This article examines popular political participation in early modern Scotland. In Scotland, some of the preconditions of public politics identified by recent scholars were less obviously present than in England or France. There was no culturally dominant metropolis or royal court; the volume of printed publications, though rising across the period, remained comparatively small. Because of these characteristics, historians of popular involvement in Scottish politics should pay particular attention to the traditional means of participation inherited from the medieval and Reformation periods. The article explores three forms of extra-institutional participation, each of which evolved out of formal, institutional political practices, but were deployed by ordinary Scots seeking to express their views. Protestations––formal statements of dissent from a statute or decision––developed in the courts, but were used in extramural contexts in the seventeenth century. Crowd demonstrations in towns took the place of traditional means of consultation, as urban government became increasingly oligarchical. And after congregational involvement in the appointment of parish ministers was legally instituted in 1690, significant numbers of small landowners and the landless poor claimed to have a say in the choice of their minister.

Near the end of a speech to his first Parliament (19 March 1604), James makes a rhetorical move, disingenuous and shrewd. He offers an excuse “in case you have not found such Eloquence in my Speech, as peradventure you might have looked for at my hands. I might, if I list, alledge the great weight of my Affaires and my continuall businesse and distraction, that I could never have leasure to thinke upon what I was to speake, before I came to the place where I was to speak.” Because James has had almost a year since being named King of England to contemplate his maiden speech to Parliament, we may take his “excuse” as special pleading. Clearly his strategy nicely reinforces the obvious eloquence of the speech; indeed, hearers may marvel all the more at the quality of the speech, given James's apparent lack of leisure to prepare it. James cannot, however, offer a compelling case for lack of time to write this important, initial speech to Parliament; in fact, his own care as a writer argues against this. But if, for the sake of argument, we take him seriously, where might James easily and readily have gotten the major ideas and themes of the speech (beyond his own obvious writings)? I answer that he could have found them in the magnificent royal entry pageant in his honor that occurred only four days (15 March) before the speech to Parliament. Most of the ideas that inform James's speech find some kind of dramatic representation in the pageant. Indeed, I will argue that the pageant and Parliament speech form a continuous event, designed to honor, instruct, and celebrate the king. These two events constitute the most important public events of James's early English reign and therefore make an exceptional claim for historical significance. In order to reach Westminster and Parliament, James must first figuratively and literally pass through London's civic pageant.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 signaled a revolution that was more apparent than real. Studies of the operation of the Act have shown that enforcement was neither complete nor uniform; local authorities failed to build the workhouses required by the Act and were therefore unable to make the invidious but (according to the Act) essential distinction between paupers (people destitute enough to qualify to enter these institutions), and the merely poor, who were supposed to fend for themselves. Instead, Guardians continued to give allowances from the poor rates without requiring that the recipients become paupers and enter the workhouse. While the English Poor Law between 1834 and 1860 was characterized by a situation of administrative variety and confusion as unions failed to comply with the 1834 Act, the economic crises of the 1860s produced important reforms: the Union Chargeability Act (1865) improved financing; many unions built modern workhouses; at the same time, collateral care for the needy such as the aged began to emerge within the Poor Law. Then in 1870 the central Poor Law authority announced a policy of strict enforcement, recommending the suspension of outdoor relief to the able-bodied, a far-reaching change in Poor Law practice.

This article has two purposes: to present some of the most basic facts about the Chartist Convention in 1839, and to offer a new structure for interpreting the Convention.

It is necessary to set forth the basic facts because historians have not bothered very much about them. The factual poverty of the historiography of the national Chartist movement was demonstrated recently by the publication of J. T. Ward's Chartism. Although the Convention of 1839 played a crucial role in the movement, Ward cannot tell his readers precisely who attended it or when it met. He states that fifty-four delegates attended it (p. 113), but in fact, seventy-one delegates attended the Convention. He incorrectly dates the adjournment for the simultanous meetings as 16 May (p. 123), and states that the Convention dissolved on 6 September (p. 133) when it met last on 14 September. Another sort of error in Ward's account involves the attendance of delegates. He asserts that Fletcher retired to Bury in March (p. 117), but Fletcher attended the Convention through July and sat in London on the Council in early August. He asserts Joseph Wood “left on 18 April” (p. 118); but no evidence exists that Wood attended the Convention after 18 February, and the evidence is overwhelming that he was not present at any time after 21 February. Ward says that Vincent and M'Douall were arrested in April (p. 121); in fact, Vincent was arrested just past midnight on the morning of 8 May, and M'Douall was taken by the authorities on 8 June. Ward asserts that Rider “led the summer resignations” (p. 125); he resigned on 2 May. Yet another source of error involves the sequence of events in localities as it affected the Convention and the delegates. Ward states that Richardson resigned to be replaced by Christopher Dean (p. 125); Dean was elected on 4 May, and Richardson resigned on 5 July. This dreary catalogue could be extended, but the point is clear.

