This article considers the cultural work of commoditization through the example of the London Auction Mart and the market for real estate in early nineteenth-century England. The auctioneers who founded this exchange sought to reconfigure the organization of property sales in an institution that would bring order and transparency to a world of informal institutions, local markets, and private exchange. The Auction Mart made visible the idea of a universal, abstract property market. At the same time, it offered a new social and cultural space in which to negotiate the often contradictory meanings of marketable property. This work of making the property market meaningful is told through institutional archives, published accounts, diaries, and estate correspondence.

With the collapse of presbyterian efforts to effect structural change in the Church of England in the 1590s, reformers were forced to realize that only widespread and sustained popular support could bring about further reform of the church. It is in this last decade of Elizabeth's reign that Christopher Hill sees the emergence of what he calls a “new Puritanism” designed to nurture such a broad base of support for further reform. This “new Puritanism,” which emphasized preaching and the cultivation of an individual piety rather than ecclesiastical reorganization, “with the household as its essential unit rather than the parish,” could also be described as a return to earlier values that had characterized Puritanism before the rise of the presbyterian party. Whether one chooses to interpret the trends of the late 1590s as “new” or “old,” what is important is that reformers by 1600 were making extensive use of both pulpit and press as instruments for influencing the hearts and minds of the English laity. An examination of the more frequently reprinted works of practical divinity in the first generation of the seventeenth century (which included much sermon literature) ought to reveal the themes that reformers hoped would strike a responsive chord with English readers.

Surveying such publications from the 1580s into the early 1600s, we may be surprised to find that two of the most popular works were Protestantized versions of Catholic works: Thomas Rogers's translation of De imitatione Christi (1580) and Edmund Bunny's A Booke of Christian exercise, appertaining to Resolution (1584), adapted from Robert Parsons's First Book of the Christian exercise (1582).

In 1909, two years after his retirement as British Consul-General in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer — knighted in 1883, he was created Baron Cromer in 1892, viscount in 1899 and earl in 1901 — was invited to be the President of the Classical Association. It was a duty which he took very seriously and he prepared his Presidential address on “Ancient and Modern Imperialism” with immense care. In the course of this preparation he consulted many of the most distinguished scholars of the times, among them Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at Oxford, J. B. Bury, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, F. J. Haverfield, the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, Sir William Ramsay, the Regius Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen University, Edwyn R. Bevan, a Hellenistic scholar much interested in Indian questions, Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist and expert on the Near East and Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, one of the most famous journalists of his day and an authority on Russia. After he delivered the address in January 1910 Cromer entered into further correspondence with the Conservative leader, A. J. Balfour; John Buchan who, although he is probably best remembered today as a writer of adventure stories, had been Alfred Milner's private secretary in South Africa, 1901-03 and was subsequently to be Governor General of Canada, James Bryce, the author of the classic The Holy Roman Empire, a former cabinet minister and at this time British Ambassador in Washington; and Sir William Ridgeway, the President of the Royal Anthropological Institution.

This article presents the first addition in recent years to the canon of the British eighteenth-century statesman and political thinker Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a manuscript essay “On the Character of a Great Patriot.” For the first time, this article identifies Bolingbroke as the likely author of this unascribed, undated, and untitled essay in the Senate House Library manuscript collection. Using internal and contextual evidence, the article demonstrates that the “Character” is a description of Bolingbroke's opposition colleague William Pulteney, and that it was written in the final months of 1731, most likely for publication in the opposition journal the Craftsman. The “Character” dates from a period in which Bolingbroke wrote very little, and it is thus a crucial addition to his biography as well as an early exposition of his theory of opposition politics. Moreover, study of the essay shows that Bolingbroke drew extensively on the example of Pulteney when formulating his idea about the necessity of a systematic opposition party, not fully formulated until On the Spirit of Patriotism (1736). The “Character” thus sheds further light on the important relationship between political practice and theory in the age of Walpole.

It is the intent of this article to restore to Lanfranc's early career some of the luster that recent scholarly investigations have chipped away. I intend to show that historians have become overly skeptical of the traditional view of Lanfranc's dominating position during his eighteen years as prior of Bec (c. 1045-63). On the basis of the best current research, he is no longer regarded during these years as a major ducal adviser but as a back-bencher, overshadowed by other Norman churchmen. His once-celebrated school at Bec has gone the way of the school of Chartres: it was a good school, but it functioned for only a short time, opening c. 1059 or 1060 and closing three or four years later on Lanfranc's elevation to the abbacy of St-Étienne, Caen, in 1063. And some of its most famous alumni, including Pope Alexander II, are now believed not to have studied there at all. Similarly, Lanfranc's association with the papacy is thought to have been much exaggerated by earlier scholars. It is now doubted that he had anything to do with the dropping of the papal ban against Duke William's marriage with Matilda of Flanders, or with William's establishment of the two great abbeys at Caen.

