George Yule's “Independents and Revolutionaries” suggests that in many respects he and I are not so far apart. We agree that a “rigid two-party view” of Interregnum politics is a mistake, that not all members of the Rump were political Independents, that “Independent” was not commonly used as a political term after 1648, and that the clue to the events of 1648-49, the climax of the Puritan Revolution, lies in the existence of a group of genuine radicals who can and ought to be identified. He also seems to agree in one place that the criticisms of his statistical methods in The Independents in the English Civil War which I advanced in “The Independents Reconsidered” are justified, though in another he argues that the table in The Independents enables the reader to surmount these difficulties. This being so, if a technical dispute over methodology was all that remained between us, his latest article might well be left unchallenged. It contains, however, a number of assumptions about seventeenth-century religion and politics which are either unfounded or need serious qualification, and on which a few further comments are necessary.

First, as to method. It is true that the table referred to enables the reader to obtain Yule's estimates of the total numbers in various groups, such as (a) “Fled to Army, 1647,” (b) purged, 1648, and (c) Rumper, and of how these break down by social position and religious affiliation. But nowhere is there any entry for all of Yule's allegedly Independent M.P.s and of the breakdown for these, nor is there any way of obtaining it from the table.

In January, 1696, Parliament passed an act to reform the procedure used in treason trials. The consequences of this act were immense. It immediately changed the complexion of treason trials from that of conciliar hearings aimed at eliminating the government's enemies to that of actual trials which sought to establish guilt or innocence. Moreover, Parliament subsequently extended some of the key provisions of this act to criminal law proceedings, thus giving the 1696 statute a claim to being one of the well-springs of legal reform in modern England. Most important of all, however, was the effect the act had on politics. It helped to bring to a close an age in which politicians frequently attacked their opponents with charges of treason, and it thus played a part in opening a new age, one where less violent practices were employed in the political struggle.

It is not the least of ironies in English history that an act as important as the Treason Trials Act of 1696 should have received so little scholarly attention. The only historian to give the act more than a few pages is Samuel Rezneck in an article written in 1930. Most historians who work on the period follow the practice of such scholars as G. M. Trevelyan, David Ogg, and Sir Keith Feiling, and either fail to mention the act or note its passage in a sentence or two. Many scholars, especially those of an earlier generation, seem to assume that the act was a natural, perhaps inevitable, reaction to Stuart tyranny—that it was part of the light brought in by William and Mary at the end of a dark century—and, hence, that there is little need to discuss it.

Sir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be “improved” by making it more “humane.” Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was a rare but influential metropolitan-based planter with an expansive imperial vision, prepared to work with British politicians to guarantee his investments in slavery through progressive slave reforms. This article intersects with recent historiography highlighting connections between metropole and colony but also insists on the influence of Demerara, including the effects of a large slave rebellion centered on Gladstone's estates (which illustrated that enslaved people were not happy with Gladstone's supposedly enlightened attitudes) on metropolitan sensibilities in the 1820s. Gladstone's strategies for an improved slavery, despite the contradictions inherent in championing such a policy while maintaining a fierce drive for profits, were a powerful counter to a renewed abolitionist thrust against slavery in the mid to late 1820s. Gladstone showed that that the logic of gradual emancipation still had force in imperial thinking in this decade.

“My men should use their swords and bucklers…but if John Stanshaw is in one alehouse then I will be in another.”

To historians of medieval and Reformation England, these lines should not be all that surprising. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the heyday of livery and maintenance, ritualized effrontery was in vogue among the affluent and they often employed large retinues of armed servants as signs of potency and prestige. However, it may surprise some to learn that the above statement was uttered by a priest, Geoffrey Elys, vicar of Thatcham (Berks.), around the beginning of the sixteenth century. Though the medieval Church tirelessly struggled to convince its flock of the wickedness of interpersonal aggression, its own servants were not immune to bouts of conflict and strife. As R. N. Swanson cautions in his study of parish priests, the clergy “can be considered as a group; but they were also individuals who created their own careers and had their own personal relations with their parishioners.” Indeed, the conduct of clerics in their parish communities, especially their violent conduct, can be quite baffling if one only evaluates it by the criteria of ecclesiastical proscription and fails to recognize that such proscription was just one thick strand of an intricate web of relations and expectations. In his examination of thirteenth-century parish priesthood, J. Goering has traced the transition of pastors from merely members of the village to semi-detached individuals who were compelled to abide by both village customs and the values of a more unified and doctrinally authoritative Church.

This paper is the first fruit of a study of electoral politics in the Borough of Cambridge between the first and second Reform Bills, in which we are attempting to explore in detail some of the most important general questions about the political history of mid-Victorian Britain.

The critical importance of the period between 1832 and 1868 to the transition from aristocratic rule to parliamentary democracy in Britain is not in doubt. In the terms of the most useful comparative study (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) 1832 represented an early, genuine but limited concession by the old elite to bourgeois and working class claims to political influence, a remarkably Whig view. The major works on the politics of the period (esp. Gash 1933 and Hanham 1959) have emphasised the limited nature of the concession while other have thrown doubt on the notion of concession, at all, pointing out the conservative intentions behind the First Reform Bill (Moore 1966, 1976) and the contingent pressures on the actual provisions of the Second (Cowling 1967). Control of Parliament remained largely where it had been before; the decline of aristocratic government was long drawn out; adaptation of the political system followed slowly in the wake of economic and social change. Middle class reform and militant labour were gradually accommodated in the parliamentary system, enlisted in the ranks of the aristocratic parties, which though transformed, even now, moderate, loyal, constitutionalist, bear the marks of their origin. Part of the explanation for the success of gradualism must be sought in the weakness of the labor movement and its failure at the revolutionary moment, which has been illuminated in detail by Foster's studies of industrial towns (1967, 1968, 1974).

