General elections occurred in mid-19th century Britain for various reasons. Sovereigns died; prime ministers tried to enlarge their xsmajorities in the House of Commons—or to reduce their miniorities; and, of course, the Septennial Act put an outside limit upon the length of time a given Parliament might last. The seven year limit has since been replaced by a five year limit. Also, the death of a sovereign no longer requires the summoning of a new House of Commons. These changes are important. They have often been noted. But they are far less important than certain other changes to which less attention has been given. As a rule today a contest takes place in every constituency on every possible occasion. But at some general elections in the mid-19th century a contest took place in fewer than half of the constituencies.

Presumably, historians have always been vaguely aware that such was the case. But until fairly recently this awareness was indeed rather vague. To my knowledge Professor Gash was the first person to make a systematic count of the numbers of constituencies from which candidates were returned to Parliament without opposition. He made the count for each of the general elections between 1832 and 1847. And then, in a way that suggests his uncertainty what the phenomenon of the uncontested election really meant, when he published his figures in 1953 in his Politics in the Age of Peel, he did so not in the body of the book but in an appendix to which no significant reference was made. Since then others have continued to count. In 1965 Trevor Lloyd published a short piece entitled “Uncontested Seats in British General Elections, 1852-1910.”

Debates about poverty in mid-seventeenth-century England have, for some years, been a staple of historical studies. In our own time, where the numbers of the dispossessed continue to challenge the success of current modes of social and economic organization, such an interest is understandable and to be welcomed. But the relevance of studies of past problems and solutions and their applicability to present purposes is more complex than is usually recognized.

The immediate benefit of studying discussions for change in mid-seventeenth-century England is that they provide an unusual insight into how members of that society conceived of it. In particular, their observations about the problems of poverty and the role of the poor offer us an understanding of the perceived social structure, the ethical bases for social differentiation, and the degree to which the future could be envisioned as differing from the past or present. Such understandings of proposed social change are invaluable for historians wishing to grasp the underlying assumptions on which past thought and action was predicated.

Past proposals for social reform, however, have also been the focus of a significantly different enquiry by historians. In order to render those past programs more comprehensible (and more directly “relevant”) to modern readers, they are often placed on a “conservative” versus “radical” continuum, one end of which has sometimes been marked “extreme left wing.” This article argues that any such classification inevitably leads to misunderstandings of the authors and of their programs and, consequently, misrepresents both to the present.

The late Sir Lewis Namier seems to have the highest, or nearly the highest authority of historians, chiefly for his work on English politics in the 1760's. This article attempts to make a judgment of his authority by examining the truth of his findings about English politics in the 1760's. Namier's authority is in great part based upon his seeming care in his researches, since people suppose that those who are occupied with details are careful with details. The results of his researches must therefore be considered in their presentation. But these researches need not be redone, at least for the purpose of understanding Namier's findings; for his findings rest upon an argument — an argument constructed not only from the results of researches but from general statements that are not results of his researches. Indeed, it happens that Namier's general statements fall within political science, as that subject has been understood since Aristotle. The present writer is a political scientist, and proposes to concentrate on Namier's argument.

Namier's principal conclusion is that there was no danger of tyranny in Britain in the 1760's. His argument has two parts, or he has two arguments: the apparent danger of tyranny is explained and deflated, first by the heir-apparent cycle, and second by the superiority of modern party government. He reaches his conclusion by denying effect to the source of danger usually identified by historians and thoughtful contemporaries, the influence of Bolingbroke — so that he seems, to one critic, to ignore the importance of “ideas.”

The mid-Victorian state was a modest, and only moderately democratic, affair. It was modest both in its size and in what it set out to do. There was no pretense that the government could do much on its own to remedy or compensate for social ills, and there was no party in the land with a serious program of state intervention. This minimalist character of the state, whose restricted ambitions were underpinned by the constraints of Gladstonian finance, was reinforced by its inaccessibility. Political participation was the preserve of a distinct minority, less than 15 percent of the male population after the reform of 1832. The Second Reform Bill of 1867 widened the franchise further, to about 35 percent of men, but political citizenship continued to be denied to the bulk of the working class and to all women.

