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This article looks again at the ‘Peterloo massacre’ of 16 August 1819 in Manchester, and offers new evidence from the Home Office Disturbances Papers about how it came about and who was responsible. In Section I the revisionist case that Peterloo was a conflict rather than a massacre is examined and found wanting. Section II argues that in the months before Peterloo, the Home Office had consistently urged the Lancashire magistrates to combat radical agitation ‘either by the law or the sword’; its well-known advice for restraint on 16 August was a piece of qualified back-pedalling which came too late. It also argues that the authorities misinterpreted the peaceful mass platform agitation of 1819 in the light of their experience of the attempted insurrections of 1817. Section III shows that the prosecution at the Peterloo trial privately conceded that its own version of events had been discredited. Section IV suggests that both conservative and progressive versions of what happened at Peterloo are constricted by whiggish assumptions, proposes some questions for further study, and offers a brief summary explanation of the Peterloo massacre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the representation of the nation through a group of real people, exploring how the romantic figure of the Beefeater became entwined with ideas of national identity. It begins with the reforms introduced by the duke of Wellington, whose appointment as Constable of the Tower of London in 1826 led to sweeping reforms of the Body of Yeoman Warders (popularly known as Beefeaters), who had fallen into disarray after years of neglect and mismanagement. It looks beyond the late 1820s to consider how the Beefeaters' appeal was consolidated during the later nineteenth century, in particular, how increased tourism and the growing depiction of Yeoman Warders in fiction, art and music impacted upon popular perceptions of the Beefeater. So much so that by the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the reinvention of the Beefeater as a patriotic icon was complete. The article is concerned not only with representation of the warder but also how the Beefeater himself helped to construct his own identity. As a living embodiment of the past the Beefeater, via his verbal commentary and participation in the Tower's rich ceremonial life, actively shaped his own image. This research contributes to the debates surrounding the 'invention of tradition' and 'democratic royalism' and popular narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay begins by exploring the difficult personal circumstances in which Pat Collinson completed his final book - suffering from cancer, far from Cambridge and with his private library largely dispersed. It examines how this return to the sources he had pondered for half a century allowed him to make one last effort to get inside the minds of the godly ministers and laymen whose struggle for the soul of the Church of England he had so long admired and struggled to understand. Now he explored them through a study of their close encounters with and battles against their greatest opponent within the Church's establishment, Richard Bancroft, in sequence chaplain to the Lord Chancellor, then bishop of London, and (from 1604) archbishop of Canterbury. It explores Bancroft's obsession (his 'Moby Dick') with a supposed conspiracy of international Calvinism to take over Great Britain. The essay explores Collinson's empathy with Bancroft's puritan opponents and lack of empathy with his Catholic enemies, and concludes by finding much to admire in the heroic engagement with treacherous evidence that often misleads as to its completeness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the public attitudes of various religious commentators in Britain towards emigrants and emigration in the mid-Victorian decades. These figures include bishops, Anglican clergy (but also those of some other denominations), those directly involved in ministry to emigrants, and lay proponents of emigration. It also contrasts their views with those of more secular commentators influenced by political economy. The article argues that while religious commentary proposed emigration to be a good thing, for emigrants and for the expansion of Christianity and the British empire, this contrasted with a more sceptical attitude towards steerage immigrants by Thomas Malthus. It also contrasted with a focus on amelioration of conditions for emigrants by those in emigration ministry, who saw emigrants as assisting the extension of the Church rather than the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article places a new account of the English state's changing framework for economic regulation alongside what economic historians have demonstrated about the phasing and arenas of economic growth between 1660 and 1714. It places studies of parliamentary legislation into a broader examination of the state's means of regulation (which included the privy council and parliament) and sets this account of regulatory actions against a new account of the changing ways in which petitions approached the state as a regulatory body and how the state responded to those approaches. It also offers a more textured account of the changing styles of economic regulation in this period and of the important (though neglected) role played by commercial interests groups. It argues that the executive colluded with these interests during the Restoration period to use the state to increase the scale of England's overseas trade. With the rising importance of parliament after 1689 regulatory initiative diffused to either local interests which focused on infrastructure projects or trading interests bent on defeating regulating statutes in ways that would lead to deregulation as other constitutional means of regulation (especially the privy council) retreated from view. The state continued to regulate to protect manufacturing (which also provided customs revenue) and to support the monopoly of the East India Company (which provided money and materiel for the wars against Louis XIV). As such the article offers a broader and more agile means to understand the economic connotations of constitutional change in this critical period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with recent work on the consequences of the lapse of licensing (1695) that has emphasized that many people embraced the new opportunities offered by the end of pre-publication censorship. It is argued here, instead, that many people opposed the press and lobbied enthusiastically for books and authors to be prosecuted. Far from the lapse of licensing being an important precursor to the emergence of a self-confident and modern nation it initiated a period of political and religious turbulence. Nevertheless, the intention here is not to revise a simplistic view of censorship as a series of discrete moments devoid of ideological importance. Rather, this article contends that the consequences of the lapse of licensing can only be understood by considering the interaction between acts of censorship and theories of the freedom of the press. To this end the article considers the disputes between freethinkers and clerics to establish the answers to a series of vital questions: why and when should authors, books and publishers be prosecuted? Who had responsibility to initiate prosecutions - government, church or public? How much publicity should be given to censorship trials so that they acted as forms of deterrence? This article, then, by considering both the promotion of a free press and the subsequent clerical responses, sheds new light on the vitality of the confrontation between freethinker and cleric in the early eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptions and misconceptions about foreign models for law enforcement and criminal justice often shape reform debates in important ways by excluding certain options and promoting specific agendas, which are claimed to be more effective, humane or legitimate. This article analyses the reception of the ' English police model' in German debates between 1848 and 1914. It argues that the frequent references in German debates to English policing functioned