This article, a revised and annotated version of a plenary lecture given at the North American Conference on British Studies meeting in October 2018, considers the place and significance of aliens in England's history between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and the arrival of the French and Dutch Protestants from the 1540s onward. It draws extensively on a new database of immigrants to England between 1330 and 1550, which itself relies principally on the remarkable records generated by a tax on aliens resident in England, collected at various points between 1440 and 1487. Aliens emerge as a significant element in English society—sometimes chastised, sometimes subject to violence and other abuse, but also recognized clearly for their contribution to the economy. If immigrants were sometimes seen as a potentially disruptive presence, they were also understood to be a natural and permanent part of the social order.

The dramatic collapse of the Liberal party during the second decade of the twentieth century has long fascinated academic historians, but only in the past twenty years has it become one of their major preoccupations. Every history of modern Britain now has a discussion of the causes and course of the Liberal collapse, and the specialized literature on the subject is voluminous, much of it highly technical and sophisticated.

It is easy to see why the Liberal decline appeals to historians. It has personal drama: the contest between Herbert Asquith, “the last of the Romans,” and David Lloyd George, “the Welsh Wizard.” There is the larger drama associated with the collapse of a great party and the rise of another. There are the large silent “revolutions” historians have found behind the political changes: the rise to maturity of the working classes, the evolution of British capitalism, and a vast cultural shift ushered in with the First World War.

Tudor statesmen, in their statutes and debates, and Tudor jurists, in reports and treatises, recorded their awareness of an antithesis between regal power and political law. Political action and juridical argument made them increasingly sensitive to an oppugnancy between executive authority and constitutional control. Medieval men of law, too, had noted this inconsonance in England's polity. Sir John Fortescue, while Henry VI's Chancellorin-exile in 1468, faced the dilemma; but he resolved it only verbally. He wrote: “regal power is restrained by political law.” Then he added, “such is the law of the Kingdom” of England. So facile a formula as Fortescue's might make nice theory, yet it was one easier to prescribe than to apply to a live monarch.

The pragmatic Tudors, however, succeeded in surmounting the antithesis between political law and regal power, paradoxically, by augmenting both. To solve immediate political crises and to enhance the effectiveness of government, Privy Councilors and parliamentarians passed act after act that increased the King's prerogatives. At the same time, moreover, these very statutes afforced, by implication, the principles of political, or public, law. Kings and queens, judges and councilors, Lords and Commons during the sixteenth century formulated a concept of the rule of law and made it transcendant. By the 1590's they had accorded the rule of law statutory, judicial, and regal recognition. For the Tudor time-being, this principle served to balance regal power and political law and to give to this antinomy a congruity.

The genesis of the Reform Act of 1832 is still not fully understood. It has become fashionable for historians to direct their attention toward two groups of Whigs who are seen as the ultimate arbiters of policy. The first, men of high visibility such as Lords Grey and Holland, was certainly of importance. The Reform Bill prime minister was the most brilliant political tactician the Whigs had produced since Walpole. But the senior leaders of the 1830s were already becoming rather antiquated in their ideas, and men of their type and generation were generally very moderate reformers. The other group to whom historians attribute the progressive elements of Whiggism, the Edinburgh Reviewers and especially Henry Brougham, are seen as the “new men,” the radicalizers and educators of Whiggery. Yet Brougham, for example, frequently worked against the efforts of advanced Whigs to unify and strengthen the party. Indeed, he actually regretted the liberal nature of the Reform Bill. The “new men” who might have played such a role in the House of Commons, Romilly, Horner, and Whitbread, were dead by 1818, the victims of disease and madness. Mackintosh and Macaulay contributed to the party's articulation of principles but did not shape them in the 1810s and 1820s.

No peaceful steps could have been taken toward actual constitutional change without the acquiescence, indeed the active cooperation, of the great Whig magnates. No Whig government could hope to survive for long or call itself Whig without support from the great families, most of them cousins by blood or marriage, whose surnames and titles were inextricably bound up with mythology anchored in the events of 1688–89.

T. S. Ashton has described the Industrial Revolution in England as a time when the “chimney stacks rose to dwarf the ancient spires.” He has also described it as a time when the voluntary association replaced state initiative in governmental affairs. These two phenomena of modern society – the urban industrial complex and the growth of public opinion – are usually paired. Perhaps it is natural to think of the growth of public opinion as something made possible by the growth of cities.

Yet it is known that the Industrial Revolution profoundly affected not only the cities but the countryside as well; that the new technology prompted (among other things) an enthusiasm for agricultural improvement. This is evident in the formation of numerous societies in the last quarter of the eighteenth century which were devoted to purely agricultural pursuits. With the decline of rural prosperity after 1815, however, there arose societies of a different sort which had as their object not the improvement of farming through better techniques but the improvement of agriculture through political action. Both kinds of society revealed the stirrings of public opinion in the countryside.