Between 1931 and 1947, the American industrialist Henry Ford financed a British agricultural experiment at the Fordson Estate in the Essex countryside. This article analyses the Fordson experiment as it developed from a limited attempt to test the merits of American farming methods into a wider model for remaking British industry and society. Focusing closely on Sir Percival Perry, a Conservative Party activist and Ford's partner in the venture, it explores the extent to which the experiment sought to harmonize modern technology with traditional patterns of life. In doing so, the article places the history of the Fordson Estate within the paradigm of interwar conservative modernity. By tracing Perry's participation within a network of industrial paternalist organizations and delineating his connection to the interwar conservative movement, the article demonstrates that conservative modernity stood largely outside formal party politics but was central to the praxis of interwar conservatism. It highlights an experimental, radical, and utopian form of conservative politics that aimed to foster conservative rural citizens.

During the 1790s, political speech in London's public spaces and commercial sites of leisure came under intense governmental surveillance. Fearing revolutionary infection from across the channel in France, the Pitt ministry sent spies into popular organizations such as the London Corresponding Society and turned more attention to other sites as well, including coffeehouses, taverns, debating-club rooms, and the street. Recently, historians too have explored the ways in which radicals manipulated the ludic vocabularies of urban sociability to critique the regime, protest persecution, and argue for reform. In this article I address a site that figured prominently as a place for radical speech in the 1790s: the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Although it was a site whose content was strictly regulated by the state through the office of the Examiner of Plays, the royal theater was, like other eighteenth-century theaters, a place where performances multiplied: viewers watched the play, but in the well-lit and noisy pit, boxes, and galleries, they watched other viewers intently. All were engaged in a complex process of performance, reception, and counterperformance. Indeed, as scholars have shown, theater audiences in late Georgian London were highly skilled at appropriating a theatrical grammar by which to demand their perceived rights as English subjects. Such strategies revealed the potency of theatrical representation in a society where, as Gillian Russell notes, “performance, display and spectatorship were essential components of the social mechanism.”

Violence was an important part of the educational experience of many British children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It principally took the form of playground fights, in which children competed in displays of physical prowess to win the accolade “cock of the school,” the term attached to the best fighter. This article examines the background to these fights using autobiographical accounts produced by individuals educated between 1890 and 1940. Working from common themes in these accounts, it explains the structure and context of schoolyard fights. In particular, it examines the manner in which contemporary notions of masculinity influenced the conduct of children. Fighting was a means by which a schoolboy could act out a fantasy of manhood and, through this, relate to his peers and the school environment.

The health and well-being of pets became a significant matter of medical and scientific concern during the first decades of the twentieth century. Addressing the case of dogs, this article contends that this circumstance was not primarily a consequence of developments internal to veterinary practice but rather emerged from the broader-based domestic-science movement. The elaboration of scientifically oriented approaches to dog care signals the incorporation of pets within a maternal ideal that emphasized care and efficiency as domestic virtues. Via consideration of canine milk foods, women-led canine medical institutions, canine-concerned domestic workers, and rationalist approaches to kennel design, the article demonstrates that dogs should be placed alongside such established objects of domestic scientific reform as children, homes, and human bodies. Moreover, it shows that scientific reconceptualizations of dogs relied on an extensive network of (primarily women) laborers that included food producers, nursing staff, kennel attendants, and breeders. The article thereby contributes to a growing body of scholarship highlighting ways in which the domestic-science movement forged new scientific objects and practices around the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, dogs were routinely being upheld as exemplars of the kinds of homely existence made possible by scientifically informed approaches to domestic living.

The cooperative communal side of peasant life in the Middle Ages has been discussed widely, most often in the context of open field agriculture as being the basis of village solidarity. Although such writings state, or imply, the important truth that economic reality necessitated a degree of cooperation among peasants, they tend to offer little or no evidence to justify the romantic notion that the medieval village possessed a spiritual cohesiveness, that it represented a harmonious society with close emotional bonds between neighbors.

For example, one scholar suggests the romantic view of community life in the Middle Ages when he states:

Another writer presents a similar perspective in a discussion of the pre-industrial village:

… living together in one township, isolated, spatially, from others of comparable size, of very much the same structure inevitably means a communal sense and communal activity ….

One wonders about the meaning of the terms “solace” and “communal sense,” and also about the evidence which supports the above positions. The nature of the ties within the medieval peasant community represents a major question which should not be answered with the kinds of a priori assumptions quoted above.

“Who loves the state these days?” Frances Cairncross rhetorically asked in The Times Literary Supplement at the height of the Thatcher era. “People have become more cynical,” she went on, “about the central tenet of socialism: the concept of a wise and beneficent State, representing the best interests of the community at large.” The skepticism about the state as a provider of national well-being which Cairncross was referring to was of course not confined to Britain. Nor was it, in Britain, simply to be identified with “Thatcherism.” Rather, such disillusion developed over a period of several decades and across the political spectrum. As significant in this development as the thunderings of Thatcherites were the reconsiderations of those further left; David Marquand spoke for many when he declared his own tradition of Croslandite social democracy virtually bankrupt, flawed to the root by its statism, through which “civil society was seen, all too often, not as an agent, but as a patient.” The deep shift of opinion embodied in such observations has made its mark in a variety of realms, one of which is the subject of this essay: an alteration in the interpretation of British history, in particular of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era in which this newly problematical state began to grow into its modern form.

It has become something of a truism that historical writing is a part of the wider field of social discourse.