What determined the value recorded for a manor in the Domesday Book? This is a controversial question among scholars engaged in Domesday studies, and various arguments have been adduced as solutions to this problem. It has been suggested that the Normans calculated manorial value by using the quantity of a manor's sheep, its annual income, the amount of its tax units, or the number of its plow lands; but no one has proved which of these factors were used by the Normans in 1086 to compute manorial value. Many of these proposed solutions overlook the importance of agrarian agriculture, which was the basis of Domesday economy. Some historians disregard the contemporary meaning of Domesday terminology to advance their new and, as yet, unacceptable interpretations of how to compute the value of a manor. This article uses the contemporary meaning of Domesday terminology combined with traditional historical method and statistical analysis to argue that the Normans used plow lands as the basis for determining manorial value in Domesday Essex county.

Before the arrival of modern computers, the vast amount of available information in the Domesday Book obscured this simple solution to the problem. There was just too much data to be assessed accurately by pen and pencil. The unique qualities of the Domesday survey make it particularly suitable for a computerized statistical analysis of its database. This is because the survey employed a predetermined set of questions that yield data appropriate for statistical analysis, and manorial value is one of those questions.

It is far too early to talk with any real certainty about the mid-nineteenth century electoral structure. The very materials of which it was built are in dispute, let alone the shape of the edifice. A deference school of historians is challenging traditional notions of the growth of political individualism in the period, while so-called quantitative historians are beginning to question the assumptions and approach of both deference historians and traditionalists. Serious and detailed study of the questions involved has hardly begun. Still, some comment on the present state of the controversy may not be entirely out of place. An enduring interpretation can only be constructed of sound materials; and I am by no means certain of the soundness of some of those now being put forward for our use.

W. O. Aydelotte, in a paper read a couple of years ago and soon to be published in a series of essays entitled The History of Parliamentary Behavior, notes the divergence of opinion among historians on the role of the electorate in shaping parliamentary opinion after 1832. As he rightly suggests, Norman Gash in his Politics in the Age of Peel appears to be of two minds on the subject, depending on whether one reads his introduction or his text. In the former Professor Gash stresses the increase of popular influence on Parliament, in the latter the continuance of traditional influences over the mass of the electorate. D. C. Moore comes down heavily on the side of the latter influences, contending that a relatively few leaders of what he has called “deference communities” represented effective electoral opinion, which was simply registered by the mass of the electorate.

In 1935, R. G. Collingwood defined the historical imagination as an innate or a priori part of thinking that allows students of history to reconstruct the past. Whether stored in the furniture of the mind, learned through practice, or inherited as genetic inclinations, imagination is indispensable to the historian's craft. The historian's imagination may be richer, more diverse, more inventive than that, say, of an orthopedist, because the historian's present is the surviving but elusive past. Historians have to imagine more because they can never know what actually happened. Like orthopedists and everyone else, historians enter their professions hauling baggage packed haphazardly with images drawn from cultural, personal, religious, moral and practical experience. An orthopedist checks his psychological and social luggage when treating anesthetized muscle and bone in the controlled atmosphere of an operating room. For the orthopedist, the only images relevant for diagnosis and remedy are those produced precisely by x-rays or magnetic resonance. A historian neither diagnoses nor remedies. Instead, relying upon recalcitrant evidence, she tries to explain events that occurred in a dynamic, unpredictable, uncontrollable world already finished.

