PEOPLES are back on the historian's agenda. Their return to the historical limelight, or at least out of the historical shadows, is doubtless in part a response to the growing awareness of the power of ethnicity in our own contemporary world. So it is with changes of historical fashion at all times. But it also no doubt arises in part from the growing recognition that the centrality that academic historians have so long given to the unitary nation state as the natural, inevitable and indeed desirable unit of human power and political organisation is itself a reflection of the intellectual climate in which modern academic historiography was forged in the nineteenth century. The linear development of the nation state is no longer of necessity the overarching theme and organising principle in the study of the past that it once was. Once our historical gaze could be shifted from the state and its institutions and from the seductive appeal of its prolific archives, other solidarities and collectivities could come more clearly into historical focus. Some of them seemed to have as great, if not occasionally greater, depth and historical resilience than did the nation state. At the very least they deserve to be studied alongside it. Not least in prominence among such collectivities are the peoples of Europe.

‘CIVIL philosophy’, Hobbes declares in an oft-quoted boast at the start of De Corpore, is a science ‘no older … than my own book De Cive.’ As Hobbes explains in De Cive itself, and later in Leviathan, the failure of all previous efforts has simply been due to their ‘want of method.’ The method hitherto followed, especially in the universities, has been to rely on the authority of selected writers and books. The universities, indeed, have come to rely so heavily on one particular writer that their teachings no longer deserve to be called philosophy, but merely Aristotelity. This approach, however, is nothing but ‘a signe of folly’, one that is ‘generally scorned with the name of Pedantry.’ The only scientific way of proceeding is to follow the methods of geometry, which requires its practitioners to ‘begin at settling the significations of their words’. Only by this means can we hope to avoid the insignificant speech of the Schoolmen, and thereby lay the foundations for a genuine science of political life. For ‘the foundation of all true Ratiocination is the constant Signification of words.’

Some four hundred years ago this month Stephen Limbert, master of Norwich School, stood before the gates of the Great Hospital and addressed his well-turned Latin phrases to an audience almost as eminent as that gathered here today. Elizabeth I and her mobile summer court were on progress, and Norwich, the second city of the kingdom and capital of a region that was both the agricultural and manufacturing heartland of England, was determined to impress its monarch with both its loyalty to the Tudor dynasty and its contribution to the common weal—so it hired an impecunious London hack, sometime soldier and court hanger-on, Thomas Churchyard, to write the script. In part, at least, this no doubt accounts for the frequently reiterated commonplaces of Elizabethan propaganda embodied in such of those pageants and speeches as survived the intermittent downpours that sent both Her Majesty and her municipal hosts scurrying for cover on more than one occasion during her visit. Neither did Master Limbert's disquisition differ in its enthusiasm for Elizabethan rule from those of his metropolitan confrère. ‘It is reported’, he told Her Majesty, ‘that Aegypte is watered with the yerely overflowing of the Nilus, and Lydia with the golden streame of Pactolus, whyche thing is thought to be the cause of the greate fertilytye of these countries: but uppon us, and farther, over all Englande, even into the uttermoste borders, many and maine rivers of godlynesse, justice and humilitie, and other inumerable good things … do most plentifully gush out … from that continuall and most aboundaunt welspring of your goodnesse … With what prayses shall wee extoll, with what magnificent wordes shall we expresse, that notable mercie of your Highnesse, most renowned Queene’, sentiments that earned the former Norwich schoolmaster the Queen's invitation to kiss her ungloved hands, and sentiments that direct our attention to the symbols and image-creating aspects of the political culture of renaissance England.

On the centenary of the birth of C. P. Scott, the political outlook of the Manchester Guardian under his editorship was explained thus: ‘He, and those who wrote under him, thought always in terms of what he called “the progressive movement”. What was important was that those who were agreed on reforming measures should work together to secure them’. In its use of the rather imprecise label ‘progressive’, in its conception of a reform movement wider than strict party boundaries, in its distinctive flowering in the press—in all these respects the progressive movement of early twentieth-century America gives us some notion of what Scott had in mind. And indeed American historiography can, I believe, suggest valuable lines of analysis which have not been fully applied in England. Perhaps the most obvious would entail giving closer attention to the intellectuals and publicists and asking more searching questions about their role in politics. A few years ago the late Charles Mowat pointed to the broadly similar problems in social policy which Britain and the United States faced at this time; and he commented on how, despite these similarities, the history of social reform in the United States had been written with due attention to the history of ideas: in Britain, by contrast, almost exclusively in terms of political and administrative history. It would not, perhaps, be fair to extend Mowat's observation by saying that in England we purposely write history with the ideas left out.

