When the Scots advanced on England in August 1640, reports of their formidable progress quickly reached London. Their march was

It would be hard to find a more vivid example of the integration of war and religion, of assent by military laymen to clerical authority, or of manipulation of ritual to impart a message: the presence of ministers and the Bible even more than the sobriety of the troops asserted that this army was the agent of God, to the comfort of its soldiers and the terror of its enemies.

Could England achieve comparable godliness, order, and confidence in execution of divine purpose in the conduct of its own war? Parliamentary clergy lived in hope of similar recognition and achievement. Yet at best ritual must be distinguished from accompanying practice, as the conduct of Scottish soldiers in Newcastle and its environs was to demonstrate; at worst the clerical message was derided and ignored.

Henry:
Then you perceive the body of our kingdom, How foul it is;
What rank diseases grow, and with what danger, near the heart of it.
Warwick:
It is but body, yet distempered, Which to his former
Strength may be restored with good advise and little medicine.
[Shakespeare, Henry IV]

Shakespeare's words remind us that in the learned traditions of Renaissance Europe, good advice remained more important than potent medicines for restoring both physical and political states to their previous strengths. As the lord advised the king, so a physician advised his patient, or lawyer his client, or minister his flock: preventing troubles was worth far more than cure, and the best remedy even when matters went wrong was good advice on how to return to a state of harmony. Still, plenty of quacks in politics and medicine, law and church, advocated strong measures, not helping people to live in accordance with their world but attempting to alter the conditions under which they lived. Bad advice and powerful remedies seemed to be everywhere, trampling good council and temperate behavior. The connections between learning and authority that lay behind claims to authority in general are especially well illuminated by the ways in which the physicians argued for possessing, maintaining, and extending their professional privileges.

Among all the number and variety of medical practitioners in early modern England, one small group self-consciously considered itself to be professional: the physicians. As one of the three learned professions surviving from the Middle Ages, the “medical profession” has been a crucial test case for various definitions of what a profession is or was.

In December 1655, four stewards for the Worcestershire feast wrote to the eminent divine Richard Baxter regarding possible worthy charities for money collected at their recent London feast. Baxter, elated by their offer, suggested that they set up a public lecture in a dark corner of their native county. He later recalled how well the charitable concerns of this first Worcestershire feast tied in with his concurrent actions to establish a clerical association in the county. Almost thirty years later, in 1682, Roger L'Estrange noted the same phenomenon of annual county feasts in London. Like Baxter, L'Estrange defended what he termed the “innocent county feasts,” and his Observator advertised both tickets and published sermons for more than a dozen county or city feasts during its brief run between 1681 and 1687. Such common cause between Baxter and L'Estrange is remarkable. Moreover, the “innocent” county feasts, which flourished for fifty years from the late 1650s, were often controversial and were the setting for feast sermons which often heaped vitriol on “parties,” whether religious or political. This article examines the rise of the county feasts in the 1650s and their peak in the 1680s in order to assess their significance in the development of late Stuart society, culture, and politics.

The county feast was in fact an urban phenomenon: natives of a county met annually, usually in London, for a sermon, dinner, and a subscription to a charity. The phenomenon has long been noted, though rarely analyzed.

There is now a strong case for banning the word “community” from all academic writing and an even stronger one for banning it from the vocabulary of politics. As one early modern historian has put it, the word is becoming a “shibboleth.” It is employed where “group” or “society,” for example, would be more appropriate, and, worst of all, its use is often not just a matter of slack thought but expresses an implicit hankering for some mythical past when there were “communities.” The increasing overworking of the word by politicians and other public figures can be related to an uneasy feeling that the sense of belonging and of mutual obligation implicit in the idea of “community” are disappearing. Accordingly, if they call things “communities” often enough, that will somehow create them. This prelapsarian attitude to communities is, as we shall see, quite as fundamental to historical use of the term. It is the purpose of this article to examine critically how the word has been applied in relation to the medieval English gentry, to ask whether there can be any legitimate use in this context, and to look at the types of identity, whether communitarian or not, that may have obtained among this important group within medieval society.

Historiographically, the “gentry community,” as is well-known, first appeared in the seventeenth century, specifically in the work of Alan Everitt.

In the purview of theater history, as on the theatrical stage itself, performers' and writers' command on attention is almost complete. Ancient Greek gave a word to its mask builders (skeuopoio), but apart from distinct vocabulary, history leaves few traces of theatrical laborers. A glance through any number of theatrical books, periodicals, bibliographies, biographical guides, and encyclopedias reveals the predominance of performers in the public eye, though managers, directors, designers, and critics occasionally attract scholarly studies. Even among novels, journalism, and theatrical guidebooks—genres that venture behind the scenes—the personnel that dress, light, paint, and build shows are rarely present. Their identity and labor is marginalized in the annals because it is marginalized in the conceptualization of what is important in theater production. Susan Todd takes unusual measures to challenge this tradition by documenting the experience of women stage managers in the contemporary theater, but in the historical realm this has not been attempted. Writers devote attention to how the stage actually worked (how stage effects were achieved and how the creative chain of command functioned), but to date no one has examined the structures and traditions of backstage labor by asking basic questions about the sociopolitical organization of the work.

