Enclosure riots were a prominent manifestation of social tension in England in the 1530's and 1540's. Although enclosures of land for pasturage and tillage had been undertaken since the beginning of English agriculture and did not usually cause social conflict, the rapid increase in population of the sixteenth century pressed hard on the available supply of land. The necessity of increasing the food supply speeded up the process of enclosure. The supplies of corn and meat could not be increased significantly without the year-round use of enclosed and consolidated plots of land, which was inconsistent with communal access to common and waste land and the stubble remaining after the harvest on arable lands. Other causes of friction in agrarian society included the greater fluidity in the land market resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries together with revolutionary methods of exploiting the land. The social relationships existing among great landlords, small holders and tenants could not remain unaffected.

The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the early Tudor enclosure riot as a primitive or pre-political form of social protest. This will necessitate: (1) describing the forms and extent of violence employed; (2) distinguishing between those riots that accompany the Pilgrimage of Grace and the rebellions of 1548-49 and those riots that occur outside of the years of rebellion; and (3) modifying the assumption that the typical enclosure riot was perpetrated by an exasperated peasantry venting their rage upon the hedges and ditches of a commercially-minded, grasping gentry.

With the recent four hundredth anniversary of the sailing of the Spanish Armada came a virtual flood of new works concerning the great invasion fleet and the English ships that opposed it. While it would seem that there would be little new to say about such a heavily researched subject, there is one aspect of this momentous year that has been received relatively short shrift by historians of the period, the national mobilization of England to meet the threatened invasion. Often referred to as the Great Muster of 1588 because one of its most important elements was the muster of the militia to fill the ranks of the army, it was an administrative feat of massive scope that involved months of preparation, extensive military planning, and precise timing. Because these arrangements were never tested in battle, however, the effectiveness of this effort is hard to judge, and its importance is often missed by historians. While Garrett Mattingly devoted an entire chapter of his well known work on the Armada year to events on land, he found the queen's visit to the army at Tilbury after the departure of the Armada more important, or at least more interesting, than the actual state of the nation's defense. More recently, Geoffrey Parker has used the discovery of a large quantity of siege equipment on an excavated armada wreck as a jumping off point for his article “If The Armada Had Landed.” Approaching the issue from the standpoint of a historian of the Army of Flanders, and leaning heavily on continental sources, he adheres to the view that England was totally unprepared for fighting on land if the Spanish had succeeded in landing troops on the island. While this view reflects the common opinion of both nineteenthand twentieth-century historians on the subject, a careful review of English sources, particularly the surviving muster records, military papers, and coastal surveys, leaves a good deal of doubt concerning the accuracy of Parker's judgment. It is the purpose of this article to examine the English side of the story of the Great Muster of 1588, by illustrating the extensive defensive preparations that were organized to face the Spanish threat.

Irish political activity diminished in the early 1850s from previously more intensive levels. The tenant-right movement, established to secure economic justice for tenant farmers whose numbers dominated the ranks of Irish cultivators, continued to elicit a sympathetic response. But by the middle of the nineteeth century, it had deteriorated to a shadow of its former strength. The enthusiasm of the rural Irish for political causes had seemingly been drained by the traumatic experience of the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. The potato blight, with the failure of a crop upon which many were heavily dependent, resulted in the death of over a half million persons. The flow of emigrants accelerated in the famine and immediate post-famine period. The population of Ireland was reduced from over eight million in 1841 to about six and one-half million in 1851. Landlords engaged in widespread tenant eviction during the famine episode. The established trend of the shift of agricultural land from crop to livestock production was accelerated.

Rural assistance programmes initiated in the famine and immediate post-famine years were primarily intended to benefit landlords and large farm operators with measures for soil improvement and drainage control. Recovery from the famine was slow and tortuous: the real value of agricultural output was still ten percent lower in the early 1860s than in the early 1850s. The reduction of the value of crop output by about one-third was largely compensated by the rise of value of livestock output. It proved to be a hostile environment for those tenant farmers surviving the famine. The tenant farmers — all but three percent of the total number of farm operators — were defeated and submissive. They offered slight resistance to measures introduced for the consolidation of estates and for the transfer of title from indebted to more commercially oriented owners.

The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, Gathered out of the Worde of God is a seventy-seven-page octavo for which no one claimed public credit. The book appeared in 1590 (n.s.), as shown by the date of the preface, January 1, 1589, though the title page is misprinted 1599. No place of publication is named; in fact that book came from the press of Richard Schilders at Middleburgh. The author chose anonymity. He must have been known at the time but was not identified inprint until some thirty years later. He was Henry Finch (1558-1625), third son in a prominent family of the Kentish Weald, who became a member of Parliament, a knight, serjeant-at-law to James I, and a respected student of the common law. His stepfather, Nicholas St. Leger, was active in the puritan interest in Parliament, and Finch, too, had a puritanic streak that marked his religious writings from The Sacred Doctrine of Divinitie, his first, to his last and best known, The Worlds Great Restauration, or the Calling of the Jewes, a millennial tract of 1621 that put him at odds with the king.

This much is known: author, printer, date. What has remained obscure, even unguessed at, is the authorship of the long unsigned “Preface to the Christian Reader.” In addition, the work is freighted with glosses that sometimes squeeze the text into a corner or drive it off a page entirely. There are reasons to believe that these marginalia are largely the work of another hand than Finch's, in all likelihood the same that wrote the preface.

It is generally assumed that the earl of Salisbury's last years were a time of political decline, largely because of the failure of the Great Contract. “In 1610,” one historian has written recently, “Salisbury lost the confidence of both king and Parliament. The collapse of the Great Contract, in which so much of his credit was bound up, was a blow from which his prestige never recovered.” The outlines of the story are familiar. Salisbury, lord treasurer since 1608 and James's chief minister since the beginning of the reign, was securely established in the king's trust and affection at the beginning of 1610. His fall began with court opposition to the Great Contract, opposition which it has been suggested may have been the real cause of the contract's failure. According to Godfrey Goodman, a “great peer” on his deathbed advised the king

The dying peer blamed those who “did endeavour to engross and monopolise the King, and kept other able men out of his service.” From that point, according to Goodman, Salisbury, “who had been a great stirrer in that business, and was the man aimed at, began to decline.”

Nurses and their labor are essential to the provision of health care. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the flagship institution of postwar British welfare, the National Health Service. When it launched in 1948, a shortage of thirty-five thousand nurses endangered its future. This article examines the National Health Service's nursing shortage and its most enduring solution: the recruitment of Caribbean and African nursing staff for struggling British hospitals. It follows the manner in which British civil servants, hospital administrators, and nursing leaders came to recruit nurses from the colonies and the deep ambivalence that marked their project. What began as a reformulated colonial development project gave rise to a sprawling and unregulated market for nursing labor that powered the National Health Service for decades. The so-called dark stranger, deemed unworthy of membership in the national community, in fact carried out its most intimate work—caring for the bodies of sick white citizens.