Using a unique source on offenders' place of birth, in combination with trial reports and newspapers, this article offers the first systematic analysis of how the Irish were treated by the English criminal justice system when they came as witnesses, prosecutors and accused. Although the Irish were massively over-represented amongst the accused, in the vast majority of Old Bailey cases – i.e. those involving property crime – they were no more likely to be convicted than other groups and overall the sentences they received were slightly less severe. However, doubts about their evidence and their reputation for violence meant that they were less successful as prosecutors and were more heavily punished when they were accused of violent offences. Thus the Irish were on the receiving end of both justice and prejudice and their treatment was intimately linked to contemporary English discourses about the Irish.

This article reopens the vexed question of how many women in early modern England could read by calling attention to the precise ways in which women marked, initialed, and signed legal depositions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London. It shows that initialing and signing were closely correlated skills, and it argues that women who wrote their initials had begun to learn how to read. Using initials as a proxy for elementary reading literacy, it goes on to map female literacy in early modern London, showing that urban upbringings fostered female literacy and that reading literacy was far more broadly socially diffused than the ability to write. Changes in initialing patterns as women aged suggest that women found reading to be useful and relevant to their lives, and that literacy carried social prestige.

This article discusses the impact of declining British power and increasing Commonwealth immigration on religion in England after the Second World War. It argues that a diminishing sense of Britain's greatness undermined the belief that England was a Christian nation, a belief common among Britain's elites, especially members of the Conservative party, and one that had long undergirded Christian faith and practice in the country. The language of Christian nationhood became toxic as it became associated with unpopular white settler governments in southern Africa. Moreover, the debates over the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act show how the migration of non-Christian religious groups to England had created a situation in which those who wished to continue to speak of the country as Christian would be accused of racism, a charge with fresh bite at that time. The article argues that international contexts deserve greater attention in the study of religious change.

On July 21, 1683, William, Lord Russell, the former leader of the Whig party in the House of Commons, was executed in Lincoln's Inn Fields for high treason. The week before a jury had convicted him of conspiring with other Whig leaders in schemes that have become known as the Rye House Plot to raise rebellion by capturing King Charles II's guards and, thereby, in law, to kill the king. But Russell is not known in history as a traitor or even as a Whig conspirator. Rather he is remembered as a Whig martyr, as a victim of late-Stuart tyranny, a man who suffered death in the cause of the liberties and rights of Englishmen and the true Protestant religion. To explain how the Whig conspirator became the Whig martyr and has remained so from 1683 to the present is my central purpose in this essay. I will show that the carefully constructed image of Russell as martyr drew inspiration from familial and political considerations and that it has influenced our understanding not only of Russell but also of late-Stuart politics and political ideas.

It is self-evident, I think, that a martyr is made—and made only by the interaction of three factors. First, an individual must die or endure suffering with great courage on behalf of some cause or principle. Although this is true of all martyrs, there seem to be no personality traits common to them. A common pattern of psychological behavior does seem apparent, however, among sixteenth-century English Protestant martyrs awaiting execution. Curiously, given the quantity of twentieth-century martyrs, modern psychiatrists have not studied martyrs systematically, but one has ventured the suggestion that a physiological condition—a “highly developed cortical base” in the brain that increases a person's capacity for empathy and decreases his regard for egocentric needs—may account for an individual's self-sacrifice. This is a tantalizing thought, but, obviously, at this remove in time it is impossible to discover anything about the structure of Lord Russell's brain. But evidence does show that he was a heedless person, prone to act without calculating the consequences.

The role of evangelical religion in the social history of the English working class has been an area of both bewildering theories and un-founded generalizations. The problem, of course, was given a degree of notoriety by Elie Halévy who, according to the received interpretation, claimed that the revolutionary fervor characteristic of the Continental working class in the first half of the nineteenth century was drained from its British counterpart because of the latter's acceptance of Evangelicalism, namely, Methodism.

It was revived most notably by E. P. Thompson, who accepted the counterrevolutionary effect of Methodism but claimed that the evangelical message was really an agent of capitalist domination acting to subordinate the industrial working class to the dominion of factory time and work discipline. Furthermore, Thompson argued, the English working class only accepted Methodism reluctantly and in the aftermath of actual political defeats that marked their social and economic subordination to capital. This view has gained a wide acceptance among many of the most prominent labor historians, including E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé who believe that Evangelicalism was the working-class's “chiliasm of despair” that “offered the one-time labour militant … compensation for temporal defeats.”

There could hardly be a starker contrast between the interpretation of these labor historians and the views of those who have examined the social and political history of religion in early industrial Britain. Among the most important of these, W. R. Ward has claimed that Methodism was popular among the laboring classes of the early nineteenth century precisely because it complemented political radicalism.

