This essay reviews the historiography of the Vikings, especially in England, from the nineteenth century onwards. Successive constructions of Vikings as ‘ancestors’ or ‘Others’ are shown to reveal more about quests for identity on the part of those who devised them than about ninth-century Scandinavians. In the rest of the essay, the interactions of Danish groups and individuals with Franks and Anglo-Saxons are examined in particular places and times. It is argued that these display contacts of multiple kinds, including much collaboration and some integration, often promoted by lordly and royal interests. It is suggested that these findings are explicable in terms of reshapings of individual and group identities in a broad context of cultural likeness and adaptability.

Despite its association with the ill-fated reforms of Archbishop Laud in the 1630s and its dubious legality, the railed altar re-appeared in parish churches in the years after 1660. Initially only a handful of parishes and a minority of bishops backed so controversial a change, but the reconstruction of the city churches in London after the fire of 1666 popularised the railed altar, which was adopted elsewhere, particularly during the tory reaction of the 1680s. Studies of two urban parishes in the early 1680s indicate how struggles between dissenters and zealous anglicans could extend to disputes over worship. By 1700, what had been new and contested in the 1630s was becoming widely accepted, which may point to the powerful legacy of Laudian ideals in the restoration church.

This essay offers a major reassessment of the career of Einhard, biographer of Charlemagne, and an analysis of elite lay piety in the Carolingian era. Einhard's life (c. 770–840) is discussed in terms of childhood, youth, marriage and old age, with emphasis on the significance of his wife, Imma. His personal relationship with the relics which he had translated from Rome to Seligenstadt and his self-description as a ‘sinner’ offer insights into his religiosity. Einhard and Imma are also situated in a broader discussion of the religious activities of other elite married couples of their day. Monastic foundations, relic collecting, Christian household morality and close engagement with the Psalter characterise a distinctive conjugal Christianity in the Carolingian period.

Under the Old Poor Law internal migrants moved from one jurisdiction to another when they crossed parochial boundaries. Following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 central government took an enlarged and expanding part in welfare. As it did so, the entitlement to welfare of immigrants from overseas was scrutinised at a national level in a way that was analogous to the manner in which the status of internal migrants had previously been scrutinised at a parochial level. Having established this analogy, the essay asks whether the entitlement to welfare of outsiders improved or deteriorated over time and seeks to account for the broad trends.

Rather than examining the navy as a professional fighting organisation, this essay approaches the institution as one in which a range of masculine identities and lifestyles were constructed. From this perspective, its focus is on the material culture of naval uniform, and the function of uniform in defining and communicating particular understandings of class and masculinity. It demonstrates that the respective uniforms of various ranks associated their wearers with specific clusters of stereotyped socio-cultural qualities and characteristics, and indeed with substantially different incarnations of masculinity. The essay also relates the design of naval uniform to much wider class- and gender-related debates within British society during the period.

Leyrwite was a fine for fornication levied on the bondwomen of many medieval English manors. This essay traces the distinctive chronological history of leyrwite (it flourished especiallyc. 1250–1350), its regional distribution (leyrwite was levied only in England and only in some regions of England), its socio-economic implications (leyrwite was directed especially 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 regulating poor women and their families).

This essay examines the issue of armed resistance in France 1941–4 through the lens of collective reprisals inflicted on local communities as a result of armed resistance. It uses three examples from different parts of France: the north, the west and the Massif Central. It examines not only the incidents themselves and the reprisals but the way in which the local communities reacted to and commemorated the events in the years after the war. The essay concludes that local communities were at best ambivalent towards and at worst hostile to acts of armed resistance committed in their midst

I like to hear a girl in the elementary school beginning her sentences with the words ‘I wonder why!’. There is all hope for a girl who wonders: ‘I wonder why the arches in this old church are some of them round and some of them pointed?’ You are getting ready to begin your study of English history.

The term ‘history’ is confusingly ambiguous, not least in being identified both as the study of the whole of the past and only that part of the past accessible through the written record. This has an effect on those historical disciplines such as architectural history in which the study of the material evidence is inseparable from that of the documents. The paper examines how the use of texts in the study of objects can both casually mislead and powerfully explain, and equally how analyses of objects can both obscure and illuminate the textual record. Examples discussed indicate the value of stylistic analysis in the study of areas as different as African sculpture and the effects of the Norman Conquest.

Central to the understanding of Modern architecture is the concept of three-dimensional space and an appreciation of the nature of new materials. But the contemporary architectural historian, denied an Architectural education, continues to explore, often two-dimensionally, traditional structures. Conversely, many architects, denied an education in History, have moved towards Philosophy in the study of their own subject, alienating their discourse from much of the profession and almost all of the public. The historical study of Modern architecture, therefore, can never be successful until the architectural historian has learned the process of making buildings within the language of Modernism.