as an important rhetorical device to promote certain reform agendas. Highly diverging projects for police reform were promoted in German debates under the label of the ' English model'. These projects bore only a partial resemblance to English principles of policing as the original model was deliberately misinterpreted or the elements presented as the ' English model' was limited to certain selected elements. Nevertheless, the ' English model' as a label had the important function in German debates of shaping which forms of police reform could be considered. Conversely, negative references to other foreign influences - notably French ones - served to undermine the credibility of existing institutions or competing reform projects. Accordingly the 'englischer Policeman' in German debates bears little connection to the original model and the English Bobby is only discernible as seen through a German monocle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1581 the archbishop of York, Edwin Sandys, resided overnight at a Doncaster inn whilst making a visitation of his archdiocese. This seemingly innocuous visit triggered a series of events that cast light on early modern ideas regarding respectability, reputation and wider views of Protestantism. The trigger for all of this occurred when Sandys was found in bed with the innkeeper's wife. He claimed this was all part of an elaborate plan to blacken his name by associating it with sexual scandal and that moreover this was an attack on the reformed Church. The observer to the events at the inn and the accused in the subsequent legal proceedings was a local gentleman, Sir Robert Stapleton, who was accused of blackmailing and slandering the archbishop. This article will not seek to condemn or exonerate either Sandys or Stapleton, but rather to examine the motives and actions of all involved. The nature and fragility of reputation in early modern England in relation to both sexual behaviour and religion will be discussed and the importance of preserving one's good name will be seen to be paramount to both men. In addition the interaction of regional and national tensions will become evident as a minor incident turned into a cause célèbre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the extraordinary political swing that occurred in the Durham coalfield in the 1931 general election. Having won all eleven county seats in 1929, Labour lost all but two in 1931. This was despite the dominance of the coal industry, the strength of the miners' union, and the increasing pre-eminence of Durham's Labour organization. While the circumstances of the election certainly motivated a traditional anti-socialist base, the article suggests that previous explanations have failed to acknowledge the extent to which mining constituents may also have been responsible for the result. Rather than any uniform political identity amongst the mining community, it finds that allegiances were fluid and complex, swayed by factors such as political charisma (particularly with regard to Ramsay MacDonald, re-elected at Seaham), specific local concerns, and paternalistic loyalties. In doing so, it reveals the fragility of the Labour Party's appeal even amongst its 'core' supporters. The National success in 1931 demonstrated that Labour's dominance in Durham remained recent, limited and as yet provisional, a finding that has significant implications for the wider picture of Labour's national advance, revealing that Labour's progress in the inter-war years was conditional and erratic even in its most 'natural' strongholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally held that the monasteries were dissolved by Henry VIII and his leading minister Thomas Cromwell for financial reasons. This article suggests that more important factors were Henry VIII's determination to assert his royal authority and more clearly religious reasons, especially an erasmian scepticism about the value of institutions that set their face against the world and in which superstition flourished. At first Henry sought reform, dissolving the smaller monasteries while allowing monks and nuns to transfer to larger houses, but in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a great rebellion directed above all against that dissolution, the king aimed at and achieved total dissolution, a striking feature of which was the way in which monks and friars when surrendering their houses to the king subscribed to principled denunciations of their past way of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the passage of legislation making witchcraft a capital crime during the mid-sixteenth century, magistrates across England found themselves under increasing pressure to investigate the activities of supposed 'witches'. The present article explores how the Justices of the Peace of one urban community - the city of Exeter - reacted to those pressures. The article shows that, in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Elizabethan statute of 1563, the Exeter magistrates were still prepared to punish those who had been accused of witchcraft in the 'traditional' way - by simply banishing them from the city. Attitudes soon became harsher, however, and by 1581, at the very latest, the first execution of a convicted witch at the city gallows can be shown to have occurred. At least one further execution was to follow, in 1610, but - although these cases reveal that the hanging of supposed witches in the south-west began at least a century earlier than was previously thought - the evidence suggests that the Exeter JPs were generally more keen to restrain than to encourage the popular enthusiasm for witch-hunting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liverpool remained the UK's second port into the late 1960s, and, at the same time, its overseas trade remained highly skewed towards the empire-Commonwealth. By the 1980s, however, Merseyside had become almost a byword for British economic decay. Through focusing upon Liverpool's leading shipping group - the Blue Funnel/Elder Dempster complex, representing the premiere UK lines to eastern Asia and western Africa - this article provides a testing ground for recent debates on economics and the end of empire. It confirms that in line with other UK imperial business leaders, Liverpool shipowners were disaffected with the process of decolonization. Yet, whereas the historiographical consensus has pointed to a limited impact of imperial dissolution on the British economy as a whole, the diversification strategies pursued by these disgruntled Liverpudlian 'gentlemanly' businessmen unwittingly contributed to the port city's late twentieth-century downturn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clearer understanding of Henry VII's reign is hindered not only by practical problems, such as deficiencies in source material, but also by its liminal position in historical study, at the end of the period conventionally studied by later medievalists and the beginning of that studied by early modernists. This makes it harder to evaluate changes in the judicial system, in local power structures, in England's position in European politics, in the rise of new social groups to political prominence and in the ideas behind royal policy. However, thoughtful combination of the approaches taken by different historical schools and reflection on wider processes of change at work in Henry's reign, such as in England's cultural and economic life, can make a virtue out of Henry's liminality. Together with the use of more unusual sources, such an approach enables investigation for Henry's reign of many themes of current interest to historians of the later Tudor period. These include courtly, parliamentary and popular politics, political culture, state formation and the interrelationships of different parts of the British Isles and Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces the emergence of a distinct conception of the Devil among Protestants in England in the early 17th century. Role of Satan as a spiritual force with great powers over human affairs; Depiction of the Devil in crudely physical form in an older tradition; Willingness of Protestants to utilize folk images of the Devil to promote their own religious agenda.

