Ellington, Huntingdonshire, a village belonging to the estates of the abbot of Ramsey from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, was a typical East Midlands open-field village of 2,700 acres, with a largely villein population and a mixed farming economy. In these and other respects, Ellington was fairly representative of the rural settlements that housed the vast bulk of European populations throughout the Middle Ages. In the last several decades historians have intensified their efforts to understand the economy and society of these peasant communities, using records of local provenance, primarily the minutes of the semiannual manorial courts. The present article, based upon a larger socioeconomic study of the village community of Ellington from 1280 to 1600, examines the local response of that community to the long-term crises engendered by the arrival of plague in the mid-fourteenth century. Here, we are interested in examining the social underpinnings of village government, specifically, the dynamic complex of community standards or expectations that informed the selection of local leaders in the village.

Thanks to the evidence of court rolls, which begin in the thirteenth century, and other local records uniquely available for the English peasantry, we can study a number of indices of change in peasant communities and thus identify some of the aspirations and choices that constituted one dimension of the “mental world of the non-literate folk.” A study of village government through local leadership is a direct and significant avenue of investigation, first, because the surviving data allow us to identify the village's official leaders, both as individuals and as a group.

Between 1848 and 1853 a series of major peace congresses was held—in Brussels (1848), Paris (1849), Frankfurt (1850), London (1851), Manchester (1853), and Edinburgh (1853). This midcentury period was one of great confidence and optimism in the likely success of the cause. Indeed, reading the reports of the congresses today, one is struck by the at times naive overoptimism of many delegates. This may in part have been the product of the millenarian atmosphere of the period. However, it has to be said that the congresses were also characterized by a strong sense of the practicality of their proposals and the steady progress toward their goal that implementation of such proposals would achieve. Above all, the efflorescence of the peace movement in the short six years around the midcentury was the product of a class confidence, of a momentary triumphalism that inspired a section of the bourgeoisie to believe that the scourge of war could be eradicated at last.

The nineteenth-century peace movement effectively began with the establishment toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, independently and virtually simultaneously, of peace societies in the United States and Britain. They were dominated by men of religion, particularly Quakers, and for a quarter of a century their work was essentially that of proselytizing the peace cause through publicity, petitions, and lecture tours. In connection with the last, the London Peace Society sent emissaries on tours of continental Europe in the early 1840s to spread the peace message.

The early Stuart period witnessed a startling transformation in the physical environment of the royal court. At James I's accession, Whitehall and the great courtier's palaces along the Strand still lay in an essentially rural landscape. To the south, Westminster was a compact town of perhaps 6,500 people, while to the north and east, the three Strand parishes of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, St. Mary le Savoy, and St. Clement Danes contained another 6,000, mostly concentrated in a narrow ribbon along the Strand itself. North of the Strand, the landscape remained open except for a thinner ribbon along High Holborn. Covent Garden was a pasture and orchard, containing a number of fine timber trees, St. Martin's church was still literally “in the fields“ and Lincoln's Inn Fields comprised over forty acres of open land. Dairying and market gardening were going concerns over much of what soon became the West End. Only a few years before, St. Martin's parish had experienced an enclosure riot.

On the eve of the Civil War, a continuous urban landscape extended from Temple Bar as far as Soho, and ribbons of development spread along both sides of St. James's Park, as far as Knightsbridge and Picadilly. The population of old Westminster had increased by about 250 percent, while the Strand area grew even more rapidly, with St. Martin's-in-the-Fields experiencing more than a fivefold increase to as many as 17,000 people. Had they been independent settlements, all three of the large West End parishes of St. Margaret's Westminster, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and St. Clement Danes would have ranked among the half dozen largest English provincial cities. In all, the western suburbs' population probably stood between 40,000 and 60,000.

The myth of the English Reformation is that it did not happen, or that it happened by accident rather than design, or that it was halfhearted and sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism; the point at issue is the identity of the Church of England. The myth was created in two stages, first in the middle years of the seventeenth century, and then from the third decade of the nineteenth century; and in either case it was created by one party within the church, largely consisting of clergy, with a particular motive in mind. This was to emphasize the Catholic continuity of the church over the break of the Reformation, in order to claim that the true representative of the Catholic church within the borders of England and Wales was not the minority loyal to the bishop of Rome, but the church as by law established in 1559 and 1662. In the seventeenth century the group involved was called Arminian by contemporaries, and in later days it came to be labeled High Church, or Laudian, after its chief early representative William Laud. In the nineteenth century the same party revived was known variously as Tractarian, Oxford Movement, High Church, Ritualist, and, most commonly in the twentieth century, Anglo-Catholic. Here are two characteristic quotations from one of the most distinguished of this nineteenth-century group, John Henry Newman, before his departure for Rome and a cardinal's hat. First, when defending himself against the charge of innovation: “We are a ‘Reformed’ Church, not a ‘Protestant’ … the Puritanic spirit spread in Elizabeth's and James's time, and … has been succeeded by the Methodistic. …We, the while, children of the Holy Church, whencesoever brought into it, whether by early training or after thought, have had one voice, that one voice which the Church has had from the beginning." Second, introducing the characteristic Anglican expression of the idea of continuity, the notion of the via media: “A number of distinct notions are included in the notion of Protestantism; and as to all these our Church has taken a Via Media between it and Popery.

