Browse

The importance of the medieval abbot needs no particular emphasis. The monastic superiors of late medieval England ruled over thousands of monks and canons, who swore to them vows of obedience; they were prominent figures in royal and church government; and collectively they controlled properties worth around double the Crown’s annual ordinary income. As guardians of regular observance and the primary interface between their monastery and the wider world, abbots and priors were pivotal to the effective functioning and well-being of the monastic order. This book provides the first detailed study of English monastic superiors, exploring their evolving role and reputation between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Individual chapters examine the election of late medieval monastic heads; the internal functions of the superior as the father of the community; the head of house as administrator; abbatial living standards and modes of display; monastic superiors’ public role in service of the Church and Crown; their external relations and reputation; the interaction between monastic heads and the government in Henry VIII’s England; the Dissolution of the monasteries; and the afterlives of abbots and priors following the suppression of their houses. This study of monastic leadership sheds much valuable light on the religious houses of late medieval England, including their spiritual life, administration, spending priorities, and their multi-faceted relations with the outside world. It also elucidates the crucial part played by monastic superiors in the dramatic events of the 1530s, when many heads surrendered their monasteries into the hands of Henry VIII.

This book brings together an unprecedented volume of material to offer a fundamentally new account of the social order in early modern England. The book pieces together the language of self-description deployed by over 13,500 witnesses in English courts in response to questions designed to assess their creditworthiness. Spanning the period between 1550 and 1728, it is the first study of English society that fully incorporates women; that offers comprehensive coverage of the range of social groups from the gentry to the labouring poor and across the life cycle; and that represents regional variation. The book sheds new light on the conceptualization of wealth and poverty by ordinary people in the early modern past; on the operation of credit in the early modern economy; on gendered divisions of labour and people’s working lives; and on the profound consequences of widening social inequality that redrew social relations and the calculus of esteem in England between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

This volume revisits the debates and disputes known collectively in the literature on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England as the ‘Archpriest Controversy’. We argue that this was an extraordinary instance of the conduct of contemporary public politics and that, in its apparent strangeness, it is in fact a guide to the ways in which contemporaries negotiated the unstable later Reformation settlement in England. The published texts which form the core of the arguments involved in this debate survive, as do several caches of manuscript material generated by the dispute. Together they tell us a good deal about the aspirations of the writers and the networks that they inhabited. They also allow us to retell the progress of the dispute both as a narrative and as an instance of contemporary public argument about topics such as the increasingly imminent royal succession, late Elizabethan puritanism, and the function of episcopacy. Our contention is that, if one takes this material seriously, it is very hard to sustain standard accounts of the accession of James VI in England as part of an almost seamless continuity of royal government, contextualized by a virtually untroubled and consensus-based Protestant account of the relationship between Church and State. Nor is it possible to maintain that by the end of Elizabeth’s reign the fraction of the national Church, separatist and otherwise, which regarded itself or was regarded by others as Catholic had been driven into irrelevance.

From the early eighteenth century into the 1830s, Great Britain was the only major country in the world to adopt gold as the sole basis of its currency, in the process absorbing much of the world’s supply of that metal into its pockets, cupboards, and coffers. During the same period, Britons forged a nation by distilling a heady brew of Protestantism, commerce, and military might, while preserving important features of its older social hierarchy. All That Glittered argues for a close connection between these occurrences, by linking justifications for gold’s role in British society—starting in the 1750s and running through the mid-nineteenth century gold rushes in California and Australia—to contemporary descriptions of that metal’s varied values at home and abroad. Most of these accounts attributed British commercial and military success to a credit economy pinned on gold, stigmatized southern European and subaltern peoples for their nonmonetary uses of gold, or tried to marginalize people at home for similar forms of alleged misconduct. This book tells a primarily cultural origin story about the gold standard’s emergence after 1850 as an international monetary system, while providing a new window on British exceptionalism during the previous century.

