This chapter examines the action of breach of promise of marriage to show its relationships with deception. It outlines how a broken promise of marriage, which could always imply deception regarding intention to keep the promise, attracted damages and highlights how known deception constituted an aggravation. The chapter also demonstrates how deception about certain features of oneself or one’s circumstances could justify a fiancé(e)’s decision to break a promise of marriage. Beyond these points, the chapter shows how conventions about relationships shaped the processes by which promises of marriage could be inferred or imputed, and it explores the links between actions of breach of promise of marriage and changing expectations of marriage, including the expectation that it should be based on real love. Through this process, the chapter offers an original argument about the decline of breach of promise at marriage which reveals its changing relationship to deception. The chapter concludes with some reflections on what actions of breach of promise suggest about the capacity of law to regulate promises and statements of future intention, as they relate to intimacy, in a contemporary context.

This chapter tells the story of the witch hunts arrival in Little Oakley and Beaumont cum Moze, and reconstructs the life of the sole suspect there, Annis Herd. Using parish and manorial court records, and the records of the archdeaconry court, it shows how Annis interacted with the churchwardens of several parishes, her inter-related neighbours and the Beaumont Rector, Richard Harrison, leading to her accusation.

The intersection of childhood and rulership has a long history. This chapter compares examples of child kingship across Europe before 1050 with cases between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It illustrates how structural developments in society, culture, politics and law brought greater political stability to a child’s rule during the central Middle Ages. Over this period, cultural attitudes towards violence were changing, practices of succession and inheritance were evolving, and ideas around marriage, illegitimacy and queenship were shifting. Such developments fundamentally altered the court environments into which royal children were born, the political context within which they succeeded, and the practicalities and precarities of their early experiences of rulership. This chapter examines aspects of violence, succession and queenship in turn before, in the fourth and final section, arguing for the need to revise claims of Germany’s exceptional ‘rejection’ of child kingship. While there are meaningful differences in how children were incorporated within systems and practices of kingship, this chapter suggests divergences between kingdoms should not be exaggerated.

Sometimes killing by male-female couples represents an escalation of an adventure that starts with entirely, or at least relatively, harmless activities, as in looking at fringe pornography, sharing fantasies or accounts of earlier experiences, S&M or swinging. In some cases, this could be seen as grooming by the male. The existence of killer couples raises the issue of whether the female derives sexual pleasure from killing or the pleasure comes solely from pleasing the male . In each of the couples described here, the male would appear to be the dominant partner. For Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, it is unclear what set them on his tragic course. For Brady, it was possibly resentment against illegitimacy and social standing. Fred and Rosemary West both came from abusive backgrounds. The case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka raised the issue of whether Homolka showed evidence of Stockholm Syndrome.

Which elements of tyranny are paramount wax and wane across eras, but tyranny itself remains a consistent concern. In Western political thought, defining tyranny in one or two sentences is rare, and when undertaken, it is often embedded in a specific political context. Defining tyranny may appear straightforward; nonetheless, diagnosing and remedying it, enabling recovery and inoculation, requires more than a rigid definition. All governance orders display a range of features. For instance, no two democracies are alike, and the political, economic and social realities they serve must always be considered; the same is true of tyrannies.

This chapter explores social morality on the home front focusing on the commentary about the public behaviour of soldiers’ wives, anxiety about a supposed increase in incidences of female drunkenness, and concern about prostitution and the spread of venereal disease. It tracks the number of wartime arrests of women for drunkenness and child neglect. The chapter argues that the hostility to separation women transcended the nationalist movement, and that while there were many incidences of soldiers’ wives arrested for drunken behaviour, the rhetoric exaggerated the reality with total convictions for drunkenness declining in wartime Ireland after the first year of the war.The chapter further explores concern with sexual immorality in wartime, focusing on venereal disease and illegitimate births. It also examines the women’s patrols established to limit the public interaction between working-class women and the soldiers. The chapter concludes that the public behaviour of working-class women in Ireland altered little as a consequence of the war, but there was nevertheless greater censure of problems evident before 1914. While the separation allowances brought women greater control over their domestic spaces, the surveillance of state and society confined women to narrowly defined codes of behaviour.

