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.

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.”

The rapid increase in Irish immigration, it is often argued, was the chief cause for the growth of anti-Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century England. Patrick Joyce and Neville Kirk both believe that ethnic tension and violence in southeast Lancashire and northeast Cheshire increased during and after the late 1840s, that that increase “followed the pattern of the arrival and dispersal” of Irish immigrants, and that the controversy over the creation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in 1850 intensified the conflict.

L.P. Curtis, Jr., agrees that the mid-century is important, for it was then, he argues, that the stereotype, based on scientific racism, of the Irish as inferior, was “finally assembled and reproduced for a mass reading public which was by then ready to believe almost anything of a derogatory nature about the Irish people.” The English image of the Irish

Curtis admits that the Victorians used the word “race” very loosely, and that working-class anti-Irish “prejudice” had class and religious, as well as racist, bases. But he fails to explore these non-racist elements; his argument rests on the evidence of Victorian anthropological writings; he clearly believes that racism bears explanatory primacy.

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 victory of the Labour party in the British general election of July 1945 was preeminently a triumph of Left over Right. Labour won 393 seats, while the Conservatives, despite the prestige associated with their wartime leader Winston Churchill, won only 213. As the election results came in over the radio on July 26, the veteran Labour M.P. James Chuter Ede “began to wonder if I should wake up to find it all a dream.” By the end of the day, he was moved to record that the outcome of the election was “as great as 1906 … one of the unique occasions in British history—a Red Letter day in the best sense of that word.” At the same time, however, the election was of crucial importance in the development of the Left itself, especially with regard to the relationship between the Labour party and the Left as a whole.

I Labour's decisive election victory has commonly been interpreted as the climax of a long and gradual rise to power. The historian Charles Mowat was quick to point out that its success was “the culmination of a political movement now more than sixty years old.” The historic mission of the Labour party, its “fifty years' march” from tiny pressure group to majority government, was the subject of several Whiggish treatises in the following few years. Over the last decade, moreover, the increasing recent difficulties of the Labour party have tended to highlight the comparative steadiness of its earlier growth, although they have also stimulated greater attention to the early causes of later conflicts.

This article explores the distribution of women witnesses in a selection of English church courts between the mid-sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries, in order to assess the extent to which women's participation as witnesses in these jurisdictions might be characterized as a form of legal agency. It shows that women's participation was highly contingent on their marital status and between places and over time and was shaped by the matters in dispute as well as the gender of the litigants for whom they testified. Although poverty did not exclude women witnesses (higher proportions of female witnesses than male claimed to be poor or of limited means), women were more vulnerable than were men to discrediting strategies that cast doubt on their authority in court. Such findings show that the incorporative dimensions of state formation did not deliver new forms of agency to women but depended heavily upon patriarchal norms and constraints.

This article examines ordinary priests in late medieval England who, despite clear guidelines to the contrary, employed and lived with female servants. Ecclesiastical legislation frequently and firmly warned priests against living with women, including servants, because of the potential for sexual temptation, scandal, or both. Historians have long assumed that most clerical households were homosocial, but looking closely at the living arrangements of ordinary parish priests reveals a different story. Evidence from the dioceses of Hereford and Lincoln suggests that elite clerical expectations were often ill-suited to the social and economic realities of parish life, and priests’ living arrangements reflect this incompatibility. Distrust of female clerical servants was heightened during periods of church reform, when these women bore the brunt of both reforming rhetoric and action.

“I love a mob,” the aging Duke of Newcastle said in 1768, “I headed a mob once myself. We owe the Hanoverian succession to a mob.” As I read those words I wondered if the good Duke, who was 73 when he said them, had slipped into senility or into an aged-ripened concept of the past, for the textbooks tell of the Jacobite rioting at George I's accession and during and after the Rebellion of 1715, but not of mob action in support of the Hanovers. The more specific histories of the period such as George Rude's Hanoverian London show that some of the events which we interpret as riots were actually pitched battles between mobs of Jacobite sympathizers and friends of the new government. This shows the existence of rival forces but where was Newcastle's mob? This paper attempts to define that mob, to explain the reasons for its formation, to show its organization around the young Pelham-Hollis, Duke of Newcastle, and to illustrate its activities.

William of Malmesbury's Historia Novella is an apologia for his pro-Angevin patron, Robert Earl of Gloucester, the premier supporter of the Empress Maud in the civil war with king Stephen (1135-1154). Stephen's failure to secure Robert of Gloucester's full backing weakened the reign from the outset. Robert, one of the two or three greatest landholders in the Anglo-Norman world, was among the last and most reluctant magnates to render Stephen homage, and among the first to turn openly against him. The earl of Gloucester became the model for the lay and ecclesiastical pro-Angevin nobility, and William of Malmesbury's panegyric of him guarantees the Historia Novella its place of importance among the sources for Stephen's reign.

Professor Robert B. Patterson has recently argued that the Historia Novella is inaccurate, mendacious, and unreliable, and that its author is unworthy of being called an historian. But a close analysis of Patterson's allegations shows that William's account of earl Robert's actions is consistent with evidence from charters and other chronicles. William of Malmesbury's bias lends interest to his account without seriously compromising its accuracy. The Historia Novella, William of Malmesbury's final work, is a characteristic product of his careful research and scholarship.