The relation of the architect to architecture is elusive, since documentation can be scarce and the cult of the individual architect as a hero has allowed less well-recorded individuals to disappear from the narrative. The collaborative nature of building throughout history has been lost to historians. The paper considers the problems of attribution and the efforts of historians to discover architects, as well as those of architects to rewrite history to their advantage. We cannot take for granted the architect as he or she moves through history.

Postmodernism is now firmly established as a critique of historical narrative; this paper looks at its implications for architectural history, where the built object is viewed through many texts. The example of the department store in Paris shows how the process of writing history has been simplified to serve different purposes, while the complexity of different viewpoints and contradictions within and between them can be restored and emphasised to give a more truthful historical account. Cubist painting is proposed as a useful analogy for reconciling this process of historical representation to Postmodern thought.

This paper examines the important but obscure late Georgian architectural history of the Palace of Westminster and attempts to put architectural developments in their historical contexts in order to gain insight into the dynamic relationship between public architecture, public policy and the public perception of the nation and its values. The substantial but lost work of the architects Sir John Soane and James Wyatt at the Palace form the core of the study. From this perspective, the design competition of 1835–6 was not the beginning but the culmination of four decades of intense struggle over the form and meaning of architectural interventions at the Palace.

This paper highlights some roles architectural history can uniquely play bothvis-à-vispolitical history and/or in constructing it. Through looking at a particular city – Lyons – it suggests how the disregard both of built evidenceper seand of its specifically architectural interpretation has distorted the conventional account of that city's history. By means of a particular case study, of perhaps the most significant single building within that city – its town hall – it indicates some of the ways in which architectural history can serve to enrich political history, and indeed why it should be considered an essential tool for such history.

This paper seeks to examine the origins of the Jacobean Great Barn at Vaynol Park in North Wales. The evidence suggests that this barn was built to represent the status and ambitions of the owner of the Vaynol Estate in 1605. However, the barn itself poses questions about the finances of the Caernarfonshire gentry and the state of local agriculture at that time. By relating the study of its physical form to the social and economic context in which it was built, the threads of evidence create a picture of an expanding estate and substantial seventeenth-century Home Farm.

Documentary sources for studying buildings commissioned by women tend to conceal their involvement in building projects. Historians could usefully give greater attention to the formal elements of women's commissions to show how women used buildings and building projects to make statements to a wider world about their wealth, ancestry, social aspirations, taste, religious preferences and their ability to deal with directing builders, managing money and the other practical details that go with building projects. Architectural historians could benefit from an understanding of buildings that do not survive and of buildings which exist in literary works which allow some reconstruction of the spaces occupied by men and women and illuminate their domestic relations.

The paper surveys almost fifty women-authored texts of the 1790s, asking what they reveal about the gendering of space in elite houses, about the meaning of buildings and landscapes for women and about women's aesthetic preferences. They imply that elite houses had largely ungendered public, private and intermediate spaces. Castles had negative meanings for women, but not ‘olden time’ houses; there was some disapproval of exclusionary landscapes and an idealisation of country life (but not for hunting) and of rural cottages (but not rural villas). A neoclassical aesthetic was endorsed by women writers alongside sensibility and the picturesque.

Anecdotal evidence is much beloved of architectural historians, particularly in their attempts to recreate the social context in which architectural practice took place. But there are dangers inherent in its use. Using examples relating to the West End house in the periodc. 1765 toc. 1785, this paper argues that architectural historians should be wary of tacking on such evidence to corroborate what they read from built evidence; rather they should treat the body of anecdotal evidence as a source worth investigating in its own right. Only then will they unearth new readings and new understandings which elaborate and sometimes contradict received interpretations of architectural forms.

Oakwell Hall, Birstall, Red House, Gomersal, and Bagshaw Museum, Batley, are three historic properties which lie at the heart of the old Yorkshire woollen manufacturing district, west of Leeds, where factory production emerged out of a dual economy that combined farming and making. Each effectively represents a key stage in that evolution. Here we examine how the real history of such houses, focusing especially on Red House, which epitomises the dynamic era when its owners helped build up domestic manufacturing to global success, could pay dividends in connecting people to the real social and economic history of their area.

The early National Trust reflected current concerns about national identies. Small-scale buildings, acquired 1895–1910, demonstrate a desire to monumentalise English political, religious (Anglican) and literary traditions for English-speaking peoples at home and abroad, particularly in America. Its active, though overlooked, founders include Liberal politicians such as James Bryce (Britain's ambassador to Washington). Its buildings had antiquarian appeal but seeing them only in terms of their architectural history or regional characteristics overlooks conscious attempts to use architecture as historical evidence for a vision of an English life and social order, as both that order at home and England's status abroad altered.