By contrast, few people—scholars or laymen—would attach the label “modest” to the state in the twentieth century, and, for all the flaws and imperfections that reduce its representativeness, it is obviously part of a highly democratic polity. The sphere of state action has expanded enormously since 1850, and, despite the recent efforts of Conservatives, the government still bears responsibility for numerous aspects of its citizens' well-being. Over roughly the same span of years the British political system has been democratized. Successive installations of reform in 1867, in 1884–85, in 1918, and in 1929 have brought first working-class men, then middle-class women, and finally all women into the formal political system. These two processes—the expansion of government and the democratization of British politics—constitute the major transformations in public life in modern Britain.

During the years from 1697 through 1699, King William III of England was engaged in a struggle with a radical Whig press and a Tory coalition in the House of Commons over the size of England's standing army in peacetime. Both sides regarded the contest as one of particular importance; for the King there was no issue during his entire reign which involved him more deeply in English domestic politics. The parliamentary debates on the matter were notably stormy. For what was at stake, just ten years after the Glorious Revolution, was the relative power of King and Parliament. For the first time Article VI of the Bill of Rights, that is, that Parliament must consent to an army in peacetime, was applied and tested. The army question has intrinsic importance but can also be seen as part of a broader struggle between King and Parliament for power. Among such questions as Irish land grants, “placemen,” foreign advisers, and the Land Bank, the standing army was the most complex and emotion-filled issue between the House of Commons and William. Although some of the political implications of the standing army controversy have been suggested, historians have not investigated the part played by William. The King's role is worth isolating for it casts fresh light on William's talents in dealing with domestic politics, illustrates the relationship between a King who, at the end of the seventeenth century, still retained power and a House of Commons which increasingly claimed power, and shows that, however disparate the strength of the two sides in the standing army controversy, a genuine contest took place.

Major emphasis has been placed on the political significance of the final abolition of the Court of Wards and Liveries in 1660. Not only did it remove a substantial source of grievance against the crown but, as part of a wider settlement whereby Charles II surrendered ancient dues in return for revenue granted by parliament, it formed a major signpost on the road from a feudal to a constitutional monarchy. Historians have also stressed the importance of abolition to developments in landownership and agriculture. To Blackstone writing in the eighteenth century, abolition was “a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even Magna Carta itself.” A century later G. C. Brodrick felt it “at least possible” that “this great reform” had provided England with “an advantage in agriculture over her foreign rivals which has not yet been fully exhausted.” David Ogg went so far as to suggest that abolition “was possibly the most important single event in the history of English landholding.” While most recently, in analysing the economic causes of the English revolution, Lawrence Stone has argued that “it is surely significant that among those [things[ whch were not [restored in 1660] were feudal tenures.”

It has been suggested that the more substantial landowners benefited in three respects from abolition: fiscally; collectively, in relation to other groups in rural society; and managerially, insofar as the reform increased their capacity to conduct their affairs effectively. Their financial position improved with the disappearance of the feudal exactions associated with wardship to which the majority of them had previously been liable.

In December 1990 I published an essay critical of the work of Dr. John Adamson. I cited numerous examples of what I consider systematic misuse of evidence, including selective quotation and misquotation, tendentious interpretation, and the citation of sources that either have no bearing on the point being substantiated or are so tangential to it that no reasonable researcher would consider the cited material to constitute evidence within the canons of accepted scholarly practice. I came to these conclusions after a long period of checking citations. What I found was that the evidence for these questionable practices was embedded in Adamson's work and concealed from the view of his readers. Because he uniformly preferred to cite from manuscripts and disdained cross-reference to readily available printed editions, only someone whose familiarity with the materials nearly rivaled his own could be aware of the problem. Dozens of manuscript citations were offered as evidence for self-confident assertions, but time after time no quotations were provided in either text or footnote to make the assertions concrete. When sources were quoted, the quotations were largely run into Adamson's sentences rather than appearing in their own contexts.

