Over a century ago, the pioneer English historian of law F. W. Maitland observed that “If some fairy gave me the power of seeing a scene of one and the same kind in every age of history of every race, the kind of scene that I would choose would be a trial for murder, because I think that it would give me so many hints as to a multitude of matters of the first importance.” For many decades Maitland's remark was ignored, as historical scholarship passed over murder trials as far too “atypical” and “sensationalistic” to merit serious study, leaving them to amateur devotees of courtroom drama and detection mysteries. One notable exception was Brian Simpson, the distinguished legal historian, whose Cannibalism and the Common Law, published in 1984, for the first time placed in its social context the leading case of R. v. Dudley & Stephens, which in 1884 produced the still-authoritative rule governing the “necessity” justification for homicide. In Simpson's hands the case, a “sensational” one indeed, involving the eating of a cabin boy by shipwrecked sailors, opened up the little-known world of late Victorian maritime life. However, Simpson's lead was not followed up, and his book remained a fascinating “one-off,” regarded as an “amusement piece” by an otherwise “serious” scholar of arcane legal reasoning.

Only more recently, with developments such as the rise of the genre of “micro-history” and the legitimation of interest in the “sensational,” have historians come to accept homicide and its legal treatment as a worthy subject.

The hunger riots which spread across most of southern England in the summer and autumn of 1766 were the most extensive rural disorders in a century when food riots became chronic. More serious in their threat to the social order than the violent protests against the high cost of “necessaries” and the new Militia Act in 1756-57, the disturbances of 1766 placed a heavy strain upon the forces of order. They foreshadowed the more serious agrarian riots of the next century.

While the War Office in September, 1766 moved its detachments across the countryside in a vain effort to parry the rapidly-shifting threats from militant labourers, colliers, tinners, weavers, and others of the provincial dispossessed, the rioters becamer bolder and seized control of large tracts of the countryside almost in the manner of an occupying army. As the crisis developed, demands for military protection from market towns and isolated country estates poured into the War Office. By late September the pattern of events had unfolded to the point where Lord Barrington, the Secretary-at-War, apprehended a threat of general insurrection. Striving to mobilise his limited resources, he ordered the commanders of both active troops and “invalides” to assist the civil magistrates “upon requisition,” while at the same time he urged the leaders of rural society, the aristocracy and the gentry to abandon their lethargy and use initiative in arming their servants to suppress less serious disturbances.

One of the many problems facing the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was the future of the conquered German and Turkish territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Widespread anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and the United States opposed direct annexation of the possessions, but wartime agreements and the security interests of the Allies prevented returning the conquered areas to their former rulers. In particular, many British leaders wanted to ensure that Germany could never again attempt world domination and were convinced that the restoration to Germany of its overseas possessions would pose a “grave political and military menace” to Britain's vital maritime connections with South Africa and India. After a long, often acrimonious debate, the Conference agreed on a compromise that placed the former German colonies and Ottoman provinces under the supervision of the League of Nations. This solution gave the Allies control of their acquisitions as “mandates” within a framework of international accountability. Great Britain received the most mandates, including Germany's largest colony of German East Africa. For the British leaders who had always advocated transforming German East Africa into a British colony, the new system seemed to make little practical difference. For the colonial officials in London and at the highest levels of colonial administration within the conquered possession, however, the mandates system presented serious problems and was not simply a disguise for annexation.

The campaign for better public health was a major social issue in England during the second half of the nineteenth century. As in the case of Poor Law and factory reform, Edwin Chadwick stands as the person who directed public interest toward the need for sanitary reform. He did this through his association with the Poor Law Commission in the late 1830s, then through his seminal and widely read 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population. Chadwick's report captured the minds of many in the British upper middle class. The Health of Towns Association, founded in 1844, helped to diffuse information on the “physical and moral evils that result from the present defective sewerage, drainage, supply of water, air, and light. …” Although the sanitary reformers had made some minor gains by 1847, they had failed to produce a satisfactory bill that would allow government some role in coordinating sanitary improvement. At this point, neither Chadwick, nor any other leading proponent of sanitary legislation wanted to put full authority in the hands of the central government, but they did desire a more efficient combination of local and national control.

The sanitary reformers, and particularly Chadwick, achieved a measure of success in 1848 when the Public Health Bill received parliamentary approval. It was hoped the Act would bring about a useful consolidation of responsibility for drainage, sewerage, water supply, and road maintenance. Instead, the legislation spurred a furious debate over how much national government interference was acceptable. It did little to improve public health because the argument over government interference for a time took attention away from critical issues of sanitation reform. Although never completely overcome, the argument over principles faded in the 1850s in the face of an urgent need for reform.

The reforms in the rites and ceremonies of the Order of the Garter that Charles I introduced during the 1620s and 1630s have traditionally been seen by historians as enhancing its high church, religious associations and downplaying its military traditions. This study, however, argues that the celebration of courage, martial achievement, and noble companionship remained central themes within the order during this period and that this tells us a good deal about how Charles understood his relationship with his nobles, and the honorific and chivalric values that lay at the heart of his kingship.

This article explores the ideas of “Walking” John Stewart (1747–1822), a little-known adventurer and philosopher active in debates over social reformation during the French Revolutionary period. Renowned as a peripatetic who walked from India to Britain, Stewart befriended Thomas Paine and others during the early years of the Revolution. His main aim was to persuade them of the value of his philosophy, which was derived from French materialism as well as Hindu and Buddhist sources. But Stewart also came under the influence of the Shakers, Dunkers, Moravians, and other North American sectarian communities. As early as 1791 he commended small-scale “cohabitations” of no more than 100 men and 100 women as the ideal form of association. Here, and in his radical approaches to marriage and sexual relationships, he strikingly anticipated the ideas of Robert Owen and the early socialists.

