THERE is a considerable body of opinion which holds that marriage in early modern England, and especially marriage among the lower orders, was uncaring, affectionless, and entered into for economic rather than emotional reasons. This view was, for example, axiomatic to those writing from a feminist perspective in the 1970s. Thus Sheila Rowbotham felt that in the pre-industrial world The peasant judged his woman by her capacity to labour and to breed more hands for toil…among the peasantry women were essential in the family economy. The peasant's wife bore children which meant more hands to toil and she laboured herself. She was like cattle, a means of production.

My subject is the new police of the nineteenth century. It was said of policemen in Mid-Wales in the later part of that century that, after five years of looking at sheep, their minds turned to emigration, drink and suicide. Writing this paper has been a comparable travail. My initial enthusiasm for the topic has been somewhat crushed by the weight of evidence and the models of police historians. The evidence is vast and problematical. Thisis not the world of the historian of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Great parliamentary and government papers, an ever-widening range of local and national statistics, countless newspaper files, court records and police books await the historian of the nineteenth century. Much material is still being catalogued, and a great deal of police evidence has yet to be collected.

Before coming to the substance of this paper, I feel that I must define its purpose somewhat more closely than I have done in the title which I have given to it. A study of the state and landed interests, of course, could embrace most of the domestic and much of the external histories of France and England in the thirteenth century, I shall be concerned with much less than that—with a problem which nevertheless seems to me to be of the first importance in any study of the social and economic policies (if that phrase be not too anachronistic) of medieval governments. I mean the break-up and alienation of feudal tenements in the thirteenth century, some of the causes and consequences thereof, and some of the attempts made to deal with the difficulties thereby occasioned. This still remains a large subject, and at best this paper is an attempt at synthesis, even of vulgarisation, which rests, in the main, upon the work of others. In particular, I have drawn heavily upon Professor Plucknett's study of the legislation of Edward I, and I was encouraged to venture upon some comparisons with France because he has also shown, I feel, that such comparisons may not be without value.

MEDIEVAL England fell into that broader Eurasian region within which property from conjugal estates devolved on both men and women, either by inheritance or by certain mechanisms of pre mortem endowment. Although males were generally preferred heirs, demographic realities ensured that women would be found in a sizeable minority of instances as residual heirs. Given likely conditions of mortality and fertility, a wife would often have needed to bear at least four children to secure a sixty per cent chance of furnishing a son who would survive his father to inherit the estate. Indeed in stationary demographic conditions roughly twenty per cent of families would have only surviving daughters and no sons at the father's death. This female inheritance potential combined with the possibility of the transmission of pre mortem dowry to daughters in those families who were blessed with at least one male heir implies that considerable reorganization of land might occur at every generation.

A quiet revolution has occurred of late in the history of poor people and poor relief in early modern Europe. Shapeless, decentralized and infinite, like the story of most everyday things, it has depended for progress on the laborious accumulation of local examples, garnered from patchy, weedy and erratically surviving evidence; and for vitality on cerebration which outstrips research, on hypo-theses which demand to be tested in a hundred detailed trials. Time was when sociologists and students of social legislation encouraged historians to believe that with the Reformation there developed fundamental differences in the ways in which the old and the new faiths treated their poor–variances which sprang essentially from the abandonment in the wake of Luther of the ancient belief that ‘good works’ (almsgiving included) offered to those who performed them a direct means of securing salvation. To compress is often to parody. But it can perhaps be said that the coming of Protestantism, in all its forms, was believed to have emancipated poor-relief from the control of a too-indulgent Church, which encouraged the almsgiver to think only of the benefit to his own immortal soul. In so doing the Church had allegedly destroyed all incentive to contrive a rational philanthropy—to build systems which would benefit the receiver of alms, which would serve the common weal, which would in general be directed at procuring good order and reducing physical want and suffering. Hence the Church was credited with a very low capacity for organization and even accused of breeding the very poor whom it relieved, by depriving them of all incentive to find employment and attain self-support.

This article explores the campaign waged by Irish women against the draft constitution of 1937. A number of articles within the constitution were deemed by women activists to threaten both their rights as citizens and as workers. A campaign, organised principally by the Women Graduates' Association, the Joint Committee of Women's Societies and Social Workers, together with the Irish Women Workers' Union, sought to amend or delete the offending articles. The campaign ran for two months and in that period, feminists, the press, parliamentarians, the Catholic Church and republicans all engaged in the debate about women's position in Irish society.

(READ 26 March 2004 AT ROYAL HOLLOWAY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON)

Money', wrote Richard FitzNeal in the preface to the Dialogue of the Exchequer, ‘appears necessary not only in time of war but also in peace. In war it is poured out in fortifying castles, in soldiers’ wages and in numerous other ways, depending on the nature of the persons paid, for the preservation of the kingdom. In time of peace, the Treasurer added, money was spent on charitable purposes; but it is clear from even die limited evidence of the Pipe Rolls of Henry II that expenditure on defence greatly exceeded that on charity.

WHY was the Mau Mau movement in colonial Kenya believed to be so evil? It was the horror story of Britain's empire in the 1950s. Less of a military or strategic threat, it was thought to be more atrocious than either the Communists in Malaya or the Cypriot EOKA. It has lived in British memory as a symbol of African savagery, and modern Kenyans are divided by its images, militant nationalism or tribalist thuggery. This essay explores some of these constructions of Mau Mau.

A student of the sixteenth century is always tempted to represent his period as being one of unprecedented change and new departures. In the case of my present subject the temptation is particularly strong, because printing was a new invention, and the technical problems and opportunities which it presented to governments were also new. Nevertheless it would be most misleading to begin a discussion of Tudor censorship with Sir Thomas More's restrictive proclamation of 1530, or even with the introduction of printing to England in 1476. The concept of society, and of the duties and responsibilities of government, which censorship was to reflect was deeply rooted in the past, and was not fundamentally challenged until the puritan revolution of the seventeenth century.

The importance of the rôle of the industrial inventor in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution is recognized by everybody: Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, John Kay, James Watt, James Neilsen, George Stephenson, William Murdoch, Josiah Wedgwood, even schoolboys can reel off their names with glee, and their careers have mostly been investigated in satisfactory detail by economic historians. But the rôle of the merchant entrepreneur—their natural partner and alter ego—has been far less exhaustively studied. Those who are well known are few, and those whose careers have been examined in detail even fewer. As a class they do not even occur in the indices of the two standard text-books on the Industrial Revolution—those by Mantoux and Ashton; Matthew Boulton is one of the few individuals amongst them who have avoided total obscurity, and he is now receiving adequate treatment.

The paper examines the reasons that India, Pakistan and Ceylon chose to become Dominions within the Commonwealth instead of becoming republics on independence as many expected. Each of these South Asian states had different motives that compelled them to take on a form of government more associated in areas where the British had settled in significant numbers. The ‘Tropical Dominions’ differed from the settler cases and tested this vague British concept. The British and South Asians had to compromise their wishes in order to satisfy their wants. India is characterised here as the ‘Expedient Dominion’, Pakistan the ‘Siege Dominion’ and Ceylon the ‘Imitation Dominion’. This paper focuses on the years immediately prior to independence to understand the various objectives of the South Asian elites that negotiated with the British for their sovereignty and how they varied from each other and from the Dominion ideal.

Some tenth-century English kings, especially Æthelstan and Edgar, were commonly presented as rulers of Britain. The basic reason for this is that they had a loose but real hegemony over the other rulers on the island. This hegemony did not collapse in subsequent centuries, but English kings were less often described as rulers of Britain. The intensification of royal rule within the English kingdom in the second half of the tenth century made kings’ power inside the kingdom increasingly unlike their power elsewhere in Britain: it consequently became harder to think of Britain as a single political unit.

The death rattle of the landed order, like the death knell of capitalism, has been clearly heard dozens of times over the last hundred years and more. Yet there is a suspicion that the sounds have been mis-heard misinterpreted, for collapse and decomposition have never followed the symptoms of sickness and crisis. The Churchill family have played their part in crying ‘wolf’. In 1885 the 8th Duke of Marlborough, reflecting on ‘the organised agitation against the present ownership of land’, asserted that ‘were there any effective demand for the purchase of land, half the land of England would be in the market tomorrow’. He had inside information, the Blenheim estate being heavily indebted. A generation later his son, the 9th Duke, having helped stave off disaster by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, wrote in his turn to The Times. Under the heading ‘Old Order Doomed’ and the shock of the 1919 Budget, with its ‘confiscatory’ increase in death duties to a rate of 40 per cent on estates of £2 million and over, he stated that ‘[the] fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality’ and forecast that ‘the new tax must make it impossible for the heirs of these men—[the landed magnates]—to carry on the tradition’. Whether the heirs have carried on the tradition is debatable, but it is indisputable that in 1989 his grandson, now the 11 th Duke, is still seated in Blenheim Palace, surrounded by an estate of 11,500 acres. That may be no more than half the acreage owned by his great-grandfather but it is nevertheless a very large estate, and a principal reason for placing the IIth Duke among the 200 wealthiest people in Britain.

By the fourteenth century the descendants of those who had gone from Britain to Ireland in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries had come to call themselves ‘the English of Ireland’ or ‘the English born in Ireland’. Or, to be more accurate, they did so when faced by Englishmen from England: within Ireland they described themselves simply as ‘the English’. From the 1340s onwards a series of disputes with agents of the king formed a context in which they collectively stressed their Englishness. By the fifteenth century this identity was from time to time problematical, both for those who claimed it and for the metropolis. Historians who work on the late medieval and early modern periods have found it equally so, and have argued about the atuitudes and nationality of the settler élite. While fourteenth-century evidence has been called upon in these debates, there has been little serious consideration of the first two centuries of the lordship of Ireland. In what senses were those who went to Ireland during the founding period ‘English’? Why does the emphasis upon being English appear to have intensified among their successors as time went by? What does the self-proclaimed Englishness of the fourteenth century signify? How far do the complexities and tensions associated with it foreshadow the better-known difficulties of later periods? These are the matters I wish to explore.

Althought anticipated by earlier writers, the clearest formulation of the idea of a metropolis as the focus of economic activity is to be found in Professor N. S. B. Gras' The Evolution of the English Corn Market. There he writes:

The metropolitan market may be described as a large district having one center in which is focussed a considerable trade. Trade between outlying parts of course may take place, but it is that between the metropolitan town and the rest of the area that dominates all. This is chiefly the exchange of the raw pro-ducts of the country for the manufactured or imported goods of the town. The prices of all goods sent to the metropolitan center are ‘made’ there, or, in other words, prices diminish as the distance from the center is increased.

This essay explores further the notion associated with W. K. Jordan that a new rational protestant philanthropy emerged after the Reformation. Drawing upon a sample of London wills from the period 1520-1640, it argues that protestants sought to forge an association between protestantism and charity, but suggests that there were rather more continuities with the catholic past than the polemics of the early reformers would leave one to believe. It explores the variety of forms in which voluntary giving was expressed, and argues that although giving was increasingly channelled through public institutions, giving within those institutional frameworks was often mediated through discretionary relationships of patronage and clientage.

IN the gallery of Anglo-Saxon kings, there are two whose characters are fixed in the popular imagination by their familiar epithets: Alfred the Great and ÆEthelred the Unready. Of course both epithets are products of the posthumous development of the kings' reputations (in opposite directions), not expressions of genuinely contemporary attitudes to the kings themselves: respective personalities. In the case of Alfred, it was the king’s own resourcefulness, courage and determination that brought the West Saxons through the Viking invasions, for it was these qualities, complemented by his concern for the well–being of his subjects, that inspired and maintained the people’s loyalty towards the king and generated their support for his cause. Whereas in the case of jEthelred, it was the king’s incompetence, weakness and vacillation that brought the kingdom to ruin, for it was these failings, exacerbated by his displays of cruelty and spite, that alienated the people and made them abandon his cause. Few historians, perhaps, would subscribe to such a view expressed as bluntly as that, and more, I suspect, would consider such comparisons to be futile and probably misconceived in the first place. I would maintain, however, that something is to be gained from the exercise of comparing the two kings in fairly broad terms: by juxtaposing discussions of the status of the main narrative accounts of each king’s reign we can more easily appreciate how their utterly different reputations arose, and see, moreover, that in certain respects the apparent contrast between them might actually be deceptive; by comparing the predicament in which each king was placed we can better understand how one managed to extricate himself from trouble while the other succumbed; and overall we can more readily judge how much, or how little, can be attributed to personal qualities or failings on the part of the kings themselves.

It has been a characteristic of studies of social policy-making in England to lay considerable stress on the importance of quantification, of precise measurement, in the evolution of any given policy. It has been suggested that the power of the evidence, once properly assembled and measured, could on occasion be sufficient to dissolve previous certainties and act as a catalyst of new thought. It is perhaps not entirely fanciful to see links between this aspect of the historiography of social policy and the preoccupation of English social thought with empiricism, a preoccupation which led sometimes to the presentation of empiricism as an alternative to social theory. All of this enhances the importance of attempts to assess the role of measurement in any given field of policy and to confront directly the questions of its autonomy and the power of its advocates.

If we may believe John Leyland, a tradition widely current throughout England in the 1530's attributed some of the costliest building of the later middle ages to warriors who had returned home laden with the spoils of France. Everywhere that the antiquary travelled, from Ampthill in Bedfordshire to Hampton Court near the Welsh border, from Streatlam in county Durham to Farleigh, Somerset, he was told of castles raised in stone and brick ‘ex spoliis nobilium bello Gallico captorurn’, sometimes of a whole mansion paid for from the proceeds of a single battle; and that not merely in the great days of Edward III and Henry V, but also when John of Bedford was ‘governor and regent’ of his dead brother's hard-pressed conquest. So Henry Vffl's subjects, not least those descended from the military captains of the Hundred Years War, were firmly convinced. Members of the Tudor nobility were willing, nay anxious, to swallow some very improbable stories about their family-origins and in a good many cases their faith in a particular forebear's achievement, indeed his very existence, may be open to question. But the fact remains that within a century of Bedford's death the spoils of France were generally regarded as at least a plausible explanation of a family's sudden wealth and of its capacity to embark upon a large-scale building project. There are signs that it had already won acceptance in the lifetime of Leyland's precursor, William Worcester, whose birth in the year of Agincourt and long residence in the household of Sir John Fastolf, the Regent's major-domo from 1422 to 1435, entitle him to speak with more authority.

This paper argues that the last eighty years of American politics can be understood in terms of the rise and fall of two political orders. The first political order grew out of the New Deal, dominating political life from the 1930s to the 1970s. The history of this order (the New Deal Order) is now well known. The other order, best understood as ‘neoliberal’ in its politics, emerged from the economic and political crises of the 1970s. This paper is one of the first to elucidate the political relationships, ideological character and moral perspective that were central to this neoliberal order's rise and triumph. The paper's narrative unfolds in three acts: the first chronicles the 1980s rise of Ronald Reagan and the laissez-faire Republican party he forced into being; the second shows how the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s accelerated the globalization of capitalism and elevated neoliberalism's prestige; and the third reveals how a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, facilitated his party's capitulation to neoliberal imperatives. Political orders encourage such capitulation, the paper argues, by universalizing their own ideological principles and making alternative ideologies seem marginal and unworkable. A coda shows how the Great Recession of 2008 fractured America's neoliberal order, diminishing its authority and creating a space in which different kinds of politics, including the right-wing populism of Donald Trump and the left-wing populism of Bernie Sanders, could flourish.