The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes offers a revisionist interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's evolving response to the English Civil War and Revolution. Conventionally, Hobbes is portrayed as a consistent, if intellectually maverick, royalist partisan. This book challenges that view, and vindicates the widespread contemporary belief that Hobbes had betrayed the royalist cause and accommodated himself to England's revolutionary regimes. In sustaining these conclusions, Professor Collins emphasizes the central importance of religion to both Hobbes's political thought and to the broader course of the English Revolution itself. Hobbes and the Revolution are both placed within the tumultuous historical process that saw the emerging English state securing political authority over public religion and the national church. This cause animated the radicals who propelled the English Revolution, including, Collins argues, Oliver Cromwell and his supporters. It also animated the evolution of Hobbes's political theory, which was centrally concerned with vindicating this aspect of the revolution's political program. Seen in this light, Thomas Hobbes emerges as a theorist who moved with, rather than against, the revolutionary currents of his age.

Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-16th century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their reintroduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these developments over a 150 year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change. Far from being the passive recipients of changes imposed from above, the laity is revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents — a division later translated into competing protestant views. This book integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another. It draws on hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, and examines the riches of local parish records — especially churchwardens' accounts.

This book examines the military experiences of peers and gentlemen from the British Isles who volunteered to fight in the religious and dynastic wars of mainland Europe, as well as the ordinary men who were impressed to serve in the ranks, from the time of the English intervention in the Dutch war of independence to the death of the soldier-king William III in 1702. The apprenticeship in arms exposed these men to the technological innovations of the military revolution, laid the foundations for a professional officer class based upon merit, established a fund of military expertise, and helped to shape a British identity. The remilitarization of aristocratic culture and society was completed by 1640, and provided numerous experienced military officers for the various armies of the British and Irish civil wars and, subsequently, for the embryonic British army after William III invaded and conquered the British Isles and committed the Three Kingdoms to the armed struggles against Louis XIV during the Nine Years War. Conflicts between amateur aristocrats and so-called ‘soldiers of fortune’ led to continuing debates about the relative merits of standing armies and a select militia. The individual pursuit of honour and glory by such amateurs also obscured the more rational military and political objectives of the modern state, subverted military discipline, and delayed the process of professionalization of the officer corps of the British army.

Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England charts the moment when well-educated, well-resourced, English intellectuals first became interested in classical architecture in substantial numbers. This occurred after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 and involved people such as John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and Roger North. The book explores how these figures treated architecture as a subject of intellectual enquiry, either as writers, as designers of buildings, or as both. In four substantial chapters it looks at how the architect was defined as a major intellectual figure; how architects acquired material that allowed them to define themselves as intellectually competent architects; how intellectual writers in the period handled knowledge of ancient architecture in their writing; and how the design process in architecture was conceived of in theoretical writing at the time. In all, the book shows that the key to understanding English architectural culture at the time is to understand how architecture was handled as knowledge, and how architects were conceived of as collectors and producers of such knowledge. It also makes the claim that architecture was treated as an extremely serious and important area of intellectual enquiry, the result of which was that, by the turn of the eighteenth century, architects and architectural writers could count themselves amongst England’s intellectual and cultural elite.

From 1649–1660 England was ruled by a standing army for the only time in its history. The nature of that military rule was far more complex and nuanced than has traditionally been appreciated. This book describes the nature of that rule, both for members of the army and for civilian society. The first part of the book describes the character of the army by looking at the life that officers and soldiers led, the promotion structure, and the ways in which political engagement changed to provide a sense of the day-to-day reality of being part of a standing army. The second part of the book considers the impact of the military presence on society by establishing where soldiers were quartered, how they were paid, the material burden that they represented, the divisive effect of the army's patronage of religious radicals, and the extensive involvement of army officers in the government of the localities. The final part of the book re-evaluates the army's role in the political events from Cromwell's death to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy, and explains why the army crumbled so pitifully in the last months of the Commonwealth. The book casts new light on: the changes in the army between 1649–60; Cromwell's control of the army; the co-existence of political ideals and a professional ethos among army officers; the place of the major-generals in English history; the attitude of the political nation to a standing army; the army's support of religious radicals; the reasons for the fall of the Commonwealth.

