Although there had been substantial donations to the church in the course of the last two centuries of the Roman Empire, the amount of property transferred to the episcopal church and to monasteries in the following two and a half centuries would seem to have been immense. Probably rather more than 30 per cent of the Frankish kingdom was given to ecclesiastical institutions; although the Anglo-Saxon church was only established after 597, it also acquired huge amounts of land, as did the churches of Spain and Italy, although the extent conveyed in the two peninsulas is harder to estimate. The scale of endowments helps explain the occasional criticisms of the extent of church property, and also the secularisations and reallocation of church land, and indeed suggest that the transfer of property out of the control of the church in Francia and England in the eighth century may have been greater than is often assumed. The transfer of land should probably also be seen as something other than a simple change of ownership. Church property provided the economic basis for cult, for the maintenance of clergy, who were unquestionably numerous, and for the poor. In social and economic, as well as religious terms, this marked a major break with the Classical World.

Taking a micro-historical approach, this paper explores the business activities of Elizabeth Carter and Elizabeth Hatchett, two married women who operated together as pawnbrokers in London in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Based on a protracted inheritance dispute through which their extensive dealings come to light, the discussion assesses married women's lending and investment strategies in a burgeoning metropolitan economy; the networks through which women lenders operated; and the extent to which wives could sidestep the legal conventions of ‘coverture’ which restricted their ownership of moveable property. It is argued that the moneylending and asset management activities of women like Carter and Hatchett were an important part of married women's work that did not simply consolidate neighbourhood ties but that placed them at the heart of the early modern economy.

THAT something remarkable was happening in England in the quarter millennium separating the late sixteenth century from the early nineteenth is plain. In Elizabeth I's reign the Spanish Armada was perceived as a grave threat: the English ships were scarcely a match for the Spanish, and the weather played a major part in the deliverance of the nation. By the later eighteenth century the Royal Navy was unchallenged by the naval forces of any other single country, and during the generation of war which followed the French revolution, it proved capable of controlling the seas in the face of the combined naval forces mustered by Napoleon in an attempt to break the British oceanic stranglehold. Growing naval dominance was a symbol of a far more pervasive phenomenon. In the later sixteenth century England was not a leading European power and could exercise little influence over events at a distance from its shores. The Napoleonic wars showed that, even when faced by a coalition of countries occupying the bulk of Europe west of Russia and led by one of the greatest of military commanders, Britain possessed the depth of resources to weather a very long war, enabling her to outlast her challenger and secure a victory. The combination of a large and assertive Navy and dominant financial and commercial strength meant that, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Britain was able to impose her will over large tracts of every continent. But her dominance did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It derived chiefly from exceptional economic success: it grew out of the corn sack, the cotton mill, and the coal mine.

The Byzantine Empire of the period 1081–1204 is generally con sidered to have been culturally brilliant but economically decadent. The standard against which this decadence is measured is the situation supposed to have existed during the ninth and tenth centuries when the Empire consisted basically of the Balkan coastlands, the Aegean islands and Asia Minor, and when it possessed a flourishing agriculture dependent upon a free peasantry which also supplied the manpower of its army and navy, a vital urban life, and control of its extensive internal and external trade. Its revenue was therefore assured and its coinage stable. By the twelfth century it had lost the greater part of Asia Minor which had formed the factor essential to its agricultural, military and urban life. The first two were now largely in the hands of feudal magnates who commanded ruinously expensive but unreliable mercenaries, and the trade of the Empire had fallen under the control of the Italian merchant cities. The reduced revenue was incapable of standing the strain placed upon it by increased expenses, the difference being made up by the debasement of the coinage—which caused further chaos in economic life.