The assembly of the Long Parliament in November 1640 witnessed an outburst of passionate hostility toward recent royal policies in church and state. “The Common-wealth hath bin miserably torne and macerated,” declared Harbottle Grimston, “and all the proprieties and liberties shaken: the Church distracted, the Gospell and Professors of it persecuted, and the whole Kingdome over-run with multitudes and swarmes of projecting cater-wormes and caterpillars, the worst of all the Aegyptian plagues.” Yet, as Kevin Sharpe has recently reminded us, “to those on the road during the 1630s, the journey seemed far from a headlong rush towards conflict.” Sir Henry Wotton could write in 1633 that “we know not what a Rebel is; what a Plotter against the Common-weal: nor what that is, which Grammarian[s] call Treason: the names themselves are antiquated with the things.” To resolve this flat contradiction requires much further research into the politics and government of Charles I's Personal Rule. In particular, a clear picture of the political behavior, relationships, and attitudes of many public figures is still lacking. This article therefore presents a case study of one prominent individual: Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, privy councillor and lord chamberlain to Henrietta Maria. These offices gave Dorset an exceptional opportunity during the 1630s to “see more clearly into [the king's] intents and actions.” Moreover, both official sources and personal correspondence should reveal his activities during the Personal Rule and his attitudes toward it. What follows will examine in turn Dorset's duties as the queen's lord chamberlain, the political influence that this office conferred, his work as a privy councillor, his relations with various factions, and his private opinions of the regime and of Charles I and Henrietta Maria.

For historians, as for revenue officers, the bold English smuggler of the eighteenth century has been an elusive figure. His motives, the structure of his business, and his relationship to broader social and economic trends, remain far from clear. This is partly because the sources for histories of smuggling are fragmentary and obscure, but it also reflects the inadequacies of proposed interpretations. The early chroniclers of the smuggling trade represented it as an assertion of popular rights, bravely, if at times violently, defended against the agents of an intrusive government. This somewhat romantic view has recently been reformulated by Cal Winslow, who has depicted southcoast tea smuggling in the 1740s as a “social crime,” sanctioned by the laboring classes but condemned by those in authority. Conversely, economic historians have written of smuggling as a “big business” that accounted for one-third of English trade with France and Holland and had an effect both on the level of prices and the distribution of goods. The tea smuggler, as Hoh-cheung Mui and Lorna Mui have noted, “was indeed an important complement to his legal counterpart and as such contributed to the commercial expansion of the kingdom.” He “became a virtual pioneer in developing trade facilities,” especially in remote areas, and helped to expand the market for luxury commodities like brandy and tea by undercutting the prices of the great merchants and established companies.

Much has been written in recent years about the history of childhood in Edwardian Britain. To some extent, that concentration of scholarly effort reflects a profound shift in academic concerns away from the superficially extraordinary and noteworthy to the apparently mundane and neglected that has characterized much of the so-called new social history, and from which redirection of academic attention the history of childhood in modern Britain has been only one of many beneficiaries. But perhaps to a greater extent, the outpourings of recent historiography on the changing nature and changing significance of childhood in Britain during the first decade of the twentieth century and in the years immediately leading up to the outbreak of the Great War reflect an intellectual preoccupation that would have been perfectly comprehensible to the Edwardians themselves: a preoccupation, during the first decade of the twentieth century, with the discovery of “child life,” that is, with a form of mental, emotional, and psychological life peculiar to the child.

Precisely what that life consisted in, how it was discovered, and what, having unearthed it, the Edwardians made of it, is a subject too vast to be explored here. This article draws attention to only one aspect of that life and of the Edwardian discovery of and uses of it that has been largely neglected in modern historical writing. This is the religious life, religious education, and religious development of the child, particularly of that life as it was lived, nurtured, and brought (or not brought) to fruition in the Sunday schools of Edwardian England.

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scott's Redgauntlet, set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scott's tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement.

It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.

