One of the most intriguing and important eras of British demographic history is the later middle ages, crudely defined herein to encompass the years 1270 to 1530. This period includes medieval population at its apex, followed by what many observers have called a Malthusian subsistence crisis, an era of famine and plague pandemic, and finally, a slow, almost phased, period of recovery. Much of the groundwork of urban demographic studies was laid in the nineteenth century, by scholars such as William Denton and the Greens. They believed that most aspects of urban life declined in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and that demographic contraction went hand in hand with social and economic ruin. Despite some questioning and modification of these premises, the concept of decline passed into the twentieth century, and was synthesized by M.M. Postan, the leading economic historian of his time. Using empirical methods, Postan built a general model of late medieval economic stagnation and decay. Towns were more or less peripheral to the gist of his argument, which stressed the overwhelming importance of the rural economy, but he did comment on urban life.

Elizabethan puritanism, becoming programmatic, declared its intentions for the church in An Admonition to the Parliament, by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and in the Second Admonition to the Parliament, both in 1572. The first of those manifestos erected a “true platform of a church reformed” according to “the prescript of God's word” and the examples of the “best reformed churches throughout Christendom.” The second took up what its author called “the hardest point,” namely, to show how reform was to be accomplished—in effect, by persuading queen and parliament to become presbyterian. The admonishers appealed to the power of God's word, the threat of his wrath, and the promise of his reward, presenting the cause of reform as a national case of conscience for the civil authority.

Two years earlier, in a bold sermon to the queen, another spokesman for the faction had set forth these same considerations but with a significant difference, for the preacher, Edward Dering, grounded his argument on a theopolitical principle—the principle of covenant—which Protestant extremists (including English and Scottish exiles of the Marian period) had already given a revolutionary twist. This article examines the role of ideas of covenant in the ideological address of sixteenth-century puritanism to crown and commons, prince and people. It finds in the reformers' changing conceptions and applications of covenant a key to the character of the puritan movement and the making of the puritan mind.

Though puritans of the Elizabethan era made something of covenant doctrine in their theological writings, they rarely put it to political use, and when they did—when some hardy preacher proposed to constrain the civil magistracy by covenant to do God's will—such efforts boomeranged, endangering both the preacher and his cause.

This essay examines the extensive attention received in the England of the 1570s by the small religious sect calling itself the Family of Love and professing allegiance to the continental mystic, Hendrik Niclas; it also examines why the Elizabethan establishment became, for a time, so disturbed about the Familists. A rough indicator of the attention is found in the Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in English, 1475-1640, where the individual entries for Niclas and other Familist writers outnumber all other separatists before 1600, including such men as Robert Browne and Henry Barrow. (In another comparison, they outnumber the entries under Martin Marprelate also.) The establishment's concern was evinced in several ways. The Family was written or preached against by three members of the bench of bishops, besides lesser clerics; matters relating to it were discussed by the privy council on thirteen different occasions between June 1575 and January 1581; and on October 3,1580 it was the exclusive target of a royal proclamation.

Until the past decade or so, the attention aroused by the Familists in Elizabethan England has not been much reflected in the writings of modern historians. Those interested in the Family itself have dealt largely with its continental developments. They have described the sect Niclas founded at Emden in 1540, with its emphasis on personal religious experience, spiritual rebirth and the close fellowship of the faithful, and they have traced its growth in the Low Countries and contiguous areas.

Natural law is one of the oldest concepts in Western philosophy. When the Psalmist asked Yahweh, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him,” he was struggling with the same problem that occupied thoughtful men in Greece: the need to understand man as he is and in his potentiality. Unlike the unknown Biblical poet, however, Plato and Aristotle found an answer with the aid of reason rather than revelation. For them, man is an entity in process of becoming, possessing an essential, cognizable nature that gives rise to certain inclinations he must fulfill. Until the Enlightenment, the idea of man's nature and his need to realize it served as the focus of much of secular thought, out of which developed principles of government and a distinctive ethic. But ordinary people were touched only by the practical consequences of such things. The great law codes and the teachings of the church combined with philosophy to work out the individual's relationship to others according to a teleological conception of law rooted in the very nature of things. Understandably, the ontological theses and conclusions drawn from the theory of natural law remained irrelevant and unknown to common folk.