Argues that to see the contrasts between late medieval `courtesy books' and early modern manuals of manners as markers of changing ideals of social conduct in England is an interpretation too narrowly based on works written in English. Examination of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature shows that the ideal of the urbane gentleman can be traced back at least as far as the most comprehensive of all courtesy books, the twelfth-centuryLiber Urbaniof Daniel of Beccles, and was itself underpinned by the commonplace secular morality of the much olderDistichs of Cato.

Between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century the notion of the `polite gentleman' lost its political purchase. `Manliness' became the identifying code of both the business class and the `respectable' working class. The virtues of rugged individualism and personal integrity were emphasised at the expense of sociability and ease of manner. In the political sphere debates about who should be included in the franchise were permeated by the language of manliness, and the politicians with the greatest popular following were hailed as `plain men' possessing a `simple manliness'.

WHEN rebellion broke out in England in 1642, the political nation had been, for over a decade, obsessed with medieval precedent and its gothic past. Practices and institutions which had seemed defunct revived, during the 1630s, into new and sometimes controversial life. Trial by combat was reintroduced in appeal of treason in 1631, and confirmed by the judges in 1637 as a legitimate legal procedure even in disputes of property; in 1636 a bishop was appointed to the Lord Treasurership for the first time since the reign of Edward IV; in 1639 England went to war without the summons of a Parliament for the first time since 1323; and the following year the Great Council of Peers met, for the first time since the reign of Henry VIII, to deal with a revolt of the Scottish nobility. At Court, the king was encouraging a gentleman of his Privy Chamber, Sir Francis Biondi, in his labours on a massive survey of the baronial struggles in England from Richard II to Henry VII—a work which, when it appeared in 1641 as The Civill Warres of England, was shortly to be endowed with a profoundly ironic topicality.

This essay examines the work patterns of housewives and female servants in rural England between the mid-fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Despite the fact that such women expended the majority of female work-hours in the rural economy, their activities remain a neglected topic. Here probate documents, wills, inventories and probate accounts are used alongside other types of sources to provide insight into women's work. The three parts of the essay examine the proportion of female servants employed in different households and localities, the types of work that servants and housewives undertook and the scale and level of commercialisation of four common types of women's work.

(READ 30 April 2004 AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KENT AT CANTERBURY)

As the recent lament over falling standards by the Secretary-General of the United Nations reminds us, universal literacy is today considered a necessary feature of civilized society. This may be one reason why the problem of medieval literacy, of a society where the ability to read and write was apparently confined to a clerical élite has so intrigued modern historians. In this paper, I wish to reconsider the extent of lay literacy in England before the Conquest. But first we must be clear what we mean by literacy. The ability to read does not necessarily imply the ability to write. To take only the most famous medieval example, Charlemagne could speak Latin, and enjoy the City of God, but he never learnt to write. What Parkes calls ‘pragmatic literacy’ may extend from the capacity to recognize, if not sign, one's own name, to the ability to write a formal document in Latin. What might be called ‘cultured literacy’ could range from reading free prose in the vernacular to composing Latin in the classical tradition. The more advanced types of pragmatic literacy might well overlap with the more basic cultured levels. But it is obvious that we cannot deduce a widespread ability to read any-thing from the fact that the names of owners or makers were some-times engraved upon Anglo-Saxon coins, weapons or memorials; or a generally high standard of lay culture from the fact that there were documents in the vernacular. If we are to describe early English society as literate in a sense that would satisfy the ancient, or later medieval, historian, we must show that the proportion of laymen able to read at least a vernacular writ or poem was socially, if not statistically, significant.

ROY Foster remarks in Paddy and Mr Punchthat a nodding acquaintance with Irish history, which one of his English commentators claimed to have, is ‘the most dangerous type of acquaintance.’ My own growing alarm at attempting to reinvent the wheel for the purpose of this conference has been allayed only slightly by reading a remark of John Stuart Mill: ‘Those Englishmen who know something about India, are even now those who understand Ireland best.