In December 1990 I published an essay critical of the work of Dr. John Adamson. I cited numerous examples of what I consider systematic misuse of evidence, including selective quotation and misquotation, tendentious interpretation, and the citation of sources that either have no bearing on the point being substantiated or are so tangential to it that no reasonable researcher would consider the cited material to constitute evidence within the canons of accepted scholarly practice. I came to these conclusions after a long period of checking citations. What I found was that the evidence for these questionable practices was embedded in Adamson's work and concealed from the view of his readers. Because he uniformly preferred to cite from manuscripts and disdained cross-reference to readily available printed editions, only someone whose familiarity with the materials nearly rivaled his own could be aware of the problem. Dozens of manuscript citations were offered as evidence for self-confident assertions, but time after time no quotations were provided in either text or footnote to make the assertions concrete. When sources were quoted, the quotations were largely run into Adamson's sentences rather than appearing in their own contexts.

In recent years, historians of the Augustan period have done much to rehabilitate the posthumous reputation of Queen Anne, a monarch traditionally viewed as dull, weak, reactionary, and easily led. Beginning in the 1920s with the work of W. T. Morgan, continuing with that of G. M. Trevelyan and G. S. Holmes, and culminating in the definitive biography by Edward Gregg, Anne has gradually emerged as a figure to be reckoned with. We have come to see her as a tenacious and often skillful navigator, charting a middle course between the opposing shoals of the Whig and Tory parties, in an attempt to preserve freedom of maneuver for the postrevolutionary monarchy.

This article will explore a heretofore neglected aspect of the queen's political helmsmanship: the attempt to make her person and crown a focus for national (i.e., English) unity through the revival and exploitation of royal ritual and symbol. It will be argued below that Anne—alone among the later Stuarts—made extensive use of the arsenal of ceremonial paraphernalia, what David Cannadine has called “the theatre of power,” which is normally associated with her Tudor and early Stuart predecessors. This essay is thus intended not only to contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Anne's political role but also to help fill a gap between the wealth of fine work on pageantry at those earlier courts and the work Linda Colley and others have done on the reign of George III.

“Speenhamland” is a word popularized by late nineteenth-century historians as a derogatory term for the systematic subsidization of laborers' wages by allowances paid from the poor rates. This system was thought to have flourished in southern and agrarian England in the early nineteenth century, the size of the allowances determined by the size of the family and the price of bread. The unwitting “villains” were the Berkshire justices who met at the Pelican Inn, located in a tithing of Speen Parish. Moved by corn dearth and a terrible winter, the justices on May 6, 1795, set in train the fatal hemorrhaging of the Old Poor Law that, in turn, led to the draconian Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Myth this may largely be, and it has been explored elsewhere; however, no one questions that subsidizing the employed from the poor rates, including allowances in aid of wages, occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is in this sense that “Speenhamland” is used here, but to suggest a radically different and mainly constructive consequence for British economic and social development.

For subsidizing the employed poor, when it took the form of nonresident relief, could function as a kind of “Industrial Speenhamland” (freshly coined), to wit: a system of parochially funded labor migration that promoted a work force for expanding industries. This subsidization could include allowances in aid of wages as well as other welfare benefits in times of sickness and unemployment—all at the expense of the home parish or township, not of the places in which the factories and industrial workshops were located.

This article examines Jane Cobden's campaign for the London County Council (L.C.C.) in 1888–89 and its controversial aftermath. Cobden's effort, a pioneering political venture of British feminism, illuminates late-Victorian concepts of gender. It provides at once an anticipation of, and a distinct contrast to, the militant suffragism of the Edwardian era. In addition, it suggests new ways of thinking about the connection between women's-suffragist and labor politics. Perhaps because the campaign was a comparatively obscure incident when measured against the broad sweep of British political history, however, no scholar has done much more than sketch its bare outline. Hopefully, the fuller depiction provided below will accord it the treatment it really deserves.

This article approaches the subject from a tangent, however. Cobden's campaign was a significant if little-known episode not only in the history of British suffragism but also in the life of a man who went on to play a major role in British politics long after the first county council elections had been forgotten. This was George Lansbury, Cobden's political agent during 1888–89 and secretary of the Bow and Bromley Radical and Liberal Federation. Lansbury eventually became one of the main architects of the socialist movement in East London and a chief male supporter of the militant suffragettes during the Edwardian era (in 1912 he temporarily lost his seat in the House of Commons and went to prison on their behalf). He also became a founder and editor of the quintessential “rebel” newspaper, the Daily Herald (which was designated Labour's official organ after Lansbury left it in 1922), a pacifist opponent of World War I, and, from 1931 to 1935, leader of the Labour party itself.