It will be argued here that Lanfranc was indeed intimately associated with both the duke and the papacy, and that the school of Bec flourished as an international center of learning for many decades. No such reinterpretation can be attempted without taking into full account the growing sophistication in source analysis that has characterized recent scholarship on Lanfranc, and the systematic doubt that has been directed at the testimony of twelfth-century writers about eleventh-century Normandy. The dominating prior of Bec who emerges from A. J. MacDonald's 1926 biography of Lanfranc is no longer fully recoverable; yet the sources, when carefully evaluated, continue to portray Lanfranc as a major force in the political and intellectual life of his times.

Although party was a considerably more limited force in the British political system between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Second Reform Act than it had been either during the thirties and early forties or in the later decades of the nineteenth century, it was nonetheless a significant fact of English political life throughout the Victorian period. Few students of nineteenth-century British politics, however, would look to J.S. Mill, perhaps the most influential political thinker of his time, for insights into the role of party. The consensus has been that very little of a positive nature can be said about Mill and party. In The Elements of Politics, Henry Sidgwick observes that “Mill… hardly seems to contemplate a dual organisation of parties as a normal feature of representative institutions.” A.H. Birch asserts, in his Representative and Responsible Government, that Mill “simply ignored the existence of political parties.” Dennis Thompson's study of the structure of Mill's political thought devotes some three pages to Mill's attitude towards party government, the author concluding that he was hostile to it and did not consider it necessary “for effective, stable democracy.” Indeed, Mill's major political treatise, Considerations on Representative Government, says remarkably little about parties, and where they are referred to no constructive influence is imputed to them. His discussion of Thomas Hare's plan of personal or proportional representation, for example, makes clear that one of its numerous virtues is the security it provides for insuring the representation not of “two great parties alone” but of every significant “minority in the whole nation.”

Few places in early nineteenth-century Britain had as grim a reputation as the Manchester suburb of Ancoats. In this concentration of “dark, satanic mills” and festering slums were some of the worst social problems of the Industrial Revolution. Angus Reach, a journalist with the Morning Chronicle, who visited Ancoats in the late 1840s, described it as “entirely an operative colony” containing “some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have ever seen.” While making his way through this “labyrinth,” Reach saw no promise of anything better. Even the handful of chapels seemed to complement the scene of hopelessness; in a pathetically futile attempt to carry the eye up to a vision of something better their “infinitesimal” Gothic arches and ornaments only served to reinforce “the grimy nakedness” of the surrounding factories.

The revival of the Foxite opposition from the demoralizing effects of its rupture of 1792-1794 and the subsequent secession of 1797 is an important and not fully understood episode in Great Britain's political history. The central feature of that recovery was the alliance struck in January 1804 between Charles James Fox and William Lord Grenville. It was not only to provide the foundation for the “Ministry of All the Talents” of 1806-1807, the whig opposition's sole tenure of office between 1783 and 1830, but it was to have profound effects on the activities of the whig party for at least a decade after the fall of that ministry. The arrangement and reception of the “cooperation,” as it was termed, illuminates the condition and the preoccupations of the Foxite opposition during Henry Addington's tenure in power. The alliance involved the most important political decisions Fox made in the last decade of his life, and the history of its establishment explains many of the workings of his mind after the secession. The actual proposition of association was one of the key incidents in the career of its initiator, Grenville, and it provides much information on a man who remains one of the least understood major politicans of George III's reign. The alliance has as well its own interest as a study of how two opponents with differing aspirations and ideals could form a successful union, each with motivations more complicated than the mere desire for office.

This article examines the formation and development of the concept of the Establishment in British political argument after its recoining in a celebrated article by the journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955. The author argues that the term “the Establishment” did not have a stable referent but rather acquired a range of possible meanings and uses as part of a new political vocabulary within which the course and significance of recent political and social change was contested, and that ultimately transformed social-democratic and conservative politics in Britain. The article situates the formation of the concept of the Establishment within a prolonged contestation of social and political authority in Britain during the middle of the twentieth century and traces the recoining of the term in conservative political commentary prior to Henry Fairlie's frequently cited 1955 Spectator article. From the late 1950s, it is argued, the concept acquired more distinctively contemporary meanings that enabled its adoption by Harold Wilson during the mid-1960s and its subsequent reappropriation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1970s. These usages registered and helped to accomplish fundamental political realignments, the understanding of which depends upon a close analysis of political and social concepts.