This paper stems from an initial interest in the relationships between science and technology in the eighteenth century. Hence its concern lies principally with the nature of technical innovation and the sources of technical change during the Industrial Revolution. Exploring the ways in which new technology is diffused can shed light on the nature of technical change itself, which is a complex amalgam of influences governing invention, innovation (the bringing of inventions into productive use) and the diffusion of new techniques. Taking as a topic the diffusion of technology, particularly in machine-making and engineering, between Britain and Europe in the late eighteenth century is thus not meant to be a peg on which to hang wide-ranging animadversions on the differing economic fortunes and pace of advance of Britain and Europe, or a discussion of why industrialization came first and fastest to Britain and lagged elsewhere: it is a much narrower enquiry into seeing what light the processes and difficulties of diffusing new technology cast upon technical change itself at this time.

Leyrwite was a fine for fornication levied on the bondwomenof many medieval English manors. This essay traces the distinctive chronologicalhistory of leyrwite (it flourished especiallyc. 1250–1350), itsregional distribution (leyrwite was levied only in England and only in someregions of England), its socio-economic implications (leyrwite was directedespecially at the poor and more at bastardy than fornication) and, most of all,the significance of its focus on women (leyrwite served as one means of regulatingpoor women and their families).

The history of mentalities has now become so widely accepted that even British historians sometimes refer to it: one hardly needs to talk about mentalités any more, though the French word still sounds more modish. But the subject goes back at least to Vico. Although Weltanschauung and Zeitgeist sound old hat by comparison with mentalités the words remind us that nineteenth-century German historians were interested in the different ways past societies may have viewed the world, while F. W. Maitland and Henry Adams are obvious examples of Anglophones who in their different ways tried to understand medieval ways of thought. In 1933 Jean Guitton, a Frenchman, it is true, but one who presumably came out of that older tradition of intellectual history against which Lucien Febvre set himself, wrote about the need to study the mentalité of an age and summed up what he meant by this as ‘the totality of those implicit assumptions which are imposed on us by our environment and which rule our judgements.

There is surprisingly little early medieval social history being written. In recent years, more specifically economic history has had a remarkable rebirth, thanks to the (largely unconnected) efforts of archaeologists on the one side and Belgian and German historians on the other; but the study of society in general, outside the restricted spheres of the aristocracy and the church, has been neglected. I speak schematically; obviously, there are notable exceptions. But it is significant that noone, in any country, has thought it worthwhile to attempt a synthesis of early medieval European socio-economic history as a whole that could replace those of Alfons Dopsch or, maybe, André Déléage. It would be hard; but people have tried it for the centuries after 900, with interesting (even if inevitably controversial) results. Why not earlier? Richard Sullivan recently lamented the conservatism of most Carolingian scholarship; in the arena of social history, he could easily have extended his complaints back to 500.

Preoccupation with the policies of governments as a major theme in the history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is now unfashionable with economic historians. However, masters of Oxford colleges and professors of social history can afford to be out of fashion. According to Mr Hill, ‘The Middle Ages in industry and internal trade also ended in 1641, when the central government lost its power to grant monopolies and to control the administration of poor relief. Attempts to prohibit the activities of middlemen, whether in industry or agriculture now ended…Guild regulations and the privileges of town oligarchies, long opposed by the common lawyers, became far more difficult to enforce…in the long run England's economic liberty, unique at that time in Europe, had a stimulating effect, especially noticeable after 1688 confirmed the political gains of the earlier revolution.’ Or as Professor Perkin claims '… the landed rulers of England… from the Restoration adopted the dynamic policy of laissez-faire in internal industry which Adam Smith… was to advocate in foreign trade.’ ‘Laissez-faire… was the direct consequence of the breakdown at the Civil War of the “Privy Council” system of central control.

IT has been, and still is, the considered opinion of many scholars that the freemen and sokemen who figure so prominently in the Domesday Survey of the northern and eastern counties of England were the descendants of the rank-and-file of the Danish armies of the ninth century. The theory is not based on any precise knowledge of Scandinavian peasant-society in the ninth century, but on the geographical distribution of the free peasantry in England. It was first propounded by E. W. Robertson in 1862:

In the Danelage, … omitting Yorkshirefrom the calculation, between a third and a fourth of the entire population were classified either as liberi homines or as socmen. … Free Socage, the very tenure of which is sometimes supposed to have been peculiarly a relic of Anglo-Saxon liberty, appears to have been absolutely unknown except among the Danes.