ON several occasions during the last twenty or thirty years students of the past have had their attention directed to the seventeenth century by historians of science and of scholarship. We have been told that we shall find there the authentic beginnings of the modern world, and that in that age reliance on the traditions and books of the past gives way to experiment, to analysis and to criticism. In the realm of history, there is a shift from the classical, literary traditions to the original sources and to official records, while the historical writings of the past are subjected to the new technique which for a hundred years had been applied to the literary masterpieces of the ancient world by a succession of great scholars from Valla and Erasmus to Scaliger and Casaubon. Certainly, in many ways the seventeenth century is more significant in the annals of historiography than is the century that followed. In England it is the age of Dodsworth, Dugdale, Twysden, Wharton, Wanley and Hearne. In France, it is the age of D'Achéry, Labbé, Ducange and the Maurists. In the part of the Netherlands that is now Belgium it is the age of the first Bollandists.

It is a commonplace of political history that in the later Middle Ages the city states of north and central Italy were the scene of a conflict in the theory and practice of government between two contrasted systems: republican and despotic (or in contemporary terminology, government ‘a comune’, ‘in liberta’ etc., and government ‘a tiranno’, signoria or principato). The conflict began about the mid-thirteenth century, and in most places, sooner or later, was settled in favour of despotism.

In 1258, as baronial opposition to Henry III erupted and the government became locked in constitutional conflict, the country found itself in the grip of a serious food crisis. To blame was a run of bad weather and failed harvests. Thousands of famished famine refugees flocked to London in quest of food and charity, where many of them perished and were buried in mass graves. The multiple burials recently discovered and excavated in the cemetery of the hospital of St Mary Spital highlight the plight of the poor at this time of political turmoil. Was their fate part of a global catastrophe precipitated by the VEI7 explosion of Samalas Volcano, Indonesia, the previous year or was powerful solar forcing of global climates responsible for the unusually unstable weather? The answer depends in large measure upon establishing the precise chronology of how the crisis unfolded, drawing upon the surviving documentary record of prices and harvests, the comments of contemporary chroniclers and a range of high-resolution palaeo-climatic proxies. Reexamination of this episode illustrates the potential of environmental history to shed fresh light on familiar historical events and its capacity to place them in a global environmental context.

In the summer of 1898 the entire Spanish fleet was destroyed in two successive engagements with the navy of the United States: the most comprehensive, catastrophic and humiliating naval defeats of modern history. Not only did these reverses shear Spain of the last shreds of transatlantic empire: they also inflicted a severe psychological blow to the Spanish nation at large. Already a stranger to most of the invigorating developments in economic, cultural and political life which had transformed western Europe in the course of the nineteenth century, Spain found that her backwardness and feebleness had now been devastatingly exposed to the gaze of the world. Spain had become a laughing-stock among the nations. What had gone wrong? The ‘Generation of ‘98’ was the name given to the group of intellectuals and public men who set themselves to ponder this question. They conceived of their task in large terms. It was not just a matter of diagnosing and treating present and local sickness—to employ the medical imagery of which they were so fond—but of taking account of the whole organism which was so visibly ailing; and this involved examining its early growth. An historical dimension was built into their deliberations from the outset. It is for this reason that 1898 is a significant date for the historian of medieval Spain.

Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative party in November 1990, but both she and the political ideology to which her name has been appended continue to fascinate pundits and scholars. Indeed, since Thatcher's resignation in November 1990, curiosity about her political legacy has, if anything, increased, fuelled in part by the memoirs produced by the ex-premier herself and a large number of her one-time Cabinet colleagues. Since the early 1980s the bulk of work that has appeared on Thatcherism has been dominated either by what one might describe as the ‘higher journalism’ or by political science scholarship, both of which have been most exercised by the questions of what Thatcherism was and where it took British politics and society. In this essay I want to look at Thatcherism from an historical perspective and thus ask a different question, namely where did Thatcherism, and in particular the political economy of Thatcherism, come from?