Only in highly esoteric treatises or the lightest of literature do theatrica jewelers, armorers, weavers, hosiers, basket makers, shoemakers, furnishers, cosmeticians, perruquiers, costumiers, seamsters, dressers, property makers, carpenters, gas fitters, printers, or ticket takers usually appear. These are all specialized trades and occupations indispensable to the building and running of nineteenth-century theatrical entertainment.

On August 14, 1868, Thomas Wells was executed behind prison walls in Maidstone. According to the The Times, the event passed off so quietly that the public perhaps failed to note the significance of the occasion. With his death the drama of the public execution came to an end. “It is,” the newspaper explained, “emphatically one of those reforms which are hard to realize before they are made, but which, once made, seem so simple and unobjectionable that they are treated almost as a matter of course.” On the face of it, this passage seems to capture the salient features of the episode. In the decades leading up to abolition, opinion was deeply divided about the value of the death penalty and the wisdom of public executions. The Times itself, almost to the last moment, resisted the change. But once the issue was resolved in favor of privacy, no voice demanded their return. There were no demonstrations protesting the reform. Even the arguments once used to defend the publicity of punishment disappeared from view.

But The Times meant something more by the phrase “one of those reforms.” It indicated a belief that the abolition belonged to a special category of measures, those that contributed to the progress of civilization in England. The idea that civilization demanded the end of the public execution figured prominently in reform arguments, and occupied just as important a place in later interpretations of the change. A liberal member of Parliament, John Hibbert, in pointing to an execution in 1866, explained that “no one anxious to promote civilization could wish to see the recurrence of a scene of that kind.”

Lord Palmerston's constituency of support within the nineteenth-century Liberal party has received relatively little attention from historians. In many ways, however, his strong plebeian following provided the major popular current within Liberalism prior to the emergence of the cult of Gladstone in the mid-1860s. Even after Palmerston's death in 1865, his legacy continued to exercise a powerful influence, and William Ewart Gladstone, Viscount Hartington, Lord Rosebery, and others vied with one another for possession of his mantle and the role as his successor.

Historians have shown themselves baffled by this phenomenon of Palmerston's popular appeal. Conservative historians have sought to annex Palmerston for the Tory interest. Themes like “the nation,” the sanctity of British citizenship, and defense of British interests abroad they see as presaging the appeal of Benjamin Disraeli's “imperialism.” Most have combined in portraying Palmerston as a profoundly “illiberal” figure, more Tory than the Tories, whose views sat uneasily alongside such canons of Liberalism as free-trade noninterventionism and Gladstone's graduated program of parliamentary and civil-service reforms. His contribution to the midcentury Liberal consensus was, however, a major one, and must be seen as carrying equal weight with that of such figures as Richard Cobden, John Bright, and J. S. Mill.

Recent reappraisals of Liberalism have challenged the notion of a uniform, popular Liberalism in the 1850s and 1860s. In their research Patrick Joyce and James Vernon have emphasized the degree to which Liberalism at a popular level was a fusion of older and newer political forms, incorporating long-standing radical memories of the mass platform, traditional styles of leadership, and established methods of political communication.

Almost every social problem that troubles the conscience of a community has a history. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, the consequences of crime and epidemic disease—all are familiar topics of contemporary discourse that also mattered in the medieval past. Then, as now, questions about social welfare provoked debate and thoughtful comment in courts, churches, and political councils. The parameters of discussion naturally shifted with the ebb and flow of economic circumstance, but seldom more so than in the fourteenth century, when famine, recurrent plague, and labor unrest disrupted English society. In the villages and little market towns of the countryside, where most of the population lived, the threat of economic insecurity raised ethical and legal dilemmas about begging, vagrancy, and alms for the poor. All posed hard questions for people living in small groups, for they understood, better than solitary folk, how the ideals and practices of social welfare were grounded in communal life. Its conventions and norms reflected the shared values of neighbors and kin, as well as the social boundaries and inequalities of medieval society. How, then, did people who lived by the labor of their hands view the poor and disabled? Were the aged, the unemployed, the infirm, and chronically ill a part of the community, or did disability and want set them apart?

These questions pose the problem of how social cohesion and a sense of belonging were maintained by people of diverse sorts and conditions in the medieval countryside. To ignore or hurriedly dismiss their interest in the subject of community life would be a mistake.

“Who loves the state these days?” Frances Cairncross rhetorically asked in The Times Literary Supplement at the height of the Thatcher era. “People have become more cynical,” she went on, “about the central tenet of socialism: the concept of a wise and beneficent State, representing the best interests of the community at large.” The skepticism about the state as a provider of national well-being which Cairncross was referring to was of course not confined to Britain. Nor was it, in Britain, simply to be identified with “Thatcherism.” Rather, such disillusion developed over a period of several decades and across the political spectrum. As significant in this development as the thunderings of Thatcherites were the reconsiderations of those further left; David Marquand spoke for many when he declared his own tradition of Croslandite social democracy virtually bankrupt, flawed to the root by its statism, through which “civil society was seen, all too often, not as an agent, but as a patient.” The deep shift of opinion embodied in such observations has made its mark in a variety of realms, one of which is the subject of this essay: an alteration in the interpretation of British history, in particular of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era in which this newly problematical state began to grow into its modern form.