For students of the interaction between oral and written forms of communication the early modern period provides an important case study. England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far from being an oral society; and yet it was not a completely literate one either. On the one hand, old vernacular traditions had long been infused and supplemented, or corrupted and destroyed, by the written word; on die other hand, only a certain part of the population could read and write or ever relied on the products of literacy. Indeed, as Keidi Thomas has suggested, ‘it is the interaction between contrasting forms of culture, literate and illiterate, oral and written, which gives this period its particular fascination’.

The thirteenth century was a crucial time in the history of the English borough. It saw towns at the height of their prosperity before the calamities of depression and plague, and the last burst of town-making until the spas of the seventeenth century inaugurated our present urban society. It saw an apparent attempt by Edward I's government to define a hierarchy of towns, in which that which was not a borough would be seen plainly to be something else. It marks the time during which the continental commune was tamed and assimilated to English politics, and commune, gild and portmanmote fused together, in as many different ways as there were boroughs, to make the communities for which the Common Law had evolved the doctrine of incorporation. It also produced for us the first substantial quantity of original records written in the towns themselves, records which are from that time onward our principal source of information about municipal affairs. The purpose of this paper is to display the nature and scope of borough archives before 1300, both as a guide to the mass of material that survives from later centuries, and as a commentary upon the thirteenth-century borough. It is confined to those towns, such as the shire boroughs of Domesday Book, which may be presumed to have recruited their own clerks, and not, like the numerous enfranchised manorial towns of this time, to have had someone else provide them.

Mental health care in Britain was revolutionised in the late twentieth century, as a public asylum system dating back to the 1850s was replaced by a community-based psychiatric service. This paper examines this transformation through the lens of an individual asylum closure. In the late 1980s, I spent several months in Friern mental hospital in north-east London. Friern was the former Colney Hatch Asylum, one of the largest and most notorious of the great Victorian ‘museums of the mad’. It closed in 1993. The paper gives a detailed account of the hospital's closure, in tandem with my personal memories of life in Friern during its twilight days. Friern's demise occurred in an ideological climate increasingly hostile to welfare dependency. The transfer of mental health care from institution to community was accompanied by a new ‘recovery model’ for the mentally ill which emphasised economic independence and personal autonomy. Drawing on the Friern experience, the paper concludes by raising questions about the validity of this model and its implications for mental healthcare provision in twenty-first century Britain.

The history of honour in early modern English society has tended of necessity to focus on dishonour. The ways in which women and men were defamed, shamed and dishonoured have seemed to offer a vivid insight into how what we call ‘honour’ worked in early modern society. And yet honour and dishonour were not exactly correspondent points on the same axis of values: what was dishonouring was not necessarily the opposite of what constituted honour. This was especially true where sex was concerned; sexual conduct could be dishonouring in all sorts of ways, but rarely if ever did it confer honour. Sexual dishonour was a concept and a process with a disrupting power of its own, applied most powerfully to women.

No historian of the Kingdom of Jerusalem is likely to ignore the hostile environment in which the western settlers found themselves and the effects of military needs on their politics, government and society. The Latins’ war establishment has long been the subject of study, with historians naturally concentrating upon the actual manifestations of conflict: invasions and defence, feudal institutions and the use of mercenaries, castle-building and tactics in the field. Other less tangible factors, quite as important in contributing to the stresses to which society in Palestine was subjected, are rarely considered. The Latins believed themselves to be engaged in a sacred task in maintaining Christian presence on the holiest soil in Christendom; others believed this too, and military reverses in the East aroused in the West bitter criticism of them. They found themselves, moreover, in a situation in which, for reasons outside their control, permanant peace with their Muslim neighbours was impossible. It is this ideological background to the history of the defence of the kingdom that is discussed in this paper.