For all the pride which it engendered among contemporaries, who saw in the Tudor fisheries a nursery for English seamen and even a hallmark for the national identity, the fishing industry in the sixteenth century has received scant attention from English historians. This neglect has been doubly unfortunate. On the one hand, it leaves us in general ignorance of the industry itself: its organization, personnel, productivity, and economic importance in both national and regional terms. On the other, it has denied us the opportunity to observe a tradition-bound industry of considerable antiquity as it faced the political, economic, and technological changes of the post-medieval era.

The format of an essay cannot reasonably encompass a detailed study of a major industry, but the selection of a particular case for study can at least present a helpful paradigm for the whole, and fill part of the void in the existing literature. The fishing industry of Great Yarmouth seems an appropriate choice. The fact that herring collected off the mouth of the River Yare each September for as far back as man can remember has made the association of Yarmouth and fishing as old as it is logical. Fishermen plied those grounds from at least the sixth century, making the town one of the earliest recorded fishing centres of Northern Europe, and well before the Conquest townsmen had dedicated their parish church to St. Nicholas, patron of fishermen. Throughout the Middle Ages Yarmouth stood alone as the chief supplier of herring, a dietary staple to the English market, and ranked near the top of the European fishing industry.

The Second World War and the rise of social medicine in 1940s Britain reframed population health as a social problem in need of state investigation. The resulting government inquiry, the Survey of Sickness, sampled the whole adult population of England and Wales, engaging a broad and diverse cross-section in public health research for the first time. Complaints made against the Survey of Sickness reveal a complex set of relationships between different sections of the public and the British state. This article situates complaints about privacy, liberty, and wasted resources, as well as challenges to the authority of survey fieldworkers, in the context of wider resistance to postwar controls. By viewing these protests and criticisms in light of the material circumstances of the people who made them, this article argues that, for those with social, economic, and political capital, the role of the public in public health was up for negotiation in postwar Britain. The everyday politics of the survey's doorstep encounters were heavily influenced by gendered notions of home and citizenship. This exploration of how different sections of the public were constructed by public health and how they responded to that construction describes the hierarchies of expertise under formation while illuminating how class and gender informed contemporary understandings of citizenship in the emerging postwar British state.

The “methods of barbarism” and the “rights of small nations” are perhaps the most recognizable of British slogans arising out of the wars of the early twentieth century. They are instantly associated with the Boer War and the First World War respectively, but seldom are they associated with each other. However, the Pro-Boer rhetoric of “the methods of barbarism” and the First World War propaganda of “the rights of small nations” are intimately linked through their roots in the pluralist Liberal vision of Britishness.

These slogans and the propaganda campaigns that they epitomized must be understood within the context of a multicultural Britain and opposing notions of British national identity. Defining “barbarism” as the oppression of small nations through the brutal use of force, the Pro-Boers associated the term with the Anglocentric vision of the British nation reflected in the “New Imperialism” of the Conservatives. Through their belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, the Conservative imperialists maintained that small nations like those of the Irish, the Welsh, and the Boers would either be assimilated or swept aside by the historical progress of an expanding Anglo-Saxon nation state. In contrast to this notion of Conservative “barbarism,” the Pro-Boer Liberals drew on the Gladstonian heritage of their party in defining the United Kingdom as a multinational state at the center of a multinational empire. They eschewed the use of force in the maintenance of empire and argued that the bonds of imperialism must be based upon mutual goodwill, voluntarism, and the recognition of the principle of nationality.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, propagandists drew upon these contrasting constructions of Liberal cultural pluralism and Conservative cultural uniformity. In terms similar to those employed by the Pro-Boers, British propagandists depicted the First World War as a struggle against German “barbarism” and as a fight to vindicate the “rights of small nations.” Solidly based upon the Liberal construction of the multicultural and multinational nature of Britishness, Britain's role as the champion of the principle of nationality was proclaimed with an eye not only to the international context of Europe but to the domestic context of the British state and empire as well.

This article explores the changing relationship between paupers and the parish authorities in Tongue, in the far north of Scotland, between the passing of the Scottish New Poor Law in 1845 and the end of the nineteenth century. It does so by focusing on Scottish pauper letters and petitions for relief. Such sources, though relatively abundant in the archives, have so far been ignored by welfare historians. The article begins with a discussion of the trials of Tongue's poor crofting community in the early years of the century, the impact of widespread land clearance, and the dislocation of long-established communities. Following on from this, through a close reading of pauper appeals alongside other official sources the authors demonstrate that, despite persistent hardship and inadequate resources, the relationship between paupers and the parish authorities changed markedly over the period. An attitude of supplication and entreaty, rooted in Highland traditions of deference and reflective of a rigid social hierarchy, gave way to a clear sense of entitlement and an expectation that paupers' appeals would—indeed, must—be heard toward the end of the century. This fundamental shift mirrored, and was profoundly influenced by, wider agitation among crofting communities for change.