Edwardian England has become an increasingly significant period for scholarly research. One of the more carefully examined subjects is the interrelationship between politics and army reform. The debacles of the South African War forced the governments to examine England's army, and reforms emerged after 1901. Historians have concentrated on the efforts of Balfour's administration of 1902-05 and Haldane's sojourn at the War Office from 1906 to 1912; these periods witnessed the emergence of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the reorganization of the War Office, the shaping of the General Staff and the development of the British Expeditionary Force. All of these have been subjected to detailed examination — notably, the C. I. D. in recent works by Peter Fraser and Nicholas d'Ombrain, and the War Office by W. S. Hamer.

There is, however, at least one gap in the historical literature on politics and army reform: St. John Brodrick's term as Secretary of State for War, 1901-03. An understanding of Brodrick's activities is necessary, since he was, of course, the first War Secretary to attempt reforms as a response to the obvious shortcomings of the army in the South African War. A careful examination will explain why he failed in many of his programs, the political consequences of these failures, and some of his more positive contributions.

The breakdown of the British army in the first few months of the South African War, which began in October 1899 and ended in May 1902, shocked and dismayed both the public and the Government.

The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins posed the question, is a friend a friend because he helps you, or does he help you because he is your friend? Most cultures, Sahlins noted, could choose one of the two. Individuals in Tudor-Stuart Britain, however, would be hard-pressed not to reply, both. Thus, in 1577 after their children’s marriage Sir William Gerard wrote to Moras Wynn of Gwydir that he appreciated Wynn making the match out of “very friendship without respect of gain,” by which Gerard meant affection and goodwill, but went on to add that he understood Wynn now “expected friendship” from him, meaning practical assistance using Gerard’s Court connections. Friendship was both chosen and given, a fortunate accident or a tie strenuously worked for and assiduously cultivated. Ubiquitous and vital, friendship was an act as much as a state of mind: Richard Brathwait spoke to its scope in claiming “there is no greater wilderness than to be without true friends.”

“The country towns are grown poor,” declared Hugh Boscawen, member for Tregony, to his colleagues in the House of Commons in November 1670, “the inlands grow generally poor. The trading people abroad deal only with London.” Sir Robert Howard agreed: “It was ever said by the wisest men he could meet with that the greatness of London … would be the ruin of the country.” But in 1670 the complaint was hardly new. For well over a century English men and monarchs alike had watched with an anxiety increasingly acute as London, already a giant among English towns, continued to add to her size and population. Many in the country had feared, as did Boscawen and Howard, the effects of such growth upon the rest of England, while those close by tended to be aware of the special economic, political, and social problems which the unhealthy and crowded conditions in the overgrown old city presented.

On March 12, 1564, Queen Elizabeth had issued a proclamation stating “Rules to prevent crowding, in plague ridden Westminster, close by London.” And on July 7, 1580, she proclaimed from Nonsuch Palace that

On 14 February 1716 at Ruthven in Badenoch, the remaining officers of the Jacobite army in Scotland gathered to decide their next move. They had turned out the previous autumn in high hopes of restoring the Stuart dynasty to the throne it had lost in 1689 and forcing an end to the union with England, but their confidence and enthusiasm had long since evaporated in the face of the defeat of the English rising at Preston and failure on their own part at Sherrifmuir. Their king and his chief minister had fled the country just after the army began its retreat from Perth. Now the weather had deteriorated, and desertion had reduced their once impressive force to a shadow of its former self. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the officers drafted a letter to the duke of Argyll, the commander of the British army in Scotland, asking for an indemnity and ordered their men to make their own way home. Then they themselves dispersed. It was the final act in the botched complex of conspiracies and uprisings that has gone down in history as the Jacobite Rising of 1715.

Reflecting on the consequences of the Jacobites' failure, the earl of Mar, by then the Old Pretender's secretary of state, sadly remarked: “I much doubt if ever a [rising] can be established there again.” It was a percipient observation. For over a generation, it was to prove extremely difficult to persuade most of the leaders of Scottish Jacobitism even to contemplate another uprising.

Irish historian A. T. Q. Stewart has aptly described the world inhabited by eighteenth-century Ulster Scots as one of “hidden” significance. Compared to the rise of the Ascendancy and the repression of Catholics under the penal code, the story of Ulster's Presbyterians figures as interesting, albeit less significant, marginalia. While a few studies detail the handicaps the group suffered in the years after the Williamite Settlement, their eighteenth-century experience has mainly attracted church historians interested in theological disputes, social historians charting the rise of the linen industry, and students of the '98 Rebellion exploring the ways in which a latent Presbyterian radicalism contributed to the formation of the United Irish movement. Explaining who the Ulster Scots were or how they defined themselves has not attracted much scholarly attention, an unsurprising failure given that historians have designated the eighteenth century in Ireland as the period of “penal era and golden age.”