This essay is concerned with the second type of society, which rose and spread among what are loosely termed the tenant farmers of England. These societies were numerous enough and sufficiently of one mind to take on the character of a movement. The movement was to fail, as agrarian movements are notorious for doing.

Lamb in the 1820s and Dickens in the 1830s had written about some of those who made their living or advertised their services in the streets of London: beggars, chimney sweeps, cab drivers, the vendors of baked potatoes and kidney pies. When, in the late forties, Henry Mayhew began his extensive study of the street-folk, he found reason to cite both these chroniclers. London Labour and the London Poor, however, is an enterprise different in kind from the essays and sketches it occasionally quotes. Somehow, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the street-folk became a subject worth four volumes and sixteen hundred pages.

The decision to devote so much attention to the people of the streets came at a crisis-point in Mayhew's journalistic career. He had undertaken for the Morning Chronicle (1849) a comprehensive study of the metropolitan poor. Defining the poor as “those persons whose incomings are insufficient for the satisfaction of their wants,” Mayhew proposed to discuss them “according as they will work, they can't work, and they won't work.” He had progressed part way through the first of these classifications when he quarrelled with the editors of the Chronicle and ended by severing his ties with them. On his own, Mayhew commenced the publication in parts of London Labour. The “will, can't, won't” division, which persists in these volumes, was supplemented or perhaps superseded by another. Mayhew's ultimate object was still to study all the London poor but he now began with a trade-by-trade survey of the street-folk.

In view of the large number of financial complaints in Tudor diplomatic correspondence, it is entirely understandable why compensation might be considered a central problem of sixteenth-century foreign service. The feeling conveyed by the diplomats is that their pay was haphazard in its conception, irregular in its distribution, and utterly insufficient in its magnitude; that is, it was thoroughly unsatisfactory in every respect. So consistent and so forceful did these envoys make their case that today it is virtually axiomatic for historians to assume that compensation was chaotic, and that service abroad was always financially debilitating. “Upon none of the royal servants did the disorder of sixteenth century fiscal administration bear harder [than upon the ambassadors],” Professor Mattingly notes. Moreover, “for an ambassador, the chance of financial embarrassment was almost a certainty.” Sir John Neale, another of only a few who have addressed this issue directly, is persuaded that, “it was not exceptional for an Elizabethan ambassador to get into financial straits … generally ambassadors had to face making inroads into their private estates.” Or: “His [the ambassador's] was not a happy lot. His profit and loss account was a statement in two terms of which one was never operative …. Their pay was often irregular and never adequate, and they were lucky if their private estates were not hopelessly mortgaged at the end of an embassy.” Other historians, making only passing reference to diplomatic compensation, simply assume the worst.

Yet the diplomats of Elizabeth served, frequently for extended periods, and often repeatedly as well.

One of the most intriguing and important eras of British demographic history is the later middle ages, crudely defined herein to encompass the years 1270 to 1530. This period includes medieval population at its apex, followed by what many observers have called a Malthusian subsistence crisis, an era of famine and plague pandemic, and finally, a slow, almost phased, period of recovery. Much of the groundwork of urban demographic studies was laid in the nineteenth century, by scholars such as William Denton and the Greens. They believed that most aspects of urban life declined in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that demographic contraction went hand in hand with social and economic ruin. Despite some questioning and modification of these premises, the concept of decline passed into the twentieth century, and was synthesized by M.M. Postan, the leading economic historian of his time. Using empirical methods, Postan built a general model of late medieval economic stagnation and decay. Towns were more or less peripheral to the gist of his argument, which stressed the overwhelming importance of the rural economy, but he did comment on urban life.

This article traces the transformation of martial law during the Civil Wars and Interregnum culminating with the creation of the High Courts of Justice in the 1650s. The Long, Rump, and Protectorate parliaments used, adapted, and combined martial law procedures with others to solve some of the most difficult and pressing legal problems they faced. These problems included the trial of spies, traitors to the parliamentary cause, Charles I and his royalist commanders of the Second Civil War, and conspirators, plotters, and rebels during the 1650s. The Long Parliament, the English Commonwealth, and the Protectorate governments used these legal innovations to control discretion at law, and to terrorize dissidents into obedience. The Petition of Right, whose makers had demanded that English subjects only be tried by life and limb by their peers in peacetime, was overturned in order to meet these challenges.

This article explores the intersection of book history and prosopography. It uses several case studies of copies of the medieval parliamentary statutes translated into English, together with later copies of English statutes translated into French, to argue for both thick prosopographical study of individual volumes and large, statistically based studies of books drawn from the largest possible data sets. Together, these methods amount to a new “prosopograhy of the book.” The case studies analyzed here reveal a complicated politicized relationship not only between script and print but also between French and English in the early Tudor era.

The polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.