Courtship behaviour varied not just across social class but also depended on individual inclination and disposition.There were agreed patterns of behaviour, particularly in middle-class society, that signalled to family, friends and the wider community that a couple were courting and the expectation was that the courtship would end in marriage. Not everyone observed or followed the rules of courtship, particularly around the issue of pre-marital sex.Courtships sometimes broke down and led to breach of promise to marry cases.While impossible to quantify, one of the facts to emerge from a study of breach of promise cases is the prevalence of sex as part of courtship. While the Presbyterian church authorities were tolerant, if not approving, of couples who consummated their relationship before marriage, the statistical evidence slowly emerging from scattered sources also indicates a significant number of pregnant Catholic brides.The single mother may have been shunned by society but there was less shame attached to the birth of children within seven or eight months of marriage.There is evidence in middle-class urban society of changing attitudes to courtship in the early decades of the twentieth century with more men and women anxious to make their own choice of spouse.

What counts as legitimately sublime and what as counterfeit? The question of policing boundaries is internal to the sublime, and particularly fraught insofar as it is defined as transgressing limits of various kinds. If music is included in the sublime – by no means a foregone conclusion in its history – then what sort of music? Must it be violent, shocking or dissonant, transgressing orderly harmony in some obvious way? This chapter examines the fraught status and remit of harmony in the literary-critical discourse of the sublime. When music and musical concepts appear within broader scholarship on the sublime, they are often aligned with dissonance and irresolvability, as part of a construction of modernity likewise aligned with the breaking of old orders and harmonies. The chapter complicates this view through a double study of the late Romantic author Thomas De Quincey and his favourite singer, the Italian contralto Josephine Grassini. It examines both the multifaceted work to which music and harmony are put in De Quincey’s Confessions (1821), and the complexity of Grassini’s performances beyond the limits of the text, including her vocal traits, gendering, roles and repertoire during the Napoleonic wars, leading to reconsideration of sublimity’s relationship to pathos alongside harmony.

This chapter explores Irish bills for divorce brought to Westminster from 1701 and to the Irish parliament until the Act of Union in 1800. The moral, reputational and financial impact of divorce is considered from a gendered and class-based perspective and noteworthy cases such as that of Sir John Dillon and Lord Abercorn are examined. The profile of the first Irish divorcees in terms of gender, religion, class and grounds for divorce is determined. Moreover, themes of female agency, illegitimacy, collusion, adultery, false testimony (procured in particular from servants) as well as the association between the availability of divorce as an incentive to adultery which became a recurring theme in both clerical and lay debates are also explored in both jurisdictions. The impact of the Act of Union on the rate and profile of Irish divorces is analysed. In addition, the popular criticism and press reportage of Irish divorce allow the tropes of immorality and moral superiority to be defined and considered.

This chapter explores the revolution in licensing in Britain from the mid-1960s. In London, Blackpool and Glasgow, liberalisation of control of venues, leisure activities and notably music-related events, presaged the development of a youth culture accompanied by widespread access to contraception, recreational drugs (including cannabis and LSD) and sexual activity. Licensing boards tried to impose a crackdown – on coffee clubs, jukeboxes, miscegenation and illegal drinking establishments (in London, Sheffield and the Isle of Lewis). Little of this worked for long. Illegitimacy rates rose, the music revolution led in Blackpool and Sheffield to the advance of popular culture even faster in some regards than in London. Glasgow had a delay to liberalisation, but it moved rapidly from the mid-1970s to being in the cultural avant-garde. But in Lewis, a local government reorganisation led, uniquely, to home rule for Calvinism churches on the islands, triggering an attack on sexualisation and cinema for a number of decades. Provincial stories reveal different trajectories of change.