It has become something of a truism that historical writing is a part of the wider field of social discourse.

New Aliens. By not being Others we define ourselves. We have always done so. In bad times the barbarians were at our gates; on more fortunate occasions we were at theirs. As we changed, so did our alter ego. A hundred-plus years ago in England, “we” were the upper classes, perhaps the middling lot aspiring upward. Primarily men. The Others populated the Empire, the East End of London, and even many social and geographic quarters closer to home. And if we were not men, we mostly pretended we wished we were. We wrote our history, as well as theirs. In time, growing familiarity transformed many strange aliens into us, an acquaintancy which led to multiculturalism, gender assertiveness, and subjectivism. In the process we found new aliens—the DWEM (dead white European males).

Some of us have maintained our moral righteousness throughout, whereas others have been skeptical all along. Having gone through a generation of a strong antipatriarchal/anticolonial writing, writers of different persuasions have come to reevaluate and pose challenges to the new edifice. Suspended between conflicting incredulous postmodernist sensibilities and a pragmatic sense that communication is maintained despite its announced demise, it seems an opportune moment to examine the new attitudes to writing (imperial) history in light of such questions as the role of agency within and against a dominant discourse, the place of morality in the writing of history, and the process of alienation mediated among competing victimizations.

In the course of the past several decades, scholars have exposed Black people's long history of life and work in Britain, but their approaches to racial conflict have slighted the historical contingency of racial difference itself. Black workers have been presented as logical, visible scapegoats in an otherwise homogeneous working class, and interracial hostility as an ineluctable product of economic or sexual competition between two mutually exclusive and naturally antagonistic groups of working men. Scholars examining Black people's experience in Britain under the rubric “immigrants and minorities” have placed particular emphasis on racial conflicts, xenophobia, and prejudice, which they see as evidence of “traditions of intolerance” widespread in British society. Such interpretations leave unchallenged the assumption that racial or ethnic hostility is latent in social relations, resurfacing in any crisis. Whatever the intentions of their authors, such assumptions can all too easily be used to justify rather than to combat conflict and exclusion.

Intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, moreover, are not explanations for racial or ethnic conflict: in themselves they require explanation. In focusing on “attitudes,” and behaviors, these works neglect to examine the structural underpinnings of popular racism and xenophobia—in particular the ways that Black and white working people were positioned in relation to each other within a system also riven by class, gender, skill, and other power dynamics. What many scholars have taken for granted, indeed, is the objective or fixed quality of racial difference itself and its inexorably divisive effects.

The village community has a shadowy existence in historical writing about the English Middle Ages. With a few honorable exceptions, scholars have been reluctant to assign to the village any central place in their account of medieval society. In some cases it is ignored or given such small emphasis as to imply that it was of little importance, and it is still necessary to provide evidence for the existence of the community and its organization.

This essay is concerned first with questions of definition and locating the village community's role in society and government. Second, the problem of the community's decline will be investigated, examining the relationships between villagers, mainly in the peak period of social and economic development around 1300, and then exploring the evidence for deterioration in the unity of the village after 1350. This is intended to reexamine the subject in the light of recent work and in particular to consider the skepticism about the collective nature of peasant society. Attention will also be given to the idea that late medieval villages were as divided in their social structure and as collusive with outside authorities as were their successors in the early modern period.

In the history of medieval ideas about community, a prominent place must be accorded to the fraternity, or guild. This type of voluntary association, found throughout medieval Europe, frequently applied to itself the name of communitas. The community of the guild was not, however, a simple phenomenon; it invites closer analysis than it has yet received. As religious clubs of mostly lay men and (often) women, the fraternities of medieval Christendom have lately been a favored subject among students of spirituality. Less interest, however, has recently been shown in the social aspects of the guilds. One reason for this neglect may be precisely the communitarian emphasis in the normative records of these societies, which most late twentieth-century historians find unrealistic and, perhaps, faintly embarrassing. But allowing, as it must be allowed, that medieval society was not the Edenic commune evoked in fraternity statutes, the social historian is left with some substantial questions concerning these organizations, whose number alone commands attention: fifteenth-century England probably contained 30,000 guilds. Why were so many people eager to pay subscriptions—which, though usually modest, were not insignificant—to be admitted as “brothers” and “sisters” of one or more fraternities? Who attended guild meetings, and what did they hope to achieve by doing so? What social realities gave rise to the common language of equal brotherhood? This essay is intended to shed some light on these questions by focusing on what for every guild was the event which above all gave it visible definition: the annual celebration of the patronal feast day.