The section on town life and trade includes an early town charter for Newcastle, an item in a Patent roll recording payment made to a ‘tranter’ who travelled the country sourcing food for the king, rules for a craft Guild in the Records of Leicester, a Close roll in which the king sets the price of wine in London in 1315, and excerpts from the port records of imports and exports, with names of ships, the ship’s owner and the contents of the cargo.

The Province entered a new phase of expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century after the friars accepted the mission at Woodchester in Gloucestershire, where a noviciate of strict observance was established in a purpose-built monastery through the support of Vincent Jandel, Master of the Order. The new recruits attracted to the Province enabled it to take on first new missions, and then open priories in large urban parishes at Newcastle, London, and Salford, ministering to the poor working-classes, while the friars continued to serve the poor of Leicester. This work required the funding of new churches and schools which often resulted in long-term debt and much anxiety for the friars responsible for raising funds. The period also saw the Province’s reliance on a small number of lay donors, the influence of which was seen in the construction of a large formation house at Hawkesyard in Staffordshire. The close of the period was marked by the adoption of an overseas mission on Grenada, which was at odds with the observant priory life that had attracted so many new members.

Britain’s narrowing horizons carried all manner of implications for its constituent ‘four nations’ — none more crucial than a heightened awareness of their separate existence. The Kenyan Asians crisis of 1967-8 was a particularly resonant moment, at once highlighting the no-man’s land occupied by holders of UK passports issued overseas, while subtly magnifying the finer distinctions between England and Britain on the home front. The sudden urge to close the perceived ‘loophole’ of a liberal, capacious, expansive Britishness prompted a resignification of the category of Englishness in a newly circumscribed nation. It was an ingenious, if largely unselfconscious means of discounting the bona fides of those Asian families who ‘beat the ban’ in March 1968, while avoiding the overt stigma of ‘racialism’. In this way, the looser, empire-derived affinities of Britishness could be downgraded without relinquishing the badge of ethnicity available only to the ‘true-born’. But repatriating the frontiers of nationhood in this way raised implicit questions about what ultimately bound the constituent parts of the Union together — questions that would become increasingly explicit as the shared global projections of Greater Britain receded into the past.