The whole subject of forests, especially forests in the Middle Ages, is overlaid with a great deal of romanticism. The picture of a heavily-wooded England with primeval forests dotted here and there with villages connected by meandering tracks to relieve their isolation is fixed. Only a handful of Robin Hood bands lived within the depths of the forest itself. The present concern for man's destruction of his environment has caused this idyllic picture to be contrasted with the denuded landscape of large areas today, and the pathetic remnants of Sherwood Forest can be used as a cautionary lesson on industrialization since the eighteenth century. In fact, that lesson needs to be extended backward in time and the picture of the untouched medieval forest abandoned, for the reality was that men in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made heavy use of the forests and encroached upon them just as man had done since he first came to the island or, more emphatically, since the Anglo-Saxon invaders began to make drastic changes in forested areas by their farming practices. However, after the Norman Conquest, the policies adopted for the royal forests did serve as some protection for the trees, even though the Norman kings no more had this as their purpose than had their predecessors. The thesis of this article is that the medieval English kings from the Normans on were conservationists in spite of themselves, even in the face of continuous demands from their own barons for disafforestment. Royal forest regulations enforced within the extensive areas under forest law protected the trees from complete destruction and slowed the inevitable encroachment of field upon forest.

The images that the phrase “Marian Protestant” summons to mind are both dramatic and predictable. Whether they are of Cranmer holding his hand in the flame, Latimer exhorting Ridley to play the man, or more generalized images of men and women dying at the stake, we see the landscape of Marian Protestantism shrouded in the smoke from the fires of Smithfield and think of it exclusively in terms of martyrs. This unblinking fixation on the Marian martyrs is partly the result of an all too human fascination with violent death, but it is also the result of our dependence on John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563–83), popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs,” a sobriquet that does justice to Foxe's preoccupations when discussing the penultimate Tudor reign.

Nevertheless, to ignore the majority of Marian Protestants who did not die for the gospel is to study the steeple and believe that you have examined the entire church. Like the steeple, the martyrs are the most conspicuous group of Marian Protestants, yet like a steeple their existence depended on the support of the rest of the church. However, even this metaphor fails to do justice to those coreligionists who provided the Marian martyrs with physical, financial, moral, and emotional support. The relationships between the martyrs and their “sustainers” (to use Foxe's phrase) were profound and complex, with both parties drawing strength from each other. The relationships between male martyrs and their female sustainers are of particular interest and importance; in fact, it will be suggested in this article that these relationships had a decisive influence on the development of English Protestantism.

Although in recent years Victorianists have eagerly cultivated the fields of sport and women's history, they have produced surprisingly little relating the two areas. Historians of women have virtually ignored the physical dimension of the struggle for female emancipation, while historians of sport have reflected sport's traditional male orientation by neglecting the distaff side. As W. J. Baker noted recently in the Journal of Sport History, “the history of British women in sports … stands high on the agenda of work to be done.”

What limited material there is on women's sport history as such has tended to be produced by physical educators or amateurs like former players and journalists whose methodology can only be described as narrative-descriptive. A broad historical perspective permitting an exploration of the relationship between women's sport and social change is noticeable by its absence. Interpretation and analysis if they exist at all are usually limited to commonplace and uncritical observations about sport mirroring social attitudes to women and providing them with new opportunities for recreation and physical exercise. Such studies should not be denigrated, for when precious little has been known even of the facts of women's involvement in sport their revelation is certainly an important stage in the journey of discovery. However, if a truly meaningful and comprehensive picture is to be developed interpretative accounts are needed, which deal with such topics as power and control, motivation, the nature of participation, female sport's ambiguities and socially disruptive potential, its emancipating and restricting characteristics, and the interaction between feminism and female athleticism.

One of the few achievements the communist left in Britain can still plausibly claim is its anti-fascism in the 1930s and beyond. This has recently been most dogmatically reasserted in a series of publications by David Renton, who calls for a distinction to be made between “anti-fascists” and “non-fascists.” The former are characterized by their “correct” understanding of fascism and reliance on organized, active resistance, often in the streets; whereas the latter contributed very little to fascism's defeat. Such a loaded definition of anti-fascism ensures that only the Communist Party and their acolytes fit the bill. But within the historiography even more “neutral”—and seemingly encompassing—definitions have tended, in practice, to look largely to left-wing organizations.