Given that Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party in 1975 this might seem a logical starting-point from which to track Thatcherism's origins. Some have argued, however, that Thatcher's election in itself was of little importance, in that the Conservative party's leadership contest in 1975 was a competition not to be Edward Heath, and that Thatcher won because she was more obviously not Edward Heath than anyone else. This emphasis on the personal aspects of the leadership issue necessarily plays down any ideological significance of Thatcher's victory, a point often reinforced by reference to the fact that key elements of the policy agenda that came to be associated with Thatcherism, notably privatisation, were by no means clearly articulated in the late 1970s and did not appear in the Conservative Election Manifesto of 1979.

DURING the second quarter of the eighteenth century there were successive waves of public agitation over the spirits trade—in 1726, 1728–9, 1735–8 and again in 1748–51. Opponents of ‘Mother Gin’ and her supporters waged a multi-media propaganda war, through tracts and sermons, broadsides, ballads, satirical verse, petitions, posters and prints (though Hogarth's Gin Lane and Beer Street came only as a final, splendid coda to the attack on gin, in 1751). Parliament in this period enacted a series of measures to deal with the problem. The most dramatic and draconian of these was the 1736 Gin Act, whichwas hurried through Parliament in a few weeks and threatened to close down the spirits trade overnight. The Act, with secondary legislation in 1737 and 1738, caused such a landslide of protest and opposition in the capital that it had to be abandoned and later repealed. In this paper I want to concentrate on the 1736 Act, looking at its background and aftermath. As we shall see, the controversy raises important questions not only about the organisation of the drink trade and consumption patterns in the early eighteenth century, but also about the social and political processes of legislation–the activity of interest groups, the attitude of government, and the problems of enforcement.

Notions of honour and reputation were ubiquitous and important in early modern England for a variety of reasons. They were part and parcel of how individuals in this society conceived of the relationship between the personal and the public, and between the projection and the perception of one's character. More particularly, they lay at the heart of two crucial issues: how people thought about social status, and about the differences between men and women.

I hope to show in this paper that the national debate in the press and in parliament about the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament is of crucial importance to a proper understanding of the politics and, still more, of the political ideology of eighteenth-century Britain. The significance that this doctrine had come to assume by the later eighteenth century becomes clearly apparent from any study of the dispute between Britain and the American colonies. In the final analysis the most serious point at issue between the mother country and her colonies rested on a fundamental disagreement over the nature and location of sovereignty. The majority of the ruling oligarchy in Britain saw parliament as the creator and interpreter of law and superior to any other rights or powers in the state. To the American colonists it appeared that the arbitrary and absolute power which Hobbes and Filmer had put in the hands of a king had been transferred to the whole legislature of King, Lords and Commons. In rejecting what they regarded as tyranny in another form, the colonists moved towards the concept of divided sovereignty with the people as the ultimate source of authority.

It is merely idle and frivolous, to conceive that any unperfect Union is desired, or can be granted: It is no more unperfect, as now it is projected, than a Child, that is born without a Beard. It is already a perfect Union in me, the Head … It is now perfect in my Title and Descent, though it be not accomplisht and full Union; for that Time hath all the Lineaments and Parts of a Body, yet is it but an Embrio, and no Child; and shall be born in his due Time; when it is born, though it then be a perfect Child, yet it is no Man; it must gather Strength and Perfection by Time; Even so is it in this case of Union. The Union is perfect in me; that is, it is a Union in my Blood and Title; yet but in embrione perfect. Upon the late Queen's Death, the Child was first brought to light; but to make it a perfect Man, to bring it to an accomplisht Union, it must have Time and Means; and if it be not at the first, blame not me; blame Time; blame the Order of Nature.

Unlike their American cousins, the Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Britain have, until recently, received comparatively little scholarly attention from historians. This is not to say that their presence in Victorian Britain has gone unnoticed; far from it. Throughout the nineteenth century the doings and, much more often, the mis-doings of the immigrant Irish were logged in massive detail by an army of social investigators, philanthropists, clergymen, royal commissions and parliamentary committees. But, with very few exceptions, the scholarly analysis of the data has only begun in earnest during the last two decades, and especially during the past few years. In a growing body of local and regional studies, and in studies of particular aspects of the Irish presence, the literature on the Irish immigrants is becoming not only more plentiful but also conceptually more sophisticated.