This article will explore the interplay between a traditional fête in Devon and Oxfordshire, the celebration of the Fifth of November, and the last significant wave of English food price disturbances in 1867. Both popular culture and collective action mutated, of course, as underlying economic and social structures changed; but even in those regions where the pace of change was rapid, to neglect the factors of persistence and survival would lead to a history written according to a too simplistic formula. To say that culture and collective action changed in the nineteenth century as society and the economy changed can even become a truism, telling little about the processes through which these relationships worked themselves out. Without overdrawing the case, an effort has been made here to focus precisely upon persistence and survival, and to show how, in regions such as the southwest or Oxfordshire—and by implication, many other regions of Britain as well—the pace of nineteenth century cultural, economic, and social change was more leisurely than studies based exclusively on the industrializing north might lead one to conclude.

Besides remaining the celebration of the failure of the Popish Plot of 1605, Guy Fawkes acquired a number of new meanings for those involved in nineteenth century Fifth of November manifestations, and some other novel “uses” as well. Annual celebrations all over the south were frequently organized and mounted by secret or semi-secret societies of “bonfire boys” or “Guys.” Members of the bonfire gangs usually concealed their identities with masks or soot and appeared in uniform or grotesque costumes to preside over the collection of wood and other combustibles, the begging or extortion of money from the wealthy, and the fabrication of suitable effigies to be ritually consumed on the bonfire.

The history of the long reign of George III has recently been shaken by a vigorous and determined revisionism. A temblor of this magnitude has not been felt since Sir Lewis Namier mounted his prosopographical revolution more than half a century ago. Indeed, it has been suggested that J. C. D. Clark's English Society actually will surpass the influence of Namier's Structure of Politics. If so, it is difficult to imagine the combined impact of English Society, Rebellion and Revolution, The Dynamics of Change, The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, the host of articles already published, and the plethora of words certain to be typeset in the relatively near future.

Perhaps Clark's relentless torrent of prose will relegate to the historiographical scrap heap virtually all existing scholarship about the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in favor of his corrected model of Hanoverian England. Already Clark claims that the standard account depicting eighteenth-century England as “an economically progressive society, increasingly secular and individualist in its ethos and distinctively demarcated from its European contemporaries” is, quite simply, “no longer tenable.” Clark's most recent pronouncement declares that “the revisionists’ [i.e. his] views of the period now command widespread acceptance.” The revisionist view cannot be fairly summarized in a single statement (though the phrases “ancien regime” and “confessional state” both manage nicely to encompass a great deal), but a passage Clark cites to illustrate England at the death of George III serves as a point of departure.

This article explores where the people fit in to British history and whether there was such a thing as British public opinion in the seventeenth century. It argues that given the nature of the Stuart multiple monarchy, and the way the power structures of that monarchy impinged upon Ireland, Scotland, and England, the Stuarts' political authority was at times publicly negotiated on a Britannic level. People across Britain were engaged with British affairs: there was public opinion about British politics, in other words, albeit not British public opinion, since the people were bitterly divided at this time. However, because the crisis that brought down Charles I had been a three-kingdoms crisis, which in turn had helped spark the growth of a more sophisticated British news culture, the Restoration monarchy became increasingly sensitive to the need to try to keep public opinion across the Britannic archipelago on its side. In response to the challenge of the Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis, Charles II and his Tory allies sought to rally public support across England, Scotland, and Ireland and thus to represent “British public opinion” as being in favor of the hereditary succession. It was a representation, however, that remained contested.

In an 1989 article in Irish Historical Studies, Brendan Bradshaw challenged the current practice of Irish history by arguing that an “ideology of professionalism” associated with the modern historiographical tradition established a half century ago, and now entrenched in the academy, “served to inhibit rather than to enhance the understanding of the Irish historical experience.” Inspired by the cautionary injunctions of Herbert Butterfield about teleological history, T. W. Moody, D. B. Quinn, and R. Dudley Edwards launched this revisionist enterprise in the 1930s, transforming Irish historiography which until then was subordinating historical truth to the cause of the nation. Their mission was to cleanse the historical record of its mythological clutter, to engage in what Moody called “the mental war of liberation from servitude to the myth” of Irish nationalist history, by applying scientific methods to the evidence, separating fact from destructive and divisive fictions.

Events in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this sense that the Irish people needed liberation from nationalist mythology, a mythology held responsible for the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and which offered legitimation to the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the nightmare of history from which professional historians could rouse the Irish people. Nationalist heroes and movements came under even more aggressive, critical scrutiny. But much of this was of the character of specific studies. The revisionists seemed to have succeeded in tearing down the edifice of nationalist history, but they had offered little in the way of a general, synthetic history to replace it.

The history of the Scottish East India Company of 1617 is a history of partnerships and rivalries within and between Scotland and England. The company was opposed by the merchants of the royal burghs in Scotland and by the East India Company, Muscovy Company, and Privy Council in England. At the same time, it was supported by the Scottish Privy Council and was able to recruit Dutch, English, and Scottish investors. The interactions between these groups were largely shaped by the union of the crowns, which saw James VI accede to the thrones of England and Ireland and move his court to London. Scotland was thus left with an absentee monarch, decreasing the access of Scottish merchants to the king while increasing the importance of court connections in acquiring that access. Regal union also created opportunities for Scots to become part of the London business world, which, in turn, could lead to backlash from English interests. Having developed in this context, the Scottish East India Company speaks to how James VI and I approached patronage and policy in his multiple kingdoms, how commercial rivalries developed in England and Scotland, and how trading companies played a role in constitutional developments in Stuart Britain.

This essay explores the attitudes of the British middle classes towards witchcraft, ghosts, and other so-called superstitions from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Conventional historiographical wisdom maintains that belief in magic among middle-class Britons declined gradually between the early modern and modern eras. Grounded in the study of newspapers, antiquarianism, public lectures, and literary fiction, this essay proposes a more precise chronology for the decline and subsequent resurgence of magic. It argues that it was only from the 1820s that the middle classes, the media that served them, the police, and certain politicians put popular superstitions under significant duress, and examines the agendas and anxieties underlying this temporary cultural shift away from magic. The later Victorian period saw the emergence of greater tolerance towards witchcraft and ghost beliefs, allowing them to be reinterpreted as picturesque folklore or fitting subjects for the enquiries of psychical science.

So wrote Mary Tudor to the Marquis of Winchester in 1554. The subject of the Queen's approval was Sir Edmund Peckham, one of her most trusted councilors. The result of that approval was an outright gift of land worth nearly one hundred pounds a year.

Land, the basis of the social structure of the age, was one of the crucial instruments of patronage. The crown estate not only had its financial function as a regular source of income and an emergency source of realizable capital, but one directly relevant to social control and to government. It was a means by which past services to the prince could be rewarded and future services perhaps anticipated. The way land was used for this purpose and whether the frequency and extent of its usage can throw any light on problems and methods of government are questions meriting close consideration. The period taken here—the late 1530s to the early 1570s—spans several very different phases of government: how far did policy towards patronage vary from phase to phase? And how far did these variations reflect the needs of each successive government?

To acquire an accurate picture of the use of the crown's estate, some localized knowledge is essential.

In satire, as in lapidary inscriptions, a man is not upon oath. Shadwell is a better playwright overall than Dryden, and Theobald a far better Shakespearean than Pope; and if Colley Cibber is a more appropriate stand-in for Dullness, few would regard Pope's treatment of him as wholly without bias. With Swift the case is even more clear. The butts of his satire were often men of the first importance, national or even international figures whose reputations were not to be shaped by satire alone. While Pope may have succeeded in imposing his version of Lord Hervey upon history, Swift's Wharton, and even more his Marlborough, now exist only in the rhetorical world of Augustan humanism.

This somewhat tenuous relation between factual accuracy and artistic success, in satiric as in other portraiture, has long been appreciated, and critics now scarcely pause to defend the ground of literal truth before retiring to their prepared positions of literary tradition and rhetorical form. In general such strategy is sound, but occasionally it does the satirist less than justice. This is decidedly the case with one of the greatest of Swift's satiric portraits, that of William Wood, the unhappy victim of the Drapier's Letters.

Greed, avarice, rapacity, the quest for filthy lucre, are none of them traits peculiar to western Europeans of the last few hundred years — the capitalist epoch. Eastern potentates, feudal lords, magnates of the church, humble peasants, noble Romans, cultured Greeks and many others have been infected with the love of gold. The desire for wealth is not confined to capitalism; wealth for high living, conspicuous display or hoarding are all non-capitalist. Mediaeval and Renaissance monarchs shared with a number of ‘primitive’ tribes a taste for extravagant display. The hoarding of treasure typical of French peasants (at least until quite recently) is strikingly similar to the practices of wealthy Romans described by M. I. Finley.

None of these people are capitalists in any strict sense of the word. Some of them own some means of production — although this would not necessarily be true of churchmen or princes who were the beneficiaries of systems forcibly expropriating a surplus from the producers. But even those who, like some peasants, own means of production, do not necessarily live in a capitalist system in a capitalist manner. They do not reinvest in order to procure further income; they merely exchange commodities for money, which is then exchanged for other commodities or hoarded (not ‘saved’ or invested, merely hoarded). Capitalism, on Marx's account, involves a different process — money is exchanged for commodities which are exchanged for money once more: M-C-M rather than C-M-C. In Capital Marx describes hoarding as a petrification of money; it exists in a naive form in traditional societies producing for a limited circle of wants.

Strikes are like certain bitter-sweet varities of sin. However frequently and violently they are denounced and however painful the consequences to those who indulge, they continue to flourish. V. L. Allen noted this curious role of strikes in industrial society some time ago. “Strikes,” he wrote,

Strikes have become so common in modern society that they seem to be a normal part of the social landscape. This is perhaps one reason why historians have tended to ignore them and their history. Upon reflection, it is indeed surprising how little attention the history of industrial conflict has received from historians. Of course, certain dramatic events, like the General Strike of 1926 or the London dock strike of 1889, are relatively well chronicled, but even these are sorely under-analyzed. There are not even competent narratives of other episodes, like the explosion of militancy just after the First World War; and we know still less about the persistent dynamics of strikes throughout British industry. In this respect, historians lag well behind other social scientists who have been studying industrial strife for many years, but whose work is unfortunately limited by their frankly ahistorical or even anti-historical approach. It is time for historians to remedy this deficiency, and this essay is intended as a first, very small effort in that direction.

In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the British state enacted a series of restrictive legal measures designed to pacify the Scottish Highlands and crush the military power of the Gael. With the evolution of scholarly work on the British state, these measures are increasingly seen through the prism of state power, with the Scottish Gàidhealtachd cast as the victim of a fiscal-military system determined to impose obedience on its territory and peoples. In analyzing the implementation and enforcement of the laws passed between 1746 and 1752, this article challenges this narrative. By focusing attention on the legal system—particularly with regards enforcement—this article considers the local reception of the laws and the ideological, legal, and bureaucratic limitations to state authority. Yet it also explores how clan chiefs and traditional elites, who were the primary target of the legislation, quickly turned the laws to their own advantage. This analysis challenges the idea of effective state intervention in the Gàidhealtachd after 1746 and instead brings attention to how parliamentary legislation was mobilized by regional actors to local ends in ways that cast a long shadow over the history of the Scottish Highlands.

At the turn of the century the temperance question ranked among the handful of public issues which dominated British politics. It aroused powerful pressure groups which insinuated themselves in the political process at every level from constituency to Cabinet. The politics of drink raises difficult questions about the effectiveness and style of these temperance and trade pressure groups, the internal dissension which sometimes dissipated their influence, and their relationship with political parties and factions at a time of uncertain allegiances and narrow pluralities. The temperance question worried the Conservatives intermittently, the Liberals incessantly. It strengthened the Liberty Party, strained it, and sometimes threatened to shatter it.

Paradoxically at a time of decline in per capita consumption of alcohol, the temperance movement gathered impressive new support and the beleaguered drink trade achieved unprecedented political effectiveness. The dominant tradition in the temperance movement, that of the prohibitionist activists, was rooted in a hatred of drink as innately and infectiously evil, a force destructive of everything good, and in a Christian humanitarian concern for the security of the home. Many moderate reformers who did not look upon drink as sinful in itself or share the ideology of the teetotal home also worried about the effect of heavy drinking on the country.

Edward III's foreign ambitions, which in 1337 precipitated the Hundred Years' War, generated such severe financial pressures at home that eventually the fiscal crisis became a political one. Exasperated by the inability or unwillingness of the government of regency under Archbishop Stratford to provide him with money and matériel for his continental campaign, an outraged Edward returned to England on November 30, 1340, determined to purge the government of those corrupt and disloyal officials whom he blamed for his humiliation. The attack on the chief ministers, especially Stratford, who was both primate and principal councillor, created a political crisis of considerable proportions, wherein some dominant issues of medieval English politics — the liberties of the church and clergy and the role of the baronage in political decision-making — were re-stated and re-argued. Modern historians have focused their attention on the more dramatic aspects of the crisis of 1341, particularly its “constitutional” implications. Lapsley, Clarke, and Wilkinson, for instance, examined the conflicts of the king with Stratford and with the baronage — events reminiscent of the confrontations of Henry II with Thomas Becket and of Edward II with the Lancastrians. Tout explained the administrative reforms of the early part of Edward III's reign, which, by subjecting the great offices of state to the control of the king's itinerant household, were designed to transform the administrative system into a device for purveying supplies and cash to feed the English war-machine. More recently, E. B. Fryde has described the ordinary and extraordinary financial techniques employed to subsidize the king's expensive foreign policies.

This essay inaugurates a new series in the Journal of British Studies titled “One British Thing.” This short essay uses a bottle of welfare orange juice distributed sometime between 1961 and 1971 to tell a larger story about the relationship between Britain's Welfare State and the colonization and decolonization of the British West Indies. The history of the Welfare State has largely been told as a metropolitan story severed from a wider global history of empire. The empty bottle of concentrated orange juice, however, tells a different story. It exposes Britain's own dependency on its colonial subjects to provide the means of furnishing welfare benefits to its metropolitan citizens. The history of welfare orange juice thus opens up a richer understanding of the politics and economics of the Welfare State and its relationship to colonial development projects on the one hand and the slow processes of decolonization on the other.

The 1982 Falklands War was shrouded in symbolism, bringing to the fore divergent conceptions of Britishness, kinship, and belonging. This article casts light on the persistent purchase of the idea of Greater Britain long after the end of empire, addressing a case that would normally be deemed outside its spatial and temporal boundaries. By highlighting the inherent contradictions of this transnational bond, the South Atlantic conflict had a profound effect on an underexposed British community with a lingering attachment to a “British world”: the Anglo-Argentines. As they found themselves wedged between two irreconcilable identities, divisions threatened to derail this already enfeebled grouping. Yet leaders of the community, presuming a common Britishness with the Falkland Islanders and Britons in the United Kingdom, sought to intervene in the conflict by reaching out to both. That their efforts were met with indifference, and sometimes scorn, only underlines how contingent and frail the idea of Greater Britain was by 1982. Yet this article also reveals how wide ranging the consequences of the crisis of Greater Britain were, and how its global reach was acutely put to the test by pitting different “British worlds” against each other.