This article will question these perspectives and argue for the significance of a “liberal” anti-fascism, which brought together many Liberal, Conservative and Labour politicians and intellectuals in cross-party pressure groups. What characterized the anti-fascism of these men and women was not resistance to the actions of the BUF, which most regarded as thuggish but insignificant, but resistance to the ideological challenge to English parliamentary democracy represented by continental “totalitarian” movements. The article will begin by considering the compromised nature of the British Communist Party's anti-fascist record and why “liberal” historians have, on the whole, tended to underestimate the extent of liberal anti-fascism. It will then suggest that a truly less exclusionary and partisan approach to anti-fascism should readily include the likes of the liberal Sir Ernest Barker and many in his political and social circle. It will also argue that, even accepting Renton's own, restrictive definition, Barker would still qualify as an anti-fascist, rather than a non-fascist, for he combined a coherent analysis of single-party, totalitarian states with a commitment to organized action through bodies such as the New Estates Community Committee and the Association for Education in Citizenship to remove the pre-conditions of antidemocratic beliefs.

Historians have begun to rediscover the Puritan Revolution. A number of recent studies concentrating on the Long Parliament, on particular counties, or on clusters of religious ideas have found religious divisions at the heart of the collapse of early Stuart government. This article tries to consolidate this trend by looking at the behavior of one prominent individual. If it was indeed religious conviction that drove active minorities to take up arms, then it is essential to find men who have left enough evidence of a sufficiently intimate kind to permit us to pry into the feelings and longings that determined their particular responses to the developing crisis in church and state. While it is hoped that such a case study can help to clarify general issues, it is obviously not possible to claim that one case study demonstrates any particular theory of allegiance. This article presents an instance of a general theory and no more.

The subject of the first part of this article is Sir William Brereton (1604–61) of Handforth in Cheshire, who will be examined as a Puritan magistrate in the 1630s, as a Parliamentarian activist in the early 1640s, as a county boss in the war years, and as an increasingly disillusioned “honest radical” from 1646 and especially from 1653. He is probably better documented in the public records than all but twenty or so M.P.s in the Long Parliament, and his fifteen hundred extant letters plus a collection of private papers and travel journals from the 1630s make him probably the best documented of all county bosses, at least down to 1646.

No area of Victorian administrative history is more richly documented or less adequately explored than that concerning the development of public policy by professional or scientific “specialists” within the civil departments of Government. Traditionally, texts on the evolution of the modern state have concentrated upon the role of political philosophy, economic motivation, and parliamentary expedience in determining the direction and timing of government involvement in the private sector. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in the anatomy and function of institutional change within the so-called “Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government.” Now a number of attempts are being made to describe the manner in which science, technology, and “special professional knowledge” were used administratively by the state to conserve and protect the wealth of the nation.

The Salmon Acts administration reveals this phenomenon of development particularly well. These acts embodied what one contemporary observer called the first permanent attempt by Parliament to protect and regulate private property in the public interest. Their administration involved the first permanent staff appointed to supervise the fisheries of England and Wales and laid the foundations for British nature conservancy policy. Government intervention in the salmon fisheries followed different lines of development in Scotland, Ireland, England, and Wales during the course of the century. The following pages, however, will be confined to salmon administration in England and Wales during the period 1860-86, in what was essentially the “heroic age” of policy-making by the salmon inspectors at the Home Office and the Board of Trade.

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.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the honour to announce a sale of many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical and necessary articles. Here you will find objects of taste, such as Babies' Shoes, Children's Petticoats, and Shetland Wool Cravats; objects of general usefulness, such as Tea-cosies, Bangles, Brahmin Beads, and Madras Baskets; and objects of imperious necessity, such as Pen-wipers, Indian Figures carefully repaired with glue, and Sealed Envelopes, containing a surprise. And all this is not to be sold by your common Shopkeepers, intent on small and legitimate profits, but by Ladies and Gentlemen, who would as soon think of picking your pocket of a cotton handkerchief, as of selling a single one of these many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical and necessary articles at less than twice its market value.