This book analyses the back and forth between the Elizabethan regime and various Catholic critics, who, from the early 1570s to the early 1590s, sought to characterize that regime as a conspiracy of evil counsel. Through a genre—the libellous secret history—novel to English political discourse, various (usually anonymous) Catholic authors claimed to reveal to the public what was ‘really happening’ behind the curtain of official lies and disinformation with which the clique of evil counsellors at the heart of the Elizabethan state habitually cloaked themselves. Elements within the regime, centred on William Cecil and his circle, replied to these assaults with their own species of plot talk and libellous secret history, specializing in conspiracy-centred accounts of the Catholic, Marian, and then, latterly, the Spanish, threats. We have here a series of (mutually constitutive) moves and countermoves, in the course of which the regime’s claims to represent a form of public political virtue, to speak for the commonweal and true religion, elicited from certain Catholic critics a simply inverted rhetoric of private political vice, of persecution and tyranny. The resulting exchanges are read not only as a species of ‘political thought’, but as a way of thinking about politics as process and of distinguishing between ‘politics’ and ‘religion’. They are also analysed as modes of political communication and pitch-making—involving print, circulating manuscript, performance, and rumour—and thus as constitutive of an emergent mode of ‘public politics’ and perhaps of a ‘post-Reformation public sphere’. While the focus is unashamedly on English history, the origins and imbrication of these texts within, and their direct address to, wider European events and audiences is always present. The aim is thus to contribute simultaneously to the political, cultural, intellectual, and religious histories of the period.

The Reformation was about ideas and power: but it was also about real human lives. This book provides the first comprehensive account of what it actually meant to live a Protestant life in England and Scotland between c. 1530-1640, drawing on a rich mixture of contemporary devotional works, sermons, diaries, biographies and autobiographies to uncover the lived experience of early modern Protestantism. Beginning from the surprisingly urgent, multifaceted emotions of Protestantism, it explores practices of prayer, of family and public worship, and of reading and writing, tracking them through the life course from childhood through conversion and vocation to the deathbed. It examines what Protestant piety drew from its Catholic predecessors and contemporaries, and grounds that piety in material realities such as posture, food and tears. This perspective shows us what it meant to be Protestant in the British Reformations: a meeting of intensity (a religion which sought authentic feeling above all, and which dreaded hypocrisy and hard-heartedness) with dynamism (a progressive religion, relentlessly pursuing sanctification and dreading idleness). That combination, for good or ill, gave the Protestant experience its particular quality of restless, creative zeal. The Protestant devotional experience also shows us that this was a broad-based religion: for all the differences across time, between two countries, between men and women and between puritans and conformists, this was recognisably a unified culture, in which common experiences and practices cut across supposed divides. The book shows us Protestantism, not as the preachers on all sides imagined it, but as it was really lived.

One of the most important aspects of the Reformation in England was its impact on the status of the dead. Protestant reformers insisted vehemently that between heaven and hell there was no ‘middle place’ of purgatory where the souls of the departed could be assisted by the prayers of the living. This was no remote theological proposition, but a revolutionary doctrine affecting the lives of all 16th-century English people, and the ways in which their Church and society were organised. This book illuminates the (sometimes ambivalent) attitudes towards the dead in pre-Reformation religious culture, and traces (up to about 1630) the uncertain progress of the ‘reformation of the dead’ attempted by Protestant authorities as they sought to stamp out traditional rituals and provide the replacements acceptable in an increasingly fragmented religious world. It provides surveys of perceptions of the afterlife, of the cultural meanings of ghosts, and of the patterns of commemoration and memory which became characteristic of post-Reformation England. Together these topics constitute an important case-study in the nature and tempo of the English Reformation as an agent of social and cultural transformation.

From Shakespeare’s Hamlet to Burton’s Anatomy to Hilliard’s miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, bringing believers closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation—something this book calls ‘emotive improvisation’. Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts—including moral treatises on the passions, medical textbooks, mortality records, doctors’ case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays—Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across forms of evidence too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.