This article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

This article provides new insights into long-standing debates on lord-tenant relations in medieval England and how they were negotiated through the manorial court. We examine an institution, which we term the stray system, that facilitated cooperation between lords and tenants to manage stray livestock. Specifically, we argue that the stray system is a clear example of a public good. In this context, the system was a social benefit provided by lords to their tenants as a collective. In a world where most of the population was dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, any potential damage to a crop would have been of real concern. However, in managing the threat of wandering livestock, the property rights of owners had to be clearly protected to avoid disputes over ownership. The manorial court's management of strays provided an institution to resolve these countervailing pressures. Ultimately, that system helped to protect a community's arable land—the most vital source of income for lords and tenants alike—while simultaneously assuring the property rights of those who had lost important capital assets in the form of livestock.

The deterrent workhouse, with its strict rules for the behavior of inmates and boundaries of authority of the workhouse officers, was a central expression of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, known widely as the New Poor Law. This article explores for the first time the day-to-day experience of the power and authority of workhouse masters, matrons, other officers of the workhouse, and its Board of Guardians, and the resistance and agency of resentful inmates. Despite new sets of regulations to guide workhouse officers in the uniform imposition of discipline on residents, there was a high degree of regional diversity not only in the types of offenses committed by paupers but also in welfare policy relating to the punishments inflicted for disorderly and refractory behavior. And while pauper agency was significant, it should not be overstated, given the disparity in power between inmates and workhouse officials.

David Lloyd George's reputation and political position seemed unassailable in 1918. Lord Beaverbrook, perhaps somewhat extravagantly, wrote of that period:

Not the least praised of all his works during the First World War was the formation between May 1915 and June 1916, of the Ministry of Munitions. In the eyes of many Britons, he had patriotically given up the prestigious and powerful Chancellorship of the Exchequer to take up the burden of munitions production when the shortage of shells and guns seemed to frustrate the British military effort. Some time thereafter the necessary armaments appeared, and the Minister and his associates shared in the popular acclaim. The apparent early success of the Ministry of Munitions helped to propel him from the Munitions Office in Whitehall Gardens to Number 10 Downing Street itself. Peter Lowe has written in his recent evaluation of this episode of Lloyd George's career:

The erosion of his political position after the war and the long period of his eclipse gave opportunity for critics to revise the popular view of the career which had received so much applause.

In early November 1790, Edmund Burke noted the existence in England of “several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in bustle and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of each other.” Burke's observation both informed and amused conservative opinion, but its condescension masked the seriousness of the situation that it described. Throughout Britain men were assembling into societies organized in celebration of French liberty and motivated by the prospect of parliamentary reform at home. While it was true that the leading members of these clubs sometimes indulged in “puffing” and “mutual quotation,” their commitment to reform was nevertheless deeply held. Joseph Priestley, for one, sacrificed his home, his laboratory, and nearly his life in defense of the cause; Maurice Margarot, Joseph Gerrald, and Thomas Muir sacrificed their freedom; sadly, Thomas Hardy sacrificed his wife and unborn child. For their equally obstinate devotion to reform, the Revolution Society, which took its name in commemoration of the Glorious Revolution rather than in envy of the French uprising, and the Society for Constitutional Information, a longtime reform leader reinvigorated after the fall of the ancien régime, became the objects of Burke's ridicule. But in his conviction that “contemptuous neglect” was the best method by which to defeat the “vanity, petulance, and spirit of intrigue” displayed by these societies, Burke exposed an embarrassing improvidence. For if, as he claimed, these associations were “inconsequential” in their own conduct, their agitation would eventually prompt the emergence of a new generation of populous and, therefore, menacing societies. By spring 1794, neither Burke nor Pitt would be able to ignore the reformers any longer. What were once “petty” had become “the mother of all mischief.”

The year 1655 might with reason have been described as the “annus horribilis” of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate. January saw the dissolution of his first Parliament, which had signally failed to ratify the Instrument of Government, the constitution imposed by the Army in December 1653. This undermined the already dubious constitutional basis of the government's ordinances, resulting in legal challenges and even recalcitrance among some of the judges. The policy of “healing and settling” had gained at best a grudging acquiescence from the political nation, and the determined enemies of the Protectorate sought to exploit its instability. Former allies of the Army, such as the commonwealthsman John Wildman and the Fifth Monarchists, continued to publish bitter condemnations of the regime designed to incite rebellion; in March, Royalist plotting culminated in Penruddock's abortive uprising. Instability and disaffection at home coincided with military disaster abroad: July brought news of the failure of Cromwell's “western design,” the expedition against the Spanish island of Hispaniola. This was the first major defeat suffered by the New Model, and was received by Cromwell and many of the godly as an indication of divine displeasure.

In August, Cromwell abandoned “healing and settling” for more military counsels, appointing Major Generals to provide security by raising a new militia, financed by punitive taxation of the Royalists, and by imposing godly order on the localities. Despite the initial optimism of the Major Generals, it was plain by the beginning of 1656 that they could not finance the new militia, and that their efforts to impose reform were far from uniformly effective.