If not one of the pieces of Edwardian legislation which contributed to the growth of the English legal system, the Statute of Mortmain was nonetheless a most important enactment, a fact which has been realized in the not inconsiderable attention devoted to it by historians. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the crown's execution of the law in the period 1279 to 1348, with reference to the Benedictine houses of Crowland Abbey, Thorney Abbey, and Spalding Priory, and the statute's effects on the territorial policy of each of these.

Information on their territorial policies is to be found in the three chartularies relating to them. These are the Spalding Register, written c1331, numbering 801 folios in two volumes; the Red Book of Thorney, written c1326, numbering 472 folios in two volumes; and the Wrest Park Chartulary, written in the mid-fourteenth century after 1343, numbering 257 folios. No doubt there may be omissions, but a close scrutiny of the Spalding Register and the Red Book of Thorney, which both contain land acquisitions added by later clerks up to 1348, shows how faithfully, if not in the Spalding case carefully, (the original Spalding clerk tended to be rather a haphazard organiser; the original Thorney clerk was a real craftsman) recorded are the land acquisitions made by these two houses from the later thirteenth century to the middle of the fourteenth century. There are literally scores of these, with the additional evidence of the Calendar of Patent Rolls, which is useful as a check as well as a supplement to the chartularies, and which almost invariably testifies to the reliability of the clerks.

Customarily, the British Labour party has been regarded as the natural product of an advanced industrial society. Given a sufficiently developed economy, like Britain's in the early years of the twentieth century, it was assumed that a socialist working-class party was due to emerge as an increasingly large and effective force. In this democratized version of Marxism, the absence of such a party in the United States had to be explained as the result of the relative immaturity of American industrial society. Labor in the United States was on the same political road as labor in Western Europe, but well behind. Especially did it seem behind labor in Britain, “the country in which modern Capitalism first emerged to full growth — the country which was, therefore, the pioneer of Labour organisation.

That this entire approach needs to be reconsidered is now plain. Recent American political trends fail to support the expectation of a European-style working-class movement in the United States, and this type of party in Western Europe itself appears by this time to have had more of a past than it has a future. Socialism is hardly a thriving faith in advanced western nations, and the old class base for protest movements is being shaken as Western European societies share larger national products, assimilate increasingly their higher paid workers to bourgeois styles of life, decrease the proportion of manualists in the total work force, and provide wider educational opportunities. As Aneurin Bevan said deploringly of the new generation of British working-class voters, whose support Labour had failed to attract in the 1959 general election, “This section of the population has become thoroughly Americanized.”

The appeal for treason lodged against Sir Thomas Mortimer in the parliament of 1397 as well as the entire background to the event has been the subject of considerable confusion. Much of this confusion has been the result of poor communication within the historical community. The information has been available, but it has appeared in diverse places. Thus, the two most recent biographers of Richard II, Anthony Steel and Harold Hutchison, have each been puzzled by the appeal of Mortimer: “The reasons for his inclusion are not clear…”; “…a mysterious addition for which no satisfactory explanation has ever been offered.” Sir Charles Oman, however, offered an explanation over sixty years ago: “As a small supplementary addition to the appeals of the previous autumn, two noted supporters of Gloucester in 1387 were dealt with—Lord Cobham, and Sir Thomas Mortimer, who had murdered the constable of Chester at Radcot Bridge.” Oman was not quite accurate when he grouped Mortimer with Cobham. Although Sir Thomas was not included in the original bill of appeal, he was cited in the summary of the appeal and the subsequent processes of the autumn session of Richard II's last parliament; lord Cobham did not become involved until the parliament reassembled in the next year. Oman's explanation of the matter, however, is not vitiated by this error. It, therefore, deserves further investigation as a solution to the mystery of Mortimer's appeal.