From childbirth and baptism through to courtship, weddings, and funerals, every stage in the life-cycle of Tudor and Stuart England was accompanied by ritual. Even under the Protestantism of the reformed Church, the spiritual and social dramas of birth, marriage, and death were graced with elaborate ceremony. Powerful and controversial protocols were in operation, shaped and altered by the influences of the Reformation, the Revolution, and the Restoration. Each of the major rituals was potentially an arena for argument, ambiguity, and dissent. Ideally, as classic rites of passage, these ceremonies worked to bring people together. But they also set up traps into which people could stumble, and tests which not everybody could pass. In practice, ritual performance revealed frictions and fractures that everyday local discourse attempted to hide or to heal. Using first-hand evidence, this book shows how the making and remaking of ritual formed part of a continuing debate, sometimes strained and occasionally acrimonious, which exposed the raw nerves of society in the midst of great historical events. In doing so, it brings to life the common experiences of living and dying in Tudor and Stuart England.

Some of the poorest regions of historic Britain had some of its most vibrant festivities. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the peoples of northern England, Lowland Scotland, and Wales used extensive celebrations at events such as marriage, along with reciprocal exchange of gifts, to emote a sense of belonging to their locality. This book looks at regionally distinctive practices of giving and receiving wedding gifts, in order to understand social networks and community attitudes. Examining a wide variety of sources over four centuries, it uses contributory weddings, where guests paid for their own entertainment and gave money to the couple, to change not only how we view the societies of ‘middle Britain’, but also how we interpret social and cultural change across Britain. These regions were not old-fashioned, as is commonly assumed, but differently fashioned, possessing social priorities that set them apart both from the south of England and from ‘the Celtic fringe’. The book is about informal communities of people whose aim was maintaining and enhancing social cohesion through sociability and reciprocity. Communities relied on negotiation, compromise, and agreement, to create and re-create consensus around more-or-less shared values, expressed in traditions of hospitality and generosity. Ranging across issues of trust and neighbourliness, recreation and leisure, eating and drinking, order and authority, personal lives and public attitudes, the book explores many areas of interest not only to social historians, but also literary scholars of the British Isles.

Britain’s separateness from the rest of Europe is often taken as read. For generations, historians have presented Britain as exceptional and different. In recent years, an emphasis on the Atlantic and imperial aspects of British history, and on the importance of the nation and national identity, has made Britain and Ireland seem even more distant from the neighbouring Continent. This study offers a different perspective on eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland’s relationship with continental Europe. It acknowledges areas of difference and distinctiveness, but points to areas of similarity. It accepts that both Britain and Ireland were part of an Atlantic and wider imperial world, but highlights their under-recognized connections with the rest of Europe. And, perhaps most ambitiously of all, it suggests that if the British and Irish thought and acted in national terms, they were also able, in the appropriate circumstances, to see themselves as Europeans. Some of the chapters say more about British and Irish similarities to the Continent, others stress connections, and still others illustrate European identities. But, taken together, they present a case for our regarding eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland as integral parts of Europe, and for our appreciating that this was the perspective of many of the British and Irish at the time. Other historians have opended up parts of this subject, presenting a more rounded picture than exceptionalist narratives allow, stressing convergence rather than divergence, establishing important connections and exploring their ramifications; but none has attempted such a panoramic view.

This book provides a full view of the social, political, and military aspects of the volunteer movement of the French Wars: the volunteer infantry, yeomanry cavalry, and the armed associations in England, Scotland, and Wales from 1794 to 1814. It considers the antecedents of voluntary military forces, and the government planning that led to the formation and development of the volunteers and yeomanry. It shows how the administration of volunteering fitted into the existing system of county administration and central government. It analyses the geographical spread and concentrations of volunteering in relation to the apparent threats from popular radicalism and French invasion. It considers the type of men who joined the volunteers and their motivation for doing so, and those who promoted and organized the corps and the incentives they offered to recruit them. It analyses the social structure of volunteer membership and compares it with other mass organizations. It looks at the ways in which volunteering affected existing social relations, and examines the allegedly democratic aspects of corps' internal organization. The book examines the political affiliations of volunteers and the implications they had for the behaviour and use of the force. It considers criticisms of volunteering, in particular the alleged political and constitutional dangers of an armed population able to challenge the existing order. It shows how volunteering fitted into national defence planning, in particular for preparations against invasion, for evacuation and maintaining internal order. It examines in detail how the volunteers were used in policing roles.