In the midst of the English Civil War, the concept appeared in the welter of disputes and conflicting plans for the revitalization of all aspects of English life, invoked by ordinary men who were neither philosophers nor theologians, neither jurists nor statesmen. This paper considers the use of natural law by one group, the Levellers, at a dramatic moment in the turbulent period following the king's imprisonment.

During 1661 and 1662 Scotland experienced one of the largest witch hunts in its history. Within the space of sixteen months no fewer than 660 persons were publicly accused of various acts of sorcery and diabolism. The hunt began to the east of Edinburgh in the villages and small burghs of Midlothian and East Lothian, where 206 individuals were named as witches between April and December 1661. The hunt did not remain restricted to that area, however, as the privy council busily issued commissions to local authorities throughout the country to try suspected witches. We do not know how many people were executed during the hunt, but the report of John Ray, the English naturalist, that 120 were believed to have been burned during his visit to Scotland suggests that the total number was substantial. It is true that some of the witches tried in the justiciary court (the central Scottish criminal court, also known as the justice court) were acquitted, and a number of those who were simply named as accomplices never actually came to trial. This should in no way, however, detract from the size and importance of the hunt. At no other time in Scottish history, with the possible exception of 1597, were so many people accused of witchcraft within such a brief period of time. Indeed, the hunt, which involved four times the number of persons accused of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, was comparable to the large witch hunts that occurred on the European continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the last twenty years we have seen a revolution in the study of later Stuart and early Georgian England. Spurred in great part by Robert Walcott's brave attempt to apply Namierian methods and assumptions to the early eighteenth century, a squadron of able historians has attacked the sociopolitical history of the period, and has given us what might be called a neo-Whig interpretation. Such scholars as Geoffrey Holmes, William Speck, John Western, and recently B.W. Hill and J.P. Kenyon have sifted through the historiographical detritus and discovered that there is much to be saved from the older interpretations.

Most importantly, the new scholarship on the period 1660-1760 has reemphasized a vital political factionalism, whether it be called party strife or merely shifting ideological alliances. English social and political groups apparently stood in a fragile equilibrium at best, rather than in a solid Namierian consensus. Even J.H. Plumb has noted the pressures brought to bear on relatively weak post-Revolution central governments by influential sociopolitical interest groups, pressures that restricted severely the available options for policy and power. E.P Thompson would go farther to claim that factionalism (mainly that of an elite against the rest of society) was so ingrained that only by using repressive means was Sir Robert Walpole's government able to stay in the saddle. Even if some would disagree with Hill's contention that there was always an effective Tory opposition, few deny that debate on issues that were deemed basic—including the form of government, of social organization, and of thought—continued far beyond 1688 or even 1714.

In the last week of September 1756, Sir James Lowther of Lowther, the famous eighteenth-century boroughmonger, spent more than 58,000 pounds securing 134 burgages in the parliamentary borough of Cockermouth. When added to the twenty-four he already possessed this gave him more than half the total. As a result, he was recognized thereafter as being able to return both members for the borough. The Earl of Egremont, whose family had held the strongest interest since the borough was restored in 1641 to the ancient privilege of returning two members to parliament, was completely eclipsed. His younger brother, Percy Wyndham O'Brien, who had been returned with his support in 1754, retreated to Minehead at the 1761 election. Cockermouth was not contested again before the 1832 Reform Act, and its two members were counted among Lowther's famous ninepins.

Pocket boroughs were one result of the oligarchic structure that came to characterize English political life by the middle of the eighteenth century. The vigorous party struggles of Queen Anne's reign had melted away following the eclipse of the Tories and the passing in 1716 of the Septennial Act. In its place came the long Whig ascendancy, a period of political torpor that rendered burgage boroughs, in the words of Sir Lewis Namier, “predestined to become pocket boroughs.” Longer parliaments pushed up the cost of election contests, which in consequence became less frequent. If one did take place and the result was close, the inflated cost of canvassing was likely to be compounded by the near certainty of a petition.

One of the strangest facts about intellectual life in the Victorian years in England is that for most of the period there does not seem to have been any intellectuals. There was no group of people designated as “the intellectuals” or even “the intellectual elite.” Only if one chooses to take a functional definition of intellectuals—for instance, people “who create, distribute, and apply culture, that is, the symbolic world of man”—then can it be said that Victorian England had “intellectuals.” However, Egyptian temple priests, medieval monks, and modern university professors can all be grouped this way. Thus this definition is misleading, for not all thinkers have stood in the same relation to their own societies, nor have societies looked upon their thinkers in the same way, or even considered that the various kinds of thinkers should be considered as a group or class. In the Victorian period, from about 1830 to 1870, the English almost never used phrases such as “an intellectual” or “the intellectuals” as nouns to denote a particular kind of person or group of persons. Such phrases had been used in the romantic period, and they were readopted with increasing frequency from the 1870s on; but in the early and mid-Victorian years, the English used terms such as “men of letters,” literary men, poets, prophets, scientists to denote those who gave symbolic interpretation to experience.

The change in usage from “men of letters” and other such terms to “intellectuals” was no trivial change in linguistic style; rather, it marked a profound transformation of the economic, social, and conceptual relations in which the writers and thinkers stood.

The National Education League came to prominence in the 1870s as the most militant of the pressure groups that spearheaded the so-called “Nonconformist Revolt” from the Liberal Party. The revolt began in 1870, reached its peak in 1873, and contributed to the Liberal defeat in the general election of 1874. It finally petered out in the wake of that defeat and the emergence of a revitalized liberalism during the Eastern Question agitation in the late 1870s. The National Education League was founded in 1869, and disbanded in 1877, in the midst of the Eastern Question agitation. Because its dates are coincident with the revolt, and because it did play a crucial role in that movement, the league's history has been treated as an integral part of the Nonconformist Revolt. The revolt itself has been generally interpreted as a sectionalist attack on the Liberal Party, launched by Nonconformist grievance organizations for narrow, and largely sectarian, aims. According to this view, the revolt ended when the Nonconformists finally accepted the notion of a comprehensive liberalism that transcended their particularist interests; when they recognized that, politically speaking, they were Liberals before they were Nonconformists.

This explanation is misleading because it ignores the generally radical thrust of the Nonconformist Revolt and the agitations of groups such as the United Kingdon Alliance and the Liberation Society. In particular, the rise and fall of the National Education League cannot be understood solely within the context of Nonconformist politics.

In the midst of the political controversies of the early twentieth century, Lord Willoughby de Broke, a landed aristocrat with little parliamentary experience, emerged as a major political figure. An ally of the Chamberlains, Lord Milner, Sir Edward Carson, and Leo Maxse, editor of the National Review, he became a significant spokesman for extreme conservatism. During the Parliament Bill struggle, the battle over the Conservative leadership in the fall of 1911, and the Home Rule crisis, Willoughby de Broke organized the efforts of peers and other Conservatives radically dissatisfied with the direction of British politics. Since 1914 Willoughby de Broke has become a symbol of reaction and traditionalist resistance to change: the fox-hunting nobleman “whose face,” in Dangerfield's wellknown description, “bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse,” and who “was not more than two hundred years behind his time.” Such an analysis, however, is more amusing than accurate. In fact, while Willoughby de Broke's objectives were basically those of a traditional landed aristrocrat, his methods and emphases strongly prefigured those of later rightist politicians, both British and continental: tactics of political democracy could be mastered in order to preserve the status quo.

Although Willoughby de Broke often fondly recalled the patriarchical society he had known in his childhood on a great estate, he did not merely attempt to recreate the past. He and his political associates, for all their commitment to conservatism, understood that important adaptations would have to be made to new conditions.