Spoken amidst trumpet flourishes by Robert Louis Stevenson's “allegorical Tout,” these words introduce an institution familiar to all of us and one full of interest to the social historian — the charity bazaar. Tea-cosies, bangles, Brahmin beads, and Madras baskets may seem only quaint and comical, but they and similar trifles filled countless stalls in innumerable bazaars and raised tens of millions of pounds in nineteenth-century England for causes of every conceivable description. Men and women of all social classes found bazaars, fancy fairs, fancy sales, or ladies' sales as they were variously called, a most popular and fashionable way of making money for the charity of their choice. Many philanthropic societies depended on them for annual funds. Clergymen of all persuasions, not without a touch of compromise, looked to them as a last resort to build a church or to enlarge a school or drawing room.

“It is very interesting to compare Spencer and Comte,” wrote George Sarton in an essay lauding their efforts to embrace all knowledge in a grand synthesis. The comparison, indeed, was tempting for contemporaries, as it has been for students of ideas. Both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were authors of new philosophic systems which, they believed, had been built on the firm foundations of science, and both were convinced that society should be reconstructed in accordance with the truths of their philosophies. The insistence of Positivists and some who were not Positivists that Spencer, consciously or not, had been influenced by Comte, and Spencer's repeated and fervent denials, made for a series of controversies that extended over half a century and ranged from the minutiae of priority to the more important issues of the classification of the sciences and the nature of religion.

The eclipse of both the Positive Philosophy of Comte and the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer in the twentieth century hardly suggests the interest they aroused in the nineteenth. The unification of knowledge and the discovery of the laws of man and society were dreams which nineteenth-century science and philosophy hoped to realize. Comte and Spencer made their contribution in this area; and while both were attacked for erecting systems on questionable assumptions, and for their weakness in details, their extraordinary ability to amass quantities of information and to come up with penetrating generalizations attracted admirers and disciples. Few of their critics thought that what they had set out to do was not worth doing, or could not be done.

This article examines the politics of colonial voluntary work as an aspect of settler society and in relation to broader networks of imperial activism and reform. The East Africa Women's League, a predominant white women's organization in colonial Kenya, participated in settler politics during debates in 1930 concerning a Closer Union of British territories in East Africa. This involvement established connections between the voluntary welfare activities of settler women in Kenya and contemporary transimperial activist networks. Drawing on the private archives of the League, this article argues that the public lives of white women in colonial Kenya were entwined in the tensions of welfare in the twentieth-century British imperial project.

Conservative movements have generally played a negative role in accounts of the history of political expression in Britain during the period of the French Revolution. Where E. P. Thompson and others on the Left tended to identify radicalism with the disenfranchised and with a struggle for the rights of free expression and public assembly, conservative activists have been associated with state campaigns of political repression and legal interference. Indeed, conservatism in this period is typically conceived in negative terms, as antiradicalism or counterrevolution. If this has been the view of hostile commentators, it is consistent with a more sympathetic mythology that sees nothing novel about the conservative principles that emerged in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. They represent an establishment response to alien challenges. Even where conservatives set about mobilizing the resources of print, opinion, and assembly in a constructive fashion, the reputation for interference has endured. John Reeves's Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers is a useful case in point, since it managed in its brief but enterprising history to combine fierce anti-Jacobinism with the later eighteenth century's rising tide of voluntary civic activism. The association came together at the Crown and Anchor Tavern when a group of self-professed “private men” decided “to form ourselves into an Association” and announced their intentions through the major London newspapers in November and December of 1792. The original committee then called on others “to make similar exertions in their respective neighbourhoods,” forming energetic local associations that would be linked by regular correspondence with the central London committee. In this way, the loyalist movement grew with astonishing speed.

Students of twentieth-century migration generally agree that in any analysis of human migration two essential questions must be answered: Who are the migrants? And why did they leave? The questions seem obvious, but as they relate to seventeenth-century emigration to the American colonies, they are difficult to answer with precision. The records cannot be expected to reveal much about the emigrants as persons because they were ordinary people. If they could write—and most could not—the seventeenth-century emigrants left few diaries or letters to aid those who would study their movements. In fact, it is a rather fortunate researcher who uncovers even the few basic facts of their lives in the parish registers of christenings, burials, and marriages.