When historians conduct research and then interpret what they find, they are unwilling and unable to lay aside their every day images of human nature and society. Such concepts, even when wrong, are logically necessary to explanation. Historical imagination organizes the categories that provide a historian with a match between her expectations and the subjects of her inquiry. The historian's juxtaposition, unlike the orthopedist's realistic image, is impressionistic. It becomes satisfying only when it fulfills a cultivated sense of propriety. Although honest historians are persuaded by the information they discover, there are few experiences more pleasing than that frisson of recognition when initial impressions are validated by the historical records. That pleasure is far more agreeable than disappointment. If the records repudiate anticipations then the historian must search for a more adequate explanatory scheme that approximates the truth more closely.

Social historians have long suspected that religious convictions made a difference in the sixteenth century, and historians of the late Tudor religious and political settlements have recently emphasized the differences that advanced forms of Calvinism are alleged to have made. They say that religious radicals—puritans and precisianists, to their contemporary critics—were social conservatives who thought wealth was a blessing and poverty a curse. According to Keith Wrightson and David Levine, the “firmly committed Puritans among the yeomen of the parish” promoted a “sense of social distance” between themselves (“the better sort”) and the less respectable. The 1995 republication of Wrightson's and Levine's study of social discontinuity, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, seemed a splendid occasion to revisit the intersection of religious conviction and social practice and to ponder the precision with which puritanism's supposed contributions to social stratification—and the stratification itself—have been, and can be, measured.

Measurements of a vastly different kind preoccupied Elizabethan religious theorists interested in gauging the effects of election and thus discovering whether they and their parishioners had been elected or chosen by God and redeemed. Assurances of election and of eternal reward were difficult to identify, because everything that Christians did or dreamed up was so deplorably flawed. “There remain relickes of syn” in the most righteous persons on earth, William Fulke preached in 1574; Christians desperate for assurance invariably experienced (and measured) those “relickes” as tokens of divine displeasure.

Ever since J. H. Plumb published his Ford Lectures, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1679-1725 (1966), the topic of political stability has gripped the attention of England’s early modern historians. In particular Plumb’s characterization of the politics of 1679-1722 as “The Rage of Party” was refined by Geoffrey Holmes, whose British Politics in the Age of Anne ushered in a variety of studies of political warfare in what has come to be known as The First Age of Party. These and succeeding works have elaborated and confirmed the existence of deep and severe differences between Whig and Tory partisans, differences renewing animosities extending back to the Civil Wars and generating a self-perpetuating struggle for power. The consequences of this “rage of party” for the formation and execution of policy were daunting. In particular party rage placed three important restrictions on the executive’s room for maneuver. By rendering all political alliances unstable, partisanship limited the ability of the governments of William and Anne to operate as combinations of the parties. Partisanship also put all government servants under the constant threat of defending their conduct from year to year. And partisanship dictated certain policy options while frustrating others.

The navy occupied a significant position in the 1553 succession crisis. However, assessments of its role hitherto have been hampered by conflicting contemporary observations and a paucity of information. Not all issues of consequence can be resolved, but important fresh evidence, particularly, extensive High Court of the Admiralty documentation for one of the royal ships dispatched by the Duke of Northumberland to the East Anglian coast following Edward VI's death, permits a reappraisal of the episode and its significance for the events of that year. The evidence confirms that the Northumberland regime experienced difficulty from the outset in its attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and it suggests that the regime's perceived strengths—in this instance the mid-Tudor navy—were all too frequently illusory.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, the growth of the national debt, the burden of the taxes necessary to support it, and the effect of this system of public finance on the politics, economy, and society of Britain, deeply concerned politicians in opposition. Their frequent expressions of concern were sufficiently persuasive to induce similar apprehensions on occasion in politicians at court. In 1753, when the national debt was a little over £74,000,000, earl Waldegrave, a personal favorite of George II, felt compelled to tell the House of Lords about a “consideration of very great importance, … the state of our national debt [and] the heavy taxes which are the consequences of this debt.” The situation required, he went on, “prudent measures of government, with that strict national economy which must be our only remedy.” Waldegrave did not go so far as to believe the nation was on the verge of collapse. As he pointed out, “a country and a government like ours has so many and so great resources, that we may bear a great deal and still be in a flourishing condition.” “Yet as long as this evil does subsist,” he warned the House, “we can never expect fully to exert our proper strength.” He concluded, “Till this burden is removed it will remain a check to our trade, will be still heavier on the landed interest, must lessen our credit and influence abroad, and will be a cause of discontent if not of disaffection at home.”