Recent research has stressed the importance of “popular politics” in English political culture especially after the Peasants' Revolt and during the political disturbances of the fifteenth century. Scholars have begun to explore how the structures of local political culture could inflect the nature of politics on a national level, notably through petitioning and the circulation of open letters and manifestos, thus moving beyond the nobility and gentry to consider the influence on late medieval political life of the society and culture of rural and urban communities that were far from the center of power. This article is a contribution to a growing body of work that aims to show how particular aspects of provincial urban politics affected national political culture. By focusing first on news distribution and contemporary conceptual structures that linked rumor, noise, and riot in one continuum; and by then considering the relationship between communal mobilization at times of political crisis and everyday policing institutions such as the hue and cry, the article investigates how the nature of political life in provincial towns affects our understanding of late medieval English political culture as a whole.

The life of James Harrington is singularly ill-documented. None of his manuscripts is known to survive; he makes few and insignificant appearances in the state papers of his time; and though he was clearly a sociable and talkative man, in an age when scholars and writers all knew one another and wrote letters which they kept, correspondence from, to or about him is altogether lacking. Apart from the personal reminiscences of John Aubrey (who knew him well) and a few details from Thomas Herbert, we depend for our knowledge of his life on information supplied through John Toland, deist and literary adventurer, who edited his works in 1699-1700. It seems that a sister, Lady Assheton, formed a collection of papers by and concerning her brother, which entered the possession of a younger half-sister, Dorothy, the wife of James Bellingham, then of Levens Hall in Westmoreland. She was alive in 1699, though no longer living at Levens, and made the Assheton collection available to Toland. He found there, and published, a number of Harrington's manuscript writings, and we must suppose that the detail he gives of Harrington's life and circumstances is based either on personal information from Dorothy Bellingham or on material from Lady Assheton's papers. But whether these still exist is unknown, and though some of Toland's statements can be corroborated and few have been proved wrong, there is a great deal of what he says which is very hard to test against independent evidence. This state of affairs is especially unsatisfying when one is trying to reconstruct an account of the intellectual and political situation in which works were read and responded to by their first public; for it is here that Toland (though a serious and conscientious editor), writing forty years later with strong ideological prepossessions of his own, is least likely to be of help.

Marriage, for the nineteenth-century woman, was perhaps the single most profound and far-reaching institution that would affect the course of her life. For the woman who did not marry, whether by choice or by chance, spinsterhood marked her as one of society's unfortunates, cast aside from the common lot of the sex. For the woman who did enter wedlock, marriage spelled, simultaneously, a loss of freedom in both political and financial matters, perhaps domestic drudgery and frequent pregnancy, but undoubtedly a clear elevation in social status. Class position aside, marriage had a far greater effect on the lives of women than of men, and the pressures for women to marry were correspondingly far greater than those brought to bear upon men.

The meaning and significance of marriage in Victorian England represented a central pressure point in the lives of all women. It was undoubtedly one of the major agencies of socialization to which women were exposed; the pressures it imposed were enormously persuasive and difficult to resist. Family expectation and even self-esteem competed with the public assessment of women on the basis of their marital status. For women, marriage and its effects permeated every aspect of their daily existence and shifted the focus of their emotional and social contacts—what Patricia Jalland has dubbed their “bedroom-bathroom intimacy”—from their own families to those of their husbands.

The growing demographic imbalance between the sexes during the course of the nineteenth century was viewed with alarm by contemporary commentators who feared that the changing ratio of men to women would increase the numbers of unmarried women.

The Bristol Bridge Riot of 1793 was one of the most serious riots, in terms of killed and injured, to occur in Britain during the last half of the eighteenth century. George Rudé lists it as second in violence only to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Yet, because it defies classification, it is rarely listed in the categories of riots so meticulously set out by Rudé and others. It was neither a turnpike riot transferred to an urban setting, nor was it the expression of long-held social grievances. It was a demonstration of dissatisfaction with official incompetence and deception. In many respects it was a riot caused by officials whose perception of the crowd led them to overreaction and violence.