This article argues that a new, more fully integrated approach to the study of Ireland and Britain offers possibilities for recovering the history of the Ulster Scots. Nearly twenty-five years after J. G. A. Pocock issued his “plea” for a “new British history” that would incorporate the experiences of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within a single narrative by exploring the ways in which each “interacted so as to modify the condition of one another's existence,” scholars have finally responded. The new British history, with its focus on the development of a British state system, seeks to explore, according to a chief proponent, John Morrill, the ways in which “the political and constitutional relationship between the communities of the two islands were transformed” and the processes through which they gained “a new sense of their own identities as national communities.”

In the past twenty years there has been a renaissance in Jacobite studies in Britain and North America. It started with the publication in 1970 of Romney Sedgwick's The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1715–1754, in which the post-1715 Tory party was resurrected from the untimely death to which earlier historiography had consigned it in the face of the so-called Whig hegemony under Walpole and his successors. This section of Sedgwick's volumes was the work of Eveline Cruickshanks, who not only showed that there had been an active Tory party under Walpole, but also claimed that it had been essentially a Jacobite party. Dr. Cruickshanks has, since 1970, produced a book, several articles, and essays expanding her thesis. She has been joined in the quest for Jacobites by many others, and the flow of work on Jacobitism seems unabated. This body of work has, however, left other historians with a good deal of unease, not only over the conclusions reached, but also the methodology used and the sources upon which these conclusions are based (most notably the uncritical use of the Stuart Papers in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle).

An important aspect of John Knox's thought is his concept of divine providence. Closely related to and partially dependent on his notion of providence are the reformer's ideas on God, history, politics, and predestination. Knox did not, however, write a specific tract on divine providence. In fact, he denied being a speculative “theologian” and regarded himself as a preacher, being called “to blow my master's trumpet,” rather than “to compose books for the age to come….” Consequently, he did not approach the subject systematically. For example, Knox did not, as John Calvin had done, logically relate the subjects of creation and providence. In fact, the Scottish reformer seldom spoke of God's act of creation. Despite this nonsystematic approach, Knox did have a doctrine of divine providence, even if at times it was implicit rather than explicit. As a result, his concept of providence must be derived piecemeal from his historical, polemical, and pastoral writings.

What then is the value of studying the concept of providence in the thought of a reformer who did not think systematically? First, such a study will demonstrate that a coherent conception of the nature of divine providence can be found in Knox's writings, though not expounded in a single treatise. Second, his thoughts on this subject have not been the object of an extensive scholarly investigation, either by historians or theologians. Third, Knox's concept of providence had a practical and motivational significance for both the reformer's thought and actions, thus revealing more about Knox the man, his mission, his motivation, and worldview. His great objective was the reformation of religion, particularly in his native Scotland.

This article takes a new look at British radicalism in the 1790s and explores it within broad geographical and cultural frameworks and through the early career of Henry Redhead Yorke, a West Indian Creole who became a radical in England but frequently recanted his politics. It views radicalism within the Atlantic World and provides a broader interpretation of the excluded majority than as an English working class. It examines the radical “citizens of the world” and sheds new light on the apparent conflict within English radicalism between universalist and constitutionalist ideologies. Politicization and identity are the key themes here examined within micro- and macro-histories.

This article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos expressed a broad range of subjects, affinities, and interests from wider popular and even mainstream culture. The diverse occupations held by convicts, the contexts in which tattoos were created, and incidental references to tattooing in other parts of society all point to a growing phenomenon that was embedded in Victorian culture rather than constituting an expression of deviance or resistance. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, tattooing became fashionable within elite society. These findings not only shed light on the significance of tattooing as a form of cultural expression but also undermine the myth that nineteenth-century criminality was the product of, as contemporary commentators termed it, a distinct “criminal class.”

A major town planning dispute between church and state in Galway in the 1940s over the location for a new school provides a lens for rethinking Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity. Using town planning and urban governance lenses, this article argues that existing scholarship on the postwar Irish Catholic Church overstates its hegemonic power. In analyzing the dispute, it critiques the undue focus within European town-planning studies on the state and on the supposedly “rational” agendas of mid-century planners, showing instead how religious entities forged parallel paths of urban modernity and urban governance. It thus adds an Irish and an urban-planning dimension to existing debates within religious history about urbanization and secularization, showing how adaptive the Irish Catholic Church was to high modernity. Finally, with its focus on a school building, it brings a built environment angle into studies of education policy in Ireland. In seeking to revisit major historiographical debates within town planning, religious history, and studies of urban modernity, the article makes extensive use of the recently opened papers of Bishop Michael Browne of Galway, a noted public intellectual within the Irish Catholic Church and a European expert on canon law.