In 1833, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote, “I do not know where I could put my hand upon a book containing so much sense with sound constitutional doctrine as this thin folio of Johnson's works.” The “Johnson” to whom Coleridge referred was not the celebrated Doctor Samuel Johnson of the eighteenth century but instead the late seventeenth-century Whig clergyman, the Reverend Samuel Johnson. Reverend Johnson's single volume of complete works impressed Coleridge; he scribbled laudatory remarks throughout the margins of a 1710 edition. Coleridge admired the directness of Johnson's style and his persuasive method of argumentation. Johnson would have appreciated Coleridge's comments. They reflected the way he himself understood his work—as sound constitutional doctrine, plainly put.

Yet for all its clarity and consistency, Johnson's political thinking was not always appreciated by England's political elite of the 1680s and 1690s. The implications of Johnson's political ideas—much like those of his contemporary John Locke—were understood as far too revolutionary and destabilizing. However, Johnson's fiery prose and sardonic wit often proved useful to the political opposition: from the Whig exclusionists of the early 1680s, to the supporters of William and Mary in 1688/89, to the radical Whigs and country Tories of the 1690s and early eighteenth century.

Johnson's career as a Whig propagandist spanned 1679 to 1700. Among his contemporaries, he was undoubtedly most renowned for his strident anti-Catholicism and for the brutal punishments that he endured for his radical politics.

1988 and 1989 have been vintage years all over the world for centenary celebrations. People have celebrated the centenary of the Eiffel Tower, the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the bicentenary of Australia, the bicentenary of the American Bill of Rights, the quatercentenary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the sexcentenary of the battle of Kosovo (this one may have escaped your notice, but it brought over a million people to a gathering in the city of Pristina in Yugoslavia in June 1989), and, of course, the tercentenary of the English Revolution of 1688–89, with which I am concerned tonight. You will have no trouble believing that I have been “concerned with” and “celebrating” the Glorious Revolution for two years now, but I want to confess to you in the intimacy of this festive occasion that it has really been at least ten years, and that sometimes it feels more like three hundred!

How did centennial observances start? Why do people go to trouble, take time, and spend money to call to mind an event that happened one, two, or three hundred years ago? What is it about centennial moments that turns serious-minded, scholarly-inclined historians like ourselves into “party people”? What do celebrations tell us about the uses of the past in successive “presents”? The fact is that celebrations, each varying in character, have attended the Glorious Revolution from its beginnings on through each centennial anniversary thereafter — in 1788–89, 1888–89, and 1988–89. The observances at these centennial moments not only celebrated the Revolution itself, but also served, even as they reflected, current political, cultural, and/or economic ideas and goals. In a long perspective, the celebrations are an important part of the political and cultural history of the Revolution of 1688–89 itself. They illustrate how high and low politics may intersect, show how political ideas circulate through society and undergo transformation, and offer an index of changing ideological and cultural assumptions and aspirations over three hundred years.

This article takes the opening of the Brook Advisory Centres in London (1964) and Birmingham (1966) as a comparative case study for exploring the public debate on youth sexuality. The two centers were the first in postwar Britain specifically dedicated to the provision of advice on birth control and emotional problems to unmarried and young people. By focusing on an initiative that launched amid rising concerns over illegitimacy and promiscuity, the article engages with the debate over social change in the 1960s and the so-called permissive society. The author argues that the notion of responsibility became a key paradigm for supporters of a new sexual culture. Combining archival material, media analysis, and oral history interviews, the author shows that in constructing the need for a service for unmarried people, the Brook Advisory Centres faced accusations of encouraging promiscuity. Their main line of defense was the production of a narrative that stressed the notion of responsibility and moral guidance for unmarried people in avoiding unwanted babies. And in the debate around youth sexuality, locality mattered. In Birmingham, the prospect of formal contraceptive advice for unmarried girls was violently opposed by church members and family-planning doctors, whereas London witnessed the creation of a viable discourse with an emphasis on sexual responsibility.