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This article considers the impact of the Laudian Reformation upon the spatial organisation of early modern English parish churches, drawing upon the Somerset churchwardens’ accounts and court depositions of the 1620s and 1630s. An explosion of scholarly literature on early modern church seating plans and pew disputes has increased our understanding of how early moderns used the parish floor space to represent and reinforce social hierarchies and relationships. This paper investigates the significance of pewing practices to understanding parochial receptions of Laudianism, which required an overhaul of church interiors and which impacted seating arrangements in turn. It proposes that Laudian attempts to enforce a radical restructuring of churches, and to co-opt the churchwardens in pursuit of their policies, ran against established and hotly defended practices for the organisation of the parochial space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores ways in which the identity of the secular priesthood in England and Wales has been shaped by its particular historical experience. Five themes are proposed: the creation of the concept of mission in the post‐Reformation world; the combination of isolation and independence that became characteristic of recusant priests; the emergence of new ways of relating to church structures that priests were forced to find; the distinctive fraternal identity that was nurtured in a variety of ways throughout the penal times and the period of the Catholic Revival; the revolutions in relationships with the laity. These themes are pursued through the nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐centuries when the meaning and experience of them changed as the emphasis shifted to buildings and organisations. The twentieth century experience of priesthood in a parish context created possibilities for expansion, which masked issues and problems already rising to the surface. Both the challenges and the opportunities of the recusant way of life became stifled. A fixed model of the church made change difficult to contemplate. The loss of an historically shaped sense of priestly identity is explored as part of the explanation for the contemporary loss of confidence and direction within a shrinking presbyterate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causes and course of the Irish rebellion,which broke out on the 22 October 1641, have been the subject of extensive research by historians. The thousands of Protestant ‘refugees’ who fled to England and Scotland, in response to the rebellion, however, have received very little attention from scholars. This article will explore the identities of the refugees, the volume and direction of refugee movement and the organisation and dispensation of local relief through a case study of the parish of Upton, Nottinghamshire. Upon their arrival in England refugees were expected to return to their parish of birth or last residence, leaving the responsibility of refugee relief firmly in the hands of parish churchwardens, overseers of the poor and constables. By focusing on the charitable response of these parish officials to the Irish refugees this paper will outline the motivations for the provision of aid at a local level. Moreover, this article will show how local officials were able to negotiate relief with respect to the economic and social position of the parish, particularly during the turbulent years of the British and Irish Civil Wars [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The registers of Dublin's parishes in the seventeenth century provide access to aspects of civic and religious life. In the registers are records of burials, marriages, christenings, and expenditures. The registers also record charitable acts such as the interment of the dead found on city streets and the care of abandoned children. Aggregated parish data provide an empirically based index of the comparative quality of parish life across the city, the P- QOL index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to approach the administration and functioning of justice of first instance in the Parish district of Manizales between 1855 and 1865. Through the analysis of the judicial processes for sluggishness, games and forbidden dances, we want to show the capacity scope of the Neogranadinian State to establish an order in a peripheral society, and the roles that prosecuted social actors played in the social and legal fabric of that time. Our hypothesis is that prosecuted individuals were not mere spectators but that they participated, altered and used the processes of normalization of their practices to negotiate punishments, accuse their enemies, defend themselves from justice and flee when there was nothing else to do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early history of the parish of St George, to the east of Bristol, has been characterised as one of marginality and neglect and its inhabitants as 'a set of ungovernable people'. This paper examines conflict and conciliation in the parish over the hundred years following its formal establishment in 1751, drawing on correspondence during a period of unrest in 1795 to illustrate the complex social relations within the parish, and using census, property, and vestry records to develop a more rounded view of social relations in the parish than that offered by the broad analysis of previous historians. Detailed examination of the sources gives the impression that, far from being 'ungovernable', various groups of parishioners adopted a range of strategies for conflict and conciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study provides an overview of the musical life of the Romanians in Sebeş, with a deeper insight into the choral work performed by them in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th. The existence of the four choir groups presented here is related to the names of institutions or associations under the patronage of which they functioned: the Sebeş Orthodox Parish, the Astra Division of Sebeş and the "Sfântul Gheorghe" Association. The material is compiled, to a large extent, from documents belonging to the funds of Astra, the Sebeş division and the Orthodox Parish of Sebeş preserved in the Romanian National Archives, Alba County Branch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Victoria County History (VCH) was founded in 1899 but struggled to survive during the inter-war years. After 1945 it was revived in a number of counties, including Leicestershire, and this raised questions about its subject matter. This article argues that W. G. Hoskins' interests in the 1930s and 1940s were far distant from the VCH approach to local history, but that with the founding of the Department of English Local History at University College, Leicester, in 1948 he needed all the 'academic friends' he could find. The VCH had been taken over by the University of London in 1933, and work had resumed in Oxfordshire. These credentials were helpful to Hoskins, but he soon ran into difficulties with the VCH over the nature and content of traditional VCH parish histories. This led to a debate between 1950, when he drafted an entry for Great Stretton, Leicestershire, and 1952 when he left Leicester University College for a post at Oxford. The VCH moved its position on the subject matter of its parish histories in the 1950s and in doing so reflected Hoskins' argument for greater emphasis on the community of farmers, labourers and their farms in addition to its traditional strength in manorial and church history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how the dominant imagery of the (un)dress of the mad poor in England, from literary, medical and other sources, matches the real conditions of the poor insane as found in institutional and documentary sources between 1650-1850. Researchers examined documentary sources such as clothing procurement for the poor insane as chronicled in parochial records. The accuracy of existing cultural representations is assessed through a case study of the records of Bethlehem Hospital.