The origins of the other communities are much less certain. Records from the end of Henry I's reign suggest that the Jews of England were still based in or around London, though some indirect evidence suggests the presence of isolated Jews elsewhere in the kingdom. It seems clear, however, that the years falling between Henry I's death and the accession of Henry II—the reign of Stephen, commonly known as the Anarchy—witnessed an expansion of Jews throughout the country, marking this period as very important to the history of English Jews. The meager evidence surviving suggests three important points: first, that it was, in fact, in the reign of Stephen that communities of royal Jews spread from London into other English towns; second, that significant Jewish communities existed only in areas that remained under royal control during Stephen's reign; and third, that these new Jewish communities may have been fostered by Stephen to further his own political and fiscal interests. The paucity of the available evidence makes any case for the English Jewry in this period uncomfortably conjectural; nevertheless, the few scraps that exist suggest these points to be at the least plausible, if not indeed likely.

What determined the value recorded for a manor in the Domesday 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 the Domesday Book obscured 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.

Since D. B. Quinn's The Elizabethans and the Irish, the history of early modern Ireland has been the subject of a wide range of studies, but only recently has women's role in that history received attention. Similarly, Nicholas Canny's article on “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity” initiated a debate about whether sixteenth-century tracts on Ireland express a unified colonialist ideology, but only recently has the construction of sexuality in these texts come under scrutiny. It is not surprising that those who study the history of women in early modern Ireland do not often turn to the English tracts for evidence, except with great caution and reservation. So much related in these documents is indebted to the stereotypes of a colonialist discourse, initiated by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, rather than to observation or encounter. Recent work on the history of women in early modern Ireland presents us with a sense of what is not being represented in the English settlers' descriptions. Such aspects of women's lives in Gaelic Ireland as their right to hold and acquire their own land and to keep their own names while married are not referred to in these tracts. These tracts do not yield transparent information about actual Irish women of the period, although there are fascinating references to their activities. Spenser writes that Irish women had “the trust and care of all things both at home and in the fields.” And at least one woman, the foster mother of Murrogh O'Brien, is said to have drunk the blood of her child's head as she grieved when he had been drawn and quartered by the English. The character of these texts as colonialist discourse makes the representation of women as a symbolic category or “gender” the more useful focus rather than some unmediated sense of “women.”

The practice of politics and the nature of government in England were transformed in the reign of Charles II, and recently, the scope and significance of this transformation has received renewed attention. For some years the historiographical spotlight focused on an earlier period, and debate centered upon the genesis of the civil wars and revolution. That is changing, but though a number of historians have once again turned their attention to the Restoration regime, a generally accepted account of the changes of the period has not yet emerged. The earlier historical consensus about some of the major issues of the period—the king's political goals, the importance of the Exclusion Crisis, and the impact of the radical tradition, to name a few—has been subjected to a good deal of critical scrutiny of late.

The years between 1667 and 1673 marked a crisis in the English Restoration. This crisis was produced by parliamentary consideration of an act to replace the expiring Conventicle Act of 1664. Hoping for relief from the provisions of the first act, dissenters in London and elsewhere were described by late 1667 as “mighty high and…expect[ing] to have their day now soon.” But having briefly experienced de facto religious freedom, the English nonconformists met with disappointment in 1670 when parliament adopted a second Conventicle Act. The act of 1670 reaffirmed the settlement of religion in an established Church protected by a coercive and persecuting state. Indeed, it offered the Church even greater security than the act of 1664. It provided for the distraint of the goods of those convicted of attending conventicles, and it established fines for justices and magistrates who failed to carry out its provisions. In renewing the policy of persecution, parliament also repudiated arguments made in public and in the prints, since the fall of the Earl of Clarendon, for such other ecclesiastical options as comprehension, toleration, and indulgence. The result of parliament's decision was a crisis—a period of confrontation, throughout the country, between the defenders of conscience and many magistrates charged with the enforcement of religious policy.

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 of De imitatione Christi (1580) and Edmund Bunny's A Booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to Resolution (1584), adapted from Robert Parsons's First Book of the Christian exercise (1582).

On October 5, 1663, the Scottish Parliament took an action unique in its long and variegated history. It ratified a marriage contract between two of the king's subjects. Not ordinary subjects, to be sure—they were the duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest bastard, a lad of fourteen, and Anna Scott, countess of Buccleuch, aged twelve, who had been married the previous April. Persuading Parliament to ratify this contract was potentially a very tricky business; the king entrusted the handling of it to the earl of Lauderdale, the secretary of state, normally resident in Whitehall, who had been sent to Scotland to manage this session of Parliament. The ratification was a private act, one of a large number passed at each session of the Scottish Parliament in favor of private individuals and corporations: towns, universities, etc. Because it was a private act Osmund Airy, the editor of the Lauderdale papers, our principal source for the day-to-day doings of this Parliament, ignored it in making his selection from the vast Lauderdale correspondence. So the episode has gone completely unnoticed by historians. This is a pity, not only because the story of the marriage contract and its ratification is fascinating in itself, but also because it was important for Lauderdale's political future. Lauderdale's success in getting the ratification passed without backlash helped to convince King Charles that he was the man to manage Scottish business from now on.

The political history of Restoration Scotland has been largely neglected by historians. Lauderdale was the dominant figure for most of Charles's reign, but it was some years before he achieved that eminence. Lord Chancellor Clarendon, until his fall in 1667, was Charles's principal adviser for all of his three kingdoms, a fact that Lauderdale resented but had to live with. Clarendon did not like Lauderdale, who, he wrote, had been a leader of the Covenanters' rebellion “when he was scarce of age, and prosecuted it to the end with the most eminent fierceness and animosity.”

The Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History published for 1991, contains 393 items in section G, “Britain 1714-1815,” a section that excludes works devoted to “long periods” that also cover the period. Of those 393, twenty were in Ga “General,” thirty-six in Gb, “Politics,” eight in Gc “Constitution, Administration and Law,” thirty-two in Gd “External Affairs” and thirty-seven in Ge “Religion.” Though politics is in theory restricted to Gb, in practice it overlaps with these other categories, and, indeed, in part, with the categories Economic Affairs, Social Structure and Population, Naval and Military, and Intellectual and Cultural. Restricting, however, the survey to Gb, the figures for 1988, 1989 and 1990 respectively were fifty-six, fifty-two and fifty-four. It is thus clear that while political history no longer dominates eighteenth-century historiography as it once did, there is still a formidable quantity of it produced. This is not a situation to be regretted, but it does emphasize the subjectivity of any assessment of recent work and of current problems. Such a situation, however, is not simply a question of problems derived from quantity, for any attempt to produce an historiographical account focusing on earlier scholarship would itself encounter many difficulties. The absence of consensus among modern scholars extends to their assessment of historiographical trends. This was demonstrated clearly by Jonathan Clark in 1986. Having, the previous year, in his English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), asserted the strength of conservatism and religious identity and the marginality of reform and radicalism in eighteenth-century England, he offered, inter alia, in his Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), a combative interpretation of the methodology and historiography of the period.

The depiction of influenza as a separate species of disease first became common during the eighteenth century. During that period, physicians developed competing theories about its etiology (causation) and transmission, including the theory that influenza was contagious. Theories of contagion were held by an increasing number of physicians during the course of the eighteenth century, although the issue remained a contested one, as symbolized by the publication of two separate reports on the epidemic of 1782 by the Royal College of Physicians and the Society for Promoting Medical Knowledge: reports that differed on the question of transmission.

It was because this issue was not settled by an overwhelming preponderance of the evidence that physician's views on this question had political implications that reflect the political and social fissures underlying medical practice in the eighteenth century. This article will examine the political, social, religious, and educational factors that influenced the initiative to investigate influenza as a separate disease, and will argue that these factors also influenced the readiness of some groups of physicians to entertain the hypothesis of contagion in the face of conflicting information. It will also suggest that the divergence of opinion on epidemic diseases reflected the social and educational differences between the graduates of English universities who were eligible for Fellowship in the College of Physicians, and the often equally distinguished “outsiders” who had obtained their medical degrees from other institutions, and who formed competing medical associations.

So read a typical entry from the diary of the widowed Mrs. L.M. Simpson, born in 1839. The continuing refrains of a lack of money, a sense of not belonging and an unwilling dependence reverberate throughout her diary. She celebrated (if that is not too cheerful a term for such a morose notation) her fortieth birthday while writing in this journal, and noted the passing of her former wedding anniversary and the birthdays of each of her deceased parents. The most important entries dealt with persons who are no longer with her and happy events that took place long ago. This lamentation from Mrs. Simpson provides a startling contrast with the picture presented by a large group of historians.

The Restoration period has attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years, with the result that many of our commonly held assumptions about politics in the reign of Charles II have come under increased critical scrutiny. Nowhere is this more true than for the Exclusion Crisis and the subsequent Tory Reaction. For a long time we thought we had the dynamics of this period worked out: the Exclusion Crisis gave birth to two parties—the Whigs and Tories—with the Whigs being the anti-Catholic, exclusionist, and Parliamentarian party, who carried with them the support of the people out-of-doors, and the Tories being the party of divine-right, absolute monarchy, anti-populist in their outlook, putting their belief in the sanctity of the hereditary principle before the interests of the people. The Whig challenge was essentially defeated with the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, and thereafter the 1680s saw a drift towards monarchical absolutism, until this trend was defeated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.

It has been twenty-seven years since Professor Plumb, now Sir John Plumb, delivered the Ford lectures at Oxford University. In a prose that was elegant, spirited, at times colloquial, always luminous, he offered a persuasive explanation for the growth of political stability in eighteenth-century England. Later published as The Growth of Political Stability in England, these lectures were widely read and the explanation offered in them widely accepted. Professor Plumb's thesis became and remains the orthodox interpretation of the political stability that England enjoyed in the eighteenth century.

During the past twenty-seven years, however, a considerable literature has appeared concerning the growth of political stability, some of it occasioned by Professor Plumb's own fertile suggestions. Historians such as J. V. Beckett, Lloyd Bonfield, Christopher Clay, Linda Colley, Norma Landau, John Owen, John Phillips, and Nicholas Rogers have studied the rise of the great estates, the decline of party, the role of patronage, and the politics of deference. The appearance of this literature offers a useful occasion for looking once again at the growth of political stability. In particular, it offers an opportunity to ask how valid is the Plumb thesis, and, if found not to be valid, what alternative explanation can be given for the growth of political stability in eighteenth-century England.

Despite the initial welcome extended to him, Charles II returned to the English throne in 1660 accompanied by skepticism and even hostility from substantial numbers of his subjects. In the years immediately following the Restoration, the king, his government and the landed order, all uncertain of the extent of their power, strove together to define, reassert, and make it permanent. This was no easy task, in part because the messages of the Restoration were confusing. One was conciliatory, acknowledging that the events of the 1640s and 1650s could not be undone and had to be accommodated in some manner by the new regime. Legal proceedings under the republic were confirmed, passage of the Act of Indemnity signalled the eschewal of systematic revenge, and the retention of Interregnum officials, especially in local administration, deprived triumphant Anglican royalists of the monopoly of power and office for which they had hoped. The other message was conveyed in harsher terms. In many places and from many institutions, adherents of the revolutionary regime did lose their positions, while followers of recently-respectable creeds were now cast as enemies of the state and good order. The new monarchical order held no brief for republicans, and many dissenters of no very radical stripe were quickly placed beyond an official pale because they could not accept a prayer-book order in the church. In the early years of the Restoration, then, policies of accommodation coexisted with those of repression, and we may well ask how in these circumstances an enduring regime was reconstructed.

One of the many problems facing the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was the future of the conquered German and Turkish territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Widespread anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and the United States opposed direct annexation of the possessions, but wartime agreements and the security interests of the Allies prevented returning the conquered areas to their former rulers. In particular, many British leaders wanted to ensure that Germany could never again attempt world domination and were convinced that the restoration to Germany of its overseas possessions would pose a “grave political and military menace” to Britain's vital maritime connections with South Africa and India. After a long, often acrimonious debate, the Conference agreed on a compromise that placed the former German colonies and Ottoman provinces under the supervision of the League of Nations. This solution gave the Allies control of their acquisitions as “mandates” within a framework of international accountability. Great Britain received the most mandates, including Germany's largest colony of German East Africa. For the British leaders who had always advocated transforming German East Africa into a British colony, the new system seemed to make little practical difference. For the colonial officials in London and at the highest levels of colonial administration within the conquered possession, however, the mandates system presented serious problems and was not simply a disguise for annexation.