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Abstract: Notwithstanding recent interest in the politics of housing, squatting in the formative contexts of post‐Restoration rural England remains little understood and studied. Drawing upon a diverse archive of central government papers and those of the local officers of the New Forest – the largest Crown forest in England and Wales – this article argues that the resort to squatting was a function of the uneven contours of forest governance. Moreover, while squatting led to the formation of new communities, it was neither exclusively a plebeian act nor, against official discourses, necessarily an abuse of the assets of the forest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the circulation of news that daily arrived in the ports of late Elizabethan Devon concerning the Spanish fleet. It utilizes the state and Cecil papers, as well as other centrally and locally held manuscript collections, to probe the nature of provincial news networks through the prism of a county-based case study. Previous scholarly research has tended to focus on the single 'hub' of London. However, as this article reveals, there existed much more complex sets of news networks that operated in the first instance at a local level, but which also had connections with the capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the Spanish marriages episode of 1846 as a prism through which to examine the relationship between the leading foreign affairs writers for the increasingly powerful Times newspaper and the authors and servants of British diplomacy in the early Victorian period. The focus of this study is Lord William Hervey, the first secretary of the British embassy in Paris, a diplomat who well understood the power of the press over ministers, parliament and the people. Hervey's under-utilized private papers shed light on the divisions in British political and literary (press) society over the nation's policies towards France and Spain. They also paint a picture of an increasingly isolated foreign secretary, Viscount Palmerston, a Whig statesman who failed to carry his policy through the Whig cabinet and who failed to convince the Conservative Times of its supposed merits, despite the support of some overactive members of the British diplomatic community. This is a story of diplomatic failure; a rare study of how not to win friends and influence people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These two documents from the state papers of Henry VIII, one previously misdated, provide evidence of Thomas Cranmer's and Thomas Cromwell's investigation between 1536 and 1538 of ecclesiastical corruption involving Sir Richard Mabot, master of St. Thomas's Hospital in Southwark. This is an example of Cranmer and Cromwell genuinely attempting reform – the abuses at St. Thomas's were extensive – but Cromwell may also have tried to exploit the case to his advantage in his ongoing struggle with Bishop Stephen Gardiner for political influence with the king and to determine the future direction of the English church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many assumptions about the frequency and scale of electoral violence in mid Victorian England and Wales have previously been made but there has been no attempt at a comprehensive quantitative analysis. This article, which draws upon home office papers, election petition reports and contemporary newspapers, identifies and differentiates between riots, disturbances and incidents at general elections from 1857 to 1880. It concludes that electoral violence was more widespread and serious than generally believed, that it usually occurred in cities rather than small towns, and that it was directly related to the number of contested constituencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]