Patterson maintains that Robert of Gloucester did not support Maud until 1138, after the earl formally renounced his allegiance to Stephen. In fact, however, Robert was active in his half-sister's service as early as 1126.

A complaint among twelfth-century English moralists and chroniclers was that monarchs were choosing “men raised from the dust” to be their ministers and counselors instead of members of old noble families. They charged that the king was choosing as his courtiers or familiares low-born men—plebes, ignobiles, even rustici or servi—allowing them to usurp places that belonged to the aristocracy. This chorus of complaint began in the time of William the Conqueror's sons. Only then did nobiles and curiales begin to divide into two distinct groups, and new administrative posts provided opportunities for new men to rise to greater wealth and influence.

The early twelfth-century monastic chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that William the Conqueror “raised up the lowest of his Norman followers to the greatest riches.” Often cited is his complaint about Henry I, “So he pulled down many great men [illustres] from positions of eminence …. He ennobled others of base stock [de ignobili stirpe] who had served him well, raised them, so to say, from the dust, and heaping all kinds of favors on them, stationed them above earls and famous castellans.” The author of the Gesta Stephani also complained that Henry I took men of low birth [ex plebeio genere], who had entered his service as court pages and enriched them, endowed them with wide estates, and made them his chief officials. Another chronicler, Richard of Hexham, made a similar comment, although in admiring rather than condemning language, “He oppressed many nobles because of their faithlessness; he elevated to high honors many commoners [ignobiles], whom he found to be upright and loyal to him.”

For the British, the Anglo-Russian Convention was the culmination of repeated efforts, first begun by Lord Salisbury's government in the 1880s, later reiterated by the ministry of Arthur Balfour after the turn of the century, to come to terms with Russia in Asia. What was the effect on the British position in Asia of the agreement which the Liberal administration of Henry Campbell-Bannerman finally obtained in 1907? The actual working of the Convention in Asia has not received close attention. Since Britain and Russia were wartime allies, it appears to have been taken for granted that, before World War I, the Anglo-Russian Convention produced no major disenchantment or dangers for either partner. One purpose of this essay is to show that for the British, the Convention eventually generated serious dissatisfaction, that it failed to fulfill the British aim of halting Russian expansion in areas strategically crucial to the defense of India, and that in Central Asia after 1912, the Anglo-Russian Convention hindered rather than furthered the British quest for security. Further, a thesis of this paper is that Anglo-Russian relations dominated British policy in Central Asia, and that it was British anxiety about Russian expansion in Central Asia which led the British after 1912 to attempt to establish a veiled protectorate in Tibet. This view diverges from that of a recent major work on the once obscure history of Central Asia: in The McMahon Line, Professor Alastair Lamb emphasized the importance of Sino-Indian relations to the formulation of British policy in Central Asia.

Robert Hooke's intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up London's coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it.

I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.

Eighteenth-century British foreign policy has been a marginal subject for several decades. During that period much good work has been produced, particularly on the diplomacy of the first four decades of the century, but this work has not been integrated into the general scholarship of the period. The textbooks for the century, commonly written by experts in high politics, generally offer a hurried account of foreign policy, that is, a jumble of names and dates that are not related to the problems discussed in the rest of the work. Foreign policy is rarely perceived as a crucial problem of political management or debate. Eighteenth-century scholars complain often, particularly in conversation, about what they regard as the excessively detailed nature of foreign policy studies and their supposed failure to address themselves to problems of general relevance.

The strong diplomatic bias of eighteenth-century foreign policy studies has certainly led to the production of many works that have few points of access for the general scholar. The domestic context of foreign policy and, in particular, the extent to which policy was debated are subjects that have received relatively little attention. Partly this is a result of the development of the subject. The great age of foreign policy studies was the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, an age in which history existed to study the growth and exalt the triumphs of the nation-state.

In recent years, historians of the Augustan period have done much to rehabilitate the posthumous reputation of Queen Anne, a monarch traditionally viewed as dull, weak, reactionary, and easily led. Beginning in the 1920s with the work of W. T. Morgan, continuing with that of G. M. Trevelyan and G. S. Holmes, and culminating in the definitive biography by Edward Gregg, Anne has gradually emerged as a figure to be reckoned with. We have come to see her as a tenacious and often skillful navigator, charting a middle course between the opposing shoals of the Whig and Tory parties, in an attempt to preserve freedom of maneuver for the postrevolutionary monarchy.

This article will explore a heretofore neglected aspect of the queen's political helmsmanship: the attempt to make her person and crown a focus for national (i.e., English) unity through the revival and exploitation of royal ritual and symbol. It will be argued below that Anne—alone among the later Stuarts—made extensive use of the arsenal of ceremonial paraphernalia, what David Cannadine has called “the theatre of power,” which is normally associated with her Tudor and early Stuart predecessors. This essay is thus intended not only to contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Anne's political role but also to help fill a gap between the wealth of fine work on pageantry at those earlier courts and the work Linda Colley and others have done on the reign of George III.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the role of the East India Company was significantly altered. In the early part of the century, the main thrust of Company activity was commercial, but this began to change as the French challenged British interests in India and conditions on the sub-continent demanded political and military involvement. Lucy Sutherland has summed up these changes succinctly: