Whereas both Houses of the Parliament of England have been necessitated to undertake a war in their just and lawful defense … all oaths, declarations, and proclamations against both or either of the Houses of Parliament … or their ordinances and proceedings, or any for adhering unto them, or for doing or executing any office, place or charge, by any authority derived from them; and all judgments, indictments, outlawries, attainders and inquisitions in any the said causes … be declared null, suppressed, and forbidden. (From the first of nineteen Newcastle Propositions, July 1646; expanded from the first of twenty-seven Propositions of Uxbridge, November 1644; repeated in the second of The Four Bills, December 1647)

Indemnity Committee cases from the 1647–55 manuscripts indicate a widespread volume of suits pressed against parliament's Civil War and Commonwealth officeholders. Invariably, the officials petitioning the Indemnity Committee were under prosecution. Often they had been fined and even jailed. Also revealed in these papers is a public knowledgeable in the law and ready to wield its power in punishing an array of officials in London and the shires. Four broad conclusions are asserted here. First, the Indemnity Committee records reflect a massive legal assault on state officials from the beginning of the Civil War to the mid-1650s, a factor in the political, administrative, and social history of the period that has heretofore been ignored. Second, suits were lodged mainly as the result of actions stemming from fiscal innovations put into place by a parliament that pushed toward victory and then struggled to pay its war debts.

A single eighteenth-century British manuscript recipe book, bound in parchment decorated with gold tooling, can tell us an enormous amount about Britain's gastronomic and imperial ambitions. That is because this book, now known by its call number, V.a.680, and held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, contains recipes like “Indian Pickle,” which included ginger, garlic, cauliflower, mustard, turmeric, and long pepper. How did this distinctly South Asian recipe find its way into a London recipe book? In this essay, we explore how British households engaged with and circulated new ideas about food during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We analyze two remarkable recipes, one for mutton kebabs and another for sago pudding, both brought to Britain through emerging imperial projects. Although one recipe originated in the eastern Mediterranean and the other in Southeast Asia, both were changed and altered to suit British metropolitan tastes. We then examine the book itself as a material object created and altered over time, offering evidence of the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts were amended, torn apart, repaired, organized, and ultimately professionalized over multiple generations. As physical testaments to the social alliances and networks of knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons, manuscript recipe books were tools of empire, used to appropriate, translate, and transmit the global foodways that permeated Britain's earliest colonial schemes.

Over three decades, the Provisional Irish Republican Army waged a campaign of violence that claimed the lives of some two thousand people. This article explores the moral framework by which the IRA sought to legitimate its campaign—how it was derived and how it functioned. On the one hand, the IRA relied on a legalist set of political principles, grounded in a particular reading of Irish history. An interlinked, yet discrete strand of legitimation stressed the iniquities of the Northern Irish state as experienced by Catholic nationalists, especially in the period 1968–1972. These parallel threads were interwoven to build a powerful argument that justified a resort to what the IRA termed its “armed struggle.” Yet the IRA recognized that the parameters for war were set not simply by reference to ideology but also by a reading of what might be acceptable to those identified as “the people” or “the community.” Violence was subject to an undeclared process of negotiation with multiple audiences, which served to constitute the boundaries of the permissible. Often, these red lines were revealed only at the point of transgression, but they were no less important for being intangible. An examination of the moral parameters for IRA violence provides a new perspective on the group, helping to explain IRA resilience but also its ultimate weakness and decline.

This essay examines the history of the safety razor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it explores male shaving practices and the male investment in physical appearance in the age of industrial capitalism. In highlighting the history of a single material artifact to showcase the relationship between masculinity, good grooming, personal success, and notions of self-improvement, this essay also underscores the growing influence of American products in British life, the intricacies of the consumer economy, and the increasing sophistication of advertising practices.

Conventional typologies of lordship and its relationship with royal power in the territories of the English crown emphasize the precocious distinctiveness of royal power as against noble lordship, with the latter consequentially bound by an essentially restrictive territorialized model. Drawing particularly on the example of the kingship/lordship of the Isle of Man, this article considers the manifestations of sub-kingship from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries as a way of understanding the complexity of manifestations of sovereignty in these territories. It assesses the use of royal titles and associated ceremonial and issues such as forms of dating. Also considered are some of the practical manifestations of “sovereign” power, seen in rights associated with justice, taxation, and relations between princes, and in the capacity to exclude the intervention of others in these spheres. From the discussion emerges an understanding of royal power as more variable in its footprint and shared in many spaces by men conventionally seen as part of an undifferentiated aristocracy. The reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII have usually been seen as the final point at which centralization through the power and authority of the English monarch obliterated any remaining echoes of sub-kingship in the North Atlantic archipelago, ending once and for all the possibility of a shared space between kingship and lordship. In considering the historiography of this moment, and evidence for continuity through Henry VIII's reign, the article raises questions about lordship and its political and cultural boundaries in the late medieval and early modern periods.

If coverture justified patriarchal control and legally erased many aspects of wives’ separate existence, did this mean that husbands in eighteenth-century England also enjoyed absolute authority over their wives’ sexual bodies? This article examines how contemporaries described the sexual boundaries between spouses and what wives could do when they had been violated by their husbands. Wives had few legal protections and limited social and economic resources to escape unwanted marital sex, but the small number who could afford the high costs turned to the ecclesiastical courts to legally separate from their husbands. The five case studies from the ecclesiastical courts explored here are exceptional, first, because sexual problems were at their core, and second, because unusual collateral evidence survives describing attorneys’ and judges’ opinions about spouses’ bodily rights within marriage. Whether they were seeking relief from reproductive toil, venereal infection, threat of sexual violence, or trauma from marital rape, these wives wanted to escape their husbands—but they faced hurdles. Because English ecclesiastical law did not explicitly identify sexual discord as justifying marital separation, the women's attorneys had to demonstrate that unwanted sexual relations were acts of cruelty. By invoking bodily safety, decorum and propriety, and sensibility and sympathy, advocates argued against husbands’ absolute conjugal authority. The author considers how broader transformations in beliefs about gender and sexuality may have resulted in giving wives slightly more room for protection by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly when they faced the threat of marital rape or venereal infection.

This article examines key themes in the political and intellectual life of E. P. Thompson. It argues for the centrality of romanticism to his work; it focuses on his unfinished study of the early Romantics. Thompson drew parallels between socialist hopes and disappointments of his own day and the reactions of the early romantic poets to the failed promise of the French Revolution. This article charts the trajectory of the early Romantics as they moved from political engagement to retreat, and relates this trajectory to Thompson's own politics. Thompson discerned a pattern whereby intellectuals and artists moved through stages from political engagement to disenchantment and then to “apostasy” or default. Disenchantment could be a productive condition; at issue was how the poet handled the “authenticity of experience,” how disenchantment was dealt with in verse. Both Thompson and the Romantics privileged the concept of “experience” which they set in opposition to abstract theory. The article's final section turns to themes that Thompson had intended to address but left unfinished, including shifting views of patriotism and the defeated cause of women's rights. For Thompson the romantic impulse was ultimately linked to utopian desire, to the capacity to imagine that which is “not yet.”

The terrain of British intellectual life in the twentieth century was dominated by two major features: freelance writers and university scholars. At the elite level, as Noel Annan showed, the two types—independent thinkers and academics—can be treated as one class, linked by personal connections and by common attitudes arising largely from the old school tie. However, when intellectuals beyond the elite stratum are surveyed, it becomes clear that the fortunes of these two features of the intellectual landscape differed sharply. The university teachers grew rapidly in number and made themselves into what Harold Perkin calls “the key profession.” But as John Gross has contended, freelance writers, despite a rich heritage from the nineteenth century, seemed, especially in their own eyes, to form an old and decaying mountain range. From 1880 to 1980 freelance writers experienced a pervasive and intensifying sense of crisis in their trade and in their cultural role. John Wain, a successful novelist and critic, stated the matter plainly in 1973: contemplation of the difficulties of “being an author,” he said, always threw him into “a black depression in which I could slash my wrists.”

How can one explain the pessimism of freelance writers, their sense of being increasingly marginalized? Were their complaints simply habitual expressions of a writerly pose common since the romantic period? After all, many of the broad social and cultural trends in Britain between 1880 and 1980 should have been advantageous to independent writers.

When Sir Richard Southern wanted to illustrate the moral compromise that was the inevitable cost of being a courtier and servant of King Henry I of England—the culture of whose court encouraged profiteering and sharp practice—he found the material to hand in a number of surviving letters of the unfortunate Nigel d'Aubigny. At some time between 1109 and 1114 Nigel fell ill, and he believed himself dying. He dictated to his royal master a letter—on which one can almost see the spots of the tears—begging him to confirm the restorations of land that he wanted now to make to various churches he had formerly deprived. Another letter was to his brother, listing further—rather weighty—restorations he wanted made to numerous laymen likewise defrauded by him in the course of his career. Perhaps he felt rather silly when he got better, as he did, and lived for many years more to meditate on his unworthiness.

Sir Richard proved his point, but it occurs to me that the same evidence can be used to explore further a different but related issue: how it was that these men who lived and worked in Henry's service were so very conscious of the moral compromises they had made. If Nigel d'Aubigny was brought to the state that his letters reveal that he was, when he was threatened by death, it can only be because he had been aware of actions that might be considered his sins for quite some while.

When Mary queen of Scots met her first Parliament, she encountered an institution that had long played an influential part in Scottish history. The Scottish Parliament was important for its legislation and taxation, but it was even more important as the forum in which the political community assembled to take major decisions about how the government should be configured. This article uses a newly-discovered list of those attending the Parliament of 1563 as the starting-point for an investigation of the political community in Mary's reign.

Although our understanding of sixteenth-century politics has been much enhanced by studies focused on “kingship,” many crucial issues concern relationships among people other than the king. For more than half of the century there was no adult monarch present, and government had to be carried on by consensus between a regent and the nobility. Adult monarchs usually had more power than temporary regents, but they, too, had to seek consensus if they were to rule successfully.

There is an important collection of videotaped interviews with British historians that is now available in London. The Publications Department of the Institute of Historical Research (IHR) has produced twenty-eight videotaped interviews with prominent historians in Britain. More tapes are to be released with others scheduled for production in the future. The historians who have already been interviewed are senior British historians who have made their scholarly contributions since World War II. All the interviews are conducted by younger colleagues who have specialized in the same or related fields of history. Interviewers explore the influences that have shaped the work of the senior historians and encourage the latter to reflect upon their background, training, publications, and careers. Because the historians are selected by an IHR committee, the members of which are mostly economic historians, senior social and economic historians have been more fully represented in the IHR videotapes than other historians. Of the twenty-eight interviews, fifteen of the historians have written mostly about the modern period (nineteenth and twentieth centuries), eight are historians of the early modern period (from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries), three are medievalists, one is a classicist, and one is a historian of science. Concluding this article is an alphabetical list of all the historians interviewed in this series.