Both Burke and Coxe have said that Jenkins never lost his ear from the stroke of a Spanish ‘cutlash’; a modern historian has shown it to be likely that he did. What, however, is more important than the establishment of this truth is the decision as to the exact amount of influence it had upon producing the war which followed. Jenkins' ear may be said to typify the feelings of the English public in their broad sense, their hatred for the Spaniards as cruel Papists, their insular detestation of the foreigner, and the like. The question is how far did these feelings influence the declaration of war; what were the main motives of the diplomats on either side? Did the English statesmen first truckle to Spain and then to England? The great interest of such an inquiry lies in the fact that the year 1739 was a turning point of history. It was, perhaps, the first of English wars in which the trade interest absolutely predominated, in which the war was waged solely for balance of trade rather than for balance of power. But it is not alone memorable on this account; from this war issued, in a clear and undeviating succession, the series of wars which were waged between England and France during the eighteenth century — wars in which Spain was sometimes a passive spectator, oftener an active enemy, never the friend of England. Spain's alliance with France produced grave complications for England in 1743, contributed to the fall of the greatest of English ministers in 1761, and to the loss of the greatest of English colonies in 1783.

In colonial Australia, the meanings of politeness were continually contested. The urban centres held a world of strangers of dubious origin. Social edifices erected to deal with the question of who was `in Society' became ever more elaborate and unstable. To the elite, English manners represented a last bastion of civilisation in a wilderness of social disintegration. To self-made Australians, seeking acceptance rather than exclusion, they were absurd remnants of a class-ridden `Old World'. Important issues of class, gender, social organisation and identity clustered around the problem of comportment and shaped a redefinition of politeness in a colonial world.

This paper examines ideas about democratic legitimacy and sovereignty within Ulster unionist political thought during the revolutionary period in Ireland (c. 1912–22). Confronted by Irish nationalists who claimed that Home Rule (and later, independence) enjoyed the support of the majority of people in Ireland, Ulster unionists deployed their own democratic idioms to rebuff such arguments. In asserting unionism's majority status, first, across the United Kingdom and, second, within the province of Ulster, unionists mined the language of democracy to legitimise their militant stand against Home Rule. The paper also probes the unionist conception of sovereignty by examining the establishment of the Provisional Government of Ulster in 1913, which was styled as a ‘trustee’ for the British constitution in Ireland after the coming of Home Rule. The imperial, economic and religious arguments articulated by unionists against Home Rule are well known, but the space given to constitutional rights and democratic legitimacy in the political language of unionism remain obscure. While the antagonisms at the heart of the revolutionary period in Ireland assumed the form of identity politics and sectarianism, the deployment of normative democratic language by unionists reveals that clashing ideals of representative government underpinned the conflict.

The rapid spread of print in the fifteenth century masks considerable difficulties that faced the industry in adapting to the new disciplines of mass production. Many early print shops were short-lived. Within two generations production of printed books was concentrated in a comparatively small number of major centres of production. This paper explores the implications of these developments for our understanding of the ‘print revolution’. It considers in particular the contrasting fortunes of three major markets: France, one of the largest centres of production; the Netherlands, a major hub of international trade; and England, which lay towards the periphery of the European book world.

It is just fifty years since Thomas Frederick Tout died on 23 October 1929. Apart from a few formative years at St. David's College, Lampeter, Tout spent the whole of his academic career in Manchester. It was there that in 1908 he read and reviewed Eugène Déprez's Etudes de diplomatique anglaise and soon afterwards conceived the monumental work of a lifetime, modestly entitled Chapters in the administrative history of Mediaeval England. This six-volume work describes the organization of the household of England's medieval kings between the Norman conquest and the revolution of 1399, and the way in which the great administrative departments of state sprang from it. Beginning as a study of the king's personal chamber and wardrobe, it blossomed into a study, first, of the principal and less personal offices of the chancery, the exchequer and the privy seal—their growing complexity and bureaucratization, their increasing professionalism and specialization, and their eventual permanent settlement in or near London—and, second, of the way in which these offices affected, and were affected by, the relationship between individual kings and their subjects. The focus of Tout's work was the court and the central government, institutions and administration.