The tendency by recent writers has been to see riotous activity in the eighteenth century as a sort of class warfare between the “people” and the “establishment,” represented by land owners, entrepreneurs, or parliament. This class warfare is presented as taking various forms under the categories of food riot, urban riot, country riot, and the like. While classification of riots may serve useful purposes and there may sometimes be more than a grain of truth in the class-war interpretation, it must be acknowledged that the resulting impression of uniformity in eighteenth-century riots is misleading. In the case of Bristol riots, in particular, it is the differences rather than the similarities that are of significance in understanding the changed perception of the crowd that caused the tragedy of 1793.

Demographic movements remain a controversial and largely unknown facet of medieval studies. This is particularly true for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the later middle ages, which in western Europe coincided with the second and most destructive pandemic of plague in recorded history. Most observers of late medieval England agree that population declined from sometime early in the fourteenth century, and that the decline extended to at least 1450, but the precise causes, extent, and chronology of this decline are still very much in debate. A recent analysis of 20,000 testamentary records from East Anglia, London, and Hertfordshire from 1430 to 1480 indicated that epidemic disease was the primary element in controlling and establishing demographic trends. It also showed, however, that this pattern began to change in the early 1470s when child replacement ratios, the generational measure of parents to progeny at fixed periods in time, began to rise for virtually all socio-geographic groups surveyed. By process of elimination, it was concluded that this was the result of an upturn in fertility. Since population increases generally have been attributed to changes in marriage patterns and/or mortality schedules, and since mortality was the major element in regulating population from 1348, the onset of the Black Death and the second plague pandemic, the postulated fertility rise of the 1470s took on even greater interest. Were the events of the 1470s anomalous, or did the projected fertility rise continue on into the 1480s, and even lead to the long-term period of population growth which occurred in the sixteenth century?

Despite having a powerful influence on the historiography of radicalism and nineteenth-century politics for the past several decades, the language of the constitution has not recently received scholarly attention. In Chartist and radical historiography, the constitution is usually treated as a narrative of national political development. This article extends the horizons of Chartist constitutionalism by exploring its similarities with American constitutionalism. By doing so, it also opens up questions regarding the ideas of the movement. Like the Americans sixty years before, the Chartists were confronted by a parliament that they believed had superseded its constitutional authority. This perception was informed by a belief that the constitution rested on the authority of the fixed principles of fundamental law, which they argued placed limits beyond which Parliament had no power to reach. As a result, the Chartists imagined that the British constitution functioned like a written constitution. To support this claim, they drew on a sophisticated interpretation of English law that argued that the common law was closely related to natural law.

Among the individuals who populated rural England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few were more unloved than the gamekeeper. That he was regularly damned at the village alehouse is not, perhaps, all that surprising. The gamekeeper was, after all, responsible for enforcing the highly unpopular laws “for the preservation of the game.” It was he who searched laborers' cottages for snares, nets and illicit game; it was he too who hauled poachers before the local justice of the peace for summary trial and punishment. But if the gamekeeper was hated by the poor, his standing in other quarters was not notably higher. Stewards questioned his honesty, foxhunters denounced him as a vulpicide, and the press was always eager to brand him as a rank hypocrite. Defenders were rare and cautious. Even Richard Jefferies, author of a very sympathetic portrait of a keeper he had known in his youth, nevertheless felt compelled to acknowledge “the abuse lavished upon [gamekeepers] as a class—often, it is to be feared, too well deserved.” Historians, for their part, have made little effort to discover whether that abuse was in fact deserved. Those who have not ignored the question altogether have usually been content to repeat the charges hurled at gamekeepers by their contemporaries. In the view of one of the more recent historians of the game laws, for example, the gamekeeper “was usually some bold pugnacious labourer, often a former poacher chosen on the maxim ‘set a thief to catch a thief.’… He could not often resist the constant temptation to sell game on the sly ….And the combination of igonorance and authority all too often made him into a brutal and arrogant man.”

Much is known about the negotiation of personal credit relationships during the eighteenth century. It has been noted how direct contact and observation allowed individuals to assess the creditworthiness of those with whom they had financial connections and to whom they might lend money. Much less is known about one of the most important credit relationships of the long eighteenth century: that between the state and its creditors. This article shows that investors could experience the performance of public credit at the Bank of England. By 1760 the Bank was the manager of nearly three-quarters of the state's debt and housed the main secondary market in that debt. Thus, it provided a place for public creditors, both current and potential, to attend and scrutinize the performance of the state's promises. The article demonstrates how the Bank acted to embody public credit through its architecture, internal structures, and imagery and through the very visible actions of its clerks and the technologies that they used to record ownership and transfer of the national debt. The Bank of England, by those means, allowed creditors to interrogate the financial stability and reputation of the state in the same ways that they could interrogate the integrity of a private debtor.