Alien subsidies suggest that many men and few women immigrated to England between 1440 and 1487. This article examines the one exception to this pattern: the large numbers of Scotswomen assessed as aliens in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Northumberland in 1440. It considers why so many women are found in these particular returns, what we can know about them, and how this knowledge might change our histories of women, labor, and mobility in both Scotland and England.

This article examines British understandings of the laws and legal traditions that regulated slavery in French and Spanish colonies in the late eighteenth century, particularly between the American and French Revolutions. Based on reports from those with firsthand knowledge of different slave systems, many imperial commentators contended that enslaved persons under French and Spanish rule were treated more humanely—and consequently worked more efficiently—than those in British jurisdictions. Advocates of slavery reform therefore looked to the slave management strategies of competitors to help advance their cause. For some, appropriating foreign slave regulations became a central feature of programs designed to lessen the brutality of slavery and eventually bring about emancipation. For others, highlighting the comparatively benign treatment of enslaved workers in French and Spanish islands served as a way to pressure the British government to more proactively police slaveholding in its own colonies. By exploring calls to emulate the slave regulations of rival empires, this article provides a window onto shifting British attitudes toward both slavery and imperial governance during a period of major political and economic change in the Atlantic World.

This article discusses the development of techniques and practices of murder crime scene photography through four pairs of photographs taken in England between 1904 and 1958 and examines their “forensic aesthetic”: the visual combination of objective clues and of subjective aesthetic resonances. Crime scene photographs had legal status as evidence that had to be substantiated by a witness, and their purpose, as expressed in forensic textbooks and policing articles, was to provide a direct transfer of facts to the courtroom; yet their inferential visual nature made them allusive and evocative as well. Each of four pairs of photographs discussed reflects a significant period in the historical evolution of crime scene photography as well as an observable aesthetic influence: the earliest days of police photography and pictorialism; professionalization in the 1930s, documentary photography, and film noir; postwar photographic expansion to the suburban and middle class, advertising images of the family and home; and postwar elegiac landscape photography in the 1950s and compassion shown to infanticidal mothers. Crime scene photographs also demonstrate a remarkable shift in twentieth-century forensic technologies, and they reveal a collection of ordinary domestic and pastoral scenes at the moment when an act of violence made them extraordinary.

For those who by the end of the twentieth century came to be termed “survivors” of child sexual abuse, different genres and forms have been available to narrate and evaluate that abuse. This article explores the reception and practical results of such disclosures: the unpredictable effects of telling, and the strategies of containment, silencing, or disbelief that greeted disclosures. I make note of the ethical challenges of writing the history of child sexual abuse and conclude that twenty-first-century observers have been too ready to perceive much of the previous century as a period of profound silence in relation to child sexual abuse. At the same time, historical and sociological accounts have also been too ready to claim the final third of the twentieth century as a period of compulsive disclosure and fluency in constructing sexual selves. The history of child sexual abuse reveals significant barriers to disclosure in the 1970s and 1980s, despite new visibility of child sexual abuse in the media and through feminist sexual politics. Attention to such obstacles suggests the need to rethink narratives of “permissive” sexual change to acknowledge more fully the ongoing inequities and hierarchies in sexual candor and voice.

This article re-examines existing narratives of British permissiveness and secularization through a discussion of the Church of England's role in shaping the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and ongoing debates on homosexuality in the 1970s. It suggests—contrary to existing narratives of religious decline and marginalization—that the views of church commentators, and the opinions of the Established Church more generally, remained of real cultural and political influence in the years leading up to the 1967 Act. Religious authorities were thus more responsible for the moral landscape of the permissive society than historians previously assumed. Nevertheless, British permissiveness was full of contradictions, not only in terms of the unexpected ways in which reform was shaped and brought about, but in terms of the constraints of the new moral settlement which decriminalized homosexual behavior within modest boundaries. Such contradictions were not confined to the opinions of religious commentators—they were the genuine essence of the position on which the moral consensus in favor of homosexual law reform was based. Through a consideration of the final collapse of this moral consensus in the years after 1970, this article reassesses questions of the nature and timing of British secularization. It considers how the Church of England, although anticipating and shaping earlier developments in approaches toward sexual morality, unintentionally left itself out in the cold in the years after 1970, as progressive opinion began to move away from the consensus on which the 1967 Act had been based.