The relationship between nationalism and the land, observes Philip Bull in his recent study of the Irish land question, “formed a nexus which was so strong that the one issue became effectively a metaphor for the other.” Any student of nineteenth-century Irish politics can appreciate the force of this eloquent conclusion. Nevertheless, the preoccupation with the land by contemporaries and historians alike has relegated an important strand of economic nationalism devoted to manufacturing industry to a footnote in Irish history. The fate of manufacturing industry in the aftermath of the Union of 1800 is the subject of controversy among scholars suggesting, at the very least, substantial regional and sectoral variations. Contemporaries, however, were in little doubt that Irish manufacturing industry was suffering from terminal decline, a perception that had formed a regular reprise in public comment throughout the previous century. As John O’Connell wrote in 1849 “the question of Irish manufacturing has been, for more than a century and a half, one of the chief grounds of bitterness and bickerings” between Ireland and England.

In preparing the Vita Ædwardi Regis…, the First Latin Life of King Edward the Confessor, for its convenient modern edition, Frank Barlow has subdivided the work into two internal “books,” which he sees as very loosely connected, to which he assigns dates of 1065-6 and 1067 respectively, and for which he editorially supplies the subtitles: Book I “Queen Edith's Family,” Book II “Edward's Religious Life.” Much of Barlow's work, not only on The Life but also on the whole subject of Edward and his times, is so good that it is not surprising that this division of the text has been widely accepted: even Sten Körner, who questions Barlow's dating, writes: “The Vita Edwardi is in two parts.…” Nevertheless, viewed in the light of this two book theory, the “work” remains, as Barlow has recently said, one “we now find most difficult to understand,” partly because we must see its author as changing his literary purpose during the course of the writing. It is my own purpose to show that a closer reading of The Life does not support the conclusion that the work has no internal literary unity and that, once this unity is perceived, both the dating and the evaluating of the text become easier. Indeed, when The Life is seen as one work all written during those “evil times” to which its anonymous author refers, its interest is much enhanced; through it we can then glimpse “Edith, the first gem in the middle of the kingdom,” covertly lamenting the fall of her kinsmen and the tribulation of her land during its first years under the victorious William of Normandy, yet at the same time refusing to believe that there was no future for the kingdom of the English.

When one of the characters in William Morris's Utopian romance News from Nowhere says “We are very well off as to politics—because we have none” he was talking about the manipulation and intrigue that everyone hopes will be banished from Utopia. Morris had to carry on his own political work amidst the manoeuvring he hoped would be unnecessary in the future. News from Nowhere is about politics in the sense in which the word is used in the title of Aristotle's Politics; and it teaches the rather Aristotelian message “Men come together in communities to live, they remain in communities to live in fellowship.” But the book had its local and immediate political context: most directly, in 1890 Morris gave up the editorship of the Socialist League magazine Commonweal, which was publishing the story in installments, when twenty out of the thirty-nine installments had appeared. While his retirement was not entirely voluntary there is no reason to think that the remaining installments were altered by the new editors. When Morris published the story as a book the following year he added a certain amount of new material which indicates a somewhat different point of view.

What he published in 1890 (the Commonweal version) was considerably closer to the anarchist view of revolution than what is now accepted as News from Nowhere, and what he added for the 1891 version (the book) shows a distinct shift towards an attitude more favourable to the State Socialists, or Fabians, that anything he wrote in Commonweal.

For several years I have been exploring the projection of Britain in America during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. My focus has been on aspects of cultural propaganda initiated for the most part unofficially, although often with government complicity. Simply put, I have been concerned to discover what ordinary Americans were seeing and hearing and reading about England in the crucial years before the onset of the Second World War and, even more significantly, in the period from the summer of 1939 to American entry in December 1941.

It is often claimed that John Milton grew politically disaffected under the Protectorate government, which he served as Latin secretary. This article reviews the evidence for said disaffection. It finds that the passages in Milton's writings that have been taken to show disaffection with Protectorate or Protector, most of which postdate Cromwell's death, have little to do with Cromwell and mainly to do with the rapidly shifting political conditions of 1659–60. While the Cromwellian religious settlement fell short of the disestablishment Milton wanted, Cromwell favored religious toleration more strongly than his parliaments did, and Milton supported him in foreign affairs. Most likely Milton had no such thing as a single view of the Protectorate regime; his views of its various actors and interest groups, its successes and failures, would have been detailed and complex.