The task of identifying and reconstructing the thoughts and motives of such an anonymous body of people is therefore a formidable one. Those who have pursued the task, first in regard to the so-called “Puritan Hegira” of the 1630s to New England, have concerned themselves almost exclusively with the question of motivation, and have failed to consider who the emigrants were. Only in a recent study of East Anglian and Kentish emigration to Massachusetts Bay in 1637 has there been a systematic analysis of the ordinary settlers. Yet, no attempt has been made either to identify emigrants or to investigate motives behind several considerable movements to America from areas outside East Anglia and southeastern England, thereby to test the various emigration theses based exclusively on those models.

It is striking that historians of the early nineteenth century have been relatively reluctant to consider relationships between economic policy and the consolidation of the British state. In today's context, the economic and political challenges posed by both European integration and resurgent nationalism have generated hotly contested controversies on the political economy of state formation. From the perspective of the United Kingdom, the prospect of political and administrative devolution has forced us to address the implications of political decentralization for regional economic development (and vice versa) and to consider in turn the impact of these dynamics on the political integrity of a multinational state. For Britain, the period between circa 1780 and 1850 was characterized by unprecedented economic growth, imperial crisis and acquisition, and political consolidation. In a metropolitan sense the most dramatic feature of this process was, of course, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Insofar as historians of early nineteenth-century Britain have examined the relationship between “state formation” and economic policy, however, they have tended to focus on the ideas, politics, and pressures surrounding the retreat of the state from economic intervention. Thus in more general accounts it became axiomatic that the nineteenth-century state shrank progressively from social and economic intervention, liberating commerce, and resting the fiscal system on secure but modest direct taxation.

More recently, the relationship between the concept of “laissez-faire” and British state formation has been dramatically revised and refined by Philip Harling and Peter Mandler.

Interest in the origin of Walpole's Black Act (9 Geo. 1, c. 22), or the Waltham Black Act, as it was actually called, has arisen from work by Pat Rogers and E. P. Thompson. It was an act of exceptional severity, making no less than some fifty new offenses capital, and its origins have been debated by legal as well as by political historians. While Rogers stressed the criminality of the Blacks, Thompson set the act in a sociohistorical context, suggesting that its importance was in assisting the placemen of the Hanoverian establishment and Walpole's administration to a stronger hold on lands in the Black areas, at the expense of older and smaller gentry and the usage rights of yeomen farmers, tenantry, and the poor. In Thompson's argument the Black Act has exemplary significance for the tendency of greater Whig land owners toward more efficiently exploitative procedures, backed by ferocious legislation. The involvement in Blacking of Alexander Pope's kinsmen Charles and Michael Rackett, stressed by both Rogers and Thompson, constituted a point of additional interest.

The difference between Rogers and Thompson over whether Pope felt shame at his relatives' predicament turns in part on the political dimension of Blacking. Aside from the politics of conflict over land usage, Thompson rejected a link between the Blacks and the Jacobites, even though the act was introduced in the midst of legislation against the Atterbury conspiracy.

Throughout the first year of the French Revolution The Times newspaper could not decide who was the madder, Lord George Gordon or Edmund Burke. The former as a violent incendiary and convicted libeler had fortunately been safely locked in Newgate the previous year, but Burke was still loose. The newspaper had no doubt that he belonged in Bedlam; there could be no other explanation for his obsessive campaign to impeach Warren Hastings long after everyone else had lost interest in the case. A stream of reports suggested variously that he had checked himself into a lunatic asylum, been forcibly confined in a straitjacket, or become temporarily deranged through physical and mental exhaustion. On first reading The Reflections on the Revolution in France published in November the following year, many of his friends, as well as his foes, felt forced to agree.

Even those who found things to like in the book were puzzled that Burke should have produced such a work. In the first place, how did one explain what Thomas Jefferson called “the revolution of Mr. Burke,” an abrupt political tack from advocating parliamentary reform, religious toleration, and American liberty to denouncing France's fledgling efforts at liberty. Why had he turned so violently against the Dissenters and radicals with whom he had often cooperated in the past? Why did he believe that the apparently innocuous revolution in France was unlike anything that had gone before? And even when events in that country began to move more in line with his predictions, there remained something embarrassing about the tone of the book.