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One of the more difficult practical questions raised by the English Reformation was just how to support its clergy and its fabric. Despite extensive resistance from the godly members of church and state, the Elizabethan church maintained the pre-Reformation system of impropriations, lay ownership of ecclesiastical tithes. This article examines the historical, practical, and ideological stakes of these everyday economics in the late sixteenth century. It argues that the majority of impropriators were responsive to the needs of the church, sustaining rather than undermining the nascent English church. In the space opened up by the Reformation's rents in the social and physical fabric of the parish, new bonds between church, state, and society were knit. This process of building the post-Reformation church thus tied the laity closer to the interests and activities of the church in England. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at central government's role, focusing on the parliamentary terms 1959–64 and 1964–6, in directing the way in which local authorities enacted the central area redevelopment schemes of the 1960s. The first two sections review the substantial but little-studied literature produced across the political spectrum about central area urban renewal in the period 1959–64. Section III uses the Joint Urban Planning Group, a group set up within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, as a case-study to show how modernist approaches to redevelopment became operative within a government department. The Joint Urban Planning Group has received no attention from historians. Section IV discusses the fate of these ideas during Labour's first term after the 1964 election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

England was blighted by frequent agricultural depressions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Recurrent crises brought poor law reform to the parliamentary agenda and led to the passage of two non-compulsory pieces of legislation, Sturges Bourne's Acts of 1818 and 1819. These permissory acts allowed parishes to ‘tighten up’ the distribution of poor relief through two vital tools: the formation of select vestries, and the appointment of waged assistant overseers. Whilst previous studies have tended to represent the legislation as a failing reform in the dying days of the old poor law, we know remarkably little about the relief practices deployed by parishes operating under the auspices of Sturges Bourne's Acts. This article starts by detailing the genesis of the reforms before considering the provisions of the acts and their rates of adoption in rural England. Focusing upon administrative records from Wessex and West Sussex, the article proceeds to examine the inspection of relief claimants, and judgments made as to their ‘character and conduct’; the general measures taken to reduce outdoor relief; and their alternative strategies for allocating relief. It is argued that the reforms re-drew the distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, ultimately changing individuals' and families' entitlement to relief under the old poor laws. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Processes for the identification of criminal suspects tell us a great deal about wider cultural assumptions and social prejudices regarding somatic difference; its causes, relative degree, and consequence. If early modern Europeans had something approaching a forensic science, it was astrology, which has recently garnered renewed attention from historians of ideas. Rather than assume astrology's seventeenth-century decline in the face of revolutionary natural philosophy, what follows suggests that English astrology remained significant for mundane bodily discrimination, in the context of both a more deliberate, gradual reform and the tenacity of centuries-old humoral physiology. More importantly, scrutiny of astrological practice, and the logic underpinning its lasting currency, can reveal much about the significance of bodily contrasts and the meanings ascribed to them by Tudor-Stuart folk. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 20 Oct. 2011. It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember the English Reformation as a decisive juncture and critical turning point in history. Investigating the interaction between personal recollection and social memory, it traces the manner in which remembrance of the events of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s evolved and splintered between 1530 and 1700. A further theme is the role of religious and intellectual developments in the early modern period in forging prevailing models of historical periodization and teleological paradigms of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eighteenth-century architect-builders were a small group, but important for understanding the market strategies of knowledge-based experts in an age of rapid growth in technical information before the creation of modern professions. This article confronts a teleological historiography of emerging professionalization. It is focused on Robert Mylne and several of his contemporaries in Edinburgh and London, including a number of successful London-based Scots who were active as architects, builders, engineers, and surveyors, and self-styled in all these areas when it suited them. It supplies an account of what it took for building experts to establish themselves and flourish in big cities and the ways in which such experts navigated, controlled, and accommodated an environment of unregulated expertise that largely suited contemporary practitioners. Individual, family, and collective market strategies are examined in detail and the final section is a close analysis of the activities of the Architects Club in the 1790s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The second earl of Shelburne is well known for his association with reform initiatives in the second half of the eighteenth century. However, he also put conspicuous effort into strengthening his aristocratic credentials and status. One noteworthy feature of this was his politeness: he aimed at personal cultivation, a goal in itself and a foundation for leadership in society; he also had a reputation for politeness in everyday social situations. One context for Shelburne's conspicuous politeness was his personal need to overcome a number of impediments to asserting aristocratic status. However, another context was his effort to articulate a vocation for the modern aristocrat. For Shelburne, polite sociability was a way for the aristocrat to gather, organize, and deploy creative energies in society for the sake of improvement and reform. Though a particular example, Shelburne illustrates the energy that asserting aristocratic status could demand and the sort of modernity that could be claimed on behalf of aristocracy. Finally, Shelburne demonstrates the role of politeness in aristocratic formation: in particular, he shows how aristocratic engagement in contemporary society entailed a range of social relations which polite competence helped to manage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The development of the poor law has formed a key element of recent discussions of 'state formation' in early modern England. There are, however, still few local studies of how formal poor relief, stipulated in the great Tudor statutes, was implemented on the ground. This article offers such a study, focusing on Lancashire, an economically marginal county, far from Westminster. It argues that the poor law developed in Lancashire surprisingly quickly in the early seventeenth century, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence of implementation of statutory relief before 1598, and formal relief mechanisms were essentially in place before the Civil War even if the numbers on relief remained small. After a brief hiatus during the conflict, the poor law was quickly revived in the 1650s. The role of the magistracy is emphasized as a crucial driving force, not just in the enforcement of the statutes, but also in setting relief policy. The thousands of petitions to JPs by paupers, parishes, and townships that survive in the county archives suggests that magistrates were crucial players in the 'politics of the parish'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]