In Franz Kafka's The Trial, a horrifying fable of human alienation from human institutions, there is a central encounter between Kafka's persona K. and the painter Titorelli, whose task is to reproduce endlessly the icons of the judicial system—arbitrary, logically absurd, yet cruel and inescapable—of which K. has become the latest victim. Approaching a painting in progress, K. recognized its subject as a judge, but could not identify a large figure rising in the middle of the picture from the high back of the judicial seat:

The America of Boston, bound from its home port to London in December of 1688, began taking soundings that were political as well as nautical as it approached England. Two weeks before an English port was reached, the first news was heard from a shipmaster returning from Barbados, who shared what he had heard earlier from an English vessel out of Galloway. The passengers of the America were told that William of Orange had landed at Torbay early in November, that the prince had taken England, and that King James was dead. The truth, the guess, and the false rumor all came aboard with equal credibility. They were only four days from port before they learned that the king was not dead, though the source was a five-week-old report from the Canary Islands. The occupants of the America could still be buffeted by strange and disturbing tales when they were only one day from Dover. The master of a pink that was two weeks out of Liverpool gave the date of the prince's landing as three weeks later than the event, gave William's force as an astounding 50,000 men and 600 ships, and told the apprehensive colonials that the drowned bodies of Englishmen were being found tied back-to-back and that French men-of-war were cruising with commissions from King James II. All this worrisome “news” proved erroneous but accompanied an account that would prove correct, that the king was not dead but had fled to France.

Early modern women are often categorized by historians in relation to their marital status—whether they appeared as single, married, or widowed women. These identifications reflected the effects of marriage on women's legal and social status. Focusing on the records of the burgh and commissary courts of seventeenth-century Glasgow, this article shows how Scottish women's legal status existed instead on a “marital spectrum,” including liminal phases prior to the formation of marriage as well as overlapping phases following remarriage after the death of a spouse. This spectrum situates women's legal claims in relation to their marital career, allowing for a closer reading of women's legal activities. Court clerks working in Glasgow documented women's varied marital, familial, and legal identities within the court records, a Scottish practice that can shed new light on how women negotiated the boundaries of justice in early modern courts of law.

Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrs for the cause newly victorious. They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order. Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstruct history and manipulate memory with the violent context of the French Revolution. Recent work in French cultural history has provided scholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda, from iconography to ritual. Investigations into festival, street literature, rhetoric, reading, audience, and memory have given the revolutionary experience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.

This article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

This article argues that in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, changes in the perceived value of children, both materially and emotionally, put them in a new position of possible danger. The valorization of childhood brought new risks to children. Children were thought to be vulnerable to child abduction, or “child stealing,” as contemporaries termed it. Between 1790 and 1849, 108 cases of child abduction were tried at the Old Bailey and then recorded in its Proceedings or heard before magistrates in London's police courts and at county sessions courts and subsequently reported in newspapers. These cases, along with fictional accounts of child abduction, give insights into what were considered the most common motives for this crime. While some child abductors were motivated by poverty and saw children's clothes as economic assets that could be sold, others were driven by a desire to assume a mother role and represented stolen children as their own. Popular interest in abduction stories was sustained while contemporaries shared common fears about the loss of children and the limitations of adults to protect children from harm.

In Maitland's words, “Of all the centuries the twelfth was the most legal.” It was a time of growth for the great legal systems in the West: English common law, revived Roman law, and canon law. Students of medieval England have rarely concerned themselves with the question of the connection between these legal systems. For six centuries, from Bracton until the rise of modern legal history with Maitland, the study of English law was insular, ignoring the continental legal systems. When a seventeenth-century civilian wrote that “our common law, as we call it, is nothing else than a mixture of the Roman and the feudal,” he aroused the anger of Coke and the common lawyers. Recently scholars have taken such a view more seriously, and a number of studies have sought Roman or canonistic influences on English law. It might be useful, then, to reconsider the matter of the impact of Rome on English law in the light of recent scholarship, asking three questions: To what extent was Roman law known and studied in England before the time of Bracton? What influences, if any, do scholars find that it had on the legal innovations of Henry II and his sons? Why did the English fail to ‘receive’ Roman law in the way that countries on the Continent did?

Any influence of Roman law in England during the centuries after the withdrawal of Roman legions and before the Norman Conquest can be dismissed quickly. Once Christianity was re-introduced to the island, the revival of Roman Law, or at least of some notion of Roman legal concepts, was possible.

The most persistent difficulty confronting historical interpreters of popular religion in the early modern world is that of establishing the relationship between ideas enunciated by religious leaders and those held by their hearers. The causes of that uncertainty are obvious; where historical materials for the former are plentiful, sources that address the latter are far more difficult to obtain. The great majority of evidence that we have concerning lay religiosity derives from clerical rather than lay sources, and most of it tells us more about religious behavior than belief. Even those rare accounts we have that purport to narrate the spiritual experiences of ordinary people tend to be both unrepresentative and stylized, to the point where the ultimate implications of such materials for understanding popular belief often are far from certain.

Problems of documentation lead to equally significant but less often noted distortions in perspective. Where they have lacked adequate source materials for recovering the mental world of the laity, historians almost by necessity have had to approach their task as one of ascertaining the portion and proportion of the expressions of the ministry that lay men and women adopted. Thus deviations from clerical orthodoxy can only be understood as indicative either of a lack of intellectual sophistication on the part of the laity, or, at best, of a latent “folk” worldview that remains almost inaccessible to historical description. Yet there is ample documentation in the historical record that the laity possessed a rather remarkable capacity to integrate seemingly disparate beliefs and actively forge their own understandings of the delivered message and create their own religious symbols.