Studies the activities of the Puritan commissioners and major-generals in the provinces of England in the 17th century. Responsibility for improving security and bringing about moral reformation; Imposition of decimation tax on royalist neighbors; Removal of suspect clergymen from the ministry; Suppression of immorality by closing down unlicensed beerhouses.

Reports that the Sound Records Department of the Imperial War Museum in London, England wishes to launch to historians its facilities for research. Collection of recordings made since 1972 in the oral history program; Coverage of topics such as the armed forces from 1910 to 1945; Availability of readings by war poets.

Describes the social change and military situation in Mid-Tudor, England. Implication of demographic decline for the military forces; National recruitment of men to reinforce the quasi-feudal forces; Details of the recruitment schemes.

Analyzes the franchise and electoral politics in England and Ireland during 1832-1885. Problems of focus and nomenclature inherent in British politics during the 19th century; Dominant political parties during the period; Differences between the electoral systems of the two countries; Factors affecting politics in the countries during the period; Peculiarities of the Irish electoral system; Legislation passed during the period that influenced the countries' electoral politics.

Discusses the content of history in England. Assumptions and interpretations of national history; Significance of history in the revival and restoration of the language and customs of ancestors; Utilization of history for the purpose of indoctrination.

Marriage is a false dividing line to impose on our understanding of childhood, adulthood and parenting in the past. In early modern England neither the dependency which has been associated with childhood, nor the supervision of parents in the lives of their children, ceased with wedding bells. An examination of the parent-child bond beyond marriage within the middle and upper ranks can provide new and important insights into the intergenerational relationships of the early modern past. While parents could contribute to the smooth running of their children's marriages, they could also have a role as instigators of, commentators upon, and arbitrators of the discord which could result in their children's marriages. Motives for parental involvement could be complex, but parents could share in both the sorrows and the joys of their children's marriages. The emotional and financial repercussions of marriage breakdown could have painful effects for parents as well as for the married couple. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]